ACW's Journal
[Most Recent Entries]
[Calendar View]
[Friends]
Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
ACW's LiveJournal:
[ << Previous 20 ]
| Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012 | | 3:54 am |
Project Gutenberg etext #94: Alexander's Bridge
Alexander's Bridge was the third novel by Willa Cather to be digitized by Project Gutenberg; the ones I've read already are O Pioneers! (1913, discussed here, here, and here) and The Song of the Lark (1915, discussed here, here, and here). But Alexander's Bridge was Cather's first novel, published in 1912; I didn't know that while reading it, but I looked it up just now. This explains a few things that confused me while I was reading it under the impression that it was written later; things that make much more sense now that I know it was Cather's first long work. First, it isn't very long at all. Second, its plot is much simpler than either O Pioneers! or The Song of the Lark. Cather is not yet uncomfortably avoiding romance in this first novel. It's a rather conventional love triangle, with the charismatic engineer Bartley Alexander at the center. Married to, and deeply in love with, the stately and aristocratic Winifred, Alexander nevertheless resumes an affair with a former sweetheart, the Irish actress Hilda Burgoyne. I think we are supposed to take Alexander's powerful masculine attractiveness as a given, but Cather's description didn't sound all that attractive to me. Perhaps it's because my sense of masculine attractiveness is poor. But we can certainly deduce it from his effect on the women in his life. Apparently "nothing can happen to you after Bartley.". It is clear from close to the beginning that this is a tragedy; Alexander's besetting flaw is a hopeless yearning for his youth, even though he knows that the youth he remembers is more a nostalgic reconstruction than a faithful memory. Alexander is another character that convinces me that Ayn Rand read Willa Cather. In fact, Atlas Shrugged feels, in places, a bit like Alexander's Bridge fanfiction. A few other readers on the Web seem to have noticed this as well. In this novel, Cather is already showing what is to me her most salient skill, the ability to throw in casual detail that somehow sharpens the sense that real people, real scenes, and real events are being described. I'm finding it more and more striking, the more of her work I read. In the Project Gutenberg edition is included, as a sort of appendix, a 1904 ballad by Alfred Noyes called "The Barrel-Organ", which conjures a similar artificial nostalgia to the sort that preys on Alexander. It is unclear from this edition whether Cather explicitly mentions the poem, or whether a later editor (perhaps even the etext producers for Project Gutenberg) decided it was appropriate. Project Gutenberg's etext #95 is Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda. | | Sunday, May 20th, 2012 | | 12:25 pm |
Project Gutenberg etext #93: Tom Sawyer, Detective
Tom Sawyer, Detective followed Tom Sawyer Abroad two years later, in 1896. It's a more coherent story than the preceding volume; Mark Twain says in a brief introduction that he based the story on an actual Swedish crime. Tom and Huck go back down the river to provide moral support to Aunt Polly's sister Sally, whose family we already met in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain really liked writing in Huck's voice, so as with the preceding two books in the series, Huck narrates his adventures with Tom. All these stories are placed in the pre-Civil-War South, and slavery is constantly in the background. I can't think of anything particularly noteworthy about this short novel. It was pleasant and amusing enough, but there is nothing substantial about it. Now I am on to etext #94, Alexander's Bridge, the third Willa Cather novel digitized by Project Gutenberg. | | Saturday, May 19th, 2012 | | 6:35 pm |
Ninth run of 2012
Oh, yeah. I did run this morning. Seven miles in 73:22. I think I had a really good start, but slumped in the last four miles or so. | | 4:28 pm |
Project Gutenberg etext #92: Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar
I don't know exactly when Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar, the fifth novel in the Tarzan saga, but since it was serialized in late 1916, it's likely that it was written earlier that year. Burroughs had a devoted following by then, and had a good relationship with his publishers, so a longer delay between writing and publication wouldn't have been warranted. I noticed several things while reading it that I thought were worthy of mention, but I'm having trouble recalling them all now. I should probably keep a notepad near my reader, so that I can write these things down when they occur to me. I tried using the reader "highlights and notes" function, but now I've discovered that there is no way to show all the pages that have highlights. One thing I noted was the complete absence of Tarzan's son and new daughter-in-law from the scene. They are never even mentioned. Furthermore, John and Jane Clayton are living happily on their vast estate in Africa, despite