Classical Bookworm

I'm outa here!

Classical Bookworm is moving! I’ve finally had enough of Typepad’s bugs and backwardness and am decamping to . . .  wait for it . . .  Blogger! I had never really considered Blogger before because of their absurd commenting system—it seemed counterproductive, and just plain rude, to make readers jump through hoops just to leave a comment. I for one didn’t like doing it, and I know many others didn’t either. But I recently discovered that Blogger has finally made it an option to allow commenting directly from the post page. Hurrah! That along with the fact that Blogger gives you complete access to the stylesheet and template, for free, made it a no-brainer.
Hasta la vista, Typepad.

So, I invite you all to visit my new home at:

http://classical-bookworm.blogspot.com

If you subscribe to my Feedburner feed, everything should be fine. You’ll be getting a post there presently from my new location. If you use an older feed or surf here some other way, you’ll have to do some updating. I’ll also be having a word with Google so that you can get to my new blog by searching. This blog will stay up for a while to give everyone a chance to switch over. If you link here, I’d appreciate it if you’d update your links to the new address. This includes links to the Astronomy Reading Challenge, which can now be found here.

So that’s it. Last one out get the lights, OK?

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CODA: In a final ironic twist, I was not able to post this from Windows Live Writer (which I use because the Typepad application is so slow and buggy). I kept getting server errors from Typepad. Clearly I'm getting out not a moment too soon!

Anne of Green Gables: Orphans and Kangaroos

“Matthew went to Bright River. We’re getting a little boy from an orphan asylum in Nova Scotia and he’s coming on the train to-night.”

If Marilla had said that Matthew had gone to Bright River to meet a kangaroo from Australia Mrs. Rachel could not have been more astonished. She was actually stricken dumb for five seconds.

—Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

I’m not sure how I managed to grow up in this country without reading Anne of Green Gables. It is undoubtedly our best-loved children’s classic (though Wikipedia says it was written for a general audience). Of course I’ve seen the wonderful CBC production with Megan Follows, but I hadn’t ever read the book. I bought a copy last year in honour of Anne’s centenary but didn’t get around to opening it. Finally now I am listening to the audiobook, and, not surprisingly, it is a complete delight. I’m still laughing about that kangaroo comment. Things like that don’t translate to the screen, so even though I know exactly what happens in the story I expect to enjoy this book thoroughly. And since there are a total of 8 Anne books, I have plenty more to look forward to.

Read Without Ceasing

Sometime in the late eighties, though, when I was in my twenties, I started going to Jahorina in the summer for long reading holidays. I would pack my little fićo (the Yugoslav replica of a Fiat 600) with books and tapes and move up there for a month or so. I was still living with my parents then, which, besides threatening my rightful privacy and personal sovereignty, made reading with sustained attention pretty hard—my parents were prone to designing elaborate chores for others to accomplish. But in our cabin I could read for eight to ten hours a day, fully in charge of my own time, which I regimented like a monk. I interrupted my monastic mission only to attend to the needs of my foolish body, which, in addition to food and coffee, demanded some occasional exertion. Hence, I went for long hikes up the mountain, to the harsh, barren landscape above the tree line. I avoided other people and delayed for as long as possible my trips on foot to the supermarket, a couple of miles away.

For weeks before leaving for the mountain, I would be assembling my reading list. There were all kinds of books on it: from John le Carré’s Smiley novels to scholarly works on the origins of the Old Testament myths; from anthologies of contemporary American short stories to the Prince Valiant comic books. At the top of the list were the thick classic novels that I couldn’t focus on in the city, what with my parents’ choral nagging and the daily temptations of urban life.

In the cabin, I would enter a kind of hypersensitive trance that allowed me to average four hundred pages a day. The book would become a vast, intricate space in my head where I stayed even when eating, hiking, or sleeping. It took me less than a week to read “War and Peace,” for example, and Bolkonsky and Natasha showed up regularly in my dreams. And while I was reading “The Magic Mountain,” on my hikes I conducted conversations with imaginary partners, not unlike the ones between Castorp and Settembrini in Thomas Mann’s novel.

… I went to the mountain to replenish my mind, to reboot its language apparatus. My reclusion worried my parents, and my friends thought I was crazy. But I loved the silence cushioning me while I read.

—Aleksandar Hemon, “The Magic Mountain”

What reader wouldn’t love such a distraction-free environment? My poor books find it hard to compete with all the other projects and amusements in my life. They are just one in a crowd of possible occupations, and being the least time-sensitive, they are too often passed over. DVDs must be returned, gardens must be weeded, appointments must be kept, but books can wait. Is there anything more humble and patient than a book?

via pausetowonder

Derek Price, King of the Autodidacts

[Derek de Solla Price] was born in 1922 to Philip Price, a tailor, and Fanny de Solla, a singer. The couple didn’t have many material possessions, but they had enough money to indulge their young son in his love of Meccano, which was all the rage at the time. With enough ingenuity, the red and green painted girders, pulleys and cogs could be built into pretty much anything a boy could imagine—a bridge, a crane, a car, a spaceship—and Price wasn’t short of either ingenuity or imagination. The toy instilled in him a passion for mechanics and for how things work, which stayed with him for life….

