Quotulatiousness

March 13, 2021

The Paperback Revolution

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Railways, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 12 Mar 2021

Sponsored by Blinkist. The first 100 people who go to https://www.blinkist.com/thehistoryguy​ are going to get unlimited access for one week to try it out. You’ll also get 25% off if you want the full membership.

Today, the most popular book format in the world is not a traditional hardcover book, nor an ebook, but a paperback — a format that changed the what, how, when and how much the world reads. It is history that deserves to be remembered.

This is original content based on research by The History Guy. Images in the Public Domain are carefully selected and provide illustration. As very few images of the actual event are available in the Public Domain, images of similar objects and events are used for illustration.

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All events are portrayed in historical context and for educational purposes. No images or content are primarily intended to shock and disgust. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Non censuram.

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The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered is the place to find short snippets of forgotten history from five to fifteen minutes long. If you like history too, this is the channel for you.

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Script by THG

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March 5, 2021

QotD: P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster

Filed under: Books, Britain, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

During the first lockdown, I often found myself going to bed with two especially charming gentlemen. The first was a boisterous Old Etonian called Bertie, who took understandable pride in his aptitude for theology (and, indeed, won the prize for Scripture Knowledge at his prep school), and whose conversation usually involved reference to his club, the Drones, and the unfortunate incident where he served a night in the cells for knocking off a policeman’s helmet during Boat Race festivities. And the other man – Reginald, though he preferred to be known as Jeeves – was of a more sombre and serious mien. Quieter and more reserved than his companion, he was less free with his opinions and chatter, but what he said revealed a serious and deep intellectual commitment and purpose, albeit one leavened with a degree of good-humoured and entirely understandable exasperation at his charge’s more whimsical and mercurial antics.

Everybody has those books, and authors, that they go to when they are in need of escapism. For me, PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster series have always been these tales. Nightly incursions into their pages during the pandemic made the misery and boredom of those long days and weeks considerably more bearable. He wrote 35 short stories and 11 novels featuring the duo, beginning in 1915 with Extricating Young Gussie (although purists prefer to begin with Leave it to Jeeves which appeared the following year and features the most recognisable incarnation of the characters), and ending shortly before his death in 1975 with 1974’s Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen. Undoubtedly, if Wodehouse had somehow lived another five or ten years, there would have been more stories, but his prolific dedication to “the graft” has left us with a truly splendid collection of tales, all revolving around a pre-lapsarian world that was always a fantastical creation, even when Wodehouse began writing. By the time of the last book’s publication, when Britain was immersed in the three-day week and the dying days of the Heath government, the events depicted bore as much relation to readers’ everyday lives as if Wodehouse had been writing about events on Mars.

This was, of course, the point from the beginning. As Evelyn Waugh, a great admirer, famously said, “Mr. Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.” Nobody has ever sat down to read about the adventures of Jeeves, Bertie, Bingo Little, Gussie Fink-Nottle, the terrifying Aunt Agatha and Roderick Spode (to say nothing of his black short-wearing followers) and expected gritty social realism.

Instead, they have come to marvel at the twentieth century’s greatest comic prose stylist’s apparently endless invention, in which matrimony is a predicament to be averted at all costs, where the distaste of one’s gentleman’s gentleman for an ill-considered sartorial faux pas can lead to a (happily temporary) breakdown in amicable relations, and where the sole work undertaken by Bertie is to contribute an article about “What the well-dressed man is wearing” to his aunt’s periodical. Like his prize for scripture knowledge, he remains proud of this modest achievement, and continually refers to it throughout his adventures.

Alexander Larman, “The enduring appeal of Jeeves and Wooster”, The Critic, 2020-10-16.

February 14, 2021

QotD: Pauline Réage’s Story of O

Filed under: Books, France, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I’m sitting on a plane and I’m feeling increasingly excited. I’m flushed. My heart rate is up, and I can’t seem to find a comfortable way to sit. My agitation isn’t caused by any nervousness about flying, nor by any fears of contracting COVID-19 during the flight. My disquiet has been triggered by the book I’m reading. The sensations it arouses almost overwhelm me. I find I have to pause every few paragraphs, close the slim volume, and rest it on my lap in order to regain some sense of personal composure. Fiction usually transports my imagination away from myself, but this book is accomplishing the opposite: I feel increasingly aware of my body as I read it, as though being immersed in fiction has drawn me into a moment of privacy with myself. It feels somehow unseemly for the public world of the airplane to intrude on my private sensations. I have to put the book down frequently in order to remind myself that it is no act of indecency for the happy family sitting down the aisle from me to be talking casually, but rather that it is my own sense of secrecy that must be reconciled to the ordinary world around me.

