Author: Laura Conrad

Torture in Tolkien

I’m rereading the Lord
of the Rings, which I do every couple of years.

I’m at the house of Tom Bombadil right now. Thanks to Kate
Nepveu’s reread on tor.com,
I’m enjoying the verse Tom Bombadil speaks in — I knew he had his
own rhythm, but I’d never noticed the rhyme scheme before.

So far, the only other thing that’s struck me as new this time
is thanks to the political debate on torture.

In the second chapter, The Shadow of the Past, Gandalf says to Bilbo:

What I have told you is what Gollum was willing to tell – though not, of course, in the way I have reported it. Gollum is a liar, and you have to sift his words. For instance, he called the Ring his “birthday-present”, and he stuck to that. He said it came from his grandmother, who had lots of beautiful things of that kind. A ridiculous story. I have no doubt that Sméagol’s grandmother was a matriarch, a great person in her way, but to talk of her possessing many Elven-rings was absurd, and as for giving them away, it was a lie. But a lie with a grain of truth.

The murder of Déagol haunted Gollum, and he had made up a defence, repeating it to his “Precious” over and over again, as he gnawed bones in the dark, until he almost believed it. It was his birthday. Déagol ought to have given the ring to him. It had obviously turned up just so as to be a present. It was his birthday-present, and so on, and on.

I endured him as long as I could, but the truth was
desperately important, and in the end I had to be harsh. I put
the fear of fire on him, and wrung the true story out of him,
bit by bit, together with much snivelling and snarling. He thought he was misunderstood and ill-used. But when he had at last told me his history, as far as the end of the Riddle-game and Bilbo’s escape, he would not say any more, except in dark hints. Some other fear was on him greater than mine.

The emphasis is mine.

I had never before noticed that Gandalf had tortured Gollum,
using much the same rationale as the Bush administration.

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United Breaks Guitars

Ran into this
video, by singer/songwrite/guitar player Dave Carroll about his
experience checking his guitar on United Airlines and trying to
recover damages when it was broken. He claims it will be a trilogy. The link on the youtube page
is broken, so here’s
a little more information about the incident.

This is a serious problem for all musicians who travel, and
more of them should be fighting back this way. I know of several
large recorders that have suffered serious damage in airline
travel.


Report on the July 7 meeting

We played:

Schedule

We will be having our usual dropin meetings on Tuesdays at
7:45 PM at my
place.

We’ll probably skip August 11, so that people can go to the
special West Gallery
Quire workshop with Francis Rhodes.

Other Events

The Wakefield Summer Band (Laura Conrad, tuba) will be giving
concerts this summer on the banks of Lake Quannapowitt. The first
one will be this Friday, July 10, at 7 PM. You can get directions
to the park from the First
Parish Congregational Church site.

Pride and Prejudice fanfic

After reading all that science fiction last week in order to
vote for the Hugos, I was ready for a change of pace. I picked
Pride and Prejudice (free online
version) because one of the novelettes (Pride
and Prometheus, by John Kessel)
uses characters from it, and I wanted to confirm my impression
that it directly contradicted what Jane Austen said.

The novelette continues the history of Mary and Kitty, the two
sisters who remain unmarried at the end of Pride and
Prejudice. Jane Austen says about them:

Kitty, to her very material advantage, spent the chief of her
time with her two elder sisters. In society so superior to
what she had generally known, her improvement was great. She
was not of so ungovernable a temper as Lydia; and, removed from
the influence of Lydia’s example, she became, by proper
attention and management, less irritable, less ignorant, and
less insipid. From the further disadvantage of Lydia’s society
she was of course carefully kept, and though Mrs. Wickham
frequently invited her to come and stay with her, with the
promise of balls and young men, her father would never consent
to her going.

Mary was the only daughter who remained at home; and she was
necessarily drawn from the pursuit of accomplishments by
Mrs. Bennet’s being quite unable to sit alone. Mary was
obliged to mix more with the world, but she could still
moralize over every morning visit; and as she was no longer
mortified by comparisons between her sisters’ beauty and her
own, it was suspected by her father that she submitted to
the change without much reluctance.

In the novelette, Mary and Kitty are both living with their
parents; Mrs. Bennet has given up on Mary, but is still working
hard to marry off Kitty. Mr. Kessel does pick up, as I had not,
on Kitty coughing and being generally more delicate than her
sisters. But certainly Jane Austen did not envision an affair
with a butcher’s son.

But it is interesting to note that Victor Frankenstein is a
contemporary of the Bennet sisters, and to envision Mary having
a crush on him.

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Walk in the woods

Yesterday, I was still in Fall River, since I went there for
the cookout on the Fourth of July, and you can’t get back to where I
live from anywhere else on the Fourth, because all the people
who come to the fireworks pretty much have to go by my house,
and it takes them until well after midnight to get away.

One of the things that’s better in Fall River than in Cambridge
is the woods, so I went for a short walk.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera with me, but here’s a
picture someone else (from the Connecticut
Botanical Society site) took of the Indian Pipes I saw a lot
of.

