On Wednesday we ate. A lot. I’d show you how much. But then I’d have to do laps.

Steph helped. Of course. But she never sits still. And always looks like a blur in my point-and-shoot pics.

One of the things I loved about the University of Manchester were the special collections (which date back to the 3rd millennium BC) held by the John Rylands Libraries. Stateside, Princeton University Library is digitising its rare books. Their latest addition is the Islamic Manuscripts Collection. The University Library holds approximately 9,500 Islamic manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish and other languages of the Muslim world written in Arabic script. The manuscripts date from the 9th to the 19th centuries. Two hundred of these manuscripts are being digitized for the digital library.

There’s also a late 13th-century Byzantine manuscript from Constantinople which contains Aristotle’s Organon (De interpretatione, Analytica priora, Analytica posteriora, and Topica), accompanied by diagrams and other textual materials.

Princeton University Library Digital Collection

“The thing to do is write something with a delayed reaction like those capsules that take an hour to melt in the stomach. In this way, it could be performed on Monday and not make them vomit until Wednesday, by which time they would not be sure who was to blame. This is the principle I operate under and I find it works very well.”

-Flannery O’Connor in a letter to friend and playwright Maryat Lee in 1959.

“She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.” – A Temple of the Holy Ghost, Flannery O’Connor

More than any other American fiction writer of her time, her influence has gone beyond literature to the realm of American popular culture. Tommy Lee Jones, who wrote his college thesis on O’Connor, seemed to be directing under her spell in his film “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.” Randy Newman and Bruce Springsteen have both recorded albums that sound like background music to her world; Springsteen admitted he wrote and recorded his album “Nebraska” while reading O’Connor. The chilling ending of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is echoed in the title song from that album. In O’Connor’s story, two escaped convicts murder a family, including a grandmother, in cold blood..

Salon

I’m not a dialects person, but I’ve chased down people who are and the general consensus of those ‘in the know’ seems to be that it’s the Appalachian tongue that’s closest to Shakespeare’s own. That the mountains have served as an insulator and protected the mother tongue of their earliest immigrants.

In the days following the Civil War, travel writers returning from the nation’s newest state mocked its inhabitants as weird religious folk who prayed to mountains and still spoke Elizabethan English.

Speaking from personal experience, and this isn’t to do with dialect expressly but it goes to the same point, I’m amazed and excited at how often I hear my grandfather, a deep-wood, West Virginia fellow, as he’ll tell you himself, using words or phrases that are more relevant to The Bard’s time than our own.

You won’t find half of his words in a dictionary, but you WILL find them in the likes of Johnson, Raleigh, and Shakespeare. Of course.