Archive for May, 2009
Ebook Readers and the Pixel Qi
Friday, May 29th, 2009
I’m probably in the market for an ebook reader, when someone produces one that does everything I want it to do.
What I want:
- A screen that I can read outdoors without too much difficulty.
- And that isn’t too small.
- WiFi.
- A web browser. For reading, I prefer to load Opera, because I can easily kill the idiotic formatting on most badly-designed web pages with it, and because its Save Windows features gives me an automatic bookmark that will remember my exact position on the page. I’m reading things online that I have no interest in downloading, or finding a downloadable source for. I want a device that will handle all my electronic reading, not just some fraction of it.
- Good battery life.
- The ability to handle common open formats like epub and pdf without me having to send the document to someone else for conversion.
I have a Samsung Q1 Ultra that does most of this. But it’s got a shiny screen that’s a trial to read outside in daylight. Its handling of right-clicks is vexatious — I usually get both a left- and a right-click when I hold the stylus down long enough to get a right-click — and even with XP on it instead of Vista, the boot is very slow. And it was expensive. I needed a capable backup computer when I bought it, so overall it’s serving my purposes, but for an ebook reader, what I really want is a netbook with an outdoor-readable screen and a faster boot.
None of the dedicated ebook readers currently on the market have the characteristics I’m looking for.
The Kindle, according to Amazon, is DRM-agnostic, but there isn’t any way to tell whether most Kindle ebooks have DRM or not; and I’m not buying DRM’d ebooks, not now and not ever. The Kindle has a 3G connection rather than WiFi; and while a 3G connection would be nice, I don’t have service at the house; I’d have to walk down to the end of a rather long driveway. Using the Kindle to read open documents is evidently inconvenient, as it requires mailing documents to Amazon for conversion; and browsing the web is right out.
The Sony Reader has more of the open formats I’m looking for built-in, but I really want WiFi and the ability to read web pages. I usually don’t manually transfer content from my desktop to my Samsung UMPC in any organized manner, since I keep them in different places and often don’t have them turned on simultaneously; I end up using it more because I can connect over WiFi.
So I’m holding out for more.
This morning I came across a link to a blog about the Pixel Qi, which isn’t in production yet. It’s beginning to look there’ll be netbooks with epaper screens in the foreseeable future.
You bet I’m interested. I’m going to be keeping an eye on this one.
To Seek Out Strange New Books
Thursday, May 28th, 2009
In previous posts tagged ‘buying books,’ I discussed why I’ve been buying fewer books even though nothing beats a good read. I’ve already started a project to see if I can find a better way to buy — if I can recover the ability to locate fiction I like at a price I can afford.
(I don’t have a problem buying nonfiction. That’s much easier than it used to be. If a book has been published on a subject I’m interested in, all I have to do is afford it and shelve it. Since Amazon’s database came online, I’ve bought cartloads of nonfiction I scarcely ever would have seen on bookstore shelves.)
This isn’t the first time I’ve gone looking for another way to buy fiction. Some years ago, when the hype about ebooks was fairly new, I started looking around to buy some. I tried a few and stopped, for two reasons:
- Ebook publishers’ sites were not designed for efficient browsing; they tended to be intolerable on dialup.
- The editing was bad. I came across too much writing that was awkward at best.
I have broadband now, which ought to go some way toward mitigating the first problem, though it may well not eliminate it. As for the editing … within the fortnight, I found myself reading a novel from a New York publisher in which a character who wasn’t otherwise supposed to be an ignoramus used the word ’smited.’ After such a fine example of goodly writed English, I’m not sure there’s as much distance between New York publishing and indie ebook publishing as there used to be.
My method of buying, over the last couple of years, has mostly been to throw darts at Amazon. I take about fifty dollars and buy quasi-random works of fiction by authors I don’t know in genres I don’t hate. Over the last couple of years, I found new authors to read this way. I can’t say I did well this year: I’ve spent half my fifty and, while I didn’t hate all of the books, I didn’t come up with any keepers, either. So I’m going to see what else I can try.
Preparing to Record
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
My new microphone arrived today. I bought a Samson Q1UCW USB mike, which comes with Cakewalk Music Creator Limited Edition.
The microphone works well — and I sound better than I thought I would, on a good microphone, which is a relief. I really like the microphone, and I recommend it.
