BETWEEN THE COVERS COMPILED BY J. L. HERRERA BETWEEN THE COVERS To the Memory of TONY BAULD With Special Thanks to Madge Portwin, Rose Brown, Brenda Dudkowiak, Cheryl Perriman, Marie Cameron, Hobart Toastmasters Club, Ken Clarke, Patrick Herrera, Margaret Clarke INTRODUCTION Another Writer’s Calendar type book? Just one more? It is a bit like being tempted by chocolate cake or asparagus puffs. We-e-ll, just one more. Just a wee bit. Just a taste. And so here it is. I justified it to myself using much the same argument I use when there’s a little bit of something nice left on a plate. It doesn’t seem worth putting away. Also I had a few little bits and pieces, ideas, things I thought I would like to follow up, still sitting around. Of course this is a specious argument. Give me a few months and I will have collected piles of new things to add to my leftovers. And although I sometimes feel I am wasting time, all those wonderful things I could be doing and am not, I am increasingly inclined to think that, like family history, ‘writers’ calendars’ constantly press out the boundaries of my life and knowledge and imagination. I won’t claim that they make me a better person, there is absolutely no evidence for that, but they make me a more ‘satisfied’ person and in a curious way I think that is valuable. The world is full of dissatisfied people, I don’t mean dissatisfied with the political and social status of a suffering world, but dissatisfied with what they’ve got, they want a bigger share, something different, someone else’s life (all those programs asking people who they would like to be) … but just give me a good book and enough light to read by and I ‘wudn’t call the quane me cousin’. So I hope a little of my moment of content will fill these pages. J. L. Herrera Hobart 2007 I mentioned FIBS (the Falkland Islands Broadcasting Station) in my previous book; it has now changed its name to FIRS (the Falkland Islands Radio Service). Recently I came upon a book called Rediscovering Lafcadio Hearn by Sukehiro Hirakawa; this contains a number of contributions by Japanese writers and gives a different perspective on his life. You might like to take a browse through it. (And see Appendix 1 for more.) 2 BETWEEN THE COVERS * * * * * January 1: Maria Edgeworth Robert Shaaban Sir James Frazer Sandor Petofi * * * * * Hungarians have gained greatly from the richness and innovation of Petofi’s work but poetry does not travel well so I found myself thinking vaguely on what else we non-Hungarians have gained from Hungary. I could point to things from medical advances to music but the other day I came upon this little snippet in Anthony’s Bird’s Roads & Vehicles, “By the middle of the eighteenth century the name ‘coach’ (the word and the vehicle are of Hungarian origin) signified a rigid-roofed closed vehicle with two vis-à-vis seats to hold four or six passengers, arranged with the body part suspended above the ‘carriage’ (the name given to what, in motor-car terms would be called the chassis) by leather braces acting, usually, with steel springs to insulate the passengers from the worst of the jolts.” Of much more use in the twenty-first century, though still occasionally execrated by purists, and used by hundreds of millions without a thought is another Hungarian invention: the biro. Dian Dincin Buchman and Seli Groves in What If wrote, “People used to write with pens which had to be dipped over and over in ink or with fountain pens that they filled up with ink. Sometimes the ink would spill — and sometimes the fountain pens would leak. One day in Hungary, in 1938, a newspaperman named Biro visited a print shop. He noticed that when the papers came out of the press, the ink the printer used was dry, not wet or smudgy. He thought to himself, “That would be a great ink to have inside a pen! What if I could make a pen that could carry a quick drying ink inside of it — the way a fountain pen carries regular ink inside of it?” He worked out the first model, but the ink didn’t come through the point. He had to make a completely different point. Instead of a long, thin one, he used a round ball that spread the ink over the paper like a paint roller spreads paint over a wall. In 1940 when the Nazis invaded Hungary, Biro escaped to Argentina where in 1943 he patented his ingenious pen. Meanwhile, the English government had a problem with the pens used by the pilots of the Royal Air Force. The high altitudes at which the planes flew often caused these pens to