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- Word Of The Week: February 6th, 2010. - Posted to Just Write
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- Super (War) Heroes. - Posted to Just Write
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When I was a kid and I’d hear someone say they spoke a language fluently I’d think they were saying fluidly, and in a way it makes sense. Both words come from the Latin word fluere, which means “to flow” . Language is like a fluid, especially if you’re listening to someone speak a language you don’t understand. My mother’s parents came from Czechoslovakia, and I used to love listening to some of my relatives speaking Czech. Because I couldn’t understand a bit of it the sounds were like music. I once met a guy who was fluent in three different languages. He said at one point that being trilingual had its disadvantages. I said, “Wait, what could disadvantage could there possibly be?” He said, “I misspoke. I meant it definitely has its advantages.” If a guy who speaks three languages can misspeak I guess I shouldn’t feel too bad about those times when I not have way.
That would make an interesting surprise ending for the movie, but it’s also kind of a downer. The original film also scores some accuracy points for the Stygian Sisters, for instance, who are thoroughly creepy, and for little touches such as when Thetis tells her fellow goddesses that Zeus once tried to seduce her disguised as a cuttlefish. She responded by turning herself into a shark.
And yet it’s hard not to draw political conclusions, at least looking at some of them, such as the one of Captain America between Himmler and a concentration camp prisoner. Looking at the one of Batman talking to US soldiers on June 5, 1944 I can’t help thinking he’s giving them a stirring pep talk but, unlike Henry V, he’s not about to lead them into battle. And unlike Henry V he couldn’t come to the camp the night before in disguise. That’s one of the paradoxes of the superhero: the identity protects their anonymity, but it becomes their public face. Others are just goofy. What is Darth Vader doing at the Yalta Conference? Well, he is standing right behind Stalin, so maybe he’s planning to take out the competition, although, as a friend of mine said, shouldn’t he have been carrying a real light saber and not a cheap plastic one? The Joker standing on a Moscow hotel roof is the one I like best. The composition makes it look like someone just happened to be up there with a camera and caught the super villain just as he popped in. It’s unnerving, but it makes me think that it’s easier to define a villain than a hero. This is wartime, but there’s no question which side The Joker’s on. He’s on his own side, taking advantage of the chaos of war.
If scientists could develop a spacecraft that could travel at that speed–and if it were safe for humans–we could make the trip to Mars at its most distant point in a matter of minutes*. The trip to the Alpha Centauri system that Gilster describes, by the way, would take more than forty years. That’s why A spacecraft travelling even at one-tenth the speed of light would make Mars a day trip, but would probably flatten any human passengers, which just reminds me of the biggest obstacle to reaching Mars: gravity. It’s not just that the spacecraft carrying human passengers would need a tremendous amount of fuel for both the takeoff from Earth and the return from Mars. The trip would also take years, and in zero gravity muscles atrophy while bones disintegrate. Gilster doesn’t even think about human beings in his equations so he doesn’t worry about gravity, but it’s a huge problem for space travelers. In most science fiction the problem’s solved with artificial gravity. If we could manipulate gravity it would solve a lot of problems. Imagine this: if we could manipulate gravity we wouldn’t just be able to create one-G environments inside spaceships. Potentially we could create zero-G environments outside of spaceships, making it possible to launch a ship using only a small amount of fuel. And maybe we could even alter it so that the ship could travel at incredible speed–say, one-tenth the speed of light–while the ship’s passengers would be comfortable in a one-G environment inside the ship. The problem is that, while Gilster offers some practical solutions to the problem of reaching the closest star (after the Sun), including antimatter and solar sails, as well as a ground-based laser system that would propel the craft from Earth. Okay, they’re not exactly practical, but at least they’re theoretically possible. As far as I know there’s not even a theoretical model for an artificial gravity device, but I hope someone’s working on it. Sending unmanned spacecraft to the stars is an intriguing idea, but I really want to go to other places. Even if I can’t go myself I find the thought of a human footprint–even a permanent human presence–on Mars more exciting than sending unmanned spacecraft to the stars. *Please feel free to check my math on this, especially since it doesn’t sound at all right. Mars at its most distant is 250 million miles from Earth. I divided that by 18,600 and got 13,440 units, which, divided by 60, comes out to 224 seconds–or a little over 3.7 minutes. But I think it’s safe to say that even if my math is way off at that speed Mars could still be a day trip.
