‘We encourage the humans in the belief that every other job in the world, especially that of running the world, is so simple that only a malicious idiot could possibly foul it up; whereas one’s own job is skilful and complex and requires a genius that no outsider can understand. This encourages the useful habits of pride and ignorance, and moreover, brings each human’s pride into direct collision with all the others.’
New beginnings
1 March 2021 by 3 Comments
I last posted on January 1, which is, in some respects, a singularly unfortunate time for new beginnings; especially in the throes of the Bureaucratic Plague. Between the assorted shutdowns, slowdowns, and putdowns, and beastly weather right from the North Pole, and the Narcissist-in-Chief duking it out with his successor, who has every appearance of being a slightly warm corpse, and Big Tech trying their hardest to unperson all the crimethinkers, and what not, I found it advisable to spend the last two months hibernating under a rock and then try again.
So here we are in March, which was the first month of the year in the early centuries of the Roman calendar. It was on the 15th of that month (Idibus Martiis) that the new consuls took office each year, and with it command of the year’s legions; and that day was the official beginning of the campaigning season. (This, by the way, is why Julius Caesar was assassinated on that day. Even after the New Year changed, the Ides of March remained a major festival, and it was considered most proper for the Senate to discuss military affairs on that day. Caesar meant to do both before he left Rome to finish the conquest of the Mediterranean world. Oops.)
The Ides of March continued to be New Year’s Day until the second century B.C., when it was moved to the Kalends of January. There it remained until the Council of Tours (A.D. 567) officially moved it to the Feast of the Annunciation, March 25. This was also the traditional date of Christ’s crucifixion, fitting the old Jewish tradition that prophets lived an exact number of years from their conception to their death. As it happens, there is some evidence supporting the notion that Jesus was born in December; so the tradition may actually have been true in his case.
Dionysius Exiguus (a.k.a. Little Dennis), a Scythian-Roman monk, had gone to enormous pains to work out the exact number of years since the birth of Christ (in which he was probably off by a shade) and his crucifixion (which he probably got right). This was an intellectual and historiographic feat of the first order – a fact that we too easily forget. [Read more…]
Surrender?
25 August 2019 by 17 Comments
I’m seriously thinking of packing it in.
I mean, I will probably continue to write for my own amusement, since I need to fill my time somehow; but I am coming to the conclusion that it would be folly to try to publish anything further. The public simply does not want the kind of stuff I write. I have seen the kind of stuff that does sell, and it doesn’t appeal to me at all; so it does not stand to reason that what appeals to me would sell.
I am more disheartened than I can say.
EDIT, 27 August: I have ‘received a communication’ to the effect that it is my business to carry on, though no favourable outcome is promised. Cf. the Scriptural injunction against ‘hiding one’s light under a bushel’. My light needs no bushel; I could probably hide it comfortably under a thimble; but that is no excuse for doing so.
I thank all of you who responded with encouraging words. There appear to be more than 3.6 of you, a fact that confuses and astonishes me; but I never did master the New Math.
A small update
23 August 2019 by 2 Comments
I have been trying to teach myself to draw maps in the current version of Adobe Illustrator, since the old version that served me faithfully for years isn’t compatible with my current operating system. (At one time I would have drawn the line art by hand, scanned it, and added lettering and shading by computer; but since my stroke, I can’t trust my hand to produce anything clean enough to use.) In the process, I have learnt two things:
1. Adobe Illustrator is absurdly powerful, but this also makes it absurdly difficult to do the simplest things. It feels rather like trying to pick up a raw egg with a construction crane.
2. I can only work on this stuff for an hour or two at a time before my eyes go funky. Once that happens, the job becomes intensely uncomfortable and more or less futile. It feels rather like trying to pick up a raw egg with a construction crane whilst operating the controls with boxing gloves on.
Nevertheless, I have put in a bit of practice on a scratch map that bears no possible relation to any of my written work. I do not intend to show this map to anybody. But I am gradually getting familiar with the tools again, and finding where they are hidden in Adobe’s New & Improved™ Horrid User Interface.
