Pedantry is an occupational hazard for someone in my profession(s), so I’ve been trying to nail down the salient trait(s) of a pedant, mostly in order to watch for them in myself.
A few stabs at the target:
A pedant is someone whose acquisition of knowledge has impeded their ability to perceive and/or to reason.
A pedant is someone whose desire to prove someone wrong exceeds their desire to understand what that person is saying.
A pedant is someone whose impulse to educate has impaired their ability to learn or understand.
A pedant is someone who weaponizes knowledge in an attempt to achieve social dominance.
Last night at the movies: a daring raid on an 24-hour check-cashing place on Halloween night was planned by a thirtyish Laura Antonelli and a middle-aged Jim Backus, who had the Hawaiian shirt of Thurston Howell III and the mannerisms of a sinister Mr. Magoo. (Actually, Howell doesn’t seem to have worn a Hawaiian shirt. My subconscious may have been confusing him with the Hawaiian Punch guys.)
Dramatis Personae. Upper left: Laura Antonelli on the cover of Paris Match (April 4, 1980) Upper center: Jim Backus holding a Mr. Magoo doll in his hat. Upper right: me, at a costume party as Lake Wobegon Vice (circa 1984) Lower left: the famous Chat Noir poster. Lower center: Nastassia Kinski and fuzzy friend (circa 1982) Lower right: the Hawaiian Punch guys (puncher & punchee)
Antonelli had recruited me for the caper. Also figuring in the plot was a goofy black cat with pipe-cleaner limbs who was the only member of the gang that everyone liked, and a Kelly-green velvet frock-coat that was supposed to be part of someone’s disguise for the robbery.
Antonelli’s plan-within-a-plan was that she and I would freeze out Magoo with the help of her friend (a Cat People-era Nastassia Kinski), who would pretend to be ill. While he was busy tending to her, Antonelli and I would commit the robbery by ourselves.
Antonelli was acting crazy while Kinski was off roping Magoo, and I told her I was out. She wanted it too much; she was making mistakes; and I had to figure that, if she was ready to doublecross Magoo, she was likely to do the same to me.
Antonelli was still trying to get me to change my mind when Kinski, on schedule, faked her illness. Antonelli insisted that Magoo take Kinski to the hospital. Magoo declined, looking on us with a kind of genial malice, and said that Kinski was Antonelli’s friend and she should take her—that he and I had things to talk about.
I figured that Magoo had tumbled to Antonelli’s plan, and I was interested to see what would happen next when I woke up.
Moral of the story: don’t watch two old crime movies before bed. Or: stay asleep longer.
One of the features or bugs of reading five or six books at a time is that sometimes you finish them all in the course of a day and then wander around feeling strangely bereft.
There’s a lot to it, and I may blog about it and a much older history I was reading around the same time (Davis’ England Under the Normans and Angevins; 1905) when & if my ideas about them settle into place.
One takeaway is that idealism in medieval statesmen often went hand-in-hand with anti-Semitism. Both Simon de Montfort and Edward I engaged in murderous cruelty towards England’s Jewish population, even as they laid the foundations for Parliamentary government in England.
Another is that, although Edward I (like his father, the mostly hapless Henry III), had lots of kids, most of the ones he had by his first queen didn’t survive into adulthood. The eventual Edward II was his 4th son. For a while, his older brother Alphonso was the heir apparent.
If this kid could have held on, medieval England would have had a King Alphonso–perhaps a whole string of them, given how names repeat in royal dynasties. That would have brightened up the later Middle Ages.
I came to T.H. White’s brilliant fantasy Mistress Masham’s Repose (Putnam, 1946): immediately after reading two much inferior (but not worthless) books. One was by White himself, The Age of Scandal (Putnam, 1950), a social history of the later 18th century; the other was by Louis Kronenberger, Kings and Desperate Men: Life in 18th Century England (1942, Knopf).
Three books; one blog post. We pass the savings on to you!
Kronenberger’s book has some merits, but I don’t really recommend it. He gives historical background which is useful for the novice in this zone of history (like me), but frequently he’s just winding you up with his opinions: about the characters of Sarah Churchill and the Duke of Marlborough, of the several King Georges, of Sir Robert Walpole, etc. etc. He’s like a guy who lives to call into a sports show and yammer on about what’s wrong with the pitching staff of the Twins (or whatever ball team is closest to or most irritating to you). It gets a bit tedious.
