Blogs worth reading: Envisioning Future

Posted on April 10, 2012 by Richard Bowker

One of the unexpected advantages of starting a blog is that interesting people stop by. How they find me, I have no idea. I thought I’d point them out once in a while.

Here is a blog written by a young woman in Pakistan. This is from a post on “The Bride-Hunt”:

Attention all ladies! The matrimonial aunties are on their way! If you’re from the subcontinent you would be well aware of those “aunties” who are on a mission to find their “Ideal daughter-in-law”. Let’s take a look at the scene here. The hunting starts with tea parties and neighbourhood weddings when all the gorgeous girls are dressed-up in desi clothes and aunties with their hawk eyesight stalk their potential daughter-in-laws. It is then followed by a tea party hosted by the girl’s parents and it ends with a bunch of broken hearts (mostly of girls) and one satisfied “saasu-maa”!

There is a lot of confusion among the bride-to-be, the groom-to-be and the future mother-in-law. The groom thinks that the girl he is marrying is either Angelina Jolie or Katerina Kaif. The girls think that the guy they are marrying is either Edward Cullen or Fawad Khan (ya, the Humsafar guy). The mother-in-law thinks that the girl has some sort of special super powers to be great in… well, everything!
Reality: Disaster.

Which got me to look up Fawad Khan (a Pakistani actor)

And Katerina Kaif (a British Indian actress):

It’s a big world!

Replica cover ideas?

Posted on April 9, 2012 by Richard Bowker

The cover for Senator is still in process, but the ebook should be available in a few short weeks. Next up is Replica. Which is a really good novel! Expect some posts about robots and artificial intelligence!

Anyway, we need to start pondering cover art yet again. Replica, as the link will tell you, is about a plot to create an android replica of the president of the United States. The novel contains many surprising twists and turns, although I can’t remember any of them off the top of my head.

Here is the American cover:

And here, just for fun, is the cover of the German edition, evidently created by someone who has spent way too much time watching German silent movies:

That could be the worst cover ever created.

Any opinions or suggestions?

Easter, 1916

Posted on April 8, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Yeats:

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

That woman’s days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone’s in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse –
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

The Easter Rising began in Dublin on Easter Monday, April 24, 1916. Note that the poem has four stanzas, alternating 16 and 24 lines.

Here’s an interactive tour of a Yeats exhibit at the National Library of Ireland, including a manuscript of “Easter, 1916”.

Here is Yeats:

And here is Patrick Pearse, one of those whom “excess of love bewildered” till he died. He was executed by firing squad on May 3, 1916.

Wikipedia says: “Sir John Maxwell, the General Officer commanding the British forces in Ireland, sent a telegram to H.H. Asquith, then Prime Minister, advising him not to return the bodies of Pádraig and Willie Pearse to their family, saying: ‘Irish sentimentality will turn these graves into martyrs’ shrines to which annual processions will be made which would cause constant irritation in this country.'”

House Plots

Posted on April 7, 2012 by Richard Bowker

House, M.D. is going off the air after eight seasons.

It’s one of the few shows I watch consistently. Like most network shows, it has a very formulaic structure:

Someone has some interesting medical event happen to him before the opening credits.
House’s team makes their initial diagnoses, which are invariably wrong.
Some kind of workplace or personal subplot starts taking place in conjunction with the main save-the-patient plot. We also delve into the patient’s life–and generally we discover that the patient is lying about something, and his personal life is much more complicated than we expected.
An exciting medical event happens about mid-way through the show–a seizure, blood leaking out of the eyeballs, etc. Can this patient be saved?
The patient keeps getting worse. Finally, House makes some connection between the workplace subplot and the patient’s disease and comes up with the correct diagnosis in the nick of time.

Here’s what I find interesting: The plot is structured as a standard mystery story, but it’s missing a key element of standard mysteries–namely, the viewer has no way of guessing the outcome, because we’re not doctors. Furthermore, we couldn’t care less whether the patient actually has typhus or lupus or a brain tumor or some rare genetic disease that only affects people who have been to Ethiopia in the past decade. We’re just along for the ride. It’s a tribute to the acting and the writing that House works as well as it does.

Two more points about House:

House is portrayed as a jerk, and part of his jerkness is that he’s a thoroughgoing atheist. But throughout the entire series his skepticism always turns out to be justified: there are no miracles; there are no sentimental endings where someone’s prayers are answered.
Anyone who can portray both House and Bertie Wooster has got to be some kind of great actor. Let’s hope Hugh Laurie gets more great roles. After the money he made on House, he can afford to be choosy.

Prejudice and Conservatism

Posted on April 7, 2012 by Richard Bowker

John Derbyshire, a conservative writer, has kicked up a fuss with an article that apparently is his version of “the talk” that Black parents have with their kids. I couldn’t get to the original, which may have been taken down at this point. These quotes are from a piece about the article in the New York Daily News:

Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally.

Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.

