back to the web

Once again, I have been falling behind in updating this blog, but then the last couple of weeks of term are always manic so that might explain why. Now there feels a bit of time to breath and look back on it all. Once again it has been a mix of web journeying, train travel and book voyaging. A highlight was heading off down with a group of students to the National Maritime to learn about the Northwest passage. We got to work our way through admiralty charts from all periods, see the improbaility of the kind of maps that Hudson was basing his travels on, view at close quarters Franklin's last letters and read some of the most adulatory and least reliable works on Hudson that I have ever come across. For a wonder the trains also worked and the whole group of us were able to get group tickets to London and back cheaply and on time on the Chiltern network. I am rapidly growing to appreciate that service. It may meander its way along but it does tend to arrive more or less on time - something that could not be said of this weekend's jaunt. 

Now here is a querry? Would you not have thought that setting off on a train from Birmingham to London at 9:30am one would be perfectly safe for two pm carol singing? Would you not have been absolutely certain that one should be able to arrive for a 6pm opera? Well, when all is said and done, Virgin trains did succeed in bringing me to my destination in time for the opera but the singing went out the window. At 11:45 our train was still sitting somewhere outside Coventry. At about this time, Virgin rail anounced that because of flooding and/or signal failure (reports varied) no trains would be continuing. Instead when they had found enough buses for our 9 carriage train, they would meet us at Berkswell station and bus us back to Birmingham! What amazed me was how muted the protest was. There was definite muttering, but it did not even reach the level of disbelief whereas I was sitting there thinking in what other country could this happen? We patently did not want to be back in Birmingham. We had all left there at 9:30. Why take us back? If they could get the buses surely they could take us on? The majority of British train users however seemed to be resigned to the fact that they might not ever reach their destination or the shows that seemed to be the main reason for us all heading south. To do Virgin rail justice, it did then get the train through and we arrived only 3 hours late and they did allow us free food and water; they also brought me back in record time for a Sunday train the next day.

Well clearly too much of my time has been spent on trains in the last wee while, but that has had some advantages for the book voyaging front. I am still working my way through the trials and victories of Augustine, but at least I am no longer totally stalled. I have also had rather a lot of fun reading M. M. Kaye's Shadow of the Moon. It is a great read - a fictionalised love story, but at the same time a beautifully-researched account of the Indian Mutiny. Sometimes the story loses it a bit as Kaye's fascination with the mutiny takes over (Kaye was the grand-daughter of one of the earliest historians of the Indian Mutiny, John Kaye), but it is a good read despite its horrendous back-drop.  

One of my students has also got me more intrigued by the Klondike gold rush (in which I have always had an interest) so I have journeyed from one continent to another and followed some of the women on the trail of gold. 

Along with my students, I have also travelled with the Incas as they journeyed the length and breadth of their empire, consolidating their rule, voyaged with Frobisher up into the frozen arctic (those early explorers were MAD!!!), and sympathised with Sebastian Munster as he tried to make sense of the geogaphy of the Early Modern world. Most recently I have picked up Anthony Grafton's What was History and am suffering pangs of jealousy. I want to have his breadth of knowledge. 

It is time to leave the world of the world wide web now, however, and get back to the pages of a good book. I may be jealous of Grafton, but I want to know more of what he has to say, and travel back with him through the pages of time and the understanding of history. Later, however, it will be back to something and I shall either travel in the mind out to India or up to Yorkshire. M.M. Kaye is going to be competing with Jack Sheffield's Mister Teacher for my spare time. I feel that ironing and cleaning should also be in the competition, but with two good books calling to me, I can predict that they will lose, and instead I shall be travelling vicariously through another's words.

A long time gone

It seems ages since I last updated this blog, and it is not as if I have not been travelling here there and everywhere both in word and action. Indeed, I have even damaged my carbon footprint by travelling by car down to investigate the joys of the Taylorian library (where we once again followed the Portuguese on their travels round the world), and then further afield to Carlton to meet friends and retrieve much missed furniture. The main problem is I haven't discovered Harry Potter's time turner. If Ihad I might manage to have enough hours in the day to read all that I wish, travel through the world wide web, and meander my way around Britain in addition to teaching my courses and keeping a blog up to date. As it is, my alotted time span has to suffice. Nonetheless in this week we have managed to follow Betanzos and Zarate and de la Vega as they looked with Spanish eyes onto the intricacies of Incan customs and religion. We followed Sabine McCormack as she deciphered their reactions for us. Then it was a quick dash north to sail with Jacques Cartier up the St Lawrence and suffer with him as his men succumbed like flies to the horrors of scurvy and the terrors of a winter in a hostile land. I have also found time to follow a certain St from Hippo as he confesses the details of his life. Closer to home, I have also recently come across a real joy of a book. Perhaps it is not a joy for all but for a homesick Scot and a historian, the Flindlater's Crossriggs has provided delightful soothing reading. On which note, it is time to stop logging (or blogging) on books and travelling through the world wide web and instead to pedal my way back to a freezing Victorian townhouse that seems to have travelled back into the past. It certainly has not grasped that there are such modern luxuries as efficient heating or insulation! That said there is nothing to stop one nestling down there with a good book.

