9 December 2013 Last updated at 14:21 GMT

Medieval Latin dictionary completed after 100 years

Dr Richard Ashdowne, current editor of the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources

Dr Richard Ashdowne is the dictionary's current editor

The final part of an epic dictionary of medieval Latin is to be published this week, bringing to a close a project initiated 100 years ago.

The Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources has more than 58,000 entries and currently spans 15 volumes, the first of which came out in 1975.
The 16th and final volume is published by the British Academy on 11 December.
Academy president Lord Stern called it "the most comprehensive study ever" of medieval Latin vocabulary.
He said it had "enabled us to discover more about the English language and shown us that Britain has indeed been at the heart of humanities and social science since the 6th Century".
According to the British Academy, Latin was used by scientists, diplomats, philosophers and lawyers for more than 1,000 years after the end of the Roman empire.
The dictionary details the Latin language used in Britain between 540 AD and the year 1600, drawing its contents from the Domesday Book, the Magna Carta and thousands of other documents.
"During this project we were sometimes the first people to have read these documents for centuries," said Dr David Howlett, editor of the dictionary from 1979 to 2011.

The final entries of the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources

"For the last hundred years the project has been systematically scouring the surviving British Medieval Latin texts to find evidence for every word and all its meanings and usage," said current editor Dr Richard Ashdowne.
"Much of this fundamental work was done in the early years of the project by a small army of volunteers, including historians, clergymen and even retired soldiers."
Dr Howlett has previously compared the task to "eating a bowl of concrete", telling The Oxford Times: "The task was huge, and has got bigger as we have gone along."
The last full entry of the dictionary, which the Academy has overseen since 1913, is for 'zythum', a form of beer.
The work's completion is being marked by a conference and a display at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

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非凡歌手的平凡自傳

書評BEN RATLIFF2013年12月09日

史蒂文·帕特里克·莫里西(Steven Patrick Morrissey)來自英國曼徹斯特，一個「比世界上任何地方都要冷漠無禮的地方」，這位「史密斯」(Smiths)的前任主唱從過去到未來一直都是受誤解者們的英雄，是弱者與動物們的捍衛者，也是一位極具創意的推銷者。他在自己的新書《自傳》(Autobiography)中說，「史密斯」唱片封面的概念是「使用那些毫無魅力可言的圖像，為它們注入心靈與慾望，使『平凡』亦能成為傳達力量的工具——如有可能，亦可成為展現魅力的工具」。

「史密斯」最精彩的幾幅唱片封面確實做到了這一點，它們是略帶淡彩的黑白照片，字體全用大寫。比如1984年的單曲《老天知道我現在很悲慘》(Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now)的封面，用的是約克郡蛋糕廠工人維芙·尼克爾森(Viv Nicholson)獨自站在遍布車轍的街道上的照片，她是1961年足球彩票的大獎得主，以將獎金很快揮霍一空而聞名。照片上，她穿着駝毛外套，淡色頭髮，髮型可笑，表情嚴肅。表面上，她置身荒涼的環境，顯得十分怪異，但卻煥發著力量。這張封面強調着她的重要性，也宣示着樂隊的重要性，它所煥發出的光彩則更加強烈。

Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

《自傳》在英格蘭由企鵝經典(Penguin Classics)出版了平裝版（美國出版時間未定），這本書既犀利又沉悶，既富於移情作用，同時又有毫無意義的殘忍。它的封面也同樣煥發著力量。書名設計採用企鵝公司20世紀之前圖書的模版，黑底上襯着橘黃色的字。通過一系列言論，莫里西已經讓自己打入了一個由死人組成的特殊小圈子。他或許是英國的國寶級藝人，但他是怎麼做到的呢？

