Month: November 2024

The Iliad: At least I tried

The Iliad. Translated by Emily Wilson. Norton, 2023. 848 pages.

Sixty pages of the Iliad was all I could handle. Reading Homer is thought to be edifying. I did not find it edifying. I found it boring. The mortals (at least in the first sixty pages) all are idiots, all behaving badly — vain, blind, belligerent, conniving, and mean. The gods are even worse. The mortals are hyperactive and volatile. The gods are lazy. I often have said that dysfunction and foible do not make good stories. If there is a quest in the Iliad, it’s crushing and looting Troy, just for the heck of it. What an edifying goal!

Stories require villains, but there’d better be at least one character per story whom we actually can like. No such character appears in the first sixty pages of the Iliad.

Of course I understand why reading the Iliad is thought to be edifying. To be able to read the ancient Greek would be very edifying. But translations not so much.

I tried to remind myself that the Iliad was 300 or 400 years old in Plato’s time. It’s not surprising that it is so primitive.

I do think, though, that this new translation of the Iliad is a good book to have on the shelf as a reference. There is a long list of characters at the back of the book that would serve as an excellent reference on Greek mythology. There are extensive notes nicely keyed to the verse. The notes explain many of the symbols and allusions, things that only Greek scholars would know. To me, the notes are more edifying and illuminating than the text itself.

There is a fascinating clash between Greek philosophy, with its wisdom, and Greek mythology, with its foolishness. From what little I know about Greek history, it was inspired more by foolishness than by wisdom. Reading about the Peloponnesian War, which was complete folly, will break your heart. Foolish gods, perhaps, drive foolish projects.

Having flung the Iliad, I’ve started on a guaranteed good read — Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop. I may have read it many years ago, but if I did I don’t remember anything about it. Many of Dickens’ novels were serialized — The Old Curiosity Shop, Bleak House, Oliver Twist, Barnaby Rudge, Nicholas Nickleby. These are my favorite Dickenses, though I love David Copperfield and have read it several times.

It’s a shame that nobody serializes novels anymore, because serialization requires that the writer make each installment compelling in itself, so that the reader is eager for more and desperate to know what happens next. A serialized novel probably will be a hot read, and we all love hot reads. The only modern serialized novels that I can’t think of are Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City novels, which were serialized in the San Francisco Chronicle (and briefly in the San Francisco Examiner after Maupin had a spat with the Chronicle’s editors).

Why I’m optimistic about the election


Source: Wikimedia Commons

A couple of friends have told me recently that they wish they had my optimism about which way this election is going. I make no predictions. But I see many reasons for optimism.

Ever since Kamala Harris became the nominee, it is hard to imagine things going better for the Democratic Party. Harris hit the ground running, reversed the sense of doom that we all felt after President Biden’s debate performance, and inspired a huge wave of enthusiasm and political momentum. The polls started moving our way.

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign has been doing pretty much everything wrong. It has been one stupid move after another. For whatever reason, Trump has chosen to throw out red meat to inflame the people who are going to vote for him anyway, instead of reaching out for votes that he might otherwise not have gotten. He keeps infuriating women voters, and in two days’ work he probably has permanently reversed the defection of Latinos from the Democratic to the Republican party. Best of all, the once-forbidden word “fascist” has been rehabilitated and forcefully injected into the national conversation. Even the New York Times was forced to run pieces (quoting experts, of course) acknowledging that, yes, Trump is a fascist. (That the New York times was the last, rather than the first, to tell us that Trump is a fascist says a lot about how completely useless our political media have become.)

I don’t pay much attention to the polls this close to the election. Again this year, as they did in 2022, Republicans have cranked out a bunch of trash polls to convince MAGA voters that Trump is sure to win, even if he loses, and that therefore that the election was stolen.

A few days ago, Jen O’Malley Dillon, Kamala Harris’ campaign chair, put out a YouTube video about the numbers (see below). Yes, of course, someone in her position has to express optimism at this point and stress the importance of voting. But O’Malley also refers to some numbers from the campaign’s internal polling. You can be sure that the campaign’s internal polling is laser-focused and of higher quality that the public polls. The internal polls are essential to campaign decisions about where to concentrate their efforts. If you’ve been stressing out about the election, then maybe you’ll feel better after watching the video.

