mcgees.org

I can highly recommend, to US buyers, the oddly-named Vera Trinder, self-described as “London’s Oldest Stamp Accessory Store”, for philatelic literature.  They have relatively low prices, good coverage, and exceptional service.

Watch your checkbook, though: the merchant is completely honest, to be sure, but the current exchange rate (plus “international fees” on your credit card) leaves much to be desired (when importing — it has been a boon while selling on eBay!)

My brother has a new essay entitled Deus Ex Leo, about C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, in his continuing series of hacking to death, as an adult, fond memories of his childhood.  The series is very good.  Have I mentioned my brother is a better writer than I?

Also, I has a comment there, or might eventually, if it gets approved by a mod.

This is not the next post in the Chain Link saga, but I had to comment.

The (living) author J.K. Rowling hand-wrote and illustrated seven copies of the book The Tales of Beedle the Bard, which is referenced as a fictional book in one of her Harry Potter stories.  Each copy is magnificently bound, with deckle edges, Moroccan leather, and sterling silver.

All proceeds go to charity.  Good for her.

Amazon bought one for £1 950 000 at Sotheby’s, which presumably does not include a buyer’s premium.

Um, yeah.  A couple years ago, at least (when I was still following prices), you could buy a Gutenberg Bible and a Birds of North America for less money.  Save up a few more pennies, and you could walk away with a First Folio Shakespeare.  If you like children’s literature, you could probably buy every hand-written and -illustrated Beatrix Potter and Lewis Carroll volume and letter in existence for less.

What do you think will have more enduring value?

I’ve placed an order for an e-book reader: the first-generation Amazon Kindle.  I’ve been interested in a good e-book reader for about 8 years, but what I previously thought was going to be the best, the Everybook, failed to bloom.  It was many times as expensive and heavy, and used LCD screens.

I sat down some years ago and put together a checklist of what I wanted in an e-book reader.  They were:

1. Lightweight
2. Electronic paper
3. Long battery live
4. Expandable storage
5. Ability to be annotated
6. Multiple format support
7. Price under $500
8. Fold-open design to see two facing pages
9. Viewable area at least as large as a paperback
10. Hackable!

Only the first seven are guaranteed.  This is only a one-page reader, however, rather than a two-page reader.  The viewing area is only 6 inches diagonally.  And I’m not sure whether it’s going to be hackable, but I’ll try my best.  But Amazon added a whole bunch of extra functionality: MP3 player, free wireless access to buy books or download content while seeing Amazon reviews, free browsing of Wikipedia, an email address for the device.  I think this all adds up to “good enough for now”.

Notice how everything is converging?  My ideal reader today would support full-motion video, color, advanced music playlist management, email, telephony, touch-sensitivity; it would be a replacement for a separate book reader, phone, mp3 player, PDA, calculator, and laptop.

C.S. Lewis, 1947 (?), final stanza:

Hence, if belated drops yet fall
From heaven, on these her plastic power
Still works as once it worked on all
The glad rush of the golden shower

Wow.  The truth.  Email subscribers, go to the site for the scan.

Do check out PaperBackSwap.com.  Trade books — for free! — with other book lovers around the country.  There is a sister site for CDs, but that costs money.

This is going to fall off Google’s archives quickly, as eBay has suspended his account.  Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui was offering for sale on Half.com, under the alias blazers5505, the following books:

• Micro Fiction
• Oates’s The Female Of The Species
• Horror novel Hell House
• Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings
• John Donne’s Poetry
• Best of HP Lovecraft
• Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film
• Ten Little Indians, and
• Sabbath Night In The Church Of The Piranha

No judgment of his tastes is implied by posting the list, it’s just going to be forever-lost data in a few hours.  (Archive of search).

Hmmm.  Amazon: 92% reassuring, 8% not at all reassuring.

I’m hoping this post will help web surfers.  If you’re looking for a caustic solution to dissolve paper, cardboard, and ink of all tested varieties, mix cat urine and diet cola in roughly equal quantities, and immerse.

