Kingsley Amis What Became of Jane Austen? (1970)

Kingsley Amis What Became of Jane Austen? (1970) Amis wrote occasional pieces, mostly book reviews it seems, and 30-odd are gathered in this collection. The overwhelming impression is that of a man with a clear sense of his own taste, and a rarely disguised contempt for those who disagree with him. Amis is also given to gratuitous insult of people he doesn’t like, such a sociologists. Much of this rudeness adds nothing to his argument or explication, but appears in the form of well-turned epigrams or similes, which must have cost him some effort to produce, hence his inability to leave them out. That being said, the essays are entertaining enough, and I do happen to agree with his (late) recognition of the pernicious influence of the Leavises. The title essay attacks Austen on the grounds that Mansfield Park fails in its moral judgments. Not having read that book, I can’t comment; but his throw-away comments on Pride and Prejudice indicate that Amis prides himself on enjoying a contrarian taste.
     The couple of personal pieces that round out the collection, especially his memoir of his father, make him appear somewhat more amiable, which suggests that his curmudgeonliness was largely a pose, a judgment that he would no doubt strenuously deny. An entertaining collection, which makes me think that I should read a couple of his novels. * to ***

Evanescence

Evanescence
2013-05-08
     This evening, we watched a documentary about Yousuf Karsh, portrait photographer. Towards the end, the curator of his estate mentioned that printing his negatives is becoming ever more difficult, because there is less and less paper and chemistry being produced. A historian wondered how much of the mass of digital images being made would be available for historians 20, 30, 100 years from now. He didn’t answer, but we can surmise it will be a very small, and randomly biased, sample. There were a few shots of people working with digitised imagery.
     I’m digitising my collection of negatives and slides, an interesting, frustrating, sometimes heartbreaking, and often tedious job. Tonight’s session was interrupted by getting the garbage ready for tomorrow: I threw out several of Jon’s floppy diskettes that were no longer readable. I’d used my best utilities to scavenge what I could from them, but most of the data was gone. Jon may have copied some of the data to his hard drives, but it will be almost impossible to tell. He also left some notebooks, most of the notes recording data for games he played, but here and there he wrote poems and bits of prose. These will be digitised, too, but we will keep the paper copies: paper will last longer than floppy disks or hard drives or DVDs.
     All data eventually vanishes. We have records from certain periods of the past only because the bureaucratic mind desires records, hoards facts and data. At one time, most data was created by bureaucrats. Then printing drove a demand for new content, and writers and poets left records of their works in progress, notebooks and diaries and drafts of essays and stories. Now, most content is created by digital media, and most of it is of no more (or less) permanent interest than casual conversation. Very little of this will be kept for any length of time, and even less will ever be examined. Automated data searches will no doubt flag what’s worth keeping, or worth using for whatever nefarious purposes the State has in its bureaucratic mind. But most information has very short-lived value. As it is, the scraps of paper that survive the decades and centuries do so as much by accident as by design. Later generations have different notions of what’s important to know or understand. What we wish to be remembered by may not matter to our descendants.
     Evanescence is the fate of all information. Electronic information will vanish more quickly than anything our ancestors produced: information that requires electricity to be read is doomed to obsolescence. Only an obsessive regimen of repeated conversion to new media will preserve it for more than a decade or two. For ourselves, we can at best hope for being recorded in some living memories and some randomly surviving hard copies of photographs or text, and perhaps a few artifacts that mattered to us, or that we created.

