I was about ten years old when I first saw the PBS series Cosmos, hosted by the late astronomer Carl Sagan. I was a pretty bright kid, if I do say so myself, and I think I probably knew more about science and history at that age than a lot of grown-ups do now. Still, I was only a kid, which meant that a lot of the series’ content went over my head until I saw it again years later. Even so, I remember being utterly captivated by the big ideas behind Cosmos: that history, both of our puny little species and of the entire universe, is like an epic journey; that life, even intelligent life, may be ubiquitous in the universe but is nevertheless incredibly fragile and therefore precious; that knowledge and the quest to understand is at the core of our species; and that human beings are simultaneously — and paradoxically — insignificant in our scale to creation, but infinite in our spirits, destined for great things if we can only avoid destroying ourselves. I was equally fascinated by the show’s host, Dr. Sagan, who seemed to my ten-year-old self like such a gentle, kind-hearted man, but also, in some way I couldn’t quite put my finger on, a very sad man. I imagined that his sometimes grim demeanor must’ve come from his knowing everything there was to know, and that he suffered because of that awful, burdensome knowledge. (Yes, I really was a brooding Romantic even at the age of ten.)
Carl Sagan had a son, Nick Sagan, who grew up to become a science-fiction novelist. On his blog the other day, I found the following video clip from Cosmos, in which his father sums up so much of what that series was about. Curiously — or perhaps frighteningly — his words from almost 30 years ago still seem relevant today:
So, I may not have done much of my promised blogging about books last week, but I was at least thinking about the subject. Cranky Robert and I exchanged a flurry of e-mails which resulted in mutually recommended reading for both of us, as well as my discovery of the Titanic Book Site, a wonderful resource for anyone interested in the world’s most famous sunken ocean liner. And I also walked up the street from my office one day to Sam Weller’s and bought a couple of books. That may not sound terribly noteworthy, but it sort of is, at least to me. You see, I don’t buy many books these days. And that’s quite a change from The Way Things Used to Be.
Hmm. This is interesting. It seems there’s a bit of a kerfuffle brewing among the on-line writing community (i.e., folks involved in or aspiring to professional writing and the publishing industry, and who also have blogs) because a shady literary agent named Barbara Bauer — who is number three on SFWA’s list of the 20 worst agencies — threw a tantrum and got a Website called Absolute Write shut down. Teresa Nielsen Hayden has the details.
I haven’t read Douglas Adams’ brilliant and genuinely funny sci-fi parody novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in years, but I still remember large passages of it — no doubt because my memories have been fortified by hearing them dramatized in various media formats over the years. Still, I can’t say that I remember chunks of any other books I read in high school, and that is probably reason enough for me to pass along the news about this somewhat silly gesture of tribute to Adams, who left us unexpectedly five years ago. I think Doug would’ve appreciated the absurdity of people carrying around towels in his honor…
(Incidentally, if you haven’t read the Hitchhiker’s book, listened to the radio show, or seen the TV series or last year’s rather disappointing movie, you may be wondering about the significance of the towel. Go below the fold for the explanation…)
If WMD-shaped computers don’t make your pulse race, how about tales of lost airplanes pulled from watery graves?
The photo above shows the remains of a vintage B-25 bomber, one of those lumbering old birds that I love so much, recovered from South Carolina’s Lake Murray. More photos can be found here. A little googling reveals that there was an Army Air Corps training base near Lake Murray during the war, and several of the lake’s small islands were used for target practice. B-25s saw a lot of action during World War II (most famously in Jimmy Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo shortly after Pearl Harbor); several of them apparently ended up on the bottom of Lake Murray due to training accidents, although the exact number is disputed. This particular aircraft was recovered in September of last year.
Here is a page that provides a good overview of the Tokyo raid, B-25s over Lake Murray, and the salvage of this particular plane. From this page, you can go to a detailed news article on the salvage, and here is another, more extensive collection of photos.
In this day and age, when there are no blank spaces left on our maps and it seems like everything of interest has already been discovered, invented, or marketed, it thrills me to know that there are still treasures like this waiting to be found and people who want to go looking…
Hey, kids — sorry for the long period of radio silence, especially after the big build-up I delivered for my planned “Talkin’ Books” week. I had — and still have — some major ambitions for that topic, but unfortunately Real Life last week wasn’t very conducive to ambitious blogging, or much of anything else, either. The short version: my load at work has been heavier than expected (I was told things were due to start slowing down for the summer; as Wayne and Garth might say, “shyeah…”), my allergies have been fearsome (the tissues around my eyes were so swollen and dark on Saturday that I looked as if I’d lost a bar fight), and I just haven’t had anything left to give at the end of the day. So rather than dragging my sorry rear-end home and blogging about books until bedtime, I’ve been dragging my sorry rear-end home and sitting insensate in a darkened room with a cool, damp cloth over my face.
I’m hoping to get around to some of the book-related posts I’ve got in mind later this week, but in the meantime, here’s a little something to take the edge off your Simple Tricks jones:
Okay, the following is a bit of a departure from this week’s Talkin’ Books theme, but it’s so in line with my general philosophy that I thought it bore immediate repeating here. From a blog called Hooptyrides comes the Idiots Rule:
Everything you love, everything meaningful with depth and history, all passionate authentic experiences will be appropriated, mishandled, watered down, cheapened, repackaged, marketed and sold to the people you hate.
–Mr. Jalopy
Yep, that about says it all…
[Ed. note: Actually, on re-reading the source of this quote I see that the original entry was actually “Idiots Rule,” not “The Idiots Rule.” That puts a slightly different spin on things, doesn’t it? Oh well, I still agree with the sentiment…]
To kick off Book Week here at Simple Tricks and Nonsense, here is an item I’ve been meaning to blog about for some time but haven’t gotten around to yet. (My apologies if you’ve already seen it somewhere.) It’s a list of the top 1000 titles owned by libraries as determined by an organization called the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), a network of some 53,000 libraries around the world. According to the intro copy, the list — which is updated annually — comprises “the intellectual works that have been judged to be worth owning by the ‘purchase vote’ of libraries around the globe.”
As you can probably imagine, the list includes all the usual canonical titles that you think of when you hear the word “classics,” but there are some surprises. One of them appears right in the top 20, which I’ve reproduced below the fold. (Hint: I’m talking about number 15…)
I’m thinking I’d like to talk this week about a subject that tends to be somewhat neglected in public discourse these days: books. As I understand it, there was a time in America — probably that fabled mid-century period following World War II and preceding Watergate, when architecture was googie and kids still respected their elders — when books were the major driving force of our popular culture, not movies or television or the as-yet-uninvented Internet. The controversies that office workers debated around the water cooler, the fictional characters that everyone knew and loved like their own flesh-and-blood friends, originated on the printed page, not the silver screen. I think it’s pretty obvious that those days are far past us now. It isn’t that books are irrelevant or that people don’t read anymore — I personally believe those claims are overhyped and just a tad hysterical, and if you don’t believe me, walk down to your local Barnes and Noble store sometime and ask yourself how this place could stay in business if people were no longer reading — but the cultural emphasis has definitely shifted away from the oldest of our media. Where once the movie version of a best-seller was considered the spin-off product, now it’s more like the pay-off that everyone is really interested in. The book often seem to serve as a warm-up for the featured act. Further, the movie is most likely the version that will be remembered in the future — do you know anyone who’s actually read The Godfather? I didn’t think so. The book has become the ancillary product now.