2015 — 9 October: Friday
I must say today began a bit early, even by my usual standards. When I started this entry it was still dark. It's my own fault. I woke up feeling too hot, because I'm the idiot who decided winter had arrived early, chucked my "reserve" blanket on the bed, and twitched the central heating up by one whole degree.
Another cuppa will give the sun1 a chance to get its act together.
I'm now re-reading...
... my next Bujold book: "Captain Vorpatril's Alliance". In it, she deliberately shifts Vorpatril (a previously-minor character) to centre stage. Bujold admits she modelled her Vorkosigan series, in part, on CS Forester's "Hornblower" novels; this would be like handing things over to Bush while Hornblower was elsewhere, and seeing events from a different perspective. Forester never changed narrative voice2 (the character's point of view, or "POV") in his Hornblower tales. (If he did, I missed it!) Bujold, by contrast, expertly and hilariously juggles no less than five fully-developed and amusingly complex POVs just in the course of one of her novels — yesterday's "A Civil Campaign".
C Northcote Parkinson...
... didn't just come up with "Parkinson's Law". He also wrote a "biography" of Hornblower. This, and Basil Boothroyd's less fictional biography of Philip, were retrieved from dear Mama's eccentric filing system while niece #3 was sorting through the Wombourne house contents in September 2010...
These books had been my Xmas present to Dad in 1970 and my birthday present to dear Mama a fortnight later. Both are first editions, and I was delighted to get them "back" 40 years later. Which brings me to...
My Hornblower story
In July 1984 I spent a couple of very hot weeks in Texas and Florida. I was cruelly "exposing" the CICS Application Programming Primer to some hapless IBM customers. They had kindly volunteered to assess its acceptability "in the field"3 in return for what was essentially a free one-week course in CICS programming for batch COBOL programmers.
An IBM Systems Engineer called Fred Hornblower sat in on these test sessions to act as an unbiased observer and help interview the guinea pigs. Fred was proud, he told me over drinks one evening, to be a descendant of the great British naval hero Hornblower — whose biography he had very much enjoyed. "You mean the one by Parkinson?" I asked him. "That's the one", he confirmed. I mildly pointed out it was a spoof. I'm not sure he believed me. And if he did, I doubt he forgave me.
Oops, (no) apocalypse!
Or, perhaps, "How long, oh Lord, how long?"
The drawing of the dark
Not, it turns out, just the title of a fine book by Tim Powers :-)
In Owning Your Own Shadow (1991), Robert Johnson, a popular American Jungian author and analyst, explains why rivalries tend to erupt between especially creative people: "Narrow creativity always brings a narrow shadow with it, while broader talents call up a greater portion of the dark." The more creative you are, the greater your chances for rivalry. And the fiercer your rivalry — the higher your chances of remarkable progress.
How, I wonder, does one set about becoming "a popular American Jungian author and analyst"? Only in America, perhaps. Probably takes years of therapy, too.
The habitual perversity...
... of the Known Universe Hereabouts has struck again. No sooner have I posted off my "change of registered keeper of the Yaris" details to the DVLA than I receive a snailmail from their sister organisation, the D&VSA, warning me of a pending airbag-related vehicle recall for which Toyota are, erm, girding their loins and stockpiling their new bits as I type.
Still, at least I found a suitable birthday card for my birthday twin. We're meeting for lunch next Monday. Lunch? Now there's a good thought.
Sadly...
... I confess I know people who would find this a perfectly reasonable question :-)
Returning...
... to today's earlier theme of elderly books, I've just uncovered a disregarded-until-now slim paperback from 1967 given to Christa by (I suspect, from the barely decipherable inked inscription) her elder brother Karl...
It was originally published in 1965 under the title "The Churchill Wit" and is a dual-language edition of glorious stories. Example:
Churchill was very concerned, during World War II, for the safety of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had a makeshift bomb shelter in the crypt. After one inspection tour of the bomb shelter, the Prime Minister turned to the
Archbishop and said:
This will never do. We must build a deeper and stronger shelter. But if, by chance, you should suffer a direct hit, I am afraid, my dear Archbishop, we will have to regard it as a divine summons.