Today I learned: the first English translation of Euclid included pop-ups for 3-D proofs. (I was fact checking a claim that John Dee was the translator. No, but he wrote the preface and did some editing.)

Heaven preserve me from linking to Slate, but this article on the re-printing of John M. Ford's work is news too good not to share.

But I reconnected Ford’s family and editors at Tor, and after a year of delicate back-and-forth spearheaded by Beth Meacham, Tor and the family have reached an agreement that will gradually bring all of his books back into print, plus a new volume of stories, poems, Christmas cards, and other uncollected material. First up, in fall 2020, is the book that introduced me to Ford, The Dragon Waiting. Then, in 2021, Tor will publish—at long last—the unfinished Aspects, with an introduction by Neil Gaiman.

Now if we can see a full re-print of Cordwainer Smith, and if Pamela Dean ever gets that last Secret Country book out....

You know what limited this sort of thing in the past? Dueling.

The world of young-adult-fiction Twitter, or YA Twitter, is a very intense place, prone to constant callouts and opinion-policing, particularly on matters of identity and social justice. And things seem to have only gotten worse since Kat Rosenfield wrote the definitive article about this subculture for Vulture, "The Toxic Drama on YA Twitter" in 2017.

Death by wallpaper

SHADOWS FROM THE WALLS OF DEATH, printed in 1874 and measuring about 22 by 30 inches, is a noteworthy book for two reasons: its rarity, and the fact that, if you touch it, it might kill you. It contains just under a hundred wallpaper samples, each of which is saturated with potentially dangerous levels of arsenic.

Ars enecat, vita brevis, hmm?

AI does classic book covers: Link one.
AI does classic book covers: Link two.

In vengeance, Peculiar:

Some Limericks.

He must be a quintessential fool who does not realize that the following fifty limericks are a document of enduring value. And I beg leave to say that the collecion has been made not for such people, but for those who can appreciate its significance.

... 

I shall quote none of them. Caveat lector asinum.

When passing to the other world, the soul of a person who has hit a dog “shall fly howling louder and more sorely grieved than the sheep does in the lofty forest when the wolf ranges.” A man who kills a dog is required by the Avesta to perform a list of penances eighteen lines long. One of the penances is to kill a thousand cats.

From a fascinating book review by Chas Clifton. Another for the reading list!

An interview with Tim Powers, about the wellsprings of his ideas, his research methods and writing process.

Peevish marginalia from monastic manuscripts

Apropos of John Bellairs, I didn't realize that Edward Gorey did his illustrations.

I just pre-ordered Moro Rogers' upcoming graphic novel, and so should you.

Don't miss the teaser for John Scalzi's new fantasy novel, The Shadow War of the Night Dragons, Book One: The Dead City (announced yesterday).

Lot of overlap between a parody of bad fantasy and good Terry Pratchett. I expect it took a certain amount of willpower for Scalzi not just to keep writing.

Update: And a follow up, a statistical look at fantasy novel titles.

Here's more on the revisionist-history Lord of the Rings (which Smartdogs mentioned in the comments a few posts back). Sundry observations:

• Somehow, this brings strongly to my mind the more paranoid stories on modern-day Pravda. Something to do with that Slavic soul we hear so much about, I guess.
  
  
• I find the excerpts barely readable, in the stylistic sense. Substantial (though far from total) blame can go to the translator. But it makes me wonder how Tolkien comes across in translation. I can't imagine these stories without his philologist's pen evoking all those pre-1066 ancestral memories buried in our dictionaries. I suppose it likely does well in the Germanic languages.* Yet another big score for us native English speakers!
  
  
• On a similar note, ever a borderline Luddite and nature Romantic, I still find myself siding with Gandalf in excerpted dialog. Who cares if Mordor may eventually produce the iPad?
  
  
• Many things indicate that the author is not a very serious Tolkien fan. I leave their identification as an exercise to our nerdy readers.

Needless to say, I'm in no rush to read the whole thing.