[Indian pipe]

I can’t remember when was the last time I thought of the word
“saprophytic”.

There was also a little brown frog.

I went with my sister, and we had both her dog, who is too
energetic and we worried about losing him, and my dog, who is
getting pretty old for that kind of hiking, and we worried about
whether the gentle hills were too much for him.

[Monte]

Doggie day care in an economic crisis

One of the guests at the cookout I attended yesterday runs a day care center for dogs. You would expect the demand for this to be fairly elastic, so people were asking him how his business was responding to the economic crisis.

He said it was actually holding fairly stable. Of course there are people who’ve lost their jobs and aren’t using day care for their dogs any more. But there are also people who have two jobs or longer commutes and need it more than they did.

And there are the people who thought they should cut back and then came back two weeks later and said the day care was cheaper than reupholstering the couch. Paul said these are all married people; single people just put something over the part that needs reupholstering.

Declaration of Independence

Happy Fourth of July, if you’re someone who celebrates it.
Even if not, you might want to read the Declaration
of Independence and think about it.

In the first place, it’s a really good piece of writing. And
there are a lot of phrases and sentences that have entered the
English Language. It isn’t quite as full of quotations as the
best of Shakespeare, but it’s close:

  • the course of human Events
  • the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God
  • a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind

That’s just the first paragraph (preamble). The second
paragraph is almost more jam-packed:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men
are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty,
and the pursuit of Happiness—-That to secure these Rights,
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers
from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of
Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of
the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new
Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and
organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most
likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed,
will dictate that Governments long established should not be
changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all
Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer,
while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing
the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of
Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object,
evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is
their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and
to provide new Guards for their future Security. Such has been the
patient Sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the
Necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of
Government. The History of the Present King of Great-Britain is a
History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct
Object the Establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these
States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid
World.

And the last paragraph is the one that makes it such fun to
read aloud:

We, therefore, the Representatives of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World for the Rectitude of our Intentions, do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly Publish and Declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States; that they are absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political Connection between them and the State of Great-Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm Reliance on the Protection of the divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

One of the features that makes it such a tight piece of writing
is that it’s a syllogism:

A: When these things happen, the government should change.

B: These things have been happening.

C: The colonies are of right and ought to be free and
independent states.

Another point to consider is that, compared with many other
pieces of political propaganda, it seems to have been mostly
true. Not that some of the stories might not have been told
differently by the opponents of independence, but historians who
have looked at the question find some basis for all the “Facts” in
the document.

So you can complain, and I certainly do, about the abuses of
power in the system of government set up after this Declaration.
But it’s worth thinking about all the important revolutions
inspired by this language, probably including some minor ones in
our own biographies.

And have a good cookout or fireworks or whatever you do.

Wimbledon

I’ve been watching Wimbledon instead of reading
newspapers and listening to radio news the last couple of weeks,
so I can’t tell you anything about either Michael Jackson’s death or the
situation in Honduras.

But I thought I’d share a few thoughts about the tennis:

  • The women’s singles draw would have looked like less of a
    vast wasteland populated only by the Williams sisters if they
    had shown us some of Elena Dementieva’s matches in the early
    rounds. American TV networks have trouble believing that people
    want to see good tennis, rather than Americans playing tennis.
  • I’ve always liked Tommy Haas, and I’m glad he managed to win
    some difficult matches this year. He’s had a history of playing
    better than his ranking but then losing in 5 sets when he plays
    a higher-ranked player. But this year he won a 5-set match in
    the third round against Marin Cilic and a 4-set match in the
    quarter finals against Novak Djokovic, and played Roger Federer
    almost even on serve for two sets in the semi-finals.
  • Of
    course, one hopes that this is because he has his head together
    better and not because he’s changed his doping regime, but I
    don’t think we should be cynical about that without some
    evidence. This is of course what the tennis association hopes
    we’ll think, and the point of the article is that they’re
    refusing to test so that we won’t have any evidence to think
    with. That is, they’re testing only during the big tournaments,
    and apparently the doping that would be likely to help happens
    during training.
  • There are some good young American players coming up —
    18-year old Melanie Oudin qualified and made it to the fourth
    round, by beating sixth-seeded Jelena Jankovich in the third
    round, and the Men’s junior tournament had 3 Americans in the
    quarter-finals.
  • They really have to look at the computer program that
    determines the rankings. Nobody watching Dinara Safina (seeded first) play
    this year would believe that she should have been ranked above
    any of the next three seeds (Williams, Williams and
    Dementieva). What happens is that if you play lots of
    tournaments and get to the fourth round, it outranks playing
    fewer tournaments and winning them. And the fact that the
    Williams sisters (who play fewer tournaments) are still
    there and most of the people who’ve been ranked above them for
    the past 10 years aren’t should make them think about whether
    the rankings should be giving points for playing too much.

Hugo Award Voting

One of the things I have to do today or tomorrow is vote on who
should get the Hugo Awards.

I signed up as a supporting member of Anticipation so that I could get the
packet of nominated works as ebooks.

