"Rewrite man"

Christopher Logue has died. I was never an unconditional admirer of War Music but have always sort of seen what others like about it; and some bits of description have stuck with me:

Achilles saw his armor in that instant
And its ominous radiance flooded his heart.
  Bright pads with toggles crossed behind the knees,
Bodice of fitted tungsten, pliable straps;
His shield as round and rich as moons in spring;
His sword's haft parked between sheaves of gray obsidian
From which a lucid blade stood out, leaf-shaped, adorned
With running spirals.
  And for his head a welded cortex; yes,
Though it is noon, the helmet screams against the light;
Scratches the eye; so violent it can be seen
Across three thousand years.

Apparently Logue was a colorful character:

In the 1940s he even penned a pornographic novel, entitled Lust, under the nom de plume Count Palmiro Vicarion.

His poems were set to music by both jazz musicians and in ballads by Donovan and Joan Baez.

Poets as vending machines

I like this conceit from Michael Hofmann's piece about Bishop in the new LRB:

Other poets are predictably and more or less unvaryingly themselves, like cellophane packs of cigarettes from a vending machine; with Bishop you get the surprise gift in a plastic ball – sometimes purposeless and perplexing, more often flat-out exhilarating, the toy of your dreams, like ‘An acre of cold white spray … Dancing happily by itself’. Bad Lowell is just bad Lowell; it has something parodic and clanking about it, as the epigrams sail bafflingly past their targets. Lesser Bishop may be disappointing, but it isn’t demoralising, somehow doesn’t affect the whole. You stand in front of the machine, the dispenser of miniature planets, and throw in more quarters; surely you will be luckier next time; you have the obscure but possibly correct feeling that it is your fault for not understanding the toy you have been given.

[Also cf. "little worlds made cunningly."] The review is otherwise very good (I always want to describe these reviews as "awful but cheerful" -- sadly the tag never fits). As Hofmann says, for instance, "Things in Bishop are anarchically themselves. Her shoes clack in different keys." And "One Art" is indeed "a poem so stifled in its compressed clamour I’ve never cared for it." Marina's favorite line about "a mind thinking" makes its inevitable appearance. And this is really fodder for a later, more thought-out post, but I was intrigued by Hofmann's remark about the pronoun thing:

Bishop is [...] a poet of ‘eye’ and not ‘I’, or even of ‘eye-and-tears’ and not ‘I’, and also of ‘we’ and not ‘I’. Both the ‘eye’ and the ‘we’ are ways of not saying ‘I’, of getting around it or playing it down. (It’s not that Bishop never says ‘I’, but she seems almost to ration it, in a militant modesty, to no more than its statistically probable occurrence among the other pronouns.) She makes that very change, movingly, in a fragment called ‘A Short, Slow Life’:

We lived in a pocket of Time.
It was close, it was warm.
Along the dark seam of the river
the houses, the barns, the two churches,
hid like white crumbs
in a fluff of gray willows & elms,
till Time made one of his gestures;
his nails scratched the shingled roof.
Roughly his hand reached in,
and tumbled us out.

Originally, that read ‘I lived in a pocket of Time’ (and ‘tumbled me out’) – a little nightmare of scale and vulnerability and the end of cosiness, alongside the pocket plays on ‘close’ and ‘seam’ and ‘fluff’. But no, that wouldn’t do, too much pathos, too much drama of self, too much contemplation of the ungainly blunt fingers (what is their rude gesture?), and so the ‘I’ is scratched out and becomes a ‘we’, and the poem loses its identity and its urgency (perhaps neither of them especially Bishop-like qualities anyway), and the Robert Louis Stevenson or Hans Christian Andersen idea, now gone mousy and a little folksy, fails to survive.

Not clear on the extent of Bishop's interest in/acceptance of Puritanism, but this reminds me among other things of Frank Kermode on Cowper's "Castaway" (in The Uses of Error):

Calvinism suited this poet's dementia almost exactly; but it was not only mad but theologically incorrect for him to suppose himself singled out from the rest of humanity for both election and reprobation.

PS Hart Crane as claw crane? 

Iceberg-tipping

Alexis Madrigal, in the Atlantic, on the history of iceberg-towing schemes:

Mid 1800s: According to the Encyclopedia of Antartica, small icebergs were towed from southern Chile up to Valparaiso as part of the brewery supply chain. A Chilean researcher said, "The icebergs were towed by ships of the conventional type. Sometimes the icebergs were supplied with sails to utilize the prevailing winds. The ice was used for refrigerating purposes in the breweries and was generally substituted for artificial ice." Apparently, the business continued until about the turn of the century.

