September 2005

A Dutch witch has won her battle to make the cost of her brooms and spell-making lessons tax-deductable.

Absolutely.

General Zod for President in 2008

(thanks to Peter David)

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently with a book I’m really fond of — E. S. Turner’s Boys Will Be Boys: The story of Sweeney Todd, Deadwood Dick, Sexton Blake, Billy Bunter, Dick Barton, et al. It’s a retrospective of the “boys’ papers” and “story papers” of the 19th century — the bridge between the adult prose periodicals of the 1800’s and what we now would recognize as comics.

For the storyteller working in children’s literature, this book is full of information that it may not actually be important to have, but can nonetheless be a whole lot of fun to get into. The book investigates everything from the economics of the “penny dreadfuls”…

Each penny part weighed a mere quarter-ounce against the two ounces afforded by such meritorious publications as Leisure Hour and the Family Herald. [James Greenwood, author of The Wilds of London] declared: “It is the infinitesimal quantity of trash that may be palmed off for a penny that serves as the carrion bait to attract toward it the flies of the book trade.”

…to the rivalries, large and small, that went on between/among the publishers…

In 1866 the Reverend J. Erskine Clark published his Chatterbox at a halfpenny, in a bold effort to undercut the “penny dreadfuls”. Sir James Barrie, who was an eager consumer of sensational literature in his young days, admits that he was side-tracked onto the Chatterbox, which broke him of the “penny dreadful” habit, though not before he had tried to write one or two himself.

…to the public attitude to the people working on them (not incredibly high, from the looks of things).

Despite the advance of education, complained the Edinburgh Quarterly, such works as Joscin the Body Snatcher and Three-Fingered Jack, the Terror of the Antilles, were still there “to dispute the favor of the poorer class of readers with translations of the improving romances of M M. Zola and Paul de Kock… In a lane not far from Fleet Street is a complete factory of the literature of rascaldom — a literature which has done much to people our prisons, our reformatories and our Colonies with scapegraces and ne’er-do-wells.”

The Quarterly’s critic claimed to have private knowledge of the authors of many of these penny publications — ” — not as a rule very distinguished members of the Republic of Letters, though in some few instances their antecedents are better than might be expected.” …The critic knew of a maidservant whose father wrote novels from ten to four for a cheap publisher: also of a cook who, taxed with dilatoriness in the preparation of meals, explained that she was busy in the kitchen writing novels.

Hey, I didn’t know I had a previous life in London. 🙂 But no, wait, this description’s even better:

…the miserable beer-swilling wretches who write them…if such a word as write could be applied to their work!

As a rule they are drunken, sodden creatures whose lives have been one long unbroken story of failure. Sometimes they are University men who in the flower of their youth gave promise of being noble men but giving way to the temptations of drink they have gradually sunk lower and lower in the scale of life until at last they reach the depths of degradation and their natures have become so debased that they are fit only to write evil stories which fill the pocket of the man who prints and sells the “penny dreadful”. …Where do they write? Communal kitchens of cheap lodging-houses, the bar parlours of dirty back-alley “pubs”…

Hooboy. But Turner himself is dryly funny all through:

Who will withhold sympathy from a hack presented with, say, six pictures showing a redskin dancing round a captive, two Frenchmen fencing, a highwayman holding up a coach, a smuggler’s boat landing in a cove, a detective looking at a footprint through a magnifying glass, and a bound and gagged woman, with instructions to “keep it down to 20,000 words” and call it “Guy Gaspereau, the Brigand Chief”?

I’ll be coming back to this subject in some blog entries next week, because there are some things in this book that are just too good not to share. But here’s something very cool in the meantime:

Stanford University has an online “window” into their Dime Novel and Penny Dreadful Collection. There is a “guided tour” of the dreadfuls, and a timeline. Additionally, titles of papers and thousands of (usually, cover) images can be browsed, though something weird seems to be going on with the text-search facility — it keeps demanding some kind of Stanford-based login procedure. But the clunky interface doesn’t interfere all that much with the sheer wonderfulness of the basic material, once you start getting into it.

I really wish that the British Library would do something like this with its own famous “penny parts” holding, the Barry Ono Collection, which is apparently really something to see. (It’s been microfilmed, which is all very well, but I really wish someone would CD-ROM or DVD that output…)

And not the dear old “Google’s Moonbase Is Hiring” ad, either.

Web search firm Google has formed a partnership with US space agency Nasain an effort to harness new technology which could boost the space programme.

