When Worlds Collide - The New Revised Edition

3583One of the novels that I have loved since I started reading SF is that classic of American SF literature, When Worlds Collide. 

It is an odd bird, this book.

It is, arguably and as far as I know, the first mass-market work of prose or literature that has as its main event the physical annihilation of the planet. It's influence has rung down through the years: it's cited as the inspiration for Flash Gordon (in as much as the rogue planet Mongo is on a collision course with Earth) and Deep Impact, the comet-hits-earth flick from 1998, the year with not one but two asterism-threatens-to-hit-Earth-and-everyone-dies-movies (this was the one that didn't suck).

The broad outline of the plot, for those who don't know, is that a binary rogue planet, the Bronson Bodies (named for their discoverer) are discovered hurtling toward the Solar System, and scientists quickly determine that they are going to interact, not in the good way, with Earth. One planet, known as Bronson Alpha, is a gas giant world similar to Uranus or Neptune in appearance and size. The other, Alpha's moon, is Bronson Beta, a world almost identical to Earth in size and, as it turns out, environment.

A scientific clique, the League of the Last Days, is formed to address the threat. The first-amongst-equals is an American physicist, Cole Hendron. He and his group of scientist-engineer survivors drive most of the plot in their endeavor to construct a ship to escape our doomed world and make a landing on Bronson Beta, for it is predicted that the Bronsons, after making a close and catastrophic pass on Earth will round the sun and return in sixteen month's time to finish the job; Bronson Alpha to collide with and physically demolish the Earth and Bronson Beta to be captured by the Sun and bereft of gravitational influence from Alpha by Alpha's collision with Earth.

The novel was written by two well-known and popular novelists and writers of the day, Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer (Balmer, who mostly wrote SF and for the pulps, has been largely forgotten while Wylie, who wrote in more than one genre and famously wrote a mainstream novel Generation of Vipers and another classic of speculative fiction The Disappearance, still has something of a legacy footprint). It was written and first published in 1933 and has been in and out of publication ever since. So it has staying power.

It has, unlike the novels frequently touted as its equal on the covers (Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World) not aged well. Tied into the current events of the day of its writing and laced with soft versions of the sexism, racism, and elitism of the day, it's a literal period piece, dated as dated can be, despite being apparently regarded as one of the seminal works of the modern form of the genre.

So, last night at Powell's, I found a particularly luridly-covered vintage copy of this book. I found it interesting in that way, especially the incongruence of the two imperriled people to the catastrophe unfolding literally at their feet, the handsome man and the beautiful woman as stylishly on-point as their world is chaotically disheveled, as well as the melodramatic tagline Out of the horror of doomsday comes hope for life, for love. In a dark way, hilarious.

The real hook for me? In the lower right hand corner of the book, there is a dark blue flag with white letters reversing out the legend NEW REVISED EDITION.

Here, see:

On the right, a more modern version of the paperback, one I've owned for many years. Grim, blocky type made more intimidating by the atmospheric and effective Vincent DiFate cover art. On the left is the oddity I found last night, sardonically-hilarious art and all. Isn't that a scream, really? It's almost unfair to make fun of it, it's so obviously silly.

That's not the real treat here, though. Remember NEW REVISED EDITION? Well, the original text, written in the 1930s, is so full of anachronisms it's amazing that anybody's using it as an inspiration anymore other than wistful rememberances of That Was The World that Was (and if you are, you're almost certainly Caucasian; the only character that got any development that wasn't white was the Japanese manservant of the pivotal character Tony Drake, and when he was regarded, the text is leaden with benevolent, kindly patriarchal condescension). When I read the first few pages of this edition though, I almost fell over myself in bewilderment; the book starts off chapter one with the supporting character Dave Ransdell, a war veteran and aviator entrusted to courier the precious photographic plates to Dr. Hendron in New York, waiting to pass through customs at an airport, receiving urgent pleas to sell his story to the papers first.

Hold up. I've read this novel dozens of times. I knew he approached New York on a fast cruise ship from France. In this version, though, he voyages on a transatlanic flight from Lisbon.

It was then it sunk in just what NEW REVISED VERSION really meant. And I went looking. This edition was released in 1952 and sections of the text were revised to reflect more accurately the then-current geopolitics. A resurgence of the Nazi party in Germany was referenced. A reference to Mussolini was deleted. The Iron Curtain is referred to. East Germany is mentioned.

The truly odd thing on top of all the other odd things is that the version you're most likely to pick up today is the more anachronistic one, not the NEW REVISED VERSION which, while still anachronistic, is less so than the original. The version on the left, the more modern edition, was copyrighted in 1962 and was probably published sometime in the 1970s (all a guess as it's not documented in the book itself when it was published) but it's the original Thirties text, not the updated version, which came out in about 1952. It's not unprecedented; the Patrick Tilley novel of ET invasion and conquest, Fade-Out, was originally published in 1975 with reference to then-recent military events and geopolitics and republished in the 1990s with Gulf War references.