leak. The pilots began using Biro’s new pen with its quick drying ink and its ballpoint. No leaks! Soon the ballpoint Biro pen was used all over the world.” I can write with a pencil, a fountain pen, a stick in the dirt, a slate pencil, even possibly a chisel in stone … but for convenience … what better present than a biro and a box of refills? Even better an ink shop where I can not only get computer cartridges refilled but can take empty biros in and get them refilled … Alas! No one seems to be listening … * * * * * January 2: Isaac Asimov January 3: J. R. Tolkien January 4: Michele Turner Jacob Grimm January 5: Umberto Eco January 6: Kahlil Gibran January 7: Robert Duncan January 8: Wilkie Collins Stephen Hawking January 9: Lascelles Abercrombie 3 Karel Capek * * * * * “There are, it is true, machines in existence which we have, perhaps rather prematurely, categorized as robots. But long before even this primitive vanguard became a practical proposition the idea of the robot was enjoying a lively existence in the human imagination. It seems to have been around even before it gained a name. Other inventions had to take concrete form before a name was found for them, and it took some time for the English speaking world to agree that the ‘horseless carriage’ should be a motor car or a ‘flying machine’ an airplane, yet when Karel Capek published his play RUR (for ‘Rossum’s Universal Robots’) in 1923, the obscure word (it means no more than ‘serf’ or ‘worker’ in Capek’s native Czech) was quickly and universally adopted. Capek’s ‘robots’ were but the latest in a whole line of mechanical men, and all that the concept had hitherto lacked was a label. “Sixty years later, while their real-life counterparts are only just undergoing their birth pangs, fictional robots have become as familiar a part of our imaginative lives as cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers; many a hero of contemporary space opera would be as lost without a robot companion as the Lone Ranger without Tonto or Holmes bereft of Watson. Moreover, from a very early stage the new genre of science or speculative fiction had seen that the robot had possibilities that most of its other technological paraphernalia lacked. Spaceships and time travel served to transfer old plots to new planets, but robots, along with those other novelties, alien beings from distant worlds, were jokers that could be dealt into the existing pack to produce a whole new game. The robot was not a prop, it was a character, and one which could be used to explore new metaphysical issues. Those exponents of sci-fi who aimed at simple entertainment were content to use the robot to play Watson to a human Holmes, but more serious writers saw that it had far greater potential in the role of Holmes himself — or, perhaps, Moriarty.” From Reinventing Man by Igor Aleksander and Piers Burnett. They go on to say: “Many accounts credit rabbis with creating golems to serve in their households, a sort of magical race of gentlemen’s gentlemen whose only drawback was that the power of speech was withheld from them. But a much more dramatic version of the legend is associated with Rabbi Loew of Prague who is alleged to have created a golem in order to protect the Jewish community in the city against one of the recurrent pogroms. In fact, later research has established that Loew was a sober theologian who would no more have meddled with golems than serve roast pork at a bar-mitzvah and the golem has moved further back into the realms of conjecture. But the golem attributed to Loew had two features that ensured its survival as a theme in fiction — it was superhumanly powerful (how else could it deter the gentiles?) and it was prone to get out of control and turn upon its creator. In one version of the story the creature ultimately runs amok and its career of destruction is only ended when the rabbi tricks it into kneeling before him and plucks the magic formula from its brow, thus reducing it to clay again.” * * * * * Jaroslav Seifert wrote a poem called ‘Verses from an Old Tapestry’: Prague! who has seen her but once will at least hear her name always ring in his heart. She is herself a song woven into time and we love her. So let her ring! My first happy dreams glittered above her rooftops like flying saucers and vanished God knows where when I was young. 4 Once I pressed my face against the stone of an ancient wall somewhere below the Castle forecourt and in my ear, suddenly, sounded a gloomy booming.