The Book Corner 6/20. Robert Elsemere,
by Mrs.
Humphry Ward, published and wildly successful in
1888. The
authorette is mad for socialism, and also wrapped-up in the exciting
question of the day, was Christianity just a disgusting fraud, or might
there be something worthwhile left in the ruins? The Elsemere character
was made fun-of in later days, notably in 1923’s Told
by an Idiot by Rose
Macaulay, where papa routinely loses his religion
every few years or so, but
for Elsemere it’s all deadly serious. He promises
the supremely-beautiful rural Catherine that they would worship Christ
together when he proposes, and then, only
two years later,
realizes it’s all a fake and resigns his Anglican position and their
idyllic rural life, where he had been fighting valorously &
successfully for the little people. ... The story never
notices what a huge repulsive
betrayal this was — it is made clear that Catherine could’ve
gone ... I actually delayed reading the Times Literary Supplement magazine for a day or two to finish this appalling/amusing tripe. ... So Elsemere, through obvious holy self-neglect, manages to die in the 5th (?) year of his marriage, leaving behind a tiny tot & beloved wifey, + seas of mourning workmen who, the authorette rather improbably claims, continue on with his atheistic socialist religion — which is the usual embarrassing tarted-up deism — to glorious heights. It’s really kind of science fiction. Ward obviously thinks that such a thing would be wonderful wonderful, and so she writes it, and the idiots who agree bought the book. ... Henry James loved it.... 10/7/20. The Cuckoo Clock, Mrs. Molesworth. It’s an 1877 children’s book, a masterpiece I think. It is written so simply, kind-of stupid — but it penetrates to the core somehow. Near the end, the little girl learns that everything must obey orders — the sun, the moon, children. She is informed of this helpful insight by the cuckoo in the clock, who takes her on presumably dream adventures to many wonderful places.
I’ve applied a similar policy to other stories I hoped would be amusing but didn’t come up to snuff, and I think I’m becoming skilled at it. ... Macaulay’s Towers of Trezibond was a notably unfortunate example, where her lovely elegiac evocation of a lost world is trashed by a totally unnecessary/irrelevant tragedy in the last chapter. ... I must also recommend E. Nesbit, another brilliant children’s author, particularly The Enchanted Castle and The Magic City. Her “famous” book and big hit what got her started in 1906 was The Railway Children, but both the Castle and the City are masterpieces of fantasy and weirdness. In the Castle, a crowd of spectators for a concert are created magically, formed of umbrellas or something — but then, in some cases, they persist to the end of the book! One of ’em becomes a powerful London financial magnate! ... I should warn the gentle reader off of Nesbit’s “adult” novels, a few of which seemed to involve unlikely slinky-but-nevertheless-heart o’ gold women who died after dancing in the forest — except for her last novel The Lark which was really quite lovely. ... As in today’s best society, most of my authorettes were communists to one degree or another; Nesbit was a founding member ot the Fabian Society. Which, of course, hasn’t saved her from enthusiastic condemnation by contemporary perverts-of-the-week for her hideous racist blah blah etc. ... Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote A Little Princess in 1905, and while obviously related to the Shirley Temple movie, it’s better, of course. She, too, has her gutenberg page. Also outstanding is The Secret Garden. But she will swerve into depressing melodrama occasionally — actually, those most guilty of this sin are those who wrote the most, natch. ... My original expeditions into antique authorette serenity started with, I think, Georgette Heyer’s regency tripe and/or Angela Thirkell’s stuff. My graduation to the victorian/post-victorian “hard stuff” was occasioned when I bought an actual book I found in a beloved junk store, christian science lunatic Clara Louise Burnham’s Jewel....
