{"id":747,"date":"2020-04-05T17:00:26","date_gmt":"2020-04-05T06:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/?p=747"},"modified":"2020-04-05T17:00:26","modified_gmt":"2020-04-05T06:00:26","slug":"sailing-by-lamp-light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/sailing-by-lamp-light\/","title":{"rendered":"Sailing by Lamp Light"},"content":{"rendered":"

Something to cheer us up on a bright and sunny day.<\/p>\n

Observation Post<\/h2>\n

I am back at my post observing the traffic on Pittwater. Yes there is traffic in spite of the lock-down and $1,000 on the spot fines. I am taking note of the boats\u2019 ID numbers to make a full report to the Police Commissioner at the end of the day. I will also note that they seem to be observing the 2 meter rule for personal distance. However, maybe the police need to get some boats as horses can\u2019t swim very fast.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Jules Verne under Water<\/h2>\n

I was a fan of Jules Verne\u2019s novels at school. I seem to remember reading The Mysterious Island<\/em> at one point and being impressed. Was this a set text or did I discover it on my own? The details escape me. (I seem to be saying that more and more as time goes by.) This morning I came across this devastating review of an Oxford University Press edition of his Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas<\/em> by Matthew Walter who points out all the absurdities in the plot and the bad writing. \u201cKale-Flavored Smoke,\u201d The Lamp<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

One of the things that attracted me to Verne\u2019s novels was the fact that several of his characters were \u201canarchists\u201d who roamed the world ignoring political authority. Here is a sample of Walter\u2019s criticism:<\/p>\n

In addition to all the things I have mentioned above Verne is guilty of numberless absurdities, some of them frankly painful. I have, for example, always wondered about the provenance  of the mysterious \u201cseaweed rich in nicotine\u201d from which Captain Nemo makes his cigars. How is it possible for them to smoke onboard \u2014 he tells Aronnax, a confirmed addict, that he should feel free to do so as often as he likes \u2014 even though there is no mention of any kind of air filtration system and they often go days and even weeks without returning to the surface? Hell, even the Navy doesn\u2019t allow submarine smoking anymore. Could it be that Verne, in the course of spinning his yarn, found himself thinking that a life aboard a ship that afforded its passengers so many pleasures \u2014 friendship, philosophic conversation, tasteful interior design, good food, a massive library and picture gallery, and almost daily opportunities for scientific discovery \u2014 would still be unbearable without tobacco, or something like it anyway, in virtually unlimited quantities? The mind reels, in a delightful upward spiraling direction, reeking of kale-flavored smoke.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

His critique of the famous \u201csquid scene” is hilarious:<\/p>\n

This is bad, and for a lot of reasons. One is simply that even if the reader is willing to grant Aronnax and companions the remarkable faculty of instantaneously determining the precise lengths and weights and suction organ capacities of monsters that are about to eat them without so much as a rounding error, the fact of their being shared with us either in metric or imperial units tends to interfere with our ability to concentrate on such trivialities as as being horrified or thrilled and wondering how our heroes will possibly make it out alive. Lovecraft was in many ways an atrocious prose stylist, but it\u2019s hard to imagine one of his narrators casually interrupting his and our sublime apprehension of ultimate evil to inform us that Cxaxukluth weighed eight hundred stone and ten. For all I know all that muck here about counting the suckers \u2014 did he use his fingers, I wonder? \u2014 is just there to distract us from questions even deadlier to Verne\u2019s ostensible narrative ambitions, such as how Aronnax can even see the eyes of a creature that we have just been told is moving very rapidly backwards. Nor does it help matters much when, having gone into so much detail about mass and velocity and so on, he glosses the actual death of an unnamed crew member with: \u201cA strong smell of musk filled the atmosphere. It was horrible.\u201d It certainly is.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The essay appears in a new online Catholic magazine called \u201cThe Lamp\u201d whose goal is to promote a \u201cconsistent, undiluted Catholic orthodoxy.\u201d What I hear you ask is David doing reading such a thing? His answer, it is a Sunday and somebody has to do it.<\/p>\n

Putting the VAN into Beethoven<\/h2>\n

The classical music magazine VAN<\/a> (the \u201cVAN\u201d comes from Ludwig van \u2026) has an article on how the crisis will tectonically (or should that be \u201cteutonically\u201d) change classical music, for the better possibly here<\/a>. You like me are probably listening to music at home though probably not quite like this grande dame, although who knows what you do in the privacy of your own home?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Keeping the lamp burning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Something to cheer us up on a bright and sunny day. Observation Post I am back at my post observing the traffic on Pittwater. Yes there is traffic in spite of the lock-down and $1,000 on the spot fines. I am taking note of the boats\u2019 ID numbers to make a full report to the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_import_markdown_pro_load_document_selector":0,"_import_markdown_pro_submit_text_textarea":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[86],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musings"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}