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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Steven desJardins' LiveJournal:
| Sunday, May 4th, 2008 | |
| 10:40 pm | Caroline the Moderately Surprising Back when I was in middle school, I took the SAT's as part of a Johns Hopkins research program, and did pretty well. The program's still going on, and my niece Caroline, who's in sixth grade now, took the SCAT test last fall. The awards ceremony was today. Caroline had the highest quantitative, the highest verbal, and the highest combined scores in the state of Maryland. Even for a family that's accustomed to doing well on standardized tests, that's moderately surprising. |
| Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 | |
| 2:14 am | Unexpected Discoveries I'm almost finished with a novel for Project Gutenberg, a juvenile pulp paperback called A Prisoner of Morro written during the Spanish-American War, set in the Spanish-American War. I think this is one of the ones I picked up for a few dollars at World Fantasy Convention, when one of the dealers started heavily discounting some of his stock. Today I started poking around on the web to see what I could find out about the author, Ensign Clark Fitch, U. S. N. What I found was that this was part of a series of books a young author wrote under a pseudonym, a few years before he began publishing under his own name: Upton Sinclair. I think it's important to preserve cheap pulp paperbacks, to preserve a large sample of the popular literature of previous eras before it vanishes forever. It feels odd—and good—to discover that one of these books is more significant than I suspected. (It is, incidentally, not a good novel, but he was sixteen years old when he wrote it, and was writing at the rate of fifty-six thousand words a week.) |
| Tuesday, January 1st, 2008 | |
| 1:14 am | New Year's resolution I'd like to learn Hungarian. It would be nice if I could get to the point of being able to puzzle out an average written text, with the help of a dictionary. My hypothesis is that that's the point where learning the language goes from being difficult and frustrating, to slightly less difficult and actually kind of fun. |
| Thursday, December 27th, 2007 | |
| 8:06 am | Undistributed Proofreading I decided to do one project solo, without putting it through Distributed Proofreaders. It was a short book, and I thought it would be a good experience. Biggest problem: the tools assume that the book's been stitched together from DP from individual page files. Starting with a single text file means that there are no page markers to work with, which means the program can't associate the scans of each page with the associated text. Makes it harder to double-check things. I'd definitely want to come up with a work-around before doing this again. As for the proofreading itself, I think the accuracy is probably pretty good. I read through the text file once, then ran the spell-checker and various automated tests, and found about a dozen typos I'd missed on the first pass (including obvious ones like "flre" for "fire"). That's more than I'd like to have missed, but not so many that I'm seriously concerned. Still, it can use another pass to try to catch more errors. It'll probably be a few days before I can upload it, anyway, since somebody has to check that it's in the public domain before Project Gutenberg will accept it. (It was published in 1878, so there's no real question, but they usually only review the copyright clearances about once a week.) So I'll wait to get the clearance, then read through it one more time. In the meantime, if you want to take a look, I've put The Forest King; or, The Wild Hunter of the Adaca, by Hervey Keyes, up on my website. |
| Saturday, December 22nd, 2007 | |
| 1:48 am | The Chauvinism of Missionaries I'm currently proofing the account by a missionary of his time in India. It's fairly interesting when religion isn't the subject, tolerable when discussing Christianity in isolation, and infuriatingly bigoted when contrasting Christianity to native religions or discussing native religions without reference to Christianity. I just came to a passage which is a mild, but otherwise typical, example. Once, when thirty miles away from Ranee To me, it sounds more the other way around. The poor man has a thoughtful conception of sin, while the lad taught in school merely parrots what he's been told. But the missionary sees any deviation for Christian thought as mere error, so a sophisticated philosophy which differs from his own is interpreted as amusing ignorance. If he's typical of missionaries of the period, it's no wonder they had (by his own account) virtually no success in making converts, despite decades of effort. |
| Wednesday, December 19th, 2007 | |
| 5:22 pm | The Melting-Pot It's been a while since I mentioned any of the books I've been reading, or posting. I should try to catch up with the backlog; it's nice having a record. In the meantime, I wanted to show off the HTML version of The Melting-Pot, by Israel Zangwill, which I think turned out very well. |
| Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 | |
