Many years ago, maybe 40 years ago, a relative of mine, whom I shall call Wilson (since that was his name), told me in the pub that he had invested in a personal project which he hoped might change his life.
Wilson had until recently been one of the older students at a Teachers' Training College (Alnwick College, in fact), and among his age-group peers he made some close friends who were very seriously intellectual - at least they seemed so to Wilson. He enjoyed the company and the elevated chat, but secretly was always rather humbled by his own lack of learning.
The week of our pub conversation, he had signed up for a new, weekly-instalment colour magazine which would build up, week by week, into a fine encyclopedia. Wilson was smart enough to realise that having an encyclopedia sitting on a bookshelf gave the chance to look things up, but didn't necessarily make you any wiser. However, a weekly magazine was a different thing altogether; if he read each magazine as it arrived then, in a large (but finite) number of weeks, he would eventually know everything there was to know. A superb plan, you must admit.
Sadly, it didn't work out. He paid up his subscription, bought the special binders which would hold his collection, and proudly showed me the first few instalments as they arrived. After about 7 weeks the magazines stopped, the company went bust, and Wilson and a load of other unfortunates were left with very little to show for their brave investment.
During a subsequent pub session, he told me that it was especially frustrating, since everything had started so well, but he ended up knowing an awful lot about aardvarks, abalone and Aberdeen, but not very much more. As he said at the time, he would have to pick his conversations carefully.
This story has nothing going for it at all, except that I remember it with affection and it impressed me at the time with the futility of owning part of the first volume of an encyclopedia, and I liked the idea of knowledge and enlightenment arriving in alphabetical order. [If anyone reading this doesn't know what an encyclopedia was, suggest you look it up on Google.]
I had a recent reminder of Wilson.
At the end of last year I treated myself to a few BBC DVD box-sets - they were on special offer - and one of the things I bought was the complete set of Shakepeare's plays, which were filmed by the BBC between the late 1970s and the mid 1980s (I think), with really excellent casting. I had seen a couple of them over the years, but I really fancied buying them in, and the challenge of living long enough to watch them all was another driver. I'm actually getting through them pretty well, and enjoying them - well, most of them. I've filled in a lot of gaps in dodgy periods of my historical knowledge, been absolutely thrilled by some of them and had some good laughs. The only plays which I have given up on thus far have been Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Love's Labour's Lost, mostly because I didn't find the actors sufficiently engaging.
I don't propose to attempt my own spotty reviews of Bill S's back catalogue, which seems to be generally regarded as OK. The important point here is that there are an awful lot of DVDs in the set, and they are packed very cleverly in some special plastic cases which require careful handling. Since the plays are arranged alphabetically in the packaging, and I have already had a few minor disasters dropping DVDs all over the floor, I decided that by far the easiest way to approach this challenge was simply to watch them in the same order. That's the punch line - that's as amusing as this gets, though personally I find it very funny indeed. I am so delighted by the hysterical idea of "doing Shakespeare" in alphabetical order that I am sticking with it. I've just finished Part 1, which gets me up to Macbeth.
I'm going to have a week or two's break before I carry on with Part 2, but am looking forward to it. In the meantime, my specialist topic for Master Mind could be "Shakespeare's Plays, from A to M". I think poor old Wilson would have been impressed.
I would hurry , I fear the DVD player's days may be numbered, or so I am informed by a young tech savvy relative
ReplyDeleteI have heard something similar - mostly from someone who tells me as often as possible that this is now the 21st Century. Interestingly, this same person now buys vinyl records, which I was delighted to get rid of around 1980. Perhaps he is not yet ready for the cassette player, but we are getting there.
DeleteThe great thing about streaming video is that it is less easily ripped off, allows fees to be charged and advertising revenue gained, and gives somebody some control over what the world does. The not-so-great thing is that it does not work well for that proportion of this same world that has crap broadband, such as me, and possibly thee, and (whisper it) large areas of rural USA.
I shall cherish my BluRay player, my nice new Smart TV and my collection of disks - I shall play them as often as I like. They are MINE.
I had a genuine laugh out loud moment there Tony. Having enjoyed your company over remote games I can now read the punchline in your dry very delivery. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteThere is something delicious about the idea of consuming "great works of art" in something mundane like alphabetical order. What next? Paintings classified by the number of legs visible?
I had an interesting email from Prof De Vries, who points out that Ludwig Van Beethoven (among many others) took care to compose his symphonies in numerical order, so maybe this approach is not so wacky as it seems.
DeleteI am impressed by your "number of legs" classification system, by the way - that is very sound. The prints and wall hangings at Chateau Foy are almost all of landscapes and castles - maybe the odd bridge. I guess they would all come under "zero", though I would have to check for cows and sheep. The portraits of my ancestors in the Upper Hall are all painted from the waist up, so no legs there either - a few cows and sheep though. Interesting.
I recently re-watched the BBC series I, Claudius.
ReplyDeleteIn order, rather than jumping straight into the "John Hurt Emperor" period!