White’s social history is more lively, but is deformed by his general unhappiness, his political embitterment, and (my guess is) some sexual practice he was ashamed of. (The final chapter is on the Marquis de Sade, who is a little off-topic for the English 18th Century… unless he’s not, if you know what I mean. There’s a lot of discussion of caning and physical cruelty in the various chapters.) I also don’t admire many people and things that White admired: Toryism (of a venomously anti-democratic type), Horace Walpole, aristocrats and royalty in general, etc. De gustibus non disputandum, and all that. The book was interesting enough to finish but I was glad to reach the last page.
Both volumes would seem to be irrelevant for discussing a kids’ book which is set in post-WWII England… except that Mistress Masham’s Repose is not necessarily a kids’ book and it’s no more set in 20th-Century England than The Sword in the Stone was set in the historical Middle Ages. This is an imaginary England looking back at the 18th Century through the wrong end of a telescope and finding very tiny people there.
Mistress Masham, for instance, is not a character in Mistress Masham’s Repose. She was one of Queen Anne’s favorites—the younger one, played by Emma Stone in the Yorgos Lanthimos film.
“She may be a favorite, but I’m favoriter.” “I’m favoritest.”
So why put Mistress Masham’s name in the title? Candidly, I think it may have been a mistake, but there’s no doubt that White did it on purpose. He wanted the book to be awash with the 18th Century from the title page. (The title phrase also supplies the book’s last words, closing the ring of White’s composition.)
“What is this book about, though?” I seem to hear you say or scream.
It’s about the big and the little. There’s a particular kind of humor that comes from sharp contrasts between big and little.
cartoon by B. Kliban
It’s all over the place in the firsttwo Ant-Man movies in the MCU.
Pez is mightier than the sword?
You see it in Vergil’s Georgics 4, also, where the poet talks about a beehive as if it were a mighty nation. Vergil doesn’t have the reputation of a hilarious writer but these passages always make me laugh. There are some echoes of it in my story “Evil Honey”, where Morlock is sent (against his will) into a diseased hive on a mission from the god of bees.
And this little-is-big stuff is the main theme in Mistress Masham’s Repose.
Principally, the story about a girl, Maria. You can see her above in Fritz Eichenberg’s vivid drawing, except that that’s not really her.
If I avoided reading this book on purpose for fifty years, and I did, it’s partly because I didn’t know or care who Mistress Masham was, and partly because I didn’t want to read about sad, passive, upper-class children wilting under the cruel ministrations of their caregivers.
That’s not what Maria is like at all, though. She is the last remnant of a ducal family; she’s a ten-year-old orphan who grows up on an untended, crumbling estate; she has vile caregivers as sinister as any who darken the pages of Roald Dahl. But Maria is no fainting lily; she’s a fireball. She makes things happen.
We meet her swaggering around the half-wild grounds of the estate, intent on trying some piracy. “She boarded the tree bole, brandishing her cutlass, and swarmed ashore with the battle cry of à Maria, her spectacles twinkling fiercely in the sun.”
She sets sail on her mighty craft (a punt) across the wild briny waves (a small lake on the estate), lands on terra incognita (a little island “about the size of a tennis court” called Mistress Masham’s Repose), and prepares to confront the savage natives.
There are no savage natives, really. It’s all a game. To Maria’s surprise, there do turn out to be natives, though. When she cuts her way through the brambly hedge that’s grown up around the edge of the island, she finds in its center a place with short, well-kept grass like a bowling green. Even stranger, she finds a baby. Stranger yet: the baby is small enough to fit into a hollowed-out walnut shell, acting as a crib. Strangest of all: the baby is alive.
With the help of her friend, a kindly but scatter-brained professor who hopes to make his fame and fortune with a fastidiously correct translation of Ambrose’s Hexameron (that’s how scatter-brained he is), Maria finds out that these minuscule strangers on her estate are Lilliputians. After Lemuel Gulliver (a historical person in this novel) was rescued from Lilliput, the ship captain who’d rescued him returned and kidnapped some of the little people with an eye to making money by showing them at fairs and elsewhere.
