Disasters of this sort happen much more rarely in books of the second category. Or rather, the things that do go wrong are sent from outside to try the heroic château-owners: items such as the French Revolution, the German occupation, hail, drought, floods, phylloxera, mildew and oidium. Disasters are there to be triumphed over; owners (or, at any rate, recent owners) are always doing their best, even when the world is less than the best possible. Greed, corruption, exploitation of employees and sharp practice turn up as rarely in the literary genre that is the château profile as does premarital bonking in Barbara Cartland. (And just out of interest, were there no collaborators in the vineyards during the last war? I’ve yet to read of any.) Of course, these books tend to be commissioned when the château is rich and its label famous; even so, it would be a nice change to read some day of an estate where the vineyards were wrecked, the workforce pissed, the proprietors fraudulent and the wine disgusting. In the meantime we have Asa Briggs: ‘I would not have written this book, however, had I not been invited to do so by the Duc and Duchesse de Mouchy, and they, along with other members of the Dillon family (who now own the vineyard) on both sides of the Atlantic, have given me great encouragement – and offered me memorable hospitality – throughout the inevitably protracted period of my research.’ Well, yes. Briggs does his little nods and bows, and writes with the bonhomie of a trusted courtier. He imparts all the key information that official sources will disclose about Haut-Brion; he writes effectively about the wider history of the Bordeaux wine trade (which perhaps should have been his subject in the first place), and fascinatingly about the city under the Revolution, when the owner of Haut-Brion was sent to the guillotine. But it is not for nothing that the name Asa Briggs, as a New Statesman competition entrant pointed out, is an anagram of Sir Gasbag. He just can’t help the pompous and the self-referential: ‘The year 1938, when I went up to university, was only an ‘average year’, rather like 1939, the first year I visited Bordeaux before war reached it … I have never tasted the 1955, the year of my marriage’. He is also a generous quoter of the gasbaggery of others. Take this insight from that ‘great citizen and long-time Mayor of Bordeaux’, Jacques Chaban-Delmas: ‘The spirit of a city takes bodily shape, so to say, across time and across the history that defines, affims and perpetuates both its identity and its raison d’être.’ Not much will have gone missing in the translation.
It is, no doubt, the fault of the genre, but Haut-Brion avoids controversy like a corked bottle. Briggs praises Edmund Penning-Rowsell’s ‘thoughtful and wide-ranging’ The Wines of Bordeaux, but does not quote its author’s judgement that ‘vinously the château has had its ups and downs in this century’. Briggs is ‘deeply impressed’ by Robert Parker and his ‘outstanding personality’, but does not refer to Parker’s assertion that the château produced ‘simplistic’ claret in the years 1966-74: ‘Whether this was intentional,’ Parker writes in Bordeaux, ‘or just a period in which Haut-Brion was in a bit of a slump remains a mystery. The staff at Haut-Brion is quick-tempered and sensitive about such a charge.’ Briggs also manages to blandify the potentially interesting anecdote. There is a story about Malcolm Forbes (‘who died while I was carrying out research for this book’), who at one extreme famously bought a bottle of Jefferson claret for $156,000, and at the other several hundred bottles of 1965 Haut-Brion for $5 a throw. ‘Forbes described himself as an appreciator of wine rather than as a collector, and he was a shrewd appreciator at that, a man who liked a bargain,’ Briggs notes. He records Forbes’s opinion that the 1965 got ‘better and better’ each time he drank it, the owner of Haut-Brion’s view that Forbes had been ‘quite right’ to have bought the wine, and ends by nervelessly quoting the Haut-Brion brochure to the effect that the wine is ‘astonishing for the vintage’. Sir Gasbag concludes: ‘Six thousand cases of Haut-Brion were produced in 1965. The comparative figures for 1964 and 1966 were 17,500 and 19,500. Forbes obviously knew what rarity meant.’ Among the fawning and the back-slapping lies a moderately interesting story about the penny-pinching of the super-rich. Of course, the reason the 1965 is ‘rarer’ than those on either side of it was because of climactic conditions which made it one of the crappiest of all postwar vintages, in which Haut-Brion produced a marginally less crappy wine than some of the other first growths. And would any vineyard-owner ever willingly dump on his own wine in overt contradiction of a millionaire client? I once attended a vertical tasting of a second-growth claret in the presence of the owner and her business manager. Among several excellent vintages there was an obvious super-dud of a 1958, which should long since have been emptied straight into the vinegar mother. When the owner arrived for the tasting she asked her manager in some puzzlement why they were showing the 1958. Because we have several hundred cases of it left,’ he replied. Whereupon, a few minutes later, she rose to her feet and gave measured praise to the lesser-known but arguably undervalued 1958.