I think this would be worth a series of articles here about each chapter and what got changed and the book in general. It's still, though hoary and old, a part of what I informally think qualifies as an American modern SF canon, and it continues to inspire works of not only comics and literature but also popular music. And it's always useful to confront what's expired in our culture and winnow the bad out or at least call it by its name.

Oh, and just to be complete, here's the back covers, complete with more melodramatic text, some of which never actually occurred in the work itself.

[lit] Proust On Film

3450.

A great deal of Proust's life is known about; he left a surfeit of information about himself behind, and a great many photographs. But we may now actually have him on film.

The following clip, of a high-society wedding in Paris in 1904, shows an unaccompanied individual proceeding down the steps on the viewer's right, in the 37th second:


Des images de Proust retrouvées ? by LePoint

This via France24 (http://www.france24.com/en/20170215-france-literature-marcel-proust-footage-wedding-clip) is a clip of the wedding procession of Armand de Guiche, being betrothed to Elaine Greffulhe, daughter of Countess Greffulhe (whoever they may be). De Guiche was a good friend of Marcel's.

There are a number of tells that make it extremely likely this is Marcel Proust. From the article:

The clip from 1904 shows a single man dressed elegantly for the occasion. The gay French writer was one of the few unaccompanied guests at the Greffulhe-de Guiche marriage ceremony.

The clothes also correspond to Proust’s sartorial tastes. "The clothes he wears, elegant but distinct from those of the other men at the wedding, correspond to what he wore at the time, when he was a dandy in the English fashion,” said Sirois-Trahan. Proust was then a young man of 30, a socialite who was admitted into aristocratic circles due to his reputation as a spiritual, reclusive man working on a massive book project.

So, Marcel Proust, rescued from lost time … on film.

Hat tip: Friday Valentine. Thanky! 

[literature] I've Read Proust, And Here's The first Things I Thought About That

3442.

Just over two years ago I took up what, for many readers, is Everest: Reading Marcel Proust.

The work, many of you have heard of, if only as the punchline of a Monty Python joke (one of its most memorable, which is something, as this was part of the tag end of the series, after Cleese had left). "The All-England Summarize Proust Competition", which is absurd as a title in and of itself, was skit in which three entrants (two individual men and a chorus collectively as the third) attempted to cogently summarize the sweep of the seven-volume masterwork of the modern novel, In Search of Lost Time, a single novel in seven parts actually, in only 15 seconds.

How long is ISOLT (or, in French, A la recherche du temps perdu)? Wikipedia gave the following stats: 4,215 pages; 1,267,069 words. Perhaps needless to say, the prize went not to any of the contestants, but to the 'girl with the biggest tits'.

Sex sells.

Anyway, reading it was not always easy. There were stretches of days which I didn't crack open the volume I was in. It's called an 'oceanic' work; sometimes it was like swimming one. I'd never seen sentences that long, a writer so involved in describing every nuance of a thought, and, in places, as dry as the Sahara. ISOLT hits some beautiful highs and some very, very self-indulgent lows and middles. In more than one way, it's not one book, but several.

But was it worth reading? Definitely. My opinion of this book will probably evolve over the years to come, so this is far from the last word on it. But here's what I think, thus far:

The book is a great journey. It's much like life itself, within the mind; who amongst us doesn't have incredibly highs, low lows, all connected by banal betweens? In the more abstruse sense, though, the book tells of the paths that a person can take through life, and how they seem different, until that one moment when the epiphany happens and you see all the ways of your life as different versions of the same way, or two ways that intersect in more than one place. These observations we frequently miss, because we are looking for other things at the time.

In the course of the novel, Marcel is striving. He wants to create, to love and be loved, to be successful and celebrated as an artist. For many years, it eludes him. He wants to be a writer, but just never has all the pieces to start the story he feels he has in him.

At the end, though, understanding that time holds all the lost and wasted years in the folds of the ages to be revisited if one wants to take the time to look over them all, and seeing the evolution that time imposes on the very world he sees, and seeing that Swann's Way and the Guermantes Way are unified in the person of Mlle. Saint-Loup, he realizes, as the joke goes, that the material for his art was in him all along. The experiences of a lifetime that have not only aged his generation towards death but which have also made of him an old man. There he is, near the end of his own days, and all of a sudden, at last, with the enlightenment that the change of time provides, there are all the tools in front of him to create the art he had within him all that time, and knew it, and couldn't yet coax out.

At this point, it's the last 100 pages of La recherche that speak to me the loudest. I've tried to compel myself down avenues of artistic absorption and expression only to have every one of them sputter out before I've gotten very far. In that part of the book, the fictional Marcel is aging, and after years in sanitaria is aware of the heavy hand of mortality upon his shoulder. He's not at the end of his world, but he feels he can see it from there, and instead of frightening him and making him despondent that human life is a limited thing, it only fires his enthusiasm, with a brief plea to fate that he should live long enough to encompass his art, he energizes and digs in joyously.

