The Expendable universe is a great setup for medium-light fiction. Its advanced aliens are so advanced that they give both magic-show technology and deus ex machina moral strictures to the comically adolescent younger races, including humans. Between one and the other, each novel has a puzzle with an intellectual and a moral side, but the moral dilemmas don't play Top That! to the limit of belief; the aliens are supposed to leave an answer, not necessarily an easy one.
I liked this a lot. It seemed to prevent the superhero series problem of winning every fight, and collecting powers with each win, and accordingly facing progressively more dramatic and less plausible enemies. Remember the 's Lensman books, which as I understood them followed the reasoning to an O altitudo! that left the universe in the loving hands of a psychically incestuous band of siblings; that's where the ideals of inherited aristocracy and sublimated life-force take you.
I don't need many stories along those lines, and it's far too common for the reasoning to lose altitude and decide that the grand plan will reward us for what we'd mostly do anyway. I was, therefore, alarmed when the standing heroine of the ostracized elite Explorer Corps, and a new heroine who makes a pretty bookmatched set with her, decide that they are the representatives of advanced races who need something from humanity that the advancement lost. Oh, sure, we're here to remind the gods of something; the meaning of 'hubris', I hope, but all too often in SF not. Humanity's puning self-esteem is braced from below when the other young races are like caricatures of stereotypes of aspects of our own; a bit too Here's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy
, if taken seriously. (Taken lightly, and with humans just as annoying, I enjoy the parodies as mockery gently directed at the author and readers.)
Maybe Gardner isn't going to write the triangles a three-sided god. The 'avatars for the gods' bit is a cautious guess on the parts of the characters. They've been wrong before. Me, I was thinking of dog-breeding and pigeon-fancying, which are known interactions between a powerful species and a weak one, and are even defended as polishing the best traits of the weak species.
ISBN: 0060595264
Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare
For builders, she flirts behind the framing square.
This is a chapter of a 1923 book, so who knows, maybe Vincent was familiar with it. It doesn't mention either her or that I've noticed; the practical geometry is given as 'cookbook' algorithms, although sometimes an explanation of what works ends with a minatory Why?
. Or, p. 25,
The intelligent workman should not be satisfied with knowing which number to use but he should want to know why each particular number is used.
followed by an easy-to remember octagon diagram. I'm a little bemused by vitia's worry over the bifurcation of vocational and accrediting, let alone liberal, education; surely the use of language isn't really more socioeconomically more discontinuous than the use of math? Is it taught more discontinuously? No, I forgot; if this synopsis of teaching styles vitia linked to is a fair description, even math is taught differently to different classes, in ways that reinforce class. (The varieties of teaching also strengthen pointy-haired, mauve-database idiocy in the capitalist classes, if I read it right. I'm so happy I'm a Beta
; discuss.)
So! No wonder I like the carpenter's guide. It is useful; it assumes the audience is competent in Euclidean geometry but doesn't assume the audience is educated in it; it should expand the capabilities of either a theorist or a jack-of-all-trades. Specifically, I like the explanations of the tables still engraved on decent squares. Some of the geometry, e.g. adding a another straightedge to make a slide-rule for specific problems (squaring the circle, pitching a gear wheel), is very pretty in itself. I can't think of a use for To find the diameter of a circle whose area is equal to the sum of the areas of two given circles
; cooperage? Custom cakes?
It would be just as easy nowadays to go get a calculator as to find the extra straightedge. On the other hand, I don't think my calculator has explanations of jack rafters. Any undergraduate's graphing calculator has room, and it's a pity if they don't apply some to roofing. Maybe they do; perhaps someone with a shiny new calculator will consult her manual and bring the good word.
ISBN: 1894572343
This is, I presume, a chapter in a coherent novel about the Mamur Zapt, a Welshman with duties to both Egypt and the British Empire just as World War I pulled those apart. It's also a complete mystery in itself, more a motive-first emotional mystery than an intellectual puzzle one of the train-schedule kind.
If the "Mamur Zapt Mysteries" are one novel, then I ought to read them in order, not randomly as I have begun. The Poisoned Pen Press could have made this a little easier by numbering them.