it having been an important plot element in The Son of Tarzan that Jane didn't want to live in Africa. All right, stand by while I laboriously page through looking for my notes. Ah, I remembered something I didn't write a note about. Burroughs is an indisputable master of the cheesy plot device; I think we're all agreed on that. He has people meeting completely by accident in the trackless wastes of Mars or the tangled jungles of Africa, way more often than is justified by even a very stretched version of the laws of probability. But one is willing to grant these things to him because he's so entertaining. Even granting him this License to Commit Melodrama, however, I was disappointed when Tarzan got knocked on the head during an earthquake and spent most of the rest of the novel running around with that magical sort of amnesia that only happens in fiction. He can remember the general drift of his jungle upbringing, but has been conveniently stripped of all that awkward civilization stuff. This amnesia is absolutely essential to making the plot go, but it annoyed the heck out of me. Part of what I like about Tarzan is the tension between his wild and civilized selves, and when the civilized self is gone, so is that nice tension. Also it bothered be that he could still speak English and French. Perhaps I am being too picky. This is Burroughs, after all. I found a note! Burroughs uses the pronoun she as a noun, meaning "female" or "female mate". For instance, "Tarzan decided to secure the person of the she before further prosecuting his search for the pouch." That sentence is on page 87 of the epub version of the Gutenberg etext of Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar, but "she" is used throughout the Tarzan series whenever Burroughs wants us to feel the thrill of thinking of females, including human ones, as objects or possessions, the way those lovely uncivilized jungle creatures do. Which is fairly often. At first it felt so ungrammatical to me that I was sure it was an accident. I suppose I see his point: "female" is a little too coldblooded and detached. If Burroughs ever used he in the same way, I think I would be less distressed. I can't remember an instance, though. There is no lioness fighting for her he. Oh, yes. Lions. If you want a drinking game that will make you really sloshed, read Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar and take a swig whenever the word "lion" appears. I will permit you to abstain on "Numa" and "Simba", which are synonyms in Burroughs. It is as if Burroughs had a product-placement deal with the Syndicate for the Promotion of the African Lion, and every once in a while he slaps his forehead, and says, "OMG, there's been no lion for at least twenty pages!" My note on page 65 says, "How old is this expression?", referring to Burroughs's use of "strap hanger" to refer to a public transit commuter. So I'll take a peek on Google Books. Hmm. Why did I not notice the expression in Willa Cather's 1915 The Song of the Lark? It's there. Unfortunately for my scholarly effort, there is a piece of construction hardware called a "strap hanger", which swamps a lot of the early usage, but I seem to have found a 1912 magazine that uses the phrase. I think I would have guessed that it started in the twenties. Now I have started etext #93, Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, Detective. My hopes are not high. | | Thursday, May 17th, 2012 | | 10:09 am |
Eighth run of 2012
Indeed, I had to take two days off running on account of weather. And also, it turns out, because my muscles were pretty stiff after running twice in close succession, so it was a good thing. I did my seven miles in 73:24, half a minute slower than last time. Maybe the difference is meal timing, maybe it's warmer weather. Anyway, my times bounce around a lot. We'll see what happens if I manage to run again on the weekend. | | Tuesday, May 15th, 2012 | | 8:52 am |
Project Gutenberg etext #91: Tom Sawyer Abroad
Please forget what I said in my post about A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court regarding "early" and "late" phases of Mark Twain's writing career. Tom Sawyer Abroad is definitely "late" (1894), but its darker elements are subdued, and it isn't detectably bitter. It is, however, pretty goofy. Tom and his pals Huck and Jim come into possession of a flying machine that is essentially magical, though its marvels are putatively technological. Without ever worrying about fuel or buoyancy, the three pilot the machine across the Eastern United States, the Atlantic Ocean, and North Africa, having adventures and philosophical disputes all the way. When they reach Egypt, the story extinguishes itself hurriedly and ridiculously, as if Mark Twain suddenly noticed that he was running out of ink and had to wrap things up unexpectedly. The philosophical disputes all have the same formula, which was established in Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Tom, who is improbably well-read, makes some authoritative statement about the world, which is disputed by Huck and Jim. Sometimes Tom's decree is true, but is against common sense (like the fact that the sun's apparent motion is due to the rotation of the earth), and sometimes it is false or incoherent. Huck and Jim argue with Tom, mostly arguing by analogy, and usually things finish up with Huck and Jim feeling that they have got the better of Tom, and Tom sulking that his companions just don't know how to reason properly. The joke begins to get old somewhere in these pages. While amusing enough, there is nothing substantial in Tom Sawyer Abroad; it is a justly-neglected work. I understand that Twain was chronically short of cash around then. Now I have begun etext #92, the fifth Tarzan book, Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar. | | Monday, May 14th, 2012 | | 10:34 am |
