59’th year – Page 3

Bright Star

This
is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen about a poet.
The people who make movies in general do better with composers
— you’re going to need background music anyway. You can
actually have background poetry in some cases, as the reading of
Ode to a Nightingale over the closing credits of this movie
demonstrates, but it’s less common. But often they just take some
event in the poet’s life that could be part of the plot of a movie
and write that movie without using anything at all about the poetry.

What makes this a good movie about a poet is that there’s
ordinary dialog (well-written, but not transcendent), which is
then echoed in a recitation of one of the poems (which is
transcendent). Keats is making love to Fanny, and says
something like “I need a better word for you than bright, or
soft.” And several scenes later, he’s reading her:

BRIGHT star! would I were steadfast as thou artâ€”
   Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
   Like Natureâ€™s patient sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priestlike task
   Of pure ablution round earthâ€™s human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
   Of snow upon the mountains and the moorsâ€”
Noâ€”yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
   Pillowâ€™d upon my fair loveâ€™s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
   Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live everâ€”or else swoon to death.

I was also really impressed with the costumes. It’s the Jane
Austen era, set between 1818 and 1821, so you have lots of
supposedly authentic BBC examples to compare them with. But
these costumes were made by someone who really likes looking at
fabric draped over the human body. Apparently the costume
designer used actual antique fabrics or copies.

Costume design was the only Academy Award this film was
nominated for. I’m not sure all the people nominated for Best
Actor and Best Actress were actually better than the two leads
in this film. And I haven’t yet seen the other films nominated
for Best Costume Design, but I liked this one well enough that
I’ll be rooting for it anyway.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B002WY65VA&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Songs my mother taught me

A surprising number of them are under copyright. I thought
about it this morning because the BBC had a story that
hinged on Kookaburra
being under copyright.

Of course, everybody knows about Happy Birthday,
largely because of the suit
against the Girl Scouts. This is why a family-friendly
restaurant I go to sometimes has its staff come out with the
lighted cake singing “Happy Birthday” to the tune of the
Hallelujah Chorus, instead of the tune the rest of
us use.

An example I noticed reading through a fakebook, that I don’t
know anyone’s been sued over is On Top of
Spaghetti. (No, my mother didn’t teach me that one —
I learned it in the gutter.)

Wolf Hall

This
book is mostly set between 1527 and 1535 at the court of Henry
VIII, while Henry was maneuvering to control the English church and
marry Anne Boleyn.

I found it difficult to get into, as did a friend of mine who
read it before I did. Eventually it turned out to be as gripping
as you would expect a narrative about an interesting period of
history with well-drawn characters to be.

Analyzing why this was, I realized that it was the narrative
style. Eventually I figured out that it was written in the third
person, but completely from the point of view of Thomas Cromwell,
so that whenever “he” is used without an obvious antecedent,
Cromwell is “he”. Some of the time, this is made explicit, but I
continued to look backwards for an antecedent all through the
book.

I looked up the technical description of various kinds of
third-person point of view, and it looks like this one is called
“third person limited”. Wikipedia gives the Harry Potter books as
an example of this technique, so it doesn’t always have to make
a book hard to read, but I have to admit I thought it was
frequently clumsy here.

Aside from that, it was a fascinating book. I had read
biographies from the period, but hadn’t run across a lot of the
details in this one. For instance, I’ve read lots of things about
Thomas More, but hadn’t known that he was renowned for his
abilities as a torturer. The characterization of London
businessmen in terms of whether they had copies of Tyndale’s
translation of the Bible was interesting. I was intrigued by the description of
well-off, heathy people dying of the fever in the course of a
morning.

There are also scholarly biographies of the main characters in
this book, which are probably better if what you really want to
know is more of the history of the time. But if you want a good
read with some history from a point of view you might not have run
into, this is your book.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0805080686&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

When Everything Changed

I enjoyed reading this
book by Gail Collins, who’s one of the New York Times
columnists I read regularly. It’s not so much a comprehensive scholarly history, as
a collection of the stories about women’s issues in the last
century. They’re well-told. And even if you lived through it
all, you’ve probably forgotten even some of the good ones.