I am reading Story of O, a novel written in 1954 that recounts the titular character’s journey into sexual bondage, violent penetrations, beatings, whippings, burnings, chains, gags, and dungeons. Readers only familiar with the pedestrian 1975 adaption are advised not to be put off — director Just Jaeckin’s film benefits from the lovely Corinne Cléry’s beguiling performance in the title role, but his soft-focus softcore aesthetic (gauzy white linen dresses and a smooth classical guitar soundtrack) miss the tenderness, the elegance, and the literary grace of the source. Graham Greene described Story of O as a “rare thing, a pornographic book well written and without a trace of obscenity”; Brian Aldiss remarked that O makes “pornography (if that is what it is) an art”; even JK Rowling has offered praise for the book, observing that, “If you’ve read Story of O you’ve kind of read the ultimate.” But it is JG Ballard’s description of the novel as “a deeply moral homily … touched by the magic of love” that resonates most powerfully with me. O is a radical instruction in morals (the book has a clear sense of feminine virtue, for one thing), and yet this sexual morality is unlike any I can find in our contemporary expression of sexual ethics, where self-expression is valued more than self-giving.

O is the story of a woman objectified and humiliated, of a woman who submits to being violated by the countless tongues and phalluses and fingers which enter her. The novel is more sensual than suspenseful — although there is a clear narrative, it is not a story driven by plot, but rather by a series of erotic episodes (Geraldine Bedell writing for the Observer described them as written with “a hallucinatory, erotic intensity”). It is a psychologically as well as sexually penetrative story of surrender, of being mastered and of becoming enslaved, especially its first chapter which describes the elegant sexual tortures of the Chateau at Roissy, a kind of playboy mansion with fewer grottos and more dungeons.

It is here that, at the request of her lover René, O acquiesces in her complete submission. The cast of characters is sparse: O and René; Jacqueline, a young model whom O seduces, and Jacqueline’s 16-year-old sister, Natalie, a virgin eager to be initiated into the sexual rites of Roissy; Anne-Marie, an older and more ruthless mistress than are the many men at the Chateau; sundry blondes, brunettes, and redheads arranged alluringly throughout the text; and finally O’s ultimate lover, the sophisticated Sir Stephen, a kind of father-figure to René who ends up laying claim to O, flogging her, shackling her labia with an iron ring, and branding her with his initials as his slave, “a condition,” the narrator tells us, “of which O herself was proud.” As I read of the many exquisite ways O gives herself for men’s uses, I begin to wonder if the book was presenting me not with a picture of masculine sexual fantasies, but with a vision of my own.

The novel was written by the mysterious Pauline Réage, a pseudonym. In what is arguably one of the most successful literary secrets, Réage’s identity was kept hidden for decades. It wasn’t until 40 years after the novel’s publication that the then 86-year-old Dominique Aury, a respected editor and French intellectual, revealed that she was the author. It seems fitting that in a novel of sexual submission, Aury — Dominique, dominance, dominatrix — maintained such strict control over her own identity. Even Dominique Aury was not her “real” name: she was born Anne Desclos, but legally changed it in 1940. Aury’s nested names and identities are like a meta-fictitious exercise in un-making and making the self, for questions of self-identity and self-integrity lie at the heart of her novel.

Marilyn Simon, “My Own Private Chateau — Pauline Réage’s Story of O Revisited”, Quillete, 2020-10-18.

January 28, 2021

QotD: Art for art’s sake

Filed under: Economics, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Théophile Gautier didn’t actually say “Art for art’s sake,” but even if he did, it was only about 100 years ago. The notion that a true ahr-teeeeeste would never sully his hands with shekels comes from the fin de siècle, when a bunch of nancy boys sponging off their parents decided their works could only be properly appreciated by other useless mooches. William Shakespeare — a true artist, the finest writer in the history of the English language — would’ve laughed right in these guys’ mincing little faces, because as Larry Correia says, the writer’s prime directive is GET PAID. Shakespeare worked for a living, which means he wasn’t above a fart joke. Whatever got the job done. Ditto Mozart — The Magic Flute was the Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure of its day — and all the rest. The “artist” who trumpets his intention to produce “art” is a poseur, always and everywhere.