莫里西做事的基調就是，一邊不斷做非常引人注意的事，同時又暗示出自己殘存的質樸一面。20世紀70年代，是誰同意他一邊就讀他口中全世界最嚴厲的天主教學校，一邊又挑染了一縷黃髮？「只有古典作曲家才能讓人們只用姓氏稱呼，這很對我這挖泥工人的爆脾氣。」這句話他是怎麼想到的？這個從沒受過正統音樂教育的人在和「史密斯」一起錄音時，又怎麼能做到「像雄鷹翱翔一樣隨心所欲地在畫布上塗抹」，在約翰尼·馬爾(Johnny Marr)的作曲基礎上創作出極具特色的人聲旋律？

這本書於上周出版後不久，他很快發表了一份聲明，給那些讀完了全書 457頁卻還是對他的性取向感到迷惑不解的人們，「不幸的是，我不是同性戀，」他宣布，「從技術事實的角度而言，我是『人類戀』 (humasexual)。我迷戀人類。不過，當然……並不是很多人。」這樣的事，他又是怎麼辦到的？

他了解自身的價值——他永遠是個男孩——他也了解超級歌迷的地位。書中最精彩的一部分是以十幾歲少年的視角，用令人興奮的現在時態寫成，來自對20世紀70年代末期音樂電影、電視，乃至英國風格的密切觀察。

他邊看歐洲電視網的唱歌比賽，邊按「自己的評分系統」做筆記。他深愛着早期的「洛克西音樂」(Roxy Music)，關於「紐約妞兒」(New York Dolls)的第一張專輯，他寫了七頁紙——他們是美國人，但他們身上有他想要的東西。這些內容呈現出高水平的正面評價，在確鑿的事實和狂野的隱喻之間來回搖擺。諸如「在極小的規模上，『紐約妞兒』的歌是關於我們人生中遭遇的意外——從未發生在我們身上的，或只在我們身上發生的——他們如同特工一樣探尋自身的煩惱，把一切都同自己聯繫起來。他們眼神漠然，他們已經拋棄了這個世界的規則。」

他心目中的叛逆之神還包括伊基·波普(Iggy Pop)、大衛·鮑伊(David Bowie)、帕蒂·史密斯(Patti Smith)以及奧斯卡·王爾德(Oscar Wilde)和A·E·霍斯曼(A. E. Housman)。但他也對流行文化中精美而遭人遺忘的作品深有興趣。書中你會讀到布魯·敏克(Blue Mink)的《坩堝》(Melting Pot)、桑迪·肖(Sandie Shaw)的《你一直沒變》(You've Not Changed)、「風流韻事」(Love Affair)的《彩虹谷》(Rainbow Valley)。你也可以看到電視劇《迷失太空》(Lost in Space)，特別是關於飾演扎克里·史密斯博士(Dr. Zachary Smith)的演員喬納森·哈里斯(Jonathan Harris)。（「帶女人氣的男人都很詼諧，」當時他在筆記本上寫道，「大男子主義的男人都悶得要死。」）

在《自傳》中，莫里西描述了自己在「史密斯」之前，之中，之後的生活，圖為2012年他在廣播城音樂廳的演出。

Richard Perry/The New York Times

這是全書精彩的前1/3部分，其中的莫里西就像一件敏感的樂器。 1982年，「史密斯」建立，他從樂隊核心的角度嚴格而中肯地評判着他們的作品。他爭辯說，樂隊的風格其實是強硬的，不是溫柔的；他討厭第一張專輯中的音色；他解釋若干首歌的創作原因和創作方法；他還宣布《我們走上奇異的道路》(Strangeways Here We Come)是樂隊的傑作。他對「史密斯」的廠牌「艱難行業」(Rough Trade)表示不滿，認為都是因為他們的經營和人員（「一大堆牛津劍橋抽大麻的異見分子，滿口都是承諾」），才使得樂隊沒能獲得應得的知名度。這一切都有趣而令人信服，直到關於誤解和被低估的抱怨成了厚厚一本書的主旋律。

離開「史密斯」後，1991年到1992年，他在美國做個人巡演，麥迪遜廣場花園演唱會的票子銷售一空，他承認，他覺得自己的崇拜者們都瘋了。他聽說伊麗莎白·泰勒也來看她的演唱會，「她是不是把我和別人弄混了？」歌迷包圍了他的車子。「他們覺得會發生什麼？」他想。

