Atomic Razor

Rand Simberg - Blogger - Swan Dives off the deepend... Blogger Alzheimers??

The Uncle Seems Real - Transterrestrial Musings

Wow...  really... wow...

Rand is a huge proponent of the theory of BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome) in which people misread and claim George Bush is things he's not.  Meanwhile it seems that Rand might have succumbed to ODS (Obama...) - the thread is fascinating, not for what Rand says.  His grudging, "ok, the didn't actually lie" stuff is pretty pedestrian, but for his utterly clueless defense of a mis-used phrase.

I've known Rand on and off since the late 90s when he was a prickly but at least, generally, competent commentator on space matters.  He's gradually slid into a deep dark hole and I don't think there is any hope for him to return.  In some respects it is sad.  When he avoids discussions of Space Tourism or American Politics I tend to agree with much of what he says.

The trouble is those moments of lucidity are becoming rarer, almost like watching somebody succumb to Alzheimer's...  I wonder if there is a Blogger version of this, where the original personality is slowly lost to something that eats it up and leaves a shell of the former self pandering to the crowd?

Answers on a postcard please...

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If Life Gives You Lemmons

I am currently ploughing (and ploughing is the word - it's over a thousand pages, all told - although, to be fair, I am  quite enjoying it) my way through Zachary Leader's (crazy name, crazy guy)  Life of Kingsley Amis. Of course, when I have finished that I have to plough my way through The Letters of Kingsley Amis (Z. Leader, ed.). Amis at least is considered one of the great letter writers of the C20th, perhaps the last great letter writer and perhaps second only to Evelyn Waugh (this is supposed to the be the Year of Evelyn Waugh Completeness) in the C20th (I know, I know - I did recently come across mention of Humph's dad's correspondence with Rupert Hart-Davis).

But Amis had one more thing in common with Waugh other than being a great correspondent and an epoch-defining novelists (Amis extended Waugh's mode from an exclusive focus on the concerns of upper and upper-middle classes to encompass a much wider angled view of the bourgeoisie - much post-war British fiction is either imitation of Amis or reaction against him, particularly, of course, the novels of Martin Amis, so that today writers inevitably find themselves reacting in some way towards both of the big beasts). Or at least he had one more thing in common with him for eight years. Consider this description of the Lemmons from the Life

It was a late-Georgian mansion fifteen miles from the centre of London, with eight bedrooms, three reception rooms, two staircases, a large, high-ceilinged coach-house kitchen and offices; surrounding property included an ancient barn (a listed building), garages, a detached cottage, a conservatory, an enclosed courtyard at the side, a gravel drive and an enormous sloping garden at the back, including magnificent cedar trees and a meadow. Though within walking distance of the London underground's (sic) Northern Line - only just, and rarely for Amis - it faced directly on to Hadley Common; living there felt like living in the country.

This sounds almost exactly like the kind of house that John Plant was after in Work Suspended (and Waugh in real life). Amis bought it with Elizabeth Jane Howard, his second wife. They got it for £48,000 at auction in 1968 (corresponding to ~£575k with respect to prices and ~£1.1M with respect to wages in 2006) - they were prepared to  pay up to £57,000. Either way it would be a bargain today, but neither Amis nor Howard were that rich and in the high tax days of the 1970s (one of the major differences between now and 1977 - there is so much less Cameron can do - no high taxes to slash, no unions to best - perhaps the problems of Britain in 2008 after 29 years of the Neoliberal Economic Dispensation are - God forbid that one should actually say it - actually the fault of the Neoliberals and not of the Lefties), they did struggle to pay the bills - hence Amis productivity during the Lemmons period.

In another Waughian touch, when they bought the the house it was called Gladsmuir, which both Amis and Howard (understandably) disliked. A quick glance through old documents revealed that it had formerly been known as Lemmons, which is even even better than Gramps.

I'm not sure I'd want to live at Lemmons. High Barnet is a long way out. Then I again I'd like to have the opportunity to try or at least the money to have the opportunity to try. I think I might prefer to live in Gardnor House in Flask Walk, Hampstead where Amis and Howard lived from 1976 to 1981. Whichever way, I had better get writing.      

Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam

As brixtonbrood didn't say a few months ago "If pirates are good and space is good, then space pirates must be better; if dinosaurs are good and zombies are good, then zombie dinosaurs must be better. Which means that zombie dinosaur space pirates must be best of all." Well, perhaps, not quite. Reading Sam Jordison's recent blog entry on James Blish's A Case of Conscience yesterday, it struck me that there is one vital element missing. Consider Kelly Freas's legendary Astounding cover for Murray Leinster's The Pirates of Ersatz. It could be a a zombie dinosaur space pirate coming about to come through the airlock hatch, blaster in hand, slide rule clenched firmly(?) between his undead teeth. But for maximum effect, the zombie dinosaur space pirate should be in clerical garb. Yes, it's Jesuit zombie dinosaur space pirates that the reading/viewing public and merchandisers of the world are demanding. 