Via the blog formerly known as the Plank. Tangentially, the Wikipedia article on planking is priceless, esp. the "notable incidents" section:

• The game made news in September 2009, when seven doctors and nurses working at the Great Western Hospital in Swindon, England were suspended for playing the lying down game while on duty.^{[13][13][14][15]}

• On 13 May 2011, a 20-year-old man from Gladstone in central Queensland was charged for allegedly planking on a police vehicle.^[16]

• On 15 May 2011, Acton Beale, a 20-year-old man, plunged to his death after reportedly "planking" on a seventh-floor balcony in Brisbane, Australia.^[17]

Missed connections

Via Stan Carey, the UChicago press has put the History of Cartography online; I can't view some of the pdfs but this is probably because I'm using an old version of Acrobat. I was esp. fascinated by the chapters on surveying and mapping in the Roman Empire, with all the gromas and dioptras and portable sundials... Something that caught my eye was this bit about digging tunnels and aqueducts:

If [tunnels] were dug from both sides simultaneously, the result might be a near miss, as happened with the Siloam tunnel or that mentioned by Nonius Datus. To avoid this, the Greek mathematician Heron (Hero) of Alexandria, who was evidently writing at some time around A.D.62, shows by a plan the method he advocates.

Heron's construction looks like this:

The cartography book gives a rather opaque account of Heron's idea but it's actually quite simple (as Tom Apostol explains). Suppose you want to dig a tunnel from B to D through the amorphous blob that is the mountain. You have to know the angle at which you should be going in. Observe, first, that once you know the lengths of the two legs BM and DM of any right angled triangle (BMD) whose hypotenuse is BD you're in business, because you can construct triangles BNO and DQP that are similar to BMD but lie outside the mountain, so you can construct the lines OB and PD which are the lines along which you should dig. So how do you work out the dimensions of BMD? Heron's idea is to traverse the hillside making only strictly perpendicular turns and keeping track of how far you go. You can work out MD by adding up all the vertical legs, and BM by subtracting all the right-moving from the left-moving legs. Knowing MD/BM, as well as the direction of the lines BM and LD, allows you to construct similar triangles around the edges. [NB the lines are tangents to the hillside in this picture but this is entirely unnecessary.]

According to Tom Apostol, Heron suggested that this was how the tunnel of Samos was built, and for a long time historians accepted this story. The problem with the method is, however, glaringly obvious, once you realize that you've also got to worry about changes in height. (If only because the notion of a right angle only exists in flat space.) The area around a tunnel is typically hilly, which means that the right-angle-making traverse would look something like this:

It should be immediately obvious to any scientist that this won't work at all, barring some incredibly precise way of measuring right angles, because all the little deviations from 90 degrees will add up. Heron's proposed angle-measuring device, the dioptra, was nowhere near adequate:

In practice, each application of such a tool (the dioptra included) necessarily introduces an error of at least 0.1 degree in the process of physically marking the terrain. The schematic diagram on page 33 shows a level path with 28 right angles that lines up perfectly on paper, but in practice would produce a total angular error of at least two degrees. This would put the two crews at least 30 meters apart at the proposed junction. Even worse, several of these right angles would have to be supported by pillars 10 meters high to maintain constant elevation, which is unrealistic. A level path with pillars no more than one meter high would require hundreds of right angles, and would result in huge errors in alignment.

(One wonders, btw, why the Greeks considered it so important to dig a tunnel from both sides.) Heron was a profoundly interesting character, whose other achievements include an extremely useful formula for the area of a triangle, and (most strikingly) the first recorded vending machine:

The first vending machine was also one of his constructions, when a coin was introduced via a slot on the top of the machine, a set amount of holy water was dispensed. This was included in his list of inventions in his book, "Mechanics and Optics". When the coin was deposited, it fell upon a pan attached to a lever. The lever opened up a valve which let some water flow out. The pan continued to tilt with the weight of the coin until it fell off, at which point a counter-weight would snap the lever back up and turn off the valve.

And various theatrical contrivances

including an entirely mechanical play almost ten minutes in length, powered by a binary-like system of ropes, knots, and simple machines operated by a rotating cylindrical cogwheel. The sound of thunder was produced by the mechanically-timed dropping of metal balls onto a hidden drum.

(As a pioneer of cybernetics, Heron should have known that his tunnel-digging scheme was not self-correcting.)

PS I believe the standard form of the name nowadays is Hero, but my reasons for preferring the "Heron" variant  are too obvious to be worth mentioning.

Vintage typewriters

I'm not really "on Facebook" anymore but I like to visit occasionally, if only to be reassured and/or reminded of the existence of old friends I'm no longer in touch with. Thus, e.g., I found out today that my college friend Adwoa now (a) lives in Geneva, (b) is obsessed with vintage typewriters -- apparently there's been a Vintage Typewriter Revival of sorts lately... -- and has a blog documenting the obsession. The pictures are fascinating, at least to me: as prev. noted I like visibly articulated objects. Some of the old ones (this is from the 1920s) remind me vaguely of pipe organs:

And this one might go well with your furniture:

These intricate mechanical contraptions delight me, partly because I so completely lack the relevant kind of ingenuity (or temperament), partly because they are, in some profound sense, things one understands; any electrical appliance induces a measure of "irreducible bafflement" that even one's mental picture of electrons being dragged through viscous tubes by potential gradients goes only so far to dispel.

Finally that pic of he-who-must-be-mentioned in any post on this topic: