Sunt Lacrimae Rerum

Regarding Avatar...

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 18:10:36 GMT

.. which I'm not really planning on seeing, but have seen all sorts of general data on:

What would be far more interesting at a plot level, while preserving a human/alien interaction theme, would be a film of Golden Witchbreed.

Probably way too much to hope for, though.

Bishop Baines and Christmas Music

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 14:52:20 GMT

I was irritated into this by a bit of slow news which has been replicated across various outlets: a typical example is http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/6680422/Traditional-carols-are-nonsense-says-bishop.html .

This particular piece shows a C. of E. bishop as (no particular surprise) clueless, lacking context, and fundamentally misinformed.

Before moving to the general argument (which is about the Church as an historical body and the general issues of historicity and Christianity), let's look at some of the specific points.

First and most adrift from reality: Adeste Fideles (an 18th century Latin hymn translated fairly closely in the 19th - none of the pieces mentioned in the article is an actual carol) is not directed even notionally to the shepherds or the magi, but to the contemporaneous body of the faithful. There are two verses referring to them in the third person. The song refers to an interior journey to the nativity, corresponding directly to the custom of the crib visit.

Secondly: "Away in a Manger" (again, not a carol, but a Victorian hymn) may be sentimental (and hardly a favourite of mine, although my seven-year-old daughter likes it) but it commits no solecism with "no crying he makes": rather, this is one allowable interpretation of the orthodox position that Christ was fully human but without sin. You can get to "no crying he makes" in two ways from there: first, by viewing the crying as a result of the alienation from nature which is a result of the Fall; alternatvely, by viewing the lack of crying (and hence lack of troubling his parents) as an avoidance of a negative activity. It is, of course, also allowable to see a newborn crying as nature even in its restored state; but since we have no actual evidence of the dividing line between marred and restored nature the question is open to debate. But the point is that it is open to debate, not automatically excluded.

Finally we come to "Once in Royal David's City", which will lead us into the larger and more general point. It "invites children to be 'mild, obedient, good as he’, which means what, exactly? This sounds suspiciously like Victorian behaviour control to me", Baines is quoted as saying (What is wrong with Victorian behaviour? Well, potentially quite a bit if you're disauthoritarian, but that is for a different post. Also, and more to the point, the thrust of the hymn isn't really Victorian: it's more an anticipation of the peculiarly 20th century (and peculiar) idea of the Holy Family as a model for the modern family; but that is also a topic for a different post.) Of course it has that sort of thrust; this is Mrs. Alexander. The one who wrote "All Things Bright and Beautiful" with its immortal verse

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made the great and lowly
And ordered their estate.

For something like 1400 years, if not more, this was seen as not only compatible with Christian doctrine but part of Christian doctrine (consider Piers Plowman for a moment, or some nice Elizabethan setting forth of the Great Chain of Being). Children were supposed to be deferential just as the third estate ("pays for all") was supposed to defer to the first and second estates.

Now I'm highly unlikely to back this view of society, and I can't say I know anyone who does (although I still know people who expect deference from children just because they are adults). But it is arrogant and parochial to take the view that just because we are in the present that our views are necessarily right by comparison to our precursors; it's just a mask under another form for the Victorian view of Progress and the Whig version of history.

When we edit out bits of hymns or carols which we dislike because they clash with our sensibilities we effectively try to pretend that our way of being Christian is and always was the only way. More generally, and outside the Church, whenever we suppress or downplay part of the past in this way we lose one thread of the overall understanding of the complexity of human experience and of how we got here.

There's been a wave of this, in hymn books and history curricula, for the past few decades. (Percy Dearmer tried to be respectful of hymn and carol writers and generally preserved words intact in The English Hymnal and The Oxford Book of Carols; his successors have not been so respectful.) And don't get me started on historical novels whose point of view characters and other sympathetic figures somehow hold twentieth-century values.

It's important to instill in people the ideas (1) that they should have some humility as regards the necessary correctness of even teir most deeply-held conceptions, (2) that because the past is a foreign country you have to make some imaginative effort to understand it, and (3) that it's important to understand history as well as we can, because the present is rooted in the past and because it shines a set of lights from a vriety of perspectives on our own understanding.

This is all the more impotant when the arena in question is the Church, whose theological foundations are bound up in the nature of historicity.

We need the full range of Christmas pieces to complement and check each other: the ancient office hymns such as Christe Redemptor Omnium or Veni Redemptor Gentium (note that these tend to downplay the manger in favour of a theme emphasising the theme of descendit de caelis, much as many of the high mediaeval carols tend to focus on the Blessed Virgin) the genuine carols and mediaeval lyrics such as "The Lord at first did Adam make" and Angelus ad Virginem; modern pieces like "Bethlehem Down"; and even the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century hymns which make up the bulk of the popular repertoire.

Tolkien and Modernism

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 04:19:03 GMT

Lifted from a Crooked Timber comments thread: "I fully understand why a lot of people don’t like Tolkien; they’re still invested in the
War over Modernism, in which Tolkien was one of the last holdouts on the losing side,on more than one front ."

I wouldn't say that Tolkien was a holdout in that war; more like one of the last generation -- the one that came of age before the Great War -- which, being formed in a context in which Modernism was not a defined presence, could formulate their literary methods and structures without reference to it. He was a holdout in the Lang vs Lit wars in the English Curriculum, but that is a different battlefield. Nor am I sure that the side he represented "lost": it was displaced by a new old guard. (Making allowances for the differences between Anglo- and Roman Catholicism, T.S. Eliot and Tolkien could be argued to have had pretty convergent substantive views on many core subjects, including the religion which bulked so greatly in both their lives).

Another relevant question: if you make two heaps of writers from the twentieth century and toss them into the piles based on affinities, and Tolkien goes into one pile, and, say, Hemingway and William Carlos Williams go in the other, which pile does David Jones go into?

There are a lot of things which tend to distinguish Tolkien from most subsequent writers, and he was certainly not a Modernist, but I'm not sure that a view which uses the presence or absence of Modernism as an organizing schema is a very helpful way to approach Tolkien.

The Late Roman Aggression

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:48:33 GMT

Well, actually that was the setting up of a set of dioceses in England in the mid nineteeth century. However...

There are a couple of interesting things about this.