To my surprise, I had problems with Music Creator. I say it’s to my surprise, because several months ago we bought an Audio Technica USB turntable to convert vinyl records with. The turntable came with Cakewalk Pyro, and in that case both hardware and software worked perfectly and effortlessly.
Alas, on my system, Music Creator seems to have some problems with the mike. It induces a popping or clapping sound that sounds a bit like clipping distortion; but it was doing that even with the mike gain at uncomfortably low levels, when clipping was impossible. Nothing I could do to the audio settings fixed the problem, to my frustration.
So I went and downloaded Audacity, which is free. Audacity with the LAME plugin (which is easily installed) exports MP3s, and I’ve done some successful test recordings. I should be able to start making recordings of Dragon Winter and Sigurd the Volsung soon.
I wanted to do a recording per week, but I’m not sure I’d be able to keep that schedule and upload a new text section of Sigurd every week too. The sections in Sigurd are long, and I’m not used to making recordings yet, so I’ll have to do a few before I can make a realistic judgement about a schedule for them.
I’m happy. I’ve always liked Sigurd, obviously, but reading it aloud is giving me a new feel for the poem as a work of art.
Dofollow!
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009
I’m trying it.
Probably most readers are saying, “What’s that?”
You may know that your website’s page rank, at Google and other search engines, is partly determined by how many links point back to your site. A few years ago they came up with a ‘nofollow’ tag that can be placed on links; the nofollow tag tells the search engine not to follow the link back and give the linked site rank. The links at a number of social sites are tagged ‘nofollow’. So are links in the comment section of most blogs, so your link won’t help improve your site rank. This discourages spammers, but it also makes it harder to collect legitimate links.
An article less terse than the description above.
I’ve activated Dofollow, a plugin that will turn off the ‘nofollow’ tags in comments to this blog. I’ve set it to do this two days after the comment is placed. This means that if I don’t delete your comment before it’s two days old, your link will count to improve the rank of your site, when the spiders find it. I figure I can delete a spam link within two days; and I can change the timing to three or four days if I need to.
I’ve also activated Akismet, the anti-spam plugin. As long as I don’t have to deal with unmanageable quantities of spam, I’ll leave it this way, to encourage comments.
Existing comments already ought to have had their nofollow tags stripped.
In other news: I’m planning to make MP3 recordings of William Morris’ Sigurd the Volsung as I transcribe sections, and of my own poetry. But my microphone hasn’t arrived yet. The sections of Sigurd are long, and it may take me some time to get the hang of doing good readings of them.
Some of you may know that Gutenberg has Sigurd, and you’re wondering why I’m transcribing it. In the version Gutenberg has, some of the verse has been abridged into a prose summary. I want to make the complete poetic version of Sigurd available.
Accentual Alliterative Poetry: Storytelling Style
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009
Wild weather largely kept me off the computer yesterday.
Last time I had a chance to post, I discussed the rarity of accentual-alliterative poetry in modern English, and speculated that the loss of case endings in English may make it harder to write good accentual-alliterative poetry, and easier to write good syllabic poetry. I don’t view that speculation with a great deal of confidence; and, at any rate, I don’t think it’s the most important factor contributing to the rarity of modern accentual-alliterative epic poetry.
Far more important: the expected approach to storytelling has changed since people started writing novels. The novel seems to have begun with an emphasis on the quotidian — the daily lives of (often) ordinary people, as they go about everyday activities. Even when the matter is high and heroic, a novel will often present many more mundane details about the characters’ activities than a verse narrative will. Consider this passage from The Lord of the Rings:
Frodo stripped the blankets from Pippin and rolled him over, and then walked off to the edge of the wood. Away eastward the sun was rising red out of the mists that lay thick on the world. Touched with gold and red the autumn trees seemed to be sailing rootless on a shadowy sea. A little below him to the left of the road ran down into a hollow and disappeared.
When he returned Sam and Pippin had got a good fire going. ‘Water!’ shouted Pippin. ‘Where’s the water?’
‘I don’t keep water in my pockets,’ said Frodo.
‘We thought you had gone to find some,’ said Pippin, busy setting out the food, and cups. ‘You had better go now.’
