Literature: January 2003 Archive Page

"The Geezer loves film noir. These dark, taut, black and white films give the lie to the illusion that the forties and fifties were upbeat, positive decades. I like that." The Geezer --The Geezer Speaks WeblogGeezerSpeaks.com)

An amusing personal website... and by a Geezer, too.

Your name is Masakati, which means "White Queen" in the language of the Scorpion People. You were named this before you were hatched, when the serpent witches foretold to your mother Essekunit, the Tangeri Queen, that her child would be as great a ruler as had been not seen in this Age: that you would be Queen not only of the Tangeri but of all the Scorpion People, and take back the lands stolen by the Empire.

--The Wheel, Masakati Episode 1: The White QueenInterfable.net)

The beginning of a collaborative fantasy story. At the end of the chapter, readers vote on what happens next. Set in an interesting world that borrows mythology from the Zodicac. I rather enjoyed the multi-chapter story I read a few weeks ago... this is a new story.

"About one-fourth of university-based medical researchers receive funding from drug companies -- ties that sometimes distort study results, according to a review done by two researchers with industry connections of their own."

--Review finds Pervasive Medical Research-Industry TiesAssociated Press)

Ohmigosh ohmigosh oh...my...gosh! Scientific research isn't completely objective? Scientists aren't lofty supreme beings of pure intellect, untouched by such human vices as pride and clumsiness? And when did corporations start funding scientific research? This is an outrage! I'm glad I'm in the humanities, where fraud never happens.

"The problem may be that they are simply bored with the conventional curriculum, says the study, titled Morphing Literacy: Boys Reshaping Their Literacy. The study found it is a myth that boys do not read. While they are less interested in fiction or traditional literature than girls are, they read more on the Internet and memorize vast amounts of detailed material from games or stories they read in the newspaper, the research showed." Julie Smyth summarizes an academic report, but doesn't say where it was published.

--Study says boys do read, they just don't read booksNational Post)

Another telling quote, which reminds me of Sugata Mitra's minimally invasive teaching philosophy: " The researchers found boys are becoming literate "in spite of school instruction," and may end up better prepared for a career because their skills are more useful than being able to write a narrative or analyze a work of fiction....They found boys spend large amounts of time on chat sites and Web sites to get tips on how to "cheat" or compete at video games, read books about animals, sports and fantasy, and will pick up magazines and newspapers to read hockey scores, entertainment stories or news about things relevant to their lives, such as the death of Napster.

Vocation
"I want to be a Bohemian, Rachel."
"A what?"
"A Bohemian, a hanger onner around the arts"
"I thought you already were - all that cafe society poetry stuff"
"Yes, but it's kinda hard on your own - do you want to be one too?"
"Erm, can't I be a bum instead?"
Elin Merriman

--Fifty Word FictionAlistair Fitchett)

Click the question mark to view a random story, click N to see the newest, or click S to submit your own.

"To be the subject of a Hirschfeld drawing endowed one with a special cachet. To find the word 'Nina,' the name of his daughter, hidden several times in the lines of his caricatures, was a weekend pastime for millions of readers. Next to his signature he put the number of 'Ninas' in his drawings, creating a sort of pleasurable Sunday game for his admirers." --Al Hirshfeld, 99, Dies; He Drew BroadwayNYTimes)

Cranky avant-garde novelist Kurt Vonnegut on George W. Bush: "He's in the same business I'm in. He's telling stories. It turns out this is the simplest of all stories to tell. I mean, I want to hold attention when I write something. What he wants to be is interesting. And revenge is interesting. I've said there are two radical ideas that have been introduced into human thought. One of them is that energy and matter are pretty much the same sort of stuff. That's Einstein. The other is that revenge is a bad idea. It's an enormously popular idea but, of course, Jesus came along with the radical idea of forgiveness. That was radical. If you're insulted, you have to square accounts. So this invention by Jesus is as radical as Einstein's." --Vonnegut at 80Nuvo)

Thanks for the link, Jim. It is very hard to think of forgiveness when faced with images of North Korea's concentration camps.

"When humans use a personal computer, we enter into the computer's world. If it can't do something, or if it crashes, too bad; we have to deal. But a robot enters into our world. If floors are uneven, if legs get in the way, if lighting conditions change, the robot has to deal." George Musser's review of the Roomba robot vaccuum cleaner explains why Robot armies haven't taken over the world yet. --Robots that SuckScientific American)

Another quote from the article: "What makes it a breakthrough is the price, $200, which approaches the don't-need-spousal-preapproval range." The word Robot was popularized by Karel Capek's play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), which was written in 1920.

"[T]he promise of a pill for every ill remains, as it always will, unfulfilled. Anyone who had read his Shakespeare would not have been surprised by this disappointment. When Macbeth asks a physician:

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?

"The physician replies laconically: 'Therein the patient / Must minister to himself.'

"Every day, several patients ask me Macbeth's question with regard to themselves-in less elevated language, to be sure-and they expect a positive answer: but four centuries before neurochemistry was even thought of, and before any of the touted advances in neurosciences that allegedly gave us a new and better understanding of ourselves, Shakespeare knew something that we are increasingly loath to acknowledge. There is no technical fix for the problems of humanity." Theodore Dalrymple --Why Shakespeare is for All TimeCity Journal)

"A serious literary magazine published by a hospital? Sounds unlikely. But the Bellevue Literary Review, published by the New York University department of medicine at Bellevue Hospital, is drawing on a long literary heritage. Bellevue has nursed William Burroughs, Eugene O'Neill and many other close-to-the-edge writers and artists. Danielle Ofri, the review's editor-in-chief and a doctor at Bellevue, believes scientists and doctors too often dismiss the power of language." --The Word DoctorNew Scientist)

Ofri asks her medical students to write up patient histories as a first-person narrative, I presume in order to encourage greater empathy with the human patient. Several years ago, I found NYU's excellent Medical Humanities website. Georgetown also has a site on Disability Studies in the Humanities, an interest that has arisen in part due to the near-obsession humanities scholarship developed in the study of "the body" in the 90s.