I’m going to discuss the novel category, since it’s the one I
most care about. I expect to read enough of some of the shorter
works to vote in some of those categories, but it’s having good
novels to read that I care most about.

Voting options

The way the voting is set up,
you rank your choices, and “No Award” is one of the
choices. So the first thing to decide about everything you read
isn’t “Should this get the award?” but rather “Would I rather
there were no award than that this should get it?”

Did you enjoy it?

This year’s field of nominees is quite strong, and they’re all
well-written, but there was one (Saturn’s Children)
that I disliked. If I were looking for a good book to read, and
picked that one up because it had won an award, I would be
annoyed at the people who gave it the award. So I’m going to
rank that one behind “No Award”.

Do you want to read another one?

The others are all books I really enjoyed reading, and I
wouldn’t feel that the voters had done me a disservice in voting
for any of them. So I have to look for some other criterion to
decide how to rank them.

I’ve decided that the next factor to consider about the effect
of an award is how it might influence the writers. So the
question here is not so much, “Did you like this book better
than the others?”, but “Do you wish other writers would write
more books like this one?”

Now obviously to some extent, each book in this genre is unique
— nobody else is going to write a book exactly like The
Graveyard Book about a child growing up
in a graveyard raised by the ghosts. But lots of people will be
writing “coming of age” narratives about a child who struggles
to overcome an unusual background and join the “normal world”.
And I will read many of them and enjoy them.

Little
Brother (Free
download) was the first of the books to occur to me as in
the category of something I was glad had been written but I
didn’t want to read again, but now I’m not so sure. Certainly I
don’t want another coming-of-age narrative where Linux and
Social Networking save the world, but another coming-of-age
narrative where the intrepid hero realizes that the world he’s
being educated for is wrong in important ways and fights to
change it could certainly be enjoyable.

Similarly, Zoe’s
Tale seems like a rewrite of all the Heinlein juveniles
where the intrepid heroine saves the world and learns martial arts, but
if you think about it, it’s been updated quite a bit. Both of
Zoe’s parents do a lot of nurturing, the discovery of the
opposite sex is a lot less embarrassing, and the characters’
dealings with aliens are interesting. I don’t mind at all that
Heinlein wrote one juvenile a year (timed to appear at
Christmas) for over a decade, and if John Scalzi wants to start
doing that too, it sounds like it should make a few people’s
Christmas buying easier. Whether they
should all win Hugo awards is another question, of course.

Old adult versus Young Adult

You may have noticed that the last three books I mentioned are
all Young Adult(YA) fiction. I don’t believe in being prejudiced
about this — many of my favorite books of all time (Little
Women to name one) would be Young Adult Fiction if they were
published today.

Anathem
is definitely not Young Adult fiction, although in a way it’s
the same kind of coming-of-age and saving the world narrative
that the YA books have. To some extent this is a disadvantage
— there really isn’t enough character and plot for a 900 page
book, and there are a number of places where this reader wished
that it had gotten the kind of editing that the YA books
did.

The acknowledgements page credits a philosophical lineage
that can be traced from Thales through Plato, Leibniz, Kant,
Gödel, and Husserl. Most of those writers couldn’t have
survived YA editing, either, so I suppose if you enjoy this book
(and I did), you have to be glad there are editors who will
allow the kind of digressions that turn this from a 350 page
novel to a 900 page tome. I do hope someone finds a middle
ground some day, though.

So how am I going to vote?

I don’t know. Part of why I wrote this was to see if I could
figure it out. Here’s what I’m leaning to right now; I may
change my mind before I actually vote.

  • Anathem
  • Little Brother
  • Zoe’s Tale
  • The Graveyard Book
  • No Award
  • Saturn’s Children


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Potato Blight hits New England

The email from my farm
share this morning includes a warning that there have been
early signs in New England of a disease called “Late Blight”,
which is what caused the Irish Potato Famine. It includes
information about what to do if you notice things wrong with your
potatoes and tomatoes. You can read the whole article at The
University of Vermont Extension Site.

The symptoms that develop on tomato leaves, stems and fruit are quite dramatic, and are very obvious to the naked eye. The infected areas on leaves appear to be water-soaked, varying in size from a nickel up to a quarter, often beginning at leaf tips or edges. They proliferate when
the foliage has been exposed to watering, rainfall, or heavy overnight dews. If these infected areas dry out quickly, they may appear lime-green or beige in color.

The edge of the water-soaked area, either on the top or bottom of the leaf surface, will be covered with white fungal growth (mycelium) that contains the spore inoculum (visible with a hand lens). Spores are easily blown to surrounding areas and infect plants and even weed
species, in the plant family Solanaceae (the black nightshade family).

Brown to almost black lesions appear on infected stems, and the same lesions will develop on fruit, either directly on the infected plants, or a few days after they are sitting on your kitchen counters.

Please inspect your tomato and potato plants on a daily basis! If Late Blight symptoms are already appearing on plants in your garden, these plants should be removed immediately and put in a plastic bag for disposal. Don’t just put the removed plants in a compost pile as spores
will still spread from this debris. Your neighbors, not to mention commercial growers, will appreciate your taking this action immediately.