ISBN: 1590580656
A bookful of pretty pictures of goofy houses, mostly small West Coast imitations of romanticized rural Old World houses; half-timbering, tiny turrets, pointy roofs, etc etc. They complement 's basically modernist small, efficient, utilitarian houses, although I don't think Susanka's fans would find the Storybook houses intellectually respectable. could mount a better defense.
Hot-country traditional styles make at least as much sense in most of California as glass boxes do. The sublime goofiness of the style doesn't just transplant architectures but translates them; Seattle has some surviving Spanish/Moorish 1920s architecture that looks both subtly wrong and subtly right, because the eaves and so forth have been altered to deal with our rainfall and seasonal solar angles. I suspect the adorable Berkeley and Carmel cottages have rather more windows and outdoor porches than would have been comfortable in the originals.
There's a surviving silent film of Hollywood's improbable architecture, "Hollywood the Unusual", which I found as an extra on a DVD of "The Garden of Eden" (which the SPL has, Seattleites). It has a wider range than Storybook...; not just the half-timbered 'village shops' and Graumann's Chinese Theater, but imposing pseudo-ancient-Egyptian architecture and 'Moorish' gas-stations. Also, there are people in 1920s plus-fours or tea-gowns dancing through the gardens to a new piano score. This is the sort of record that current copyright law puts at risk.
The movie "The Garden of Eden" was charming, and its star very pretty, although the plot was half-slapstick half-sensation and not very intellectually respectable. The heroine wasn't just a feeble Imperilled Pauline, either, she's as active as a comedienne usually is. In other serendipity, we get some truly delightful combinations underwear, villains in lipstick - usual in the silents; why? - and what may be the earliest filmed scene of a concert audience waving lighters in the dark.
ISBN: 0670893854 (Storybook Style)
Rewriting the past as the present is irresistible, however dubious in scholarship and dangerous in politics; good for romances and poetry, then. This is both, the raucus, she-lad autobiography of a woman who grows up poor in Roman London, marries money, seduces an emperor, and dies for it. It balances the Penelopeia. This puts the least socially acceptable enthusiasms into rough, silly, vulgar, broken verse in several forms; that hid not just the unpopular but the confusing urges of Penelope, and smoothed it all into imitation Lattimore.
I like Evaristo's book a lot better, of course. The most startling subject is the visit to a gladiator fight, which heroine Zuleika has no anachronistic objections to. It's not that she doesn't think about the horror, but there's no Victorian in her at all, it is not her duty to be good. Slower, and less considered, and more smoothly jointed to modern behavior, is her attitude towards her slaves; not intentionally cruel, but completely selfish.
The macaroni combination of Latin and modern London-melting-pot White Teeth urban slang and proper academic freeform verse works better than I expected it to.
ISBN: 0142001716
How unbelievably ambitious. Like all Powers's novels, the tone is melancholy, the narrator fallible. The underlying burden, of being black and Jewish at once in the United States from the 1930s on, is not quite as completely painful as the theme of Operation Wandering Soul, but has no comfort other than a gospel hope that it will end someday. I don't think the language is quite as beautiful as that in The Gold Bug Variations, but it doesn't matter, because the singer comes in with Dowland, with Bach, with Palestrina. The weight of the plot is probably a fugue (probably a Mass), with all the repeats and inversions and silences.
ISBN: 0374277826
Much later: The reviews and commentaries I've read mostly describe this as a novel about being black, or of mixed race between black and white. I think this is odd in the context of the novel, which implicitly covers the Holocaust and explicit antiSemitism. It really isn't a novel about either case individually, although it's long enough to develop characters in one case or the other.
The most impressive scene is an argument between two aging men in pain, one black one Jewish, on whose pain is worse; they are both usually too wise to have that argument, they do anyway, it's very painful even to read, and there is no real reconciliation: it's a destructive break within the family. Nor do I think Powers took a side in the argument.