*Also Finnish, maybe? I have the sense, almost totally derived from folk music, that there are certain vocabulary and idioms, mostly Ingrian- and Karelian-oriented, that hint at a more tribal, barbaric, pagan past. What other languages have such a tension? Maybe the Turkic tongues, when they prefer old steppe vocabulary over other terms. The Turks seem to do this when they use ak and kara in lieu of beyaz and siyah (white and black). The latter are the dictionary words, but the former show up in the family names, toponyms, songs, strong idioms and such, from Turkey to Mongolia. (Digression: karakurbağası="dark frog" i.e. "toad.") I suppose their equivalents of Latin and French are Arabic and Persian; no doubt the tension was much stronger before Atatürk's linguistic reforms (makes you wonder what we'd be speaking had Tolkien been to England as Mustafa Kemal was to Turkey). But nothing's even in the same league as English for this stuff. Hooray for us!

A vicar has revived an ancient law to call members of her parish together for archery practice. (hence)

This is clearly for the sake of their morals.

S.M. Stirling's Santa Fe vampire novel is now released! Samples are available. Been looking forward to this one (though it is not the first Santa Fe vampire novel).

Thanks to Chas for the reminder, and for a very pleasant recent visit:

...layers and layers. Ethnic balkanization and people cherishing hatreds and triumphs that go back centuries. Martyrs and massacres. Deep roots in the earth.

That's us! Don't be a stranger!

Update: Can't really recommend this one, alas. S&M Stirling would be an apt moniker in this instance. He really seems rather more interested in the sexual implications of his vampires' abilities than in, say, plot.

Challenged by Peculiar, I have no choice but to respond. No promises of anything high, or even middle brow.

Natalie Babbitt, The Search for Delicious. When I got older I could identify the emotion this book brought over me as nympholepsy, an affliction I have yet to recover from. It's about magic, and nature, and how we abandon them.

William Faulkner, The Reivers. My favorite novel. Unflinching sacrifice of our innocence.

Homer, The Iliad. Is this cheating? I don't care. Rage is our first word. I will say that jack's senior essay helped me understand it quite a bit more deeply than I could have on my own.

Epictetus, Discourses.

Do you then show me your improvement in these things? If I were talking to an athlete, I should say, "Show me your shoulders"; and then he might say, "Here are my halteres." You and your halteres look to that. I should reply, "I wish to see the effect of the halteres." So, when you say: "Take the treatise on the active powers, and see how I have studied it." I reply, "Slave, I am not inquiring about this, but how you exercise pursuit and avoidance, desire and aversion, how your design and purpose and prepare yourself, whether conformably to nature or not. If conformably, give me evidence of it, and I will say that you are making progress: but if not conformably, be gone, and not only expound your books, but write such books yourself; and what will you gain by it?

Sheri S. Tepper, Beauty. Hard for me to go back to this one, but I read it perhaps twenty times when I was fifteen. I'll still read anything she wants to write.

G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday. In which we learn that the world is mad, but we still have our duty.

Luo Guanzhong, Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I use this book constantly to help me understand and deal with practical life. This is probably unhealthy.

Diane Duane, So You Want to be a Wizard. "I am on errantry, and I greet you."

C. S. Lewis' Narnia series. I'm not sure the effect on me was a beneficial one; I seem to have spent a great deal of my life assuming that at some point I would find a way into another world, and so didn't need to do my Social Studies homework.

Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain. A good part of these books is about the joy of useful work, and also there is Princess Eilonwy.

Notably absent: overt religion, much philosophy (the Discourses scarcely count), any sci-fi, medieval works, or Xenophon. Hmm.

The Querencia folks have a fun meme going: name the ten books which had the biggest influence on you. Influence is an interesting question, since influences are decidedly not the same as favorites. I think my list would have to run as follows (roughly chronological in my life):

J.R.R. Tolkein, Lord of the Rings: I'm not ashamed to be a nerd. And quite a lot of my personality is in there: philology, history, myth and epic, ethnography, poetry, Old English/Norse influence, a sense of loss of the old wonders, wilderness, mountains, rivers. I just re-read it and I still love it.

Hergé, The Tintin oeuvre: World travel, ethnography, archaeology and a great fondness for Britishness (yes, of course I know they're French).

Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang: Wilderness and the American West, anarchist sympathies, environmentalism without the sanctimony and pseudo-spirituality.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World: Didn't spawn, but sharply amplified my discomfort with government and "progress."

The Kalevala: If I were really pursuing the thread of influence here, I suppose the ultimate source is the liner notes on Seleniko by Värttinä. Weird folk poetry, epic, non-Indo-European tongues; I think this was my first awareness that there's poetry which really must be examined in the original. And that other languages are much more fun to learn than Spanish. And that that Anon. guy wrote a lot of really good stuff.