Julian Barnes, “Did You Get Black Truffles on the Nose?”, Literary Review, 1994-10.
March 8, 2019
QotD: Wine books as hagiography
March 1, 2019
Theodore Dalrymple on Michel Houellebecq: “Houellebecq runs an abattoir for sacred cows”
At the New English Review:
Not reading many contemporary French novels, I am not entitled to say that Michel Houellebecq is the most interesting French novelist writing today, but he is certainly very brilliant, if in a somewhat limited way. His beam is narrow but very penetrating, like that of a laser, and his theme an important, indeed a vital one: namely the vacuity of modern life in the West, its lack of transcendence, lived as it is increasingly without religious or political belief, without a worthwhile creative culture, often without deep personal attachments, and without even a struggle for survival. Into what Salman Rushdie (a much lesser writer than Houellebecq) called “a God-shaped hole” has rushed the search for sensual pleasure which, however, no more than distracts for a short while.
Something more is needed, but Western man — at least Western man at a certain level of education, intelligence and material ease — has not found it. Houellebecq’s underlying nihilism implies that it is not there to be found. The result of this lack of transcendent purpose is self-destruction not merely on a personal, but on a population, scale. Technical sophistication has been accompanied, or so it often seems, by mass incompetence in the art of living. Houellebecq is the prophet, the chronicler, of this incompetence.Even the ironic title of his latest novel, Sérotonine, is testimony to the brilliance of his diagnostic powers and his capacity to capture in a single word the civilizational malaise which is his unique subject. Serotonin, as by now every self-obsessed member of the middle classes must know, is a chemical in the brain that acts as a neurotransmitter to which is ascribed powers formerly ascribed to the Holy Ghost. All forms of undesired conduct or feeling are caused by a deficit or surplus or malalignment of this chemical, so that in essence all human problems become ones of neurochemistry.
On this view, unhappiness is a technical problem for the doctor to solve rather than a cause for reflection and perhaps even for adjustment to the way one lives. I don’t know whether in France the word malheureux has been almost completely replaced by the word déprimée, but in English unhappy has almost been replaced by depressed. In my last years of medical practice, I must have encountered hundreds, perhaps thousands, of depressed people, or those who called themselves such, but the only unhappy person I met was a prisoner who wanted to be moved to another prison, no doubt for reasons of safety.
Houellebecq’s one-word title captures this phenomenon (a semantic shift as a handmaiden to medicalisation) with a concision rarely equalled. And indeed, he has remarkably sensitive antennae to the zeitgeist in general, though it must be admitted that he is most sensitive to those aspects of it that are absurd, unpleasant, or dispiriting rather than to any that are positive.
February 27, 2019
QotD: When progressives took over SF publishing
When I sold my first novel in the late 90s. Most Americans might not be that sensitive to the “climate” but I was. I had after all grown up in a socialist (at best, during the better times) country where to graduate you had to present the proper progressive front. I knew the signs and the hints and social positioning of “further left than thou.” For instance, my first SF cons, as an author, in the green room, I became aware that “a conservative” was a suitable, laughter inducing punchline for any joke; that all of them believed the Reagan years had set us on course to total dystopia; that the US was less enlightened/capable/free than anywhere else; that your average Republican or even non-Democrat voter was the equivalent of the Taliban.