This research was underwritten by the Amazon.com VISA card, which provided Thank You For Arguing and Color for Philosophers to my nightstand, and I was ably aided by assistants Mika (our poorly-housebroken cat) and Sebastian (our clumsy cat).

Google Book Search: Buy your books by the chapter.

ITunes model for books?  Will publishers go for it?

I just finished reading Nicholas A. Basbanes’ Among the Gently Mad, a book about book collectors and book collecting that has many insights to offer about the phenomenon of collecting in general, how a germ of an idea will snowball into a major quest, and the value-adding properties of assembling a choice lot, wherein the whole becomes far more valuable than the separate parts.  Speaking as a collector of various things, I read with interest his insights into the mind of the collector — I frequently wonder the value and purpose of my collecting pursuits, and Basbanes’ analysis of the art and science of collecting do much to mollify.

The book cites two intriguing books: Double Fold, about the betrayal of the public by librarians who destroy books to save them, and Understanding Book Collecting, which is less intriguing to me now that I read that it is targeted for the British collector.

Wow, I’m glad I kept reading The Blank Slate.  The last two chapters, “The Arts” and “The Voice of the Species” were really, really, really good.  Maybe borrow the book and just read those?

I have been reading the intricate shell game that is Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate. Thought-provoking shell game, but shell game nonetheless, prone to rapid escalations from fish-in-barrel-shooting to global generalization in seven-league leaps of Randian proportion.  I’ve kept reading it for one reason: its occasional aha-generating moments are really fun (and normally in the form of citations from other thinkers.) In that sense the book is a footnote to its bibliography.

Allow me to cite, however, the first citation that has made me put the book down to write a blog post. He cites a writer called J.C. Wakefield as follows:

A good definition of a disease or disorder is that it consists of suffering experienced by an individual because of a malfunction of a mechanism in the individual’s body.

Now, hold on.  That is an immeasurably lousy definition of disease and disorder, on the scale of David Gelernter’s definition of vivid imagination.  By this definition, brain death is not a disorder.  Early-stage HIV infection is not a disease.  They’re not causing suffering, right?  At least not unless you expand suffering to something like “eventual diminution of lifespan”, or “elimination of the potential for experience of happiness”. But maybe his argument doesn’t rely on the suffering bit, or maybe it permits this sort of wide definition. He proceeds to explain why violence is not a disorder:

But as a writer for Science recently pointed out, “Unlike most diseases, it’s usually not the perpetrator who defines aggression as a problem; it’s the environment. Violent people may feel they are functioning normally, and some may even enjoy their occasional outbursts and resist treatment.  (Emphasis added)

I’m not making a claim about the pathology of violence. That’s not the point. The point is that if you are willing to start with assumptions this flawed, where do your arguments lead? Apparently, if this book is testament, the effect is arguments such as Neural models with distributed intelligence function better than top-down models. Leftism is top-down and utopian. Conservatism, with its free economic agents pursuing their own ends, is distributed. Therefore, the validity of Conservatism is supported by artificial intelligence research.  The only difference is that he takes ten pages to state this thesis.

Google begins to digitize paper books.  Amazing potential.

For the mathematically inclined reader, we note that a Calabi-Yau manifold is a complex Kähler manifold with vanishing first Chern class.

Egads.  I thought I was a mathematically inclined reader.

The age demanded an image

Of its accelerated grimace,

Something for the modern stage,

Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;

In what dialect or dialects of English do the pairs image and stage, grimace and grace rhyme?  Can anyone help?

Purchase Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash or The Diamond Age from Fictionwise by credit card, and get a 100% Micropay rebate, good for anything they sell.  Offer good through September 8th.