Seventh run of 2012
For the first time this year I have managed to get out to the track twice in three days. It was marginal weather for running, this morning: about 56 F with intermittent drizzle. But I did my seven miles. I wasn't very surprised that it was my best time so far this year, because of the cool weather and the fact that I'd had another run only two days earlier. I did my 28 laps in 71:54. The weather forecast for the day after tomorrow is dismal, so I think I'm going to have to have two off days now. | | Sunday, May 13th, 2012 | | 9:13 pm |
Project Gutenberg etext #90: The Son of Tarzan
Well, that was fun. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote The Son of Tarzan, the fourth novel in the Tarzan series, in the early months of 1915; it was published in the pulps by the beginning of 1916, and in book form in early 1917. Burroughs asks us to accept a little Lysenkoist mysticism: the love of the jungle and of animals has somehow been passed down to Lord Greystoke's son Jack, though Tarzan and Jane have carefully insulated him from all such influences. Nothing they can do can keep Jack from his fate, though. He runs away to Africa at about the age of 11, and with the help of one of his father's ape friends, manages to recapitulate, without realizing it, his father's savage coming-of-age. Around that theme Burroughs weaves a very complicated plot, one that threatens to get away from him at times. We follow at least five viewpoints through the story, as the exciting improbabilities pile up. Young Greystoke finds a mate in the jungle, in whose person at least three improbabilities are united, and the novel ends with a wedding plus a lovely pile of reunions and resolutions. No cliffhangers, as far as I can tell; I don't think any of the baddies are left alive, and surviving baddies are Burroughs's favorite way to link stories. What the heck did Burroughs have against Swedes? This was the second Tarzan novel that featured at least one disreputable Swede. I suppose Swedish immigrants in the US were poor and disreputable in Burroughs's time. Now I am returning to Mark Twain for etext #91, Tom Sawyer Abroad. | | 12:57 pm |
Sixth run of 2012
I forgot to post yesterday after I got back from running seven miles in 76:10. It's still right among the times I've put in recently; I guess I can't expect much improvement until I can start putting in runs more than once a week. | | Thursday, May 10th, 2012 | | 5:46 pm |
Programming language nostalgia
Although it now seems like the most obvious common sense to design programming languages in such a way that they encourage programs written in them to be clear and readable, there was a time when this did not seem obvious. There used to programming languages that people took seriously, in which one could write extremely terse, extremely gnomic programs that did actual useful things for not-immediately-obvious reasons. The most salient example was APL, in which I once wrote a two-line program for playing the combinatorial game of Life. A classmate spent a good hour and a half figuring out why it worked. Another example was TECO, a text editor that got turned into a programming language against its will, in which every program was a miracle of incomprehensible brevity. As recently as introduction of Perl, the gnomic-terseness esthetic was still a powerful influence. The example section of the "camel book" is full of brief tricks for doing things in unexpected ways. And it's hard not to sense that the authors were rubbing their hands in glee as they discovered one-line programs for alphabetizing files and the like. I find myself feeling a little nostalgic for the days when we weren't quite as wise about what made a good programming language. I keep daydreaming about languages in which R)).k+2^^^ prints out the prime numbers between 2 and 257, but R))\k2^^ reads a line of input and prints it backwards. | | 5:18 pm |
Missing word appeal
Is there a word that means "prone to procrastination"? I have found myself saying "procrastinaty" twice in the last two days. | | 11:59 am |