The record of the research of his artistic material up to the point it attains critical mass is the six and a half books up unto that point, it all matters and enters into it: Bloch, Elstir, the Guermantes clan, the little clan of the Verdurins, Balbec, child hood, the madeleine, the relationships between all the people he knew, Charlus, Robert de Saint-Loup, the little band of girls, Albertine, Swann, Odette, everything united by his epiphanies about time's passing and catalyzed by the realization that Mlle. Saint-Loup united Swann's Way and the Guermantes Way into a grand unified whole.

At this point, as a starting point for my integration of the experience of reading Proust into my intellect and life, I'd say that the cogent thing for those of us who have tarried at realizing our own art to the point of thinking that we may as well give up, we'll never be the artist we fancy ourselves to be, is that we may not have hit that catalyzing moment just yet. We must be ready for it when it arrives, be watchful and aware, but try not to be too despondent or too aggravated that our motivation and firing up hasn't happened yet.

That … that's a troublesome thing on its own. You have to be ready, but you can't be too desperate or it may continue to elude you. Like the thing that runs from you until you stop looking for it, and then it comes to find you, you lose time while you define the terms and limits of your struggle.

It's like this, in a way: I, as many SF fans, adore Dune, that inconic Frank Herbert novel. But, for many years, it was beyond me. I found the beginning dull and densely worded, and couldn't get past the first 50 pages or so. Then, one day, it took off with me, swept me through it, and left me wanting to read it again. And I did. I've reread it many times since: there was a year, not too long ago, where most of my reading for the year was rereading Dune. 

I wasn't ready for a long time, but then, suddenly, I was.

And the last part of La recherche reminded me hard about that. I must be ready, I must keep prodding and searching until the suggestions my wife have given me, the way she and other people look at me, the way I look at myself, the talents I know I have within me just out of fingers' reach … there will be a catalystic place where all of a sudden they fall into the place.

But I have to keep pressing. Gently, firmly, maybe not too frantically, but continually.

There's a feeling of Zen in that. At least, Zen as I understand it.

But that's why sticking to the whole of In Search Of Lost Time, despite some of its dryer parts, is important. It all matters, in the end. It all becomes a perfect whole. 

[pdx] It's OryCon 38, Day One

3419.

Spent yesterday evening and afternoon at OryCon 38, at the Marriott down on Naito Parkway.

This is the 29th consecutive time I've attended OryCon. It's like a homecoming, it always is. And I have more than just a history of being a member, I've contributed: in the OryCon 30s, I've designed no less than six of the Souvenir/Pocket Program sets: 30 through 34, then 37 and 38. I'm most proud of that. I feel very invested in the past and legacy now. I wasn't there at the beginning, but I still remember when it was a very young convention. I feel as though it were a part of me and now, for better or otherwise, I'm a part of it no matter what else I do.

I've even left a legacy of my own, at least for now. The illustration on the left I did as a one-off for my first stint as publications designer, back at Ory 30. It's evolved into a semi-official-unofficial logo for the event; it is the profile picture on both the event's Facebook presence as well as its Twitter.

I never became the successful graphic designer I though I was going to be. That is a kind of a sadness. Life intervened and possibilities did not come to flower. However, the contributions I've done here are very sustaining to me and remind me that, if I didn't attain the success I've hoped for, I do have the ability to create under pressure and under deadline, and that it can be good. 

The first day of 'con is for settling in. I breathe the atmosphere, connect with old friends, meet new ones. I saw opening ceremonies, which culminated in the host getting led away by someone in battle armor over the quality of the script (everyone's a critic). I got a good look at the dealer's room; attended the Art Show reception for the first time (urbanely snacking on cheese and crackers whilst browsing the works is a terribly, terribly ennobling thing for someone as feral as I). I got to meet a favorite cartoonist, Roberta Gregory. I wrote several pages in my dairy at an unclaimed table in the gaming room. All good things.

Steeped in the company of such interesting people makes a good many things feel possible. It's a renewal and a spiritual refreshment.

As long as there's an OryCon, the world isn't entirely broken, yes?

Next we meet, I may have pictures, or maybe just impressions.

[writing] Harlan Ellison, Crafting the Short Story, and "Night of Black Glass"

3234.

Finally found a copy of Harlan Ellison's "Stalking the Nightmare, in paperback, for my HE shelf. The high point on this collection is the short, eerie "Night of Black Glass". This is a story which stuck with me, particularly because of Harlan's exploration of survivor's guilt and how he poses it as an existential question with a real cost; also, if anyone (and I know most of you in The Harlan Ellison Facebook Fanclub have) has ever seen the documentary "Dreams With Sharp Teeth", it was apparently written as the product of an exhibition …

The picture is of Harlan sitting down in a bookstore's front window on Fifth Avenue in NYC in front of his trusty Olympia typewriter. He is then delivered an envelope with a single piece of paper, NBC letterhead, which he then opens, reads, and then gets to typing. In a voice-over, the late Jessica Savitch, from a clip from the Today show from March of 1981, states that he was given an opening idea written by Tom Brokaw: "A man walking on a rocky beach in Maine in August, finds a pair of broken sunglasses". Five hours later, "Night of Black Glass" was finished. Not only was it a demonstration of the man's almost-preternatural ability to prolifically create, it showed that creative pursuits, to paraphrase HE, was a job of work, not something dainty and airy, fit only for occupants of ivory towers.

