Howlers

My Sibling and I have been going through our father's papers with the intention of preparing them for archiving at his various universities. A folder entitled "Howlers" has surfaced. On literature:

The Rape of the Pope by Locke
Peachum is a downright scongrel.
Don Whan was a great lover.
Catch Her in the Rye
As the story opens, the heroin is seen...
Stephen discovers that Absalom has fathered an illegitimate child by the woman he married.
English took into its whore-house bed of words...
Life here can, as Shakespeare said, be compared to a baseball game.
I would agree with the author if he would only define is terms with my train of thought.
If it weren't for crime and violence, even the Bible would be reduced to a small pamphlet.
Stories of crime and violence take us away from the harsh realities of life.
The poem is a good example of the old carpet diem theme.
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales would have been dull if he had left out the stories.
Hamlet helps me to cathart.

Such Dreams as These

I have always tried to remember my dreams. Sometimes I'm good at it, other times not. Sometimes I only remember when I realize that a particular dream is familiar and that I've been in that dream or dream-territory before.
Sometimes, however, I simply wonder what on earth is going on in my head. The other night, for example, I began by dreaming that I had succeeded in flying to Sydney for what was evidently to be a vacation. Fine, I've always wanted to go to Australia and New Zealand. But rather than do anything particularly interesting, the said dream took me first to some kind of mall where I attempted to find food (!) and then next thing I knew I was asking a class of students how many of them knew that historically, artists usually originated in artist families.
If I get to Sydney before reaching my dotage, these are not activities that are truly high on my list of must-dos.
As if that weren't enough of the absurdly mundane, last night I awakened (not for the only time, I regret to say) from a not-very-sound sleep from sheer astonishment at what I had just dreamt. And what had I dreamt? That the University of Pittsburgh Slavic Department had 6000 graduate students!
The Slavic Department, while a very good one, actually has somewhere in the low two digits when it comes to grad students. No wonder I was incredulous at what I had dreamt.

More Silly Titles

A friend and I were perusing the "bizarre things" section of this blog the other day, and I was reminded of my various forays into the invention of book titles (for books no one is likely ever to write). In the interest of putting off completion of my taxes, I offer some more of these:

Horatio Alger Smiles at the Apocalypse
Rhythms and Rampages
The Good Plight
Mordants and Their Uses
Enjoying Your Hot Flashes
Table-Rapping for Beginners
Ectoplasm in My Soup
Prior Complaints
Witchcraft and Banana Splits
Night Falls on Three Ladies
Niagara Falls on Crocodile Rock
A Gentle Paranoia
Poisons I Have Known
The Architecture of Modern Kennebunkport
Dick and Jane File Their Income Tax

Translations

In the course of mining Angelo Ripellino's Magic Prague (in English translation) for writers' descriptions of Prague streets, I came across the following passage about Zlatá ulička (Golden Lane), which rather took my fancy:

“A narrow, winding lane with crenels, a snail’s path barely wide enough for one’s shoulders to pass. I am standing in front of a row of small houses, none of which is taller than myself. Were I to stretch out my arm I could touch the roofs. Here during the Middle Ages disciples set the philosophers’ stone aglow and poisoned moon beams.”

While I had to think a moment to identify "crenels," this seemed worth hunting down in the original, Gustav Meyrink's Golem.
With considerable difficulty (earlier I had intended to blog about my struggles with the endnotes to Magic Prague, which use a lot of op. cit. and are not aided by a bibliography) I determined that the edition of Golem used was from 1976. I proceeded to order the 1976 Dover edition from a library in this state, which proved to have an emendation of Madge Pemberton's 1928 translation.
The text there, however, read:

“A little twisty, twirly alley, broken here and there by arbitrary loopholes--it might almost be called a spiral passage, scarce broad enough to admit the width of a man--and I stood before a row of diminutive houses, not one of which exceeded my own height. I had only to stretch up my arm to touch their roofs.
It was the Street of the Alchemists, where the so-called ‘wise men’ of the past had evolved their formulas for the philosopher’s stone, brewing their concoctions in the watches of the night, poisoning with their noxious fumes the sweet rays of the moon.”

