Category: Books

A Life of Wild Intesity

I am reading, and really enjoying, Douglas Chadwick’s The Wolverine Way. I read this part this morning, and it almost made me cry.

(Some context. These are wolverines. F2 is the mother. M18 and M19 are her kits. They are in Glacier National Park.)

Where, I wondered, had M19 been during the month and a half we couldn’t find him? Why, if he killed M18, did he stick around so close to the body? He wasn’t feeding on it. Could the death have resulted from an excited reunion in which a tussle got out of hand? All through the fall while keeping tabs on the breakup of F2 and the kits, I felt that we were making progress in uncovering the secrets of wolverines’  lives. M18′s fate is a harsh reminder of how little we truly understand about the animals…

I picture him racing at F2′s heels to keep up across featureless snowfields through May and June, then loping beside her over the rolling tundra uplands during midsummer. His was not a large figure. Even when nearly full size, it all but disappeared within the grandeur of the landscape where he was born. Yet he was proving to be a match for this realm. By mid-September, M18 was covering this country the way the rest of us yearn to, tirelessly, alone, and unafraid. More than unafraid – burning to see what lay over the next ridge. He made multiple ascents during ordinary journeys that we would need days to do and talk about for years. He was embarking on a life of wild intensity.

Then, for a few moments, all that he had become was not enough. Not quite. Not yet. He needed to be a twitch faster. Or an ounce stronger. Or more experienced, better at reading another’s intentions. He wasn’t, and it is over. And we may never know whether his brother was the murderer or in mourning or simply waiting there, uncomprehending, for M18 to get up and go with him for a run.

The Anthropomorphic Nature of Man

More from Kraken, this is Bill Gilly. Emphasis mine, of course.

An octopus lives on a two-dimensional substrate, can travel a well-practiced route to go to work on its night-shift job, typically has a house, regularly takes out its trash, and loves to eat crab. So we think the octopus is intelligent because it behaves like we do.

A squid, on the other hand… lives in a three-dimensional world with boundaries set by temperature, light, oxygen, and salinity rather than physical objects. They do not have permanent places of residence and are nomadic hunters. They eat mesopelagic [mid-level oceanic] organisms that most people don’t even know about.

In short, they are a life-form quite alien to us, and so I think we tend to think of them as being less advanced or intelligent. Again I think that attitude reflects our limitations of perception and understanding. This is just the anthropomorphic nature of man.

Blasphemy: A Book Based on Movie Based on a Book

I made the mistake of going into Barnes & Noble last night. In the SF section is a bright red copy of John Carter, the film novelization. This is a book, based on a movie, and the movie is based on a book.

Why wouldn’t you just read the original book?

This is like a photocopy of a photocopy. It’s wrong.

If you wanted to read a book about John Carter on Mars, WHY WOULDN’T YOU READ THE ORIGINAL BOOK?

And publishers are doing a lovely job of putting out shiny new editions. Some of them are wonderfully illustrated. They have covers to appeal to a variety of fans. All of them are written by the man who created John Carter, Edgar Rice Burroughs. So why would you read some Disneyfied adaptation?

This is like saying, oh, I like this, but I only like the fake version of it, not the real thing. This is what separates people who read books from mindless consumers.

Some Things I Don’t Like About the nook

I have one of the first generation nook e-readers. I like it, and when it dies I will be sad. It’s so much better for reading than most of these so-called e-readers available now, even current versions of the nook. But there are some things I don’t like about it.

There is no “go to furthest read point” anymore. I think there used to be. It’s gone now. So if I bookmark something and go back to it later, there’s no easy way to jump back to where I left off.

The text sizing and font choices are not as good as they could be. You’re supposed to be able to pick your font size and your font face. The problem is that some ebooks ignore those settings.

There’s a thing called “The Daily,” which is completely useless but could be really useful. When I go there, I see four things. Dave Barry’s essay on the nook, the instruction manual, something from the nook blog that is always terribly uninteresting, and a “this day is literature history” sort of thing. You cannot change any of this. You cannot subscribe to your own blogs. So… what’s the point of this?

Similarly, the two games available are pretty clumsy, and the web browser is worse than the text only browser lynx ever was. Can we get rid of these please?

I probably won’t see another firmware update. This version of the nook is probably unsupported now. But once upon a time, these were new features- built useless.

Beebe’s Bathysphere

This is from the introduction to Kraken, by Wendy Williams.

In the 1930s popular author and naturalist William Beebe cobbled together the world’s first real-life deep-sea expedition with the help of fellow explorer Otis Barton. The team’s exploration vehicle looked nothing like Jules Verne’s sleek Nautilus. Small and round and crudely engineered by modern standards, the vessel was in diameter less than the height of a man, with three-inch-thick observation portholes and a bolted-shut door that imprisoned the men inside. The steel globe leaked, and to circulate oxygen internally, the men waved palm-leaf hand fans. Without an engine, Beebe’s bathysphere dangled helplessly from the topside support ship like a ball of yarn suspended from knitting needles.

…

On one dive Beebe narrated his descent to an ardent North American and European radio audience. Listeners hung on every word, as avidly as they would decades later when American astronauts walked on the moon.

I’m sure when Beebe did this, everyone told him he was crazy. Everyone questioned the value of plumbing the depths of the ocean. There was probably not a lot of money for that sort of thing. But he did it anyway, “crudely” engineering his own success and exposing the wonders around us to the doubting world.

I wonder if there are recording of that radio broadcast.