I read it in a magazine then and didn't see it again for many years. Now I have it on my HE shelf to read when I please.

Old novels and short-stories have become like totems of existence to me. Having them on hand physically makes me feel better about being here.

And so it goes.

And here's a link: An archival page, noting the title indicates a school resource for teaching literature, but it contains the entire transcript of Harlan's interview with Jessica Savitch on NBC's Today Show from March 24th, 1981. Very insightful reading at http://archives.nbclearn.com/portal/site/k-12/flatview?cuecard=34831 (if you search the NBCLearn site you only get a 15-second preview of the video, or you have to sign in to see it, and you probably have to be in school or be an educator or pay a fee for it. But at least you can read it.)

[literature] What Did Not Kill Harlan Ellison Obviously Didn't Try Hard Enough

3160.

We have been following the news of the travail of a man called, by himself, 'possibly the most contentious human being in the world' with some interest.

Above: L: Susan Ellison, R: This mook she married.
Photo: Steven Barber

Harlan Ellison, we have heard, has suffered a stroke, since about a week now. He's been in the hospital, and we hear, is doing quite well actually. He has, it is reported, lost a bit of use of his right arm and right leg.

This will do some damage to his legendary typing speed, though how his right leg entered into it, I'll never know.

I've admired his writing and watched with amusement and awe as the legends about the man grew and got spread. I've heard him described in glowing terms; one person I knew once referred to him as "The Ego That Ate Corvallis."

What he was ever doing in Corvallis, I'll also never know.

My exposure to him began with a copy of the collection Approaching Oblivion, which has eleven short, crisp, sharp-edged stories which range from the almost-too-abstract-to-be-a-story "Ecowareness" to the dark "Cold Friend" to the barbed "Knox" to the warmest, most humorous Jewish story I've ever read, "I'm Looking for Kadak", almost Sholem Aleichem in miniature. I came to this book as a 11-year-old who sent in a penny to the Science Fiction Book Club without telling my Mom; if I had had any actual ambition, this probably would have spurred my rise to becoming an actual author; as it was, even though I didn't comprehend the stories, I sensed kind of a kindred spirit there. At 11, I was a bullied social outcast, and knowing, even though not clearly, that there was someone out there who saw the world as I did, while it didn't spur me on to any artistic destiny, at the very least it helped me cope.

It is a beloved book. I still keep a copy (Book Club Edition for memory's sake, bought from Powell's) on the headboard of my bed.

He is, thankfully, recovering. His wit, they say, is as sharp as ever. I have the good fortune as having as online friends some people who are personally very close to Harlan, and they have collectively described the scent at the hospital as one of more than a fair amount of mirth. When a stroke victim is entertaining his guests, you know that's a good sign.

So, for what it's worth, whether you like him or dislike him, he's still with us.

What did not kill him should have tried harder … but I'm glad it gave up.

Steven Barber, a/k/a The Thumbnail Traveler, has a short heartfelt thing to say about it. The photo above is also via his gracious aegis, for which I am doubly grateful. 

[teh_funnay] Meanwhile, somewhere near Westeros…

3158.

GRRM hasn't killed all 140 characters … he still uses Twittah …

JK Rowling, Joss Whedon, and I walk into a bar... Everyone you've ever cared about dies.
— George R.R. Martin (@GRRM) October 3, 2014

[pdx] Photos on Sunday: Tilikum and Terrior, Via Ursula K. LeGuin.

3066.

If there are discussions about what is the quintessential Portland novel, and, more over, a novel is sine qua non as far as a "Portland literature" is, it would be Ursula K. LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven.

A bit of an introduction if one has not been. The Lathe of Heaven is set in a fictionalized Portland and Oregon of the year 2002 (it now qualifies as an alternative history). It concerns George Orr, a man whose dreams can literally alter reality, and Dr. William Haber, a sleep and dream researcher … an onierologist … who discovers the quality of this power and tries to use it to recreate the world in a better version … sans war, sans hunger. Each dream is incarnated in unpredictable ways, causing eventual chaos, a kaleidoscope world and, unwittingly, revealing Dr. Haber as a megalomaniac, if a tender, loving one.

The novel got its hooks into me (and has permanently done so … laying next to this computer at this time is a paperback copy I got at Powell's on Sunday evening for $2.95, making this possibly the most Portland thing I could physically accomplish) with its fictionalized vision of Portland of the year 2002. Writing in the late 60s and early 70s as she did, I presumably assume that at least a part of her found it somewhat inevitable that Portland might expand, toxically, and ruin its own character.

