I'm taking this class called Treasures of Yale where we basically go around to different archives, museums, and libraries and look at the cool things that we've collected over the years. Last week, we looked at illuminated Arthurian manuscripts which are so much more impressive in person and absolutely gorgeous, and this week, we looked at a bunch of original printings of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. I don't know much about Walt Whitman (even less before I took this class), and I had never really been drawn to his "mentor" Ralph Waldo Emerson, but I found it really cool that he spent his entire life revising the already published Leaves of Grass so that there were many different versions. Even the 1855 first edition had different printings from when type broke and he had to replace it or where he stopped in the middle of the printing to fix things.
We got to see 5 of the 1855 edition, all with different covers (one in paperback!), as well as many later editions, and a lot of the Whitman fans were hardcore physically affected by being in their proximity (I'll probably be like then we go to the Peabody Natural History Museum). We also read a lot of opinion pieces on the business of compiling archives and databases and how browsing databases could never replace the thrill of going through archives of material. Although I did find the discussion interesting, one of the things I took away from reading these pieces was a list of words I would like to incorporate more often into my writing. They're not particularly fancy words, and none of them are especially arcane, but they're just words that I feel like would beef up my paragraphs. So here's the list of 10:
We got to see 5 of the 1855 edition, all with different covers (one in paperback!), as well as many later editions, and a lot of the Whitman fans were hardcore physically affected by being in their proximity (I'll probably be like then we go to the Peabody Natural History Museum). We also read a lot of opinion pieces on the business of compiling archives and databases and how browsing databases could never replace the thrill of going through archives of material. Although I did find the discussion interesting, one of the things I took away from reading these pieces was a list of words I would like to incorporate more often into my writing. They're not particularly fancy words, and none of them are especially arcane, but they're just words that I feel like would beef up my paragraphs. So here's the list of 10:
- cacophony
- funnel (as a verb)
- pigeonhole
- inchoate
- cascading
- peculiarity
- dovetail
- jagged
- grotesque
- marshal
Of course, it's not so much the words as they way they are strung together and I've read a couple of phrases that I thought were well put together. However, I find that the words above have a very sonorous quality to them. Say them and the sound almost reflects what they mean.
Alright, time to sleep. More on life tomorrow!
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