Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

If you haven’t trailed after Severian the torturer or Latro the soldier, you’ve missed something great. Gene Wolfe’s genius breathes life into richly-imagined worlds, as different from one another as from our own.

I loved the aelf-haunted alternate universe in Wolfe’s latest novel The Knight. Sadly, the book falls short in other ways.

As young Sir Able of the High Heart moves through Wolfe’s glorious landscape winning the hearts of everyone he meets (except for a few skullduggerous bad guys), it begins to feel like a videogame where knightly courage in all situations is sure to win infinite one-ups.

A second flaw is that Wolfe’s multiple-world creation requires way too much exposition-disguised-as-dialogue. It’s like being invited to a magnificent banquet, then discovering that your host plans to spoon-feed you more than you want.

On the other hand, I read the whole book in two days. Maybe that’s the real review, just that fact.

New Yorker article

(Thanks to Steve Cohen over at LibraryStuff for the link!)

Must-read for Anglophiles: Suw Charman (Chocolate and Vodka) evokes the weight of history in Britain. Her essay* is lovely in itself and makes generous use of hyperlinks to information on various places she mentions.

It’s amazing how much hyperlinks add to the texture and usefulness of non-fiction.

Another place that really gets hyperlinks right: the Pepys Diary blog.

Footnotes? Bah, humbug (except for my footnote, below.) Long live the hyperlink!

* Suw’s article appears in the exciting new travel-history-culture-food-fusion blog from Tom Bridge and Robert Daeley—-Four Corners–I really recommend it.

Samuel Johnson’s great dictionary of 1755 has just been re-issued (Amazon description) and Frank brought me one as a present.

Editor Jack Lynch has usefully created an index that lists all Johnsonian insults–so beware, if you are a fatwitted finical flagitious footlicking fop of a foutra fribbling fustilarian fub.

Samuel Johnson had just the word for you.

And now I have it too.

Johnson is sometimes modest (“headgargle–a disease, I suppose, in cattle”) and sometimes lofty (“thro’ –contracted by barbarians from through.”)

He has lots of words no longer in use (“spraints–the dung of an otter”), tho the dairy industry might like “agalaxy,” which means “want of milk.”

Johnson’s definition of “network” is rightly famous for its badness:

Network

Anything reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.

But if you’re planning to look up his 1755 viewpoint on web or post or search don’t bother–if they exist, they aren’t in the abridged version.

If I ever need a fscking lawyer, this is the fscking lawyer that I want.

Thanks to Jonas M Luster for the link!

What if…Lord of the Rings had been written by someone else?

“I’m not saying they had an affair,” Elven Prince Legolas said in an exclusive interview. “I mean, I once went out with Arwen — she was kinda chilly, if you know what I mean. But right after I got to Rivendell I saw Frodo coming out of her bower….

Ellis Amburn channeled by SevenONine

I assert that Balrogs do not have wings. For, it is a natural impulse to act to preserve one’s life, and in doing so, to make full use of one’s capabilities. If the Balrog did have wings, it would not allow itself to fall to its death in the mines of Moria, but save itself by the use of its wings…

Thomas Aquinas, channeled by Captain Amazing

Frodo and Sam, having thus disposed of both the ring and Smeagol
Decided that they deserved a nice vacation, and flew off to the Bahamas by eagol.

Ogden Nash, as channeled by jr8

Thanks to Maia Cowan for pinging me about the Teemings extras!

I just found a great old post by Teresa Nielsen Hayden on “Mary Sue”.

MARY SUE (n.): 1. A variety
of story, first identified in the fan fiction community, but quickly
recognized as occurring elsewhere, in which normal story values are grossly subordinated to inadequately transformed personal
wish-fulfillment …

[for example] Galadriel’s secret love-child (Aragorn’s unacknowledged daughter) who runs off to join the Company of the Ring, sorts out Boromir’s problems, out-magics Gandalf, out-fights Aragorn during the melodramatic scene in which she reveals her true identity, demonstrates herself to be so spiritually elevated that the Ring has no effect on
her, and wins Legolas’ heart forever.

I loved this, and was all set to blog that Robert Heinlein falls deep
into this trap in some later novels–until I discoved Teresa’s
commenters had already said exactly this.

What would Mary Sue do in my situation? Drink exotic poison and die a
lingering death in the arms of Johnny Depp, as mascara ran down his
cheeks on a riptide of tears….

What I’d really like to understand right now is not absolute Truth, oh thank you so very much, or any inner details of my Self.*

What I’d really like to understand is how to get RSS coding to work on French (and Spanish and Norwegian) accents.

Grrr.

Take for example, the lovely word “été”, which means “summer” in French. It looks a lot less lovely in 99% of RSS encodings.

ISO Latin-1 entities: été
HTML 4.0 entities: été
Unicode: 0x00E9t0x00E9 (even HTML can’t read that one.)
I hope I’ll have figured it out by the time summer comes, or (in bad French) Je espère que je puisse le faire avant l’été.

*

“Il faut se connaître soi-même: quand cela ne servirait pas à trouver le vrai, cela au moins sert à régler sa vie, et il n’y est rien de plus juste.”*

Blaise Pascal, (1623-1662)

Roughly: “You need to understand yourself–not as a guide to absolute Truth, but in order to manage your life, a more useful goal.”

BTW, I acquired a lifetime supply of inaccurate French in college, where I used to sit gazing at the cute French professor through the haze of everybody’s cigarette smoke, pitying his tortured soul and wishing he would fall in love with me and write poems about us. Of course, I was virtuously trying to think all these things in French.

THE sun descending in the west,
The evening star does shine;
The birds are silent in their nest.
And I must seek for mine.
The moon, like a flower
In heaven’s high bower,
With silent delight
Sits and smiles on the night.

from “Night,” William Blake. (1757–1827)

“Okay, let’s see… In mellow-speak, that would be… ‘Oh, wow, look at the moon.'”

“Doonesbury” translation of the above, May 16, 1979.

“…no matter how bad and bloody things got on the streets of Blackhill, it was pretty much on par with the rest of Scottish history…

I still remember the blood-spattered walls of the house where several dozen [wedding] guests fought, and the verse that sprung to my mind from The Hunting of the Cheviot,
when Earls Percy and Douglas got into a ding-dong battle around 1424.

They closed full fast on every side,
No slackness there was found.

And many a gallant gentleman,

Lay gasping on the ground…”

John Nolan, a Scotsman now living in Farmington, NH, recently finished his series on “Poets Who Matter” with praise of Anonymous.

Nolan’s ostensible subject is the ongoing search of Rochester, NH for a local Poet Laureate. Between the lines, he recalls how poetry helped him make sense of life as a young Glasgow policeman. Nolan treats both Glasgow and Rochester with humanity and humor,

Recently, the Perseus Project compared our blogworld to an iceberg, with most of its bulk invisible to outsiders. Under the mass of almost-invisible bloggers, I think there’s a much larger group of bloggers-to-be. John Nolan–and I blogged about this before–ought to be up here blogging with the rest of us.

Read the whole series, and see if you don’t agree.

• Poets Who Matter: 1. Omar Khayyam
• Poets Who Matter: 2. John Clare
• Poets Who Matter: 3. John Keats
• Poets Who Matter: 4. Robert Garioch
• Poets Who Matter: 5. Walt Whitman
• Poets Who Matter: 6. Anonymous