The Portland at the beginning of Lathe massed 3,000,000 … as many people as are in the whole of Oregon today, less about 800,000 … and the New Cities of the then not-so-dry Oregon Outback had populations of approaching 7 million each. 

The Portland portrayed in the novel had a few geographical inconsistencies, but none worth noticing overmuch. Something about the narrative … the easy way she wrote of local geography, the familiar timbre to the words … made it plain to me that she knew this area intimately. She had a sense-of-place. The writing had a particular terrior… it simply couldn't have been written by anyone else, or anywhere else.

It was Oregon, fictionalized by an Oregonian, who loved Oregon. It felt good to read, and still does, to this day. I read Lathe to wallow in the descriptions of Portland, the free and casual way words like Willamette, Linnton, Zigzag and Rhodoendron are used. And if a few details are off … mentioning a place as 209 SW Burnside St … then the tender loving care with the place that is otherwise taken more than makes up for that.

Of course, the story is about a man whose dreams change the nature of reality. There's probably a little editing going on there as well.

Wandering up and down the Eastbank Esplanade, near OMSI, to get a good look at the Tilikum Crossing, the Bridge of the People. Not for the first time, looking along the river where, at many angles, you can at once take in automobile bridges and an aerial tram but also, now a bridge for trains, bikes and people only, did a feeling grasp me … and then I had it.

Passages from The Lathe of Heaven, meditations on getting around in the overpopulated, overpolluted, overmoist Portland of the fictional year 2002 invaded my consciousness and did not let go. I had to get a copy of the book to read again, you see. I had no choice.

We join George Orr as he travels from Vancouver to Portland on a subway (can you imagine?):

To go under a river: there's a strange thing to do, a really weird idea.

To cross a river, ford it, wade it, swim it, use boat, ferry, bridge, airplane, to go upriver, to go downriver in the ceaseless renewal and beginning of current: all that makes sense. But in going under a river, something is involved which is, in the central meaning of the word, perverse. There are roads in the mind and outside it the mere elaborateness of which shows plainly that, to have got into this, a wrong turning must have been taken way back.

 There were nine train and truck tunnels under the Willamette, sixteen bridges across it, and concrete banks along it for twenty-seven miles. Flood control on both it and its great confluent the Columbia, a few miles downstream from central Portland, was so highly developed that neither river could rise more than five inches even after the most prolonged torrential rains. 

 The Willamette was a useful element of the environment, like a very large, docile draft animal harnessed with straps, chains, shafts, saddles, bits, girths, hobbles. If it hadn't been useful, of course, it would have been concreted over, like the hundreds of little creeks and streams that ran in darkness down from the hills of the city under the streets and buildings.

 But without it, Portland wouldn't have been a port; the ships, the long strings of barges, the big rafts of lumber still came up and down it. So the trucks and the trains and the few private cars had to go over the river or under it. 

 Above the heads of those now riding the GPRT train in the Broadway Tunnel were tons of rock and gravel, tons of water running, the piles of wharves and the keels of ocean-going ships, the huge concrete supports of elevated freeway bridges and approaches, a convoy of steamer trunks laden with frozen battery-produced chickens, one jet plane at 34,000 feet, the stars at 4.3+ light years.

Later, very near the end of the book, Orr travels across a Portland that was, in some ways, a crazy quilt of all the possible Portlands that he had, at one time, dreamed:

Orr returned to downtown Portland by boat. Transportation was still rather confused; pieces, remnants, and commencements of about six different public transportation systems cluttered up the city. Reed College had a subway station, but no subway; the funicular to Washington Park ended at the entrance to a tunnel which went halfway under the Willamette and then stopped. Meanwhile, enterprising fellow had refitted a couple of boasts that used to run tours up and down the Willamette and Columbia, and was using them as ferries on regular runs between Linnton, Vancouver, Portland, and Oregon City. It made a pleasant trip.

Weaving UKL's words (with due apologies) amongst the pictures creates a trip of its own. SF doesn't predict, it guesses and wonders; we should not be surprised that TriMet didn't take on LeGuin as a long-range planning consultant (though I figure it would be better off if it had). Still, contrasting the dystopian future of Portland in prose with the significantly cheerier (if still flawed) present, it's hard not to see the resonance. They regard each other as brothers by different mothers. They, oddly, mesh … the one being the flip side of the other.

In an ineffable way, the terrior that made Lathe possible wells up, unseen. The book beatifies and explores its setting without wallowing in it, by dwelling on what is, and the voice you hear whispering the details is the real-world surroundings … at least, those in the year it was written.

The quintessential Portland novel. There can be none other. 

[maps] Nineteen Eighty-Four: The Only Map We Need For The Only War We've Got

3040.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is one of my favorite novels. It is a book I've read again and again; Its atmosphere nonpareil; the world of Airstrip One, despite mostly being descriptive writing and very little dialogue, is incredibly real as told by Orwell.

