Old Limericks

The august Maritime History Discussion List (marhst-l @ Queen's University, Canada) was entertained recently by an OT (off maritime topics) question.

A member was reading Patrick Leigh Fermor's entertaining (and rather enigmatically titled) picaresque, Between the woods and the water, on foot from Constantinople the Middle Danube to the Iron Gates, when he came across the final line of what seemed to be a limerick.

"What ho, when they lifted the lid!" it read.  "Where does it come from?" he asked.

And, as usual, he got instant information:

The first candidate was "The Careful Buyer."

There was an old man of Madrid,
Who went to an auction to bid;
He bought, if you please,
A case of old cheese-
But oh, Gosh! when they lifted the lid!

This, it seems, comes from The Limerick up to date Book, composed and collected by the whimsical Ethel Watts Mumford.  (San Francisco, Published by Paul Elder and Company, 1903.)


Candidates numbers two and three are similar rhythmical meditations:

There was an old man of Madrid
Who went to an auction to bid.
In the first lot they sold
Was an ancient commode -
And, my god, when they lifted the lid!

...or this rendition broadcast on radio 21 July 1984:


There was an old man of Madrid
Who went to an auction to bid
The first one they showed
Was an ancient commode
What ho, when they lifted the lid!

ARCHIVES DIGITAL LIBRARY BECOMING UNAFFORDABLE

Costs soaring for Archives' digital library, auditors say


Lisa Rein, Washington Post Staff Writer, reports that the cost of building a digital system to gather, preserve and give the public access to the records of the federal government has ballooned.

It could go as high as $1.4 billion, or as much as 41 percent over budget.

Government auditors plan to file a full report Friday.

And of course the buck is being passed.

The Government Accountability Office blames the cost overruns and schedule  delays on weak oversight and planning by the National Archives, which awarded a $317 million contract to Lockheed Martin Corp. six years ago to create a modern archive for electronic records. But is anyone going to blame Lockhead Martin for the blunders involved? 

'We are extremely pleased our team was selected by National Archives,' said Don Antonucci, president of Lockheed Martin Transportation and Security Solutions, at the time (September 2005).

There is no cause for complacency, now.  The Archives' largest and most complex capital project ever has been plagued by problems, and it is still struggling to conduct effective oversight, auditors said.

The Archives is best known for the agency responsible for preservation of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and other historical documents. But it is also the repository of billions of pages of e-mails, memos and electronic files created by every branch of government.

These, along with a growing number of audiovisual holdings, must be preserved for the public, by law, which has put the Archives under growing pressure to manage the digital avalanche.

So, I wonder -- are they going to change the law that makes this operation impossible?

Or simply throw more money at it?

Great New Writers Nominated

Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Awards

The finalists for the B&N Discover Great New Writers Awards have been announced -- and Scribner has done remarkably well.

Fiction:

   Kim Echlin, The Disappeared (Black Cat)

   Nic Pizzolatto, Galveston (Scribner)

   Eric Puchner, Model Home (Scribner)



Non-Fiction:

David R. Dow, The Autobiography of an Execution (Twelve)

Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (Scribner)

Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Crown)

  The winners will be announced on March 2.

Kindle outsells paperbacks

Amazon Says Kindle Book Sales Exceed Paperback Sales

Considering the bargain-basement pricing of many kindle books, it was inevitable that the time would come when kindle sales would overtake paperback sales, and even those of remaindered hardbacks.

For exactly the same reason, it is no surprise that the surge has had a nasty impact on the company spreadsheet.  As Amazon also says, profits have plunged.
Total sales were up to a tad under thirteen billion dollars for the fourth quarter of 2010, up 36% from last year's report. But operating income declined by $2 million, descending to $474 million.