Of course, if you lived through it, you probably have your own
stories that are as good as plenty of these. I kept thinking
about the time (probably in the mid-70’s) I didn’t get a job I was interviewed for, and the
person who did get it was a married woman. My mother was
incensed, because she thought I should have had priority over
someone with a husband to take care of her.

Another good part is that Ms Collins
followed up on what happened to the characters in the stories. So
a woman who in the 50’s was famous for having been able to iron a
shirt in 12 minutes was interviewed in the assisted living
facility and said she only owned one skirt, because she wears
pants everywhere these days. And she gets both Gloria
Steinem’s and Phyllis Schlafly’s reactions to Sarah Palin.

Ebook experience

Most of my ebook reading has been fiction. Terry Pratchett
does put footnotes in his fiction, and the most recent one I
bought did the right thing about making the footnotes links.

This Adobe epub book does even better and has a link back from
the footnote to the place in the text where it occurs.
Unfortunately, when you move to the link, it doesn’t appear at the
top of the screen, so you have to scan the whole page to find the
footnote you were looking for.

Another annoyance was that the page numbers (unnecessary,
because they’re redundant to the Adobe Digital Editions display at
the top of the window) obscure some of the text.

The illustrations came out very well. They were all at the end
of the book, with no links between them and the text that refers
to the same subject. This is probably similar to the dead tree
book, but it’s a place where an ebook could provide some value
added. And flipping between different sections of an ebook is a
bit more difficult than with a dead tree book, so publishers
should be thinking about these things.

But on the whole, I’m glad I was able to take this out of the
library as an ebook, even though I wish someone would crack the
Adobe epub format so that I could have read it in more comfort.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0316059544&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Sent a movie back unwatched

I don’t usually do that, and it’s not that it’s a terrible
movie.

It’s called Hands
over the City.It’s about urban development politics, which I expected to be
interested in, but in this case I just wasn’t. I tried twice,
and I just couldn’t get interested in any of the characters
enough to even recognize them when they came back in later
scenes.

There is a good scene at the beginning when a building
collapses, injuring several people. You expect that kind of
European film to have a lot of visual interest even if you don’t
like the characters, but I think one of the points of this one was
how ugly the development was making Naples, and there were an
awful lot of ugly shots of skyscrapers.

So I can’t really tell you not to watch it, because it could be
if I’d persevered there would have been all kinds of catharsis.
But I can tell you I found the first 50 minutes or so pretty boring.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B000H5U5KS&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Crutches

I got a phone call at 8 AM Friday morning.

I was nervous when I realized who it was — it was the partner
of one of the people I was playing the concert with yesterday.
The last time I got a call from someone like that the day before
the concert, it was the wife of one of the performers saying he
had slipped on the ice and was flat on his back in bed and
couldn’t possibly get to and play a concert the next day.

So I was relieved when it turned out that this call was because
my friend wanted to borrow my crutches.

The story was actually somewhat alarming. She’s a fairly fit
person who climbs mountains and does folk dancing and ride a
bicycle for long distances. Two weeks before she’d been to a
folk dance weekend and danced 15 hours between Friday night and
Sunday afternoon and felt fine during and after.

For a couple of days before, her knee had been bothering her a
little, but then all of a sudden she went to leave work, and
pushed back the chair, and she couldn’t stand on her right
leg.

She was glad I didn’t mind loaning her the crutches. Until she
got them, she wasn’t able to move anywhere without assistance. So
she had to wake up her partner to go to the bathroom at night. I
said that was like having a dog, but she said the dog probably
didn’t whimper both to and from the bathroom. Actually it’s
probably easier with the human, because for the dog, you have to
put shoes and a coat on to take them out.

Anyway, I reminded her when she was being grateful that she
wouldn’t have thought to call me if she hadn’t been so helpful
during the six weeks I was on them — she regularly called to
see if I wanted to come to the supermarket with her, and went to
the pharmacy for me, and took me to visit Bonnie.

