jazz break

Haven't been doing much these past couple weeks but trying to work on my research paper. On Tuesday night, used one of my free student tickets to see the Jon Faddis Jazz Orchestra perform at McCarter. There were two special guest performers: 'newbie' Jo Lawry, and octogenarian Clark Terry.

Lawry had a really beautiful voice, but Clark Terry stole the show--he was totally hilarious with his famous "mumbles" scat routine. If you have iTunes, you can search for 'Clark Terry' and 'Mumbles' to sample what it sort of sounded like, though half the fun of it was listening to him improvising.

The trick to his 'mumbling' is that it really sounds like he might be actually saying something, and he does toss in real words (like people's names) as well as little narratives, so it has an effect similar to half-listening to somebody talking at another table in a restaurant. You tune out but then your mind suddenly hears a word it can make sense of, and right away you're paying attention again.

During the course of Terry's 20-minute performance, Jon Faddis was continually fussing over him, so he took the opportunity to ham it up as a crotchety old man. Faddis made him drink some bottled water after his first couple of songs, and he pretended to drink a bunch of it, but then gleefully spat a little fountain-arc of water out at the audience. It was so unexpected that I just burst out laughing. It was a great break from trying to wrap my head round Gassendi's lifetime of scholarship.

Jonson's Lucretius

It seems fitting that I should get around to saying something or other about Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, since the blog is named after the book. Well, for the past couple of days I have been at Houghton Library, where most of Harvard's rare books are kept, looking at sixteenth- and seventeenth-century editions of De Rerum Natura.

One of the books I called up turned out to be Ben Jonson's copy of Lucretius, which made the librarian rather nervous about letting me see it. The catalog entry reads "Ben Jonson's copy, with his autograph and motto on title page with his marginalia in the text and on flyleaves and with a Latin satire on the Puritans in riming verse on the back lining-leaf; for a description of this volume and Johnson's annotations, see Ben Jonson, ed. C.H. Herford & Percy Simpson (Oxford, 1925) v.1, p.255ff. Imperfect: ink has been spilled over several leaves at beginning, middle, and end of the volume and has oxidized, mutilating the paper." (The spilled ink at first had inspired the nervous librarian to tell me the book had been "in a fire or something", before she reviewed the catalog entry.)

Jonson's book has extremely tiny print, with no line numbers, and hardly any space to take notes. It's really a wonder that Jonson found the space to write anything at all--he must have had an excellent nib on his pen. Although it wasn't what I was after, I did sneak a peek at Jonson's autograph and his rhymed verses penned inside the back cover. He had very neat handwriting.

Houghton also owns a volume from 1495 that was used in preparation of the 1500 Aldine edition of Lucretius by Giovanni Battista Pio (the Aldine editions were renowned for the beauty of their typeface and the elegant simplicity of their page layout), with handwritten notes by GBP. I haven't manufactured a good excuse to put in a request to see that one yet, but hopefully at some point I will be able to. I did take a look at the 1500 Aldine, which was indeed very nice and easy to read, in comparison with Jonson's copy.

The only other thing of note is that I learned a new Houghton rule today: you can bring in a laptop computer OR a clipboard, but not both. Go figure.

may day, a little late

Once a year, in honor of the first day of May, there's an organized trek up the narrow spiral stairwell of Cleveland Tower at 5:30 am to watch the sun rise, followed by champagne and strawberries & cream in the Old GC Common Room. I didn't make it last year, but I (and around 25 other people) did this morning!