Subtitle: Confessions of a Book Addict
Baxter's book addiction is undeniable, but is also completely unlike my own, although our reading overlaps. Baxter has been a collector, private and professional; he cares about the provenance of particular copies, which should be as untouched as possible, unless they're inscribed by some perverse celebrity, to raise the value. His perfect book is in some way unique and untouched, which as far as I'm concerned makes it no more a book than is the inside of someone's head. I would find his view much more annoying if it wasn't clear that he does really read (other copies) of the books he collects; and also that he recognizes this collectors' taste as perverse. He eventually decides that he can't be a 'collector of' someone he hopes to talk to even as a reader, let alone a colleague of sorts; so he sells his collection in a lump.
So; the book collecting with a lot of money in it has something in common with celebrity-memorabilia collecting, and something in common with antiquing for the money. No-one's going to suddenly mass-produce Poe manuscripts, which improves their investment value. I guess that partly explains why book-collecting became a rockstar, movie-star business in the 1960s and 1970s—according to Baxter, who doesn't say what proportion of rockstar income the trade took up.
Baxter's first connection to books and publishing was through science-fiction fandom in Australia in the 1950s, but he's worked all over the English-speaking world. He name-drops like an excellent schmoozer, and I should think that the pursuit of insiderdom has lots in common with collecting.
His claim that librarians never read books is, in my experience, untrue, and smacks a little of commercial distaste; library copies aren't any good for a bookrunner, though a copy unread by its rockstar owner is.
I was disappointed by his reaction to bookselling on the Internet. I can see why he doesn't like alibris, which bought used-book shops up wholesale; they're hard to compete against, and they don't themselves provide the knowledge some bookshop owners do. He spends too much time making fun of subliterate descriptions of books on eBay; he was happy to see the fools selling at car-boot sales, why not online? (Because you don't have to be cool and obsessive to buy online, just obsessive?) But it's oddly blinkered, or outright slanted, not to mention the universal-shopfront system that abebooks provides, which lets one search the databases of independent booksellers, who use the descriptions they already used to the trade; and purchases are usually made from the bookseller, not the intermediary. I should think this inconveniences Baxter, since he made a living by being an intermediary, but he seems intellectually honest enough that I was really curious how he'd describe it. Instead, silence.
I can't imagine that books reproduced as electronic files appeal to him at all, given his fascination with particular physical copies. Down some nearby trouserleg of time, a different Baxter is passionately devoted to Project Gutenberg, which relieves the trauma of his book-deprived Australian upbringing in a SFnal way. In this universe, he is so happy to live in the apartment above 's, to lug groceries up the very carpet-runner that threw up on, that I finished his autobiography with some charitable feeling. His next chapter was lists of important works, of modern or detective literature, many old enough to be out of copyright and therefore suitable hunting for a book-scanner too.
ISBN: 0312317255
Subtitle: or, Female Difficulties
During the dire reign of the terrific Robespierre, and in the dead of night, braving the cold, the darkness and the damps of December, some English passengers, in a small vessel, were preparing to glide silently from the coast of France, when a voice of keen distress resounded from the shore, imploring, in the French language, pity and admission.
Despite the grand drama of this opening, I can't recommend this novel as a pastime; by modern standards the story is too prolonged, the heroine too stuffy, the language too unintentionally funny. It is interesting for its compromises, between admiration for the early principles of the new French republic and horror at its violence; between the didactic novel and the thriller; between the Romantic document and the argument for self-control. Fanny Burney d'Arblay steered some narrow compromises in her own life.
The best thing in her story is the counter-heroine Miss Elinor Joddrell, who isn't actually a Villainess but like villainesses gets to act towards her own positive ends; those ends, alas, lead her to attempt suicide to prove her rigorous belief in romantic love and atheism. The second-best characters are a string of gruff older men with conscientously avuncular feelings toward the heroine; they make a set of English eccentrics. The third best thing is a trot through evocative parts of the English countryside, including an excellent scene at Stonehenge and some frightening nights in the forest.