But I’ve also been thinking some about the worst-case scenario. It’s an ugly scenario, but in the end we win.

If the American people really are so stupid as to vote for a fascist who intends to destroy the American democracy, turn us into Russia (see Fiona Hill in Politico, October 28), make elections obsolete, loot the country, and put billionaires and whack-jobs in charge of everything (thinking that this will save America!) then obviously the American people are going to have to learn things the hard way. If Trump and company get back into power, then no election will ever get them out. He even told people at his rallies that they won’t have to vote anymore, because he’ll “fix” things.

I told a friend at lunch yesterday that, if Trump gets back into power, that I think it would take Americans four to eight years to get our democracy back. After four years of Trump and a non-election in 2028, it should be clear even to MAGA cultists that they’ve been conned, that the economy has been trashed, and that the rights of everyone except for billionaires have been suspended. Non-MAGA Americans, upon seeing that elections no longer work, would clearly see what must be done. The only recourse would be a revolt, with general strikes and millions of people in the streets.

The history of how tyrants are deposed has been well studied. Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Erica Frantz have written in How Autocracies Fall that autocrats have become increasingly vulnerable to mass revolts. When Putin and his oligarchs took over Russia, the job was made much easier by the fact that the Russian people have no history of democracy. A tyrant in the Kremlin was just the same-old same-old for Russians. But that is not true of Americans. Democracy is in our bones (most of us, anyway). Anybody who takes democracy from us would have hell to pay. Nor would we Americans be in it alone. We have Canada to the north, and we have our NATO allies, who hate Trump just as much as we do. If the MAGA people ever got the civil war that they seem to want, they would lose. And maybe they’d learn a lesson that they’d remember up to a hundred years or so.

So that’s why I’m not panicking. Even if we wake up to a nightmare on November 6 (or however long it takes to count the votes), we’ll get our democracy back, whatever it takes. For decades, farsighted people have warned us about what fascism would look like if it came to America. And now we can see the whites of fascist eyes. Maybe it’s just denial, but I still find it almost impossible to believe that Americans actually would choose such a thing, especially now that we can call it what it is.

Yes, they have a plan for stealing the election. They will try, through legal maneuvers, to get it before the fascist-majority Supreme Court. Or, through dirty tricks in the states, they will try to throw the election to the House of Representatives. We do need to brace ourselves for that. Unless the election is a landslide for Harris, an attempt to steal the election is inevitable. Trump was even foolish enough to refer to a “secret plan” with the Republican speaker of the House. If they lose the election but succeed with a steal, the revolt will start on Day 1.

WYSIWYG with old daisy wheel printers


A 1985 IBM Wheelwriter 5 with the printer option. Click here for high-resolution version

I apologize to regular readers for this nerd post of limited interest. Many of the hits on this blog come from Google, from people who have run a search on one of the many subjects I’ve written about over the past 17 years. This post is meant as a service to “the typewriter community,” since I am a typewriter collector and my career was in computers and publishing.

Today I am shocked, and ashamed, at how quickly we nerds gave up our typewriters back in the 1980s and quickly adopted the new phenomenon of “word processing.” Now I’m sentimental about what we had back then. We need not only to keep the old machines alive, but also to preserve the knowledge of how to use the old machines.

A few typewriters were made that bridged the world between typewriters and computers. They had a keyboard, of course, and could be used as typewriters. But they also had a computer interface (generally a Centronics parallel port) so that they could be connected to a computer and used as a printer. Most IBM Wheelwriters did not have the printer interface. They are said to be rare. But if you can get your hands on one, they are marvelous machines. Mine is a Wheelwriter 5 made in 1985. The “printer option” for the Wheelwriter 5 consisted of two computer boards that connected to the typewriter’s main board with a ribbon cable. To house the two extra boards, an extension for the case was provided that clipped onto the back of the typewriter. Other versions of the printer option on later models of the Wheelwriter had the printer option more or less built in. Some even came with LCD displays or hardware for connecting the typewriter to an external keyboard and monitor.

