dormouse1953 | Entries tagged with books

I'm a great fan of the works of H. Rider Haggard and some year ago I picked up at a con a very battered edition of Moon of Israel, not one of his better know books. It turns out to be a retelling of the story of Exodus from an Egyptian viewpoint.

So, I'm reading a scene where the pharaoh is telling Moses that the Israelites must make more bricks, only with no more straw, and I had a flashback to a story doing the rounds at my school in the north of England in the sixties. And such is the wonder of the internet, just googling the phrase "Joshua and his wellies" got me this:

http://uk.local.geordie.narkive.com/XGODMhaC/moses-long

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Location: United Kingdom, Guildford
Current Music: Rihm: Deus Passsio
Crossposts: https://pauldormer.livejournal.com/91330.html

About this time of year I take down from my bookshelves a book I read a long time ago and re-read it, a different book each year. This year I have decided upon Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess. It is the centenary of his birth in February.

I bought the Penguin paperback edition not long after it came out in the early eighties and I think I read it in 1985. As I started reading it last night, a piece of paper fell out. I'm often leaving till receipts in books. Waterstone's receipts fade to white very quickly, I've found. This however was an ATM receipt. And not from 1985 but from 2005. (I don't think I even had an ATM card in 1985.) Apparently, I used an ATM in High Holborn on 16th April, 2005, withdrawing £50.

I was so intrigued I went and checked my diary for that day. I was indeed London, it was the day of the Science Fiction Foundation AGM. Also that night I watched a documentary on television about the General Slocum disaster and that may have been the reason I looked at Earthly Powers that day.

The General Slocum was a steamship that was chartered for a church excursion along the East River in New York City on June 15th, 1904. It caught fire, the life belts and safety equipent didn't work and over a thousand people lost their lives, the worst loss of life in a single disaster in New York City in the whole of the twentieth century. I first heard about this event as the composer Charles Ives wrote a tone poem about it. I've never heard it as it's rarely performed and never been recorded but he re-worked the explosion into the 4th of July movement of his Holidays Symphony.

June 16th, 1904 was the date on which James Joyce's Ulysses was set and the news reached the Dublin newspapers that day. Characters refer to it.

Now, Kenneth Toomey, the narrator of Earth Powers, claims to have had a sexual encounter in a Dublin hotel room that day with the Irish poet George Russell, at exactly the time that Russell is supposedly discussing Shakespeare with Stephen Dedalus at the National Library in Ulysses. I'm fairly sure that when mentioning that he was in Dublin that day, Toomey goes on to mention other events from Ulysses, including the headlines about the General Slocum. So I suppose that is why I was looking at Earthly Powers that day in 2005. No idea why I left the ATM receipt in it, though.

Current Mood: intrigued
Current Location: United Kingdom, Guildford

I went to see Dave Gorman at the G Live in Guildford last night. (I'm not sure, but I think this is the first time I've ever gone to a comedy gig.)

The show is called Dave Gorman -Gets Straight To The Point (The Powerpoint), and it starts with a Powerpoint display with Gorman doing a voice-over about how great it is to be in his favourite town. The slide that comes up says, "Insert name of town here before show". It's an old joke, and I've used it myself.

After the show, G Live sent me an e-mail asking me to rate the experience. The e-mail looked OK on Thunderbird, but on this computer I archive all my e-mails in Ameol, an antiquated piece of software developed especially for Cix in the nineties (if not earlier) that expects all e-mails to be text only. There, the e-mail read: "We hope very much that you enjoyed XXXXXX. Here at the XXXXX".

Curiously, this is the second time this has happened to me with something Dave Gorman related. I got his book Too Much Information for Christmas. One of his observations in that is after following Chas and Dave on Facebook (or maybe it was Twitter), he received a message saying, "I see you are interested in Chas and Dave. You might also like to follow Kylie Minogue." Nobody in the history of the world, he suggested, has looked at someone's record collection and said, "I see you have records by Chas and Dave. I bet you like Kylie Minogue, too."

After reading the book, I entered it into Goodreads. It came up with other suggestions based on my liking this book. One of them was "Programming for Dummies".

Current Mood: amused
Current Location: United Kingdom, Guildford

I'm reading at the moment Peter Heather's history The Fall of the Roman Empire. The second chapter, Barbarians, discusses the borders of the Empire and the threats to it in the fourth century. Just got to a sub-chapter called "Thrace: The final frontier".

Current Mood: pained
Current Location: United Kingdom, Guildford
Current Music: Nordheim: The Tempest

I finished re-reading a book yesterday that I had been reading for the last five weeks, the USA Trilogy by John Dos Passos. It was more or less the only book I was reading during that time. (It was too big to go in my jacket pocket so I read other stuff whenever I travelled into London for a concert.) Those of you who know about my massive backlog of books may be wondering why I took time off from clearing the backlog to read something I'd already read. Well, I did last read it in 1979. A few years ago, I realised that I had all these books I'd only read once and had fond memories of many of them and wouldn't it be fun to re-read some of them, and well, why not? So usually around Christmas I chose a book from my library I want to re-read and, indeed, I started re-reading this on Christmas morning.
( Read more... )

Current Mood: cheerful
Current Location: United Kingdom, Guildford

So I'm entering newly acquired books into my database, and I discover I now have two copies of To Outer Space by Captain W.E. Johns.

Current Mood: amused
Current Location: United Kingdom, Guildford

I'm currently reading Is That a Fish in Your Ear? by David Bellos, a book about translation and its problems. By a curious coincidence I was reading a section on the constraints of subtitling and then saw an amusing instance of it.