在最極端的時候，他似乎半是美國人，半是英國人：懷舊情緒混雜着自省的謙遜，乃至本能的病態失望。

他與其他人的關係都很複雜微妙，不管對方是不是名人。只要他開始稱讚某人非常正直，你就可以肯定，這人不久後就要死了；這個名單包括他的少年好友喬恩·德雷(Jon Daley)與安吉·哈迪(Anji Hardy)，他的經紀人尼格爾·托馬斯(Nigel Thomas)與曾經給鮑伊當過吉他手的米克·羅森(Mick Ronson)。他描寫自己和一個名叫傑克·歐文·沃爾特斯(Jake Owen Walters)的男人的關係，90年代中期一次宴會派對之後，此人來到莫里西家，「他走進來呆了兩年」，但後來就沒怎麼寫關於這人的事。

莫里西是一個具有非凡寫作才華的流行歌星，但寫出來的卻是一本平凡的流行歌星回憶錄：一開始很迷人，直到他獲得真正的權力，賺了足夠的錢，以至於想要保護自己的金錢地位，之後內容就開始變得枯燥，有時顯得有些卑劣小氣。「史密斯」的鼓手邁克·喬伊斯(Mike Joyce)要求平等的版稅權利，二人冗長的法律爭訟佔了將近50頁（你能理解他的立場，但你也用不着看那麼多內容）。

這本書跌跌撞撞來到了結尾，他經歷了一連串同媒體的鬥爭，意識到自己受到其他音樂家的蔑視，也受到歌迷的愛戴，這讓他心情複雜。「你為什麼還要質疑愛？」2007年，他的鍵盤手米凱·法雷爾(Mikey Farrell)問過他。「我揮別了這個質疑，」莫里西寫道，「我的心在1970年一個冰冷的早晨停滯。我真是不可思議。」

本文最初發表於2013年月23日。
翻譯：董楠

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Steven+Patrick+Morrissey&sm=12

Morrissey on Pitching the Glamour of a Plain Life

By BEN RATLIFFDecember 09, 2013

Steven Patrick Morrissey of Manchester, England, a place “more brittle and less courteous than anywhere else on earth,” former singer for the Smiths, once and future hero for the misunderstood, and champion for powerless humans and animals, is also an inspired adman. The concept for the Smiths’ record covers, he explains in his new book, “Autobiography,” was “to take images that were the opposite of glamour and to pump enough heart and desire into them to show ordinariness as an instrument of power — or possibly, glamour.”

The best of them, with tinted black-and-white photographs and all-caps type, did exactly that. The cover for the single “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” in 1984, shows Viv Nicholson, a Yorkshire cake-factory worker, a winner and famously fast spender of a lucrative football pool in 1961, fully owning the middle of a rutted street. She has what looks like a camel’s-hair coat, teased and bleached hair, a grim face. In her apparent knowledge that she is fantastic amid wreckage, she radiates power. But the cover itself, declaring her importance as well as the band’s, radiates even more.

Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

“Autobiography,” as sharp as it is tedious, both empathetic and pointlessly cruel, has been published in England as a Penguin Classics paperback. (No American publication date has been announced.) And its cover also radiates power. It follows the design template of Penguin’s pre-20th-century titles, with orange lettering on a black panel. Morrissey has talked himself into a special clique of the dead. He may be a British national treasure etc., but how did he manage that?

Morrissey’s operation is built on doing extraordinarily attention-getting things while intimating vestigial modesty. Who gave him permission to put a yellow streak in his hair while attending what he describes as pretty much the grimmest Catholic school of the global 1970s? Or to figure that “only classical composers were known by just their surnames, and this suited my mudlark temperament quite nicely”? Or to let himself, untutored in music, be “free as a hawk to paint the canvas as I wish” while recording with the Smiths, creating extravagantly mannered vocal melodies over Johnny Marr’s exact song constructions?