‘You can come too,’ said Frodo, ‘and bring all the water-bottles.’ There was a stream at the foot of the hill. They filled their bottles and the small camping kettle at a little fall where the water fell a few feet over an outcrop of grey stone. It was icy cold; and they spluttered and puffed as they bathed their faces and hands.
Now imagine writing that in blank pentameter. Better yet, try it. I’ll wait.
Back yet?
I fancy, if you have a sufficiently sensitive ear, you may have encountered some tonal problems. In this passage Tolkien is subtly contrasting Frodo’s impression of the morning— which has an element of the mysterious and the ethereal — with the travelling hobbits’ ordinary preparation for breakfast; and it works easily enough in prose, which comfortably contains both registers.
But many English meters, including pentameter, give a gravitas to the matter they recount; and they give particular emphasis to the words that follow the word-sound rules I discussed in the previous post. If the word, if the activity, can bear that emphasis, all is well; but if you end up emphasizing a word that cannot bear an intense focus because it’s too mundane or too trite, the piece may end up sounding overwrought. There is a particular hazard in placing the high and the low in juxtaposition: you can easily produce an impression of ludicrous lack of proportion — rather what you’d get if someone set a few random pieces of mudstone and asphalt in a sapphire pendant. Bathos is an everpresent menace.
Familiarity doubtless has a great deal to do with our ideas of what works well in poetry and what works well in prose. It would, again, be easy to make too much of this: I don’t mean that there’s anything that can’t be presented well in verse. Still, I think it’s not entirely an accident that storytelling with an emphasis on mundane detail and storytelling in prose became common at the same time.
I can imagine producing a maybe semi-demi-tolerable rendering of the Tolkien prose above in blank pentameter, given enough time. If I have to make it rhyme, I might produce something that was good writing; but it’s most unlikely that it would replicate the feel of the prose in any meaningful way, because of the emphasis of rhyme.
When I imagine trying to write it in the accentual-alliterative style, I have even more emphasis to deal with, because every alliterated word is also stressed. The odds of my finding a truly satisfactory way to render the light conversation about the water in the old Northern meter are slim: it can easily be too stark for so slight an interlude. Any of the old-time poets would have left the water conversation out — for good reason, meseems.
To be sure, accentual-alliterative poetry needn’t sound like the Old Norse. Several days back I quoted some lines from Tolkien’s The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, where the beat comes down like a hammer-blow on the crucial words. It is possible to write a softer rhythm, though, as you can see from the opening of Piers Ploughman:
In a somer seson, whan softe was the sonne,
I shoop me into shroudes as I a sheep were,*
In habite as an heremite unholy of werkes,
Wente wide in this world wondres to here.
Ac on a May morwenynge on Malverne hilles
Me bifel a ferly*, of Fairye me thoghte.
*I put on clothes as though I were a shepherd.
ferly: wonder
Alliteration by itself is comparatively easy to write in modern English verse. I haven’t yet attempted any accentual poetry that rhymes, like Coleridge’s Christabel, and can’t say anything about how it hard it is.
Accentual Alliterative Poetry: Grammar and Sense
Saturday, May 23rd, 2009
There’s been comparatively little accentual-alliterative poetry written in modern English. The overriding reason for this is fashion. But there are other reasons why it was the native meter of Old English and Old Norse, and is rarer in modern work — long modern works, particularly. Today I want to discuss the grammatical reason.
For the moment, let us call any rule that limits what word can be used where in a poem a ’sonic element.’ The meter — the pattern of stresses and unstresses — is one element; such word-sound rules as a rhyme scheme or a scheme of alliteration are another.
Inversions of normal word order are common in formal English poetry. As long as the intended meaning is obvious, sometimes it’s better to sacrifice the grammar to the form and to the strength of phrasing. Sometimes a poet indulges in an inversion because of the meter, but most inversions are caused by word-sound rules, because they limit the word-choice more than the meter does. Consider the opening of “The Glories of Our Blood and State,” by James Shirley:
The meaning is sufficiently obvious, and inversion sufficiently common, that you likely didn’t even blink at ‘be equal made’; and probably few people would argue that Shirley should have sacrificed the forcefulness of his wording and his rhyme to preserve the normal word order, ‘be made equal’.