Project Gutenberg etext #86: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, published in 1889, is a bridge between two phases of Mark Twain's writing career. I finished it last night and still am not sure what to make of it. I am pretty sure this is the first time I've gotten all the way through it, because the ending was surprising to me. I have a pretty good guess, too, about what made me stop in the middle on earlier occasions. The first half of the book is, as I obliviously said at the end of my last Project Project Gutenberg post, a romp. The last half is only intermittently rompy, and the last quarter is quite tragic. My younger self might well have thought, "Gee, this is not as much fun as I thought it would be," and shut the book when it started to turn dark. The Yankee is a factory foreman and expert mechanic, all up on the latest gadgets. He is sent back to the sixth century when a coworker whacks him with a crowbar during a fight. There he sets about to reform Arthur's kingdom on modern lines, and comes close to succeeding before ignorance and religious superstition finally defeat him. The point of the novel is to deflate romantic stereotypes of monarchy, aristocracy, and chivalry. But along the way, there are various episodes in which the Yankee uses 19th-century know-how to defeat various 6th-century antagonists, and these provide the real fun of the book. Part of the message of the book is that real scientific knowledge is better than ignorance and superstition, and because of that message, all of the "magic" in the main body of the narrative is flummery. The knock-on-the-head time travel is quickly forgotten, and that makes it somewhat jarring when at the apocalyptic end of the book, the hitherto-humbug Merlin succeeds in putting our hero in a 1300-year coma to get him back to his present. Twain pays no attention to any of the philosophical puzzles about time-travel. Although the mechanism is obscure, the time-travel is intended to be real, not a dream, but we never find out what happened to Hank Morgan's body in the present after he got knocked back to the sixth century. I suppose it's possible that the Yankee's interference in Arthur's court might have left no historical trace. The Yankee finds the language of the sixth century only occasionally baffling; essentially it's the language of Malory's fifteenth-century Morte d'Arthur. Twain ignores the fact that Arthur's court would have spoken a Celtic language with Latin decorations. The names and habits are also at least half a millennium off; it's all the high-medieval chivalry of French romance, complete with French-named knights and nobles -- but we can blame this on Malory and his forerunners, who started that tradition: Arthurian legend has always been anachronistically French. The traditional content of the Arthurian saga all happens off-stage. The Yankee arrives at the court with the Round Table already an institution. The tragic climactic conflict between Arthur and Lancelot happens while the Yankee is abroad with his wife and child; he returns to England to find society in the middle of a wrenching civil war, and his own apocalyptic undoing happens after the Arthurian matter is over. The dovetailing reminded me a little of the way Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead fits into the interstices of Hamlet. Mark Twain became darker in his later life, and his work turned to bitter musings about how terrible people are. This is already showing in Connecticut Yankee, and it's what makes the final part of the novel so difficult. Etext #87 was the 1993 CIA World Factbook, so we are now entering what I think of as the 1993-1994 Project Gutenberg "season". I'm skipping it, as I'm also skipping #88, a statistical summary of price/cost indices from 1875 to 1989, and #89, the text of the North American Free Trade Agreement. I've now started etext #90, the fourth Tarzan book, The Son of Tarzan. | | Saturday, May 5th, 2012 | | 6:53 pm |
Fifth run of 2012
It has been a fairly dismal week or so around here. The weather has been chilly and gray, and today was the first time in the month of May that there has been any sunlight at all. I have missed the sun. When I realized, early this afternoon, that the sun was trying to come out, I thought I should put my jacket on and go outside to be in it, a little. Then I checked the weather, and finding that it was actually 62 degrees out, I said, " Be in it? Heck, I'll run in it." So instead of a jacket, I put on my running shorts and shoes, and went down to Paul Bartley Track. I put in my seven miles in 76:52, still in the immediate vicinity of most of my performances this year. What I mean is, I've had one exceptionally good run, and one bad one, but the other three were within about ten seconds of each other. I won't start to improve until I can start getting out more regularly. | | 4:07 pm |
The Interstellar Tea House