Google is to build a new office complex on the site of Nasa’s research facility in California, close to its own headquarters in Silicon Valley.

The two companies will co-operate in a range of areas including IT solutions, data management and nanotechnology.

Going to be interesting to see where this leads…

From the online International Herald Tribune this morning:

It happens all the time: during an airport delay the man to the left, a Korean perhaps, starts talking to the man opposite, who might be Colombian, and soon they are chatting away in what seems to be English. But the native English speaker sitting between them cannot understand a word.

They don’t know it, but the Korean and the Colombian are speaking Globish, the latest addition to the 6,800 languages that are said to be spoken across the world. Not that its inventor, Jean-Paul Nerrière, considers it a proper language.

“It is not a language, it is a tool,” he says. “A language is the vehicle of a culture. Globish doesn’t want to be that at all. It is a means of communication.”

Fascinating. Globish’s homepage: www.jpn-globish.com

From “Fun with Propaganda” at Worth1000.com…

At first literature dealt with gods, and they had no money problems. Then there were godlike heroes who simply took what they wanted and filled their ships with slaves and booty. There follow several centuries filled mostly with the lives of saints and hermits, to whom worldly goods were of no interest.

With the medieval literature of chivalry a new kind of hero arrived, the high-minded knight whose attention was fastened on the glory of dying in battle for an ideal. No room for humdrum daily concerns here.

Then about halfway through the sixteenth century, at the height of the humanist Renaissance, appeared a ragged hungry boy called Lazarillo de Tormes guiding his blind master along the roads and through the towns of Castille. Two features of this anonymous tale were new and remarkable. First, the narrative was told in the first person. Second, not only did the hero, or rather anti-hero, have no money, but not having it was a real problem for him.

…Into this world, in 1547, was born Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra…

Happy 400th birthday-year, Don Quixote!

One of my favorite bits: The Curate and the Licentiate go through the Don’s books to get rid of the “novels of chivalry” (in this case, read “fantasy novels”, since a whole lot of them contained fantastic tropes and themes…) that are thought to have made the Knight of the Doleful Countenance mad. There is trenchant analysis, volume by volume, with no mercy shown to poor spinoffs, long-winded prose, or slipshod translations. There is also a brief ironic self-reference, one that makes me wonder if the author has had a brush or two with complaints about “sequelitis” —

“That Cervantes has been for many years a great friend of mine, and to my knowledge he has had more experience in reverses than in verses. His book has some good invention in it, it presents us with something but brings nothing to a conclusion: we must wait for the Second Part it promises: perhaps with amendment it may succeed in winning the full measure of grace that is now denied it…”

What a work. And (as happens occasionally) the thought comes up. How many of our novels will still be readable four hundred years from now? Or even be remembered…?

From an International Herald Tribune article on the French “new book season”, this intriguing aside:

Houellebecq’s new book has divided France’s critics, with some talking of genius and others of fraud. All the noise is good for sales, of course. And it was crucial that this book sell well. Not so long ago, Houellebecq changed publishers, leaving Flammarion for Fayard, which “bought” him for 1.3 million euros. France is used to transfer fees for soccer players, but for a writer, this is something of a first…

Fascinating.

(snicker)

Giblets has heard a whole lotta whining this week about “oh the government screwed up the hurricane rescue” and “oh they did not evacuate the city for days and days” and “oh they should have spent money to build up the dams and levees and kept FEMA funded and sent in military and national guard people with food and water right away so thousands of people would not starve to death.” Well that just sounds like a great idea – for a bunch of namby-pamby hurricane-lovers! Oh, let’s cower behind our great big levees and hope the rescue crews save us from the big mean storm – instead of taking the fight to very clouds of terror themselves!

This is a Global War on Weather and like any successful war it can’t be won on the defensive. If we spend all our time reacting to hurricanes instead of attacking them where they live, we will only embolden further hurricanes! The only language hurricanes understand is force – and possibly hurricanese, which is difficult to learn and involves the use of many glottal stops. We must fight nature where it lives so it can’t fight us at home!

The first step we must take is a series of “decapitation strike” air raids to wipe out threateningly puffy-looking cumulus clouds – some of which, Giblets observed the other day, may already resemble ferocious animals…

And so on, courtesy of Fafblog.

Courtesy of Coudal Partners: just the thing to print out and keep a few of in your wallet. Click here for the .PDF version: print ’em out, cut ’em up, and fight back.