If planning a trip to a beach or amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date (neglect of that one got me the closest I have ever gotten to death by gunshot).

Do not attend events likely to draw a lot of blacks.

If you are at some public event at which the number of blacks suddenly swells, leave as quickly as possible.

Do not settle in a district or municipality run by black politicians.

Before voting for a black politician, scrutinize his/her character

Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.

If accosted by a strange black in the street, smile and say something polite but keep moving.

Possibly there is some kind of conservative attempt at humor going on here; without seeing the original it’s hard to judge (and I generally find it difficult to figure out when conservatives are trying to be funny).

The Daily News writer says of Derbyshire: “An editor at the supposedly esteemed National Review, he is a perfect poster boy for what conservatism has degenerated into. This is not the courtly philosophy of Edmund Burke, but the delusional ideology of Glenn Beck.” But, ya know, I have Mr. Burke right here behind this sign, and this is his paean to prejudice:

You see, Sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess that we are generally men of untaught feelings, that, instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of men and ages…. Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engaged the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.

One of the successes of modern liberalism has been to give a fully negative connotation to the word “prejudice,” such that conservatives feel compelled to deny that they are in any sense prejudiced about anything (in the same way that liberal politicians feel compelled to deny that they have anything but the highest regard for “free enterprise”). But it seems to me you can make the case that prejudice is an essential feature of conservatism–prejudice represents the hard-won wisdom of the past, which we discard at our peril. Derbyshire makes explicit how this philosophy works in practice.

Here, by the way, is an article from today’s Boston Globe about the black version of “the talk.”

Bach

Posted on April 5, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Opening chorus of the Saint Matthew Passion:

Music doesn’t get any better than that.

New Look

Posted on April 5, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Somewhat. Let me know what you think.

Jibe talkin’ with honing pigeons

Posted on April 4, 2012 by Richard Bowker

I may not be the world’s best grammarian, but some things just bother me. Here are two.

“This doesn’t jive with the facts.” Should be jibe, right? Jibe is pretty much only used in this idiom, and I suppose people don’t really know the word, mishear it, and end up thinking it’s jive. People also tend to misspell gibe (meaning a taunt) as jibe.

“He honed in on the central problem.” Should be homed instead of honed, right? Like homing pigeons. In this case, honed makes a bit of sense, since to hone something is to sharpen it, and maybe you could think of the idiom as one of sharpening something to a point, rather than aiming for a target.

Anyway, language is always changing. And the nice folks at Google have given us a way of tracking these changes via the Ngram Viewer, which is simply the most awesome time-waster ever. Here we see the history of “doesn’t jibe with” vs. “doesn’t jive with” in American books from 1800 to 2000 (click the link to see a bigger version):

The data shows that “doesn’t jibe with” starts taking off around 1900, and “doesn’t jive with” doesn’t show up until the 1970s. My guess is that the slope of “doesn’t jive with” has gone up considerably since 2000, when the Google data ends.

Here we see what’s going on with “home in on” vs. “hone in on”, again in a couple of centuries’ worth of American books:

In this case, nothing much was happening with “home in on” until the late 50s, and “hone in on” followed about 20 years later. Both have exploded in popularity since then.

You can also change the corpus. If we look at British English instead of American English, we see that both phrases started up about 20 years after the American version, and “home in on” is still much more popular:

I wonder why. Was Britain picking up the American idiom?

Anyway, I could keep doing this all night! But instead, let’s listen to the Bee Gees. Can anyone tell me what the time signature is here? It’s a pretty complicated rhythm for a pop song.

Bad Reviews

Posted on April 3, 2012 by Richard Bowker

A Universe from Nothing got a scathing review in the New York Times. Jerry Coyne finds the courage to pile on, although he disagrees with the reviewer’s remarks about religion (rightly, I think — I really couldn’t make much sense of those remarks). Krauss responds in the comments. Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong (no supporter of Krauss, apparently) points out that the reviewer is the recipient of a huge grant from the Templeton Foundation, widely despised in some circles for throwing vast amounts of money at people for trying to reconcile religion and science. Does the reviewer have a hidden agenda? How could we possibly know?

This got me thinking about reviews. The older I get, the less attention I pay to reviewers I’m not familiar with; life is too short to care about the opinions of strangers. I trust Jerry Coyne, because I’ve been reading his blog for a while (and I read his book and enjoyed it a lot), but I’ve never heard of the Times reviewer. Doesn’t mean he’s wrong, of course, and I have no way of judging arguments over cosmology or quantum mechanics.

I have sympathy for writers (like Krauss) who have clearly put a lot of effort into their work, only to have it savaged. Writing is about as solitary an occupation as you can imagine, but sooner or later most of us try to inflict the results upon the world. And then we face rejection and criticism and (most depressing of all, perhaps) indifference. It ain’t easy!

Oddly, my books have never received any really bad reviews–at least, not any I remember. It’s entirely possible I blotted out the memory. Lots of rejection, on the other hand…