As usual, I will quote from Michael Quinion’s irreplaceable World Wide Words column, this time from issue 348 (Saturday 5 July 2003):

“English, whatever its other merits, has as many disparaging words
as one would possibly desire. The example that follows is from Sir
Thomas Urquhart’s 1653 translation of Rabelais’ work Gargantua and
Pantagruel, a translation that draws heavily on vocabulary used in
Scotland in his [Urquhart’s] time:

“The bun-sellers or cake-makers were in nothing inclinable
to their request; but, which was worse, did injure them
most outrageously, called them prattling gabblers, lickorous
gluttons, freckled bittors, mangy rascals, shite-a-bed
scoundrels, drunken roysters, sly knaves, drowsy loiterers,
slapsauce fellows, slabberdegullion druggels, lubberly louts,
cozening foxes, ruffian rogues, paltry customers, sycophant-varlets, drawlatch hoydens, flouting milksops, jeering
companions, staring clowns, forlorn snakes, ninny lobcocks,
scurvy sneaksbies, fondling fops, base loons, saucy coxcombs,
idle lusks, scoffing braggarts, noddy meacocks, blockish
grutnols, doddipol-joltheads, jobbernol goosecaps, foolish
loggerheads, flutch calf-lollies, grouthead gnat-snappers,
lob-dotterels, gaping changelings, codshead loobies, woodcock
slangams, ninny-hammer flycatchers, noddypeak simpletons,
turdy gut, shitten shepherds, and other suchlike defamatory
epithets; saying further, that it was not for them to eat
of these dainty cakes, but might very well content themselves
with the coarse unranged bread, or to eat of the great brown
household loaf.”

Have fun working all of these into casual sentences, or just tracking down the meanings of all these insults.  I’ll get you started: a  sychophant-varlet is a servile, flattering servant or rascal.  A blockish grutnol is a dull, lazy person.&nbp; A woodcock slangam is a lanky person as dim-witted as a pheasant (Google for slangam and you encounter a fascinating academic paper entitled A cultural-linguistic study of English sound-symbolic pejorative lexemes beginning in sl- and du-.  As long as you have your dictionary out already, it’s worth a read: just look for definitions that begin ‘Ling. -‘.)  A doddipol-jolthead seems to be a blockhead-blockhead, which suggests that there has been a great deal of linguistic compression of various insults into fewer terms.  I have the misfortune of encountering quite a few drunken roysters (revelers), drowsy loiterers, and jeering companions, and I am commonly treated as a paltry customer, although less frequently since the local Wherehouse Music stores have closed.  I have been mostly able to avoid staring clowns and forlorn snakes.  Just apply some effort: I’m sure you can work shite-a-bed scoundrel into today’s conversations with minimal effort.

The source work for these words, Gargantua and Pantagruel, inspired the English word Gargantuan, which is defined by one source as “Characteristic of Gargantua, a gigantic, wonderful personage; enormous; prodigious; inordinate.”  The author, François Rabelais (1494-1553), has also given rise to an English word, Rabelaisian, used to describe wildly obscene humor (take, for instance, Gargantua’s discussion of how best to wipe one’s arse, the final decision being the neck of a live goose, leading me to wonder if a few centuries will turn South Park into fine literature.)  If this is intriguing to you, BookFinder lists a range of copies of Gargantua, from a $0.50 Penguin mass market paperback to a charming 1708 octavo edition, containing the translation above, in calfskin with gilt lettering for £1100 (about $1800.)  If you beat me to it you can have a $50 limited edition on hand-made paper; I’m checking to see if it contains Urquhart’s translation.

The PowellsBooks newsletter has a bizarre and addictive feature called, and I’m quoting this literally, “Fup. Store Cat.”  Yes, the periods included.  As far as I can gather, Fup is the name of their store cat; that’s a picture to the right.  “Fup. Store Cat.” is like a train wreck: you can’t quite pull your eyes away, even if you want to.  You see, every newsletter presents a new “chapter” (just a couple hundred words) about Fup’s adventures.  In each chapter Fup, joined by compatriots Bear, Zooey, and Wiggums, adventure their way through unwieldy prose:

Let’s follow a path in the sun,” Bear purrs.