| 11:31 pm | Accessorize my e-Book I bought a Sony Reader Digital Book to take with me on long trips, so I don't have to carry a heavy bag full of books. I've read a couple of books on it and I'm reasonably satisfied. The biggest problem is the cover, which is made of leather or a leather-like material. The pictures in the online store don't emphasize the cover, so I didn't realize this until I had it. I'm going on a vegetarian tour of India next month, and I'd rather not make a bad impression. Unfortunately, the replacement covers I can find are all either leather (and expensive), or amazingly ugly (and expensive). My idea is to make a sort of slipcover for it—get a piece of denim that's somewhat larger than the cover, fold it over (cutting out a notch where the brackets are), and staple the interior folds in place. (Sewing would be better, but I can't sew.) If the craft-y people reading this think this will/won't work, or have a better suggestion, I'd appreciate hearing from them. I'd also appreciate suggestions for what books to load onto it. So far I've loaded it with public domain books by Frank Richard Stockton, Rafael Sabatini, Ernest Bramah, Alexandre Dumas, Anthony Trollope, Lord Dunsany, James Branch Cabell, Mór Jókai, and Sir Walter Scott. I also downloaded a travel book by Harry de Windt, and plan to look for more travel books in the PG catalog. I also plan to get some in-copyright works as well, but I haven't found much that's available, that I want to read, and that I don't already own. A few books by Lawrence Watt-Evans, some Robert E. Howard, a John M. Ford Star Trek novel. Out-of-print s.f. is probably my best bet, but I'm not sure what's out there. |
| Thursday, October 25th, 2007 | |
| 12:26 am | Lars and the Real Girl Lars and the Real Girl is the best movie I've seen in a long time. Lars is a solitary person with severe social anxiety—you describes other people's touch as like the feeling you get after your foot gets numb from the cold, then starts to warm up. A co-worker is obviously pining after him, but the idea plainly terrifies him. And worst of all, everyone is pestering him to have dinner, get a girlfriend, don't spend so much time alone. So one day...he orders a sex doll. And he introduces her to his family as his new girlfriend, Bianca, a Brazilian missionary, who has to use a wheelchair to get around, who doesn't speak much because her English is so poor, who doesn't have any clothes because the airplane lost her luggage. He's delusional. And the psychiatrist they bring him to tells them to go along with. The delusion is serving a purpose, even if they don't know what it is, and the best thing to do is play along, while bringing him in for weekly therapy. And soon the whole town is playing along. Because, really, what else are they going to do? They like Lars. And it's fun to pretend. Soon Bianca has more of a social life than Lars does. And in his companionship with the doll, and his sessions with the psychiatrist, Lars slowly finds his way past the anxieties that have held himself back so long. The premise, reduced to a single line, sounds like a comedy. And it is a very funny movie. But at its heart it's a serious movie, because the important relationship is the one Lars is most afraid of—the love between Lars and the real girl. This is a movie that could go wrong in so many different ways, yet never does. It always treats Lars, and his delusions, with respect. |
| Friday, October 19th, 2007 | |
| 9:44 pm | Business Advice I'm scanning Harold Whitehead's Dawson Black: Retail Merchant, a novel intended to illustrate sound business practices. At one point, Dawson Black proposes the following motto: Eternal humping is the price of Success. |
| Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 | |
| 9:00 pm | E-books of the Week I haven't uploaded any books to Project Gutenberg recently, but I've scanned several. Fifty-Two Stories For Girls is just that, fifty-two stories ranging from three to nineteen pages, in the categories School and Home; Girlhood and Youth; Pluck, Peril, and Adventure; In the World of Faery; and Romance in History. Dainty's Cruel Rivals is an 1898 pulp romance by Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller. I've put in the St. Valentine's Day queue, meaning it won't be released into the proofreading rounds until then. I ordinarily don't scan things so far in advance, but since I'm falling a bit behind in my post-processing, I thought it was a good idea. I also scanned two 1918 serials from All-Story Weekly magazine, which somebody removed from the magazine and rebound. The Pirate Woman by Captain Dingle is billed on the cover as "A Breathless Romance of the Caribbean", while Claire by Leslie Burton Blades is "The blind love of a blind hero, by a blind author." |