By the way: Don’t tell me to use Photoshop instead. Line art should be vector art. Raster art is resolution-dependent, which means that it looks like soft-boiled feces when blown up to larger sizes. Vector art scales. This is an article of religion, which I will not be talked out of. (And don’t talk to me about the GIMP, which is like picking up a raw egg with a construction crane whilst operating the controls with tongs held between one’s toes. The chief trouble with open-source software is that good user-interface designers have a rational expectation of getting paid.)
One step forward, two faceplants
24 June 2018 by 2 Comments
June has not been particularly kind to us. The move took a lot out of me physically, and a fair amount out of the Beloved Other. Until a few days ago I was having severe asthma attacks from all the heavily pollinated dust that had been dislodged from under furniture and behind bookcases, not to mention the depths of a ruinous old carpet that could not be properly hoovered because of its tendency to spit up its own fibres and strangle the machine with long threads of carpety stuff. At one point I had a coughing fit whilst driving, so intense that I nearly blacked out, swerved off the road, and would have driven into an open pit on a construction site if I had not banged against a friendly K-rail and bounced back into the stream of traffic.
Just about the time I got topsides on the asthma, my right knee gave out and I can no longer finish the work of moving. Unpacking is a wild Technicolor dream. I have been hobbling about the new flat on crutches, since my leg won’t bear my weight properly. The quadriceps tendon, you see, passes over the head of the thighbone on its way to the kneecap, and I (so my doctor told me years ago, when I had a similar injury) have an odd sort of rough patch or abrasion on the cartilage there. Ordinarily it does no harm, but if the tendon becomes inflamed, it catches on the rough spot and won’t slide over it. If I am sitting down, I can lift up my left foot straight in front of me like a Christian, but my right foot remains planted on the ground like a megalithic temple. The muscle simply won’t move until the inflammation subsides. It is also quite deliciously painful if I don’t keep my leg extended in just the right position with the right degree of support, and I cannot sleep in that position, so I have been waking up every morning in a fine taking.
Needless to say, my working files are still packed away, though the Beloved Other has done yeoman work to re-shelve a lot of my books; for which I am boundlessly grateful. The Impendices therefore remain impending for the moment. My apologies to all.
Impendices?
24 April 2018 by 8 Comments
Just tossing out an idea—
I have reached the stage of life where I have more books in mind than time to write them before I die, even if I drastically improve my productivity (which needs to happen in any case). In particular, there are masses of backstory material behind my principal series (The Eye of the Maker and Where Angels Die, in particular) that could with advantage be worked up into prequels and stand-alones, but probably never will be.
When old J.R.R.T. came up with backstory like that, and it wouldn’t fit comfortably in the front story without bloating and dyspepsia, he had a handy way of dealing with it:
A new character has come on the scene (I am sure I did not invent him, I did not even want him, though I like him, but there he came walking into the woods of Ithilien): Faramir, the brother of Boromir – and he is holding up the ‘catastrophe’ by a lot of stuff about the history of Gondor and Rohan (with some very sound reflections no doubt on martial glory and true glory): but if he goes on much more a lot of him will have to be removed to the appendices – where already some fascinating material on the hobbit Tobacco industry and the Languages of the West have gone.
—Letters, no. 66
In the nature of things, I have no appendices to banish such stuff to; but the rules of the game do not require me to let that stop me. Stanislaw Lem once wrote (and published!) a whole volume of introductions to books that had never been written: not perhaps his best work, but an amusing game for some of his readers to take part in. My brain, that cornucopia of questionable ideas, has suggested to me that I could write appendices to books that have never been written, and stick them up here: partly in case my 3.6 Loyal Readers might be entertained, but chiefly for my own reference, so they would be gathered in some reliably searchable spot. It further suggested that since these pieces would come before the books and not be added after them, they should properly be called not Appendices but Impendices.
I have, as it happens, written and posted a couple of things of this kind already: ‘The Worm of the Ages’ and ‘Droll’s Audition’ (both collected in The Worm of the Ages). There is also a lot of stuff on the History of This and the Languages of That, though nothing so far on the Tobacco Industry of the Other, which could go under the ‘Impendix’ heading, if it seemed advisable to air such things on this blog.
What do you all think?
Thanks for the therms!