…

Despite his talent, Price didn’t have the money or the background to go to university, so he followed a less conventional route to pursuing the subjects that he loved. He got a job as a lab assistant at the newly opened South West Essex Technical College, which enabled him to study part-time for a degree at the University of London. The physics equipment there was one glorious step up from Meccano. Square and black with clunky dials and flickering green screens, the oscilloscopes, voltmeters and spectrometers were as heavy as stones, and packed full to bursting with valves and wiring. With such instruments you could make sense of things; you could measure the whole world! Price spend hours taking these devices apart, tinkering with them and putting them back together, until his fingers and his heart were intimately familiar with their workings.

He got his degree in physics and maths in 1942 and the college—seriously short-staffed because of the war—instantly promoted him to lecturer. He worked in one classroom often for eight hours straight, learning the curriculum as he taught it. He also carried out research for the military on the optics of molten metals, and the University of London awarded him a PhD for it in 1946. Once the war ended, however, there was no job for him in London… He accepted a teaching position at the young Raffles College in Singapore….

Singapore was wonderful and exotic and it inspired in Price a new love for oriental culture and its history. It also introduced him to the history of science. Raffles College acquired a full set of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society—the journal of Britain’s foremost scientific body, with such worthy members over the centuries as Humphry Davy, Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke. The college library was still being built, so Price seized his chance and took the beautiful calf-bound volumes home with him—into ‘protective custody’,  he joked. Accustomed by now to teaching himself everything, he used them as bedtime reading, starting with the first volume from 1665 and working his way through.

—Jo Marchant, Decoding the Heavens: A 2,000-Year-Old Computer—and the Century-Long Search to Discover its Secrets

Price’s reading of the Royal Society papers aroused an interest in the history of science, particularly the history of scientific instruments, especially clockwork and astronomical instruments. When he found out about the Antikythera Mechanism there was only one thing to do: go to Athens!

The Antikythera Wreck and Archaeological Oopses

I’ve posted before about the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek clockwork device that could predict the positions of the moon, the sun, and the known planets. It was found in the first shipwreck ever to be explored by archaeologists, located on a thirty metre-deep shelf off the island of Antikythera in the Ionian Sea. For a long time the corroded lump of bronze was overlooked because of the other astonishing treasures found at the site, including large bronze and marble statues that have been displayed in Athens with much pride since their recovery in 1901.

As it was the first ever underwater archaeological expedition, pushing the limits of the diving technology of the time, things weren’t done in as scientific a manner as they would be today. The archaeologists themselves were not divers, so they never saw the artefacts in situ. Not only did they lose all of the contextual information associated with the objects, there were other unfortunate consequences:

Then the divers announced a further problem: part of the wreck, they said, was obscured by enormous boulders. After some discussion the archaeologists worked out that these must be rocks from the cliff above, dislodged at some time by an earthquake, and soon devised a strategy for shifting them.

The instructed the divers to dig tunnels underneath the boulders, then twine strong ropes around them several times, an arduous task that took more than 20 dives for each boulder. The other end of the rope was attached to the sturdy Mykale (brought out again from Athens for the task) which then steamed at full power towards the open sea. Once dislodged from the wreck, the boulders were to be released from the ropes, rolled down the slope and into the depths below.

…

But then the minister Staïs, who was visiting, had a startling thought. What if the ‘boulders’ were actually colossal statues, so overgrown and corroded that the [nitrogen narcosis-]befuddled divers, working in the dim light of the wreck site, had failed to recognize them? He ordered the next bolder to be brought to the surface—at considerable further risk to the ship. After some tense moments there was a cheering from the decks as it heaved into view through the clear water. It was a huge, muscular Hercules, complete with club and lionskin—eroded but still recognizable as similar in style to the world-famous Farnese Hercules, kept in the Naples Museum. Presumably, they preferred not to dwell on the statues that had already been rolled forever out of reach.

—Jo Marchant, Decoding the Heavens: A 2,000-Year-Old Computer—and the Century-Long Search to Discover its Secrets

Oops. The statues were obviously seriously eroded—marble melts in seawater—but it is painful to think of what might have been lost. Though the shipwreck has been revisited since its original discovery, I haven’t found any sign of an attempt to retrieve those lost statues. For now, along with countless other ancient treasures, they remain the property of the sea.

Happy World Book and Copyright Day!

I have the feeling that world events have preoccupied the good people at UNESCO because there isn’t much to see at their World Book & Copyright Day website this year. Nevertheless, public events are being held, including another continuous reading of Don Quixote in Spain, where World Book Day started. You can follow the reading on Cervantes TV (yes, Miguel de Cervantes has his own web TV channel!). I think I’ll be celebrating by dusting off my copy of Don Quixote and seeing if I can pick up where I left off. It’s a good thing I was taking notes or I’d have to start over!