I read about two dozen webcomics regularly, but usually don't talk about them. But my favorite, at the moment, is remarkable enough to deserve a plug. This is The Interstellar Tea House, which has been appearing right here on Livejournal at ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) chaogaogong. It's a science fiction story; I would classify it, if forced, as "hard" SF because of the pains the writer/artist takes to maintain consistency and plausibility. The story presupposes superluminal travel, but there's nothing else in it that I would consider fantastic. All the action happens on, or very near, a planet called Chaogaosing, probably several centuries in the future. Chaogaosing is being terraformed, mostly by humans, but there are about half-a-dozen other spacefaring alien species participating. One gets the impression that the planet's population is in the tens to hundreds of thousands. There seems to be a single, planned-out story arc, involving a unique engineered individual who is far from home and pursued by baddies. The story is interesting and dramatic, but the real star of the show is the milieu, the multicultural society slowly taking shape on Chaogaosing. There is serious storytelling going on, with sympathetic and not-so-sympathetic characters, conflicts, and one heck of a cool setting. I respect that a lot, so it's with some hesitancy that I add that the whole thing is also adorable. I've been getting one good "squee" from each posting, on average. Being me, I can't help adding that the author's linguistic realism is almost unparalleled in SF. Most authors and artists just don't bother. But in The Interstellar Tea House, the Cantonese is real Cantonese, and the Sierk D is real Sierk D. The author is a gifted amateur who is doing the whole thing completely for the love of the art of graphic storytelling, and deserves your attention. Read it from the beginning or you won't get the idea. [Edited to correct the title of the comic. I mistakenly put "teahouse" instead of "tea house". And to add:] It's a testament to the narrative skill of the author that I couldn't bring to mind two elements of the story that are a bit of a challenge to swallow from a "hard science fiction" point of view. I can explain them both without spoilers. One is the character of Dr. Mbotho. I suppose the premise for Steven Mbotho's existence is on the edge of plausibility, though if the premise turns out to be true, it will make an already-heartbreaking centuries-long tragedy even worse, in retrospect. The other is Yrek's special talent. This one is even harder to swallow; I think we just have to accept it as one of the only fantastic elements of the story (so far, anyway). This isn't the author's problem: it's mine for attempting to shoehorn this unique work into a category. My readers will both have noticed that I have been coy about the author's identity. This is because, to a certain extent, the author is cautious about the author's identity, and I should respect that. | | Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012 | | 1:09 am |
Project Gutenberg etext #85: The Beasts of Tarzan
I finished The Beasts of Tarzan this afternoon. In my last post about an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, The Return of Tarzan, I gave a taste of how, from the beginning of his writing career, Burroughs was writing constantly, interleaving several large-scale projects and managing himself like a business. If anything, I understated the case. After The Return of Tarzan (published 1913), Burroughs launched a new series, the "Pellucidar" or "Earth's Core" series, with the novel At the Earth's Core (1914). The standalone novels The Cave Girl, The Monster Men, The Mucker, The Mad King, and The Eternal Lover were all written in 1913, as was the third Mars book, The Warlord of Mars. In 1914 Burroughs found his way back to Tarzan. In The Beasts of Tarzan, Tarzan and Jane pursue villains who have kidnapped their infant son Jack; the chase takes them back to Africa, where Tarzan gets to be Tarzan. This is the novel where the dramatic trick of Tarzan taming wild animals to be his comrades really starts to come into focus, with the taming of the leopard Sheeta. About three quarters of the way through the book, Burroughs kills off Tarzan's main antagonist. Oh noes, there are at least fifty pages to go! That's OK: Burroughs pulls another gang of villains out of his sleeve to provide excitement for the last quarter. I was stunned by the nonchalant way he started a completely new story arc within sight of the end of the book. It somehow works, though. I wouldn't be me if I didn't say a few words about the treatment of language in the Tarzan novels. Tarzan's genius is displayed early, when he learns written English just by examining picture books. His first spoken language is the supposedly rudimentary tongue of his tribe of super-apes. We hear quite a lot of it in translation, and it often seems quite a bit beyond rudimentary. The subject does not bear close scrutiny: despite having a language in which Tarzan can exchange elaborate descriptions with the apes, and make deals with them, and so on, he cannot use it to teach them, say, to paddle a canoe. The apes have a language which is considerably more intelligent than its speakers. Later, Tarzan finds other human speakers of the ape language in the primeval city of Opar; in the mouths of the Oparians this language is quite poetic and elaborate. The inconsistency is never explained; coherency is sacrificed for the narrative convenience of having Tarzan be able to speak to the Oparians. Tarzan learns French from his first European friend, D'Arnot, and later finds to