Reading week and its uses (from treatises on navigation to mind mapping)

Well it has been a while now since I updated my blog, and it seems a week of being here there and everywhere, both literally and in the pages of my books. It was a week that began with a bang with a rare opportunity to go down to London and work in the British library. What bliss (though speed reading sixteenth century Portuguese was a challenge). I journeyed with Barros and the 15th and 16th century Portuguese out to India. I suffered the terrors of passing Cape Bojador with them, and the fear of rounding the Cape of Good Hope. Considering Barros's Decades of Asia was one of the most important Portuguese books on the Age of Discovery, it amazed me that I had to slog through it in Portuguese and that the only translation I could find was Italian.
After the delights of the British Library and the horrors of early Portuguese sea voyages it was my turn to travel, and true to form, I fell victim to the problem of modern rail travel. Mind you this time it wasn't signal failures or leaves on the line; it was people on the line. What a way to endear yourselves to your fellow citizens. Still, eventually it was back to Birmingham.
After a couple of days in Birmingham where I rejoiced with almost everyone I know in the return of a Democrat to the White house, and then mavelled at the yearly celebration of Guy Fawkes, and an earlier reaction to a government it was time to return to the library. Determined to make the best of reading week, I ventured down to Oxford and continued improving my Portuguese (and worked on giving myself a headache) by following Pedro Nunes's Treatise on Navigation. It is possibly less surprising that this has never been translated than that Barros's hadn't, but oh how I wish it had been. Nunes may have been the cosmographer royal in Portugal, but it is clear that his interests, unlike mine were in mathematics and astronomy of which he was one of the greatest practitioners of his age, and not so much in people and places. A combination of mathematics and Portuguese were a challenge to put it mildly. Still his way with words left me rejoicing with him in the Portuguese discovery of "new islands, new lands, new seas, new peoples and what is more a new sky and new stars" - how to word the thrill of exploration and discovery!
Having spent so much time in the sixteenth century, I also decided it was time to catch up on the 21st and turned my attention to the world wide web. I have now learnt to use www.delicious.com , and I must admit I like it a lot. To have my bookmarks (and other peoples) accessible to me wherever I can link to the web is a great boon. Ok I am not sure that I want everyone to follow all my sites, but that is a matter for me to think about when I bookmark.
On the other hand I also took a look at www.mindmeister.com. You'd have thought that for someone with an interest in mapping this would suit me to a T but you would be wrong. I may like mapping the world, but mapping my ideas just left me confused and hazy. I lose the flow of the thought in bubbles going here there and everywhere. It began to look more like a seriously mutated spider than any form of map recognisable to humankind.
To complete my journey from books to the web, I also decided to investigate wikis, and while I am dubious about completely open access ones, having looked (naturally) at wikipedia, and also at the wiki dictionary, I can see the uses of limited ones. For someone desperately trying to keep strate Mayan cah and Aztec alteptl; the Mayan Ah Chuy Kak and the Aztec Huitzlopochtli, and a wealth of other unmemorable names, I have begun to see the potential in a wiki.
That said, after all this foraging in the world wide web, I feel it is more than time to retreat to my beloved books, and rather than turning tabs, turn pages. It is off back to the 16th century to follow Matthew Restall into the intricacies of the Maya world, and after that to journey back to the ideas of a 4th century African, and follow St Augustine through the footsteps of his life.

travel back in time - before Wednesday?