And he did, keeping them prisoner and giving them only enough to survive until, one fateful night, they escaped from him and fled into the nearby ducal estate of Malplaquet. They settled there and the colony lived in seculsion for centuries on the tiny island of Mistress Masham’s Repose.
Maria is small and vulnerable enough to be endangered by her guardians, the vicious Miss Brown and the hateful Vicar, Mr. Hater. White writes, “Both the Vicar and the governess were so repulsive that it is difficult to write about them fairly.” You can fill in the details yourself, or consult White’s text. It turns out that there would be enough money to tend to the estate and Maria, but the guardians are stealing it. If they can, they plan to do away with her and keep the money for themselves—and each one plans to do away with the other, and keep all the money for him/herself.
But the Lilliputians are small and vulnerable enough to be endangered by Maria. She can be greedy and arrogant within the scope of her abilities, and unless she learns to treat others with decency, she too might become a monster, like Mr. Hater and Miss Brown.
Maria develops the character to protect the Lilliputians from her protectors, and from herself. In turn, the Lilliputians look out for her as matters come to a head in a hilarious and action-filled finale.
Is this a book for children? Yes, I guess. It’s always been packaged that way; it’s addressed to a child; it has a child as its protagonist; after the child, the next most important characters are a bunch of Lilliputians.
But it’s pretty dark for a kids’ book. Apart from the psychological tortures that Miss Brown inflicts on Maria, ostensibly for her own good, the last third of the book involves a lot of physical cruelty to a child and hinges on a plot to murder a child. Books for kids don’t have to be all flowers and happy talk, but if you’re going to hand this to a kid (or read it to one) be prepared for some discussion of the Problem of Evil.
For me the funniest bits of the book were linguistic: the Professor wrestling with a difficult Latin word, while sitting on a stack of books that contains the answer; Gulliver’s lexicon for Lilliputian; the fact that the Lilliputians speak 18th C. English as a second language.
“The Campaign, Ma’am, which follow’d the Declaration, was exasperated by the old Bitterness of the Big-Endian Heresy—a Topick of Dissension, which I am happy to say we have since resolved by a Determination to break such Eggs as we are able to find in the Middle.”
But there’s also a lot of vivid characterization and wit, for those who can’t live by words alone.
Here’s the Professor:
He was a failure, but he did his best to hide it. One of his failings was that he could scarcely write, except in a twelfth-century hand, in Latin, with abbreviations. Another was that, although his cottage was crammed with books, he seldom had anything to eat. He could not tell from Adam, any more than Maria could, what the latest quotation of Imperial Chemicals was upon the Stock Exchange.
Here’s the Professor and Maria, talking about what to do with the Lilliputian Maria has captured.
“What would you do, Professor?”
“I would put her on the island, free, with love.”
“But not have People any more?”
“No more.”
“Professor,” she said, “I could help them, if I saw them sometimes. I could do things for them. I could dig.”
“No good. They must do their own digging.”
“I have nobody to love.”
He turned round and put on his spectacles.
“If they love you,” he said, “very well. You may love them. But do you think, Maria, that you can make them love you for yourself alone, by wrapping prisoners up in dirty handkerchiefs?”
Maria has to learn this lesson for herself, the hard way. She’s never been Big before, and she finds that intoxicating. She’s never had the power to hurt someone with her recklessness and greed. But when she learns how to control the power of her own Bigness, the love between her and her little people and the others in her life proves more powerful than the greed and cruelty of Miss Brown and Mr. Hater.
I’m not the sort of reviewer who assigns numbered ratings to books. My feeling is that qualitative experiences should not be made to lie down on the Procrustean bed of quantitative measurement. But I think this is one of T.H. White’s best books. I’d put it alongside The Sword in the Stone, and ahead of any of the sequels, which would make it one of the great fantasies of the 20th century. It is a little story about little people, but great in its littleness.
I’m really worried about LLMs developing consciousness, and also my toaster. It is, after all, one of the most advanced toasters ever made, capable of toasting four slices of bread at a time, which is more than a human could do.
Does it have rights? What if it doesn’t like me?
Non-ironically: it’s obvious that the current approach to LLMs will not yield an artificial consciousness. Maybe the long-heralded arrival of quantum computing will change matters. That’ll be interesting indeed if it happens. But barring some radical new advance, all this Skynet talk is just hype by hucksters who are trying to put their hand in your pocket.