The company says they sold "millions of third-generation Kindles" in the quarter, and indicates "Kindle books have now overtaken paperback books as the most popular format on Amazon.com" and "this milestone has come even sooner than we expected - and it's on top of continued growth in paperback sales." The company adds that, "since the beginning of the year, for every 100 paperback books Amazon has sold, the company has sold 115 Kindle books."

The data is unclear, or so the pundits say, but it seems abundantly clear to this economic amateur that kindle sales and books sales are rising due to lower prices.  What is murky is whether it heralds a sea-change in the reading habits of the public.

Long and thoughtful comment on student cheating

The Shadow Scholar and the prevalence of cheating in tertiary education


Author and university lecturer Caron Dann wrote a really interesting commentary to my last post, on the booming and lucrative business of pseudonymously writing papers for desperate students. 

As it is rather too long to fit in the comments box, and Caron is a writer I really respect, I take the liberty of copying it below:




I'm a university lecturer and I know this goes on. It's the reason we need to keep exams and they need to be worth a significant percentage of the unit's final mark (40% in the case of the unit I teach).



One young person I know said students can buy essays over the internet for as little as $30.


There's another good way of evaluating students, and that's by presentation, during which they have to answer questions from other students and for which at least a part of the content has some personal element. Even if the material is plagiarised, they at least have to do preparation in order to present it to the class, thereby learning something.


I agree with Ed Dante about the desperation. It's unfair for incompetent students to be passed at first-year level - particularly if they are lazy, haven't the English skills or are just not up to it - because they then end up 'desperate' later on, having learned very little.


I also think schools don't prepare students for tertiary education. In Australia, at least half the high school graduates go directly on to tertiary learning, yet most haven't the faintest idea what it entails. Many - especially private school students - seem to have been coached a lot at school in narrow areas, for the sole reason of getting good marks in their leaving certificate so they can get in to the uni course of their choice. Meanwhile, they don't know the basics of their subject or even of academic writing or how to use a library catalogue. Many first years have no idea that cutting and pasting from the internet is plagiarism.


Meanwhile, classes keep getting bigger and bigger, since we made universities "businesses". Classes are so big that tertiary teachers often can't possibly learn the names of everyone. So the student becomes a nameless face among the masses and if she or he falls behind for any reason, they do indeed become desperate.

Confessions of an academic cheat

How to make a living out of lazy rich kids

A hair-raising article has made its appearance in a no lesser periodical than the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Ed Dante is the pseudonym of a writer on the East Coast of the United States, who makes a very good living writing papers for lazy or incompetent students who are willing to pay.

As he happily confesses, he works for an online company that employs about 50 writers who create original essays for cheating students -- 'scholars' who supply the guidelines of what is needed, and then stump up the bucks on receipt of the paper.  'On any day of the academic year,' he says, 'I am working on upward of 20 assignments.'

He excuses himself and his colleagues by adding that the clients are truly desperate -- so desperate, in fact, that they can't even spell the word: 'I have seen the word "desperate" misspelled every way you can imagine.'   It's also a truly bizarre situation -- these are young men and women in graduate school, without the writing talent to compose something as simple as a grocery list.

Which makes it easy for 'Ed Dante' to blame others for his suspect way of making a living -- 'I live well on the desperation, misery, and incompetence that your educational system has created,' he says.  And though he is fearfully busy, he would like to start a conversation -- a 'discussion about custom papers and how they differ from more detectable forms of plagiarism, or about why students cheat in the first place.'

My initial question would be whether it is plagiarism at all, because presumably the papers are all well researched, and all original.  (One hopes so, anyway, as it would retrieve a little light from the situation.)  I suppose it depends on whether a nitpicking lawyer would charge the wayward student with having pinched the work of the anonymous writer he has paid to write his paper.

The next question -- who on earth would pay to cheat -- is answered in the essay.  Three kinds of clients supply Ed Dante's income:  the students for whom English is a foreign language, the hopelessly incompetent writers, and the lazy rich kids.  Between them, they provide earnings of over $60,000 per annum.