The cats protect her by their presence, and because he hated cats she believes they’ll protect her. I won’t say how it ends, but it is ambiguous. It ends the way only a short story can. If this were a novel there’d have to be more: the woman is crazy, and her family has to deal with her, or her husband’s ghost is real, possibly even the first wave of the dead coming back to haunt the living. It could go a million different directions, but, in the end, it doesn’t need to. Ansay’s characters are also often tormented, but not necessarily tormented in big ways, ways that would fill a novel. Mary Ann, the narrator of the title story is a compulsive thief because it calms her. She says, “I was nervous and awkward most of the time, but when I stole I was smooth as cream.” This is not the story’s central problem, though: it’s her complicated relationship with her father and family, who expect her to get an education, and her friends. Making it a short story gives Ansay a chance to let a character in a larger drama tell just her story. Sometimes, too, a short story is a way to tell a story that just can’t be made into a novel. Ansay told me her story Neighbor was inspired by a real neighbor, someone who bugged her. A writing teacher I once had said that writing a novel is easy. All you have to do is write one page a day for a year and you’ll have a novel. While writing a short story may take at least that long, the short story can be so much harder because each time a writer has to start over from scratch.
When I think about that I think about the elements that compose matter. Carl Sagan said, “We are all star stuff.” It’s astounding to think that almost every element originated in the heart of a star, that almost everything from helium up to uranium (and even some of the bigger elements) begins with the fusion of two hydrogen atoms, then the fusion of helium atoms, then lithium, and so on. A friend of mine once suggested that the number of elements might be infinite. And yet it seems like nothing–not even the universe itself–really is infinite. There are limits to everything. Matter isn’t infinitely divisible, nor is its existence infinite. Anyway, because I’m a wordy kind of guy, I can’t help wondering about the origins of the word element, although it’s unknowable. According to the Oxford English Dictionary “the etymology and primary meaning are uncertain”. There are limits to what’s knowable as well. On that cheerful note here’s a great rundown of the elements from Tom Lehrer–although you may notice that his song’s actually out of date. There are a few elements he doesn’t mention that are known to Harvard, and everyone else. What we can know may be finite, but we haven’t yet reached the end.
For some reason Catcher In The Rye was one of those books I was never assigned to read in school. I did read it, but more out of a sense of obligation than desire. At the end of it I felt let down. I asked myself, what just happened? And then I asked, do I even care? I wasn’t that sure that I did. I didn’t understand why some people could be so hopelessly in love with a book that, even though it sounds like heresy, just didn’t move me. And then I read Nine Stories, and, reading one of them, The Laughing Man, I understood. It’s a short story but it was denser, deeper, and more profound than most novels I’d read—including Catcher In The Rye. It’s a story about the loss of childhood innocence which, I think, might be the most profound event in all our lives. What really makes it, though, is the story within the story—the story a group of boys are told about a hero called The Laughing Man. And it’s the story that they’re told that really destroys their innocence. That’s what got me: that a story could have so much power. If you’ve read the story, or if you go and read it now (you can find it online here), maybe you’ll feel the same way and maybe you won’t. If you don’t I hope there is something—a story, a painting, a piece of music—that affects you that deeply. Never being touched by something like that would be a kind of death. Hail and farewell, Mr. Salinger.
Coming right on the heels of the dictionary ban, a venerable old publication called The Beaver will be changing its name to Canada’s History. The reason is that the journal’s former name gets blocked by web and e-mail filters, particularly at schools. First I’d like to say that this illustrates one of the major problems with filters. It’s published by Canada’s National History Society, and there’s nothing salacious about it. Second, while many of us have made jokes about, for instance, Mrs. Cleaver saying, “Ward, don’t you think you were a bit hard on the Beaver last night?” we’re mature enough that we can pick up a magazine about Canadian history without making jokes about its title. As a librarian I see a lot of scholarly publications with dull, descriptive names, like European Constitutional Law Review or Journal of the International Phonetic Association . A magazine with a title like The Beaver stands out in libraries, not because it’s funny, but because it’s distinctive. The new title, Canada’s History, says what the magazine’s about, but it doesn’t exactly grab you by the pelt, does it? The title even has an interesting history: it was originally published by The Hudson Bay Company, which was founded in 1666, and which made most of its money selling beaver pelts. Fur may be dead, but do we have to kill off the history too? And as a librarian I can tell you how nightmarish title changes can be to deal with. The publishers of The Beaver are being nice and putting some small print on the cover of Canada’s History to tell us it’s changed its name. Some publishers aren’t so nice, so some magazine no one’s ever heard of may show up in a library and get passed around before getting tossed. We may get two or three issues before someone figures out it’s something we actually subscribed to under a different name. And sometimes publishers will cycle through a series of names. The Royal Geographical Society of London published The Geographical Magazine from May 1935 to November 1988, then changed the name to Geographical from December 1988 to April 1995), then changed it to Geographical Magazine from May 1995 to May 1997, then changed it again to The Royal Geographical Society Magazine in June 1997, before going back to Geographical with the July 1997 issue. As far as I know Geographical hasn’t been blocked by any filters, but maybe they can do something about that by changing their name to something like The Gamecock.
