Abraham in Sound-Bites

I love Brian Lamb. How can you not? He's like that high school coach who ends up teaching History because the regular teacher is on maternity leave; he's prepared, got lots of notes, fires off questions like he's drilling plays, and he always seems uncomfortable and enthusiastic in equal parts. If you don't watch "Booknotes," hosted by C-SPAN CEO Brian Lamb, you are soooo missing out. It is a great program, particularly for history buffs, among whom Mr. Lamb can clearly be numbered. He's not quite a TV personality, despite years in front of the camera, and that only adds to his charm.

Periodically, C-SPAN gathers some of Lamb's "interviews," or friendly interrogations might be more apt, into a kind of a book. Now, they've gathered excerpts from C-SPAN many wonderful Lincoln broadcasts, Booknotes interviews and the like into a new book, Abraham Lincoln: Great American Historians on Our Sixteenth President. It isn't really a book, at least not a book of essays, though that's what the clever editors are calling these interview responses and the like. Think of it more as a souvenir of Lincoln chats with some of the best -- and one of the worst -- folks in the field. Every entry is basically a bite-sized summery of remarks on a particular theme, say Lincoln on religion, by a particular historian.

There are a some genuinely bad choices here. The cover, yet again, is an over-designed cypher reproducing the revised Lincoln portrait on the new five dollar bill. All well and good, but faced-out on the shelf, there's nothing to tell you what the Hell this book is! Worse, included without comment is an "essay" from the reactionary fringe economist and "neoconfederate" favorite, Thomas Dilorenzo, on "The Lincoln Cult." This is like including neo-Nazi David Irving in an anthology in tribute to Churchill. Indefensible and offensive.

So, this book is not meant to be so much a serious bit of scholarship as it is a celebration of C-SPAN's ongoing and wonderful participation in the Lincoln Bicentennial. Enjoy it as a companion to the programming, but beware of the psuedo-historian included.

Taking an Old Friend to Bed

Opening to an essay called "My Books," I find the following:

"Sitting, last winter, among my books, and walled round with all the comfort and protection which they and my fireside could afford me; to wit, a table of high piled books at my back, my writing-desk on one side of me, some shelves on the other, and the feeling of the warm fire at my feet; I began to consider how I loved the authors of those books, -- how I loved them, too, not only for the imaginative pleasures they afforded me, but for their making me love the very books themselves, and delight to be in contact with them."

I love Leigh Hunt.  He makes me love the very books themselves, and delight to be in contact with them.  I'm taking my Essays of Leigh Hunt upstairs with me now, to read a bit more before I go to sleep.

Procrastinating in the New Year

I intended to greet the New Year here last night, first thing after our private celebrations, but I didn't get to this until tonight.  And now it's already late again, and I find I don't have the book I wanted to use so that I might start the year with an appropriate quote.  Typical.  What have I done with all of today?!

The truth is, as the New Year came quietly in, I've been reading Samuel Johnson.  Not always an easy thing to do, not, as has so often been suggested, because of Johnson's stately style, but because I have access to so little of Johnson's actual work.  I have a little, two-volume edition of The Lives of the Poets, from the wonderful Oxford World Classics -- long out of print.  I have an anthology from 1964 called A Johnson Reader, from the editors that did my edition of the Dictionary, or who, rather, excerpted entertaining bits therefrom.  Both the Reader & the Dictionary are likewise out of print.  But reading Peter Martin's  Samuel Johnson: A Biography, and finding a reference to an essay from The Rambler, #134 on procrastination, I naturally wanted that particular essay -- but I don't own it.

The anecdote from the biography told of how Johnson wrote this essay, amusingly enough, "hastily" at a friend's house, the boy from the press standing by, waiting for copy.

How could I not want that essay, written under those circumstances?

Well, it's not in any book I own, because I've never been able to find, or afford the kind of Samuel Johnson books I want.  I've looked at the Yale edition of The Rambler online, but a full run of all nine volumes sells for, at least, seven hundred and fifty dollars!  I'm about to spend eight hundred dollars repairing my car.  I think that that will have to come first.  (When, oh when, well I ever get an edition of the complete Rambler of my own?!  I'm greedy for more of Sam J.)

It's getting later and later, so should I just put off my first blog of the year until the 2nd?

Finding Johnson's essay online, I find this in the first paragraph:

"...I grew every moment more irresolute, my ideas wandered from the first intention, and I rather wished to think, than thought upon any settled subject; till at last I was awakened from this dream of study by a summons from the press: the time was come for which I had been negligently purposing to provide, and, however dubious or sluggish, I was necessitated to write."

Comrade!!

Happy New Year! -- from Charles Lamb

A favorite I reread every year at this time, for obvious reasons, is Charles Lamb's classic essay "New Year's Eve." I'd tell you to buy it, but the latest reprint of Lamb's Essays has never come back despite repeated attempts to reorder.

So instead, I offer a link to the essay online:

http://www.angelfire.com/nv/mf/elia1/newyears.htm

" -- And now another cup of the generous! and a merry New Year, and many of them, to you all, my masters"