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Thursday, October 09, 2003 |
Theodore Rex
I've been reading Edmund Morris Theodore Rex,
the second volume in his biography of Theodore Roosevelt. (No, I
haven't read the first volume, I'll probably do that one next). It's a
fascinating, very readable biography, and Roosevelt is an amazing,
larger-than-life character; I don't know that I approve of everything
he did, but that's neither here nor there. One passage I read really
has made me think, and contrast TR with today's politicians. Here's a
short excerpt, conatenated from several pages, which shows what I mean.
This is during the time when TR is working to finalize details with
Columbia for building the Panama Canal:
...Facing six hours of travel [TR] remembered that Nicholas Murray
Butler had asked him for a list of recommended books. It seemed like a
strange request, coming from the President of Columbia University, yet
deserving of a full answer. He cast his mind back over what he had read
since taking the oath of office [this is in the late fall of 1903; he
took office in the fall of 1901], and began to scribble.
Parts of Herodotus; the first and
seventh books of Thucydides; all of Polybius, a little of Plutarch;
Aeschylus' Orestean Trilogy; Sophocles' Seven Against Thebes; Euripides' Hippolytus and Bacchae; and Aristophenes' Frogs. Parts of The Politics of Aristotle.
All of these had been in translation. However, he had read, in French,
the biographies of Price Eugene of Savoy, Admiral Michiel de Ruyter,
Henri Turenne, and John Sobieski. He had also browsed, if not deeply
studied, Froissart on French history, Maspero on the eary Syrian,
Chaldean, and Egyptian civilizations, "and some six volumes of
Mahaffrey's Studies of the Greek World." What else?
The Memoirs of Marbot; Bain's Life of Charles the Twelfth; Mahan's Types of Naval Officers; some of Macauley's Essays, three or four volumes of Givvon and three or four chapters of Motley. The battles in Carlyle's Frederick the Great; Hay an Nicolay's Lincoln, and the two volumes of Lincoln's Speeches and Writings -- these I have not only read through, but have read parts of them again and again; Bacon's Essays...Macbeth; Twelfth Night; Henry the Fourth; Henry the Fifth; Richard the Second; the first two cantos of Milton's Paradise Lost; some of Michael Drayton's Poems -- there are only three or four I care for; portions of the Nibelungenlied...
Church's Beowulf; Morris' translation of the Heimskringla, and Dasent's translation of the sagas of Gisli and Burnt Njal; Lady Gregory's and Miss Hull's Cuchulain Saga together with The Chidren of Lir, The Children of Turn, The Tail of Deidre, etc.; Les Precieuses Ridicules, Le Barbier de Seville; most of Jusserand's books, of which I was most interested in his studies of the Kingis Quhair, Holme's Over the Teacups; Lounsbury's Shakespeare and Voltaire; various numbers of The Edinburgh Review from 1803 to 1850; Tolstoi's Sebastopol and The Cossacks; Sienkiewicz's Fire and Sword, and parts of his other volumes; Guy Mannering; The Antiquary; Rob Roy; Waverly; Quentin Durward; pars of Marmion and the Lay of the Last Minstrel; Cooper's Pilot; some of the earlier stories and poems of Bret Harte; Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer; Pickwick Papers; Nicholas Nichelby; Vanity Fair; Pendennis; The Newcomes; Adventures of Philip; Conan Doyle's White Company...
Kenneth Grahame. Somerville and Ross. Conrad. Artemus Ward. Octave
Thanet. Viljoen. Stevens. Peer. Burroughs. Swettenham. Gray. Janvier.
London. Fox. Garland. Tarkington. Churchill. Remington. Wister. White.
Treveleyan...
By the time Roosevelt had tired of jotting, he had listed 114 author
names. "Of course I have forgotten a great many." His catalog did not
strike him as impressive. "About as interesting," he concluded, "as
Homer's Catalogue of the Ships." [From pages 285-288 of the paperback edition.]
8:24:14 PM Permalink
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The dying Tivo
The Tivo has been acting up for the last few weeks. When watching recorded shows, sometimes it hangs for a few seconds, then races to catch up with where it should be in time; that's kind of amusing sometimes -- it's a riot to watch Rachael Ray, who's already pretty hyperkinetic in fast motion. But it's not amusing when your watching something you're more focused on. And for the past several days, the Tivo has been first hanging when watching something recorde, and also resetting itself. So today I ordered a new drive from Weaknees and sprung for the extra $ to get it here tomorrow. So tomorrow I do surgery on the Tivo. From all reports this is pretty easy to do, and I've done enough hard drive swapping in my day that I don't expect it to be too traumatic. Of course, if I screw up, I'll have to face, gasp, life without Tivo.
7:52:18 PM Permalink
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Singularity Sky
Charles Stross' first
novel has been heralded as a new generation of space opera. Space
opera, or at least the way I've always thought of it, is a genre within
science fiction that deals with interstellar adventures, often wars;
the Star Wars stuff is a good example of space opera. Star Trek, too.
In books, I always thought of the old E. E. Smith books. Some of
Heinlein's juveniles -- Citizen of the Galaxy, for example -- are space
operas.
In a lot of ways, Stross' book is a space opera. It has
a some great space war scenes, interplanetary travel, spies, time
travel, alien invasions, etc. He ups the ante, and this is why it's a
kind of "new" space opera, by attempting to address issues of divinity
and the nature of the universe (though that's always tacit in space
operas). The notion of "singularity" is au courant in sf these days,
and that's part and parcel of this book; a singularity is a moment of
phase shift in a society. Stross presents an insular, paternalistic
society which reacts to a singularity in a violent, inappropriate way.
A
fascinating book, though not always as involving as it should be. Very
enjoyable, with some interesting characters, though at times I got a
little lost. He uses one technique that is at the same time fun and
irritating; he makes frequent illusions to the 20th & 21st
centuries, in several ways. First, there's the old sf trick of "these
were not unlike 20th century telephones" (not a direct quote); of
course authors need to connect their futures with readers of the
present, but as a human, how often do you contrast technologies you use
with those of, say, the 14th century? Often writers find ways to insert
contemporary characters into the far future to correlate with their
readers, but very often it feels artificial. Stross does something else
that's both interesting and irritating: he makes less direct allusions
to our time, as at one point when a character who was debilitated rises
up to walk: "My Emperer, I can walk!" he says. It's a fun allusion, but
the effect is to pull you away from this novel to Dr. Strangelove, and
this book doesn't gain by comparison. Finally, the bridge of the space ship feels a little too much like the Enterprise.
That said, it's a strong and enjoyable novel, with an awful lot going for it; I'll definitely read more Stross. Recommended.
12:02:48 PM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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