RomanceAnd I also must recommend two contemporary romance authorettes, Lauren Denton and Denise Hunter — the latter ridiculously prolific, and God usually intervenes somewhere in the last few chapters to show the characters what’s right ... it’s really quite heart-warming. Both might be available at https://www.thriftbooks.com/ at admirably-used prices. Both were recommended by the otherwise-ridiculous World Magazine, the only positive thing they’ve been capable-of as far as I can tell — unless you crave endless thumb-suckery just like a liberal magazine. ... But the World recommendation was useful because most contemporary romance includes a wealth of gynecological information that I’m afraid I’m much too narrow-minded to appreciate. ... I find these authorettes share with Falnor the occasional need for a gothic melodrama skip, which has very little effect on the narrative as far as I can tell.... & then sadly Hunter’s later oeuvre seems to degenerate into a “counseling” quest, where some poor girly manages to unsnarl a pitiful psychological problem with skilled help. ... But I preferred the godly intervention. So I lapsed for a few months, but after reading at least one recent lifi book — well, 20 pages of it, probably — I returned, and I realized I should think of the Hunter books like my molesworth children’s books: Hunter’s stories are singularly improbable, but sweet — we don’t have to worry about her dying in a hideous international drug plot, or whatever my stupid lifi book was supposedly about. Hunter has a series set in Nantucket, a land of opulence and quaint summer seaside beauty, where romance appears to flourish. ... I probably couldn’t afford the actual Nantucket for a week, and I doubt I could stand it that long — but the books are about a magic land where everyone lives happily ever after.... 10/19/20. Kate O’Brien is probably the last of the readable hard-core lifi and As Music and Splendour may be the last of her books I’ll read, although I believe there are still a few bits & pieces. She is, in fact, a romance writer: her stories are about feisty always-beautiful Irish girls and, in general, the complicated unhappiness of their lives. Splendour is a particularly interesting & informative tale of opera singers who were “exported” from Ireland to Italy in the late nineteenth century. Dom Casmurro (1899) by Machado de Assis, translated from the Portuguese by Helen Caldwell. ... Now I will use my book corner to vociferate against lifi in general, and in particular, Dom Casmurro: F-! ... That’s letter F, minus ... beyond failure. ... It stank, and it stank in a way lifi is proud about: depicting misery and despair, hopefully inducing such in the reader so, in an ideal case, he’d off himself. ... The first few chapters were amusing: the story of a random friend’s “world as opera” concept — libretto by Satan, but music by God. The idea is played-around with skillfully, and then the book goes downhill, concentrating on the narrator’s glorious romance with his cute 14-year-old neighbor girl (when he’s 15), who he eventually marries, and who betrays him, or so the narrator is obsessively certain, by canoodling with the best friend and having his child. ... Amusingly, Machado de Assis was a late victorian, but in Brazil, not amongst my beloved British authorettes. He & they probably had comparable left-leaning politics, but the important difference is the lifi compulsory despair. (For a good time, you can read a dubiously-translated 6/20 article on de Assis’ racial purity; and google de Assis pix to see a complete selection of racial variety.) ...
So I sought to cleanse my reading pallet with Denise
Hunter’s Mending
Places,
copyright 2004 which, in the Hunter oeuvre,
means it’s got perhaps too-much sturm
& drang melodrama, much of which I shamelessly
skimmed —
not unlike the last 9/10ths of Dom
Casmurro — with this difference: the Hunter book
had a
happy ending.
... Child abuse
and rape are the topics ... Part of the super intellectual appeal of lifi is the reader or readerette is so superior, he-she-it is detached from the story — that is, doesn’t believe a word of it! — not in a billion billion years! ... I, on the other hand, being a kind of primitive throwback grunting savage, believe these stories I read, and I am made unhappy when they tell of despair. ... Darndest thing, eh!?!? PhilologySpeaking of super intellectual BS, Philology, The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities, by James Turner (2014 Princeton University Press), blows the gaffe on lifi, revealing its comparatively puerile youth which, apparently, was around 1870 — see this exciting page for how it was @ Cornell. The point being that all this nonsense about the sacred cause of literary fiction is just recently made-up stuff — a lot like the supposedly sacred-nature of journalism! — and is under our very eyes disappearing into the night, even as the Biden Landslide takes over our world. ... That is, the pitiful progressive sneaks invented literary fiction and journalism, and convinced the rest of us for years and years how beautiful and special they were. But they weren’t; & aren’t.... But Whoa! Here (1/3/22) is Classical Philology and Theology where it appears philology was going great guns throughout the 20th century what I never heard about! ... But then I never hear anything; Im always the last to know ... indeed I count on it.... H. Rider Haggardsmost famous books are She and King Solmons Mines both, along with many others, smash hit movies. The authors works are crawling with racism, and one paragraph will infect you irretrievably so that you cant help voting for the blood drinking fascist monster the next time he runs for president but, other than that, theyre really lovely, and he wrote vast quantities. He lived so long that the last ones must be bought from amazon, but the vast majority are available in mobi. And there are clinkers, mostly the earlier works where he was an amateur Thomas Hardy or worse, writing gloomy stories about gloomy girls who live near the sea and tend to wind-up in it — and even of those, Stella Fregelius is kind of good.... But the African & Egyptian books have hardly a false step and in particular his African witch doctors are a stirring and sympathetic crew. ... Well, I do skim/skip tedious sections — as in all my reading for that matter — cause I want to and I am the master of my fate, at least when Im engaged in reading amusing fiction ostensibly for entertainment despite any bits of wisdom I may accidentally encounter....