As for Libertarians, I will to my dying day cherish the dinner I had with my then editor to whom I was describing a funny incident at MileHi where for reasons known only to Bob, I found myself in an argument with someone who wanted to ban the internal combustion engine. My editor perked up and (I swear I’m not making this up) said “Oh, a Libertarian.” At which point my husband squeezed my thigh hard enough to stop me answering. But yeah. That was a not uncommon idea of a libertarian. If it was completely insane and involved banning something, then it was a libertarian.
I once overheard the same editor talking to a colleague and saying that if she got submissions across her desk and they were – dropped and horrified voice – somewhat conservative she recommended they try Baen.
Which the other editor (from a different house) agreed with, because after all, they weren’t in the business of publishing conservative works.
This immediately put me on notice that in the field if you were a conservative (I presume libertarians were worse, or at least they seemed to induce more mouth foaming. And though I was solidly libertarian and – at the time – might have qualified as a Libertarian, I suspect if faced with my real positions they would have classed me as conservative, because my positions were self-obviously not left and that’s all it took.) there was only one house that would take you, and if what you wrote/wanted to write wasn’t accepted by then, then you were out of luck.
After that I lived in a state of fear
I imagine it was similar to living in one of the more unsavory periods of the Soviet Union. You saw these purges happen. Whisper-purges. You got the word that someone was “not quite the thing” or that they associated with so and so who associated with so and so who was a – dropped voice – conservative. Suddenly that person’s books weren’t being bought and somehow people would clear a circle around them, because, well, you know, if you’re seen with a – dropped voice – conservative they might think you’re one too. And then it’s off to Never-Never with you.
I found a few other conservatives/libertarians (frankly, mostly libertarians) in the field, all living in the same state of gut clenching fear.
We did such a dance to test both the reliability and discretion of the other before revealing ourselves that we might as well have developed a hanky code. [Blue for true blue Conservative, white for pure Libertarian, red for the blood of our heroes, brown for OWL (older, wiser libertarian), purple for squishy conservative, powder blue for Brad Torgersen. (The powder blue care bear, with the bleeding heart… and the flame thrower.)]
Conventions were nerve wracking because I watched myself ALL the TIME. And you never knew how much you had to watch yourself. Suddenly, out of the blue, at a World Fantasy the speaker, a well known SF/F writer went on about Dean Howard, our next president. The room erupted in applause, some people stood to clap, and I sat there, frozen, unable to actually fake it to that point but too shocked to even put a complaisant expression on my face.
Sarah Hoyt, “Say Goodbye To The State Of Fear”, According to Hoyt, 2017-03-11.
February 24, 2019
QotD: Wine books
There are three categories of wine book. The first are guides, like those of Robert Parker, which seek to offer practical help in the purchase and consumption of wines – though their effects are often contrary, adding feverishness to the acquisition (‘I’ve landed a 95-pointer!’) and self-consciousness to the drinking (‘Did you get black truffles on the nose?’). The second category consists of historical surveys and château profiles, the latter often little more than disguised puffery, since the author will have been given privileged access to the archives, and will have been vetted, if not actually chosen, by the château, will have been wined and dined until he – or, occasionally, she – is practically wearing the château’s label as a blazer badge. Famous wine houses are nowadays international businesses, and no less good at promoting themselves than Nike and Benetton. Thirdly, there are books of almost no practical value but which appeal to the nostalgic, fetishistic or cork-sniffing side of oenophilia: celebrations, anthologies, reminiscences of the wine country and its colourful characters, evocations of people and vintages often long since dead. The wine buff will often buy such useless treasures second-hand and will employ them to induce harmless reverie, rather like leafing through an old Sears Roebuck catalogue.
Julian Barnes, “Did You Get Black Truffles on the Nose?”, Literary Review, 1994-10.
February 21, 2019
Simplified, consistent English
You may have encountered this short article usually attributed to Mark Twain (or alternatively to M.J. Shields in a letter to The Economist):
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter “c” would be dropped to be replased either by “k” or “s”, and likewise “x” would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which “c” would be retained would be the “ch” formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform “w” spelling, so that “which” and “one” would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish “y” replasing it with “i” and Iear 4 might fiks the “g/j” anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez “c”, “y” and “x” — bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez — tu riplais “ch”, “sh”, and “th” rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
Along the same lines, here’s a new take on the idea of making the English language phonetically consistent:
H/T to Rob Beschizza for the link.