First, it seems to me that the measure is as much aimed at the Roman hierarchy as at the Anglican Church. It's been possible for years to have "Anglican Rite" (usually the English or Anglican Missal) churches for disaffected Anglicans; I knew a group in Toronto who were asking for one. However, the local bishops were rarely enthusiastic and tended to do a good imitation of a brick wall. (This was similar to the situation with regard to Tridentine Rite services.) As with the Tridentine Rite rules, this now effectively bypasses the bishops -- in the TR case by setting up automatic rules for allowing the celebrations, in this case by providing a parallel structure with different ordinaries which can bypass the standard hierarchy if necessary.

Secondly, all the previous variants of this (including the Antiochene Eastern acceptance of an "Anglican" rite in the rite of St. Tikhon) have tended to take the standard Western Rite as a norm (i.e. the Missals which were a product of the Anglo-Catholic movement) and in particular the Gregorian Canon. If this means accepting the BCP -- the English BCP, or maybe the 1927 book and its cousins -- as a sufficiently Catholic rite to stand alongside the ancient rites of East and West, then it's a different ball game. This may be an echo of a shift at Rome around the narrower question of the Novus Ordo versus the Tridentine Rite where there is no longer the emphasis on there being one and only one acceptable rite which was the strong line under Paul VI and John Paul II. It may have some interesting implications regarding recognition of the forms of nonstandard rites, in that case.

Thirdly, it's a little hard to see exactly who this is aimed at. Serious Anglo-Catholics don't want the BCP -- they would be an audience for an Elizabethan-language Tridentine Rite with decent music, but most of them have been ignoring the BCP for the last century in favour of the Western Rite in one form or another. As one blogger put it, "The Society of the Holy Cross and forward in Faith in the UK, for example, consist mostly of priests whose views on the Anglican Liturgy vary from “Quite a nice little Tudor Communion Service” to “nasty Protestant invention”." (see http://saintclementsblog.wordpress.com/2009/10/20/roman-catholic-anglican-rite/).

If it's the case that the rite with Anglican elements is essentially the English Missal -- and the phrasing is consistent with this: "while preserving elements of the distinctive Anglican spiritual and liturgical patrimony" -- then it makes more sense, but it would then appeal mainly to a smallish core of non-Affirming Anglo-Catholics. However, it would be consistent with the traditional Roman approach to reunion -- that it is to be encouraged by leaving it open for the dissidents to return piecemeal. (It would be a nice umbrella for the TAC churches, who have been pushing for reunion, to manage reunion with Rome under, but they aren't exactly a major bloc.)

Protestants won't go to Rome and already have their own Network. Even in England, most of the seriously disaffected ACs have already left for Rome, or they've become less disaffected and at least decided to try to live with their Affirming Catholic confreres. But except as a stalking horse for better music and liturgy in Rome, it doesn't seem to me to be a winner. I mean, if you have a choice between Brompton Oratory or Westminster Cathedral and an "Anglican Rite" church with OK music somewhere in London, the choice isn't hard to make, now, is it? On the other hand, if the "Anglican Rite" church in a provincial town does Byrd, Tallis and Weelkes and the normal Roman church does guitar masses, the choice is reversed, but it would be just as reversed if the alternative were a Tridentine Rite mass with Victoria and Palestrina. Cardinal Levada has guessed at the scale of crossovers as being in the hundreds, which sounds about right.

Recent Reading

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 01:47:47 GMT

Finished:

Paul and Palestinian Judaism -- E.P. Sanders
Theatres of Memory - Raphael Samuel
White Night - Jim Butcher
Small Favor - Jim Butcher
Judaism in the Matrix of Christianity - Jacob Neusner
The Making of the Fittest - Sean Carroll

In progress:

Wisdom in Israel - Gerhard von Rad
I Capture the Castle - Dodie Smith
World's End - Mark Chadbourn

Translationparty

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 16:00:38 GMT

I suppose that my choices of text for translationparty.com say something about me:

#1 goes from

Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste brought death into the world, and all our woe, until one greater man restore us, and regain the blissful seat, sing heavenly muse.

to

Every Thursday, the rebels are in the world, the goddess of the sky, have banned the leader of the recovery of the death throes of death to regain the seat in the bliss of the song.

(I was considering continuing the quotation to the real end of the sentence, but I didn't want to confuse it too much. Even so, it never reaches equilibrium.)

(http://translationparty.com/tp/#923688)

#2:

When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire, the brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches, in windless cold that is the heart's heat, reflecting in a watery mirror a glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.

went to

Short-day light, fire and frost, cold heart, SUROTTOBURAINDOPURU afternoon, wind, ice, water, sun GUREAMIRAFUREMU simple. Reflecting.

(Two things broke somewhere along the way).

http://translationparty.com/#925490

#3:

Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them.

to

He and most of the young people to lead it, please do not forget the daily work on poverty.

(No equilibrium, and another truncated sentence -- it just sat there and went nowehere withe the full sentence.)

http://translationparty.com/#927313

#4:

The water never formed to mind or voice, like a body wholly body, fluttering its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion made constant cry, caused constantly a cry, that was not ours although we understood, inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

to

Wednesday, voice and body to body, formed by the conquest of the heart and an empty sleeve. However, certain non-human cry, cry, and pretend not to know the true reason for the movement of the sea.

http://translationparty.com/#929234

I would say that automatic translation has a long way to go...

Of local interest only

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 15:34:50 GMT

Just what do the people decrying the conditions for ending the City of Toronto strike think the realistic alternatives were?

This is public sector bargaining, and it's the Liberals in power provincially, not the Harris Tories.

This means, in turn, that the net effect of not settling would almost certainly have been to drag out the strike until the Liberals finally sent it to binding arbitration. Arbitrators tend not to look at things like "ability to pay" for a public employer, and it's likely that no award would have been more favourable to the city than the actual settlement reached.

Foods where spending extra makes a difference

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 20:19:25 GMT

I was thinking the other day about foods (there are lots of other possible categories, but I'll stick to foods) where specific sorts of premium-priced characteristics are worth paying for. Herewith, a list broken down into categories:

Terroir

Some things derive most of their specific character from terroir -- the specific soil, atmosphere, exposure, temperatures, etc. that they're grown with.