Severian, “The Entertainer”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-10-08.

January 26, 2021

QotD: “A world organized around institutional mass slavery”

Filed under: China, Economics, Europe, Greece, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

An example: We’ve discussed all the cool steampunk shit the Greeks could’ve had, if only Archimedes had … well, that’s just the thing, isn’t it? We look at the aeolipile and see a prototype steam engine; they looked at it and saw, as best we can tell, a party trick. Back when, I suggested, Marxist-style, that labor costs were a sufficient explanation for why nobody took the obvious-to-us next step of hooking the thing up to something productive and kicking off the Industrial Revolution. Machines are labor-saving devices; the ancient world had a gross excess of labor. Calling the aeolipile a steam engine, then, is a category error.

New hypothesis: It’s a category error, all right, but not because they didn’t think in terms of labor costs. It’s because they couldn’t think in terms of labor costs.

A world organized around institutional mass slavery is, in a very real sense, a timeless world. Herodotus (I think) actually says somewhere that nothing worth mentioning happened before him, and you can see echoes of this attitude even as late as the Antebellum South. You see their attitude described as “conservative,” but since that’s egghead shorthand for “evil” you can ignore it. They weren’t consciously backward-looking; rather, they were deeply rooted to their place and station. To the outsider, it looked like they were trying to hold time back, but to the insider, time — clock time, industrial time, the time of the Protestant work ethic — barely existed at all.

So with the Classical World. The Romans, for instance, are endlessly frustrating to their admirers (of which I am an ardent one). Their only economic fix, for instance, was debasing the currency, i.e. a primitive form of inflation. You guys could figure out how to hew an artificial harbor out of some desert rocks — a trick we’d have a hard time pulling off today — but you couldn’t figure out fiat currency? Or a better political system than the tetrarchy? Or that the forts-and-legions paradigm just isn’t cutting it? Or … etc.

Stuff like that is why Spengler said classical, Apollonian culture was fundamentally different from, and incompatible with, our Faustian culture. According to Spengler, the master metaphor for the Apollonian is the human body, which is beautiful but changeless (emphasis mine, not Spengler’s). You can improve your body somewhat, but only within certain tight limits, and the body’s fundamental form is always the same (we could time warp Julius Caesar into the Current Year and still recognize him as a fellow homo sap., no matter how different his mind might be).

The Faustian, though — that would be us — organizes his worldview around space, infinite space. Practically speaking, this results in our attitude of innovation-for-innovation’s sake. We send a man to the moon because we can, but such an idea would never occur to the Romans, for the same reason they didn’t apply all their awesome engineering knowledge to the problems of governance. Hacking a harbor out of the desert is a tremendous feat, but it’s a local feat — a one-shot deal, a very specific response to a very specific local problem, with no broader applications.

This, I suggest, is because the timeless world of institutional mass slavery naturally selects for the kind of man who is at home in the world of institutional mass slavery. It’s a world of very low future time orientation, because “time” hardly exists at all. Forget machinery for a sec; the Roman world was full of enormous problems that had teeny-tiny, head-slappingly obvious fixes. Julius Caesar, for instance, was considered some kind of prodigy because he could sight-read books. Which really was a noteworthy feat, because Romans didn’t even put spaces between their words, much less use any sort of punctuation marks. And they were radical innovators compared to the Ancient Egyptians, since at least Roman writing all ran left-to-right; hieroglyphics can be read in any direction, including vertically, and I’m pretty sure there are examples of them changing text orientations in the middle of the same inscription. It’s not hard to imagine some legion commander actually losing a battle because he had to stop and sound out an important communique from a subordinate …

… and yet the Romans, for all their technical skill, never even figured that tiny change out. See also: The Chinese doing fuck-all with movable type, vs. (Faustian) Europeans using it to conquer the world. China, too, was a timeless society. As Derb says somewhere, Classical Chinese isn’t even really writing; it’s more of an aide-memoire — designed to remind readers of stuff they already know, not to communicate new information.