“There are no paths in the sun,” Wiggums reminds him.  “You’re sitting in the last patch of sun we’re liable to find for three days.”

Up and up the fir trees go, so far beyond the leafy pockets nearer to the ground that there’s no telling where they stop. Their tops end somewhere in the sky, is about all you can safely say.

“We could climb until we’re above the tree line,” Fup suggests, “but that would be an odd thing to do, seeing as it’s trees we’re looking for.”

“Trees you’re looking for?” someone says.

Fup looks at Bear.  Then Fup and Bear both look at Wiggums.  An echo would be the most natural explanation, except that they hadn’t noticed an echo before.

Fup repeats herself, but a little louder this time: “Trees we’re looking for.”

“That’s what I thought you said.”

Down by the creek, Zooey begins to growl.

They search the woods around them, but it’s like trying to find fish in a deep lake, Fup realizes, staring into the tangle of leaves and branches.  She notices for the first time how loud the bird chatter has become — or had she not been listening before?  She can’t see a single bird for all the leaves and branches, but suddenly birds are all she can hear.

Each time the newsletter arrives, I’m presented with my WTF moment for the day.

The Tuesday, 29 April 2003 edition of Terry Gross’s peerless Fresh Air is very much worth listening to.  Diane Ravitch discusses her new book Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (the next book I plan to read), and linguist Geoff Nunberg discusses, in a captivating under-six-minutes essay, the stylistic differences between left-wing and right-wing authors (you’ll also learn the word polysyndeton, unless you are far too educated and know it already.)

Fictionwise eBooks, as discussed on my Best of the Web page, is a vast bookstore of electronic texts.  Creation by Jeffrey Ford is a great story, a Hugo nominee, and free for a limited time.  Demons and Dragons by Jim Razzi is $0.42 and really, really bad.

Spider Robinson’s Hugo-winning science fiction story “Melancholy Elephants” can (rather ironically) be found online.  It’s quite good.

I’ve yet to decide whether I really like Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel.  However, I have to admit there are few chapter titles in the world I like more than “Zebras, Unhappy Marriages, and the Anna Karenina Principle”.

I stumbled upon a collection of September 11 cartoons, some of which are quite touching.  One is a very simple picture of Uncle Sam on a couch, his top hat beside him, bent over and weeping into his hands.  Another simple cartoon shows a fireman in a soiled fire jacket with a Superman ‘S’ sewn on the back.  One cartoon has two kids trading cards; one says, “I’ll trade you two Michael Jordans and a Barry Bonds for one New York Fireman.”

A stirring cartoon shows the American eagle sitting on a stool with a determined look, holding a file, and sharpening his talons.  Another shows the moon with Earth in the distance; you see the plume of smoke coming out of New York, and the U.S. flag on the moon at half mast.  The final one I’ll mention shows a tree and a corner of a driveway.  The text reads:

There’s a small corner of my driveway at home that I often find myself staring at.

It’s where this guy I knew, Pat Danahy, sat in his car for well over an hour with the engine running.  He refused to get out because it was cold that morning, and his little girl was asleep in her car-seat and he couldn’t bear to wake her.

The last anybody saw of him, he was helping his co-workers evacuate their offices at Fiduciary Trust near the top of the World Trade Center.

Like I said, I stare at that spot a lot.

They are worth checking out.

The site Women in Refrigerators discusses the phenomenon of the superheroine tortured/raped/murdered/depowered in comic books.  A fascinating read, even if (like me) you are not really a reader of comics.

Thanks for MeFi for the link.

I have written a response to a newspaper article but decided that it

1. probably was not worth my effort to write it, and
2. almost certainly is not worth anyone’s effort to read it.

So I will just say, “good grief, some people are morons (and I don’t even read them.)”

