Words – Page 6 – Zoopraxiscope

Today’s word

Underdue, adjective

An example of its usage from an Alan Coren book review:

MAXIMINUS NAPLES
The first Proconsul of what was, in the second century BC, still Calabrium, Maximinus is chiefly remembered for his habit of throwing political opponents into Vesuvius. His proconsulate was exceptionally stormy, corrupt and inefficient, and in 134 BC, Emperor Tiberius Gracchus demoted him to the proconsulate of Sicily, where he is chiefly remembered for his habit of throwing political opponents into Etna. His significance is minimal, and my own opinion is that this dreary account is long underdue.

The book in question is a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and Coren’s review is based on the title on the spine. The review is included in The Sanity Inspector, the book I tossed in the camera bag yesterday to read while waiting for the cosplay contest to begin.

Coren on the Netherlands:

… it is an interesting country, sweeping up from the coastal plain into the central massif, a two-foot high ridge of attractive silt with fabulous views of the sky, and down again into the valleys, inches below. Apart from cheese and tulips, the main product of the country is advocaat, a drink made from lawyers.

Obviously true …

… but worth stating anyway —

Josh W. Thursday:

… often an artist’s storytelling capabilities exceed their own philosophical limitations and wind up being more universal than their idiosyncrasies. A good story tends to to be more universal than its philosophical scaffolding, which is why I don’t need to, say, find the political and social views of Asimov or Le Guin particularly toothsome to nevertheless find their works deeply meaningful for me.

Fillyjonk:

… one of the beauties of our system of government, of how the rights we have are protected: we are free to disagree with the government. That robust and strong systems are able to tolerate dissent. And by extension, I suppose, the weak and insecure ones are those that work to quash it.

Efsitz

I thought of this ancient E.B. White story the other day and found it online:

Irtnog

Along about 1920 it became apparent that more things were being written than people had time to read. That is to say, even if a man spent his entire time reading stories, articles, and news, as they appeared in books, magazines, and pamphlets, he fell behind. This was no fault of the reading public; on the contrary, readers made a real effort to keep pace with writers, and utilized every spare moment during their walking hours. They read while shaving in the morning and while waiting for trains and while riding on trains. They came to be a kind of tacit agreement among numbers of the reading public that when one person laid down the baton, someone else must pick it up; and so when a customer entered a barbershop, the barber would lay aside the Boston Evening Globe and the customer would pick up Judge; or when a customer appeared in a shoe-shining parlor, the bootblack would put away the racing form and the customer would open his briefcase and pull out The Sheik. So there was always somebody reading something. Motormen of trolley cars read while they waited on the switch. Errand boys read while walking from the corner of Thirty-ninth and Madison to the corner of Twenty-fifth and Broadway. Subway riders read constantly, even when they were in a crushed, upright position in which nobody could read his own paper but everyone could look over the next man’s shoulder. People passing newsstands would pause for a second to read headlines. Men in the back seats of limousines, northbound on Lafayette Street in the evening, switched on tiny dome lights and read the Wall Street Journal. Women in semi-detached houses joined circulating libraries and read Vachel Lindsay while the baby was taking his nap.

Continue reading “Efsitz”

A list

While pondering a reply to Robin’s comment on the previous post, I thought it would be useful to compile a list of the Nebula award winners for novel, novella, novelette and short story from 2000 on and note the sex of the writers:

Continue reading “A list”

Postcard from Missoula

Here are the answers to yesterday’s quiz.

Continue reading “Postcard from Missoula”

Pigs, birds, trains

… and now for something less depressing. Here are some lines and fragments from various poems that occasionally pop into my mind. See if you can identify the poets and poems. I’ll post the answers tomorrow.

1. Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat!

2. No. Not this pig.

3. … yuck-a, yuck-a, yuck-a, yuck-a …

4. I have awakened at Missoula, Montana, utterly happy.

5. … boxcars boxcars boxcars …

6. May God damn for ever all who cry “Peace!”

7. Polyphiloprogenitive

8. What I tell you three times is true.

N.B.: The spoiler system for this website apparently doesn’t work for comments. Don’t read the comments until you’ve made your own guesses.

Why Tolkien disliked allegory

What if The Lord of the Rings had really been about World War II?

In reverse, we could play with the idea of what would have happened in WW II if it had followed the lines of LotR…

The plot would focus on the destruction of the Atom Bomb (and implicitly all knowledge required to make it) by a small team of English patriots led by George Orwell, who infiltrate Germany and destroy the evil research establishment which is making the A-bomb.

The climactic end would be the death of Hitler (as the ready-for-use prototype explodes?) and the end of the Nazi regime in Germany with the return of the Holy Roman Emperor.

Poetry corner

Blank spaces count as characters. It’s true.
I wasn’t sure. And then I thought of you.

—Sophie Hannah

… comfy armchairs with ejection seats for emergencies

Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres:

“I am a conscientious objector to child conscription, on grounds that I should not have to suffer for a disintegrating school system’s failure to provide teachers or study materials of even minimally adequate quality.”