I admit this does raise the issue of “age appropriateness”, but is it really necessary for the Menifee Union School District of California to convene a committee to go through the dictionary and determine what age school students it should be available to? The fact that all copies of the dictionary have been pulled from school shelves seems like an extraordinary overreaction on the part of the school board, especially since this is in response to a complaint by only one parent. School administrators do have to walk a fine line between censorship and access to information, and I know it’s not easy, especially when you have students of different ages in the same school, but should the dictionary be put under lock and key? That might just lead to an underground market, with kids hanging around outside bookstores and giving adults money to buy them a dictionary. It’s not easy for dictionary editors either, and I’m sure the decision to include a definition for oral sex wasn’t easy, but this is just going to make it harder–er, I mean more difficult to decide what to include and what to leave out. Should they also remove the term for a female dog? Should they remove synonyms for donkey or rooster, or the word semprini? I know it’s not easy, but at a certain point adults have to grow up and realize that we can’t completely sanitize the world and prevent children from hearing things that we don’t want them to hear. If school officials had been this skittish when I was a kid my friend Richard Hertz would have been expelled.
I do have one serious problem with this book: it’s much too short. And, while Dave McKean has done some excellent illustrations for other Gaiman books, the illustrations for Odd done by Brett Helquist (who also illustrated Lemony Snicket’s A Series Of Unfortunate Events) are perfect for this story. The author’s biography at the end–written, by the way, by someone who claims they’re being held hostage and forced to write author bios all day long–says that there are other stories about Odd that Gaiman would like to tell. Maybe something for summer. |
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I’m pretty sure I’m fluent in the English language, although I could be wrong about that. As 
When I heard that there was a new film of 
Like so many other questions, asking What is a superhero? seems like it used to be so much simpler. They were the good guys (or gals). Even when comics were in color the superhero world was black and white. That’s what makes this gallery of pictures by Indonesian artist 
Lately I’ve noticed that, if I look almost due East in the evenings, I can see 
he compares it to cathedral-building. Some of the people involved in the building and launching of such a spacecraft likely wouldn’t live to see the project’s outcome, since, if the radio signals beamed back to Earth travelled at the speed of light, it would still be years before the information about our stellar neighbors reaches us. He also suggests Barnard’s star, although at almost 6 light years it would take even longer, while Epison Eridani, at 10.7 light years, would take even longer.
The beauty of short stories is they can be just as enjoyable as any novel but they don’t take nearly as long to read. And short stories can get away with things we’d never settle for in a novel, especially when it comes to endings. The best short stories leave us wanting more, and yet it would ruin them if they gave us more. Take, for example, A. Manette Ansay’s story Smoke, from her collection 
Several years ago I read an article in 
In a way 
It’s apocryphal, but supposedly Albert Einstein once said that the two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity. I’m sure harnessing the power of hydrogen will bring about some great advances but if we could ever harness the power of stupidity our potential would be limitless.
Remember when you were in elementary school and you’d look up dirty words in the dictionary? Sometimes they weren’t there, but when they were it was pretty thrilling. And then, presumably, you grew up. If you have kids of your own you might wonder if they also look up dirty words in the dictionary, but, compared to all the other things they could be exposed to, it probably seems harmless enough. That is, of course, unless you’re a parent who’s decided to complain that the school your child attends has a copy of the 
Winter can’t last forever. At least I keep telling myself that while I’m walking around wrapped in wool from head to toe. Actually the temperature’s been up and down lately, but reading 