Carola Dunn. Murder on the Flying Scotsman (1997)

     Carola Dunn. Murder on the Flying Scotsman (1997) I bought this because of its setting (I collect fiction with a railway motif or setting), which Dunn describes quite convincingly, even for people like me who have direct experience of steam trains in England. To create the 1923 social milieu Dunn relies too much on cliche, that is, she’s writing to her presumed audience’s expectations. She also imports a good deal of late C20 political and social values. It’s unlikely that a Detective Inspector, his sergeant, and his detective constable have no racist attitudes whatever, for example. But apart from such (very American) flaws, the pastiche works very nicely, and afforded a few hours of pleasure. The heroine, Daisy Dalrymple (who’s a Hon), is charming, if a little too demure when it comes to pursuing her love interest, the dashing Inspector Fletcher, a widower whose daughter Belinda has stowed away on the train that Daisy is taking to Edinburgh (where else?). There’s a murder on the train, a mess of family members that all want what they believe will be a sizeable inheritance, a sinister threat or two, and so forth. Plot complications abound, characters are agreeably two-dimensional, and much fun is had by all. Would make a nice little TV series of the less demanding sort. **½ (2004)

Charles M. Schulz. It’s a Mystery, Charlie Brown (1975)

      Charles M. Schulz. It’s a Mystery, Charlie Brown (1975) A picture book based on a TV special. The panels have rounded corners like a TV screen, and are displayed against a green background on which the text is printed. A slight work, it will keep youngsters occupied for a half hour or so; but it’s not up to the classic Charlie Brown videos or books. Snoopy plays Sherlock Holmes, and finds Woodstock’s nest, which has gone missing because Susie needs an object for show-n-tell. ** (2004)

Sue Grafton. “J” is for Judgment (1993)

     Sue Grafton. “J” is for Judgment (1993) Millhome is hired to confirm that a man who apparently suicided some seven years earlier is still alive. She finds him; he is murdered; and she discovers the truth even though most of it is now irrelevant. She also discovers that she has remnants of a family, but this subplot doesn’t go anywhere, and seems introduced merely to add to the back story (Kinsey Millhome fans must have wanted more details about her.) Well enough plotted, characters thin, setting OK, pacing OK, but there’s the feeling that Grafton is getting tired; this is number 10 in the series, after all. Since then she has managed to move on to “Q”. The books are a good read, but not particularly memorable. ** (2004)

Peter Medawar. Pluto’s Republic (1982)

      Peter Medawar. Pluto’s Republic (1982) Medawar belongs to that small group of scientists who can make their arcane arts intelligible to the general reader. He simplifies, but never too much. He can coin the pithy phrase, and has a nice sense of irony, as well as the courtesy to assume a similar sense in his readers. Pretty well all these essays are occasional pieces, written as lectures or addresses or for publication in reviews and other journals. Thus, there is repetition not only of theme but of language, which makes reading the book in one go tedious at times. But on the whole, his essays are a pleasure to read, and his themes need repeating: that science depends as much on imagination and inspiration as on logic and reason; that any speculation must be tested by against observation and experiment; that much nonsense clothes itself in the garments of science; and that science is too important to be left to scientists. He clearly thinks that the ordinary citizen not only needs but deserves to have broad understanding of how science works, of what science has achieved, and of science’s benefits and dangers. His book helps achieve that end. *** to **** (2004)

Gordon R. Dickson. Beginnings (1988)

     Gordon R. Dickson. Beginnings (1988) Collection of stories from the 40s on. Many show their age, both in content (the most interesting is the limited understanding of computers, but the industry itself had no inkling of what the PC would lead to) and in style. But Soldier, Ask Not, the Dorsai story that Dickson later expanded into a novel, stands up well: it was a true departure, and Dickson’s skill at placing character in an invented culture makes the story work. The other Dickson theme, the extraordinariness of human beings, sometimes descends into something close to species jingoism, but it does supply the two other stories that will surely last; Danger, Human! and 3 Part Puzzle. In his introduction Dickson stresses that he was writing for a living, and didn’t think of his stories as other than something saleable. Most of the pieces in this collection have all the defects and strengths of such writing: neatly twisted plots, more or less obvious humour, limited characterisation (though Dickson has the knack of sketching a character in a few words) focus on novelty of concept or setting, and brevity. They were written to entertain and in that aim they all succeed. ** to **** (2004)