The first thing to know about these beasts in that they are (rather obviously) ASCII printers. When Postscript and laser printers came along, ASCII printers including ASCII dot-matrix printers were quickly displaced. These days, printers have drivers that explain the printer’s capabilities to the computers they’re attached to. For ASCII printers, you won’t find any drivers, because: You don’t need a driver! The goal is a simple one — to send ASCII down the wire to the printer. But most computers these days have forgotten how to do that.

I am not a Microsoft Windows person. There are ways to make the old ASCII printers work with Windows, but I’m afraid I can’t help with Windows. However, the job is easy with Linux computers and Macintoshes, because Linux computers and Macintoshes are Unix boxes that still come with all the old text-handling utilities such as “vi,” “nroff,” and “lpr.” Other classic text-handling utilities, such as the Emacs editor, are easily available.

To get an old ASCII printer to work on a Linux computer or Macintosh, you need some basic knowledge that I can’t get into here. You’ll need to do some Googling and learning if the tools and concepts are new to you. For example, to attach an ASCII printer to a Linux computer or Macintosh, you’ll need a USB to Centronics parallel adapter cable. You’ll use Cups, the built-in print spooler, to set up the printer as a “raw” printer. “Raw” means that Cups sends plain ASCII down the wire without using a driver. You need to know your way around in terminal windows.

I’m an old hand at “vi” and “nroff,” because once upon a time that’s what we used for writing, editing, and formatting text. Another popular editor was Emacs. Emacs has a learning curve even steeper than that of “vi.” But to use Emacs with a daisywheel printer, you don’t have to know everything about Emacs. You only need to know enough to use Emacs for writing and editing English text.

Some of the early text utilities with graphical interfaces are still around and no doubt can still provide a WYSIWIG experience with a daisywheel printer. (WYSIWIG means “what you see is what you get.”) For example, George R.R. Martin is notorious for continuing to use WordStar on DOS! But you’ll have a harder time finding WordStar, or a working DOS computer, than you’ll have finding an IBM Wheelwriter with the printer option. So Emacs is the easiest way to go.

I’m sorry that I can’t get into the how-to’s here. It’s all pretty complicated, and Googling will lead you to articles on how to use Emacs, how to use Cups, etc. My purpose is only to show that it can be done and to encourage you to do it if you have a daisywheel printer, an ASCII dot-matrix printer, or a hybrid typewriter-printer such as a Wheelwriter in your collection.

About the IBM Wheelwriters

Typewriter collectors disdain machines such as the IBM Wheelwriters because Wheelwriters are not purely mechanical machines. Rather, there is a computer inside the typewriter that controls the typewriter’s moving parts. So-called electronic typewriters are far simpler — mechanically, anyway — than mechanical typewriters. Just as the IBM Selectric was the ultimate in mechanical typewriters, the IBM Wheelwriter is the ultimate in electronic typewriters. The Wheelwriters are heavy beasts, made for commercial use. The Wheelwriter keyboards are superb. The keyboards are identical to the IBM Model M keyboards, which IBM made for IBM computers starting in 1985. People cherish these keyboards today and pay high prices for them. If you are a good typist, then the best keyboards ever made are the keyboards on the IBM Selectric typewriters, the Model M keyboards for IBM computers, and the keyboards on the Wheelwriter typewriters. Like most of the Selectric typewriters, the Wheelwriters have a correcting function — a sticky tape that lifts letters off the paper if you made a mistake. The Wheelwriters (depending on the model) also have memories (for such things as form letters) and spell check. The daisy wheel itself lifts out, and an assortment of type styles and font sizes were available, as well as support for dozens of languages.

I love my IBM Selectrics, but the Wheelwriters also are lovable machines. They have a kind of robot personality, because, unlike typewriters, they have a brain inside.


⬆︎ This is Emacs running in a terminal window in Mac OS.


⬆︎ A letter from John Steinbeck to Robert Wallsten reproduced on a Wheelwriter using a proportional typeface. Wallsten was a screenwriter for “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.”