Category Archives: Literature

TGs

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A bit of holiday trivia for you. I came upon a form of tourism I didn’t quite believe. “Travelling Gentlemen” accompanied their countrymen to the Crimean War, and set up out of cannon range from the battlefields with their wives and hounds and had a jolly good time of it. Their hounds were seen chasing the cannonballs around the battlefield on which the Battle of Alma was fought. I couldn’t run up much on the net about them, but feel free to fill me in with something a little more substantial than this mention. And in the meantime, if you want to hear Alfred Lord Tennyson reciting his poem The Charge of the Light Brigade – yes Tennyson himself on old Edison wax, just link through to the Wikipedia entry on the poem. I love listening so far back in time as it were. Everything seems so different. (He sounds like he’s in scuba diving gear, but I guess that’s 1890s recording techniques for you.)

Jacques Barzun approaches 102

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I appreciate that this has been posted before and nobody has to read it again, it is just for the benefit of new people and those who like to be reminded of the achievements of this remarkable man. Barzun’s work represents a major and pioneering contribution to cultural studies.

The sheer bulk of his output is prodigious, bearing in mind his teaching and administrative responsibilities. He wrote more than twenty books, edited a similar number and contributed countless chapters to others, plus journal articles, Introductions and Forewords for books by other authors.

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The woeful Kindle: Part Two

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Pope's Odyssey as it appears on your Kindle

Pope's Odyssey as it appears on your Kindle

I wrote previously about two of my sub $300 IT purchases.  The Livescribe continues to amaze and delight – amazed that it’s not simply taken over universities and everywhere where notes are taken. the Kindle continues to amaze with how clunky it is.  I had bought it without worrying whether it would work out on the grounds that I could (surely) use it to sit in an armchair and surf the net, read newspapers and files I want to read.

Alas it is not so.  I guess there’s a way to read files on it, but I’ve done what I’ve been told which is to email it to my Kindle email address and nothing happens.  In the meantime, just to give the think a workover I bought Alexander Pope’s translation of the Odyssey. It should be for nix, but it seems all the free books are not available in Oz, and so I paid US$2 which I can’t complain about even if it has been in the public domain for a while.

Anyway, it seems to have been thrown together from some open source project on the net.  It has no table of contents.  It has an introductory essay, but it’s quite difficult doing the equivalent of ‘flicking through’ a Kindle book, so it’s very hard to pick where the introduction (prose) stops and the book (poetry) starts.  Amazing non? And you can see in the picture that the formatting is absolutely shocking, with some lines starting inset, others starting at the margin and no additional space between paragraphs, verses or whatever.

The picture I’ve shown you is actually on my ‘Kindle for PC’.  They’ve ensured that despite the fact that it’s on a PC, it’s as difficult to navigate as the horrid little white box itself. I can’t easily browse zooming in and out with multiple pages on the screen for instance.  Perhaps this is all not true. Perhaps it’s all really easy and friendly and I just haven’t figured it out, but I’m amazed at how bad it all is.

I read in a write up of the Man of the Decade himself, that the question they asked themselves at every turn of designing the Kindle was “What would Steve Jobs do?”  I can only conclude they asked this in order to do the opposite. Roll on Apple’s tablet. (It’s odd that there isn’t something about the size and shape of the Kindle with a nice colour touch screen.  It wouldn’t have to be all that flash to get me buying it to surf the net and read whatever I want in my armchair. Is that too much to ask?

Welcome back Tim, man of many parts: Introducing Blogging The Bookshelf, at least for those, like me who didn’t know of it

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If you’re a blogger and you venture into government whether in the bureaucracy proper or as a ‘staffer’ you’ve got a problem.  You can’t keep expressing yourself as candidly as you might wish for fear of breaching the relevant public service code of conduct, of having some perfectly sensible observation you make beaten up by the media or just getting others’ noses out of joint.  So often people down tools.  As Tim Watts did when he ceased writing his excellent blog Tree of Knowledge upon becoming a staffer first for Stephen Conroy and then for Sir John Brumby.  (OK John Brumby doesn’t have a knighthood, it just sounded good and I wanted to make sure you were paying attention).

Tim, being a man of substance and an irrepressible one to boot has resurfaced in a manner that finesses all these dilemmas while keeping his blogging instinct finely honed. He’s heading through his entire bookshelf, and reviewing all the books in it. Go and blog Tim’s bookshelf with him.

Adam Smith and Jane Austen the Podcast

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http://www.bmacewen.com/blog/images/PointlessBarking.gifAlex Sloan at ABC Canberra and I have a chat on air about fortnightly usually corresponding to one of my columns.  We had a chat on Adam Smith and the Theory of Moral Sentiments last Thursday and I was in some trepidation that I might become rather incoherent as the ideas are quite subtle.  And explaining Smith’s concept of sympathy – which though the best ‘translation’ is the one he uses himself, fellow-feeling – it somehow sounds sentimental and unconvincing that this could be a powerful social force.  Also Alex wanted to talk about Jane Austen which added a possibly new degree of difficulty. Anyway, it all worked out well I think, though you may disagree!

Book versus film

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I finally got around to seeing The Reader, and for once I’d read the book first (it helps that it’s short). The film was well made. The acting was impressive, especially by young David Kross — I was confirmed in my hypothesis that Kate Winslett deserved her Oscar first and foremost for Revolutionary Road.

What is the rational consumer’s response when they make a good film of a good novel? Do you need to consume both?

If the film and the novel are complements, that raises a second question: in what order? There are advantages and disadvantages in reading the novel first. On the one hand, the great thing about a book is that it leaves so much of the work to your imagination; on the other, much of the impact of a film, on the first viewing, comes from its surprises.

But if the film and the novel are merely substitutes, one is enough. They’re just the same story packaged differently. If you watched the film of, say, Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile, you wouldn’t bother reading the novel afterwards. In a few cases it might be the other way around — where the film ‘faithfully’ reproduces the novel, but doesn’t add much value, or transform the story into a different kind of experience, in moving pictures.

The film of The Reader was in this category for me. It didn’t add much value. The story and characters had already achieved their emotional impact through the novel. Continue reading →