One of the many interesting items I’ve learned from Mark S. Morrison’s
Modern Alchemy: Occultism and the Emergence of Atomic Theory
(Oxford,
2007) is the existence of Technocracy Incorporated, a type of Wellsian
open conspiracy of engineers and planners that numbered the young Ray
Bradbury among their members.
They are still around, apparently:
Morrison describes how Nathan Schachner’s “The Revolt of the
Scientists,” published in Wonder Stories is based on Technocracy Inc.,
and the use of various utopian financial texts about the potential
fluidity of currency in their founding doctrine is an altogether
fascinating bit of cultural history. (Pound’s exploration of some of the
same sources, is, as Morrison indicates, more familiar, though Pound
seemed never to think much of technocracy. [I should look at Wells and
Pound’s letters.])
He’s on an evolvulus because I’ve been progressively extirpating,
deracinating, and finally, uprooting three heavily cankered orange trees
that came with our back yard. The minor drought here has been helping,
but, when I dragged the trees to the front yard to be carried away, the
displaced leaf-footed bugs took to my asters. The nymph instars you see
above sample everything, though I think they find the lemongrass and
Vietnamese coriander in that herb bucket with the evolvulus strange and
frightening after the sweet, sweet satsumas they’ve known for so long.
Such indeed is life in the Acadian ecorama.
Montague Rhodes James (to distinguish between the Jameses, Leithauser,
with a familiarity that would have made both men stare, refers to them
as “Henry” and “Montie”) was a Cambridge don—“linguist, paleographer,
medievalist, biblical scholar”—who wrote ghost stories to amuse his
bachelor colleagues over the port and plum pudding at high table at
Christmas time in the early years of the century. “If Montie is an
ancillary literary figure,” Leithauser writes, somewhat defensively,
“he looks to be a durable one, and surely few writers have ever won a
portion of immortality with such quick, light-handed ease.” Quick?
Light-handed? M.R. James’s stories, with their roast-beef heartiness
and chortling misanthropy, always make me think of those waistcoated,
choleric bores one still encounters on wet days in slow trains in
provincial England. No amount of uncovered sexual longings can make
these yarns come alive for me.
I suppose I might as well liveblog the last half of the game, very
likely the Suns’ last half of the season.
Barkley is surely correct about going to Diaw in the post taking the
Suns out of their offense, and also surely correct about Stoudemire
fading when he doesn’t get enough shots. What is to be done?
I would like to see them attack in the second half in the zany style we
remember from yesteryear.
The first game was a cosmic fluke. Duncan misses that shot 95 times
out of 100, perhaps more.
Grant Hill’s been injured.
Nash had the flu, and looked as if he were sick, hurt, or just old
last night.
The NBA has a strong interest in seeing big-market teams like San
Antonio and Detroit make the finals, for Q-scores and advertising.
It hasn’t been as much of a blowout as it seems, in all fairness. It
really was a fluke that the Spurs won game one. The Suns were solidly in
control for the first half of the second game, and then played one of
the worst third quarters I’ve ever seen. (You have to credit the Spurs
defense here, of course.) Last night, they were beaten from
start-to-finish. It could easily be 2-1 either way, but it’s not.
Henry Clinton Goodwin was born at 8:40 AM on Tuesday. The operating room
was very cold, with the vaguely futuristic air you might expect. I sat
behind the curtain during the short procedure and detailed the various
possibilities remaining in the NBA playoffs to an interested Clancy. The
doctor called my attention to the cyanotic Henry being pulled out (these
babies are surprisingly tough—Henry has the wiry strength which
currently characterizes his mother and formerly characterized his
father, before po’ boys and gumbo rendered him a gelatinous mass). He
was then wrapped, and I was invited to escort him to the cutting table.
Not much trust was invested in my ability to step over the various wires
on the floor.
Just bought a house today and learned the title term and “hypothec” for
my trouble (which involved actually reading the mortgage contract; I got
the distinct impression that most people don’t do that.)
We will move in gradually and then suddenly, taking the house by
surprise.
You won’t find in the google books scanned copy of Oertel’s book on
Goya. I suspect an aesthete liberated it from the U of Michigan copy
(bits of student newspaper stuck to the scan). But you can see, even
with the poor quality, that the photograph of pre-transfer Saturn shows
that jolly filiphage ithyphallic. (I have the book and can confirm.) I
would alert the wikipedia entry, but for ennui.
The new interface is too busy, and the page images are too small on the
screen. I also don’t appreciate having to click through a pop-up each
time I want to download a PDF.
I looked briefly to see if there was a way of using the superior older
interface, and it doesn’t seem like it. The “see first match” option
also seems to be broken.
In other news, I’ve heard that the Networked Writing Environment at UF,
where I taught many classes as a TA, has been dismantled. The NWE was a
Unix- (first AIX,* of all things, then Sun) based system, novel in
itself and especially inviting to a young nerd. The first class I taught
there was in technical writing, and I remember walking up shortly after
distributing passwords and noticing that a youngish hacker had
reconfigured his X display and had several shells open to what looked
like NORAD servers within a space of minutes. I saw him on local TV
later that summer being jailed on suspicion of computer misadventure; I
suspect that he probably now lives in opulence trying to keep past
selves off the lawn, so to speak.