Dune – Plots and Plans – Extra Sci Fi – #2
Extra Credits
Published on 19 Feb 2019On the surface, Dune appears to be a peak demonstration of “the competent man” trope so popular in Golden Age science fiction, but Herbert deconstructs this by carefully demonstrating how all of the characters make bad assumptions on faulty premises…
February 4, 2019
Jane Austen – Sarcasm and Subversion – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 2 Feb 2019Jane Austen wrote in the name of making critical social commentary of the privileges she and others held while the rest of Europe was in political turmoil. Her novels like Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma made waves in their time for how they criticized
VictorianRegency-era society.
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From the comments:
Extra Credits
2 days ago
Jane Austen saw the hypocrisy of an entire class of the most powerful empire on Earth taking tea and planning balls while the world burned. And from a young age she took up arms against that hypocrisy with the only weapon she had: her pen.(Comment from Belinda) I don’t know if anyone else has had this experience with Jane Austen’s works, but in the educational culture I grew up in, the historical context of Austen’s writing was almost never emphasized. Pride & Prejudice in particular is frequently reduced to being the original formula for romantic comedies (to say nothing of its own spin-off movies of the same name). I remember in high school class it seemed really weird to me that we would be talking about this 19th century novel as a progressive feminist work because it’s already a given in the 21st century world that marrying for love is extremely commonplace. I’m really proud of our writers Jac and Rob, and our artist Ali, for bringing to life the “extra History” of Jane Austen that gets glossed over by popular culture. <3
January 30, 2019
The past is a foreign country, part umpteen-and-one
At Rotten Chestnuts, Severian tries to gin up some sympathy for Millennial snowflakes, who feel cheated by fate (and their parents’ generation, but mostly their parents’ generation):
One of the toughest parts of looking at The Past (note capital letters) is grasping the pace of change. Oversimplifying (but not too much), you’d need to be a PhD-level specialist to determine if a given cultural production dated from the 11th century, or the 14th. The worldview of most people in most places didn’t change much from 1000 to 1300. Even in modern times, unless you really know what you’re looking for, a writer from 1830 sounds very much like a writer from 1890.*
Until you get to the 20th century. Then it’s obvious.
This isn’t “presentism” — the supposed cardinal sin of historical study, in which we project our values onto the past.** It really is obvious, and you can see it for yourself. Take Ford Madox Ford. A hot “Modernist” in his day — he was good friends with Ezra Pound, and promoted all the spastic incomprehensibles of the 1920s — he was nevertheless a man of his time… and his time was the High Victorian Era (born 1873). Though he served in the Great War, he was a full generation older than his men, and it shows. Compare his work to Robert Graves’s. Though both were the most Advanced of Advanced Thinkers — polygamy, Socialism, all that — Graves’s work is recognizably “modern,” while Ford’s reads like the writing of a man who really should’ve spent his life East of Suez, bringing the Bible and the Flag to the wogs. The world described in such loving detail in a work like Parade’s End — though of course Ford thought he was viciously criticizing it — might as well be Mars.
We’re in the same boat when it comes to those special, special Snowflakes, the Millennials. A Great War-level change really did hit them, right in their most vulnerable years. While we — Gen X and older — lived through the dawn of the Internet, we don’t live in the Internet Age (TM). Not like they do, anyway.
He does a bit of a Fisking (that’s an olde-tyme expression from when we used to knap our own flint, kiddies) of an article by a Millennial writer trying to make the case that the plight of the Millennials is comparable to that of the Lost Generation. But some actual sympathy is eventually located and delivered:
I titled this piece “Sympathy for Snowflakes,” and finally we’ve arrived. The days of life on the cul-de-sac with the white picket fence are indeed gone… but they’ve been gone for thirty years or more. They were in terminal decline since before Rush started singing about suburbs — that was 1982, if you’re keeping score at home — and what awful conformist hells they are. Ever heard the phrase “sour grapes?” I’m not going to say we invented that — after all, anything worth saying was already said by Dead White Males hundreds of years ago — but that’s why Gen X pop culture is full of rants against “conformism.” Slackers, Mallrats, all of it — sour grapes, buddy. If you in fact grew up on a cul-de-sac behind a white picket fence, your parents, who must’ve been early Gen Xers, were among the lucky few.