Wine

This is the canonical example of important terroir. As one moves from general to specific, the detailed characteristics become more pronounced, thus:

Blended wines (e.g. Red Lion, or "Canadian" wines which blend wines from another country in) are basically crap. Never worth any money, and I'd rather drink water.
A broad regional appellation can give a guide to type, especially if there's an actual regulation associated with it. Thus (say) "Burgundy" (on a red wine) not only guarantess a general area but a specific grape (Pinot Noir).
A narrower one gives a bit more specificity, e.g. "Cotes de Nuits", and there's a more specific character there.
A narrower one still guarantees still more specificity, e.g. Gevrey-Chambertin. You can still get a lot of variation even in that small area, though.
A specific cru such as Charmes-Chambertin narrows it down still further. At this point, one is usually buying from a single vineyard, which is the most specific level of all.

The same principle can apply outside of the great wine areas like Burgundy: thus Ontario VQA doesn't tell you much, Beamsville Bench does (even though it's not an official label -- it has been mooted for one in the past -- it has to be descriptive by general labelling standards) and, say, Thirty Bench Vineyards tells you even more. That's why Chateau des Charmes has single-vineyard wines: specific character matters, and it gets lost as soon as you mix it in.

Some wine types express a single grape, some a combination: many of the best are single-grape expressions, but claret (for example) or many of the great Cote de Rhone wines, are expressions of locailty across several varietals.

Coffee

Guess why Starbucks and similar shops sell specific types of coffee based on origin? Blends may provide for balanced-out brews for daily drinking, but some specific areas have enough character that one wants that specific character to come through.

Olive oil

Both olive type and location can be important here, as well as the processing methodology.

Your basic cheap olive oils use heat extraction, which generates an oil which is OK for cooking, but not as good as far as taste goes and not quite as good nutritionally. Cold pressing methodology gets virgin and extra-virgin oils (the former better for cooking). But after that you're back to thinking about blends, locations, and varietals. Different olive types produce very different oils, which is why high-end shops like Olivier & Co. have so many different, DOC, olive oils.

Scotch

Speyside vs highland vs Islay. Need I say more? Again, there's a big gap between blended scotch and single malts, and massive differences between (say) a Glenlivet and a Lagavulin. Much of that is processing method, but some is local conditions (notably water).

Lamb

Well, pre-Salé lamb and similar special types which graze in localized areas. Unfortunately, finding this is a major problem in most places.

Finishing salt

For cooking, salt is salt. For finishing salts, texture and more subtle flavours can make a difference, with the obvious examples being fleur de sel and fumé de sel.

Heritage/Heirloom

This category reflects the fact that many of the foods we get easily have been bred for factors other than flavour (frequently ability to travel).

Pork

Modern pork has been bred for white meat and low fat, which has removed much of the flavour. Heritage breeds tase a lot better.

Tomatoes

These are bred, these days, for ease of transport and pest resistance; heritage types, all other things being equal, taste much better. Of course, sun-ripened and in season also make for better tomatoes: sun-ripened "ordinary" tomatoes in season can trump heirloom tomatoes which are out-of-season.

Processing / Raising

Poultry

Free-range vs. caged (and yes, I know that there's a wide variety in "free-range" as well). This also applies to eggs -- there may be little nutritional difference, but there's a significant difference in flavour based on (especially) what a chicken eats and how it spends its days. (Consider also the traditional distinction between winter eggs with paler yolks and a diffferent flavour from summer eggs).

Bread

Pain de mie is not standard baker's white bread, even though the ingredients may be about the same, and neither one is cheap white processed bread. The same observations apply to the variousother varieties.

Beef

Grass-fed vs. feedlot corn-fed cattle; plus (later) proper dry-aging of the beef.

Young Adultness and SF

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 02:01:27 GMT

Prodded both by a set of posts about YA and shelving, and by Adam Roberts' tagging of the Hugo-nominated novels (of which I've read three: Zoe's Tale, Saturn's Children, and Anathem), I feel prodded to make a comment or two about YA as a category.

First, a comment about juvenile: like the greek-derived ephebe, this applies to youth: juvens means young, not childlike or "younger than young adult". So the terms juvenile and young adult are effectively synonyms, whatever the marketing and library industries may want to say.

Secondly, as everyone notes, these are marketing categories, not stable genre categories.

As far as I can tell, what some people mean by them is effectively "written like a short and accessible Victorian or Edwardian novel", i.e. not much sex, not much violence, and a fairly straightforward moral universe: by this token Silas Marner, Jane Eyre, and maybe The Moonstone would qualify as YA novels, except that they're adult Victorian novels. More obviously, so would The Prisoner of Zenda, The Scarlet Pimpernel, and Buchan's Richard Hannay books, all of which were written for adults and which have had a long run of being popular and in print.

The other common, but not inevitable element, is a young protagonist; which tends to bias the selection towards bildungsroman novels. So David Copperfield and Oliver Twist become candidates; as does Tom Brown's Schooldays, which was very much an adult novel when it came out.

What Adam Roberts means is a different thing again: a novel with a plain style, no overly complex plot, and fairly "standard" characterisation: middling works with no (or not too much) sex and violence. Again, Hope, Orczy and Buchan fill this slot as well: it's not obvious that having this characterization necessarily makes works mediocre, at least if a measure of mediocrity is "no staying power". It's not a vice to be un-Joyce, or un-James, or un-Sterne-like (and note that I like all three authors).

It's easy to see how these can coexist for marketers who want to target young readers generally, or purchasers for young readers such as school librarians. (Youths may be interested in dirty books (though almost never Chaucer, Rabelais, or Balzac), but their gatekeepers are rather less so.) They don't have to have any conceptual unity, because they can work in a scattershot manner.

There are subsets which probably qualify as a real subgenre: books in the Judy Blume, Sue Townsend, or S.E. Hinton lines which are about teenage angst and which are rarely very appealing to older readers unless (hello, Adrian Mole) they are funny.

The standard SF YA exemplars are Heinlein's juveniles, which fill all three of the main slots I outlined (though they tend to avoid the fourth, teenage angst, fairly well). The modern exemplars would undoubtedly be the Harry Potter books, which manage to break one guideline -- the late ones are very long -- because to the success of the series. The next rank probably includes Panshin's Rite of Passage (a direct tribute to / critique of early Heinlein).

It's not clear from any of this why YA should be effectively a term of semi-opprobrium (which is how I read Roberts' accusation). I do see what he means about the list of Hugo nominees -- I'd rather see Halting State have won the Hugo than Saturn's Children win it, and I don't think that (aside from Anathem, where I disagree with him -- I think it's a strong candidate) it's a particularly strong year for the Hugos. But as "Young Adult" seems to lack any cohesiveness when used as a critical, rather than a marketing term, it might be best to give it a pass and formulate the criticism in a different manner.