I was also glad I’d tested getting them out of the closet while I
was fit. They had enough ice skates and vacuum cleaners and
camping equipment in front of them that I wouldn’t have wanted to try
to do it standing on one foot. I’ll be more careful when I put
them back in the closet.

We don’t know quite what’s going to happen with my friend’s
knee. She’s had an x-ray, and it looks like torn cartilage or
maybe other junk in the joint. She has an appointment to see an
orthopedist next week.

Crutches aren’t so expensive that comfortably off people can’t just go buy
them, but they do take up enough space in a closet, and
reasonably fit people use them seldom enough, that it seems silly
for every household to have a pair. I think it’s something the
socialist model “From each according to his abilities; to each
according to his needs” should apply pretty well. So there
should probably just be a central supply depot that delivers a
pair when you need them, and then you bring them back there when
you don’t any more.

My rationale for keeping mine after the hip surgery instead of
donating them to one of the places that gives them free to poor
people, was that when you sprain your ankle, which I had been
doing every 3 or 4 years, people tell you it heals faster if you
use crutches and keep the weight off of it. I’d never tried that,
because of not having the crutches, but I was going to test it
out the next time my ankle gave out on me. It hasn’t given out
since the hip surgery. I hope that’s because the physical
therapy I got then, which focused more on balance than on
strengthening hip muscles, fixed the problem with my ankle, but
maybe it’s just having crutches in the closet makes it less
likely that you sprain your ankle. The same way carrying an
umbrella makes it less likely to rain hard.

Amazon and Macmillan

So far, the best comment I’ve read on the current war
between Amazon and Macmillan, which has caused a lot of
books people would be buying and reading to disappear from the
Amazon shelves, is this
one by Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing.

He points out how ridiculous both sides look — both Amazon masquerading as a defender of
consumer rights by demanding low prices for ebooks and Macmillan
masquerading as a friend of the book industry for demanding that
ebooks sell at the price of hardcovers.

He says:

If true, Macmillan demanding a $15 pricetag for its ebooks is just plain farcical. Although there are sunk costs in book production, including the considerable cost of talented editors, copy-editors, typesetters, PR people, marketers, and designers, the incremental cost of selling an ebook is zero. And audiences have noticed this. $15 is comparable to the discounted price for a new hardcover in a chain bookstore, and it costs more than zero to sell that book. Demanding parity pricing suggests that paper, logistics, warehousing, printing, returns and inventory control cost nothing. This is untrue on its face, and readers are aware of this fact.

If true, Amazon draping itself in the consumer-rights flag in demanding a fair price is even more farcical. Though Amazon’s physical-goods sales business is the best in the world when it comes to giving buyers a fair shake, this is materially untrue when it comes to electronic book sales, a sector that it dominates. As mentioned above, Amazon’s DRM and license terms on its Kindle (as well as on its Audible audiobooks division, which controls the major share of the world’s audiobook sales) are markedly unfair to readers. Amazon’s ebooks are locked (by contract and by DRM) to the Kindle (this is even true of the “DRM-free” Kindle books, which still have license terms that prohibit moving the books). This is not due to rightsholder-demands, either: as I discovered when I approached Amazon about selling my books without DRM and without a bad license agreement for Kindle and Audible, they will not allow copyright owners to modify their terms, nor to include text in the body of the work releasing readers from those terms.

…[lots of good stuff about the bad effect of DRM on the marketplace, LEC]

If Macmillan wants to flex its muscle on an issue of substance and moment, an issue that will make it the hero of readers and writers and booksellers everywhere, it can demand that Amazon, Apple, B&N, and all the other ebook readers allow for interoperability and remove contracts that undo centuries’ worth of book-ownership norms.

And if Amazon wants to throw its toys out of the pram over a consumer rights issue, let it announce that it will offer a fair deal for any book that publishers and writers will allow a fair deal — no DRM, no abusive EULA, just “This book is governed by 17USC, the United States Copyright Law. Do not violate that law.” Let Amazon label the books that are a bad deal for readers with warnings: “At the publisher’s request, this book is licensed under terms that prohibit reading it on other devices, selling it used, or giving it to your children.” And let them put a gleaming seal of approval on the books that offer fair terms and a fair shake.