The difference between your generation and mine, Mr. Lafayette, isn’t what we wanted once we matured enough to start actually knowing what we wanted. It’s that my generation received rigorous-enough educations to figure out that the house on the cul-de-sac with the white picket fence is an aberration, just a flicker of static. Only one tiny group of people — middle class Americans, born roughly 1945-1965 — ever got to experience it. Young folks in the 1220s probably lived much as their parents did back in the 1180s, but modern life doesn’t work that way. These days, everyone makes do with what he has, gets on as best he can. Your generation, Mr. Lafayette, was taught to regard The Past as one long night of Oppression, and because of that, you never learned to take any lessons from it.
That’s why I’m sympathetic, even as I’m mocking you (but gently, lad, gently). That’s the real parallel between yourselves and the Lost Generation — it was done to you. You had no choice, and unlike the Lost Generation, you can’t even pin the blame anywhere. It just….kinda… happened. No wonder you feel adrift and powerless. No wonder “stand up straight” and “clean your room” seem like adages of life-altering wisdom.
So take an old guy’s advice, and READ. Read just about anything, so long as it’s published before 1950. Don’t think, don’t analyze, don’t snark, just read it. The change will come.
January 18, 2019
Xenophon’s Anabasis, Memorabilia, and Symposium
I’ve read an English translation of Xenophon’s Anabasis, but I only know a little bit about the Memorabilia, so Eve Browning‘s essay at Aeon was quite interesting:
The Anabasis is the first military memoir in the history of Western literature, and it recounts Xenophon’s experiences in the Persian campaign of Cyrus against his brother King Artaxerxes, and the long march ‘up country’. Since Xenophon waited several decades to commit these memories to writing, some have argued that they cannot be accurate. But as anyone who has listened to combat veterans will know, there’s a lot about the remembrance of past tours of duty that time cannot soften nor the years wear away.
Xenophon also wrote histories, portraits of leaders, practical treatises on horse training, hunting and running a household, among other things. An enduring theme that runs through much of his writing, and which has received scholarly attention in recent years, is that of leadership. What makes a good leader? What kind of leader can induce humans to endure hardships and expend effort toward a common goal? What exemplary traits mark out a leader and allow him or her to execute the requisite tasks with skill, induce a harmonious fellowship among those for whom he is responsible, maintain loyalty and mission clarity among the ‘troops’, whomever they might be? It is not difficult to see the formative roots of these questions, and of Xenophon’s answers to them, in that literally death-defying, embattled 2,000-mile march up-country to the sea.
Xenophon also wrote down his remembrances of a local philosopher named Socrates. Those who know Socrates mainly through the writings of Plato – Xenophon’s near-exact contemporary – will find Xenophon’s Socrates something of a surprise. Plato’s Socrates claims to know nothing, and flamboyantly refutes the knowledge claims of others. In the pages of Xenophon’s Memorabilia, however, Socrates actually answers philosophical questions, dispenses practical life advice, provides arguments proving the existence of benevolent gods, converses as if peer-to-peer with a courtesan, and even proposes a domestic economy scheme whereby indigent female relatives can become productive through the establishment of a textile business at home.
Socrates’ conversation, according to Xenophon, ‘was ever of human things’. This engaged, intensely practical, human Socrates can be refreshing to encounter. Anyone who has felt discomfort at how the opponents of Plato’s Socrates suffer relentless public refutations and reductions to absurdity can take some comfort in Xenophon’s Socrates who ‘tries to cure the perplexities of his friends’.
For instance, what could be more enchanting than a Socrates who solo-dances for joy and exercise, so unlike the Socrates we know from Plato? In Xenophon’s Symposium, Socrates asks the Phoenician dance-master to show him some dance moves. Everyone laughs: what will you do with dance moves, Socrates? He replies: ‘I’ll dance, by God!’ A friend of Socrates then tells the group that he had stopped by his house early in the morning, and found him dancing alone. When questioned about it, Socrates happily confesses to solo-dancing often. It’s great exercise, it moves the body in symmetry, it can be done indoors or outdoors with no equipment, and it freshens the appetite.