"Music, a social and artistic activity of the first importance, inevitably makes its way, often quite a substantial way, into literature of all kinds. Monographs have been, or could be, written on music in Jane Austen's novels, or Thomas Hardy's, or J. B. Priestley's, or on music in Galsworthy's FORSYTE CHRONICLES, to name a few instances at random. It may, then, be of some interest to recall (and I do not believe it has been done previously at length) some of the musical associations of the vast bulk of British crime fiction." Philip L. Sowcroft via Waterboro Public Library --Music in English Detective FictionMusicweb)

Naturally, the article starts with Arthur Conan Doyle, due to Sherlock Holmes's love of the violin and the opera.

"2002 Year-End Zeitgeist offers a unique perspective on the year's major events and hottest trends based on more than 55 billion searches conducted over the past year by Google users from around the world."

Top 5 gaining Google queries from 2002:

1. spiderman
2. shakira
3. winter olympics
4. world cup
5. avril lavigne

Top 5 declining Google queries from 2002:

1. nostradamus
2. napster
3. world trade center
4. anthrax
5. osama bin laden

--2002 Year-End ZeitgeistGoogle)

This listing indicates that the world is moving beyond the events of 9.11.2001. I had toyed with the idea of making Morrowind my next comptuer game purchase... the fact that it's 9th on the "gaining" list makes me more confident it will be a good use of my limited free time. The singers on this list mean nothing to me, though I've used Eminem (7th gaining) in class when my students complained that the rhymed verse of Moliere's 1660's play Tartuffe was unrealistic. Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

"This is the story of the revival of York Mystery Plays from the Festival of Britain in 1951 to the present day told by the many individuals who have been involved with the Plays - whether as actors, stage hands or front of house - through their personal memories, photographs and press cuttings."

--York Mystery Plays -- Illumination: From Shadow into LightNational Centre for Early Music)

A wonderful site that focuses on the music that accompanied these wonderful devotional and instructive plays from the Medieval town of York, England. (See my own York Corpus Christi Simulator.) Thanks for the suggestion, Heidi Johnson of the National Centre for Early Music, in York, England.

Blessed be God, at the end of the last year I was in very good health, without any sense of my old pain, but upon taking of cold.1 I lived in Axe Yard having my wife, and servant Jane, and no more in family than us three. My wife . . . . gave me hopes of her being with child, but on the last day of the year . . . .[the hope was belied.]2 The condition of the State was thus; viz. the Rump, after being disturbed by my Lord Lambert, was lately returned to sit again. The officers of the Army all forced to yield. Lawson lies still in the river, and Monk is with his army in Scotland. Only my Lord Lambert is not yet come into the Parliament, nor is it expected that he will without being forced to it. The new Common Council of the City do speak very high; and had sent to Monk their sword-bearer, to acquaint him with their desires for a free and full Parliament, which is at present the desires, and the hopes, and expectation of all. Twenty-two of the old secluded members3 having been at the House-door the last week to demand entrance, but it was denied them; and it is believed that [neither] they nor the people will be satisfied till the House be filled. My own private condition very handsome, and esteemed rich, but indeed very poor; besides my goods of my house, and my office, which at present is somewhat uncertain. Mr. Downing master of my office.

This morning (we living lately in the garret,) I rose, put on my suit with great skirts, having not lately worn any other, clothes but them. Went to Mr. Gunning's chapel at Exeter House, where he made a very good sermon upon these words:--"That in the fulness of time God sent his Son, made of a woman," &c.; showing, that, by "made under the law," is meant his circumcision, which is solemnized this day. Dined at home in the garret, where my wife dressed the remains of a turkey, and in the doing of it she burned her hand. I staid at home all the afternoon, looking over my accounts; then went with my wife to my father's, and in going observed the great posts which the City have set up at the Conduit in Fleet-street. Supt at my, father's, where in came Mrs. The. Turner and Madam Morrice, and supt with us. After that my wife and I went home with them, and so to our own home.

--1 January 1659/60 (Lord's Day) [Samuel Pepys' Diary]PepysDiary.com)

Weblogs have gotten a lot of people excited about historical diaries. Perhaps the most famous is that of Samuel Pepys, who kept a diary from 1659-1669, a span that includes the Great Fire and the Great Plague. The diary will be posted online in chunks, and readers can comment on the postings, just like a weblog. The online verison is slightly edited, leaving out the bits perceived by previous editors as too salacious or unseemly for respectable audiences. (Thanks for the link, Ben.)

"I heard of the play when it opened in Paris. But I am ashamed to say I did not see it. I had no idea that it would shortly dominate my life....My 16-year-old daughter was baffled by the programme material detailing the play's controversial history. 'What on earth is there to understand?' she said. 'It's perfectly clear what it is about. You only have to listen.' How stupid it seems now that, 50 years ago, people denied that this play was a play." --Godotmania [50-Year Appreciation of Waiting for Godot]Guardian)