Your post-Roman European, by contrast, lived in a world where high future time orientation was an absolute must. You don’t need hypotheses like the famous “lead in the drinking water pipes” to explain the seemingly bizarre things the Romans did, or didn’t do; all you need is time orientation, a fundamental attitude of “this is a variation on an old problem” vs. “this is an entirely new situation that requires a new response.” Life in the post-Roman world was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short — every man for himself; think through the consequences of your actions very carefully before you do them, or die horribly. Those who failed to do so died. Bake that into the genetic cake for a few generations, and you get Renaissance Man, who’d see a million possible applications for the aeolipile.

Severian, “Bio-Marxism”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-09-24.

January 17, 2021

QotD: Hunter S. Thompson

Filed under: Books, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

HST killed himself. He never would have “turned his life around” — that’s a hard thing to try when the room’s been spinning for 40 years. Depression? Wouldn’t be surprising. A bad verdict from the doc? Wouldn’t be surprising. A great writer in his prime, but the DVD of his career would have the last two decades on the disc reserved for outtakes and bloopers. It was all bile and spittle at the end, and it was hard to read the work without smelling the dank sweat of someone consumed by confusion, anger, sudden drunken certainties and the horrible fear that when he sat down to write, he could only muster a pale parody of someone else’s satirical version of his infamous middle period. I feel sorry for him, but I’ve felt sorry for him for years. File under Capote, Truman — meaning, whatever you thought of the latter-day persona, don’t forget that there was a reason he had a reputation. Read Hell’s Angels. That was a man who could hit the keys right.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2005-02-21

January 3, 2021

QotD: Literary stasis in the Byzantine empire

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Middle East, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Undoubtedly, the Mediaeval Romans – now exclusively Greek in their language – made little effort to be original in their literature. They had virtually the whole body of Classical Greek literature in their libraries and in their heads. For them, this was both a wonderful possession and a fetter on the imagination. It was in their language, and not in their language. Any educated person could understand it. But the language had moved on – changes of pronunciation and dynamics and vocabulary. The classics were the accepted model for composition. But to write like the ancients was furiously hard. Imagine a world in which we spoke Standard English, but felt compelled, for everything above a short e-mail, to write in the language of Shakespeare and the Authorised Version of the Bible. Some of us might manage a good pastiche. Most of us would simply memorise the whole of the Bible, and, overlooking its actual content, write by adapting and rearranging remembered clauses. It would encourage an original literature. Because Latin soon became a completely foreign language in the West – and because we in England were so barbarous, we had to write in our own language – Western Mediaeval literature is often a fine thing. The Mediaeval Romans never had a dark age in our sense. Their historians in the fifteenth century wrote up the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in the same language as Thucydides. Poor Greeks.

Sean Gabb, “The Mediaeval Roman Empire: An Unlikely Emergence and Survival”, SeanGabb.co.uk, 2018-09-14.

January 2, 2021

History Summarized: Mesopotamia — The Bronze Age

Filed under: History, Humour, Middle East — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 22 Feb 2019

Let’s spin the clock way back to the beginning of urbanized civilization, and learn about the long history of Mesopotamia from the dawn of the city to the collapse of the last Sumerian empire.

This video is part of The Bronze Age collaboration.
Find 10 other great videos with this playlist: https://goo.gl/4JLV8s
Previous video — Cynical Historian: https://youtu.be/xSDn0HSXjgo
Next video — Epimetheus: https://youtu.be/-RrAoL_PVmo

Further reading: “Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization” By Paul Kriwaczek: https://goo.gl/nyQAdS

PATREON: www.patreon.com/OSP

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December 18, 2020

QotD: Hunter S. Thompson’s view of humanity

Filed under: Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One interesting thing about Thompson […] is that much of his work could almost be assigned to the field of religious literature. This is not just because he suffered occasional demonic hallucinations under the influence of brown acid and ibogaine. Setting the drugs aside (“Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man”), there is a certain ascetic, unworldly quality to his work. He seems to have had a quasi-Augustinian horror of the greasy, hairy human body, and a strong distaste for squirming, brawling, lumpy, dumb man-apes in all their mass manifestations. His career-making Scanlan’s piece, “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved”, is really an indictment of humanity as decadent and depraved — and that remains true insofar as the subject of the piece is Thompson himself and his Hobbesian preoccupations.