The most annoying thing, alas, is the heroine's extremely negative virtue; she won't sing for money, she won't accept money from a stranger, she won't keep her mouth shut to keep a position as companion to a shrew. These acts are variously attributed to her unbowed honesty, her aristocratic pride, or her sense of the traps laid for any unprotected woman; given the subtitle I will assume that everything but her leaving the shrew was required to preserve her virtue, and therefore her person. It is repeatedly her difficulty that a solitary woman with money is assumed to have earned it immorally, and a poor woman with no family is considered anyone's prey.
I can't give a URL because I can't find a copy of this online, although I downloaded it from somewhere... I would serve up my copy of the text, but what if the cold hand of copyright law is reaching forward from 1814? On the other hand, it has been reprinted with scholarly apparatus, ISBN: 0192837583.
Such things are great fun when you get used to them; besides, contriving sharpens your wits, and makes you feel as if you had more hands than most people.
The beginning and end of the story are conventional, if not old-fashioned for their own day; Polly, who is as virtuous as a child with living parents and no consumptive disease could imaginably be, teaches her rich relations about love and self-reliance. In the end she marries her boyish cousin rather than a sophisticated, kind, older suitor.
The first virtue the book has in itself is Alcott's characteristic view of family life. Everyone has flaws, even Polly, and everyone's flaws are a little funny and fixable, especially Polly's. It would work as a sitcom. (Alcott was writing for a living, of course, and probably on a regular schedule.) The second virtue is Polly's career between childhood and marriage; she and all her friends are single girls determined to make their own livings. They lever the rhetoric of the virtuous, sensitive, artistic nineteenth-c. woman nearly as far as it can go in the service of getting that woman out of the house and into employment. Even this is not too preachy or defensive in the novel; it reads like a plausible account of the justifications these women would have used, in friendly company, at the time.
Alcott forestalls the sisters-until-marriage issue:
"When are you and Becky going to dissolve partnership?" asked Polly, eager for news of all.
"Never! George knows he can't have one without the other, and has not suggested such a thing as parting us. There is always room in my house for Becky, and she lets me do as she would if she was in my place," answered Bess, with a look which her friend answered by a smile.
"The lover won't separate this pair of friends, you see," whispered Polly to Fan. "Bess is to be married in the spring, and Becky is to live with her."
I should think they won't be separated; they're Bostonians, and were introduced so:
One stood before a great clay figure, in a corner. This one was tall, with a strong face, keen eyes, short, curly hair, and a fine head. Fanny was struck at once by this face and figure, though the one was not handsome, and the other half hidden by a great pinafore covered with clay. At a table where the light was clearest, sat a frail-looking girl, with a thin face, big eyes, and pale hair, a dreamy, absorbed little person, who bent over a block, skillfully wielding her tools.
I did notice that Alcott's virtuous women spend a lot of their effort picking up after men; for instance, in Polly's case, doing her brother's mending while working to pay his tuition. I hope he at least chopped her firewood, because he doesn't send her to Vienna to study when he's working. He would clearly take care of her if he needed to, if he noticed, which he might but isn't expected to do. The rhetoric of selfless virtue won't get you better than a distant second place in this world.
Project Gutenberg etext #2787
I've made the peach custard pie from 's Ten Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove, and found it simple, tasty, and not too rich. The custard is more of the floury-eggy than the creamy kind, so the total pie was a lot like a clafouti in a crust.
Tangentially tangentially, I think it was in a review of Schenone's book in The Women's Review of Books that I ran across a reference to Sunset Magazine being an early proponent of snow peas, which Grow Your Own Chinese Vegetables was unexpectedly surprised by. If Sunset was an early proponent of such things, establishing them among West Coast epicureans before they became familiar to the rest of the country, then that explains both why Grow... seems behindhand to me, and why Sunset still trades on an image of almost-bohemian inventive consumption.
Bobbin lacemaking must be the most inefficient way to make (admittedly ornate) cloth that anyone ever came up with. Still, in a world with ASCII versions of B-movies, what obsessive re-creation could be surprising? And, unusual among handwork, it doesn't aggravate my tendinitis, probably because one doesn't have to maintain the thread tension by hand; the weight of the bobbins does that. As with many relaxing pastimes, including not just handwork but Tetris, the boring repetition is much of the charm. I really enjoy the tapping noise the bobbins make. I don't know which childhood toy they sound like; probably Lincoln logs or Tinkertoys, which were also made of softwood.