I think that was the way to do it. Given a free choice, and less problems with falling DVDs, I might have thought of doing Shakespeare in the order that he wrote them, or possibly I should watch the histories in chronological order, so that the Henries come up in the right sequence. The alphabetical system avoids my having to make a decision, so that's handy too.
DeleteI could do with some kind of idiot sheet for each play; there is a constant stream of similar-looking men with beards, some of whom turn out to be central to the story, and some just disappear once they've finished spending 10 minutes telling us what's happening. An online search afterwards can usually reveal that the guy who died in the first scene was The Captain, or it might have been Harbisvald. Presumably Elizabethan audiences just understood these things.
I once saw a school production of MacBeth were each character had his or her name across his or her shoulders like an association footballer. It materially assisted my comprehension. On a point of detail I belive Beethoven wrote his second piano concerto before his first.
DeleteNames on shoulders is getting close to my thoughts about the actors carrying placards. In passing, I must mention that in the Edinburgh Fringe I once saw a production of Macbeth in which the cast all rode motorcyles. As I recall, it was one of those ideas which is interesting for about 2 seconds, but has become irritating long before the witches have finished the opening scene.
DeleteThe piano concertos are a bit awkward - I think Schubert did a bit of that as well. I used also to worry about the soldiers who fought in the First Bishops' War - I wonder how they rationalised this at the time.
I have just whiled away an afternoon googling 'misnumbered symphonies'. Apparently Mendelsohn and Schumann wrote theirs in the wrong order, as did Dvorak - in the last case his publishers assigned bogusly high opus numbers to his early works to make him look well-established, and contracted with him to hold the copyright to forthcoming works - musicologists have inferred that young Dvorak proceeded to evade the contract by assigning lower opus numbers to his subsequent output, leaving confusion in his wake.
DeleteMy theory is that it was initially the First Bishop's War, but the apostrophe slipped when another one broke out with more bishops.
DeleteYou have described the main reason why I have never subscribed to these 'collect the set' type of magazines - even when each issue came with an armoured fighting vehicle.
ReplyDeleteCheers,
Ion
20 years ago, or whenever it was, I was suddenly very excited by the Del Prado "Waterloo" magazines, which came complete with 25mm painted soldiers, though in numbers which were too small to help much. Fortunately, they figures proved to be too big to fit with my older 25s, as I proved to the bemusement of the Saturday morning clientele in the newsagents, when I took in a few of my own to compare [I've always wondered why people avoid me in the village]. I suspect that becoming a Del Prado collector at that time could have been yet another path to insanity.
DeleteBought into the pre internet Star Trek fact files and received every issue in this £1.99 per week two year collection. Tried to sell the lot 10 years ago in their special binders and was offered £50 which I’m guessing wouldn’t even have covered the postage given the sheer size and weight of it all. Another one of my great investments. Lol. They ended up in the skip.
ReplyDeleteRespect for the Star Trek files collection, dude. A great effort. Collections maybe have a habit of doing this, even successful ones. In an age when reading books is insufficiently 21st Century, and no-one is interested in historical soldiers in defunct scales, I try to avoid thinking about the contents of my house...
DeleteI like your story about Wilson, it has all the makings of a post-apocalyptic film / book about trying to rebuild the world with only a few books of knowledge and needing more.
ReplyDeleteWillz.
Hi Willz - hope things good with you. The desperate search for people who still know things is an ominous symptom of where we have got to, I fear. We have become an era of spoiled children (of all ages), some of whom have faint memories of days when people could still do stuff. I recall some awful short story - probably from The Pan Book of Horror Stories Vol. 14, or something, when I was a kid, when, after the human race has decided to have a go at wiping itself out, someone finds the original Mona Lisa on a heap of rubbish, so they carry it into the camp where the local survivors are trying to exist, and it is put on show, so people can queue up and have a look at it (on payment of a handful of beans, naturally); the first arrivals just take it away and put it on the communal bonfire - at least it might help keep them warm.
DeleteMy post a few months ago was on a related topic, so I guess this theme must be worrying me at present...
https://prometheusinaspic.blogspot.com/2023/07/hooptedoodle-443-gated-community.html
I wish you had posted this before watching any …. I might have suggested reading them in the order that they were written. Not that I know anything of the subject, other than doing O’level Macbeth and the only bit of that I remember is “where shall we three meet again” and of course, rather like Wilson’s Aardvark, not once has knowing that ever helped me in life.
ReplyDeleteWith vinyl, it is often said that part of the pleasure is listening to the tracks in the order that the producer intended them to be listened to. No jumping or skipping like you can do with a digital device.
This of course assumes that there was a purpose to the order of the tracks and not some random placing to get the right number of minutes per side. I’m not sure I buy into that, though with crime thriller books, I do think one should read the chapters in the order presented.
All of that aside, there is something quite special taking something special like Shakespeare’s works (or Dickens etc) and just committing to them in a sort of self treat kind of way.