Or maybe it's because of the overhwelming amount of exposition. I was struck hard by the fact that this book dealt very little in dialogue between people. Orwell was a masterful writer, no doubt about it; the paragraph-on-paragraph of exploration of the perceptions of and inner dialogue of Oceanian Everyman Winston Smith have the eventual effect of leaving you alone in this world with him, and since you identify with him, you are eventually alone in Oceania with yourself.

Of the many perceptions of life under INGSOC we eventually adopt is the political-cultural geography of the then-world-of-the future. Smith hears of it as he works in the Ministry of Truth, relentlessly revising The Times; he is illuminated more upon reading The Book … Emmanuel Goldstein's Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, of course. The world of his time is populated by three great superstates and two large disputed regions.

Each of the superstates has its own proof against conquest from without: Eurasia, its vast interior land spaces (as someone once said, never get involved in a land war in Asia); Eastasia, the industriousness and fertility of its overwhelming population, and Oceania, its vast sea reaches. The disputed lands are the grim sandboxen in which the three play war amongst each other.

They are described very functionally and schematically in The Book  and most cartographers tend to take the descriptions fairly literally. The boundaries between the three powers are, while largely stable, locally fuzzy, and not-necessarily clearly defined. The modern cartographic renderer, in their quest for exactitude, tends to draw the boundaries clearly. What I've stumbled upon is a display that makes much more sense.

This map I found at the map gallery at Chris Mullen's vast intellectual playground, The Visual Telling of Stories. Go there when you have time to waste; it will gulp it all down and ask if you have more. The thing to remember is that in the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, you have three superstates constantly at each other's throats, and, when convenient, ally swaps one-to-one for enemy, with the mass media wiping and rewriting the mass memory pretty much at will.

At a pivotal point in the story, June 21st/22nd 1984, Oceania's 'glorious ally', Eastasia, and its 'age-old enemy', Eurasia, swap places. Winston and his rewrite crew are called in for a week-long gluttony of overwork, and banners, posters, and even a speech being hectored in a public square are changed, literally, on the fly. The map would be useful to an Oceanian if it weren't for the fact that the Oceanian citizen had to be totally non-cognizant of any other alignment than the extant one ever being extant (this awareness, never more than vague and constantly doubted by Smith himself being one of the chief causes of his ongoing bemusment).

The two legends make the map doubly-illustrated. They are keyed such that the proper hatching matches the proper legend depending on how the map is viewed. Viewed in landscape, Eurasia is the ally. Viewed in portrait, Eastasia has become Oceania's friend.

Taken as a piece, it's two maps in one, and actually rather aptly demonstrates the Newspeak concept of doublethink, the ability to hold two contradictory truths in mind and accepting both … and in acknowledging them both, crimethink. 

The research stations in the remotest areas on Earth and the two disputed areas are represented suitably-amoebically, and the interface between Eastasia and Eurasia is, while evident, still vaugely-defined in a way.

This, therefore, is the perfect world map for this world, and the only one one ever needs.

The map itself is from a book by R.C.Churchill, A Short History of the Future, published 1955. The illustrator is credited asJ osef-Jan Szostak.

Via Strange Maps, whose article is also a nice exploration of the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four for the non-familiar.

[diary] The Business Journal Of Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald

2941.From the world of letters and diaries, we have this gem: the ledger of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In a business ledger, between the years of 1919 and 1938, he laid it all out; what he earned since his leaving the Army, a record of his published fiction, the money he earned by other writings, a biographical "Outline of My Life", and the money Zelda earned from her writing.

It's fascinating to me because of two things it reveals; first, that a writer on their own is not necessarily a poor record-keeper, keeping track of some minutiae for their own records if not posterity, and, second, FSF was quite a neat penman, keeping orderly records in a meticulous hand.

View it at http://library.sc.edu/digital/collections/fitzledger.html.

[literature] The End of Banned Books Week Has Been Repealed

2867.
Bill Nothstine has banned the end of Banned Books week, which is just fine with us, because the Brigade of Decent Citizenry Brigade doesn't take 51 weeks off either.

And, also they're continuing to try to ban Huck Finn. Because America.

[print] Charlotte Brontë: The First Zinester

2779.Here in Zinelandia producing zines is second nature; a little-known section of the municipal code stats that you have to either be creating one or planning one or you have to move to Gresham.

Fortunately, the Zine Police will let you off if you just say you're planning a zine. It's like having a screenplay in Los Angeles; the default position is that you're going to doing one any day now.

Written circa 1830, when the eldest Brontë sister was 14, a very tiny, handwritten volume, one of a series of "Young Men's Magazines" (the mind is intrigued here) is smaller than 1.5" x 2.6" but packs 4,000 words and a setting in Glass Town.

Big deal. I was perusing similar volumes in the zine stacks at the Multnomah County Library just last week.

But if you wanted it, you'd of have to had ponied up about $1.1 million at Sothebys.