| 8:20 pm | Books of the Week My Happy Days in Hell is a sort of novelized autobiography by George Faludy—I presume it's broadly accurate, but I suspect some of the incidents are embroidered. It's an interesting look at Hungary's slide into totalitarianism. Faludy fled Hungary in 1938, then fled Paris in 1940 after the Germans invaded. He lived in Morocco for a while, before emigrating to the United States. After the war, he returned to Hungary, knowing it wasn't safe, but wanting very much to be home again. He saw the new Communist government consolidate power and conduct show trials, and was not surprised when he was arrested, made to sign a false confession, and shipped to a labor camp where he was expected to starve to death. The most compelling part of the book is the final section, where he describes how he and his fellow prisoners schemed to get extra food or to minimize the energy they consumed, and worked to keep their spirits up. Empire of Ivory by Naomi Novik is the fourth book in her Napoleonic dragon series. It's somewhat darker than the earlier books, as her heroes sail to Africa to find the cure for a dragon plague and the British slave trade takes on a central role in the plot. It's definitely one of those books where you're meant to admire the hero and identify with him, and while I wouldn't want a steady diet of that sort of book, they're fun to read every once in a while. Don't Try This At Home is an anthology of short essays from famous chefs describing culinary disasters and how they dealt with them. It's a mixed bag; most of the chefs tell a story about some other chef they happened to be working with, or something that's pretty much off-theme, but there are some good stories about things that went wrong in the kitchen and how they salvaged it. Wizards at War is the eighth book in Diane Duane's series, and the formula is growing a bit tired. The wizards keep throwing around more power with each book, the stakes keep getting higher, and it's getting farther away from what wizardry was about in the first book: talking to things and finding out what they want. It's not a bad book, but a lot of the heart has been replaced by flash and bang. |
| Saturday, October 6th, 2007 | |
| 1:47 pm | E-books of the Fortnight I've uploaded three books to Project Gutenberg since my last update. The first is Debts of Honor, by Maurus Jókai, a 19th century Hungarian novelist. At his best, he reminds me of Dumas, with characters so perfect they become larger than life. Of the characters in this novel, my favorite is the wealthy eccentric, who delights in tweaking the noses of the civil authorities with his flagrant atheism and irreverence. The second is Perils and Captivity, an 1827 book containing three narratives from the French: The sufferings of the Picard family after the shipwreck of the Medusa, in the year 1816; Narrative of the captivity of M. de Brisson, in the year 1785; and Voyage of Madame Godin along the river of the Amazons, in the year 1770. The wreck of the Medusa was a major scandal, as scores of passengers were abandoned on a raft without food or water, and most were murdered or died of exposure before the few survivors were finally rescued. Pierre Raymond de Brisson was shipwrecked off the coast of Senegal and enslaved. Madame Godin was the only survivor of a party travelling down the Amazon River. I'm especially pleased to have finished this one, because the stories are both interesting and historically valuable. The third is Frank Merriwell's Pursuit, in which the hero encounters a most persistent villain. Porfias del Norte is shot through the head, buried beneath tons of rock by a landslide, and trapped on the top story of a burning building moments before it collapses. He finally dies from self-inflicted poison after being arrested; even then, Frank won't believe it until a doctor examines the corpse. The quote of the day comes from an 1854 fictionalized biography of Humphry Davy, which I haven't finished post-processing yet: "Not many years back the floors of our nobles' houses were strewn with rushes, but at present even our gentry are beginning to find a sanded room unpleasant to their feet, and so they must needs have soft carpets to tread upon—as if they had all at once grown as tender-footed as negroes. There's Squire Austell has already carpetted his best sitting-room; and mark my words! there's sufficient of the monkey in our natures to make his great and little neighbours ape the Squire's manners. Ugh! We shall be as unmanly as fiddlers before many years have passed over our heads. Haven't we got to drink slops for breakfast instead of a horn or two of good strong ale, as they did in our fathers' time? and do you think, sir, strength, and courage, and energy are to be got out of teacups?" I also scanned three books: Frank Merriwell's Son, Ben's Nugget by Horatio Alger Jr., and "Young Glory and the Spanish Cruiser", a dime novel published during the Spanish-American War (although, actually, it cost only a nickel). |