Colby Cosh, “Q: Where’s Cosh?”, ColbyCosh.com, 2005-02-21

November 25, 2020

Jan Morris, RIP

Filed under: Books, Britain, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

By an odd co-incidence, I began reading the third volume of Morris’s British Empire trilogy just last night and today I discovered that she recently died at age 94. The particular edition I have has Morris’s original male name on the cover, but her female name in the “note about the author”:

Jan Morris, who died last week at the age of 94, may have lived one of the more various and accomplished lives on record. She was, in turn, a soldier, a newspaper correspondent with a number of scoops to her name, a fine memoirist, and a writer of books whose scope encompassed the world.

Any dutiful obituarist must also note something else which happened fifty years ago. It is likely for ever to feature in the first paragraph, if not the first line, of everything written about Morris. She was born a man, named James by her parents, and underwent what her publishers and profilers term “a change of sexual role” in 1972 – back when such a thing was a rarity and rather dangerous to accomplish.

I hope to leave that subject aside for a moment while contemplating her place in letters. By the end of her long life, Morris had become something of a national treasure and an institution. Her quixotic obsessions – a personal, mythical interpretation of the Welsh side of her family and her home in that country, and the late First Sea Lord Jackie Fisher – became the subject of stories shared by friends, editors and admirers.

She gave wise and funny interviews to the papers about savouring mussels without dignity and why whether what one is doing is kind ought, in a good world, to be the modest test applied to action.

Other profilers note her long companionship with Elizabeth (née Tuckniss) – first through marriage, then a legally-divorced close friendship, and finally a civil partnership, with the ceremony witnessed by a local couple who afterwards invited the two for tea. Elizabeth survives Jan, but a visiting journalist or two was shown the headstone which is planned for both of them. They will lie on a Welsh island they owned in the Dwyfor, a river that runs by their home. The stone reads: “Here lie two friends, at the end of one life”.

These are beautiful stories, but they should not retroactively colour in fully our impressions of Morris. Nor should a sense – repeated in some otherwise careful obituaries – that as “James”, Morris’s “written voice always sounded certain”. Whereas as Jan, her writing grew more introspective and aware of the ways that time and tide conspire to decay the facades of men as much as they do institutions and places. This was exhibited notably in her Pax Britannica trilogy, which chronicled Britain’s imperial decline.

October 31, 2020

Halloween Special: Edgar Allan Poe

Filed under: Books, Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 30 Oct 2015

Happy halloween! Today we’re looking into the mind of one of the most well-known horror writers, Edgar Allan Poe!

On today’s roster: “The Pit And The Pendulum”, “The Mask of Red Death”, “The Cask of Amontillado”, and “The Tell-Tale Heart”.

October 30, 2020

Halloween Special: H. P. Lovecraft

Filed under: Books, History, Humour, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 31 Oct 2018

HAPPY HALLOWEEN IT’S TIME TO GET SPOOKY WITH HISTORY’S MOST PROBLEMATIC HORROR WRITER LET’S GOOOOO

While there’s something to be said for separating the art from the artist, I think there’s a lot of merit in CONTEXTUALIZING the art WITH the artist. Did Lovecraft write some pretty incredible horror? Sure! Was he also a raging xenophobe? Absolutely! Are his perspectives on life connected with the stories he felt compelled to tell? Duh! If you look at Lovecraft’s writing through the lens of his life, clear patterns emerge that allow us to pin down what exactly he built his horror cosmology out of. It’s an invaluable analytical tool that allows us to take apart his writings by getting inside his head. So before you yell at me for Not Separating The Artist From The Art, know that it was completely intentional and I’m not sorry.