And:

Then again, Harry was standing in a bank that literally stored your money in vaults full of gold coins guarded by dragons, where you had to go in and take coins out of your vault whenever you wanted to spend money. The finer points of arbitraging away market inefficiencies might well be lost on them. He’d been tempted to make snide remarks about the crudity of their financial system…
But the sad thing is, their way is probably better.
On the other hand, one competent hedge fundie could probably own the whole wizarding world within a week. Harry filed away this notion in case he ever ran out of money, or had a week free.
Meanwhile, the giant heaps of gold coins within the Potter vault ought to suit his near-term requirements.
Harry stumped forward, and began picking up gold coins with one hand and dumping them into the other.
When he had reached twenty, Professor McGonagall coughed. “I think that will be more than enough to pay for your school supplies, Mr. Potter.”
“Hm?” Harry said, his mind elsewhere. “Hold on, I’m doing a Fermi calculation.”
“A what? ” said Professor McGonagall, sounding somewhat alarmed.
“It’s a mathematical thing. Named after Enrico Fermi. A way of getting rough numbers quickly in your head…”
Twenty gold Galleons weighed a tenth of a kilogram, maybe? And gold was, what, ten thousand British pounds a kilogram? So a Galleon would be worth about fifty pounds… The mounds of gold coins looked to be about sixty coins high and twenty coins wide in either dimension of the base, and a mound was pyramidal, so it would be around one-third of the cube. Eight thousand Galleons per mound, roughly, and there were around five mounds of that size, so forty thousand Galleons or 2 million pounds sterling.
Not bad. Harry smiled with a certain grim satisfaction. It was too bad that he was right in the middle of discovering the amazing new world of magic, and couldn’t take time out to explore the amazing new world of being rich, which a quick Fermi estimate said was roughly a billion times less interesting.
Still, that’s the last time I ever mow a lawn for one lousy pound.

There may be a Harry Potter fanfic worth reading, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

(Via J. Greely.)

The most-shoplifted author in Britain

I’m not sure which writer whose books I have the largest number of on my shelves. It might be Philip K. Dick, Gene Wolfe or R.A. Lafferty. Or it might be Terry Pratchett. Pratchet, long one of my favorite writers, died today.

There are various notices and such here, here, here, here and here.

Post script: It turns out that the quote from Death in the upper picture is one of Neil Gaiman’s contributions to Good Omens.

Yesterday in literary history

A note on Nathaniel Hawthorne from Flannery O’Connor:

… Hawthorne couldn’t stand Emerson or any of that crowd. When one of them came in the front door, Hawthorne went out the back. He met one of them one morning and snarled, “Good Morning Mr. G., how is your Oversoul this morning?”

O’Connor may be the greatest Catholic writer of fiction of the 20th century, but the book of hers I most enjoy is a collection of her letters, The Habit of Being.

Spotted while looking for something else

A useful observation on Gene Wolfe:

A heuristic for dealing with Wolfe’s fiction is that, if all else seems in doubt, assume that the point of the story is to display the universality of the Christ.

Porkypalooza IV

Any study of the importance of the pig in civilization must mention the Empress of Blandings.

Anti-gravitas

Today is the centenary of the birth of possibly the most original and imaginative writer of the twentieth century, R.A. Lafferty. I’ve been collecting his books ever since I read “Continued on Next Rock” in one of the Carr/Wollheim anthologies back in ancient times. I could try to explain why Lafferty is extraordinary, but it’s easier just to refer you to the short stories that are available online.

Slow Tuesday Night

Guesting Time

The Transcendent Tigers

Narrow Valley

Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas

Hog-Belly Honey

Nine Hundred Grandmothers

The Six Fingers of Time

Nearly everything Lafferty wrote is long out of print, which is a scandal. If you ever spot one of his collections in a used book store, grab it.

Some websites devoted to the cranky old man from Tulsa:

Continued on Next Rock

I want a death and resurrection of the thing

The Ants of God Are Queer Fish

Yet Another Lafferty Blog

The R.A. Lafferty Devotional Page

R.A. Lafferty.org

Lafferty, incidentally, is partly responsible for the career of Neil Gaiman:

Lafferty was his favorite author in the world, he said. “His stories brimmed with ideas that no one had ever thought before. The use of language was uniquely his own —a Lafferty sentence is instantly utterly recognizable,” Gaiman wrote of Lafferty, in an introduction to the story in Martin H. Greenberg’s My Favorite Fantasy Story. “The cockeyed, strange, and wonderful world he painted in his tales often seems nearer to our own, more joyful and more recognizable than many a more worthy or more literal account by other authors the world stopped to notice.”
When he was 19, Gaiman dug Lafferty’s address out of the back of a library book and wrote to him, asking for advice on becoming an author. Tulsa, thanks to Lafferty, is for him a place of literary magic. “He told me how to become an author, and his advice was very good advice, and so I did. It left me quite certain that the finest literary advice in the world came from Tulsa, Oklahoma, for it did in my case,” Gaiman said.

Word of the day

Nibiruistic.

Nibiruistic (adjective), used to describe postulations, interpretations and opinions on natural phenomenae coloured by a wish for disasters on a Doomsday scale rather than based on scientific merit. The word is derived from Nibiru, the fictional planet invoked as the root cause for the disaster predicted by the Mayan calendar that would end the world on December 21st, 2012. Since the Mayan calendar was very ambiguous, it could be said to be the archetype for a Nibiruistic interpretation. Nibiruism (noun), a statement based on a wish for a disaster on a Doomsday scale rather than on scientific merit.

*****

Now that we’ve considered what the fox says, what does the moose say? ((“Hey, Rocky.”))

The furry anthem is not the first crime the Norwegian Flight of the Conchords has commmitted. Here are some earlier outrages (N.B.: rough language and worse):