Phil Nugent's Screengrab obituary for Patrick McGoohan, 1928-2009.
Also, via Torie Atkinson, a song that I know well because of a great mix tape made for me in the late 80s or early 90s by my dear friend Paul: "I Helped Patrick McGoohan Escape"!
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
"There were no sunglasses"
Beverly Parayno interviews Yiyun Li for The Rumpus.
Li's story "Gold Boy, Emerald Girl" would be my pick for the best piece of fiction published by the New Yorker in 2008; I do not read all of the stories they publish, many of 'em just strike me as too awful and in general I am not a great lover of the form of the 'literary' short story (I prefer crime and science fiction stories, or tales of the fantastic), but this one is a great story (not utterly unlike the stories of Edward P. Jones, another writer I love): go and read it if you missed it the first time round!
Li's story "Gold Boy, Emerald Girl" would be my pick for the best piece of fiction published by the New Yorker in 2008; I do not read all of the stories they publish, many of 'em just strike me as too awful and in general I am not a great lover of the form of the 'literary' short story (I prefer crime and science fiction stories, or tales of the fantastic), but this one is a great story (not utterly unlike the stories of Edward P. Jones, another writer I love): go and read it if you missed it the first time round!
Bleeding into the woodwork
My Columbia colleague and fellow-blogger Andrew Gelman offers some thoughts on Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century. I am very flattered that he mentions one of my utterly favorite books about the eighteenth century in the same breath - A. O. Hirschman's The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph....
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Precious eggs
I am too impatient to save these for an Easter post!
Via Wendy, an insanely sparkly American Egg; via Nico, a truly amazing Scotch Ostrich Egg!
Via Wendy, an insanely sparkly American Egg; via Nico, a truly amazing Scotch Ostrich Egg!
Culture's table
If you are so inclined, you can read the introduction to my new academic book here....
Consistency
Jo Walton reviews The Explosionist at the Tor blog!
This is a huge thrill for me, as Walton's one of my absolutely favorite writers (I have also gotten a kick out of seeing my novel on end-of-year roundups by several other writers whose books I particularly enjoy, namely Ekaterina Sedia and Tamora Pierce - and forgive me if I have mentioned it already here - it might be that I have one too many blogs! - it's also great news that the book's on the short list for the Cybils young-adult fantasy and science fiction award).
Walton mostly likes the book quite a bit, but she has a very interesting objection on one significant count:
I guess that I fudged this in my own head - it wasn't that I was entirely unaware of this issue, but I thought of spiritualism (in fact I remember having a conversation with my editor about this!) as something practiced by and available to a mandarin class alone. In my vision of it, ordinary people who went to ordinary spiritualists were almost as likely to be cheated (like, approaching to 100% likely) as they would be in our world, so that didn't really make much of a difference; and it was only a tiny elite who had access to techniques and knowledge that would let them practice something more genuine, and still contested (like string theory!).
So that the real-world people like Henry Sidgwick or Conan Doyle or the world-of-my-novel people like Great-aunt Tabitha and her cronies are a kind of mandarin class whose doings are in certain respects isolated from the rest of society, though those activities must have a trickle-down effect that I think I have not sufficiently attended to: the nature of the mandarin class is like the class of nuclear physicists rather than the class of, say, Old Ones in Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising books, though Sophie is a figure like Will Stanton in certain respects. Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover books have the world of the towers fairly isolated from the ordinary social world (it is a world of sociopolitical elites with power to determine the fate of the planet), Anne McCaffrey's Pern books also have the world of the dragonriders relatively isolated from the daily lives of ordinary people - it may be that I have followed this sort of model too closely....
Hmmm, just thinking out loud here, this is very useful: the sequel in many respects moves more roundly into the world of historical fiction, I've done much less playing-around with alternateness and spiritualism is less of an issue, only there are several striking fantastical components, including talking animals, so clearly this is something worth thinking through more rigorously!