Well I was supposed to do this before 10:00am Wednesday, but somehow I failed. In a week where we have dealt with Aztec ritual - have you any idea how unmemorable Aztec gods' names are - they all seem to be variations on Whatzicotl and Poxiwhatl, More's Utopia and Christian Humanism, the Power of Print and problems of illiteracy in the Early Modern World, and to top it off Cortes hacking and slashing his way through the Mexican jungle, there doesn't seem to have been much time for blogging, the web, or even reading anything that wasn't related to these not altogether enticing subjects. Huiziwhatls and Mixitotls seem to have begun muddling their way unpleasantly through my sleep. Today, however, I finally took the time to begin looking at RSS readers. I thought a poetry feed might be appealing and so subscribed, only to rapidly unsubscribe having waded through several turgid and uninspired so called verses. I tried again for an RSS on a different subject and this time found a handier feed on book reviews on history and travel books. At least this may bring my attention to books I might otherwise have missed, although at the moment they seem to be dominated by works on Kabul and Mount Everest, two areas that don't come into this otherwise rather wide ranging blog. I also took the opportunity to subscribe to a news feed on Canada, and came to the conclusion, that today at any rate, Canada did not have a lot of noteworthy news.
So what was my impression of RSS? Really Singularly Superfluous. At least at the moment, they make me feel like I am barraged with information, and while some of that information can be entertaining, I don't think I could hack keeping up with RSSs that were actually to do with my work, and otherwise I would sooner be reading my books. I think were I to use one in anyway to do with my teaching, it would have to be one that was updated minimally. I think I shall head back to Roman Africa now instead and, read along with St Augustine as he reviews his life in PPF (plain paper feed).

To Byzantium and beyond

Well, yesterday provided the perfect excuse to travel with books. My friends were off around the world and I thought it necessary to weight them down with words. I am not sure how auspicious they thought a copy of the Odyssey translated by T. E. Lawrence was but they smiled cheerfully. The caught the theme quite easily when to that was added Travels with a Tangerine (one of my favourite books that I have read all year), Journey to the Centre of the Earth (something I rather hope they DON'T do) and Fugitive Pieces.

Having invested in these books for other people, for myself, it was more visual travelling than literary travelling as I went off to the Byzantium exhibition in London. Three and a half hours later I emerged better educated and still thrilled with Byzantine icons, though less thrilled with the range of postcards the Academy had to offer. Why oh why do museums always choose the least enticing things in the exhibition to make postcards of? Virtually none of the sumptuous display of icons was available. Today it is time travelling that I am setting off upon - we shall see how the British museum's Hadrian exhibition compares.

4 continents in a day (+a world wide web)

Well I have been doing a lot of travelling through books lately. Yesterday took me to the New World again, where following Townsend, Clendinnen and others we went with Aztecs on the warpath, and a peculiarly bloody story it was. A few hours later, and we were following Barros and Correa tracing da Gama's route round the Cape of Africa and over to Calcutta. That was a voyage of extremes. Da Gama imprisoned his pilots and threw his navigational instruments overboard, putting all his faith on his own command and in God. His belief and zealotry may have taken him to India, but it didn't exactly make him tolerant of other faiths, and our journey ended in a brutal mass murder. Then having visited the New World, Africa and India, we hopped back to Germany to witness Scribner's views of popular propaganda in the German Reformation, and ended the day with humour rather than a bloodbath.
On a different note, I also decided to take a further journey into the worldwide web and try out some of google's tools. I must admit the google reader left me infinitely preferring my books. I felt overloaded with information and clutter; no tidiness there. It was a bewildering voyage. On the other hand, I found google documents rather handy and have even uploaded a bibliography on travel and literature.

Wading through the web

Well having dutifully settled down to do some homework and find a blog I appreciated, I was sorely disappointed at first. I at first began simply by looking at googles "next blog" and this wasn't worth the time it took to press the next key. I was literally wading through the morass of the web. I seemed to find rather a lot of dross about car racing, hougang mall and harbour toys, and horror of horrors, a blog on streetfighing. I decided I needed to find a different solution and searched for blogs on cartography and maps. This lead to some unexpected delights - first one run by the BL on mapping London which accompanied an exhibition which to my sorrow I had missed, but the blog and the virtual exhibition lived on. (http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/londoninmaps/cartography/index.html) Then came my true delight - a blog on strange maps. (http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2008/10/19/321-the-forgotten-kingdom-of-araucania-patagonia/)Who knew about mapping tea-drinking? Has anyone else come across a map of the Forgotten Kingdom of Araucania-Patagonia? This site though perhaps less useful than the Chicago Blog on Cartography and Geography archives provided and indeed provides a lot of fun. I can travel through the map and web into some of the weirder cartographic images of our world.

My first blog

Well, I can smile properly for the first time in months now that I am halfway through a root canal, on the other hand, I am running pillar-to-post and back again so not much time to stop to smile - or should I say voyaging. So far today been to India, Africa, the New World and now the world wide web.