Linkissage

[oursin]

The thematic bit: several stories about manuscripts, history, evidence:

Ursula Le Guin on a novel inspired by the survival against all odds of the Sarajevo Haggadah:
The Sarajevo Haggadah, pride and glory of the Bosnian collection, was spirited out of the library and hidden in a bank vault when the Serbs began to target the libraries and museums of

Comments

[noveldevice]

"The fierce reality of fiction." Yes, yes, yes.

I liked the Jane Campion; thank you for the pointer.

Yes, yes, yes.

[jonquil]

Knowing that that survived into C21 and then was destroyed by a moron makes me want to *scream*.

Add her to the list with Cassandra Austen, Lady Burton,...

[oursin]

Mind you, Plomer makes me cringe - marking up C19th ms material in red crayon (OMG! WTF! Kill! or at least give sound thrashing with library snakes), and losing the typed transcript - for the fail, definitely. At my place of work, we have both microfilm and typed transcripts of a document of which the original is held in the Clark Library in LA, and is too fragile to use. The microfilms were done a long time ago and are unusable. So any researchers are stuck with the typed transcript. You bear in mind that Shit Happens and keep tight hold of any surrogates you have. Duh.

[neil_scott]

Given how bad Look at the Harlequins! was, why do people have such high hopes for an unfinished Original of Laura. (Didn't Nabokov say that show drafts was like passing round sputum?)

[oursin]

Maybe that's why he's playing this 'wave the lighter near the manuscript' game - because otherwise no-one would give a toss.

[legionseagle]

Actually, I don't know why everyone focusses on Lewis Caroll's alleged proclivities; Kilvert's (applying modern sensibilities) are much more overt, even in the Penguin abridgement. Could changing (and more knowing) standards have accounted for the destruction?

[oursin]

Possibly. But that would presumably require reading through it and realising that It Would Not Do?

[green_knight]

I was wondering that. I have the one-volume edition, and some of it - even in this ultra-abridged form - is definitely not suitable for...

... well, I would say Victorian sensibilities were it not for the fact that many victorian writers did not seem to read anywhere _near_ as much subtext into initeractions between adults and children as we do today, and I'm left to wonder who gets it right.

Kilvert also openly writes about folk traditions that might not find the approval of the church.

I wonder what is lost :-(((

[oursin]

The BL does stuff like that: it also hosts a service which is about giving aid to collections in parts of the world where there is not much in the way of conservation support services.