11/3/20. And now for a complete change of pace, Alexander William Kinglake’s Eothen: Traces of travel brought home from the east (~1844), a tremendously-amusing rendition of the fellow’s 1834 visit to the muslim realms, including the Christian holy lands. Kinglake is out for amusement, or something, but he promises there won’t be any boring statistics and so there weren’t. I imagine it was a very popular book; even today, Amazon has numerous different versions including kindle, and there’s a mobi too. Today’s culture morons would, hopefully, explode in outrage; he manages to insult everyone although, to be sure, leaving a little tolerance for his home team Anglicans. The story includes exciting adventure with the bubonic plaugue everywhere in the east, including Cairo.... Keeping-up with our whirlind tour of lifi thru the ages, I will complain about Geoffrey Chaucer and his Canterbury Tales, a revered lifi antiquity in the not-really-English “Old English” argot, but I got the “facing-page” simultaneous translation Bantam version @ amazon so I can kind-of read the original, “cheating” by reading the real-English translation when I had to, which was often. This was nice with the famous prologue where Chaucer introduces his storytellers, which is at least an education in how poetry can’t be translated, with Chaucer’s thoughts coming tripplingly off his tongue, but so obviously worse or at least differently off the tongue of the translator. It is no fault; this is an inevitability, summed-up in the pithy “poetry is what’s lost in translation”. But then I got to the Knight’s Tale, and it was awful. I don’t care what they say, it was annoying, drivelish — the character keeps explaining how he must shorten everything, before he goes into another endless reiteration of some idiotic poetical bogosity.... |
The Machinists & Their Secret SorrowThey are basically a harmless bunch, and much put upon, as their careers have careened into dust when CNC-controlled machining and worse took over the world. They speak a tightly-hermetic argot which appears to be intended to exclude outsiders and succeeds admirably — I’ve subscribed to Home Shop Machinist for years, and I think the offerings that weren’t totally opaque number in the small integers, usually involving some electronic gadget whose interaction with the machinery they had to explain in simpleton terms, since usually they barely understood it themselves. I believe their secret tongue took root even in their glory days as they assiduously annoyed their betters, like butinsky engineers such as my father. But Digital
Machinist,
the evil CNC-contemplating
offspring of Home
Shop Machinist,
offers Ed Nisley columns, who was the only
person I ever
saw explain that 3D printing takes approximatley forever — such a sad betrayal
of the otherwise sacred omerta
is of course forbidden in the normal regulation puffery of the
magazines & internet. But the rest of the magazine’s articles
are as
intensely
opaque as could possibly be desired. ... And I do not
The YokelsThe machinists have their excuses: many of the faithful were in fact employed as such before their places all closed, providing to be sure a lively market in giant metal lathes and other such, which many of these lunatics install in their snow-frozen barns. But many also enjoy the “I’m just a yokel” pose, where they pretend to be complete ignorami but just picked-up this machining thing ril ez ’cause they’re so manly & bright I guess, when they obviously have some background which they’ll certify by tossing in a technical phrase, just to show they’re really an insider — like the fellow who “learnt very quickly that my hand cut threads are crap” — I know I really hate it when that happens. ... The linuxistas do exactly the same thing in the Linux Format letters pages, which regularly feature sincere missives from complete Linux newbies who claim they figured-out some ridiculously complicated server nonsense, an’ it was so much better than Windows, come’on kids! ... But the Linux children have far less excuse, since their skills are still presumably saleable. Although perhaps not the idiots on the letters pages....
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The Cheap ’n’ Stupid Apple SD SocketIn my beloved silly cameras and older computers, one pokes an SD into the socket and it “snicks” almost all the way in, with a spring latch mechanism. Getting it out is a matter of pressing the thing a little, and it springs out. In my life, this mechanism has never failed, on numerous devices. I used to think Apple’s grotesque abandonment of the spring/latch socket, in favor of a much stupider cheaper system where the SD card sticks half way out — which was immediately copied by numerous other stupid companies like asus, imitating the cla$$y apple — was just stupid cost cutting, but then I realized it was in aid of another cherished latter-day Apple Inc. goal: to prevent the wretched user from any modification/expansion of his machine in any way. Not the historic Apple perhaps, but quite evident in recent years, as batteries and memory and hard drives got soldered-into phones & computers permanently.
