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Bulletin Board
Bookish Linkage
Book Awards Linkage
- First published in Swedish in 1982, Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver, translated by Thomas Teal into English, won the 2011 Best Translated Book Award for fiction.
- Having won the Pulitzer Prize earlier this month, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad won the L.A. Times 2010 book prize for fiction. Other winners included Michael Short for The Big Short (nonfiction), Laura Hillenbrand for Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption (biography), and Thomas Powers for The Killing of Crazy Horse (history).
- South African author Lauren Beukes has won the Arthur C Clarke award, the U.K.’s top science fiction prize, for her novel Zoo City.
- The 2011 Hugo Award nominations were announced — and four of the five Best Novel finalists are women. I, of course, have read none of them.
Nonbookish Linkage
Reading … is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction[.]
David L. Ulin, The Lost Art of Reading
Shortest (and best????) deposition ever?
A homeless woman has been charged with a felony theft for allegedly lying about her address to get her son into a better school. (via)
People who sued themselves.
A Mississippi county judge has been suspended for 90 days after telling a woman he would “fix” the fine he gave her for public drunkenness in exchange for a sexual act. He told investigators “the devil got ahold” of his tongue and “made it wicked.”
A federal appeals court is suggesting a lawyer and his client, who was working in the Pentagon and injured on September 11, 2001, pay $15,000 in sanctions for a lawsuit alleging the Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney caused the attacks for political purposes. The Court called her claims a plane did not crash into the Pentagon “a fantastical alternative history.” (How could I forget? Since the court is part of government, it is in on the conspiracy.)
A Cincinnati police officer was fired after a public decency conviction for exposing himself to employees at a Sears store. His version? He pulled his zipper down “in an attempt to determine who would advise him that his zipper was down.” (via)
The trial transcript quotes Ms. Hayden as saying Murphy called her a snitch bitch “hoe.” A “hoe,” of course, is a tool used for weeding and gardening. We think the court reporter, unfamiliar with rap music (perhaps thankfully so), misunderstood Hayden’s response. We have taken the liberty of changing “hoe” to “ho.”
U.S. v. Murphy, No. 04-2293, (7th Cir. May 4, 2005)
You’re likely to get an odd look when someone asks what you’re reading and you tell them it’s the “new” Jules Verne novel. After all, Verne died 106 years ago and all of his work has been published. Yet therein is a tale itself.
 The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz is a novel Verne hoped would be published before his death. It is, though, among roughly half a dozen novels and a short story collection published after he died. The problem is Verne’s son rewrote many of them, recasting plots and adding characters. The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz is emblamatic of this. When first published, Verne’s son placed the story in the 18th century rather than the 19th and changed the ending. Now, though, Peter Schulman, a professor of French literature at Old Dominion University and a trustee of the North American Jules Verne Society, brings us the first English translation of Verne’s original manuscript.
The title character is the son of a famous German scientist, one many near his home regarded as possessing close to supernatural powers. The scientist’s rumored secrets bring people to his grave on the anniversary of his death, many expecting him to rise from it. Yet it seems his son has possession of those secrets, one of which is the key to this blend of science fiction and fantasy.
The story is told by Henry Vidal, who travels from Paris to a fictional city in Hungary, where his brother intends to marry Myra Roderich, the daughter of a highly respected family. Myra and her family spurned Storitz’s earlier marriage proposal. He invokes one of his father’s secrets to prevent the marriage and take his revenge on the Roderichs. In fact, one of his misdeeds might shock even the modern reader. Who can imagine the effect it would have had on an early 20th century audience?
Naturally, The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz carries the style and tropes of the time in which it was written (1895). Thus, women who suffer an emotional shock must take to their bed until they recover their constitution. Geopolitical emotions and biases into play. Hungarians are portrayed as being prone toward superstition, far more ready to accept supernatural explanations than scientific ones. It also is not coincidence that Storitz is German as Verne displays an anti-German sentiment that set in following the Franco-Prussian War. For example, when Henry Vidal unknowingly encounters Storitz en route to Hungary, someone comments that Storitz “might be German twice over, as he’s got to be a Prussian.” Vidal’s response? “And that’s already once too many!”
Verne’s style frequently incorporates references to contemporary scientific advances, artists and authors. Schulman does an excellent job footnoting names and terms that are of little or no significance today. These and more general footnotes also help explicate Verne’s literary style, occasionally referring to Verne’s life or other writings.
The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz may show its age to the modern reader. But there is never anything wrong with having something “new” from a classic author, particularly when earlier versions deviated from the author’s original work.
But when it comes to unenlightened minds, everything is explained by the intervention of the devil.
Jules Verne, The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz
The headline on The Atlantic site says it all: Last Typewriter Factory in the World Shuts Its Doors. Although I haven’t used a typewriter in years and their use has become outmoded, it’s still a sad day.
You see, I’m from the age where you took typing class — not “keyboarding.” I’m from the age when the IBM Selectric was top of the line technology. I’m from the age where the sound of typewriters and teletypes was the soundtrack to the life of a working journalist. In fact, I thought the newsroom at the Rapid City Journal lost some magic when we went to word processing machines in the early 1980s. I can’t imagine what a newsroom sounds like — excuse me, doesn’t sound like — today. In fact, I credit working amidst typewriters in busy newsrooms as giving me an ability many others don’t have to zone out sound when working or concentrating on something.
While computer keyboards and mice can click, those sounds can’t hold a candle to a typewriter. Granted, it was never fun to screw up a page when writing a term paper and face typing it again. But the sounds of the keys hitting the paper in the platen and manually returning the carriage when the bell announcing you were nearing the margin could reflect your emotions or how easily something was flowing while writing.
How special were they? I recall when my kids were young and a couple of them so a typewriter at a rummage sale. They were so very impressed that when you hit the key the letter immediately appeared on paper. None of this waiting for a printer to spit it out.
Yes, it’s a sad day. And no one can doubt the longlasting impact of this technology. One example from the modern age: not only did typewriters predate the cassette Walkman by decades, it outlived them.
When I was learning elementary probability, I was told that if a million monkeys sat at a million typewriters, they would eventually write all the works of Shakespeare. The Internet has shown that this is not true.
Michael Lesk, Practical Digital Libraries: Books, Bytes, and Bucks
Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes
Interesting Bookish Reading in the Interweb Tubes
Blog Headline of the Week
Blog Line of the Week
Local Linkage
- Free Gas Fail
- Jennifer asks questions and Joel provides information about the library budget, particularly the status of the branch library planned for my side of town. (I will have news somewhat related to this topic in the near future.)
Bookish Linkage
Nonbookish Linkage
More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
Woody Allen, Side Effects
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Disclaimer 
Additionally, some links on this blog go to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. There is no additional cost to you. Contact me You can e-mail me at prairieprogressive at gmaildotcom.
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