I had to examine these for awhile to feel certain that it was indeed the same passage, but had to conclude that it was. Not, however, the same translation! And which of these was more faithful to the original German, pray tell?
A little digging around in Internet Archive brought forth the original edition published by Kurt Wolff in 1915. The said text is on 226 and reads:

“Ein schmales, gewundenes Gässchen mit Schiessscharten, ein Schneckengang, kaum breit genug, die Schultern durchzulassen--und ich stand vor einer Reihe von Häuschen, keines höher als ich.
Wenn ich den Arm ausstreckte, konnte ich auf die Dächer greifen.
Ich war in die ‘Goldmachergasse’ geraten, wo im Mittelalter die alchimistischen Adepten den Stein der Weisen geglüht und die Mondstrahlen vergiftet haben.”

Well, even though it was written in Fraktur, the font was quite legible and indeed despite my limited German I could understand it pretty well without resorting to the dictionary. But for the heck of it I decided (given the divergent translations above) to plug it into Google Translate. Google Translate actually did a pretty good job on its own, but it now also lets you see if you'd prefer a different meaning or synonym for a given word, so I touched up a few things--"streets" to "alleys" ("alley" in the singular wasn't on the list), "worm gear" to "snail passage," "more" to "higher," "which" to "where," "adept" to "adepts" and "poisoning" to "poisoned":

"A narrow, winding alleys with gun ports, a snail passage, barely wide enough to admit the shoulders -. And I stood in front of a row of houses, none higher than me.
If I stretched out my arm, I could access the roof.
I had fallen into the 'Goldmacher street', where have in the middle Ages, the alchemical adepts annealed the philosopher's stone, and poisoned the moonbeams."

While there are still a few edits I'd choose to make on this (for example "crenels" is decidedly more suitable than "gun ports" since crenellation can be purely decorative, or meant for arrows rather than guns), it's obvious that the translation in Magic Prague is much more faithful than the Pemberton translation. I have no clue who did that translation, though, so I suppose that if I quote this passage, I'll combine the one from Magic Prague with my editing of Google Translate's version.
Life ain't simple around here.

Chaplin on Veteran's Day

Veteran's Day has never been a holiday that really captured my attention, given that none of the veterans of my acquaintance have ever paid it remarkable heed. Perhaps it is a holiday of more interest to families of veterans, as Milt Wolff, who fought in the Spanish Civil War and then in World War II, used to remark upon the fact that his daughter always called him then.

I thought of Milt and of my father this Veteran's Day, they being the veterans I knew best. There was a film festival here for the holiday, and while I had a lot of work to do, I rode my bike over to the Neon to see Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator. I've seen quite a few Chaplin films over the years, but I don't think I had seen this one in its entirety before, although of late the final speech has been circulating the internet with considerable vigor. Chaplin's plea for humanity to reject hatred, delivered in the role of a Jewish barber disguised as Hitler-figure Adenoid Hynkel, remains as current today as in 1940. Milt and my father would have appreciated The Great Dictator being shown on Veteran's Day.

A Precise Stylist, or Two or Three or Four of Them

In drafting our father's obituary, My Sibling noted that in writing, he was "a precise stylist." On the whole, this was true. The long process of determining the final wording of a generally very satisfactory obituary proved, however, that the remaining members of our nuclear family are also precise stylists who all believe that perfection can be attained in the written word.

New Laptop

Every so often one has to take the plunge and get a new computer. The old one quits, or else becomes sufficiently outdated as to be troublesome. Over the summer, my Lenovo X61, while generally functional, experienced 1) ever-full hard drive; 2) pen permanently stuck in the pen garage; 3) non-revivable battery. None of these things individually was a reason to buy a new laptop, but I had to ask myself how much longer a three-year-old laptop would work and thus whether it made sense to buy new things for it. At first I hesitated, as it seemed there were no tablet-convertibles on the market that offered the combination of features I wanted (large screen, large hard drive, swappable bay for second hard drive), but then I noticed that Fujitsu (maker of my first two or three laptops) had all of that. So I decided that I might as well get the whole project over with and have the new machine ready to go before school started.

While a large screen was one of my major desires--the small screen on the Lenovo has been the bane of my working life as Photoshop (among other things) is hard to use on it--I discovered that Fujitsu's TH700 had everything else I wanted at such an affordable price that I could get a big separate flat-screen monitor to use for Photoshop and watching movies. That seemed reasonable enough. I may use Photoshop a fair amount, but I don't have to do that kind of thing everywhere I take my laptop. It will be rather exciting to have a 27" screen (I bought a highly regarded model from Dell and it has arrived but I have not had time to do more than unpack it).

A friend with a Mac tells me it's a no-brainer to get everything from one Mac to another, and if so that's one of the few reasons I'd consider switching to Macintosh, because it always takes me days or weeks to get things properly set up on a new computer (mine, that is--I can do this for my parents in a day or two since they use few programs and have few files). I'm not sure how much of the time-sink is the searching out all those files and copying them, and how much is making decisions about reorganizing the material. Merely installing the programs I use takes hours and hours each time.

This installation process is exacerbated by changes in operating system. Once the new laptop arrived, I had to deal with Windows 7 and a 64-bit environment. This is taking some getting used to. At least two of my programs, neither of which I plan to abandon, don't yet work in 64-bit as they are complex and made by small companies that don't have huge squads of programmers. I had to upgrade Windows 7 Home Premium to a fancier flavor so that I could install XP Mode and thus install the said programs. I am still rather inclined to use these programs on the old laptop until the 64-bit compatible versions come out, which I gather should be relatively soon. There's also the matter of how many more times I can "activate" various programs that I've had for awhile, and suchlike.

For now, however, as I have most of what I need set up on the new machine, I may as well compare the two a bit.

Screens: Both have a 12" screen. The Lenovo has a 1024 x 768 resolution, however, while the Fujitsu has 1280 x 800. In other words, the shape is different, with the Fujitsu going more in the wide-screen direction. I don't know how I'll react to that, as wide-screen isn't desirable for most of what I do. The screen quality on the Fujitsu seems better, but I may need to see if I can calibrate the color, as photos that looked good on the Lenovo sometimes look gray-blue on the Fujitsu. This is not something I really want to deal with. Overall, I haven't spent enough time working on the Fujitsu to know how the screen interacts with my programs and tasks.

Keyboards: The Lenovo is the only laptop I ever felt had an uncomfortably small keyboard. I don't expect to have that complaint with the Fujitsu, which is an inch wider. I also detested the fact that the Lenovo keyboard placed special keys, intended to move you through web pages, RIGHT NEXT TO the arrow keys. I don't want to think how many times I hit those damned web keys instead of an arrow key and lost whatever I was typing on a web page. I wasn't opposed to the concept of the web keys (although I never used them), but the placement was terrible. Fortunately I won't have that problem with the Fujitsu. On the other hand, I regret to say that the Fujitsu keyboard also has some odd choices. It has the PageUp and PageDown keys in those locations, which I'm not sure I like as well as the Lenovo's location of these. I may not have any problem getting used to the switch, but more problematic is the fact that these two keys are also the Home and End keys, if you use them with the Function key. I use Home and End constantly when selecting text (or so it seems), and
I really dislike the cumbersomeness of depressing Shift, Function, and Home or End. And speaking of the Function key, the Fujitsu places it where I expect (from the Lenovo, but perhaps also from other computers) to find Ctrl. I keep hitting Function when I want Ctrl, which occasionally has bizarre results. (I will say I like how Lenovo puts everything requiring the Function key in blue.) However, if we speak of Function Keys in the plural (those F1-12 keys that were once so easy to touch-type back in the days when keyboards had them to the left!), I'm relieved to find that the Fujitsu, like most computers, aligns them pretty closely to the corresponding numeric keys. This means I'll be able to almost touch-type them. The Lenovo has F2 starting to the left of 1, so that F8 and F9 are above 7. This meant it was really hellish trying to use these keys, and believe me, I do use them. In some programs I use them A LOT. It causes me pain to watch students and conference presenters laboriously mousing through loads of menus to do things that can be accomplished by pressing (for example) F5.