his chagrin that the language he speaks does not match the one he reads, and has to start from the beginning to learn English. Tarzan is also fluent in the language of the African tribes in the vicinity of his childhood stomping grounds in West Africa. Again, for narrative simplicity, Burroughs replaces the hundreds of mutually unintelligible West African languages (of at least three language families) with a single "West Coast" language. Unfortunately all the words we ever get of it are clearly Swahili, from the East Coast. In particular, Burroughs has learned the East Bantu u/mu/wa pattern pretty well, so we get Mugambi, the chief of the Wagambi, who live on the banks of the Ugambi. (Yes, a member of the main ethnic group of Uganda is called a muganda, plural wagandabaganda. [ETA: The inflection pattern is apparently different in Luganda; I regret the error.]) In The Return of Tarzan, our hero makes a pretty good start at learning what is called Arabic but ought to be some variety of Berber, from the geography. In this third novel, Tarzan is marooned on an island where he meets a different tribe of apes, who have lived on this island for ages, and are even (perhaps) a different species from the apes who cared for Tarzan in his childhood. But they speak exactly the same ape language. Oh, well. And oh, yeah, more casual racism. And apparently Swedes are pretty degenerate as well. Now I have started etext #86, Mark Twain's chrono-fantasy romp, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Twain has already made me laugh out loud on the 73 bus. | | Sunday, April 29th, 2012 | | 2:59 pm |
Project Gutenberg etext #84: Frankenstein
Late last night I finished Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. I found the novel very interesting and thought-provoking. My frequent commenter GK was prompted to read it "along with" me; I took a week to finish it, though, and GK polished it off in a couple of days. In backchannel communication I learned that GK didn't like it much and would say a few words in the comments to this post. I look forward to that. I have a lot of more or less coherent things to say about Frankenstein, and since I anticipate that this will be a fairly long post I am editing it offline, and will refrain from spamming my readers' friends pages by putting in a cut. ( Read more... )Now I have started etext #85, Burroughs's third Tarzan novel, The Beasts of Tarzan. I'm sure I've never read it; great fun so far. | | Sunday, April 22nd, 2012 | | 5:58 am |
Project Project Gutenberg: one year on
I just paged back through my posts about my partly-silly online reading program, "Project Project Gutenberg", and discovered that I have been at it for more than a year. I find it remarkable that I have kept it up this long, and even more remarkable that I'm not bored with it yet. It also establishes a sort of benchmark: I can get through about 80 etexts per year, including in the count the ones I skip because they're inappropriate to my real purposes. This is a bit humbling, since Project Gutenberg has tens of thousands of texts, which would take me centuries to get through at my present rate of progress. Even if I could read ten times faster, I probably wouldn't live long enough to get through them. Literature really is too vast to encompass. | | 4:33 am |
Project Gutenberg etext #83: From the Earth to the Moon; and, Round the Moon
This famous pair of novels by Jules Verne are acclaimed as being among the founding works of the modern genre of science fiction. Their bibliographic history is rather complicated, and puzzling it all out is beyond my ability, patience, and purpose. To merely hint at the difficulties: the novels were originally published in French, but almost immediately English translations began to appear, both licensed and pirated, sometimes without any attribution to a translator. In both French and English there exist a confusing multitude of textual variants appearing in different editions over the decades; apparently others, including Verne's son, modified them in various ways, and Verne himself attempted various corrections and emendations, so that ascertaining the author's intent is not straightforward. De la Terre à la Lune was first published in 1865. It's not clear to me whether Verne thought the novel was complete in itself. It ends at a bizarre moment, after the launch of the projectile, but without revealing the fate of the passengers. At first I was sure this was simply a Burroughs-style cliffhanger, but then I learned that between the novel and its sequel, Verne published three other novels, including the acclaimed Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Only in 1870, did he return with Autour de la Lune to reveal the fates of the characters that, five years earlier, he had sealed into a projectile and blasted into space. At any rate, the two novels have frequently been published in omnibus form ever since, under varying differently-merged titles; a standard library edition in the United States is called From the Earth to the Moon and a Trip Around It. I was amused to learn that the producer of the Project Gutenberg