Recent Reads

I finished A Pirate of Exquisite Mind, a biography of the pirate/naturalist William Dampier. It's a fairly interesting book, although Dampier doesn't come off as particularly likeable. (Shortly after his marriage, he went to sea and didn't return for twelve years. Granted, he circumnavigated the world, and granted, not all of the delays were his fault, but - well, Magellan's crew only took a couple of years for their round-the-world trip!) Also, he was, after all, a pirate. More precisely, he spent quite a while as a privateer, and later took to buccaneering - but this was the relatively benign piracy of the late 1600s and early 1700s, not the brutality of the likes of Blackbeard. His real importance is as a meticulous observer and note-taker, on subjects ranging from the winds, currents, and tides of the Pacific, through the flora and fauna of the tropics, to a certain amount of ethnography. Given the vicissitudes of travel - several shipwrecks, at least two crossings of the Isthmus of Panama, and the occasional mutiny - that he managed to take and preserve his notes is nothing short of remarkable. They were used, for various purposes, by later figures including Swift, Cook and Darwin, and - even into the early 20th century - by the Admiralty. (He was also on the ship that rescued Alexander Selkirk, the model for Robinson Crusoe.)

I also read Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, which - itself in the form of a comic book graphic novel - discusses the tools of the trade of the comic artist. For me, the main interest had to do with the techniques used to invite particular emotional or intellectual responses - e.g., varying the width of the "gutter" (the space between adjoining panels) to influence the perceived lapse of time. A modestly interesting book, no more than that.

I've begun reading Twisty Little Passages, which - as the name suggests - is a discussion of interactive fiction, such as "Adventure", "Zork", and their predecessors and successors. Among other things, it treats them as literary constructs, comparing them to such movements as the Oulipo. (Don't fret; I wasn't sure what that was either, and when I review the book I'll say a little more about it.) I'm also rereading one of my textbooks from my undergraduate years, Abstract Harmonic Analysis, v.1 by Hewitt & Ross. Another time, maybe, I'll explain why I'm doing that. Or not...