This is a huge thrill for me, as Walton's one of my absolutely favorite writers (I have also gotten a kick out of seeing my novel on end-of-year roundups by several other writers whose books I particularly enjoy, namely Ekaterina Sedia and Tamora Pierce - and forgive me if I have mentioned it already here - it might be that I have one too many blogs! - it's also great news that the book's on the short list for the Cybils young-adult fantasy and science fiction award).
Walton mostly likes the book quite a bit, but she has a very interesting objection on one significant count:
[T]he book ought to have made up its mind whether to be fantasy or science fiction.I have never read Randall Garrett, clearly I must... Hmmm, my inclinations are much more strongly towards fantasy than science fiction, but that doesn't answer the objection.
Spiritualism—and all the apparatus of automatic writing, table tapping, mediums and spirit photography—was indeed an obsession in the 1930s, and earlier, from the mid-Victorian period onwards. (See Angels and Insects for a brilliant modern fictional treatment and Unnatural Death for a contemporary one.) But it didn’t ever actually work, and it couldn’t have ever worked in the real world. Spiritualism was largely a case of people who, as Byatt says, desperately wanted spiritual consolation in a secular age, and were tricked into believing they were getting messages from dead people. It was all fraudulent, as investigator after investigator proved.
This isn’t to say you can’t take it seriously in fiction, and even have it work just as the gullible people in our world believed it did. It’s just that if you do, you’ve moved from science fiction to fantasy. A world in which you can fairly reliably talk to dead people with crystal radios, where licensed spirit photographers can produce evidence admissible in court, and where mediums are not fakes would be a world far more different than one where Napoleon won. Davidson has thought through the consequences of her science fictional changes remarkably well, but of her fantasy ones far less so. It’s unlikely that a world with that kind of relationship with the dead would have been sufficiently like ours through any of its history to ever have got to Waterloo in the first place. Fantasy needs to be as integrated into the world as anything else, and it isn’t. I kept trying to think of the laws of magic in Randall Garrett, but Garrett’s magic is integrated into Lord Darcy’s world in a way that the spiritualism here just isn’t. It’s further unfortunate that the spiritualism is needed to drive the plot at every turn.
I guess that I fudged this in my own head - it wasn't that I was entirely unaware of this issue, but I thought of spiritualism (in fact I remember having a conversation with my editor about this!) as something practiced by and available to a mandarin class alone. In my vision of it, ordinary people who went to ordinary spiritualists were almost as likely to be cheated (like, approaching to 100% likely) as they would be in our world, so that didn't really make much of a difference; and it was only a tiny elite who had access to techniques and knowledge that would let them practice something more genuine, and still contested (like string theory!).
So that the real-world people like Henry Sidgwick or Conan Doyle or the world-of-my-novel people like Great-aunt Tabitha and her cronies are a kind of mandarin class whose doings are in certain respects isolated from the rest of society, though those activities must have a trickle-down effect that I think I have not sufficiently attended to: the nature of the mandarin class is like the class of nuclear physicists rather than the class of, say, Old Ones in Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising books, though Sophie is a figure like Will Stanton in certain respects. Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover books have the world of the towers fairly isolated from the ordinary social world (it is a world of sociopolitical elites with power to determine the fate of the planet), Anne McCaffrey's Pern books also have the world of the dragonriders relatively isolated from the daily lives of ordinary people - it may be that I have followed this sort of model too closely....
Hmmm, just thinking out loud here, this is very useful: the sequel in many respects moves more roundly into the world of historical fiction, I've done much less playing-around with alternateness and spiritualism is less of an issue, only there are several striking fantastical components, including talking animals, so clearly this is something worth thinking through more rigorously!
