Update

Things have gotten pretty busy lately in my non-blogging life, and so the second part of my essay on the Second Revolution in China will have to wait. However, since my research is directly related to that topic, I need to summarize the Revolution anyway. I should post  an update on the topic very soon.
I'm really writing this post to try to force a previous post through to Facebook though, where I suspect most people actually see this blog. Therefore I apologize for the non-content. Perhaps I shall mollify my readers or non-readers with an amusing picture:

Devil’s Dictionary-- Diary

From the Devil’s Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce:

DIARY, n. A daily record of that part of one's life, which he can relate to himself without blushing.

Hearst kept a diary wherein were writ All that he had of wisdom and of wit. So the Recording Angel, when Hearst died, Erased all entries of his own and cried: "I'll judge you by your diary." Said Hearst: "Thank you; 'twill show you I am Saint the First" -- Straightway producing, jubilant and proud, That record from a pocket in his shroud. The Angel slowly turned the pages o'er, Each stupid line of which he knew before, Glooming and gleaming as by turns he hit On Shallow sentiment and stolen wit; Then gravely closed the book and gave it back. "My friend, you've wandered from your proper track: You'd never be content this side the tomb -- For big ideas Heaven has little room, And Hell's no latitude for making mirth," He said, and kicked the fellow back to earth.

"The Mad Philosopher"

 

(It’s true, I keep a diary and consistently omit all the things which I would blush to have others read--- or my mind whitewashes the memory for me. So instead of the stupid or thoughtless or rather, course things we do that pass the small moments of the day, my diary merely records what I think about things when the nib meets the paper: of course its a departure from reality, and an exercise in self-gratification to boot.

But in the end, what should I strive to record in my diary? Certainly not just important things, since life is mainly made up of ordinary, boring moments. Certainly not every mundane thing that comes to mind, since that would be of no interest. Perhaps, what I like to read in journals that have come down to us from the past: interesting things, and the flavor of daily life. Especially the latter, since in time all our world will fade away, and be replaced by new things.)

Humanism

Listening to an audio book this afternoon regarding the Enlightenment, I realized that I have not distinguished in my thought between several flavors or definitions of humanism. There is, of course, the modern sense of humanism being theories or doctrines “which take human experience as the starting point for man’s knowledge of himself and the work of God and Nature.” (New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought sv. Humanism).

However, the term was first coined in 1808 by F.J. Niethammer to describe the study of the classics, “the revival of which had been one of the distinguishing features of the Italian Renaissance, later spreading to the rest of Europe as ‘the New Learning’.” (Ibid.) So there is another sense of the word humanism, which basically describes the humanities. Wikipedia.org’s article concerning humanism includes this interesting section on the importance of sources:

The humanists' close study of Latin literary texts soon enabled them to discern historical differences in the writing styles of different periods. By analogy with what they saw as decline of Latin, they applied the principle of ad fontes, or back to the sources, across broad areas of learning, seeking out manuscripts of Patristic literature as well as pagan authors. In 1439, while employed in Naples at the court of Alfonso V of Aragon (at the time engaged in a dispute with the Papal States) the humanist Lorenzo Valla used stylistic textual analysis, now called philology, to prove that the Donation of Constantine, which purported to confer temporal powers on the Pope of Rome, was an eighth-century forgery.^[24] For the next 70 years, however, neither Valla nor any of his contemporaries thought to apply the techniques of philology to other controversial manuscripts in this way. Instead, after the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the Turks in 1453, which brought a flood of Greek Orthodox refugees to Italy, humanist scholars increasingly turned to the study of Neoplatonism and Hermeticism, hoping to bridge the differences between the Greek and Roman Churches, and even between Christianity itself and the non-Christian world.^[25] The refugees brought with them Greek manuscripts, not only of Plato and Aristotle, but also of the Christian Gospels, previously unavailable in the Latin West. After 1517, when the new invention of printing made these texts widely available, the Dutch humanist Erasmus, who had studied Greek at the Venetian printing house of Aldus Manutius, began a philological analysis of the Gospels in the spirit of Valla, comparing the Greek originals with their Latin translations with a view to correcting errors and discrepancies in the latter. Erasmus, along with the French humanist Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples, began issuing new translations, laying the groundwork for the Protestant Reformation. Henceforth Renaissance humanism, particularly in the German North, became concerned with religion, while Italian and French humanism concentrated increasingly on scholarship and philology addressed to a narrow audience of specialists, studiously avoiding topics that might offend despotic rulers or which might be seen as corrosive of faith. After the Reformation, critical examination of the Bible did not resume until the advent of the so-called Higher criticsm of the 19th-century German Tübingen school.

I think the study of sources, and of how some of these manuscripts came to be saved and enshrined in the corpus of Western thought whilst others disappeared forever is very interesting. Kind of like peering at the source code of Western civilization.

Fake Journal Month and Meta-Fiction

International Fake Journal Month is an event sort of like National Novel Writing Month, but instead of completing a novel in a month (does anyone know someone who’s actually accomplished that?), participants create a fictional journal for the month of April. Often these journals have interesting stories going on, and incorporate sketches and other artwork chronicling the (fictional) authors’ life.

I’m a junkie for any kind of meta-fiction or “in-universe” publication, like the fake websites promoting Star Wars Episode II (which purported to be a news site from the Star Wars version of the Internet, the Holonet). I also have a “the lost journal of Indiana Jones” published in 2008 by Simon and Schuster, Inc. as a merchandised item for Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. In both cases, the “in-Universe” or meta-fictional items are more entertaining and interesting than the movies that they promote.

Another popular form of meta-fiction is the Alternate-Reality Game, or ARG. In this type of game, reality blends with fiction, as the participants hunt for fictional clues in the real world, calling phone numbers and even going to real-world locations to get more clues. Oftentimes ARGs turn out to be forms of viral marketing for new films or products.

Maybe, in our information-dense universe of the 21st Century, meta-data or meta-fiction has become the hallmark genre of our era. Of course, there are plenty of examples of meta-fiction from the past, such as the Necronomicon of H.P. Lovecraft’s horror stories. And sometimes, this meta-fiction is taken as reality: I’ve met individuals who honestly believe that the witch-cults and Necronomicon are real, and that Lovecraft was documenting, rather than inventing, his unnamable horrors.