If Charlotte were alive today … well, hell, she'd be scratching at her coffin lid demanding to be let out. But still.

[liff] The New Incuriosity

2694.A very insightful article about the new crop of authors, many of which don't feel that they should also be readers.

Apparently, the journaling quality of these works lends itself to Justin Bieber fan fiction laced with text-message acronyms. Notions of “craft” are not a real issue for these authors. But let there be no doubt, if these are the sorts of books publishers can sell, then these are the books the publishers will champion. It follows, that in the same way certain fiction writers recognize aspects of themselves in books about writing fiction and propagate more of it, fans of social networking fiction will see themselves in it and continue this new tradition. Driven by sales, it will become popular and the thought of reading the canon, or even Danielle Steel, will be considered tedious and unnecessary.

Read more: The Consequences of Writing Without Reading — Imprint-The Online Community for Graphic Designers.

It explains a lot as to why some modern fiction is so ultimately non-compelling and self-indulgent. The article is well worth  your time.

[lit] Your Spoiler-Filled Overview of Stephen King's "Under The Dome"

2275.Finally got through Stephen King's latest event, the brobdingnagian Under The Dome.

I'm not a Stephen King fan, really. At least I don't consider myself one. I have huge respect for his talent, and I'd say I'm a fan of certain stories of his: The Dark Tower I'm absolutely smitten with, I adore The Stand, and regardless of what anyone thinks of him, American man-of-letters or purveyor of prole lit, he is a master of the novel and if he can't hook you, then you're probably without a pulse.

Ask your doctor about Stephen King.

I mean, he's probably read one or more of his books.

When the buzz about Under The Dome started to circulate, the idea of a small burg cut off from the world and left to stew in its own juices got immediately under my skin. Still, I can't put into words why that is. Certainly I thought that King would tell the story in a way nobody else could, especially since he set it in Maine, his home state, in that curious Faulkneresque part of Maine that only exists in his books. He has a certain angle on the dark side of America and Americans which has such a unique voice, and it seemed as though he was probably going to look at that through this.

So, what happens when a cute, rural New England town that welcomes visitors with legendary Yankee hospitality is forced to turn in on itself? Here's what I found, with blatant, bald spoliers.

If you've not read Under The Dome yet and you don't want to find out what happens, then go no further. I'm giving it all away here, and I'm as serious as Big Jim Rennies arrhythmia here.

Spoilers Follow. Read No Further if you don't want to know how it all turns out. In the following, I've colored certain phrases to blend in with the background. To find out what they say, highlight them with your cursor, as though you were copying-and-pasting, or use your browser to View Source.

1. Chester's Mill is Rotten To The Core.

The town of Chester's Mill, Maine, is run like a traditional New England Town. Town meetings, where everyone in the community goes to decide, are headed by elected officials called selectmen. In The Mill, Andy Sanders is the First Selectmen, and thus the senior elected official, Jim Rennie, the local big businessman, is the Second, and Angela Grinnell is the Third. The real power behind the throne is Rennie, who lets Sanders stay out front as the figurehead and sees to it that Grinnell maintains her OxyContin addiction, thus making the Board of Selectmen essentially a rubber stamp for pretty much anything Rennie wants, enabling him to finance a major meth lab, distribution all over the East Coast, and funnelling off of public funds into his own private schemes. The people of Chester's Mill seem largely blissfully unaware of that their town government is corrupt to the core.

2. The People of Chester's Mill Are Not Admirable

Very few of the actual apparent popluation of the town figure into the narrative – out of a stated population of over 2,000, only thirty to forty people are ever mentioned, even if only indirectly. When the population is mentioned, in the Town Meeting toward the last third of the book, they are wearing blue armbands – showing solidarity with the current administration, being gulled into the "with us or against us" terror being instigated by Rennie and his crew.

3. Almost Everybody Dies

The climax of the book comes not, as you'd expect, when the Dome finally goes away, but when Big Jim's super meth-lab, near the town's radio station, goes up in an enormous explosion, caused by the the character they called The Chef, who had been driven beyond functional insanity.  The area under the Dome, which is as near enough Hermetically-sealed off from the surrounding environment as makes little difference, has almost all of the breathable air consumed in the resulting firestorm. The few survivors – numbering less than thirty by the novel's end – survive by breathing outside air forced through the barrier (which is just permeable) by gigantic fans.

4. The "Dome" Isn't Really A Dome.

It develops that the dome is really a column that goes up about 40,000 feet, and whose shape follows the town line exactly. The word dome is used early on by the characters and sticks. The precision of the dimensions of the "dome" is an early "tell" that the barrier is an artifact, not a natural occurrence. This is confirmed in the middle of the book, when some of the local kids find the object that's generating the barrier.

