"Improved" because instead of dumping them in the file and retrieving them several months later, I'm printing them as soon as they arrive. We'll see how long that lasts.

1:30:15 PM  [permalink]  comment []  

Answers to the King William's College quiz are now out. About a week ago Big Calm sent me a link to a PDF. Yesterday, Steve Hutton followed up with a link to the story in the Guardian.

There were other discrepancies in exact wording on several of the other questions -- most of them, in fact -- but they were trivial differences, and our answers would almost certainly be scored as correct. (Benzene's answers are here.)

For 4.7, the one cite is my only source for the name, but given the known typographical errors in the quiz (three in the questions, and a few more in the answers now), I'm inclined to believe that the quizmaster is the one who swapped the names, not me. I think that one would also be scored as correct.

Question 18.5, on the other hand, I think I would have gotten wrong. The question named six members of a certain rugby team. I named the team itself as an answer, but now I see the question asked was "who included...?" which does make more sense with the coach name.

The one that Steve neglects to mention is 1.10, which asked for a certain railway "initiative". I said the ferry service to the Isle of Man. Big Calm suggested instead the launching of the Manxman, which was the name of the ferry that ran on that route. The official answer matches BC's, but I'm not sure whether ours might still be scored as correct.

Curiously, the situation is reversed for 6.6, which asked for a connection between two cities. Others suggested "Kaiserwagen", the name of the train that traveled the route, but I went with "Wuppertal Schwebebahn", the name of the track itself. In this case the quiz answers agreed with me. Go figure.

After so many months of neglect, revival of Benzene's letter column is hopeless. Some day I may rummage through the files to see if anything warrants being resurrected as an exception, but the rule is that the entire backlog is flushed and perhaps I'll start fresh with anything new.

The book reports are still salvageable, though. I've got one left over from last year, and then two new ones to start a fresh count for 2005.

November 28
Jitterbug Perfume, Tom Robbins (1984)

I finished this up shortly before I left for California in December. As I've mentioned before, when I read fiction, I tend to reread a handful of favorite authors over and over. One of these is Tom Robbins. I don't revisit him very often, but a comment Ericka made some time in November brought him back to mind. I don't recall exactly what it was, but I assume it must have had something to do with our shared passion for over-the-top metaphoric language which somehow manages to be sensual and intellectual at the same time. I don't know anyone who does that better than Robbins.

I've only read three of his books. The other two besides Jitterbug are Still Life with Woodpecker and Skinny Legs and All, which not coincidentally are the two that I happened to find as cheap paperbacks in a used book store. I've read each at least three times. Jitterbug was the first, and it's still my favorite.

When gathering books to bring with me on the California trip, I made a point of getting a new Tom Robbins book from the library, and I came up with Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. I tried reading it, but somehow I wasn't inspired, and I didn't get very far.

I did get far enough to notice that Frog Pajamas is written in second-person. That is, sentences about the protagonist have "you" as the subject. It looks like the whole book is written that way, though I only read a few pages. It feels unnatural to me, as if the author were doing it only as an exercise and not because it's the best way to tell the story. Perhaps one gets used to it after a while. I didn't read enough to find out.

On the second page the protagonist "you" turned out to be female. Since I'm not usually female, that was a slight surprise for me, but as soon as I gave it any thought it made perfect sense. Tom Robbins is very much a woman's writer. Like Boccaccio, he does have something of a male voice, but it is abundantly clear that he is writing for women and (in spite of some good male characters) about women.

I wonder how many other authors are so easily associated with one sex or the other. Among the (few) fiction authors that I read a lot of, Gore Vidal definitely feels like a man's author to me. Robert Graves seems neutral. Larry Niven also seems very male. I'm tempted to think that's the nature of science fiction -- Isaac Asimov also seems very male to me -- but then there are others who feel neutral (eg, Frank Herbert).

Update: I originally listed Heinlein in that last parenthetic, but I've been corrected.

1:35:16 AM  [permalink]  comment []