“This is good,” I said to myself. “I’m very successfully avoiding work. But how can I extend this evasion successfully into the future?”
There being no one else there, I was forced to respond: “I have access to the issues for that whole year, in physical and or electronic form. I could read and write reviews of them all!”
So that’s what this is.
Ed Emshwiller is the artist; the art illustrates Mack Reynolds’ novella “Speakeasy”Continue reading →
Reading some Middle English this afternoon, I came across the word lere, meaning “face”.
”That’s got to be where leer comes from,” I said, with the unwavering confidence of a folk etymologist, and then my confidence wavered a bit and I looked it up.
The democratic AHD says I’m right, deriving leer from OE hleor (≈ “side of face”, where the ear, which hears, is located), going back to PIE *kleu- “hear”.
Other cognates include listen, loud, the –laut in umlaut, Clio, the –cles in Heracles, and Greek κλέος “fame”
When I heard about G20 (directed by Patricia Riggen), an action movie set at the titular summit in which Viola Davis plays an American president in action-hero mode, I knew I would have to watch it. I figured it would be dumb fun. And I was right, and I was wrong. It was mostly fun, but mostly not dumb.
Spoilers follow.
If you are looking for a movie where serious problems are addressed without violence, this is not that movie. But it’s not as empty of significance as action movies generally are.
The worst part is the opening, which features an unlikely McGuffin carried by a woman (Angela Sarafyan) who’s being chased by sinister agents, while elsewhere the president of the United States is aroused from well-earned slumber by an aide telling her that a code-named subject has been retrieved.
What’s wrong with that? The McGuffin is an electronic wallet for some kind of cryptocoin. I figured I was going to have to sit through a commercial for the blockchain. Blecch.
Plus: the scenes in the White House had nothing to do with the suspense plot. The code-named target was the president’s teen-aged daughter (Marsai Martin) who had evaded surveillance and snuck off to a bar. She’s mad that she was dragged back by the Secret Service and she’s mad at her mom. This is great, because surly teenage daughters are so rare on screen these days that—no, just kidding, they are apparentlyessential to modernstorytelling.
I’m sure there are surly teenage daughters in this world, just as I am sure that most friction between teenagers and parents comes from the parents being various kinds of jerk. Don’t bother to argue with me about this. I’m old and I never change my mind about something unless I’m wrong, which I’m not in this instance. In any case, it’s an incredibly trite narrative move. Blecch again.
“Is this movie going to bore me?” I asked Dr. Reuben Sandwich, my sole companion on this adventure (since D was off rehearsing a play). He did not immediately answer.
Dr. Sandwich carefully considers his reply.
Anyway, I figured three blecchs and they’re out: I’d turn the movie off.
But, in fact, the movie did not turn out to be some credulous puff-piece for crypto, and although the teenage daughter is introduced in the most stupidly cliche way possible, her escape from surveillance turns out to be a plot-relevant skill, and when the plot gets underway she acts in a commendably reasonable manner.
In fact, that’s true of most of the characters in the movie, and is one of the best things about it. Everyone in it acts with reasonable intelligence in pursuit of what they see as their own interests. This is not an idiot plot. That might seem like faint praise but it’s not. Useful idiots abound in storytelling (and politics, too, but let’s try to avoid thinking about that).
The suspense plot involves a group of criminals, deeply embedded into U.S. security services, taking over the G20 summit. The goal is to crash the world economy, causing cryptocoin prices to soar, enriching the criminals. They’re not exactly terrorists but their leader (capably played by Antony Starr) has a political axe to grind which sounds a lot like Brexit/MAGA gibberish. But the money is the main thing for them, like the gang inDie Hard, the illustrious ancestor of this type of movie.
When the criminals attack, the ex-military US President escapes, taking with her the doltish, yammering UK Prime Minister (Douglas Hodge), the head of the IMF (Sabrina Impacciatore) and the First Lady of Korea (MeeWha Alana Lee), all of whom are watched over by the president’s principal Secret Service guard (Ramón Rodríguez)—until he takes a disabling bullet. At that point the president herself has to take the lead, risking life and limb to save her accidental companions, her family, and indeed the world.