5. Comeuppance Is Messy – And Somewhat Random

The villains in the piece are not difficult to spot, and they are so irredeemably evil that, despite what few sympathies you might have for them – there is ample indication that Junior Rennie's psychopatic behavior is as much due to a medical condition as it is due to having a father who's a cynical hypocritcal sociopathic bully – you're happy that they get done it. The only thing you might regret is that King doesn't allow his victims to deliver the justice they so richly deserve – but each demise, and espcially Big Jim Rennie's, is typically fitting, because in the end, their own sins come back to eat them alive – and those who allied themselves with them are fittingly casualties.

But the rain falls on the just and the unjust – because "stuff" happens. King really understands this.

6. Even The Good Guys Die Unfairly

See 5. above. When Caro and Thurston and one of the "Dorphans" die, I hated King for a few minutes, and then respected him. Because he understands that life is not only unfair, it's downright inscrutable.

7. The Dome Is Not Of This World. Maybe Not of This Dimension

By interacting with the object generating the Dome, characters figure out that the Dome was put there by, essentially, extraterrestrial children who are playing a game and regard us as we might regard ants we kill with sunlight from a magnifying glass. This metaphor on humanity toward those we regard as "lower" is expressed just that way, and expanded upon, with the extraterrestrials – who one of the characters manage to beg mercy from by somehow communicating with them via the box, resolving the crisis – having to be convinced that the people they are killing are actually real beings.

The beings responsible for the Dome are, it's implied, children of a race with abilities far beyond ours, playing with a toy … in a playroom – literally, child's play.

8. The Dome Is A Classic McGuffin

In the end, the Dome's nature and operation are not actually explained, and the origin only hinted at. Why the Dome is there isn't the point, but what happens to the people there – at least from the story's point of view. Indeed, from the point of view of the Dome's owners, the stories of the people trapped there are less than insignficant until Julia communicates to one of the ETs. The story begins just as the Dome comes down, and ends just as the Dome goes away – a period of only about two weeks at the most. In that time, Chester's Mill goes from being a well-mannered, neighborly New England town to all but a fascist hell-on-earth, with a villain who sees nothing beyond the chance to consolidate his hold on the town, dimly confident, in the back of his mind somehow, that he will figure out a way to explain away the carnage if – and when – the Dome ever goes.

The civil face of this small town was just a facade, which ripped away within three days of the Dome's arrival.

There's a lot of current cultural touchpoints, a lot of message-sending, both intimated and blatant. Take them as you will.

And read the book – it's a corker of a story.

Technorati Tags: Literature, Under The Dome, Stephen King

[lit] Cormac McCarthy's Auctioning Off His Manual Typewriter.

2267.Yes, really. According to the New York Times:

Cormac McCarthy has written more than a dozen novels, several screenplays, two plays, two short stories, countless drafts, letters and more — and nearly every one of them was tapped out on a portable Olivetti manual typewriter he bought in a Knoxville, Tenn., pawnshop around 1963 for $50.

Over five million works and a place in American literature, over a period of five decades, and two hugely-selling big-screen movies – out of this:

Photo: The New York Times. Linked.

He won't nod typescriptless though, no worries – he has a replacement:

“He found another one just like this,” a portable Olivetti that looks practically brand new, Mr. McCarthy said from his home in New Mexico. “I think he paid $11, and the shipping was about $19.95.”

Now, that's someone who knows the difference between price and value.

If you're wondering how much it'll go for at auction, it's in the if-you-have-to-ask-you-can't-afford-it category, so I'll just tell you here: Christie's thinks' they'll get $15,000 to $20,000 for it.

I've had typewriters like this. Some of the basic models don't have margin or tab stops. You use the unshifted-L for the numeral 1. It used something called … ahh, what was it? Oh, yes … paper.

They used to have stacks of used typewriters at Goodwill.

Wow.

Technorati Tags: cormac mccarthy, typewriters, manual typewriters

[pdx] An Orwell Reason To Visit The Hillsdale Library

2202.If you aren't stopping to look at the small displays that mount into the walls of the foyers of your local branch of the Multnomah County Library, you're missing out, Tex. Perforce, a lesson in how to look.

As mentioned, in the walls of the foyers of most of our library branches are small display boxes. They are typically decorated with a small, usually nifty, interpretive display with a theme. Latterly, one of the ones at the entry to my favorite branch, the one at Midland out 122nd way, had a very well done collage-y bit about Whitman and Blades of Grass.

I'm no poetry fan, but the work was well done, I'm just saying.

Rick Seifert, The Red Electric, has been given the chance to do a display in the Hillsdale branch (1525 SW Sunset Blvd). The theme, perfectly pertinent in as much as his CV indicates he's a "semi-retired" journalist and journalism teacher, is George Orwell, on the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is a favorite book of mine, having been read (and re-read) many times over the years.

It contains niftyness – an old Remington 3 typewriter similar to the one Orwell used; a range of Orwell's books, and some explanatation.

It's worth a visit to your local library, yo. Crack a book, people!

Technorati Tags: George Orwell, Rick Siefert, The Red Electric, 1984, HIllsdale Library