the enemy magician

To: All Commanders and Chiefs of Staff

From: Headquarters, B.T.E. and M.E.F.

There exists a real danger that our friend Rommel is becoming a kind of magician or bogey-man to our troops, who are talking far too much about him. He is by no means a superman, although he is undoubtedly very energetic and able. Even if he were a superman, it would still be highly undesirable that our men should credit him with supernatural powers.

I wish you to dispel by all possible means the idea that Rommel represents something more than an ordinary German general. The important thing now is to see it that we do not always talk of Rommel when we mean the enemy in Libya. We must refer to “The Germans” or “The Axis powers” or “the enemy” and not always keep harping on Rommel.

Please ensure that this order is put into immediate effect, and impress upon all Commanders that, from a psychological point of view, it is a matter of the highest importance.

(signed)

C.J. Auchinleck

General,

Commander-in-Chief, MEF

The Call of Adventure

for, when it intrudes at all, more often than not its intrusion is sudden and unlooked for. Today we may seek it for romance and fail to find it; unsought, it lies in wait for us at most prosaic corners of life’s highway.

‘How strangely does the adventurous intrude upon the humdrum’

- excerpt from “The Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu"
by Sax Rohmer
(aka Arthur Sarsfield Ward)

Flat & uncertain fidelity

We agreed that every president winds up a flat, movable portrait of debatable fidelity.

- excerpt from “The Clinton Tapes”
(Wrestling history in the white house)
by Taylor Branch
Simon & Schuste
isbn 978-1-84737-140-9

This isn't real?

Even with the rise of Dick’s reputation during the ‘80s, his work could be hard to find, even in California. “In my world,” recalls daughter Isa Dick Hackett, “they never had the books in the libraries. Never, ever had the books in the bookstores. Anytime I was anywhere, I’d go to the bookstore and see if they had any of my dad’s books. And never! Never! And I’d ask the clerks, hoping for some validation. ‘Dick? Who?’”

Going from blank stares from clerks and librarians to seeing her dad become one of the best-regarded writers of his day, admired by Hollywood and the literati, makes Hackett wonder what her father would make of it. The half a dozen or so film projects in the works include “Flow My Tears” and “Ubik,” perhaps his most philosophically realized novel. Dick’s early realist novels -- writer Jonathan Lethem describes then as living somewhere between Richard Yates and Charles Willeford -- are being published after nearly a quarter-century out of print. “Puttering About in a Small Land,” set in L.A. and Ojai, was just reissued by Tor.

“He would either be laughing hysterically or just saying, ‘This isn’t real,’” Hackett says. “’This is just a figment of my imagination.’ And he’d be totally paranoid about it: ‘Something is wrong here.’ I just shake my head and say, ‘Dad, this is so amazing. I wish you could have had a glimpse of this.’ He would love to hear that other creative minds were sparked by what he wrote.”

-- REPORTER - Scott Timberg,

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/herocomplex/2010/02/philip-k-dicks-legacy-in-the-maze-of-death.html

Ancient Advice

Apparent advice to Cicero

(I think from his brother)

& response:

Reflect on what city this is,

on the nature of your goal

and on who you are

I am a new man!

I want the consulship!

This is Rome!

-- (I am not sure where I got this quote)

A Man Alone

"the misanthrope, as an essentially solitary man, is not man at all: he must be a beast or god"

-- paraphrased Aristotle

Reading

"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it is too dark to read."

-- Groucho Marx

Thoughts

Perhaps the most annoying aspect was that, even in a moment like this, part of her mind was dwelling on that problem, not giving itself over fully to the more pressing issue at hand. Volyova felt as if her brain consisted of a room full of precocious schoolchildren: individually bright, and - if only they would pool themselves - capable of shattering insight. But some of those schoolchildren were not paying attention; they were staring dreamily out of the window, ignoring her protestations to focus on the present, because they found their own obsessions more intellectually attractive than the dull curriculum she was intent on dispensing.

- excerpt from
“Revelation Space”
by Alastair Reynolds

Victor Gollancz
ISBN 0-57506-876-0

The scent of Spring

Hibernation may well be ending...

c/o http://www.1stavemachine.com/#/home

Another quick note

Bristle 3 is out.

one of the first few books printed

The book is written in an artificial language, which uses Italian grammar with words drawn from Latin, Tuscan and Greek, many of them totally made up, with Italian endings. There are also eighty epigrams and inscriptions, in Greek, Hebrew, Latin, mock hieroglyphs and ‘Chaldean’. It is the work of a cryptomaniac. Astonishingly HP has been translated into english, in part in 1592 (only a third of it), and in full in 1999 by an American academic, Joscelyn Godwin, Professor of Music at Colgate University, Hamilton, NY.

...

weirdly, the book’s erotic content is expressed most powerfully through buildings, which form a series of stages for the action. Indeed, buildings take up more than half the book, and no fewer than seventy-eight of the first eighty-six pages are descriptions of buildings or gardens. of the 172 engravings, eighty-eight are of buildings.

of:

“one of the craziest, most beautiful books ever printed”

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

(Poliphilo’s Struggle for Love in a Dream)

“nothing less than an architectural erotic fantasy”

(by anonymous - possibly one Brother Francesco Colonna)

page 228 & 230

The Gutenberg Revolution

by John Man

bantam books

isbn 978-0-55381-966-3

relative

“the relatively easily attainable temperature of 19 Kelvin.”

excerpt from “Sci/Tech: A Fifth State of Matter”

reported by Mathias Biilmann Christensen

Bits of News

Thursday, 28 September 2006

A hard part of writing is getting published

as Tolkien might have discovered these days...