Reading level

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:26:17 GMT

jsburbidge's Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 12
Average number of words per sentence:	30.16
Average number of syllables per word:	1.55
Total words in sample:	9048
Analyze your journal! Username:
Another fun meme brought to you by rfreebern

A few years ago I researched literature (no non-fiction) to try to find samples of Grade 12 text. (I used Gutenberg for my samples.) The only author I could find who was as high as Grade 12 was Walter Scott.

Minor gripe

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 18:07:01 GMT

I was hearing on the CBC today about people graduating from high school. Uh-uh. To graduate means to be admitted to a degree (== a status: one "is a bachelor of arts", not "has a bachelor of arts"), i.e a gradus (thus: "Admitto te ad gradum".) A high school confers no degree. One matriculates from high school, since what one receives is a diploma, not a degree. (When I was young we did not have "high school graduation"; we had "commencement exercises".)

Pulled from the Vaults: LOTR films

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:59:58 GMT

Kate Nepveu has a review up at tor.com of the FOTR movie coming out of her re-read project, which reminded me of my reactions to the movie when it first came out. So I've unearthed them from a posting on the Bujold list and updated them somewhat. This deals with only the first film: I found the second and third films unwatchable.

I had expected, before seeing the film, to react along the lines of Bentley's remark to Pope regarding his translation of the Iliad : "A very pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer." This expectation proved unexpectedly close: a movie with a number of virtues, but not The Lord of the Rings and definitely not Tolkienian. But this spurred a number of thoughts about the differences between modern fantasy and LOTR and the expectations which many (especially younger) readers seem to bring.

Some of the things the movie cut were clearly in the interest of time (however well or ill-judged that was). But many other adjustments were clearly not driven by the time factor, and many of the changes which involve additions seemed to me to be ill-conceived -- that is, they achieved some telescoping but in ways which were unnecessary and untrue to the thematic nature of the book.

1) History

Middle-Earth is historically deep. The Fellowship starts out in the Shire (which has very little history) but as soon as one leaves the Shire, various reminders of a much deeper past come out, usually in a casual manner: Tom's references to the Dunedain of the North with regard to the swords from the barrow, Aragorn's linking of Weathertop with the Last Alliance, the narratorial introduction of Bree. And the landscape bears the marks of civilization. The road from Bree to Rivendell goes back to Elendil and probably to at least the founding of Rivendell in the Second Age; the way through Hollin follows an old highway whose marks are still visible. Dimrill Dale has its pillar and its greensward.

There are references which have no clear referents. To those of us who read LOTR before The Silmarillion came out, many of the references in the text were almost completely mysterious, having to stand on their own (especially those to the Valar and the First Age), illuminated only by their own light. All we knew of Gil-galad was a few lines dropped here and there -- by Gandalf, Aragorn and Sam. Gildor's description of his band as "Exiles" had little if any resonance because the nature and time of the exile wasn't laid out for us.

Not in the movie. There is no reference at all to the East Road and to Weathertop's location on it, no Last Bridge, no road through Hollin. Gil-galad, Elbereth, Earendil and Luthien are never mentioned. Where Tolkien's world is built on top of multiple layers of history, the movie's world consists of isolated and unrelated spots -- Bree,
Rivendell, Moria, Lorien -- with no connections between them. (Arwen is Galadriel's granddaughter; Arwen may have greater prominence, but the reference by Aragorn which (along with a number of other references) helps tie Rivendell and Lothlorien together just drops out of the picture.) There is no reference at all to the Kingdom of Arnor, since it looks like they've decided to grossly simplify the history of the heirs of Elendil by referring only to Gondor.

2) Meals

This may sound minor by comparison, but much of the action of the book centres around food as a social occasion of one form or another: the Party, the meal with Gildor in the Shire, the feast at Rivendell, the al fresco meal on departing Lothlorien. Of these, only the Party remains (and even there, the characteristic hobbit-pleasing line "That is the signal for dinner." following the dragon vanishes as the result of changes to the plot there).

This is not as minor as it sounds: in Tolkien's world (as in many others) civilization is closely tied to eating and drinking on company as focal occasions. The nature of the societies is shown up in their differing attitudes towards meals (contrast the pure Anglo-Saxon hospitality of Theoden with the disciplined tone of Denethor's
situation, for example.)

3) Age and character development

There were distortions in the ages of the characters which were tightly related to changes in character development. To take them one by one:

Merry is 39, and should look older than Frodo, as a result of Frodo's possessing the Ring. (Pippin, by contrast, was about 12 years old at the time of the Party, and should look just younger than Frodo -- Merry was about 20 at the same time.) He's a responsible character who deals with the "conspiracy", handles the gate at Bree, and spends his time in Rivendell researching maps. Instead, he and Pippin are showed as Tweedledum and Tweedledumber. Similarly, Sam is a practical and responsible, almost certainly overconscientious hobbit. I grant that the requirements to shorten the film required some simplification of the plot, but the changes which were made, including insertions like the totally unnecessary fire scene at Weathertop, which make the hobbits (except Frodo) all look like a somewhat sillier version of Pippin are gratuitous and unnecessary. (Thirty seconds exposition regarding Weathertop's location near the Road would have provided enough of a background for the subsequent attack, and remained true to the characterization in the book.)

The hobbits in general suffered from a decision to make Frodo more prominent and the others less so (e.g. Frodo replacing Merry as the one who has the right idea about the doors of Moria). Oh, and eliminating the master and servant relationship between Frodo and Sam causes a whole chunk of motivation just to fall out, even for the actions which remain.

Aragorn turns 88 during the War of the Ring. He's not in the process of growing up. (For that matter, Arwen is 2,778, but that's less relevant here.) He knows what he is destined to do (or at least attempt), and this goes back to his mother's naming of him as "Estel". He's a representative -- the pre-eminent representative -- of classical heroism at its highest form -- warrior, healer, loremaster -- which gets contrasted both with the more modern, "Christian" heroism of Frodo and Sam as humility, and with less high, rougher heroism of the men of the Mark (and Boromir, who is more like them than the older Men of the West).

4) Elves and Elegiac

The Tolkienian elves are gradually becoming less important in the world. The elder days are passing. They have a long history of exile and struggle behind them; they are returning to Aman gradually; they are always looking westward. Such power as they still have is principally in preservation, and in their affinities for the natural world (strictly speaking, they are natural, bound to the world, and humans are supernatural, seeking beyond the world), and for language in poetry and song (they are "quendi", the speakers).

