After fiddling around with Substack for a few weeks, I've gotten my account with it into the proper "publication" form, and published, so far, a short introduction and four essays. I seem to be getting readers and a few comments over there, including some of the people who read me here. So if I have an idea for an essay, that's where it will appear. I expect I'll still make short personal comments here. But click And Shoot Well with Arrows if you want to take a look at the longer form.
I learned recently about an anthology titled World Poetry, published by W.W. Norton. It was described as covering poetry in a wide range of languages, from ancient Mesopotamia to the present; the description named poets I like, including Sappho, Li Bai (formerly called Li Po), François Villon, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Arthur Rimbaud. I was wondering if it might be a good addition to our belles lettres shelves. The University of Kansas library had a copy, so this Monday I borrowed it to take a look.
In some ways it lives up to that description. It does have all the poets I named, and less well-known ones such as Mahadeviyakka and William Dunbar and Mark Alexander Boyd. It had Psalm 137, my favorite; if they were only going to have one psalm, they picked a good one. And I liked the editors' decision to group poets primarily by era, not by language, to avoid having isolated chapters about poets in less widely studied languages whom most people hadn't heard of.
( Read more...Collapse )I appreciate staying in touch with a few friends here, but "Here's to our noble selves! There are damn few of us left." In the hope of finding more readers, I'm venturing onto Substack. If you'd like to see me over there, look for https://substack.com/@williamhstoddard793246 . I'll still carry on conversations here, but if I have something substantial to say, I'll write an essay and post it there.
Over the years I've often made an approximation to Chinese food, but I haven't felt satisfied with the effect, at least in recent years. But just this weekend I've changed my technique in a way that gets closer: I've used two ounces of sesame oil instead of one; I've turned the temperature up one notch higher, two three-quarters of the way around the dial; and I've done the cooking quickly, with steady stirring. I've also used a spoonful of arrowroot, dissolved in water, to thicken the liquids, but that's something I started doing earlier this year. I was pleased with the result: the vegetables came out crisper, in an effect more like real Chinese dishes, and that gave it more flavor. (The specific combination was narrow strips of beef, celery, and green bell pepper, with soy sauce, garlic, and ginger.)
Yesterday we went for groceries (a sign of partial recovery) and as part of the shopping I put more Kleenex in our cart—we've gone through a lot!—including one of those little 6 packs. C asked me why I didn't just put some Kleenex from a bigger box into a freezer bag and carry that. I said that I preferred the prepackaged form, and she basically shrugged and said everyone had their own tastes.
As we walked out to the car it hit me: She carries a purse, which has space for a freezer bag (though it's often crammed). I have pockets, which don't, but which those little packets are exactly sized to fit.
Not "bias" in the sense of hostility, but a difference in how it's natural for men and women to think, based on their affordances.
"Sick? Is that what it is?"
"Yes. I was sick once, about thirty years ago. It was much like this."
—Robert A. Heinlein, Beyond This Horizon
On Wednesday, I started having premonitory respiratory symptoms of what turned into a full infection of some sort. C has followed, about a day behind me (of course we share all our microfauna). I won't rehearse all the medical effects, which are always tedious to discuss except for diagnostic purposes. But it's been a while since our last illness, so I had forgotten what being sick is like qualitatively: First, the overall exhaustion, which makes any minor task fatiguing; for example, our dirty dishes have piled up, being washed only as essential for eating meals. Second, and most surprising, the reduced appetite: Not merely that I don't seem to need as much food, even when a little fevered, or even that I don't have much desire for it, but that I actually find it an effort to eat, and at about half of a normal meal it becomes Sisyphean. In fact, for the first day and a half I ate nearly nothing, which perhaps tells me what anorexics struggle with feeling all the time. And perhaps more disturbing than either, a sensible loss of cognitive functioning: I feel as if I had shed at least a standard deviation on the IQ bell curve, if not more.
( Read more...Collapse )A few minutes ago, I sent my final edit of GURPS Ring of Fire in to Steve Jackson Games. This is a supplement based on Eric Flint's 1632 and its many, many sequels. I spent part of today checking the spelling and grammar, and more of it on making a few final revisions—for example, adjusting the prices of some gear, and adding a list of suitable GURPS character traits to a whole bunch of major characters. Now it goes into other hands than mine. No idea when it will come out, but I think it's ready to do so.
Back in the 1960s, one of the books I read from the city library was a volume by Lessley Conger about her experiences reading various classics, from Vergil to Thoreau, which I remembered fondly, in a desultory way. Just lately I became curious and managed to track down the title, Adventures of an Ordinary Mind, and purchase a copy, which I've now added to the list of books I've reread after a lapse of half a century. I found some passages that I still remembered, notably the one where Conger quotes Crito's responses in one of Plato's dialogues, which uniformly express agreement with whatever Socrates has just said, and then envisions Socrates protesting "No, now wait a minute" as she steamrollers over him and disagrees with everything he says (the first place I encountered the "Yes, Socrates!" trope); but I found some equally striking passages that I hadn't remembered at all, and may not have especially noticed in my teens; for example, the start of "If you get to Heaven before I do":
. . . Please ask the travel agency up there to assign me a different guide. I know that Beatrice is ineffably beautiful, incredibly virtuous, and the absolute epitome of perfection in womanhood—and I have a feeling I wouldn't like her much. It's the way she goes around talking to Dante in the tone "a mother uses to a delirious child." I can just hear her.
Smug female monster.
( Read more...Collapse )Yesterday, as we were getting ready to run errands, I spotted what looked like a dog out in the middle of the grassy area to the east of our parking structure—one that's surrounded by duplexes on all sides but ours. I didn't see a leash or a human being, so my first thought was that someone had let their dog run loose. But I looked more closely, and it didn't look quite like a dog: The coat was an unusual, slightly tawny color, the build was gaunt, and the ears seemed unusually large. When C joined me in the car, she agreed with my guess: that we had a coyote sitting out on the grass in the middle of the day, bold as brass, not intimidated at all by our watching it, though happily it didn't show any inclination to approach us. C saw it walk off between two of the buildings, approaching the street on the other side.
I hadn't known we had such visits; up to now I've only seen squirrels, rabbits, and various birds. We'll have to be more watchful when we go out; a coyote is large enough to be a potential threat. And I'm glad we keep Macavity indoors.
In an article I just copy edited, the authors make the following statement:
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
When I read that, it says to me, first, that the authors are saying that they don't know of any problematic relationships, not that they don't have any (how carefully did they examine the issue?); and second, that they don't have relationships that visibly influenced their work. That is, they're hedging the statement so thoroughly that they don't actually commit themselves to anything! "Yes, we were influenced by getting paid by so and so, but nobody suspected that, so it's okay."
The thing is, this isn't peculiar to these particular authors. I've seen the exact phrasing over and over in articles originating from China; it seems as if it's either a dictated by the Chinese government, or passed around and copied among Chinese authors. It makes me think of the old stereotypes about "face" cultures. In our current climate of widespread scientific fraud it's a bit worrisome.
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