If You See Cid, Tell Him

My complimentary copy of the The Poem of the Cid to be review for the Blog a Penguin Classics blog finally arrived yesterday. It The good news is that it turns out to be a bilingual, parallel text edition and my Old Spanish is even more minimal than my modern Spanish, so the book is only about half the length I thought it was, which makes the issue of reviewing rather more tractable than it might have been. Having said that, they say Spanish is easy to learn, but hard to master and  few would deny that in the C20th Spanish produced  a literature of global significance, so perhaps someone or something is trying to tell me that I ought to move straightaway to Buenos Aires and immerse myself in the culture of the Hispanosphere.

Location, Location, Location

House for sale : Combe Florey, Taunton, Somerset - Knight Frank | United Kingdom UK | View details

Evelyn (and Auberon) Waugh's old pile is up for sale. It's on at £2.25M, but I suspect in the current climate you might be able to get it for £1.95M. (I wonder why the Waugh family are selling now? It doesn't seem the best time, which might suggest they've been forced into it, but it is also, I suppose, possible, that recessions don't much affect the price of this kind of property, given the shortage of supply. To be honest though, I'd have thought that it were more likely to be affected as the marginal incomes - the banker's bonuses - of the sorts of people who might buy a house of this type are highly dependent on the state of the global economy.

No mention of whether or not it still has the private chapel, but it does have come with a tennis court and [b]ehind the house is a lovely large walled garden surrounded by open paddocks and woodland extending to just over 35 acres."

"Work Suspended" is a fragment of a novel that Waugh began in the late 1930s and abandoned after the outbreak of war. It concerns a successful popular novelist, John Plant, who, after the death of his artist father, has decided to settle permanently back in England. The narrator describes the kind of house that he is looking for:

"I had a clear idea of what I required. In the first place, it must not cost, all told, when the decorators and plumbers had moved out and the lawyers been paid for the conveyance, more than £3,000; it must be in agricultural country, preferably within five miles of an antiquated market town, it must be at least a hundred years old, and it must be a house, no matter how dingy, rather than a cottage, however luxurious; there must be a cellar, two staircases, high ceilings, a marble chimney-piece in the drawing-room, room to turn a car at the front door, a coach-house and stable yard, a walled kitchen garden, a paddock and one or two substantial trees - these seemed to me the minimum requisites of the standard of gentility at which I aimed, something between the squire's and the retired admiral's."

This sounds a great deal like Combe Florey. What is particularly striking is that it must cost no "more than £3,000, all told". £3,000 in 1939 corresponds to ~£130k according to prices and ~£500k according to wages in 2008. It is possible that Combe Florey with its 35 acres is somewhat grander than the house Plant is seeking, but the fact that it is on for £2.25M gives an indication of just how property prices have risen over the last 70 years. If only one had a time machine.

Waugh discussed these kinds of houses and the kinds of people who lived in them in several works from the late 1930s (for instance, the short story "An Englishman's Home", which features Much Malcock Hall (formerly and still popularly "Grumps)", Much Malcock House, the Manor and the Old Mill) and early 1940s (for instance, Put Out More Flags). This got me thinking - and looking. There are houses of the type Waugh describes all over the place whether in Lancashire or Oxfordshire (the drive between the M40 junction and Crowmarsh Gifford is thick with them). As a jobbing writer, one may never aspire to live in such a house, but plenty of people do. Who are they (there are surely only so many retired admirals or even colonels)? What do they do for a living? Given house price rises over the last decades, how do they afford them? And why does one never meet these people? (Because I live in the city.)

I'm not sure I'd want to live in Combe Florey, but I'd like to be in a position (I think I'd prefer a three bedroom duplex apartment with a view of the Thames or substantial terraced house in Wingate Road) to be able to afford to. Combe Florey would make the perfect writers' centre. Perhaps some banker could give the Arvon Foundation his bonus so they could buy it for the nation.

IEEE Spectrum: Unsafe At Any Airspeed?

IEEE Spectrum: Unsafe At Any Airspeed?

Interesting stuff, and not entirely a surprise to me but some of the findings are worse than I would have anticipated.

" In March 2004, acting on a number of reports from general aviation pilots that Samsung SPH-N300 cellphones had caused their GPS receivers to lose satellite lock, NASA issued a technical memorandum that described emissions from this popular phone. It reported that there were emissions in the GPS band capable of causing interference. Disturbingly, though, they were low enough to comply with FCC emissions standards."

I know that we've had engineers invest heavily in potted plants to place between them and working prototype handsets when they saw the radiation and radio output data for them.  I've also seen a theoretically ready to ship 3G handset that could "talk" to its test rig without the cable across the lab.