The elves who have been in Aman -- and we meet only a few of these, since most are gone: Glorfindel, Gildor, possibly some other Rivendell elves, Galadriel, possibly (in some versions of the backstory) Celeborn -- have additional abilities which do come into play from time to time. (The only elves to show a real "aura" of power in the book are Glorfindel, at the Ford, and Galadriel, at the Mirror.) But most "elven-magic" is very close to "blessing" objects: imbuing them with enhanced virtues according to their nature (Lembas, the elven-cloaks, miruvor) or capturing light and its associated virtues (the Silmarils, the Elessar, the Phial of Galadriel). In some cases the power associated with the object is different in type, as with the Rings of Power and the Palantiri.

But as Children of Eru they are, overall, very much like men otherwise: biologically "the same species" (or else they could not interbreed in a fertile manner), with the differences being in the soul infused into the body (hroar and frear, in the Elvish terminology).

There is always, by the time of the War of the Ring, an elegiac mode associated with the elves in Tolkien's presentation: they know that they will have to depart, and that the power of the Three will fade, or be overwhelmed, regardless of the outcome of the war.

None of this is there, per se, in the movie. (Elrond makes a reference to the elves as departing, but free of all context). There is no song shown in either Rivendell or Lothlorien, and little exceptional fairness about their voices or features. Lothlorien suffers the most, but the essential character of both places as the book presents them -- Rivendell preserving the memory of the Elder Days, and Lothlorien its essence -- is just not there. The substitution of Arwen for Glorfindel, and the reduction of the role before the Ford of "I'm the faster rider" blurs to the point of obliterating the distinction between Calaquendi and Moriquendi, and Arwen's invocation of the flood rather than Elrond's (which would have made use of the power of Vilya) equally obscures the nature of "elven-magic". The whole elegiac theme regarding the whole passing of the world, in the way in which the world is changing from one kind of place to a very different kind of place with the coming of the Fourth Age, has not been prepared (Part of this lies with point 1, above, and the absence of the history of which this state of affairs is a remnant.)

5) Pacing

The book starts out slow-paced, but even when the pace speeds up (after the departure from Rivendell) the effect of the narrative is one of relatively long periods of experiencing the surroundings between crises: the Shire, Arnor, Eregion, Moria (most of which is simply empty, an echo of its former greatness, rather than threatening -- others have declined as well as the elves), Lorien, Anduin. There are usually threats, but they're over the horizon and not immediate for most of the book.

The movie moves from crisis to crisis -- and this is not merely a matter of having to edit for length: it creates crises, or heightens the threats in other situations. The Prancing Pony is a homey pub with warmth and light rather than the dive it is presented as; the confrontation with the Watcher in the water is grossly expanded; the transferral of the gap-leaping episode from the earlier part of the trip through the mines (where it merely heightens the sense of decay and abandonment) to the invented issue on the staircase, gives it a totally different sense of urgency; the heightening of the conflict in the chamber of Mazarbul and the later confrontation in the hall play up the aspects of continuing physical threat. The initial meeting with the Elves of Lorien changes from one of startlement only -- Legolas' surprise when he leaps into the tree -- to direct threat, especially as it has not been prepared for by Aragorn's previous talk about the Golden Wood.

Not all good cinema is related to action and high pacing: it's perfectly possible to enchant audiences with the opposite as many of the recent crop of films of earlier English novels do (or consider Babbette's feast or My Dinner With Andre). The movie provides no major breaks; such breaks as it does provide (at Rivendell and Lorien) are made more menacing and the sense of their length is much telescoped.

As I have noted before, these differences -- which are more thematic than purely technical -- seem to me to reflect the sorts of differences between the Lord of the Rings and the modern fantasy novel in general. (When I first posted this, I got a lot of reactions along the lines of "the media are different, you idiot!", especially from people in the film community. So let mje make it clear: I do not think that any of the changes I am highlighting are intrinsically related to the difference between the media. I think that they could have been avoided and still produced a film as good or better than the existing film.) LOTR has novelistic elements, but it is also grounded in a whole set of different narrative conventions of epic, edda, and mediaeval romance, in which characters develop only in the technical sense of "being revealed" and in which heroic nature is accepted as a postulate. In addition, landscape plays a significant role, thematically, in the structure and thematic unity of the book. Its theme is elegiac, tinged with regret for a world which is passing away. These are not aspects of the novel which have been taken up by its more recent successors.

1) Pure Novelization

Most more recent fantasies are very much novels rather than romances (in the old sense of romance) or epics. A surprisingly large number of them are bildungsroman specimens: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, The Belgariad, The Wheel of Time, and most obviously Harry Potter: they start with a young, unformed character and follow him through his development in the fantasy world. And whereas a mediaeval author who wanted to tell an Arthurian story would (usually) tell one with Arthur and his court as a fixed background and (frequently) a known figure with fixed character as the central agent, many if not most modern Arthurian stories are about character development (usually Arthur or Merlin).

Those which aren't are still, usually, very much novels. The Curse of Chalion is a good example here: the central character, Cazaril, is already mature, but the narrative gains a great deal of its interest from the developing character-related conflicts and affinities between the characters.

There is character development in the Lord of the Rings -- Frodo, Eowyn, Merry and Pippin come to mind -- but it's not central to the story in the way that it is in a "pure" novel. The film's changes -- highlighting Frodo at various points with relation to the other hobbits, and making all sorts of changes to Aragorn -- moves the conventions of the film more closely towards those of the novel and further away from the romance/epic. And the entrelacement used as a technique in the book works against too much focus on any one character or plot line as being "the" plot of the book.

The use of verse in the book pushes it away from the novel as well, although it doesn't have the strict structural role that is true of many classical and mediaeval works (e.g. Boethius). Few later fantasy novels have followed this, just as the use of many linguistic styles which is important in Tolkien has been dropped by most recent authors, since one needs a great deal of skill to do this properly, and even the older standard use of high, middle and low styles (which Tolkien follows and uses) has fallen out of favour. (Many of the film's composed scenes violate these principles, with the most egregious violation being on the staircase in Moria, but equally in just about all the made-up dialogue for Elrond and the entire Council.