But modern English has no obvious case-endings, and thus is word-order dependent for meaning. When you start encountering multiple inversions in short succession, you probably will start blinking — in the sense that it will slow your reading speed down as you have to figure out what’s intended. The Tolkien verses I quoted few days earlier are showing enough non-standard word order to inhibit speedy comprehension, which is why reading The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun as an introduction to the Volsung tale is probably not the best way to appreciate either the verse or the story.
The reason they’re showing a lot of nonstandard word-order is that Tolkien was limiting himself to a particularly terse rendering of the form; and he was working in form in which word-sound rules hit on every beat. In the more typical syllabic rhymed poetry of later eras, they usually affect only the last word in a line.
Old English and Old Norse had obvious cases. Even languages which have cases usually have a typical word order, but the case formation makes it clearer what the intended meaning was when the words occur out of order. The plainer the meaning is, the easier it usually is to create an artistic effect, because that generally depends on the reader perceiving what the writer meant to convey. I think anyone writing accentual-alliterative poetry in modern English while attempting the terse style Tolkien was imitating is working is working under a handicap, compared to someone whose language has case-endings. (And modern English may well make it easier to write syllabic poetry: case-endings that change the syllable count in syllabic poetry would make it more difficult.)
It won’t do to make overmuch of the generalization. There are more forgiving styles of accentual alliterative verse than Tolkien was working in. There are long works in accentual alliterative meter in Middle English, which had lost its case endings. But I suspect it’s not entirely accidental that the really long works, or bodies of work, in more recent English have tended to be end-rhymed or blank verse.
My Fantasy Poem, and the Hang Gliders Thereof
Saturday, May 23rd, 2009
The Poetry Friday roundup this week is at Susan Taylor Brown’s blog. I’ve been out, or writing, today, and haven’t read the poems yet.
Tonight I worked on my fantasy poem. I haven’t been feeling good enough to write, so I was glad to get back to it. I believe its title is going to be The Winds of Winter. The winds are a recurring motif, and they seem to be symbolically appropriate. And, besides, this title alliterates; that’s a hint to the style of the poem.
Later: I discovered that George R. R. Martin is going to be using The Winds of Winter for a forthcoming book, so I had to change the title of the poem. It’s now Dragon Winter.
I’m not writing in the accentual-alliterative meter I’ve been discussing in conjunction with Tolkien’s The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun: the poem is in blank pentameter, the same meter as Paradise Lost. I don’t have a formal scheme for alliteration, but I do it fairly frequently, as you can see from the opening scene, “The Incantation of the Dragoness.”
Right now I’m working on lines where I need to describe a hang glider aglow with magic as it flies into ice clouds, from the ground.
The poem isn’t urban fantasy: the culture I’m writing about somewhat resembles those of the steppe nomads of medieval Central Asia — if they had invented silk-and-bamboo hang gliders and had working sorcery of a rather scientific flavor.
About the gliders:
No, they weren’t inspired by Aang’s glider in the Avatar series (which I’m quite fond of). I started Dragon Winter in February of 1999, long before Avatar. And my gliders look very much like full-sized hang gliders.
No, they weren’t inspired by the gliders in Dinotopia. That’s a fine book — but I only read it a few weeks ago, after a friend asked me about it. Way back when I was starting Dragon Winter, I asked my father, an engineer, if it were conceivable that anyone could have built hang gliders before modern times if anyone had figured out how. He said that he thought silk and bamboo might solve the strength-of-materials problem. I suspect James Gurney may have had similar reasons for picking the same materials.
I probably would have written gliders into the poem anyway, on the theory that the Debroans could have employed enchantment to make sufficiently strong materials if necessary, but I like to have my devices work as naturally as they can. So I was pleased to make my quasi-medieval hang gliders out of silk and bamboo.
Save Soldiers’ Dogs and Cats!
Friday, May 22nd, 2009
You can support our troops in a material way by helping to bring their adopted animals home. The SPCA urgently needs contributions for Baghdad Pups.
They need them now.
Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have rescued and adopted puppies and kittens they’ve found in dire straits. They’ll be in dire straits again if they’re left behind when our troops come home — and since it’s against regulations, they can’t bring the animals back themselves.