... But Apple’s way ahead of that: the new macbrook pro has no SD card socket. My fourth hit when I googled “macbook missing SD socket” was some fawning macintosh fan drip claiming it was the camera companies’ fault for not zooming-up the wifi or blue something or whatever he was babbling about.... The Sad Decline of Asus, + Usux™ MediocrityBut the LOL got an HP laptop where, as we discovered when we tried it, the SD socket works! ... I am so jealous. My last HPs, a laptop and a desktop, behaved so shamefully I’ve stayed away from the brand for years, but who knows; perhaps I’ll have to reconsider. ... Particularly since Asus appears to be floundering, at least judging by my 12/17 Asus VivoBook F510UA FHD Laptop — no longer available, maybe for good reason, since I finally had to “recover” idiot Windows in a 4-hour operation, after some stupid asus program BhcMgr.exe would hang-up the startup. ... Really, I expect Windows to constantly complain about missing programs, but this stalled the boot — a great tradition in really stupid software, what asks at some crucial moment “What’s your favorite color?” or some other crucial query, like how some program one has never heard of is missing, and then offers nothing to do about it but click “OK”. This is the kind of stupidity we pay for in a brand name, and I’m afraid Asus is now that brand. ... My computer herd includes numerous discarded Asii of the LOL, and I guess I should’ve noticed the trend.... My 12/17 Asus VivoBook F510UA FHD laptop continues to exhibit stupid symptoms, most noticeably this time (1.) sound stopped working and (2.) stupid Win10 “search” thing was obviously crashing. After much sturm und drang I “fixed” the sound by updating the driver in device driver — after reading the web advice to roll it back. But the win10 search is still broken. I figure it’s just Usux™ and its marvelous wonders, and I think I’ve noticed the recourse to win10 search — by idiot web savants — much reduced: it used to be the first way to get something, but I assume it’s breaking all over, and I figure anyway a Win10 system with just one or two things broken — is that unusual? ... And I will guess it almost certainly has something to do with the lovely and gracious Cortana, Usux™’s entry in the stupid talking computer sweepstakes what everybody on earth wants so much it hurts, so they can get those precious talking advertisements they so crave.... My beloved 4/17 Lenovo win10 desktop shows no such symptoms, somehow managing to concoct a win10 computer that doesn’t fall over every few months. Unfortunately the Lenovo laptops have had bad reports — eviiil data stealing — but even then. ... But I went to my Lenovo desktop to see how the win10 Stupid Search™ is supposed to work, ’n’ of course it’s cracking-up at the Cortana™ advertising! Before I get a prompt to type, it’s supposed to display a wunnerful cornucopia of stupid ads, what my desktop does. ... So really, the brokenness of the asus could be perceived as a feature.... But then my display driver update for the Asus F510UA accidentally enabled my beloved PSP9, until then AWOL. ... So, really, it’s a net win.... Acer Too?My beloved asus vivobook finally was unable to play VLC music without massive stuttering, so I looked into an Acer Aspire E5-575 — which did play for a little without stutter, but then, no. But the asus’d probably work perfectly here in the homebase also, where it knows it’s being watched and in peril. ... The acer ’though is obviously part of the universal Windows 10/Computers-Stink-let’s-use-our-phones movement which will leave me bereft not too far in the dreaded icy future. Acer Power... The most amusing stupidity so far is the power button won’t turn off the computer. ... Kuel, eh? ... Oh wretched techno-geezer, what a fool U R, so childlike in the empty fields of modernity. ... All I had to do was hold the stupid key down for about 2 or three seconds. Of course! ... An innovation introduced, no doubt, after thousands of the things were returned because of people accidentally turning the stupid laptop off. ... Every five-year-old knows this hermetic inner secret these days; even I knew, in a slightly different context. ... Of course there is no way to google it. Since everyone already knows it. ... The pitiful manual, which I managed to examine after some difficulty — it insisted on coming-up in the unreadable unusable Usux™ edge — has two pointless topics, the contents of which have undoubtedly been obsolete/bogus for years, and didn’t include the stupid actively-hostile power key.... And really, the acer’s hermetic hold-down power-off is better than the Asus, which has the same stupid keyboard power-button, but doesn’t require a delay — although somehow I wasn’t constantly turning it off by accident. ... In general I’d say asus has pulled-ahead of acer in the stupidity-mediocrity sweepstakes; I got the Acer laptop about a year later than the asus for pretty much the same price — ~$550 — and it has better amenities, like an ethernet fixture — I had to use one of those wretched USB things for the asus — and a VGA port. Its SD card socket, although not the old-style “working” socket, is nevertheless arranged on the machine so the stupid card doesn’t poke-out unnecessarily. ... And of course it seems to play VLC music without rampant stuttering.... But I must anxiously note that this “safety” keyboard power-button hold-down overlays the well-known forced-power-off, where one holds down the power button for 10 seconds or so. Although maybe that