2) Action

Tolkien holds together two different styles of narrative. At times -- in dealing with the battle scenes in the second and third volumes, especially -- he provides a great deal of combat and "action scenes". It is this aspect of the books which has frequently led to them being grouped with "Sword and Sorcery" novels (by those who make no distinction between this and "high fantasy". He also uses heavily descriptive prose which is not dominated by action at all, but rather by observation and conveys no very great sense of urgency at all (although things may happen, they aren't matters involving physical conflict).

Modern fantasy tends to have diverged into two streams. On one hand, much of the modern EFP is very much action-oriented: it is organized along the lines of a narrative linking combat crises together. On the other, writers like Guy Kay and Bujold in her Chalionverse may have some very isolated incidents of martial or magical conflict but these are isolated within their narratives, where the focus is almost entirely elsewhere.

3) Other races.

Lots of post-Tolkien novels have Elves, Dwarves and/or trolls/goblins of one sort or another: consider The Deed of Paksennarion, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, Oath of Swords, and the Riftwar books, for example. In many cases the elves and dwarves are directly or indirectly derivative of Tolkien; in virtually all of them, though, the history of the other races is quite different (if any is given at all), and in most if not all of them the elves are more alien as regards men than Tolkien's elves are (and frequently the Dwarves are more like men, but that is a more minor point). In many (although not all) of them the story ends with the same status quo as regards relations between the races as held at the outset.

But the stream of novels, once again, has bifurcated. Most novels which do have multiple types of rational beings presuppose at least some points of relatively full interaction between them and tend to locate the story in a thorough mix of races. (The extreme would be the Vlad Taltos books, which have a human focal point in the middle of a society of "elves".) And most novels which are about human interaction are about humans only, usually set in worlds where humanity is the only type of rational being (other, perhaps, than the Gods). It was Tolkien's focus on the elegiac aspect -- "an end was come of the Elder Days in story and song" -- which allows him to have the elves as important but nevertheless marginal at once. (Note that this is specifically true of LOTR. In The Silmarillion the focus is entirely on elves, with a few men at the edges and at pivotal points -- Beren, Turin, Tuor -- and in the Akallabeth it is almost entirely on men until after the Fall of Numenor).

On the Evolution of SF and Fantasy

In the beginning of "modern fantasy", aside from the Sword and Sorcery writers and the writers of Unknown, there were various other clear influences on the field, of which Tolkien is the most obvious, who embodied rather different skills and virtues: Tolkien, with his knowledge of language and the northern theory of courage; Cabell, with his ironic attitude, his complex references to classical culture and his generational themes which also tended towards writing about writing; Eddison, with his heavily archaic style and mystical interests.

Science fiction, whatever may be said about remote forerunners such as Swift, Voltaire and even Verne, or outliers such as Lewis, Huxley and Orwell, really begins as fiction by engineers and scientists for engineers and scientists: Smith, Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, et al. It basically stays at that level (high idea content, typically weak characterisations, usually optimistic in general outlook) until the New Wave in the 1960's and then the gradual development of a set of writers whose concerns with purely writerly craft has raised the overall average standard of the SF novel very considerably: think of Willis, Stephenson, Bujold.

It's probably fair to say that there was no single fantasy genre until about the 1970's. (When LOTR was published, there were no obvious slots into which to put it. Many of the slots into which reviewers put it for comparison purposes -- Wagner, Ariosto, etc. -- were types of literature which Tolkien actively disliked.) And it has become a "genre" by shedding all sorts of outlying territories which are now seldom visited until it met science fiction. From some point in the late 70's or early 80's the two have grown together: SF by attaching (as it were) new writing territories to address, and Fantasy reflecting these accessions.

But fantasy has now become weighted down by several factors:

1) Much more almost purely formulaic work which floods the market. Much of this may be put down to role-playing games, which haven't had nearly the same scale of effect on science fiction.

2) A few very out-of-the-usual blockbuster sellers in Eddings and Jordan, who were definitely not the best writers in the field but who managed to become heavily popular and have distorted the economic model of publishing fantasy. (By contrast, even SF's bestsellers by and large are an order of magnitude smaller in their difference from the rest of the field.)

3) Where science fiction tends to get new ideas flowing in from the pace of technological change, fantasy has to be driven by its own internal mechanisms. Thus the most promising fantasy novels tend to show cross-pollination with genres outside fantasy: many with techniques and concerns drawn from the mainstream novel (note that a number of "mainstream" novels also draw on fantasy elements: true dreams, ghosts, etc.).

And the things which are the most "characteristic" of Tolkien have dropped out of modern fantasy almost entirely. I see this not only in the film (which manages to preserve the outline and order of events while driving them with most un-Tolkienian themes, timing, and motivations) but in the reactions of many (e.g. in the rec.arts.books.tolkien newsgroup) to the films, which is overall remarkably positive given the great liberties taken with the books which are not simply a matter of screen adaptation.

In Dorothy Heydt's A Point of Honor there is a fantasy novel (The Golden Road) inside the story which provides some important content (as well as one direct quote of about a page). It sounds fascinating and very Tolkienian (down to its inspiration in a story which is buried in the few remnants of germanic poetry of the late classical period, that of the captivity of Theodoric). But I suspect, more and more, that Golden Roads are less and less likely to turn up. The trend of the genre is away from the epic and towards the novel, or towards the gross simplification of the epic which is sword and sorcery. The new good fantasies are, more and more, the books which dispense with the inherited trappings which drove Tolkien and which make use of narrative techniques of the novel and conceptual ideas whose virtue lies in being "new" (at least to the genre) rather than "old".

Britten's Midsummer NIght's Dream

Fri, 22 May 2009 16:33:36 GMT

I went to see this at the COC last night. A few scattered thoughts, as opposed to a full review:

The way in which Britten restructures the play for the opera removes the Athenian frame from the forest; so that instead of the "green world" being a departure from the norm, it is an implicit norm with the Athenian bit - reduced to the play and the fairies' blessing - as a coda. There's odd references to the Athenian laws and one reference by Theseus to the father, but basically the opera depends on the viewer knowing the play to make sense of the plot involving the couples.

Similarly, the parallels between the actors and the fairies (shadows both) is downplayed. In many ways MSD is an extended meditation in a comic mode on Romeo and Juliet as a play - an expansion of the Queen Mab speech, a parody play of Pyramus and Thisbe, a different sort of family feud, made up more amicably, a continual framing of actions as acted or staged; an arbitrary reversibility of falling in love. This aspect is largely lost in the opera, except in the play-within-a-play which does meta-parody of Italian opera.