And what about his future, now that he has blown the secret?  He is due to do even better.  Mediabistro has just broken the news that the pseudonymous Ed Dante has signed a contract with Bloomsbury Press to write a book about the business, called The Shadow Scholar.

Shorter reading on your kindle

Amazon Launches First Singles List

Back in October, I mused about the advantages of a new Amazon initiative, of issuing shorter works on kindle at a greatly reduced price.

Now, the idea has come into concrete (or digital) reality.

Amazon has posted their first list of just over 20 Kindle Singles.  As promised, they are short nonfiction digital works -- 'typically between 5,000 and 30,000 words,' they say, which covers a lot of territory.  It is rather hard to tell just what you are buying, too, as there are no page counts. Customers' only way of judging is to guess by the price -- currently ranging from 99 cents to $2.99 -- and kilobyte counts to estimate how much wordage they are getting for their money.

Among the titles is a version of Pete Hamill's piece on immmigration, They Are Us.   Originally lbilled last year as a Little Brown 40,000 to 50,000-word digital original, it failed to appear. Hamill had not delivered as intended, it seems, reportedly backing off the project because of his wife's illness.

Priced at 99 cents and running 91 kilobytes, it would appear to be a shorter version.

Other contributing authors include Jodi Picoult (writing on parenting), Darin Strauss, Evan Ratliff, Mark Greif and Jonathan Littell. The site says the first offerings were "selected by our team of editors."

In awe of Dennis Lehane

I repeat, I am totally in awe of Dennis Lehane.  

Which means that I am ashamed to say that I discovered him when I picked up one of his books in a bargain bin -- and only bought it because the bargain was five books for thirty dollars, and I could find only four authors in the bin I could trust to deliver a good yarn.  This title, A Drink Before the War, looked promising, so I added it to the other four. 

It is billed on the jacket as "A Kenzie and Gennaro Thriller," so I expected a private detective partnership in the Batman and Robin mode, which was exactly what I got -- except that this pair of tough private eyes is not quite the same as anything I have ever encountered in the genre before. Kenzie has a soft heart under the given granite exterior, and though he is in love with the beautiful Gennaro of the melting caramel eyes, he gets utterly nowhere, because she is in love with her husband ... who beats her.  Kenzie has hospitalized him at least once, but it doesn't make any difference. 

An unusual background, do you not agree?

The plot is one of those complicated political ones, which tangles and unravels after Kenzie and Gennaro are given the job of tracking down Jenna Angeline, a black cleaning woman who has stolen confidential papers from the State House in Boston.  Staying alive is the hard part, in a hard-driven story that zips from extortion to gangs to bombed out ghettos to child prostitution.  As the title promises, it all leads to all-out war.

All in all, a page-turner. 

I sallied out eagerly in search of another Dennis Lehane -- and found Shutter Island.   Did it turn out to be another episode in the action-packed life of the Kenzie-Gennaro duo?  No, it did not.

Instead, I found myself racing breathheld through one of the most brilliant psychological mysteries I have ever read, grippingly and scintillatingly written.  I got to the end, turned back to the beginning, and read it again -- that is just how good it is.  The only other time that has happened to me with a book in this genre is Robert Cormier's equally spellbinding I am the Cheese.

Two US Marshalls are summoned to Shutter Island, a stormswept island off the Massachusetts coast that is the site of a particularly grim mental institution -- a place that houses the most violent and vicious of insane murderers, where the danger from the inmates is so great that the patients are outnumbered by the guards.  One of the murderers has vanished from her locked room . . . and a hurricane descends, isolating the island and its mentally tortured inhabitants, along with panicked guards, enigmatic doctors, and the two bewildered marshalls.

But is that a true summation of the situation?  No.  For nothing on Shutter Island is quite what it seems ...

A highly unusual feminist and the pre-cursor of the haiku

What came before the English haiku?