Another surprising side of Xenophon’s Socrates is shown through his encounter with a person who not only doesn’t honour the gods, but makes fun of people who do. To this irreligious person, Socrates presents a careful and persuasive line of reasoning about the designed usefulness of all elements of creation. For humans and many other animals, there are ‘eyes so that they can see what can be seen, and ears so that they can hear what can be heard’, eyelids, eyelashes, molars and incisors, erotic desire to aid procreation; all these are ‘the contrivance of some wise craftsman who loves animals’. And what about the cosmos as a whole? ‘Are you, then, of the opinion that … those surpassingly large and infinitely numerous things are in such an orderly condition through some senselessness?’ Human beings even have the spiritual capacity to perceive the existence of gods, ‘who put in order the greatest and noblest things’, and ‘they worry about you!’
H/T to Never Yet Melted for the link.
December 12, 2018
QotD: G.K. Chesterton’s political Catholicism
Ten or twenty years ago, the form of nationalism most closely corresponding to Communism today was political Catholicism. Its most outstanding exponent — though he was perhaps an extreme case rather than a typical one — was G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton was a writer of considerable talent who whose to suppress both his sensibilities and his intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman Catholic propaganda. During the last twenty years or so of his life, his entire output was in reality an endless repetition of the same thing, under its laboured cleverness as simple and boring as ‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians.’ Every book that he wrote, every scrap of dialogue, had to demonstrate beyond the possibility of mistake the superiority of the Catholic over the Protestant or the pagan. But Chesterton was not content to think of this superiority as merely intellectual or spiritual: it had to be translated into terms of national prestige and military power, which entailed an ignorant idealisation of the Latin countries, especially France. Chesterton had not lived long in France, and his picture of it — as a land of Catholic peasants incessantly singing the Marseillaise over glasses of red wine — had about as much relation to reality as Chu Chin Chow has to everyday life in Baghdad. And with this went not only an enormous overestimation of French military power (both before and after 1914-18 he maintained that France, by itself, was stronger than Germany), but a silly and vulgar glorification of the actual process of war. Chesterton’s battle poems, such as Lepanto or The Ballad of Saint Barbara, make The Charge of the Light Brigade read like a pacifist tract: they are perhaps the most tawdry bits of bombast to be found in our language. The interesting thing is that had the romantic rubbish which he habitually wrote about France and the French army been written by somebody else about Britain and the British army, he would have been the first to jeer. In home politics he was a Little Englander, a true hater of jingoism and imperialism, and according to his lights a true friend of democracy. Yet when he looked outwards into the international field, he could forsake his principles without even noticing he was doing so. Thus, his almost mystical belief in the virtues of democracy did not prevent him from admiring Mussolini. Mussolini had destroyed the representative government and the freedom of the press for which Chesterton had struggled so hard at home, but Mussolini was an Italian and had made Italy strong, and that settled the matter. Nor did Chesterton ever find a word to say about imperialism and the conquest of coloured races when they were practised by Italians or Frenchmen. His hold on reality, his literary taste, and even to some extent his moral sense, were dislocated as soon as his nationalistic loyalties were involved.
Obviously there are considerable resemblances between political Catholicism, as exemplified by Chesterton, and Communism. So there are between either of these and for instance Scottish nationalism, Zionism, Antisemitism or Trotskyism. It would be an oversimplification to say that all forms of nationalism are the same, even in their mental atmosphere, but there are certain rules that hold good in all cases.
George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism”, Polemic, 1945-05.
November 3, 2018
Freedom’s Fighters with Tim Worstall
Adam Smith
Published on 1 Nov 2018Every month the Adam Smith Institute hails one of those who have fought the good fight for freedom over the decades. In this month’s Dr Madsen Pirie interviewed our blog maestro Tim Worstall, who visited the UK from his rather sunnier climes in Portugal.