Or, as he did after the release of the book last week, to issue a statement about his sexual orientation, for those still confused after reading his story for 457 pages? “Unfortunately, I am not homosexual,” he declared. “In technical fact, I am humasexual. I am attracted to humans. But, of course ... not many.”

He understands his own value — boy does he ever — and he understands the position of the superfan. The best stretches in this book, written in the excited present tense of teenage perceptions, comes from extremely close attention to music, movies, television and attitudes in England up to the late 1970s.

He watches the Eurovision Song Contest, taking notes for his own “private scoring system.” He lives for early Roxy Music, and his seven pages on the New York Dolls’s first record — they’re American, but they’ve got what he’s looking for — present a high level of celebratory criticism, the kind that shoots back and forth between researched fact and wild metaphor. Like this: “On an infinitesimal scale, Dolls songs are about life happening against us — never with or for us — and as agents of their own troubles they relate everything to themselves. Their eyes are indifferent. They have left the order of this world.”

His outsider gods include Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Patti Smith; also, Oscar Wilde and A. E. Housman. But he’s also as interested in pop’s matte-finish forgotten ones. You’ll read of Blue Mink’s “Melting Pot,” Sandie Shaw’s “You’ve Not Changed,” the Love Affair’s “Rainbow Valley.” You’ll read all about the TV show “Lost in Space,” particularly about the actor Jonathan Harris as Dr. Zachary Smith. (“Effeminate men are very witty,” he wrote in his notepad at the time, “whereas macho men are duller than death.”)

In “Autobiography,” Morrissey, who played Radio City Music Hall in 2012, describes his life before, during and after the Smiths.

Richard Perry/The New York Times

This is Morrissey as supersensitive instrument; it’s a great first third of his book. The Smiths form in 1982, and from his central position he judges their work critically and well. He argues for an understanding of the band as tough, not soft; he hates the sound of the first album; he explains why and how various songs were written; he declares “Strangeways Here We Come” the group’s masterpiece. He feels perpetually let down by Rough Trade, the Smiths’ label, arguing that its management and staff — “an encouraging ragbag of Oxbridge ganja dissidents” — held them back from the popularity they merited. This is all believable and amusing, until being misunderstood and undervalued becomes the general tenor of a long book.

During his post-Smiths solo tour of the United States in 1991 and 1992, when he sells out Madison Square Garden, he professes to think that his admirers have gone crazy. He learns that Elizabeth Taylor has come to his concert. “Has she confused me for someone else?” he writes. Fans circle his car. “What do they think is about to occur?” he wonders.

In his extreme attitudes he seems exactly half-American, half-English: I-want-it-yesterday matched with self-conscious modesty and morbid, reflexive disappointment.

His relationships with other humans, famous and not, are tricky. As soon as he describes someone as having integrity, you’re pretty sure that person is going to die soon; that list includes his teenage friends Jon Daley and Anji Hardy, his manager Nigel Thomas and the onetime Bowie guitarist Mick Ronson. He describes a relationship with a man named Jake Owen Walters, who comes to his house after a mid-’90s dinner party; “he steps inside and he stays for two years,” but there’s not much about him after that.

Morrissey is a pop star of unusual writing talent, but he’s written a usual sort of pop-star memoir: fascinating until he achieves true power and earns enough money to want to protect it, at which point it turns dull and sometimes petty. His protracted legal battles with Mike Joyce, the Smiths’ drummer, over Mr. Joyce’s demands for an equal share of royalties, takes up nearly 50 pages. (You understand his position, but you don’t need nearly that much of it.)

And the book staggers to a close in a series of battles with the press, perceived slights from other musicians and adoration from fans, which gives him mixed feelings. “Why do you still question the love?” his keyboardist Mikey Farrell asks him, around 2007. “I wave the question away,” Morrissey writes, “the heart stuck in an ice-cold morning of 1970. I am impossible.”

人和書 ( Men and Books)

2013年12月15日星期日