Monday, January 12, 2009
"FOUR FIELD MICE lost from laboratory"
Paul Collins at the Paper Cuts blog. Here he praises the internet and searchable archives:
Computers have created a Golden Age for historians, because searchable archives make no distinction between the mighty and the obscure — if it’s in there, you’ll find it. Let me give you an example: I wrote an article on the Tricho medical scandal, about a 1920s company that used radiation for cosmetic hair-removal. It was run by a physician named Albert Geyser. When I plugged his address — not even his name, just his address — into the New York Times Historical Files, out jumped a “Lost and Found” ad he’d run in 1923, before his company launched: “FOUR FIELD MICE lost from laboratory, 244 W 74th St., each mou[s]e has a round bald spot on right side caused by scientific experimentation; $20 reward …”
Sunday, January 11, 2009
The light reading miscellany
Three novels, three samples...
James Blish, A Case of Conscience, which I liked very much indeed; Marie Corelli, Thelma, which I checked out of the library because its first section is set "in the land of the midnight sun" (a surprisingly good read, but I am slightly amazed to see that there is actually a 2008 reissue - there is also a Kindle edition, but the full text is available for free at Project Gutenberg - I have it from the Columbia library in the 1895 New York edition, which I see you can purchase for $4.95 via Alibris - a bargain!); Jennifer Egan's The Keep (stimulating and enjoyable, but perhaps only partly successful as a novel - I was reminded in certain respects of several books by Iain Banks, particularly A Song of Stone and The Bridge, which I think manage to do more with the castle/gaming aspect of things - but it is a quite haunting modern gothic in its way, and the feeling the novel provokes of incompleteness and dissatisfaction seems to me to be a valid literary effect in itself - I really liked it...).
James Blish, A Case of Conscience, which I liked very much indeed; Marie Corelli, Thelma, which I checked out of the library because its first section is set "in the land of the midnight sun" (a surprisingly good read, but I am slightly amazed to see that there is actually a 2008 reissue - there is also a Kindle edition, but the full text is available for free at Project Gutenberg - I have it from the Columbia library in the 1895 New York edition, which I see you can purchase for $4.95 via Alibris - a bargain!); Jennifer Egan's The Keep (stimulating and enjoyable, but perhaps only partly successful as a novel - I was reminded in certain respects of several books by Iain Banks, particularly A Song of Stone and The Bridge, which I think manage to do more with the castle/gaming aspect of things - but it is a quite haunting modern gothic in its way, and the feeling the novel provokes of incompleteness and dissatisfaction seems to me to be a valid literary effect in itself - I really liked it...).
The timid genius of mechanism, who threw cats well but Popes badly, had never met a true automaton, and so never saw that what the animal lacks is not a soul, but a mind. A computer which can fill the parameters of the Haertel equations for all possible values and deliver them in two and a half seconds is an intellectual genius but, compared even to a cat, it is an emotional moron.
My children are there today: Tucson, Gainesville, and Atlanta. They're more American than you are. My sons wear shorts in summertime. You would never see a European man in shorts - never! A man's legs out in the open like that, it's . . . it's miserably low-class.
Drifting away on those delicate imperceptible lines that lie between reality and dreamland, the watcher of the midnight sun gave himself up to the half painful, half delicious sense of being drawn in, absorbed, and lost in infinite imaginings, when the intense stillness around him was broken by the sound of a voice singing, a full, rich contralto, that rang through the air with the clearness of a golden bell. The sweet liquid notes were those of an old Norwegian mountain melody, one of those wildly pathetic _folk-songs_ that seem to hold all the sorrow, wonder, wistfulness, and indescribable yearning of a heart too full for other speech than music. He started to his feet and looked around him for the singer. There was no one visible. The amber streaks in the sky were leaping into crimson flame; the Fjord glowed like the burning lake of Dante's vision; one solitary sea-gull winged its graceful, noiseless flight far above, its white pinions shimmering like jewels as it crossed the radiance of the heavens. Other sign of animal life there was none. Still the hidden voice rippled on in a stream of melody, and the listener stood amazed and enchanted at the roundness and distinctness of every note that fell from the lips of the unseen vocalist.Bonus link: George Bernard Shaw's review of Thelma!
"A woman's voice," he thought; "but where is the woman?"
Friday, January 09, 2009
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