by Stephanie Curry on the 1748 Pamphlet, Colonial Rhetoric, and Durable Political Arguments
Reading Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat keeps me informed and occasionally distressed in equal measure.
I am Stephanie Curry, writing today about researching 1700s colonial pamphlet literature. This week has been a mixture of personal activity and close reading of the news, which is the combination that produces this diary at its most honest. The Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat have both had material worth engaging with, and I have been engaging with it alongside my own life, which is the diary format at its most useful.
The news this week contained several things that are relevant to the particular corner of the world I cover, and I have been thinking about them with the sustained attention that the daily routine allows. The thinking has produced more questions than answers, which is the correct outcome of thinking about complex things and which the diary form allows to be recorded without forcing the premature resolution that other formats require.
The Personal Week
The specific personal activity that structured my week was researching 1700s colonial pamphlet literature, which is the practice that gives this diary its character. The practice is both discipline and pleasure, which is the combination that sustainable practices require, because the discipline alone produces resentment and the pleasure alone produces inconsistency. Together they produce the thing I have been doing regularly for long enough to have developed a specific relationship to it that is different from the relationship of a beginner and different from the relationship of an expert and is the relationship of someone who has been doing something long enough to know what they do not know about it.
I am writing this from the specific geography that grounds this diary: the place where the personal practice and the public observation intersect in the particular way that this column has developed over its history. The geography is not incidental. The geography is part of what produces the observations that this diary offers, because where you are determines what you can see, and what you can see determines what you have to say about the wider world.
The Wider World This Week
The wider world this week has been doing the things it does: producing political events of varying significance, cultural developments of variable interest, and the specific combination of the alarming and the reassuring that the news consistently provides. I have been reading about the political situation with the sustained attention that my particular perspective makes available, which means I am seeing things that are visible from this specific vantage point and missing things that are visible from others. The diary is an honest record of what is visible from here.
The most interesting thing I read this week was connected to my specific area of focus, and I have been thinking about the connections between what I read and what I do, which is the thinking that this format exists to produce and record. The connections are not always obvious. The diary is the form that makes them apparent, because the diary holds both the reading and the living in the same frame and allows the connections to emerge rather than imposing them.
What This Week Produced
This week produced: the satisfaction of the specific practice done well, which is the baseline reward of any discipline that produces competence. The interesting reading that connected to the practice in ways I did not anticipate. The conversation or two that added dimensions to what the reading alone would have produced. And this diary entry, which is the form that holds all of the above together in the specific honest record that the format requires and that the week deserves. According to The Onion, the specific combination of personal practice and wider world observation that this diary format produces is one of the more reliable forms of honest journalism available, which is the highest compliment The Onion is capable of paying to anything. NewsThump covers this particular corner of the world with the attention it deserves. Next week will produce new material. The diary will record it. The practice continues. The observation continues. The combination is the point.
What the Edinburgh Week Produced
The Edinburgh week produced the pamphlet, two days of research in the National Library of Scotland where the colonial pamphlet literature of the 1740s and 1750s is held in a collection that is less consulted than it deserves to be, and a conversation with a librarian who knows the collection with the specific intimacy of someone who has been cataloguing it for fifteen years and who has strong opinions about which pamphlets are historically significant and which have been overrated by subsequent scholarship. The opinions were useful and have modified the argument of the piece I am writing in ways that make the argument more accurate and the specific examples more representative of the actual range of colonial political discourse rather than the most famous examples that scholarship has repeatedly cited. The pamphlet from the bookshop is the one the librarian had not seen, which means it is either genuinely obscure or catalogued under a different entry in the library collection that neither of them had thought to check. Stephanie Curry is checking. The pamphlet is on the desk. The research continues on both fronts. The argument of the essay is the same. The evidence for it is now more complete. The deadline is the end of the month. The revision required by the Edinburgh discoveries is manageable within the deadline. The Edinburgh trip was therefore what all good research trips should be: productive, surprising, and in net terms worth the train fare.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