Touchpads etc: The Lenovo has one of those pencil-eraser-shaped things for cursor movement. While better than a mouse, I didn't like it, as constant use was tiring. The clicker buttons were satisfactory. Thus, I was pleased to get a touchpad with the Fujitsu, although I still regret that Fujitsu phased out its earlier disk-shaped input devices, which were a very comfortable way of moving the cursor. But alas, I'm not sure I'm crazy about this touchpad. In combination with Windows 7, all kinds of weird things happen when it thinks I've gotten too close to it. I've already disabled some special function or other on the left side of the touchpad because my left hand was eternally setting it off. I may need to shut off a lot more things in order to make the touchpad truly usable rather than a weapon of unpredictable disaster. I'm also not crazy about the clicker buttons, which are too hard to find by touch for some reason. I'm always clicking on the edge of the laptop instead, I suppose because it is actually higher than the buttons and I expect the buttons to be what sticks up.

Operating System: I was really entirely content with XP. It was very stable and easy to use; I don't even remember there being much of a learning curve after Windows 98. So, especially after finding Vista a pain when working with my parents' computer, I was not eager to switch to Windows 7 despite hearing that it is considered quite satisfactory. Still, I was curious to see what it could do that I might like. At this point I'm not sure, because on the one hand I was dealing with its quirks most when installing new software, and on the other hand there are a lot of things that may be Windows 7 but on the other hand may be the Fujitsu's touch screen or touchpad instead. I get A LOT of unpredictable weird stuff happening, particularly in terms of things resizing in unwanted ways. Things would gigantify for no apparent reason, so that everything in the browser window with Gmail would be blown up too large to read--even if I closed and reopened the browser, or the desktop icons would bloat so that only about four would fit on the screen, or windows would leap to take over the screen when I wanted them to fill about a quarter of the screen. I was finally able to shut off the Windows 7 feature responsible for some of this mayhem, but it wasn't easy, and as I say that only shut off SOME of it. Also, the Windows Explorer windows are tricky to use. I was used to opening a folder and not having to see the whole directory structure over to the left--well, it's not a big deal to see it, but it takes up space. More to the point, when I'm moving files or folders, I have to be much more careful than ever before. Things really seem to want to go into the wrong place, or something I didn't intend to open suddenly becomes the open folder instead of the one I had very intentionally opened. I don't know if this is the fault of Windows 7 or of the Fujitsu.

Overall shape and contours: Much prefer the Fujitsu. The Lenovo has square corners, which I wouldn't mind except that they invariably caught in my sleeve. One of the first things I ever did after getting the Lenovo was to flip it onto the floor because I hadn't yet learned to move my arms very sedately around it to avoid catching the corners in my sleeves. I found that a very bizarre problem to have. It was partly because the Lenovo is very thin without its base. Let's just say it speaks well to the Lenovo's durability that it survived multiple tosses to the floor. Since the Fujitsu has round corners and a thicker bottom (to accommodate the swappable bay), chances of it catching in my sleeve and going flying are pretty small. Yes, it weighs more, and that's not a plus for portability, but it doesn't weigh all that much more, and I really like swappable bays. So much better than the separate base that I stupidly bought for the Lenovo instead of a plug-in DVD drive. The swappable bay means I can have a second hard drive in most of the time and swap in the DVD drive only as needed, which is rarely.

But enough of all this, classes begin in a week and my syllabi are not yet finished.