Many of us learned in school about the beguiling Japanese haiku poetry form, which was adapted for English and American use, and is still popular today.  Basically, the poem consists of three lines, the first five syllables long, the second seven syllables, and the last five.  There must also be a reference to a season, and the linking of two poetic images.

An example, from American poet Richard Wright's haiku collection:

Whitecaps on the bay
a broken signboard banging
in the April wind


To my surprise, while researching the short life of Sydney Parkinson, the talented natural history draughtsman who sailed (and died) on the Endeavour, I found that the cousin he admired and loved, Jane Gomeldon, was the inventor of the 'maxim,' the pre-cursor of the English haiku.

The World in general is a State

Of Surprise

Each wondering at the Conduct of their

Neighbour

Jane is more famous (or infamous) for the remarkable life she led than for being the originator of this neat, satirical form of poetry.  Born Middleton, she was a Quaker, born in Newcastle to a family of Quaker glassmakers, and because of this background was unusually well educated for a woman of that time.  Unfortunately, however, she fell in love with a cad at a very young age, and had the bad judgement to marry him.  This was Francis Gomeldon, an officer in a Regiment of Foot. 

Quickly realizing her blunder, she fled to France, where she had many adventures in the guise of a man, including paying court to a pretty young nun, who was silly enough to elope with her.  In 1740 her estranged husband placed an advertisement in the Newcastle Journal, announcing that she had left him.  Jane responded with her own advertisement, describing his cruelty, and accusing him of ransacking the fortune her mother had left her, despite the legal requirement written into it reserving it for her own use.  In 1742 she brought a suit against him, on the grounds of cruelty.

Eight years later, her husband died, but -- surprise, surprise -- left nothing to her in his Will.  Luckily, it seems, she was still solvent, because after cousin Sydney was hired by Joseph Banks to travel with him, she hatched a plan to voyage on the Endeavour, too.  It came to naught, unfortunately.  While she would not have been the first woman to go around the world dressed as a man, she certainly would have written a very good book, revealing who knows what ...

Why DID he call himself TUPAIA?

Bora Bora from Raiatea.  Ron Druett photo

When did Tupaia change his name?

It is currently believed that it was when warriors from Bora Bora invaded Tupaia's home island, Raiatea, and Tupaia was forced to flee to Tahiti, that the high priest changed his name.

The story originally came from the scientist on the Resolution on Captain Cook's second discovery voyage, Johann Forster, who copied down gossip that Tupaia was originally called ‘Parooa’ (Paroa).  Humiliated after the battle where the Raiatean forces were routed, he changed his name to Tupaia, meaning ‘beaten’ -- or so Forster claimed. This is also mentioned by Forster's assistant, Dr. Sparrman, but this is probably because he heard it from his employer, secondhand.

So, how true might the legend be?  It was common enough for Polynesians to change their name following some life-changing event, but 'beaten'?  It seems a strange choice for a man who was as talented and proud as the man who called himself Tupaia, whose considerable talents as a politician and strategist were quickly recognized after he arrived in Tahiti.

There is a chance that the name-change came about later, after the 'discovery' of Tahiti by Captain Wallis of HMS Dolphin in 1767, when the clever high priest proved his value yet again.  Demonstrating a gift for languages, the high priest picked up English fast enough to act as intermediary between the British sailors and his mistress, the glamorous high chief Purea, negotiate with Wallis himself, and communicate Wallis's needs to the Tahitian noblity.  Two years later, when the Endeavour arrived, Captain James Cook and Joseph Banks found this gift for translation even more useful -- so useful, indeed, that they carried the talented linguist with them when the ship left Tahiti on 13 July 1769.

I am informed by Sri Lankan scholar Somasiri Devendra that the Tahitian name ‘Tupaia’ most probably has its root in the Sanskrit word ‘Thuprasis’, since evolved into the word ‘Thuppaiah’, which means . . . wait for it . . . ‘translator’.