the past is another country
Monday, April 29, 2002
My birthday was last weekend. It was fun; the weather on Saturday was just about perfect. And it marked an end to the Literary Year. Last year on my birthday, I decided to write a short review of every book I read for an entire year. Among the many goals was to answer a question: how many books do I read in a year? When I was twenty-five, I read sixty-seven books, start to finish, not counting novellas, short stories, magazine articles, and comic books. Good enough. But I had an ulterior motive in doing the Literary Year. (more...)
11:46 pm 
Friday, April 26, 2002
The temperature mellowed last week, but I fear for the summer. Our apartment doesn't have central air, so I survive by drinking lots of ice-cold drinks. It's unsurprising that the cold-drink industry's champ was born in sweltering Atlanta before the invention of air conditioning, even if providing a relief from the heat wasn't the original goal. Coca-Cola was born in 1886, when pharmacist and morphine addict John Pemberton created Coca-Cola syrup as a non-addictive pick-me-up, featuring stimulating coca leaves and refreshing kola nuts. Georgia business man Asa Chandler acquired the company and switched the formula to denatured coca (enabling it to survive a series of legal hurdles when cocaine was made illegal in the United States, including the magnificently named case of United States v. Forty Barrels and Twenty Kegs of Coca-Cola, and the Coke juggernaut, propelled by decades of memorable advertising, both print-based and televised, was born. (more...)
11:41 pm
Tuesday, April 23, 2002
Although most of my used bookstore jaunts are in search of desperately out-of-print science fiction and the occasional classic I've been looking for, I do love it when I find a treasure of oddness. I've got a copy of Dr. Sylvanus Stall's anti-Onanism tract What Every Young Boy Ought to Know and some determinedly strange children's books, even some dandy anti-Communist literature, but I don't have anything really weird. I've never found a copy of the Codex Seraphinianus or a hitherto unknown key to the Voynitch manuscript. I've never found anything by Harry Stephen Keeler, thought by some (including Big Secrets author William Poundstone) to be the worst mystery writer ever, although others would apparently put forward Joel Townsley Rogers for the title. I've never found anything by Lionel Fanthorpe, the Ed Wood of British science fiction. I've found Masonic and anti-Masonic propaganda and all sorts of New Age hokum, but I've never found a hand-colored refutation of Einstein. I've never found anything worthy of mention in Book Happy, a zine published by Donna Kossy of Kooks fame, and I've certainly never found anything quite as remarkable as Down Home Gynecology, a women's health book written in country-fried dialect that could have been (and possibly was) lifted from Li'l Abner. And for that I am grateful.
11:56 pm
Sunday, April 21, 2002
My apologies for the somewhat sparse posting of late, dear reader. I've been exploring a rather large book. Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow tries to fit something approximating the whole of human experience into Europe at the end of and immediately after World War II. Like Pynchon's immensely more approachable The Crying of Lot 49, it's a novel of paranoia, as Tyrone Slothrop slowly investigates the truth about mad chemist Laszlo Jamf and the Schwarzgerät rocket, sought after by half the spies in Europe. It's a novel about control: industrial, personal, sexual. It's a novel about madness and love and extinction and language and lemmings and pigs. It's terrifically funny at points and almost unreadable at others. It's absolutely brilliant, and I have absolutely no problem remembering why I stopped reading it the first three times I gave it a whirl. (more...)
11:26 pm
Thursday, April 18, 2002
The founder of the Science Fiction Writers of America, Damon Knight, passed away Monday (link via Patrick Nielsen Hayden, a science fiction editor at Tor Books, who has written his own brief tribute to Knight). Knight is probably best known as the author of "To Serve Man", memorably adapted for The Twilight Zone and nicely spoofed on The Simpsons a few years ago, but his work in the field as a reviewer, teacher, and editor really surpass his contributions as a writer. (more...)
11:41 pm
Tuesday, April 16, 2002
This year's winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize was announced this week, and he's Australian. Glenn Murcutt's claim to fame is that he's an environmentally conscious designer; his work, mostly composed of single-family houses, is designed to blend in with the environment. Murcutt apparently dislikes air conditioning, and many of his houses are designed to use passive cooling and don't have air conditioners. His houses are attractive and modern looking, but not weird; they use some non-traditional materials, but nothing as strange as cordwood masonry. Murcutt makes environmentally conscious houses that don't look like a seventh-grader's diorama, slapped together out of styrofoam and masking tape after reading Dune for the first time. (more...)
11:43 pm
Thursday, April 11, 2002
In 1933, an Oklahoman physicist, Karl Jansky, made headlines when he announced that the we could listen to the galaxy. An employee of Bell Labs, Jansky had been investigating the background noise that interfered with transatlantic radio telephone calls. Much of the noise, he found, was from thunderstorms, but some was from another, unidentified source. Jansky eventually he determined that the noise was being produced not by a terrestrial source but by the Milky Way; he was the first real radio astronomer, the first to successfully learn about celestially bodies by analyzing radiation (such as radio waves or X-rays) that they emitted outside the visible spectrum. Jansky wanted to investigate further, but Bell Labs, having received the answers they needed, put Jansky on another project; he never did radio astronomy again. (more...)
11:46 pm
Monday, April 8, 2002
Adam Cadre has published one book to his name, but I know him better as the author of the spectacularly funny MSTing of "The Eye of Argon", a spectacularly funny (and bad) piece of fantastic fiction in the Conan vein. MSTing has a certain postmodernist flair (V. used Cadre's version of "Eye" as an example in a linguistics paper she wrote), and recent mention on MetaFilter reminded me that Cadre is also the author of some fascinating interactive fiction. (more...)
12:42 am
Friday, April 5, 2002
As phonograph enthusiasts know, the first phonographic recordings were not pressed onto wax but onto tin foil (although one early experimenter used lead; his recording can still be played today). Tin foil was not, however, such a durable medium. Earlier recordings on paper have lasted just as well, if not better. Sheet music was a huge commodity in the nineteenth century (and one that was widely pirated internationally, although copyrights on sheet music and live performance applied after 1831), but it wasn't so much recorded as transcribed. But the invention of automatic music, particularly the player piano, meant that an individual performer's work could be recorded, duplicated, and played in your parlor or at the local saloon almost as it had sounded in the concert hall. (more...)
11:47 pm
Monday, April 1, 2002
Baseball season began yesterday, but today is opening day for most of the league. As the season stretches on, prepare to see signs of the continuing strife between ownership and the player's union; expect to see someone -- Carl Everett or John Rocker, perhaps, now that Al Belle has retired -- make an ass of himself through a particularly churlish or stupidly criminal gesture; look forward to the first batch of stories comparing the current dross with the upstanding baseball of yesteryear, where love of the game was what mattered and no one ever entertained an ignoble thought. Except, as Roger Angell reminds us, it's bunk.
The stuff about the connection between baseball and American life, the Field of Dreams thing, gives me a pain. I hated that movie. It's mostly fake. You look back into the meaning of old-time baseball, and really in the early days it was full of roughnecks and drunks. They beat up the umpires and played near saloons.
But who's to say that two-fisted, hard-drinking ballplayers don't represent the American way? (more...)
11:45 pm