October 25, 2018
Every publication in Canada must have had lots of volunteers for this story
In the National Post, Marie-Danielle Smith gets high for science!
I just remembered I am supposed to be writing.
I am stoned on legal weed, which finally came into my hands this morning after six days of waiting. Thank you, government!
It is a different thing to get high alone — to get high alone for work reasons, right after question period. I’m sitting at my dining room table, drifting off every now and then to examine the patterns on my stuccoed walls or to focus, intensely, on the album I am listening to, the one that Kurt Vile and Courtney Barnett collaborated on. It would be a different thing to get high with the two of them.
The first thing you notice, after opening the cardboard box, which is just a little too large for your knapsack (backpack? knapsack? backpack?) … uh, you notice how much packaging there is. Tape. Crumpled-up papers. A box with government warnings and the logo of the licensed weed producer. A plastic bottle inside with a child lock cap that reminds you of Advil.
“She’s so easy,” sing Courtney and Kurt, repeatedly. Such a good album. This song has been on forever. Time stretches out. I’ve smoked a sativa-heavy hybrid strain called “Super Sonic,” which is supposed to make you feel creative rather than sleepy. On the Ontario Cannabis Store website, it’s described as having “a strong, earthy, sweet aroma, reminiscent of Quantum Kush.” I don’t know what Quantum Kush is but maybe our prime minister can explain it? (Remember that time? Anyway.)
Of course, not everyone is impressed:
I’m thinking of trying to write one sober, see how that goes https://t.co/woerC0verT
— Colby Cosh (@colbycosh) October 24, 2018
October 21, 2018
QotD: Footnotes
The absence of footnote references from the pages of this book may aggrieve some readers but will, I hope, please a larger number, who do not care for the untidy and irritating modern fashion of treating any historical study as a card-index rather than a book to be read. Footnote references are an inevitable distraction to the reader’s eye and mind. The justification for omitting them is not, however, merely one of narrative smoothness and page cleanlinness. Such references are only of value to a small proportion of readers — as a means to personal research or composition. By direction the student’s attention to an isolated quotation or piece of evidence, such footnote references are apt to give this a flase value; and can also be the means of conveying a false impression. They may enable the student to find out whether the author’s use of a quotation is textually correct, but they do not enable him to find out whether it gives a correct impression. For the true worth of any quotation can only be told by comparison with the whole of the evidence on the subject. Further, the practice of littering the pages with references is not even a proof that the author has consulted the sources. It is easy to copy a quotation — complete with footnote references! — from some previous writer, and a study of books on the Civil War, especially, suggests that this labour-saving device is not uncommon.
B.H. Liddell Hart, Sherman: Soldier, Realist, American, 1928.
October 13, 2018
The True Frontier – Alfred Bester – Extra Sci Fi
Extra Credits
Published on 9 Oct 2018Alfred Bester is known for bridging the gap between science fiction and detective comics, creating villains like Solomon Grundy in the Green Lantern and Superman stories and for his long-form stories The Demolished Man (which won the first Hugo award) and The Stars My Destination which influenced later writers.
September 15, 2018
QotD: Churchill on brevity
To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers. Nearly all of them are far too long. This wastes time, while energy has to be spent in looking for the essential points.
I ask my colleagues and their staffs to see to it that their Reports are shorter.
- The aim should be Reports which set out the main points in a series of short, crisp paragraphs.
- If a Report relies on detailed analysis of some complicated factors, or on statistics, these should be set out in an Appendix.
- Often the occasion is best met by submitting not a full-dress Report, but an Aide-mémoire consisting of headings only, which can be expanded orally if needed.
- Let us have an end of such phrases as these: “It is also of importance to bear in mind the following considerations…”, or “Consideration should be given to the possibility of carrying into effect…”. Most of there woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether, or replaced by a single word. Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrase, even if it is conversational.
Reports drawn up on the lines I propose may at first seem rough as compared with the flat surface of officialese jargon. But the saving in time will be great, while the discipline of setting out the real points concisely will prove an aid to clearer thinking.
Winston Churchill, memorandum to the War Cabinet, 1940-08-09.
