A new word I encountered in Architext: An Introduction by Gérard Genette (trans. Jane E. Lewin): misprision.
Wikipedia further differentiates between negative misprision (which includes concealment of treason) and positive (seditious conduct). In its ‘positive’ category, Wikipedia includes not only maladministration in high office but also “contempt of the sovereign”. For some inexplicable reason, this combination of examples brought before my reluctant mind’s eye the image of Boris Johnson.
Oddly enough, each of the dictionaries I consulted had as the last option on their list the only definition that made sense in the context of Architext, which was ‘misunderstanding’. Unless, that is, I am to be treated to Genette explaining how the history of poetics is “one of astonishing confusions and concealment of treasons/contempt of sovereigns”, which would have the advantage of being unexpected…
Weird Studies is one of my favourite podcasts, an intensive work-out for the intellect with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel as personal trainers / hierophants. Unable to listen to a couple of recent episodes because they depend on knowing about a film I haven't yet seen (John Carpenter's The Thing—I know, how can I not have seen this?) or would be full of spoilers for something on my TBR list (Victoria Nelson's The Secret Life of Puppets), I turned to the backlist and their 2019 exploration of an old favourite.
"What does the Ark of the Covenant signify? What does it contain? What happens if you open that box of god(s)? And whose god is this, anyway? These are questions that have puzzled theologians and mystics for centuries, and Steven Spielberg's great work asks them anew for an age gone nuclear."
Raiders is more than just a ripping yarn, though it's certainly that too.
I had not come across Johnson before: like many interesting new discoveries in the byways and margins of literature, this book has been brought to my attention by Mark Valentine's inestimable Wormwoodiana blog.
“Johnson should have been one of the great poets of the age but was already drinking eau-de-cologne for kicks while a teenager at Winchester College. His attraction to absinthe damaged his fragile health and cast him forever into a waking dream of haunted rooms and spectral poetry. A habitual insomniac, he haunted medieval burial grounds after dark, jotting down the epitaphs of the gone-too-young, as if anticipating his own early demise at the age of 35—falling from a bar stool in a Fleet Street pub.”
Perhaps fortunately, my literary influences lie more in the œuvres than the lives of other authors…
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