![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Reading? Reading! Well, some. Specifically, aside from finishing Books and Characters, all I've done is grazed selective* articles from a random slices of the 11th edition Encyclopedia Britannica snaffled from Project Gutenberg.**
Which is something to do carefully, of course -- as Wikisource notes: "The point of view held by the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica is roughly the one of the British and American educated classes at the beginning of the twentieth century. Any topic that would be sensitive to this point-of-view (POV) should be considered potentially biased … Changing circumstances and more recent research may have rendered this information obsolete or revealed it to be inaccurate, especially in the areas of science, law, and ethnography."
To give an example, the literature articles were edited by Edmund Gosse, who wrote several himself, and are, let us be diplomatic here, very late Victorian in mindset. Himself on John Donne:
OTOH, the math articles were overseen, and many written, by Alfred North Whitehead, so while they are firmly in the Principia Mathematica mindset, they are nicely lucid and readable.
Anyway, articles from a couple eighths of an encyclopedia volume, all either beginning with B and D.
* As in, what looked interesting.
** Pro-tip: to create an ebook TOC, use regex to parse out bolded article titles and stick them in heading tags.
---L.
Subject quote from "Wernher Von Braun," Tom Lehrer.
Which is something to do carefully, of course -- as Wikisource notes: "The point of view held by the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica is roughly the one of the British and American educated classes at the beginning of the twentieth century. Any topic that would be sensitive to this point-of-view (POV) should be considered potentially biased … Changing circumstances and more recent research may have rendered this information obsolete or revealed it to be inaccurate, especially in the areas of science, law, and ethnography."
To give an example, the literature articles were edited by Edmund Gosse, who wrote several himself, and are, let us be diplomatic here, very late Victorian in mindset. Himself on John Donne:
The influence of Donne upon the literature of England was singularly wide and deep, although almost wholly malign. His originality and the fervour of his imaginative passion made him extremely attractive to the younger generation of poets, who saw that he had broken through the old tradition, and were ready to follow him implicitly into new fields…Needless to say, I disagree with much of this.
The first impression of an unbiased reader who dips into the poems of Donne is unfavourable. He is repulsed by the intolerably harsh and crabbed versification, by the recondite choice of theme and expression, and by the oddity of the thought. In time, however, he perceives that behind the fantastic garb of language there is an earnest and vigorous mind, an imagination that harbours fire within its cloudy folds, and an insight into the mysteries of spiritual life which is often startling. Donne excels in brief flashes of wit and beauty, and in sudden daring phrases that have the full perfume of poetry in them.
OTOH, the math articles were overseen, and many written, by Alfred North Whitehead, so while they are firmly in the Principia Mathematica mindset, they are nicely lucid and readable.
Anyway, articles from a couple eighths of an encyclopedia volume, all either beginning with B and D.
* As in, what looked interesting.
** Pro-tip: to create an ebook TOC, use regex to parse out bolded article titles and stick them in heading tags.
---L.
Subject quote from "Wernher Von Braun," Tom Lehrer.