The SPCA is rescuing some of these animals, but it’s expensive, and apparently in about two weeks it will be too hot to bring any more back for the summer. Some soldiers may have to leave their animals behind, if there isn’t enough money to bring them home.
People who have given so much up for the rest of us shouldn’t have to come back, knowing that they couldn’t save their loyal companions.
I’ve given what I can.
Tolkien’s Sigurd and Gudrun: ‘Demonic Energy’
Wednesday, May 20th, 2009
I’m continuing discussion of the newly-published book of epic poems by Tolkien, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun. Yesterday I quoted from the poems, to give some idea of how they feel, and how I would approach reading them. Today, I’d like to continue by giving Christopher Tolkien’s own description of his father’s poems, and why he included so much auxiliary material in the book:
It must also be said that his poems are not at all points easy to follow, and this arises especially from the nature of the old poems that were his models. In one of his lectures he said: ‘In Old English breadth, fullness, reflection, elegaic effect, were aimed at. Old Norse poetry aims at seizing a situation, striking a blow that will be remembered, illuminating a moment with a flash of lightning — and tends to concision, weighty packaging of the language in sense and form … ‘ That ’seizing a situation’, ‘illuminating a moment’, without clear unfolding of narrative sequence or other matters with a bearing on the ‘moment’, will be found to be a marked characteristic of the ‘New Lays’; and here some guidance may be looked for in addition to the brief prose statements that he added to some of the sections of the Vólsungakviða en nýja.
That seems to me an entirely just description of the poems: Tolkien evidently did a fine job of imitating his sources. Christopher Tolkien has also reproduced a draft of a lecture his father wrote, introducing the Elder Edda, in which he says:
There remains too the impact of the first hearing of these things after the preliminary struggle with Old Norse is over and one first reads an Eddaic poem getting enough of the sense to go on with. Few who have been through this process can have missed the sudden recognition that they had unawares met something of tremendous force, something that in parts (for it has various parts) is still endowed with an almost demonic energy, in spite of the ruin of its form …
This is unlike Old English, whose surviving fragments (Beowulf especially) — such at any rate has been my experience — only reveal their mastery and excellence slowly and long after the first labour with the tongue and the first acquaintance with the verse are over. There is truth in this generalization. It must not be pressed. Detailed study will enhance one’s feeling for the Elder Edda, of course. Old English verse has an attraction in places that is immediate. But Old English verse does not attempt to hit you in the eye. To hit you in the eye was the deliberate intention of the Norse poet.
That is why Tolkien’s poems read the way they do. Their characteristics are not accidental.
Sigurd and Gudrun: the Poetry
Tuesday, May 19th, 2009
Last time, I discussed the versions of the story Tolkien drew on to create the epic poems published as The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, and the desirability of acquainting yourself with the story before coming to these poems. This time, I want to discuss the poetry as such — how to enjoy it. I’d also like to discuss Tolkien’s intent; but that may keep for tomorrow.
First: if you’re not already familiar with the Northern verse form Tolkien used, I described it a few posts back.
Second, here’s a quote from the poem, to give you the idea of how it reads if you don’t have a copy of the book. In this passage, Sigurd has heard about Brynhild, who lies sleeping on a mountain behind a wall of flame; and he has travelled to the mountain on his horse, the high-mettled Grani.
Ever wide and wild
the wandering path;
long lay the shadow
of lone rider.
Ever high and high
stood Hindarfell,
mountain mighty
from mist rising.
A fire at crown,
fence of lightning,
high to heavenward
hissed and wavered.
Greyfell Grani,
glory seeking,
leaped the lightning,
lightning-sinewed.
A wall saw Sigurd
of woven shields,
a standard streaming
striped with silver;
a man there war-clad,
mailclad lying,
with sword beside him,
sleeping deadly.
The helm he lifted:
hair fell shining,
a woman lay there,
wound in slumber …
Some poetry is intended to be read, in solitude and quiet, by readers who are not previously acquainted with the matter of the poem. This is no such poetry. Tolkien was trying to imitate not just the meter, but the specific atmosphere of the Norse style; and the Norse poetry was meant to be performed. Read it aloud.
Better yet, stand up and declaim it.
This is not an accessible approach, in the sense that it’s far from the easiest way to become acquainted with the story. But I have never encountered a meter I could get more power out of, in a recitation.
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