David Quammen, Song of the Dodo: This is where I began to get seriously interested in evolution and biogeography. I believe I read Steve's review galleys.

Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa: Travel, adventure and bloody good writing together, that's how to live!

Patrick O'Brian, The Aubrey-Maturin Novels: Again, contains a large percentage of my fascinations, and remains my ideal of English prose. There's a lot of how to live here too, even if you don't have Frenchmen to beat up on.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Not an approach I'd necessarily favor anymore, but she definitely got me fired up about reading the classics and exercising the critical faculties.

W.A. Mozart, The Magic Flute [score]: An odd entry, but no one can deny its influence on me. My relationship with music and general creativity, not to mention the inside of my head, has never been the same.

Interesting to note that only two (Huxley and Mozart) had anything to do with school, and Mozart is the only entry from the St. John's College program. Orthodoxy is notably absent, but not everything is about books; a few books were mildly influential there, but nothing was decisive. At least eight remain favorites, which is nice (might have to revisit Brave New World). All the other favorites wouldn't be favorites without these.

Honorable mentions: The New World by Frederick Turner: sci-fi can be so much more than gadgetry. Also, David Roberts and Craig Childs: outdoor adventure for people whose brains outmass their other glands. And of course Bodio, though I had the good fortune to get him through spoken word and excellent dinners more than through printed pages. And I have him to thank for four of the listed ten.

Odious?

The Necronomicon: "like the Bible.... but different."

Thanks Chas!

Book Review: Encyclopedia Brown: Sundown in Adaville

American letters can boast few geniuses. Skillful craftsman and observers, yes, but the flash of insight which leaves everything you read afterwards changed, I can think of only two writers, both stylistically inferior. One is Poe, and the other is Hammett.

Let me make myself clear. I'm not claiming that Hammett is superior to (say) Faulkner as a writer, but that his writing irreversibly changed literature itself. The noir novel, and the noir hero, the detective, are instantly recognizable, and that is evidence of the force of Hammett's perception. Which brings us to Sundown.

Encyclopedia Brown, boy detective, is a well-worn figure. Solving cases before dessert thanks to the trivia he has absorbed, he fulfills every nerdy, obsessive pre-teen's dream of power and acclaim. Despite his enemies' physical prowess, he invariably triumphs, saving the downtrodden, punishing the wicked, and outpacing the adults. All at 25¢ a day, plus expenses.

The shock of Sunset, then, is to begin with Encyclopedia running. He knows his pursuers are faster, and as he tries to escape, his planning is constantly interrupted by a flow of now useless information:

The blindworm is neither blind nor a worm.
There are no penguins at the North Pole.
Turtles have exceptional night vision.
--I've got to get away from them--
Nathan Samuels began the United Federation of Planets.

And instead of Encyclopedia regnant, we see him the victim of an appalling crime. His life does not improve through the rest of the book.

The plot, which would be criminal to reveal, centers on the revelation that Adaville is, with the willing aid of the police chief, a Sundown town. As outside forces begin to expose the Adaville elite, the illegitimate powers within struggle to maintain their positions. Alliances are made, broken, and remade. Battlelines are drawn. Men and women die. And slowly but inexorably Encyclopedia Brown is stripped of each ally in turn.

The noir hero, of course, always stands alone. His moral code is uniquely his, and he follows it without compromise in a world in which morality and hypocrisy are equivalent. What makes Sunset work so well is watching Encyclopedia manipulate those around him, from his best friend and his father to his worst enemy (Bugs Meany, as abominable as ever) while trying to stay his own course.

Our distance from the detective is greater in Sunset than in previous books. We aren't given the insight into his motivations we might like, and certain chapters are heavily elliptical. This is a book which rewards re-reading. We do learn to see his relentless absorption of trivia as a method of imposing order on a chaotic, meaningless universe: god may be dead, but the melting point of platinum is constant.

The book wraps up in destruction, naturally. The noir hero, dedicated to truth, must destroy or be destroyed by the lies of the rest of the world once he comes into contact with it ("takes the case"). In all, a satisfactory addition to the genre, and an excellent addition to Encyclopedia Brown canon.

Larissa has a book out! Check it out online. Fashion isn't exactly my thing (to understate the case vastly, vastly), but seeing as many of Masha Archer's creations would not be the least out of place amongst Chinese minorities or inside an Egyptian tomb, I want a copy.