Apologia over, I can say that of all the beginner's books I've looked at, and the leaflet that comes with the beginner's kit from Lacis, this is by far the best. The patterns are simple but reasonably attractive, they are given in a very logical progression of techniques, and the painstaking linework is really useful. Every exercise, and most of the beginner's patterns, is drawn out with each over-and-under clear to see, and the the drawing is also color-coded so that you know which stitch was used to generate a given crossing.
Cook also uses color for the threads themselves in the beginner's exercises. The exercises are so symmetrical that an error will show up in asymmetrical color. The results are more like 1970s macramé armbands than old lace, but as a pedagogical technique it's effective.
Somewhere else I ran across a mention of Torchon lace as 'ragged lace' or 'beggars' lace', because it's the simplest bobbin lace, the one a farm family might plausibly make for their own use. What startling exaggeration; it still requires hours of handwork, regular thread, and an undisturbed padded surface to work on, any of which a beggar would be hard put to preserve for her own use.
ISBN: 0713457406
Cross picks three contradictions out of the twentieth century structure of life, family, and childrearing, and pretty neatly shows how they reinforce each other. When technology pushed productive work out of the home, the home was represented as a sacred place, free of the unpleasantnesses of work. Women got to be the Angel in the House, and children even more so: children were angels still shining from heaven. Consumerism and advertising were rising at the same time, and they found steady profit in selling to the sense of 'childlike wonder', the untrained, therefore innocent, therefore all-deserving desire of the very young. Adults who are supposed to divide their lives between unpleasant work and the goblin-market joys of consumerism are, first, easy marks for buying their children 'real joy', and second, eager to coddle their own 'inner children', who were never as happy as the ads say they deserved to have been.
One of the problems this papers over is that childish innocence has two strong meanings; not just the 'wondrous innocence' that should get what it wants, but 'sheltered innocence' that needs to be protected. These are incompatible views, and they call out political divides between adults who have different sticking-points about what children absolutely have to be protected from. But "for the children" is a nearly untouchable political argument, the only claim strong enough to counter the ideology of the free market. Therefore it gets used more than it could support even if it weren't weakened by incommensurable beliefs regarding children's 'true natures'.
And finally, since children grow up and don't want to be tiny rois faineants forever, children turn wide-eyed cute into eyebrow-raised cool, which their parents experience as a betrayal. Great for the marketers, though, as it gives them a whole new segment.
All the above is my summary of Cross' argument, which is laid out with a lot more historical example. The evolutions of Christmas, of candy advertising, and especially of Halloween considerably strengthen his points. Halloween went from unpleasant but undangerous mumming, to cute kids and their candy, to a marker of fear; Cross points out that it is at least a little strange that parents would feel safer taking their children to the mall for trick-or-treating than letting them visit their neighbors. Little could be more telling about the decline of community trust than this.
Finally, Halloween is becoming a grown-up party with drink and naughty costumes, the squares' Mardi Gras.
I don't think Cross and I share many political viewpoints, but he seemed grudgingly fair when describing 'my' side's views.
ISBN: 0195156668
Subtitle: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions
How depressing the gambling world is; breaks up marriages and friendships, relies on bribery drunkenness and threats, generates nothing.
I didn't like Mezrich's prose, either. It assumes that everyone finds the Vegas high-roller style both seductive and dangerously vulgar; it invites us to leer and sneer at once. 'Everyone' is narrow, since the perspective is so clearly from a decent Boston neighborhood and university. The view from this apex is blinkered: part Chinese—you could see it in his eyes, narrow drops of oil beneath a ridged brow
, p. 13; He looked like he owned at least one pickup truck.
, p. 166. Unfortunately, his writing wasn't even accidentally descriptive of his own world.
However, the closing essay by Kevin Lewis, one of the MIT students who pulled tremendous profits out of blackjack over three years' work, is fine. It is entirely about the general principles of card-counting; it presents the one equation it uses in clear, accurate prose; it spends a page on subtleties of application. With such a grasp of analysis and explication, it isn't surprising that Lewis navigated Vegas better than Mezrich did.