3:20 – THE CALL OF CTHULHU
8:40 – COOL AIR
10:36 – THE COLOR OUT OF SPACE
14:38 – THE DUNWICH HORROR
19:32 – THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH

PATREON: www.patreon.com/user?u=4664797

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From the comments:

Overly Sarcastic Productions
1 year ago
Hey gang! Can’t help but notice the comment section is a little bit on fire. That’s all good with me, but one recurring complaint I’ve noticed has started to get under my skin – namely that my explanation of non-euclidean geometry was insufficient, or even – dare I say – inaccurate. Now this is a fair complaint, because after a lifetime of experience finding that people’s eyes glaze over when I talk math at them, I concluded that interrupting a half-hour horror video with a long-winded explanation of a mathematical concept wouldn’t go over too well. I put it in layman’s terms and used a simple example to illustrate the point. However, since some of the more mathematically-inclined of you took offense, I now present in full a short (but comprehensive) explanation of what exactly non-euclidean geometry is.

First, we axiomatically establish euclidean geometry. Euclidean geometry has five axioms:
1. We can draw a straight line between any two points.
2. We can infinitely extend a finite straight line.
3. We can draw a circle with any center and radius.
4. All right angles are equal to one another.
5. If two lines intersect with a third line, and the sum of the inner angles of those intersections is less than 180º, then those two lines must intersect if extended far enough.

Axiom #5 is known as the PARALLEL POSTULATE. It has many equivalent statements, including the Triangle Postulate (“the sum of the angles in every triangle is 180º”) and Playfair’s Axiom (“given a line and a point not on that line, there exists ONE line parallel to the given line that intersects the given point”).

Euclidean geometry is, broadly, how geometry works on a flat plane.

However, there are geometries where the parallel postulate DOES NOT hold. These geometries are called “non-euclidean geometries”. There are, in fact, an infinite number of these geometries, and because the only defining characteristic is “the parallel postulate does not hold”, they can be all kinds of crazy shapes. (As you can see, my explanation of “this is just how geometry works on a curved surface” is quite reductive, but at the same time serves to get the general impression across without going into too much detail.)

An example of a non-euclidean geometry is “Elliptic geometry”, geometry on n-dimensional ellipses, which includes “Spherical geometry” as a subset. Spherical geometry is, predictably enough, how geometry works on the two-dimensional surface of a three-dimensional sphere.

In spherical geometry, “points” are defined the same as in euclidean geometry, but “line” is redefined to be “the shortest distance between two points over the surface of the sphere”, since there is no such thing as a “straight line” on a curved surface. All “lines” in spherical geometry are segments of “great circles” (which is defined as the set of points that exist at the intersection between the sphere and a plane passing through the center of that sphere).

The axiom that separates spherical geometry from euclidean geometry and replaces the parallel postulate is “5. There are NO parallel lines”. In spherical geometry, every line is a segment of a great circle, and any two great circles intersect at exactly two points. If two lines intersect when extended, they cannot be parallel, and thus there are no parallel lines in spherical geometry.

Since the Parallel Postulate is equivalent to Playfair’s Axiom, the fact that no parallel lines exist in spherical geometry negates Playfair’s Axiom, which thus negates the Parallel Postulate and defines spherical geometry as a non-euclidean geometry. Also, since the Triangle Postulate is another equivalent property to the Parallel Postulate, it is thus negated in spherical geometry. Hence, my use in-video of an example of a triangle drawn on the surface of a sphere whose inner angles sum greater than 180º.

Hope that cleared things up (and helped explain why I didn’t want to say “see, non-euclidean geometry is just a geometry where Euclid’s Parallel Postulate doesn’t hold – hold on, let me get the chalkboard to explain what THAT is-” in the video)

Peace!

-R ✌️

October 22, 2020

QotD: The needs of creative people

Filed under: Economics, Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… I can’t help feeling there’s a message here about supply and demand, dreary things like that. Something to bear in mind when, say, leaving school or choosing your degree course. The glamour of the artistic and literary life is, I fear, beginning to look quite thin:

    The question of where to live on such a low income while trying to write becomes crucial: in the middle of nowhere with cheap rent, or in the city where day jobs help pay for housing? Compromise clouds every decision.

And this simply will not do. You see, creative people, that’s people like Ms Delaney, must live in locales befitting their importance, not their budget. You, taxpayer, come hither. And bring your wallet.

    The city of Sydney recently tried to address the problem of artists being priced out by introducing six rent-subsidised studio spaces in Darlinghurst. Those chosen get a year-lease and pay reduced rent of $250 a week on a one-bedroom with work studio.