| 1:25 pm | Books of the Fortnight It's been slow. I started Gyula Krúdy's Sunflower, a 1918 Hungarian novel full of elaborate seductions and passionate despair and I really couldn't care less. It's a slim book, but I wasn't making much headway, and finally I dropped it for something more entertaining. Charles Stross's The Clan Corporate is an entertaining installment from the middle of a series about a secret war between a world-hopping family of drug smugglers and the folks who really aren't happy to find out about them. I didn't feel like it was breaking a lot of new ground, though, and it felt like the plot was getting so tangled that some of the subplots were getting choked off before they could fully develop. A good choice for when you want to clear the cobwebs of dull 19th century erotica from your head, but when you think about it, that's a pretty limited market. I didn't finish A Separate War and Other Stories by Joe Haldeman either, but I did enjoy all the stories I read tremendously and do plan to come back to it. Haldeman's last few novels haven't thrilled me, but this short work is excellent. The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan raised the question of, how do we know what's good to eat? He looks at industrial-scale food production, and how it's affected the quality of our food; at a small, intensively managed organic farm; and at hunting and gathering. I found it absolutely riveting, and not just because it reinforces my preconceptions. The ways in which farm policy and corporate culture have changed the way we eat, and the question of whether artisan methods can significantly replace mass-produced commodities, is discussed with a great deal of depth and insight. Very much recommended. |
| Sunday, September 30th, 2007 | |
| 1:27 pm | |
| Sunday, September 16th, 2007 | |
| 10:12 pm | Random Friending I just friended a bunch of people with "distributed proofreaders" as an interest. If you're one of them, well, that's why. |
| 4:09 pm | |
| Wednesday, September 12th, 2007 | |
| 9:12 pm | Overhead at TIFF "I've never been out of the country, really. New Jersey doesn't count." |
| Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 | |
| 11:50 pm | TIFF Too The Secrets is about Naomi, the daughter of a famous rabbi, who decides to study in an Israeli seminary for a time after her mother's death, instead of immediately marrying the man her father has chosen as his successor. Another student, who was sent there to curb her rebellious behavior, challenges Naomi's complacency; they visit a fallen woman with food, and drink tea with her, and gradually Naomi learns first to make her own judgments, and then to defy authority by trying to devise a ritual to cleanse the woman of her sin. The ritual does more than bring a fallen woman closer to God; it teaches Naomi to be responsible to her own understanding of God's will, even when others disagree, even when a small secret defiance becomes a public, irrevocable breach. The best of the ten movies I saw. Continental, un film sans fusil (a film without guns) is about four characters, whose paths intersect but whose stories don't. It's a quirky film that reminds me of Jarmusch, with odd, deadpan humor. Interesting, but the parts failed to become a whole. A Jihad For Love is an interesting documentary about gay Muslims. They're in a tough situation, since the Koran has a fairly explicit condemnation of male homosexuality which is hard to re-interpret. (Women have a somewhat easier time.) A few Muslims take a liberal view, but most are conservative and closed-minded. Despite this, the gay Muslims we see are often cheerful and charming; sometimes, regretful and tormented. Worth seeing. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is a Wayne Wang film about a Chinese man from Beijing who comes to visit his daughter in America after her divorce. He wants her to be happy, to find a good man and bear his grandchildren, but she resents his efforts to fit her into a traditional mold. Eventually a secret grudge from her childhood is revealed, and resolved. It's a movie full of silences, rewarding patience. I liked it very much. Happy New Life is a Hungarian film about a young Roma man who was brought up in a foster family. Now eighteen, released from the foster care system and living on his own, he tries to find the truth about his past, but the official documents he finds tells him nothing or where he came from. He has dreams, flashbacks, memories. It ends badly, as his sense of disconnection overpowers him. There's a lot of raw emotion, and it's not a movie I would warn people away from, but it's not one I can honestly recommend, either. |
| Sunday, September 9th, 2007 | |
| 10:08 pm | TIFF Talk I'm about halfway through my stay in Toronto, and so far I've seen five movies. The biggest name stars I've seen are Nancy Kwan, Kate Bosworth, and Sigourney Weaver. I gather such namedropping is obligatory among TIFF attendees, who are automatically every celebrity's best buddies. ("I have a question for Sigourney...") ( Films and stuff ) |
| Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 | |
| 11:40 am | E-books of the Week I uploaded one book this week, Frank Merriwell Down South. Highlights include an ancient Mexican treasure city, located within the caldera of a volcano, which is destroyed by an eruption just as Frank comes within sight of it. I also scanned one pulp novel, A Woman at Bay by Nicholas Carter. This is one of the longest-running series in history, with over a thousand volumes.  |
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