ISBN: 0743225708
I don't know why magic - "aether" - had to be added to this political bildungsroman, which was otherwise like Nicholas Nickleby with a taste for To the Finland Station. Perhaps the magic exaggerated the moral of historical inertia? or because we use the Victorian age as a bridge to fantasy, the way they used the medieval ages? I never did think the fantasy was necessary, but it was consistent enough that I soon stopped worrying about it.
The other incongruity is that the plot is full of adventure, but the pace is leisurely by mondern standards, more like a family saga. It does have as much briskness as a thriller, in which the excitement of reading about a shocking event directly is never as valuable as finding out later what happened, and who tried to conceal it.
As semi-Victorianism goes, I was fond of Hallam Tower, and sorry not to get a reference to Michelson & Morley.
ISBN: 0441010555
All the recipes I've tried from this so far have worked. I don't know how to keep burnt flour off an un-oiled griddle, though.
The flatbreads are traditional from around the world; yeasted or not, based on wheat, corn, rye; some with inclusions, some extremely plain. The "flavors" are the food that the authors were offered with the breads. It's mostly simple, nourishing, one-pot, everyday family food. (Useful! And classic: remember, if only from Courtesans and Fishcakes, the ancient division of food into sitos and opson.)
The book's layout doesn't live up to the practicality of the recipes. Cross-references are often given without page numbers, so that comparing similar recipes requires more thumbs than I have, or a litter of bookmarks. Worse, the bread recipes usually cross a page-turn. This is especially annoying when my hands are sticky with bread-dough, which will glue the pages together if it doesn't surrender them to insects. It isn't logically necessary, because most of the recipes will fit on a two-page spread and the long ones often have logical breaks ("set to rise overnight"). It probably isn't even necessary to preserve the book's length, because there's a lot of travelogue material among the recipes, and no reason for that material not to jump pages where needed.
Cookbooks, especially pretty ones with wide margins and sidebars and autobiographical material, have this counterproductive pretty-printing far too often. I suspect there's a graphic-design rule, perhaps calcified in some otherwise-useful software, encouraging layouts to always put a heading on the right-hand page. It might look better with lorem ipsum dolor
but it divorces the form of this text from its function. Fie.
The autobiographical-anthropological stuff in this particular book is okay; it's maybe surprising in hindsight that everywhere was lovely and unique and full of friendly home cooks, but I'm happy to believe that the world is like that for good travelers.
One of the anecdotes might even be useful to historians; while discussing the many flatbreads of the Middle East, they pass on a archaeologist's tale of having failed to describe a tasty, fluffy bread to the camp cook in a region that mostly ate tough bread made of the same ingredients. A decade after he left, the archaeologist got to go back to the region, and found that practically everyone was eating a novel and fluffy bread. When he asked where it came from, his old cook looked at him oddly and explained that it was the bread he had asked for a decade ago. This was a salutary warning for the archaologist, who was professionally inclined to assume that foodways don't change that quickly, and certainly not on mere rumor. (p. 192)
I was in a cafeteria surrounded by day-camp kids earlier this summer, trying to ignore the furor, when it slowly became apparent that the table-pounding had rhythm and purpose. I even knew the tune; it was a simplified version of a song, or game, or something like, that I was lucky enough to learn from and a friend years ago in the Allegro café. I asked whether there was a circle version, and where the kids had learned it. There is a circle version, usually played with increasing speed as I remember (but you need a larger table than a cafeteria had). None of the kids knew where it came from, but all of them, and their deafened adult minders all the more, agreed that every children's camp in the state - maybe the country - maybe the world - has been playing it obsessively all summer. The adults didn't remember it from any previous summer.
Now, Artis the Spoonman is such a nexus that this could have happened a lot of ways. I don't even remember if he composed it or found it. He's been around the world with rhythm and string and has performed with someone famous from about every category of music. And who knows where the fad will go? although after playing it all summer for a year, I doubt any of those kids will forget the rhythm, it's a powerful earworm.
I wonder where the words will come from.
ISBN: 0668114113