And trust readers to make up their minds.

In combination with the Apple announcement that the new Apple
bookstore for the iPad will have a different proprietary
format for the books it sells, this has been a bad week for
readers of ebooks. I haven’t been buying DRM that can’t be
broken — maybe I should go back to not buying DRM that can’t be
*legally* broken.

I’m currently reading:

A hardcover from the library for my
bedtime book (and dealing with the light and the reading glasses
when I want to stop).
A DRM’d ebook from the library on my laptop for
my reading downstairs.
A Project Gutenberg ebook on my Nokia
for when I’m out of the house and don’t want to carry anything
as heavy as either the dead tree book or the laptop

It would really be nice if the publishers of the hardcover and
the library ebook would sell me what I want to buy and put their
books out in a format I can enjoy on my device of choice. I’m
not the only person who wants this, and there are publishers (Baen for instance) who seem to
stay in business selling it to me and others like me. But it’s
not looking like either the big publishers or the retailers are
getting the message.

Stories from the polls

I was so interested in writing about the results that I didn’t
tell you a couple of stories about the voters at the polls last
week.

One man came in and said he had a durable power of attorney for
his father and did that mean he could vote for him. I said I
didn’t think so, and so did the person I talked to at the
election commission. He came in with his father only a few minutes later, so it can’t have been a major hardship for the father to vote himself.

I had one of those for Bonnie before she died. It gave me power to do
some amazing things, like sell all the mineral rights under her
house, but I’m quite sure it didn’t allow me to vote for
her.

One couple came in together. She was registered and voted, but
he was registered in Quincy, but she wanted him to vote in Cambridge
anyway. I explained that he had to be on our list, or we
couldn’t give him a ballot. She got hostile and asked, “So
you’re turning him away?”

I think I’m supposed to say, “No, he can vote by provisional
ballot if he wants to,” but it seemed better to just say, “Yes,”
and then explain about the provisional ballots being for people
when there’s some question about whether they’re registered or
not, and it gets counted if it turns out they were
registered. There didn’t seem to be any question that he wasn’t
registered in Cambridge.

The guy from Quincy looked like he was being a bit embarrassed
by his friend from Cambridge, and not only didn’t insist on
voting a provisional ballot but didn’t even take the Voter
Registration card that would have let him change his address to
Cambridge for the next time.

I’d bet on that relationship not lasting until the next
election, but of course some very odd-looking relationships do
last for years and years.

The Challenger Disaster — 24 years later

This
post on the Boing-Boing blog reminded me that today is the
24th anniversary of the Challenger shuttle blowing up right
after takeoff.

I was working at Computervision, and heard about it on the
radio on my way to work. My most vivid memory from that day is
going into a co-worker’s office, where the radio was on, and
hearing about the children in Astronaut Christa Macauliff’s
class having watched it live. The co-worker, a father of three,
was visibly crying at the idea of 8 year old children coming
face-to-face with death in that way.

My memories of the congressional hearings are fairly vague, but
I did really enjoy the chapter about them in Richard Feynman’s
autobiography, What
do you care what other people think?

My third Challenger-related memory is from the Spring of 1990,
when I was standing in line in an airport behind two Republican
women. This was when I thought then-President Bush was going to
be in trouble at the next election, because one of the Republicans
was going on about his lack of leadership, and one example she
cited was that she hadn’t felt anything when he was talking
about the Challenger.

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Unwithered Sedge

I’ve been meaning to take a picture of the sedge for you, but
we’ve had snow cover since mid-December. Yesterday there was
heavy rain as well as warm temperatures, so it’s possible to
take the sedge’s picture. As you can see, it isn’t
withered this year, either.

The consistent snow cover is easier on plants than our usual
freeze-thaw-freeze-thaw cycle, so the woodruff and the wild
onions aren’t withered either.