Literature: December 2002 Archive Page

"The 2000 handwritten pages include Tolkien's translation and appraisal of Beowulf, the epic 8th century Anglo-Saxon poem of bravery, friendship and monster-slaying that is thought to have inspired The Lord of the Rings." --Tolkien's Translation of "Beowulf" Discoverednews.com.au)

Grendel-riffic!

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a Dark Lord in possession of a desire to rule the world must be in want of a ring." --Austen writes Lord of the RingsPemberly.com)

Hmm... that's a bit of a stretch... "a Dark Lord in possession of The Ring must be in want of the world." But it's really the women in Pride & Prejudice -- and chiefly Mrs. Bennett -- who so passionately desire marriage and thus "the ring". So the delicious irony of Austen's opening quotation was sacrificed for shallow parallelism. (I'm certainly overanalyzing this. Sorry.)

Charley X
Well-punished laughter,
Token of a child's longing:
Beehive disappoints.
--Star Trek HaikuWeasel Breweries)

This page presents every episode of classic Star Trek, reduced to a single haiku. Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

Hey... there's no haiku for "Turnabout Intruder". I'll fix that...

His gold-tunic'd bod
Enraptures Dr. Janice
She swaps hers for his

"Like Shakespeare, or many of the greatest writers, [P. G.] Wodehouse is violently cavalier with English grammar. The dictionary will tell you that 'window' is a noun, 'small' is an adjective, 'Fred' is a proper noun. Shakespeare's Cleopatra sees herself 'window'd in great Rome'; Hardy has a figure which 'smalls into the distance'; a character in Wodehouse can 'out-Fred the nimblest Astaire'. Try to do that in German. " Philip Hensher --The Music of the LanguageSpectator)

"[E]very word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.' " Mary McCarthy's famous quip about Lillian Hellman is the inspiration for Nora Ephron's play "Imaginary Friends." Dick Cavett suggests that the wrath of Hellman eventually destroyed the health of both women. --Lillian, Mary and MeNew Yorker)

"Writing software should be treated as a creative activity. Just think about it -- the software that's interesting to make is software that hasn't been made before. Most other engineering disciplines are about building things that have been built before. People say, 'Well, how come we can't build software the way we build bridges?' The answer is that we've been building bridges for thousands of years, and while we can make incremental improvements to bridges, the fact is that every bridge is like some other bridge that's been built." From an interview with Richard Gabriel

[Another quote from the interview: " So, the idea behind the MFA in software is that if we want to get good at writing software, we have to practice it, we have to have a critical literature, and we have to have a critical context. It looks like we may be able to start a program like that in the next year or so at a major university that I'm not free to name. It's probably going to be called a Master of Software Arts." From the other side of the coin, as a literature Ph.D. who programs on the side, I sometimes face great difficulty talking about my programming activities with non-coding colleagues (which is, in my case, everybody else in my department). Of course, books like The Soul of a New Machine and Hackers already provide a useful vocabulary for examining the values and practices that are -- pardon the pun -- "encoded" in cybercommunities. I find that many of the CS majors I teach are eager to contribute to classroom discussions on such topics as values and ethics, but that in their CS courses they are so busy learning code that they have little time for such discussions. Maybe that's not typical? Our CS department has no graduate program, so the vast majority of students are focused like a laser beam on graduating and getting a job.--DGJ] --The Poetry of ProgrammingSun)

"Consumers are often baffled at the price tag attached to what appears to be little more than a mass of paper, cardboard and ink. A whole host of factors, including the size of the book, the quality of paper, the quantity of books printed, whether it contains illustrations, what sort of deal the publisher can make with the printer and the cost of warehouse space, all affect the production costs of a book. But, roughly speaking, only about 20 percent of a publisher's budget for each book pays for paper, printing and binding, the trinity that determines the physical cost." Christopher Dreher --Why Do Books Cost So Much?Salon)

"Is it possible that we have actually come to the end of fairy tales as an available, rather than an archival, entertainment? Fairy tales, however many times they are transformed, depend in some part for their effect on an air of sincerity, of urgent seriousness. For the not merely wise but wised-up children of this new century, other tales and other, more skittish ways of telling seem to have usurped the old stories and styles. Which means that the fairy tale could be headed for the place where all our good used-up things go, America's Island of Misfit Toys, the college English department." Adam Gopnik --Magic Kingdoms... What Is a Fairytale, Anyway?New Yorker)