The most dense of the two forms of concrete is 65 pounds per cubic
foot while the less dense is a mere 30 pounds per cubic foot. These
physical attributes give the concrete boat its ability to float,
considering that water is 62.5 pounds per cubic foot.
(Daily Cal)
Concrete boats don't float because the concrete used is less dense
than water; they float because the boats weigh less than the water
they displace. The hulls of boats are regularly made with materials
denser than water. If you cut off a piece of the hull of a large
boat and dropped it into the water, it would likely sink.
Another gripe:
Spirit, Southwest
Airlines' in-flight magazine, had a piece this month complaining
about how most Americans can't identify the Constitution's
guarantee of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness".
Maybe that's because it was the Declaration of Independence.
I'm reading about
TCPA.
(If you don't want criticism, don't give your effort or legislation
a four-letter acronym! Four-letter words are so easy to fit into
songs, chants, and poems. Now, a six-letter word, on the other hand...)
I finally met
fellow
loyalty oath opponent
Jimmer Endres,
who turned up at Berkeley as a biology grad student.
I read a novel by Ross King called Ex-Libris. It's
a mystery set in the 1600s (the narrator is supposed to be
writing in the year 1700, a detail you find out on very the last
page of the book). It was engaging and thrilling and difficult
to put down (ah, what chase scenes they had in those days, even
without automobiles or electricity or automatic weapons!). But
it was also frustrating.
One reviewer felt that Ex-Libris
wears its considerable
learning lightly. By contrast, I felt that the book wears its
considerable learning rather heavily. There are many points at
which the author seems to feel compelled to include a great deal
of detail (and some of it is even slight anachronism). There are
regular wink wink nudge nudge allusions to things the
narrator doesn't understand or doesn't expect but are about to
happen some time in the next three hundred years.
For example, right in the first chapter, there's an "alas, we had
no vaccine nor name for tetanus, unlike you fortunate readers of
the future" scene:
I had married as
a young man, but my wife, Arabella, had died some years ago, five
days after scratching her finger on a door-latch. Our world was a
dangerous place.
A number of the historical discussions seemed rather heavy-handed
to me, as though the author were saying, come on, notice
my allusion, won't you, fine, I'll give you another hint
so that you get it...
There are long didactic passages on the discovery of Australia,
the problem of longitude (the subject of an exciting non-fiction
book published not long before Ex-Libris), what a
palimpsest is, how a Vignere cipher works, how to do secret
writing, and so on. So there's something awkward about a historical
novel in which the author has to decide that the protagonist is
going to encounter a Vignere cipher and so must make a long excursus
on what a Vignere cipher is (for the benefit of the prospective
non-Vignere-knowledgeable reader). It doesn't quite fit; we don't
quite feel that the protagonist is really thinking like a
17th-century Englishman.
So I perceived a contrast with The Name of the Rose.
Several reviewers compared Ex-Libris to The
Name of the Rose. The reasons why are clear. Both are
historical fiction murder mysteries, involving libraries (and
those who tend them and those who try to destroy them), a mysterious
book which gets caught up in political and religious conflicts,
lots of Latin, and smart bibliophile humanists whom everyone is trying
to deceive and assassinate. Also espionage and heresy and dark arts
and secret societies and allusions to the future. (Eco even prefigured
Ludwig Wittgenstein in a mystic vision of a German quotation
about a ladder meant to be discarded after its use.)
But I felt, as I said, that the comparison with The Name of
the Rose is inapt -- that the books have important
differences, and The Name of the Rose is a significantly
better book. Sure, both are exciting mysteries by terribly erudite
men. But The Name of the Rose really does wear its
learning lightly -- every historical detail fits seamlessly into
the story, and into the consciousness of the narrator.
Details in Ex-Libris frequently feel forced or arbitrary,
and, more significantly, don't seem faithful to the narrator's
character.
One perceptive review of The Name of the Rose said that
the book's greatest accomplishment was Eco's feat of getting into
the mind of a 13th-century monk, who really does think about things
in ways deeply different from our own. That monk really didn't
grow up with electricity or Darwin or Copernicus and really doesn't
know about what we do and really does have an outlook on everything
which contrasts in unexpected and alarming ways with our outlook.
Eco's characters are absolutely not 20th-century characters
transplanted back in time; they're authentically of their age and
faithfully reproduced. And this is very hard to do in historical
fiction, because it's possible to learn about history (even to
understand its dynamics very well) without actually learning to
think persistently within the boundaries of another culture,
without actually becoming a part of that experience from the inside.
I think Eco manages to do that through the length of The Name
of the Rose where King sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails
in Ex-Libris.
I'm reminded of the high praise of Coleridge which forms the
epigraph to Gardner's Annotated Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
But I do not think "The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner" was for Coleridge an
escape from reality: I think it was reality,
I think he was on the ship and made the
voyage and felt and knew it all.
-- THOMAS WOLFE,
in a letter of 1932, included in
The Letters of Thomas Wolfe,
edited by Elizabeth Nowell,
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1956, p. 322.
So this is the sense I have about Eco, that he really gets inside
his 13th-century characters and that they are not simply present-day
characters transported back in time. And I don't get the sense that
King sustains such a feat. I don't get the sense that his uses of
history and learning always fit smoothly with the whole.
I found a
New York Times review of Ex-Libris which contains
criticism very similar to mine.
