h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Interesting you mention Virginia Woolf - I have managed to read a few of hers, and found them difficult, but the one exception was Orlando. I recently discovered, after having watched the Sally Potter film version, that the version of the book I read had been heavily abridged to about a third of its original length! The full version has much more disturbing things to say on the subject of racism, but I haven't yet attempted to read it all, as I fear the book may not live up to my memory of the pace and style of the edited version...

Aha! So you may find you prefer the edited version? Interesting!

That reminds me of when I was a kid, and my aunt subscribed to 'Reader's Digest'. I would always read the abridged books they sent, but wished I could read the originals.

Were the Tarzan books ever much good anyway? Why not just impose benign neglect and let them fade away into obscurity?

Likewise Ian Fleming's oeuvre. The most recent Bond movies were scripted by someone else.

I would approach Sherlock Holmes as a historical fact, not a prescription for looking at the modern world. The Victorian world was what it was. If you would like revisionist Sherlock Holmes, you could try Laurie King's books about Holmes and his wife/partner Mary Russell.

The thing is that what we liked in the past is more to do with who we were then, not who we are now and historically that applies to society as well. Everyone and everything evolves, except Donald Trump and his ilk, who devolve. Who has not got skeletons in their cupboard, especially medical students?

Good point.

I don't want to give Trump more credit than he deserves. Let me just say that after a period of forward progress (the Obama era, for instance), it was not unreasonable to want a period of consolidation. It would have taken more than six years for the final verdict on the Affordable Care Act to come in. So, some of us voters (not me, but I can imagine that at least some of the Trump voters thought some good might come of having him in Washington) probably hoped for better than what we all got (to date, that is, remembering that two years is not a long time). In Tennessee, Kentucky, and some other states, of course, large numbers of people are still loyal to him. We will never convince them otherwise.

I can count a few legitimate issues that Trump had. I don't think that he was the best person to deal with those issues (or even a good person to do so), but let's understand that th public wanted certain things, and had very little power to get them, other than by voting.

Posterity may see things that we can't yet see, but we're here, not in the future.

Anyone familiar with the comic book "Tintin in Africa"? That is definitely one where you have to explain some context before giving it to your kids.

With the right amount of guidance, such books can be very educational in the direction of "how not to do it"

Same with music. There are a lot of songs that you shouldn't listen too much to what they are actually singing.

As if!

There are a few singers whose diction is so hard to decipher that you won't figure out what they're singing anyway.



(At the other end of the spectrum you have/had Ethel Merman. Songwriters were afraid to write bad lyrics, because even people in the back row of the theater could tell what they were when merman sang them)

Caiman, have you ever heard the state song of Maryland?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryland,_My_Maryland

It's a wonderful 'teachable moment' for Maryland history students. By the way, modern Marylanders don't consider themselves 'Southerners'.

That's a nice piece of poetry. I probably have to check ou how beauteous limbs should be correctly girded with steel. (maybe that's the origin of steel girders in construction)

I like the Huzza!

Now I will go and check our own national anthem. That may be a little outdated as well (written around 1570)

Ah, good old Wilem van Nassau.

Willem Van Nassau (or William the Silent) was the great-grandfather of King William III of England, who ruled jointly With Queen Mary.

Thus ends our trivia lesson for today....

I just saw the "official" English translation of the Wilhelmus, but the artistic liberties taken to make it an acrostic piece actually make it stronger than the Dutch original, which is summarised as follows:

I am actually German
(but Spain conquereed us)
Away with the tyrants(!)
(but please don't kill me, I don't say which particular tyrant, so don't take it personally)
God help me
(or anyone else He deems worthy. I don't mention whether this is in a Catholic or Protestant in any way)
I Honor the king of Spain.
(he will kill me if I say otherwise)
You get the message but now we need another 11 stanzas to spell out a name.


The Maryland song is much clearer. There is no doubt about where it stands.

Maybe someone could write a template "fill in your deity, adversary and philosophy of choice" anthem. Shouldn't be too hard.But keep it short.

idea! A generic battle hymn!

TH White wrote an adapted one in 'The Sword in the Stone', which takes place in the imaginary world of King Arthur:

'God save King Pendragon, long may his reign drag on....'

Around here, the rain certainly seems to drag on.

At the risk of accusations of taking the conversation back to its original purpose, may I confess to loving the novels of Knut Hamsun. His is a fine example of the contradictory nature of human reality - the admiration for Nazi ideals was based on his extreme individualism but, of course, a fundamental aspect of Nazi individualism is absolute conformity to the authority of the ideal Nazi.

I have long lists of great books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Hamsun's work appears on neither list. His name does seem familiar, though, so I have probably read some of his books. Just can't remember which...

I've covered him in an upcoming guide entry on Nobel prizes: A87917377

Check that entry for an embarrassing quote by him on how much he liked Hitler.

It's amazing how naïve genius's can be. I seem to remember Borges wrote a story about the psychology of a Hamsun-like character but I can't remember what it was called - old man memory problems...

If you live to be 92, you will have lots of opportunities for saying/doing regrettable things. Hamsun got his Nobel prize in 1920, long before Hitler rose to prominence. By 1933, Hamsun was a geezer of 74, hardly the sort to have much influence on impressionable youngsters.

By the time the death camps became publicly known, he was well into his 80s.

"probably the world’s most admired living novelist, is now known mainly for being a Nazi, and for his painful trial in 1946 – the 86-year-old man, who had argued that Norwegians should surrender to the friendly invading Germans, essentially on trial for treason, now almost completely deaf, but bonily imperious, his huge smooth head tilted angrily towards his defence lawyer, Sigrid Stray, a woman who had been arrested by the Germans during the Occupation, and for whose release Hamsun the Nazi had agitated."

Ezra Pound is another writer whose political sensibilities are now considered repugnant. As an editor, however, he reshaped T S Eliot's "The wasteland" to help make it the great work it became.

What a worold, what a world....