There's a French sitcom running on Sky Arts at the moment called Hard, about a young widow who finds she has inherited a porn company. Her leading actor is referred to throughout in the subtitles as "Roy the Rod". She points out that Roy is not a French name and he explains it's his porn star name - you take the name of your first pet and your mother's maiden name. He had a hamster called Roy and his mother's maiden name was Lapoutre "and La poutre means the rod" he adds. Only listening to the sound track, of course he didn't say that. French people presumably know what the word means (and my dictionary translates it as "beam", the alliteration added by the translator). I think he just emphasises the name.

Incidentally, Bellos then goes onto discuss dubbing, still the preferred method for foreign films in Germany, and mentions an old Jewish practice called "targum". By perhaps as early as the fifth century BC, by which time Aramaic was the everyday language of Palestine, the rabbi would speak Hebrew in the synagogue whilst an interpreter gave a running translation.

Bellos states that this process has been re-invented in eastern Europe, where foreign films are shown not dubbed but with a single voice giving a commentary often with the original language audible underneath. Bellos was born in the UK but is presumably too young to remember those eastern European children's films - of which the best known was probably The Singing Ringing Tree - which were shown on British TV with a single voice speaking English over the original German or Czech or Russian. (And, I suppose, this led to Eric Thomson's famous versions of The Magic Roundabout. A single voice again, but this time not even attempting a translation of the original French.)

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: United Kingdom, Guildford

Arsene Wenger: A biography.

In the Science Fiction Section

Current Mood: amused
Current Location: United Kingdom, Guildford
Current Music: Faure Piano music

Although some of my earliest memories are of being scared by space travel, after seeing an early US attempt to launch a sattelite blowing up on the pad on TV in late 1957, some time in the next couple of years I got interested in the subject, and I remember reading a book at school called The Tiger Who Went to the Moon by Nancy Spain. I think this was when I was still in the infants, so it would have been no later than 1960.

Nancy Spain is an odd enough name that I remembered, but she was also something of a TV personality at the time, so when I saw a news report in 1964 that she had died in a plane crash, I turned to my parents and said, "I've read a book by her." I think my mother looked at me not quite believing it. It was only later I heard that Spain was an out lesbian so maybe that was what worried my mother.

For years, I did wonder if it was the same person. Then, about fifteen years ago, a biography of Spain was published and I saw a copy in a bookshop. So, I had a look in the index, and there was an entry for The Tiger Who Went to the Moon, one of two children's books she wrote in the fifties.

And today, I was going out for a walk and I passed an Oxfam shop. There in the window was a copy of the book, a very tatty first edition, £35. As I was heading up on to the Downs, I didn't want to carry anything with me, but I got back into town before shop shut and bought it. The woman in the shop seemed surprised that I was prepared to pay so much for such a tatty old children's book, but they are a charity, so she wasn't going to refuse to take my money. And the book is sitting next to me now.

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Location: United Kingdom, Guildford

Saw a headline on the BBC News digitext just now: "Oliver tops Christmas books list".

What with all the Dickens 200th birthday celebrations starting up, I immediately thought Oliver Twist was an odd choice for a Christmas book. A good book, but not his most Christmassy, and not as much fun as, say, Bleak House.

Then I read the article and found it referred to Jamie Oliver.

So, how is his campaign to improve the nutritional value of the gruel served in workhouses going?

Current Mood: confused
Current Location: United Kingdom, Guildford
Current Music: Liadov, The Enchanted Lake

There's this thing where you come across a reference to a word or thing you've never heard of before, and suddenly your seeing references everywhere.

Last month I was reading a biography of Robert E. Lee, written by his nephew Fitzhugh Lee. I was mentioning this to people at Novacon because the book had a 1961 copyright date despite Fitzhugh Lee dying in 1905. I presume the date refers to the introduction to that edition, written by one Philip Van Doren Stern.

A couple of weeks later, I read a newspaper article which mentioned this person. He was mainly known as an historian, especially of the American Civil War, but in 1939 he had the idea for a story in a dream which he finally completed in 1943. Unable to find a publisher, he had copies of this story, The Greatest Gift, printed as a Christmas card and sent it to his friends. It found its way to a film producer. Cary Grant saw it and wanted to appear in a film version, but that fell through. Then it came to the attention of Frank Capra who cast James Stewart in the lead and called it It's a Wonderful Life.

I've just been watching the Christmas special episode of Warehouse 13. I'd guessed from the synopsis of the story - Pete finds himself in a world where he never existed - that it was going to based on It's a Wonderful Life. Then Artie explains why this has happened. Pete touched a brush that belonged to - Philip Van Doren Stern.

Current Mood: curious
Current Location: United Kingdom, Guildford
Current Music: Ligeti Requiem

Just been watching the final part of Planet Word, where Stephen Fry explores language. This episode dealt with storytelling. Fry read the sirens passage from the Odyssey and then said that when James Joyce updated the Odyssey in Ulysses, the corresponding siren episode was controversial.
They illustrated this with a clip from the nineteen sixties film version of Ulysses (which updated the action to the present day). But the clip they showed was the sequence where Gerty MacDowell is sitting on the beach and she shows Mr Bloom her knickers and Bloom masturbates. A controversial scene both in the book and in the film, but it's not the sirens scene. It corresponds to the scene in the Odyssey where Odysseus is shipwrecked on a beach and is discovered by Princess Nausicaa.
The sirens scene in Ulysses is the earlier scene set in the bar and restaurant of the Ormond Hotel, just after the viceregal procession has gone past, and the sirens are the barmaids. (Music pervades this scene.)

Current Mood: pedantic
Current Location: United Kingdom, Guildford
Current Music: Ustvolskaya Preludes