13 April 2018 by 6 Comments
On behalf of all the Frozen North, I would like to thank my 3.6 Loyal Readers most humbly for their generous outpouring of heat. Degrees have been arriving from as far away as Australia.
Demon weather
12 April 2018 by 9 Comments
I reverently believe that the Maker who made us all makes everything in New England but the weather. I don’t know who makes that, but I think it must be raw apprentices in the weather-clerk’s factory who experiment and learn how, in New England, for board and clothes, and then are promoted to make weather for countries that require a good article, and will take their custom elsewhere if they don’t get it.
—Mark Twain, ‘Speech on the Weather’
And what happens to the apprentices who flunk out of the New England weather factory? They get sent to Alberta, that’s what.
Where Angels Die is fiction, mostly, and rather fantastical fiction at that, but there are one or two points on which it draws from life with stark and unvarnished realism. One of these is what I have called the ‘demon weather’. When the demons attack a warm, temperate or subtropical country like Anai, the first sign of their appearance is that the weather goes sour. Winter lasts for eight or nine months of the year, the sun is blotted out by a perpetual overcast, and when it should by nature be spring or autumn, it stays just cold enough to snow, and just warm enough to let some of the snow thaw now and then so it can refreeze as iron-hard ice, just to keep the locals busy and entertained. Much like this:
Beautiful spring in sunny Alberta
This, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly the kind of weather we have been having here in the Frozen North through the whole of April so far. Once or twice I have seen the sun, but the clouds moved in quickly to censor it again. At the moment we are having one of our miniature thaws. I call it a thaw, because some of the snow on the ground melts, but not any of the ice. Meanwhile it keeps right on snowing, in a lazy and desultory way. At night the temperature dips solidly below freezing (it touched zero degrees Fahrenheit a day or two ago), and the snow-melt turns to slick black ice. When morning comes, the ice is cleverly concealed beneath a fresh dusting of snow, and the cycle repeats.
I have been gobbling Vitamin D supplements, but even so, this weather – and this much of it – is, I frankly admit, wearing me down. It is hard to get up the gumption to write, or to do anything else but the bare minimum of daily chores.
I therefore call upon you, my 3.6 Loyal Readers, for help. If any of you are living in warm and sunny climes, where the demons never reach and the weather-factory turns out a decent article suitable for export, see if you can find it in your hearts to send us a degree. Fahrenheit or Celsius makes no difference; send whatever you can spare. Five extra degrees will make each day’s snowfall run off before nightfall, putting a stop to the glaciation underneath. Ten degrees will stop the nightly freeze-out. Fifteen degrees (if so many generous souls respond to this impassioned plea) will banish the demons and apprentice weather-clerks back where they came from, to Hades or Hartford or wherever they rightly belong, and bring thousands of suffering Canadian children their first true experience of spring. Flowers will bloom, grass will grow, and the Earth itself will turn more happily on its axis. Do it for the Children, for the Planet, or for the rich and noble tax deduction.
Please give generously; or else keep your distance until June.
A joyous Easter to all
1 April 2018 by 3 Comments
I have never been in the habit of playing practical jokes, not even on the first of April, since that was my late father’s birthday and his sense of humour did not extend to such things. (He would have been 91 today, and I still miss him sorely.) This year, April 1 is a doubly solemn day. So I offer my good wishes to all for a happy and joyous Easter; even to those who do not celebrate the day (and I hope they will pardon me for it).
Christ is risen, and it’s not a joke.
14 minutes of fame
30 March 2018 by 7 Comments
In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.
—Andy Warhol
It seems the renowned Mr. Warhol was off by one minute. At least in the case of Scott Foster, a Chicago-area accountant who plays goal in a men’s recreational hockey league.
At every game in the National Hockey League, the home team is required to supply an emergency goaltender. Since every team has two goalies to begin with, a starter and a backup, the emergency goalie’s job normally consists of sitting in the press box and munching on free food supplied by the catering staff.
This season, Foster was one of the emergency goalies on the list of the Chicago Blackhawks, sitting in at about a dozen of their home games. Last night, in a game against the Winnipeg Jets, lightning struck. [Read more…]
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