“A Great Idea at the Time” by Alex Beam

As you can probably tell from my right sidebar, I am a fan of the Great Books movement, so there was no question of me reading A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books by Alex Beam. Alas, the humorous title is followed by chapter after derisive chapter portraying the architects of the movement as wackos and its followers as weirdos. It seems to be assumed that books by “dead white males” (a phrase repeated countless times in this book) couldn’t possibly contain any worthwhile or relevant content (mainly because they were written by dead white males), and therefore anyone championing them is by definition quixotic (apologies for the dead white male book reference).

Beam puts the magnifying glass on the movement’s missteps: user-unfriendly book design (Great Books of the Western World), overzealous door-to-door salesmen, horse-trading over the canon, and public bickering over pedagogical philosophies. It’s a bit like reality TV in book form: show all the exciting conflict and scandal, and cut out the boring 95% where things go well and people are happy. No doubt it sells but it does a disservice to the books in question and those who appreciate them.

What makes the whole thing perverse is that in the last chapter Beam sheepishly admits that he actually likes the great books, that they are indeed better than other books, that they are the foundation of our culture, and that they are still very much alive and all around us if we have the eyes to see them. Why couldn’t he start out that way? Is it so uncool these days to value and appreciate things that have real human meaning? Beam does suggest that youngsters who are interested in the classics are unmitigated nerds. He is also a journalist and it seems he couldn’t shake the obligatory mood of cynicism and nihilism that pervades the news media today.

Beam does seem to genuinely appreciate the classics to some extent, but they get no substantial mention in the course of the book. They only seem to be taken seriously in the appendix, a list of the works in the Great Books of the Western World annotated by Beam. Although the annotations are extremely short, mostly phrases or short quotations, it is the only place in the book where the content of these books is given any real attention. But it is probably too little too late for any reader who is not already a confirmed “great bookie.” Those for whom “dead white male” is a red flag will come away with the notion that those who like the great books are just as comical and irrelevant as the old men in togas who wrote them so long ago. Too bad.

For a more dispassionate review of this book, visit So Many Books.

St. John’s College Seminar on Agamemnon

This video is much better in the original Greek.

Check out the related videos for other SJC Great Books hilarity.

sort of via A Great Idea at the Time

“The History of Astronomy”—A Very Short Review

I recently finished the first book on my list for the Astronomy Reading Challenge. The History of Astronomy: A Very Short Introduction by Michael Hoskin is part of a  series of “very short introductions” covering a dazzling variety of topics, published by Oxford. This very slender but dense volume covers the history of astronomy from prehistory to the mid-19th century, just before the birth of modern astrophysics. It tells the story of how humans gradually grew to understand the true nature of the solar system and started exploring the cosmos with the help of telescopes.

Astronomy began as astrology, an attempt to understand and predict events by the movement of the stars and planets. The Babylonians were particularly eager astrologers, and their meticulous records were very valuable to later researchers trying to create accurate calendars and navigational aids, and ultimately for those trying to study the physical nature of the planets and stars.

While I was reading the book I was also perusing my new Peterson Field Guide to Stars and Planets and was struck by the fact that though we know so much more about the universe than the ancients, we still talk about what we see in the sky in much the same way. Stars are still mapped on the “celestial sphere,” very much like the sphere studded with stars that early astronomers conceived, complete with north and south poles.  Star charts are bisected by the “ecliptic,” the path the sun takes across the sky, even though we know it is the Earth that is moving. Astronomers talk about stars and planets rising and setting, and we still locate everything in the cosmos as we always have, relative to our position on the Earth. As much as we can turn the solar system, galaxy and universe around in our minds and view them from any angle, we only ever actually view them from the same place the ancient Greeks did, right here on our wobbly little planet, or just above it in the case of space telescopes. If a medieval astronomer used to using an astrolabe was brought here in a time machine, he would probably have a much easier time finding his way around the sky than I do, no matter how much I might know about galaxies and black holes. I actually find it quite confusing to consider the stars and planets from an Earth-centered perspective, but since I’m on Earth I had probably better get used to it!

I have two other very short introductions waiting to be tackled next, on Galaxies and Cosmology. I look forward to more enjoyable astronomical confusion!

Get Ready for 100 Hours of Astronomy!

Starting Thursday astronomers all over the world will be sharing their work with the public for 100 hours straight. Over 1500 events in 130 countries have been planned for the 100 Hours of Astronomy, a cornerstone project of the International Year of Astronomy. It’s a good opportunity to complete one of your EVAs for the Astronomy Reading Challenge. If you can’t make it to an event in your area, you can also participate in Around the World in 80 Telescopes, a global live webcast from 80 different observatories. This is not likely to be repeated, so don’t miss it! The websites have all the information you need, and you can also get updates on Twitter @100Hours and @telescopecast. Get ready to be amazed!

UPDATE: It seems that so many netizens are interested in astronomy that we crashed the servers! Oops. It seems to be working now, so if you tried earlier and didn’t get anything, try it again now. Right now I’m watching real time observation of black hole. Wow. You can also watch recorded webcasts from all the previously visited telescopes so you won’t miss a thing. Enjoy!

UPDATE II: They are still having the occasional outage, but one can amuse oneself by reading the associated live chat at ustream.tv. Disappointed starwatchers are sharing theories about the outages—aliens, coronal mass ejections, Conficker, black holes, DRM, Earth Hour, Linux…