I've certainly left my phone on a couple of times by accident.

The core issue is that outside of the critical phases this should be less of a problem anyway, (although the input on the effect of the Samsung phones on GPS is interesting, especially as built in GPS becomes a standard in 3G devices).  Part of the problem with spectrum "noise" is an artifact of phones not being designed to (a) move at multiple hundreds of kph and (b) be 5 miles _above_ the radio landscape.  Both of these factors lead to a very unhappy core network on the ground.  Put a normal phone into a landscape like that and it'll crank up the power trying to handshake with a basestation (or in the case of CDMA lots of basestations) and keep doing while moving.  It's a mess.

What will happen in the near future is the plane will have a micro-cell onboard which means the phone will lock onto the local cell a few metres away and broadcast at minimum power.  That shouldn't be a serious problem.

Of course, the more serious problem is passengers fighting their natural urges to beat the leaving hell out of the ass on their phone for an 8 hour transatlantic flight.

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Internal Exile

I was going to say that the election of Boris Johnson is a catastrophe for London and a catastrophe for Britain, but as the Weasel has pointed out, Johnson's election has already generated more hyperbolic comment in the blogosphere than can be possibly be justified or sustained. Which isn't to say that I'm not very angry at the people who should have known better - those who voted for a "progressive" third party candidate as number 1 and Johnson as 2. They are guilty ones and I do and will blame them for inflicting upon us a racist, sexist, homophobic buffoon. But the reeducation camps aren't just around the door and our lives must go on as best they can.

Of course, the real fear now for us anti-Tories is that Johnson will surprise us all and prove competent in the role. There is absolutely nothing in Johnson's own background (other than a modicum of native intelligence) to suggest that he will be competent, but I suspect that a great many people at Central Office, along with their friends, will be really, really, hoping that he doesn't mess and will be prepared to offer Johnson all the support he needs (whether he wants it might be another matter). 

For the foreseeable future, as we career towards an almost certain Cameron victory in 2010 its likely shattering consequences (the end of the United Kingdom for one),  I intend to adopt the attitude of bourgeois intellectuals in the DDR: an attitude of psychic internal exile from the body politic.

Free Neal Stephenson...

...and John Clute at Gresham College next Thursday for the symposium on Science Fiction as a Literary Genre. (Crassly the college's homepage's puffs the event with the tagline "Sci-Fi and Literature" and a picture of the Starship Enterprise, so managing to get three things wrong in one go.) I heard about the symposium a few weeks ago, but only signed up this week - I has assumed that all the places would have gone by now, but I wrong. Of course, I feel ashamed that I didn't sign up as soon as I heard about the symposium. I mean - Neal Stephenson! And for free! I wonder how Gresham managed to bag him? I suppose Gresham College might push some of his baroque buttons. The college is at least aware of what they have got to a certain extent: he is described as the keynote speaker in the letter I received this morning. It doesn't give a name to the title of his talk, but the website does: "The Fork: Science Fiction versus Mundane Culture", which does sound like a Stephensonian topic - he is certainly a geek (unlike many slipstream writers), indeed he is proud to be a geek, but there is a sense in Stephenson's work that he stands slightly apart from the fetid core of the genre (unlike, say, Charles Stross).

And in the evening I am going to see another literary hero of mine, although this time unfortunately the event isn't free. David Lodge is talking about his new novel Deaf Sentence at the place that filled the void left by the closure of Compendium Books (eternal thanks to the Weasel for introducing me to its wonders) as my spiritual home the London Review (of Books) Bookshop. There appear to be tickets still available, a snip at £6, although that's not quite the same as free - as they say what's not to like about free Neal Stephenson?

Perhaps Lodge and Stephenson should collaborate on a novel. After all Stephenson has written a campus novel (The Big U with several other novels heavily featuring students and universities) and Lodge has written a novel about artificial intelligence (sort of) (Thinks...). As two of my favourite writers it is hardly surprising that they have much more in common that might meet the eye. And I sure that Stephenson would agree with Morris Zapp (or Jacques Derrida) that Every Decoding is Another Encoding. No, they aren't that far apart (I know, I know!).

And afterwards it will be City Lit Writers' Club drinks. Can my brain, stomach and liver cope with so much literary richness in one day?       

Cantar de Mio Cid

Blog A Penguin Classic – Penguin Books Ltd

Thanks to The Magician for the tip: the Blog a Penguin Classic blog is open again to new reviewers, so register now for your free book. I've been assigned The Poem of the Cid. Yesss... OK, I can't say it's the book I would have chosen myself, but it is a work that stand at the very threshold of Spanish literature and thus is, in its way, the perfect introduction to a decade of Borgesian studies. Furthermore, who can forget the ending of the film? And the book is a lot shorter than Don Quixote.

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