I won’t go into the gory details, except that it does get a little gory. No more than the average James Bond movie, but that would include a pretty high body count. If you like this kind of movie, this is the kind of movie that you’ll like.
There is a significant political message here, which probably won’t bother you if you’re not crazy. The reviewer at RogerEbert.com found some of this stuff “too on-the -nose”. Personally, as a guy watching a lot of old WWII movies because the news is so frustratingly deranged, I didn’t have a problem with the messagey parts. There is a time and place for that kind of stuff; the time is now and the place is here, until things get considerably better than they are.
The political philosophy isn’t just a candy-coating. It’s woven through the work. There is considerable personal heroism in this movie, but it’s given meaning and effectiveness by intelligent cooperation with other people. And whenever anyone in the plot gets so full of themselves that they’re not prepared to take a clue, one is forcibly delivered.
A good example is when the president and her guard are standing around arguing about how they’re going to go through a door with some armed bad guys on the other side. The head of the IMF and the UK Prime Minister are bickering about something else. Meanwhile the SK First Lady has an idea for an alternate route: down the laundry chute. No one will listen to her (because no one listens to old ladies, even when they notice they’re there) so she shrugs and dives down the laundry chute. At that point, every realizes that there is a way out that doesn’t involve getting shot at and they follow her down.
Listen to old ladies; you might learn something.
By the time we get to the scenes where the president is kicking and shooting her way through villain-rich environments like one of the badass heroes from Person of Interest, it’s almost believable, since Viola Davis (and the script) have done so much good work humanizing the character. Anyway, by that time you’re rooting for her. (When I say you I mean me, really; de gustibus, and all that.) But it’s her shrewdness and observational skills that let her figure out Who Is Really Behind It All.
Watching this movie was a painfully melancholy, almost nostalgic experience in a way almost certainly not intended by its makers. It’s set in an alternate timeline where the US has a capable leader and the nation itself is still a respected leader in world affairs. But that was long ago—five or six months, at least. It’s amazing how far and how fast a nation can fall when it falls from a height.
Anyway.
In summary: the movie might be a half hour too long, as almost every movie is these days, and some of the more obviously CGIed scenery looks a little thin. But in general this is a fast-paced, intelligent action movie with a solid soundtrack and fine performances from a diverse cast.
P.S.
Re the soundtrack: this was my favorite track, by Miriam Makeba.
Wild dreams last night, part of which seemed to take place in cat heaven. I was in the house where I grew up and we were looking frantically for my daughter’s cat, Clarkus Maximus.
The clarkiest of Clarks, in the arms of the oversigned. (April 2025)
We found him, safe inside in the house, but then I went out through the side door and was amazed. Where the house next door and the backyard should have been was a great, sunny plain like the African savanna, speckled with all sorts of cats, including some I used to know like Fritz the Cat Leiber Pfundstein Enge. It was especially great to see him again.
Fritz, puzzling over something. (some time in the early 2000s)
Presiding over it all was a giant, peaceful lion. I could tell by the expression on his face that he didn’t like me being there, and my dreams turned to a different and darker theme.
Roman-era mosaic of a lion, currently in the Archaeological Museum in Seville.
It’s been sometimes sad, sometimes joyous, but always a pleasure to hang out with people at Windy City Pulp and Paper and celebrate the life and work of Howard Andrew Jones.
Left to right: Arin Komins (moderator and bookaholic), John O’Neill (force of nature), the oversigned (some weirdo graybeard), S.C. Lindberg (organizer of the GenCom writer’s track and sole surviving intern of the Magician’s Skull), John C. Hocking (master of adventure fantasy) photo courtesy of Van Allen Plexico
Too many stories were shared for me to scribble down. But the common theme was: Howard’s deep interest in people and his intense empathy were central to what made him a great editor, a great writer, and a great human being. “If you knew Howard, he was your friend.” I forget who in the sizeable audience said that (Bob Byrne, maybe?) but it echoed with agreement around the room.
Hocking has sometimes said about storytelling, “Action is character,” and it’s become one of my mantras for writing. But, as he pointed out last night, Howard’s character, his belief in decency and heroism, was key to his work and his life.
It was S.C. Lindberg who found the closing words for the panel. They were Howard’s words, the way he closed countless letters and conversations.