Creative people, being so creative, deserve nothing less than special treatment. I mean, you can’t expect a creative person to write at any old desk in any old room in any old part of town. What’s needed is a lifestyle at some other sucker’s expense. And so that garret has to be in a fashionable suburb or somewhere happening, where the creative vibrations are at their strongest and genius will surely follow. And that pad of choice has to come before the publishing deal and film rights and the swimming pool full of cash. Indeed, it has to materialise before the book itself, or any part thereof. How else can their brilliance flourish, as it most surely will, what with all that creativity. Our betters just need a little cake before they eat those damn vegetables. And possibly ice cream. Here’s some money that other, less glamorous people had to actually earn. You fabulous creature, you.

David Thompson, “The Humble Among Us”, David Thompson, 2014-01-21.

September 6, 2020

QotD: The process of writing fiction

Filed under: Books, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Like most writers, when I am in the throes of composing fiction I don’t actually think about my work’s future readers. All my attention and mental energy are focused on the immediate task in front of me. Scene by scene, I have to hold in my head who these people are, what they’ve just done in the prior scene and their prior lives, what will happen next (which, depending on what they do right now, can turn out to be something quite unexpected), their relationships to each other and how they are developing, and scripting the dialogue — or choreographing it, since characters’ conversations sometimes feel more like a dance than like a play, and are definitely a form of action. What should be in the next scene, the next paragraph, the next sentence, the next word — oh, not that word, this one would work better, that bit of syntax needs rearranged for clarity, and oh dear that sentence is far too long, better cut it in half and restructure it … The process of writing is like sandpainting in a windstorm.

Adding in a consciousness of the audience while doing all this would be like the tap-dancing centipede, who did fine until he started thinking about where he was putting all those feet.

Lois McMaster Bujold, introduction to the Taiwanese edition of The Curse of Chalion by Fantasy Foundation/Cite Publishing, 2020-03-25.

August 3, 2020

The Magic of Terry Pratchett by Marc Burrows

Filed under: Books, Britain — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Rachel Cunliffe looks at a recent biography of the great science fiction/fantasy author Terry Pratchett by Marc Burrows:

A satirical sci-fi/fantasy writer might not seem the obvious choice to dissect the world-changing magnitude of an unforeseen pandemic — or so you might think if you’ve never read any of his books. But anyone familiar with the Pratchett’s oeuvre will know that the scouring wit and the unflinching grasp of humanity at its best and worst found within his pages would be the only true way to understand what has happened to our world since the start of the year.

Alas, we will never know how Sir Terry would have woven the government’s dysfunctional pandemic response, the etiquette of social distancing, mask and anti-mask culture or the mass shift to remote working into the realm of the Discworld (although we can be fairly confident that he would have done). But glimpses can be found in The Magic Of Terry Pratchett, a new biography by writer and comedian Marc Burrows.

This is the first full biography of the great man, from his upbringing in the quintessentially English hamlet of Forty Green, Buckinghamshire, to his battle with Alzheimer’s (which Pratchett dubbed “the Embuggerance”) and ferocious campaign for a law change to allow assisted dying — and featuring a whistle-stop tour of his 60-odd books.

It is, as Burrows admits from the start, the project of a committed fanboy. The author never actually got to speak to his literary hero (“This book is my chance to meet Terry Pratchett. It’s yours as well,” he explains early on), and has instead pieced together his life story through old interviews, archives, and conversations with friends and contemporaries.

The result is an engaging quest to get to know the man that both explores and adds to the mythology surrounding him. Pratchett was, as Burrows makes clear, a storyteller first and foremost, and some of his oft-repeated anecdotes — such as encountering a dead body age 17 on his first day as a junior reporter, or filing his copy from a shed on the roof — may have been based more on fantasy than reality. Where he cannot verify, Burrows sticks to the strategy taken by Tony Wilson in the film 24 Hour Party People: “When you have to choose between the truth and the legend, print the legend”.

As such, while this book will no doubt be of greatest interest to Pratchett fans, even those who have never opened a Discworld novel will find themselves entertained by its numerous detours — encompassing the educational apartheid of the 1950s, a surreal stint doing PR for Britain’s nuclear industry, and the once vibrant, now sadly endangered local journalism ecosystem.

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