As a rule my tastes in opera are nonstandard - baroque opera, and Mozart, with a jump over the 19th century and then various bits of 20th century opera (Dialogues des Carmelites, Ricard Strauss, Vaughan Williams' Sir John in Love). I liked the Britten, with its resolute avoidance of show-stopping arias and its use of music to provide a continuous texture for the action.

It is also interesting to note how Britten's use of Puck as an acrobat -- inspired, I gather, by some Swedish acrobats -- anticipates the Peter Brook staging of the play.

Thirteenth Child's Premises

Wed, 13 May 2009 22:28:32 GMT

(No, I haven't read the book.)

Without expressing a direct opinion on the racefail-allied aspects of the premises and the ensuing discussion --

I just finished rereading 1491 and I noted the emphasis on the degree to which the "wilderness" which the setllers found was actually a heavily human-formed landscape -- with the obvious implications that a genuinely "virgin forest" landscape would be rather different.

Accordingly -- how could one possibly imagine that a European settlement pattern in such an alternate timeline would resemble that of our timeline in any particular?

Just wondering.

Comedy

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 20:25:13 GMT

I have to disagree with this line in slacktivist's ongoing takedown of the Left Behind series: "Comedy is essentially revolutionary. This scene is counter-revolutionary. That's never funny."

Three counterexamples:

1) Aristophanes

2) Swift

3) Waugh

Reactionaries all.

You can finesse this observation by trying to claim that they're all statirists, and that satire isn't really comedy, but I don't think that flies.

The problem with Jenkins and La Haye is that they are (1) bad writers working with (2) really poor theology. But I don't think that their problem is, as such, that they're reactionary rather than revolutionary, or that because they're reactionary they shouldn't try comedy.

Ekaterin and Tien

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 20:19:43 GMT

Asked on the Bujold list: "Given all his faults, why had Ekaterin put up with Tien for ten years?" (Which is connected, in my mind with a couple of posts at Obsidian Wings by Hilzoy about why abused spouses don't leave).

Note that by the standards of the abusive relationships Hilzoy talks about, Tien was pretty small-time: "at least he never hit me", I think Ekaterin thinks to herself at one point. My memory is that he did more direct threats to himself than to her. Of course, Bujold designed him as a classic Borderline type: abuse by psychological manipulation.

The obvious answer has been repeated many times: because she had a vow and a sense of honor. But there's more behind that.

I think a better answer to the question is: because the ties of responsibility are very hard indeed to break, once they're taken on. Again, people cite Nikki, but he's a specific aspect of that concern.

People like Tien are, especially once one has taken on some responsibility for them, almost more pitiable than people at whom one gets angry. They can't see what they do wrong, and they are dreadfully reliant on others. (When they can see that they've done something wrong, they ask for forgiveness and then think that the whol account is cleared, just like that...)

And there's a real undertow, if you have an adult sense of responsibility (which is also what underlies that sense about one's word) where doing something for somebody is better than doing it for yourself. There's a purpose there, and positive feedback from the real or anticipated response of the person for whom you do it. (Trivially, cooking dinner for somebody else is more fun than just cooking for yourself.)

And as long as the really crappy behaviour is localized -- an irrational rant here, another off-the-wall declaring somebody hostile there, but well separated by gaps of time, and as long as it's clear what techniques to use, conversationally and operationally, to minimize the wonky behaviour -- it's possible to focus on the better parts of life and convince yourself that this is all normal enough, "every marriage has its disagreements".

The subtler risk -- to which there are certainly suggestions that Ekaterin succumbed -- is to start seeing the other's worldview as normal; or, if not as the only possible normal (which is Tien's view, of course) at least as a reasonable variant of normal. (Whence the reaction Miles identifies in ACC: "Am I crazy? Am I crazy?") Once the measuring stick itself has ceased to be useful, one can accept a good deal more.

And Tien was "helped" by having a real problem to deal with, the Vorzohn's Dystrophy (for all that his reaction to it was both irrational and self-destructive). Without some very real problem to hang the rest of the behaviour on, Tien would have been far more transparent from early on.

That's (part of ) my take on Ekaterin.

Amazonfail

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 01:44:19 GMT

I have a sneaking suspicion that this may have involved second-order data analysis.

That is, nobody went and explicitly selected a set of metadata categories as "adult" with the aim of delisting them.

My guess is more along the following lines:

If you analyze all the individual works which have been manually flagged as "adult" in the past -- possibly with no effect, merely at the outset as an internal marker -- you can run a high-level analysis which looks at categories grouping the works. You'd put in extra requirements -- for example, that there be a minimum number of "adult" works in a category, and possibly might require more than one category once matched to tag a new work.

The actual human inputs into this would be the seed data -- which would be works, not categories -- plus the numeric thresholds used as parameters to the program.

The problem with this approach, which might not be visible to a programmer trying to implement an automatic labelling scheme, is that category metadata, which is basically CIP information, is set by the publisher, is wildly inconsistent, and can't really be used in this way in the first place. In addition, trying to cross-check by using multiple categories won't work because the labels aren't orthogonal.

The next problem (probably not on the developer's side, since they'd probably set this up to be tweakable) is that if you set the thresholds for this kind of analysis too low you get very unexpected results.

Finally, you would have to do extensive hardcoding tweaking for (1) categories which are too broad, and therefore useless at actually capturing useful metadata for this purpose and (2) categories which are so small that, although they are what you want to target, never get enough input to push them over the trigger limits: you would really need to do an iterative application without generating anything other than internal lists (generate tagging; check with human judgement; tweak; run again; tweak...) with knowledgeable people assessing the results each time. (One problem with this is that it's iterative -- even assuming it would work in the first place, every run produces more inputs for the next one, which generates horrendous positive feedback unless something keeps it strictly in check.) What you would really have to do is always have any new additions to the adult category found by this sort of iterative "search" vetted by human eyes: but Amazon's whole model (As far as I can tell) is to have as much done as automatically as possible (e.g. many of their recommendations, which are based on purchasing patterns rather than CIP data, are wide of the mark, but enough are close to the mark that there's a better cost/benefit point in just generating them than to have them vetted by anyone (except the end user, who can provide tuning feedback).

That's assuming that it was a good idea in the first place -- or at least, a good idea as an automatic filter rather than one which could be turned on optionally by the user. The presence of multiple communities coexisting on the net basically renders it unlikely to impossible that you'd ever get any consensus on what was a "proper" result.

