Past Me is sometimes a deadly enemy. For instance, he only left me two pieces of pizza from the other night so that I could celebrate the first day of True Summer with the Breakfast of Champions–cold pizza and hot tea, ideally enjoyed sometime in the early afternoon. Two pieces! Hardly worth getting out of bed for.
On the other hand, he’s sometimes a solid friend. A week or two ago, he ordered some books in anticipation that they would arrive this week for the beginning of my sort-of vacation. It’s a pretty good stack.
I have an ebook of the DMR book, which collects some of Edmond Hamilton’s mythological fantasies, but I liked it so much I wanted a physical copy.
I’ve been on kind of a Rosel George Brown kick, lately. She was a talented writer who tragically died of cancer when she was just getting started. Maybe I’ll have more to say when I’ve worked through these.
Like all right-thinking people, I must have four or five copies of The Dragon Masters and The Last Castle in different formats. But I’ve long wanted the one Ace Double edition that collects them both, and now I do.
Rime Isle (Whispers, 1977) collects “The Frost Monstreme” (first seen in Flashing Swords 3) and “Rime Isle” (serialized in Cosmos, where I read it with bated breath lo these many years ago). But they really belong together as a single short novel. They were, of course, collected together in Swords and Ice Magic (Ace, 1977), with a great Michael Whelan cover. But, if I’m being honest with you (as is my practice, since it’s just you and me here in the absolute privacy of my blog, where no one ever comes) the other stories in Swords and Ice Magic are less than essential Leiber. It’s nice to have them by themselves, and as a bonus this edition is illustrated by Tim Kirk, one of my favorite fantasy artists from the 70s.
Left: the flip side of the Vance double-novel. Right: the cover of Rime Isle without its dust jacket.
I like the embossed volcano-in-a-glacier on Rime Isle‘s cover.
This edition came with an unexpected bonus: signatures from the artist, the designer, Stuart Schiff (the genius behind the journal Whispers and Whispers Press), and Leiber himself.
So: Past Me. Not totally a bad guy. But you can’t trust him with your pizza.
Not trying to subtweet anyone, particularly my students, whose papers I’m wading my way through. But I’ve had a lot of occasion today to think about the identification of “great” with “first/inventor”. If some creator/creation is a a great example of something, and maybe the most famous example of a thing, there is a tendency to treat them/it as the first instance of the thing.
e.g.
“Bozo invented the tradition of modern clowning, setting the stage for the great clowns of the late-20th century, like Crusty and It.”
This seems like it’s just a compliment to Bozo. But it actually erases earlier, maybe even more important clowns like Emmett Kelly. Celebration of Y shouldn’t cause the erasure of X.
Not sure where the source of the first=best error lies. It could be from sports culture, where the second person across the finish line is nowhere near as glorious as the first. Or maybe it’s from science/technology, where the second guy to split the atom is not the guy who gets the Nobel Prize.
Those standards are not wrong, but they’re typically not going to apply to the arts. Think of all the misconceived arguments about who “invented” science fiction, as if it were the telephone or the radio.
The opposite error is the myth of progress–that later=better. So novels published in 2025 are marginally better than those published in late 2024, but not as good as those that will appear in 2026. That tendency may be true of computer hardware, but is never going to be true of writing, music, the visual arts, etc.
A still greater error is spending endless hours on social media rather than doing work that has to be done, in the vain hope that elves will come along and do it for me. That’s a mistake.
Much of the short paragraph below by Fredric Brown is outdated and/or not meant to be taken seriously. But I like his conclusion about sf, which I would broaden to include fantasy (as sf often did in those now-distant days: note the dragon wrapped around the spaceship in the image).
“It is a nightmare and a dream. And isn’t that what we’re living in and for today? A nightmare and a dream?”
Reading Diogenes Laertius through for the 1st time. Before I’d only read specific bios, like his account of Diogenes the Cynic.
DL seems to be agnostic regarding philosophic schools, interested in philosophy more from a historical and literary point of view, which mostly matches my interests.
I particularly enjoyed this wisecrack attributed to Thales:
“And so, when Pisistratos wounded himself, Solon said, ‘These things happen because of that stuff’ ” <i.e. tragedy>.
Which reminds me of our current tyrant, and how he owed his first term to a kind of lying story (reality TV) & probably owes his second term to a dramatically faked injury.
I’m not ready to burn my books yet, though. It’s people who understand fiction and myth who saw through Trump from the beginning.
As so often, when I turn to the ancient world for escape I see the modern world, like the face of Caliban, grinning back at me.
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.
Posted inacademia, art|Comments Off on Note to Self
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 seclusion 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.