still works? ... Right, normally one uses forced-shutdown when the machine won’t shut-down normally, so if holding the power button down for a few seconds doesn’t do it, probably holding it down long-enough will. I can’t really test that easily, and it’ll probably not work when it’s most infuriating.... But Acer’s really OK, or at least the most OK of the dwindling laptop offerings — particularly compared to HP. ... And I got a Windows 7 Dell laptop around 10/19 which wasn’t bad ... so far.... Ditto HPThe LOL’s beloved HP laptop got that 2-months-out-of-warranty battery blues, which is the HP behavior I so fondly recall: broken shoddy hardware and software. ... That leaves me with Acer (or Dell, for laptops) or Lenovo (for desktops — never laptops) for my next pointless purchase. ... Ad astra! ... And then I was owenizing a different HP laptop, a special hand-me-down with a sizzling SSD drive! ... Miniature of course — 120Gb — but I had clever schemes to use an additional 128Gb SD plug-in, and it was all going well and then it dived into the pit of oblivion and may never be seen whole again. ... I’m wiping it as I type indignantly, and maybe it’ll just get goin’ good & all will be forgiven ... but I’m not holding the proverbial breath. ... And my instinctive regard for both HP and SSD drives has of course been considerably enhanced. ... And then, after it came to a perilous kind-of life again, my beloved Macro Express decided it would start at every reboot with the helpful stupid useless settings/hints section, which the exact same program doesn’t do anywhere else.... The Broken EdgeOne of
the other things noticeably broken this week in my A Win10 Search FixEventually, wandering the internet, I fixed my stupid Asus VivoBook F510UA FHD Win10’s search convulsions:
That did it! For today. ... The Edge browser on the other hand, judging by internet whining, is usually broken, so who cares. And of course when I click the Stupid Search and it asks “look on the web?” or whatever drivel it emits, and I foolishly assent, it immediately runs the Stupid™ Edge™ browser, whatever my super Win10™ browser default and, of course, it falls over. ... Behold the Holy Way of Mediocrity.
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Backslash-Quote: The Greatest Bug of AllWhen the earth was cooling, computerists, probably those Kernighan & Ritchie guys, figured C-language programs should have command-line arguments, and they made it so. At that moment or shortly afterwards, people wanted command-line arguments with spaces in them, which was supported by quotes. Thus, one could go grep phrase *.txt or grep "phrase with spaces" *.txt. Both ways! Total flexibility! But then the guru masters realized they must do something; what if someone wanted a quote in the argument? So they introduced the backslash-quote, i.e. grep "he said \"Hi\"" *.txt. It was a backslash presumably because C-language already used that punctuation in C-language literals and printf syntax to indicate special characters, including quote marks, control characters, random hex values. ... But only the double-quotes were “escaped” for the command-line. This was a terrible error, because they didn’t provide for escaping the backslash itself! They only used it as an escape character when it came before a double-quote mark, and otherwise just passed it through. Perhaps they wondered, who could possibly be stupid-enough to need an argument like “c:\windows\stupid directory\”? ... Of course, they hadn’t met Bill Gates. ... MSDOS and later Windows had directory paths just like decent operating systems (i.e Unix) except to make them different, they used the backslash instead of the forward slash. To make absolutely sure everything was screwed-up forever, the option character, normally a - hyphen in Unix, was a forward-slash in MSDOS. Also, incidentally, the path separator was changed from a colon to a semicolon. ... Perhaps there had been some wacko software patent action contemporary to the bad dreams of MSDOS’ architects, but that’s what they did. Windows 95And then, Windows 95 and some version of NT introduced spaces in file and directory names. From there it was only a matter of minutes probably before somebody tried to describe a directory in a command-line like stupid-program "c:\stupid directory\" arg3 and failed utterly: the stupid-program would see a single argument c:\stupid directory" arg3 with that wacky double-quote stuck in the middle and nothing would work. Today, all the
compilers I tested include an additional
“feature”: the sequence \\"
will
be seen as a single backslash, followed by a double-quote I believe that the pre-2001 Borland state of bugitude lasted through much of the history of the feature; I don’t have an adequate supply of antique compilers (!) to really tell, but my guess is Borland stole the feature from some Unix or Microsoft compiler around 1988, and probably at least at that time nobody provided the \\" fix.
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FINDJ: A Logical GrepJust like Spock! So much more sensible. ... No, not really; you should assume findj is bad and dangerous and will erase your hard drive almost instantaneously, but here in the attic, at last, I can go findj "balm&gilead" c:\gregor\textkeep\bible.txt and if you had the Guttenberg Project ASCII bible text, your copy might also print :::::::::
c:\gregor\textkeep\bible.txt
It prints a supposedly-informative message if invoked without arguments.... ...
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