Hoc facite in meam commemorationem

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 13:57:44 GMT

"Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacle of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetish because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonisation of S. Joan of Arc-one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei-the holy common people of God".

-- Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy

Better indicator?

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 13:40:45 GMT

This Geoffrey Simpson article notes that a family possessing a dictionary (or not) is a better indicator of whether children will go to University than income level. Wouldn't possessing a copy of Fowler be a better indicator still?

(Disclaimer: I have both The King's English and (the second edition of) Modern English Usage, as well as the original Fowler-edited Concise Oxford Dictionary.)

Today's XKCD

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 22:48:14 GMT

Re this XKCD link: http://xkcd.com/557/: I actually never had that dream while I was in university. I only started to have it after my (last) degree was finished. (And since I never even handed a paper in late, let alone missed one, it's not grounded in any sort of experience.)

Noted

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 20:37:09 GMT

I find it interesting that Silverlock is basically broadly isomorphic to The Phantom Tollbooth. Are there any other books with essentially the same structure? (I say this despite the fact that TPT is clearly inspired by the general model of The Pilgrim's Progress, which forms no major part of the DNA of Silverlock.)

Lenten Reading

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 22:12:20 GMT

"In agreeing to submit oneself to the sacramental gesture of the Church, one no longer avails oneself of one's own theological ideas, as incisive as they might be, or of one's own religious feelings, as sincere as they might be, or of one's own ethical accomplishments, as generaous as they might be. All this certainly causes us to act, but it is not what is at work in the sacramental rite. Here the self is put at the disposal of the Other whom it can let act in the Church's mediation. the self lets the Other act by performing a gesture which is not from itself, by saying words which are not its own, by receiving elements which it has not chosen." -- Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament.

It sounds as if Chauvet's model of the sacraments as mediating the Other has points of contact with the more traditional scholastic discussions of the problem of predication per analogiam as applied to God -- that no truth can be applied to God directly, but only by a closer or more distant analogy. Even the category of being (primary for the Thomists) has to be distinguished between self-subsistent being and created/contingent being, a gap which is wider the more one thinks about it, eventually bringing into focus the massive otherness of God's being.

The mediation between uncreated being and created being which is put in place by the Incarnation and more particularly by the Hypostatic Union is continued via the sacraments.

It is unease about precisiely how valid any other forms of depiction of this ultimate Other are (beyond those explicitly symbolic ones provided by the sacraments and authorised by tradition) which led to the Iconoclast controversy in the East. At another pole, the tension between the sense of usefulness (indeed, necessity) of predication per analogiam and the complete inability of it to capture what it expresses drives the tension between the Positive and Negative Ways of Christian mysticism. (To cite Charles Williams, the see-sawing of "This also is Thou; neither is this Thou".)

This is enough to make me at least interested in Chauvert's sacramental theology from the small bits of it to which I've been exposed. I'll try to get a copy of his basic introduction (The Sacraments: The Word of God at the Mercy of the Body) as Lenten reading. (I gather, from what I've been able to glean via the web, that there's some significant tension between his phenomenological approach and the more traditional Thomistic and generally scholastic sacramental theologies, which should be of interest as well -- where I see a touching point may be a more considerable gap).

Distributing books -- a datapoint

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 18:23:15 GMT

I was looking into looking into (as it were) Catherynne Valente's Palimpsest and found that it was in stock at no Chaptigo -- basically, the local monopoly for most intents and purposes -- store in the entire Toronto area. (Happily, it is something that Bakka has, so there is a local store where I can pick up the book if I don't order it from Amazon without evaluation).

Now, Palimpsest is not exactly performing poorly: its amazon.com sales rank is at present 3,559, which is pretty respectable (by comparison Escape from Hell, which they have in stock at the local Coles -- not even a full-fledged Indigo -- is at 4,831).

This suggests that something is deeply broken in the distribution system (as if I didn't know that already). Its all very well for somebody like myself to know about a book (via Whatever, in this case) and decide to look for it. But many sales are made via browsing, and not carrying a book which other indicators would suggest will sell relatively well is just a way of arbitrarily dragging an author's possible sales down.

Read, started, skipped

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 15:43:30 GMT

I nicked this from fajrdrako :

Entries read entirely: bolded; entries started but not completed: italicized.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupéry
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

E-books

Sat, 07 Feb 2009 03:55:23 GMT

There have been posts at Charlie Stross's weblog and (independently) on the Bujold list on this topic, so why not just join in?

I have nothing against reading e-books as such; I've read various non-DRM'd e-books (Gutenberg, Baen CDs from HC's I've bought, CC licensed texts, etc) over the years via a PC screen. But I can't see adopting them as anything more than a minor option when in front of a computer (or a PDA) anyway. This is for three reasons:

1) Availability/cost of e-book copies. It's all very well if you just want to read recent novels, Gutenberg classics, and software reference works (which tend to be available in Acrobat format from the publishers, although the cost is steep, especially if all you were to be doing would be mainly mirroring your current dead-tree library). But the availabilty of other books in my areas of interest isn't all that high (New Testament Criticism, anyone?) and the cost of mirroring my existing library (see my Library Thing account, for reference) would be hefty.

2) More importantly, I don't need to carry my entire library with me. I get along just fine by carrying a few books at a time with me. It helps that I don't just carry novels: right now I have a light SF novel, a David Lodge omnibus, and Surprised by Sin with me; frequently I carry rather more slow-going books for general reading. Paperbacks are convenient, and even hardcovers aren't bad (although I grant that the size of God's War in HC is one reason I've been slow reading it, I handled Anathem and the Baroque Cycle just fine). The setup costs to do the same thing with existing books in my library (i.e. select two or three new books to carry with me) , assuming either purchase costs or trouble OCRing texts I already had, would be prohibitive, and the latter would be usually illegal except for older editions of older classics, for which Gutenberg is, thankfully, there.

(For that matter, I don't even use an MP3 player much, although I carry two devices (phone, Blackberry) which can play them -- when your main interests are pre-Classical music, downloading isn't much of an option, and ripping MP3's from one's entire CD library is a little daunting. (I am so Not The Target Market for MP3 players it isn't even funny. It's like being very much Not The Target Market for the changes CBC has made to Radio 2, which leave me grumbling about lamposts and rope.))

3) Random access. Digital copies are fine for sequential access, and exact word searches, but books are very nicely set up for physical implementations of a binary search, especially if you have a good memory of the text.