Ages gone by

1

Many ages ago, it was common, I find

For dumb creatures to talk just as well as mankind:

Birds and Beasts met together t’arrange their affairs;

Nay! the Frogs of the day, must needs give themselves airs,

And apeing their betters, not pleas’d with their station,

talk’d of having a King to rule over their Nation.

2

In these curious days, it did raise no surprise

(though now t’would make ev’ry one open their eyes)

that three Bears, very sick of their woods and their den

should fancy a home ‘mongst the dwellings of men;

So not caring a fig for what anyone said,

they brought a large house already furnished

opening of “the story of the three bears”

Eleanor Mure

1831

(possibly the first printed version of ‘Goldilocks and the three bears’.)

NB - In this historical variant there is no Goldilocks - but an old lady neighbour - who breaks in after being refused entry. She doesn’t sleep in the beds - but hides in a wardrobe when the bears return - who upon her discovery throw her in the fire but she doesn’t burn and then drown her in water but she doesn’t drown!

Update from Scotland

Glasgow is the "laziest city in the UK" according to the findings of a national health poll. Researchers questioned 2,049 people during May for the not-for-profit organisation, Nuffield Health. About 75% of Glaswegians who responded admitted they failed to exercise at least three times a week. This figure was 67% for people from Birmingham and Southampton, with London just behind on 66%, Bristol on 64% and Leeds and Newcastle on 62%.
The survey also suggested that some Britons were so lazy they would rather watch a television programme they do not like than get out of their chair to change channels. About one in six people questioned said if their remote control was broken, they would continue watching the same channel rather than get up. More than one third of those questioned, 36%, said they would not run to catch a bus. Of the 654 respondents with children, 64% said they were often too tired to play with them. This led the report to conclude that it was "no wonder" one in six UK children was classified as obese before they start school. Of the 456 dog owners quizzed, more than half (52%) said they could not be bothered to walk their pet. Three-quarters (73%) of people said they regularly have too little energy at the end of the day for passion with their partner.
Dr Sarah Dauncey of Nuffield Health said, "If we don't start to take control of this problem, a whole generation will become too unfit to perform even the most rudimentary of tasks."

(I know there's already a lot of info circulating on this subject, everyone's heard it all before, but I found this series of questions and answers particularly touching/tragic - a city where fat kids and fat dogs are left to languish in corners while sexless, passionless people watch TV shows they don't enjoy)

Pour vous, une attention immédiate - dernière signaux enregistrés avant sémaphore ligne brisée

"Aha! the french pan-continental semaphore tower system - with... metal arms - a mechanical scribe?... - wobbling as I speak - Raff, here look at this oddity, another of Boney's confounded devices ... note how it moves with our very words but holds still with our silences, I have a wonder that it might be sending each utterance to Paris itself - if i wasn't aware of the work of Lagrange I'd believe it to be some Eldritch device, no wonder those peasants were afraid of this place. ...--... yes, signaling, ah yes, i can see it ...--... damn, it's in French Code - quick we need to redirect the flags to point to the Tribute, see if we can get a semaphore to the fleet, and to Sir Walston-Bilbarage at once! ..--.. yes, glorious idea, Raff, you move tha-XXX-

basic stuff

There are two basic flaws with this approach. One is the fundamental notion that some species are more highly “evolved” than others. We might naturally think of monkeys occupying a position higher on the phylogenetic scale than cats, and cats higher than rats. Yet the fact is that primates, carnivores, and rodents all diverged from a common ancestor at the same time. They are all equally “evolved”. The branching tree of evolution has not just one culmination, but millions of culminations - represented in every living species on earth today. Each is a brilliant success at what it does.

- excerpt from “If a lion could talk”

How animals think

by Stephen Budiansky

Phoenix

ISBN 0-75380-772-6

of note

NSA (not NASA) has more PhDs in mathematics than any other organization in the western world.

from under a stone

I had always thought of fairies as dull, too pretty to be interesting. But suddenly I found myself reading about a fairy that wasn’t pretty at all. He was Yallery Brown, a sprite from the Fen Country of Eastern England, and he was inexorably, mindlessly cruel. He was found by a farmhand who heard a soft weeping sound, like a child crying. The man was a kindly soul, and he searched for the child, to comfort it. What he found, when he overturned a rock, was a little withered thing with bright dark eyes and cloud of long yellow hair. The little thing made him a promise: to stay with him for ever and to help him with his work, as long as he was never thanked. So far, not too bad. But Yallery Brown’s help turned out to be no help at all. Everyone avoided the farmhand because they could see his work being done for him by invisible hands, Things went from bad to worse, until one day the poor farmhand thanked his helper in a despairing effort to get rid of him. From then on Yallery Brown spoiled everything he did, and haunted him day and night, crying out,

“Loss and mischance and Yallery Brown

You’ve let out yourself from under a stone.”

The farmhand died friendless and destitute, with that voice ringing in his ears.

- excerpt from
Introduction: Fear of Fairies
“Troublesome Things”
A history of fairies and fairy stories

by Diane Purkiss

Penguin Books
ISBN 0-140-281-72X