edition was my old friend Rich Schroeppel, whom I mostly know through recreational mathematics circles. At first I was annoyed that the edition has no translator's credit nor original publication details, but after learning more about the confusing bibliographic history of these novels I'm feeling much more charitable; it's quite possible Rich gave all the info he had at the time. It's mostly an admirable production job. When I read these novels as a kid, while tearing through the meager SF collection at the Carl Sandberg Public Library, a lot of stuff went right over my head. First of all, the novels are intentionally funny, with the sort of humor you'd expect a kid to miss. The main joke is that most of the characters are Americans, and they are all humorous exaggerations of the 19th-century French stereotype of Americans. The story was placed in a contemporary milieu, which was immediately after the American Civil War, and casual bloodthirstiness figures prominently, alongside mechanical genius and a tendency to scoff at technical and practical challenges. The physics and other science is a mishmash of intentional fantasy with both accurate and inaccurate interpretations of contemporary knowledge, with occasional startlingly prescient flashes. The most obvious intentional fantasy is the conceit of launching a manned interplanetary vehicle with a giant gun, imparting all its necessary velocity (mostly correctly calculated) in a fraction of a second. Verne recognizes that there is a problem and provides intricate shock-absorbing measures, but shock-absorbers don't matter in this case: passengers and vehicle leave the gun almost instantaneously at close to seven miles a second, and in the real world the passengers could not be anything by then but a thin organic paste on the floor of the projectile. The rough outlines of (spoiler!) a figure-8 lunar return orbit (used by Apollo 13, for instance), and most of the velocities and distances, are among the competent deployments of physics as known in Verne's day. Some other details are hilariously wrong. The vehicle constantly swings of its own accord to point its base at the nearest gravitating body, and the passengers experience "normal" gravity except when transitioning from one sphere of influence to another. Any contemporary physicist could have told Verne how wrong that was. Also, the travellers are constantly opening windows to throw things out of the capsule, with cavalier nonchalance. Of course they say that they must do this quickly to avoid letting their air escape, but Verne shows no comprehension of how quickly a small capsule will vent its air to space, or of how strongly a pressure of fourteen pounds per square inch will impel a hatchway. But I'm being a classic nerd by letting this stuff bother me in a story that wasn't intended to be taken seriously in that way. The most famous piece of flat-out prophecy is Verne's choice of South Florida as a launch site. It's downright spooky, though maybe it shouldn't be: Verne was following pretty much the same logic that led to NASA's selection of Cape Canaveral almost a century later. Project Gutenberg's etext #84 continued in the "dawn of SF" vein with Mary Shelley's classic 1818 fantasy, Frankenstein. Which, weirdly, I do not think I have ever read before. More of what Project Project Gutenberg is all about. [Added a little later:] I am delighted to report that the first couple of pages of Frankenstein are completely strange to me. I was afraid that I would find that I had read it before after all, but apparently this will really be my first experience with this classic, and I'm looking forward to it happily. | | Saturday, April 21st, 2012 | | 1:52 pm |
Fourth run of 2012
OK, WTF? I haven't been slacking; it was cold and I ran on the treadmill at the gym. So I'd expect an outdoor run consistent with my earlier times. But it was way worse: 77:39, almost a minute off the first run, and four minutes off five days ago. Maybe it's the temperature, which was around 70 degrees F. | | Monday, April 16th, 2012 | | 7:43 am |
Third run of 2012
Today is "Marathon Monday", celebrated as "Patriots Day" in Massachusetts. We get a day off and a couple of thousand crazy people run from Hopkinton to Boston. On the average, the weather today is ideal for a marathon, usually in the mid fifties (around 12 for the Centigrade-speakers among you). This year, though, we have forecasts of temperatures in the upper 80's (around 30 C), which is way too hot for a 26-and-three-sixteenths-mile run. They're going to do it anyway. I hope the runners are sane enough to keep the pace down and not kill themselves. I fear that some idiots will see a chance to take advantage of a slow pack, and pour it on, and kill themselves. I went out just at dawn when the temperature was a nice 61 or so. By the time I finished my seven miles (in 73:24), it was already starting to heat up. It feels muggy, too. Humidity is not good for runners. An improvement of more than three minutes between runs is not the sort of thing I can expect in the middle of the season; I'd better enjoy the feeling now. |
[ << Previous 20 ]
|