Here is a list of the ten most frequent four-word phrases in the King James Bible:

This is the sort of thing that would have taken years of scholarship even forty years ago, and yet I created this in less than one minute on a notebook PC (Clarification added 06 February 2002: It took less than a minute to run.  It took somewhat longer to write the script.  But not years longer.)  I used a home-baked Perl script to do this.  Perl can stand for “Practical Extraction and Report Language”; see why?

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is dedicated to the memory of the author who gave us the passage “It was a dark and stormy night.”  The contest, held annually, solicits contributions of bad opening sentences to hypothetical novels.  Here are three of my favorites from the 2001 contest.

The graphic crime-scene photo that stared up at Homicide Inspector Chuck Venturi from the center of his desk was not a pretty picture, though it could have been, Chuck mused, had it only been shot in soft focus with a shutter speed of 1/125 second at f 5.6 or so.

         - Rephah Berg

Virgule gazed across the vast, cold, steel expanse past his inquisitor to
witness the full consequence of his previous decision - feral, withered
children, in tattered, filthy garments, toiled mindlessly at his command in
a single chamber which reeked of oil and burning animal flesh - his time
had come to deliver the final instruction; “Yes! I would like fries with that.”

         - Ed Reffle

Terry the Tarantula and Wendy the Wasp were frolicking and cavorting
together in the Flowery Meadow, (as they were the best of friends in all
the Enchanted Forest of Miggly-Wompsly) when, all of a sudden, and with no
warning whatsoever, Wendy accidentally stabbed Terry with her stinger,
making her very sad for she knew that soon her poison would paralyze her
friend and after a while her eggs would hatch inside him, and then her
happy wriggling larva would slowly eat him alive, but Terry tried to smile
and would have told her not to be sad as this was how the Circle of Life
was continued, but he was in too much pain and, as I mentioned before,
paralyzed.

         - Delano Lopez

As it is Burns Night, I have been passing some quiet time reading my Burns’s Complete Poetical Works, a nice Riverside Press volume from 1897 (Some day the world will realize that late-nineteenth century Riverside Press editions are excellent and far underpriced, and the prices will be increased accordingly.  Right now they are fantastic deals; keep your eyes open for them.)

I want to share three passages.  The first consists of stanzas VII and VIII from Man Was Made To Mourn, in which the narrator of the poem is listening to the story of an octogenarian walking along the bank of a river:

"Many and sharp the num'rous ills
  Inwoven with our frame !
More pointed still we make ourselves
  Regret, remorse, and shame!
And Man, whose heav'n-erected face
  The smiles of love adorn,--
Man's inhumanity to man
  Makes countless thousands mourn !

"See yonder poor, o'erlabour'd wight,
  So abject, mean, and vile,
Who begs a brother of the earth
  To give him leave to toil;
And see his lordly fellow-worm
  The poor petition spurn,
Unmindful, tho' a weeping wife
  And helpless offspring mourn.

Burns, a womaniser and drunkard, was also a very tender-hearted soul who was deeply sympathetic with animals and his fellow man.  I excerpt stanzas II and III from To A Mouse, subtitled on turning her up in her nest with the plough, November, 1785 (the poem The Wounded Hare explores a similar theme.)  I place my translation next to stanza III:

I'm truly sorry man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion
                 Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion
                 An' fellow mortal !

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;          I doubt not, sometimes you may thieve;
What then ? poor beastie, thou maun live          What then?  Poor beastie, you must live
A daimen icker in a thrave                        An occasional ear of corn from amongst two dozen
                 'S a sma' request;                                Is a small request;
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,                  I'll get a blessing with the remainder,
                 An' never miss't !                                And never miss it!

For the final selection I’ll lighten the tone with a bit of hilarious derision.  Burns allegedly inscribed this verse in a beautifully bound but badly worm-eaten volume of Shakespeare in a nobleman’s library.  The Book-Worms:

Through and through th' ispired leaves,
  Ye maggots, make your windings;
But O, respect his lordship's taste,
  And spare the golden bindings !