Tolstoy on Poetry

From August 1914 by A. Solzhenitsyn. Tolstoy is the revered Sage in this fictional work. In the opening a young idealist student on his way to volunteer for the army makes a pilgrimage to Tolstoy’s estate and imposes on his idol with questions.

“‘I very much want to write poetry. I do write poetry, in fact. Tell me, is that all right, or does it absolutely contradict what you believe? ”

The old man’s expression softened, but the question did nothing to lighten his mood.

“How can you enjoy lining up words in ranks like soldiers according to the sounds? Childish nonsense! It’s unnatural. The job of words is to express thoughts, and you don’t find much thought in poetry, do you? If you read 20 poems and then try to recall what they were about, you’ll get in a fearful muddle. It’s a case of ‘here today and gone tomorrow.’” Tolstoy’s brow darkened. Looking past Sanya, he said: “There’s a lot of poetry written nowadays, but there’s not a scrap of good in any of it.”

He was upset and shuffled his cane.

Sanya had expected Tolstoy to say that about poetry…

KiTE: A Novel in Earth Orbit

KiTE is a novel set in Earth orbit, by Bill Shears.

See below for synopsis.

You can purchase KiTE at:

Buy Kite at Amazon
Buy Kite at Barnes and Noble
Buy Kite at BooksaMillion
Buy Kite at Booklocker

The image below opens a free sample into a Flash application. You must have a Flash player installed on your computer for it to work. For best results: maximize the new window that will open when you click the link below and put your browser in Full Screen Mode. Press the “1:1″ button for actual size if needed for readability. More detailed reading tips are at the bottom of the cover image.

Kite Free Sample

Kite is available through favorite online outlets.

Dash, doubtful they’ll survive the encounter, would leave them to their fate when the alien, name of Troy, turns up. Troy’s a working stiff too but is authorized to defend himself. His sensors detect a threat and he’s armed with some powerful planet-busting weapons.

Kite: A Novel in Earth Orbit

Mason Dash, operator of Kite, Earth orbit street sweeper, along with beautiful, and virtual, stowaway Sheila face down spacejackers, a revolt inside the ship’s systems and  humankind’s first unearthly visitor. Kite is hard sci-fi with heart.

Kite available in these online bookstores, among others:
Buy Kite at Amazon
Buy Kite at Barnes and Noble
Buy Kite at Booklocker

Front Cover of Kite

Kite Synopsis
Mason Dash, operator of Earth Orbit street sweeper Kite, spots movement in a derelict space station where there should be none. Heading Earthward in his shuttle the last day of his three-month shift he detours, closing with the dark station. Something moving in there spooks him.

Dash, with the help of beautiful virtual personality Sheila, creates a plan to expose suspected hijackers. He believes Sheila is his secret but Janet, his brilliant AI expert spouse, informs him that she and Sheila are chums, and she’s even added some experimental “adaptive” modules. While preparing a simulation “scenario” to carry into orbit next shift, Dash dozes off and Sheila stows away in the code, her new adaptive behaviors kicking in. No way she’ll be left behind this trip.

Back in orbit Dash confirms the presence of intruders on the station, while inside the Kite computer systems there’s turmoil. Emerging from deep in the data depths He_Ra has assembled a powerful force to seize control from the old Main Process.

Sheila splits attention between Dash outside and her own adventure inside Kite, getting a taste of romance and revolution. The tyrant He_Ra has taken a fancy to her and wants to expand to other orbital structures, like the nearby space casino, then perhaps to Earth.

Dash sends Sheila to the space station to scout. She finds not hijackers but a team of inept diplomats, preparing to receive humankind’s first unearthly visitor.

Dash, doubtful they’ll survive the encounter, would leave them to their fate when the alien, name of Troy, turns up. Troy’s a working stiff too but is authorized to defend himself. His sensors detect a threat and he’s armed with some powerful planet-busting weapons.

Earth’s fate is in the balance and only Dash, Sheila, Janet, and Kite, can prevent disaster.

Publisher’s Note
Hard science fiction works, whether they keep you on or around Earth or take you to the farthest reaches of the galaxy, are those that adhere more closely to science fact than not. Much dispute and emotional argument can ensue among fans in attempting to nail down any definition, but the term hard should in no way imply that a work takes itself overly seriously. Kite, with its orbitweary workman co-protagonist and its strong women co-protagonists is one of those stories that builds in the humor with the possibilities, that a time will come when humans will utilize Earth orbit in a mundane, everyday fashion, and that going to space in ships will not be as costly and risky as it is now. The inevitability of this is as sure as the inevitability that wherever people go they tend to make a mess, and someone will still have to be out there doing the rough jobs, and the cleaning up.

Author’s Note
Kite is a story that had been latent for a few years before emerging. The amount of debris in orbit has been building up since the days of the Mercury program, and it seems like every shuttle mission these days generates a news story about a debris encounter. Now that the shuttle program is coming to its long-overdue end, if we’re every going to inhabit the space around Earth, and use it as the platform for leaping out, as Carl Sagan put it, into the nearby neighborhood, the next generation of technology would need to do something about all the junk. A ship like Kite is just one projection of how it might be handled. – Bill S.

Alan Furst’s Top Five Spy Books

Alan Furst

Master World War II espionage novelist recommends his five favorites.  

Oddly enough, it was Five Best spy novels by Charles McCurry that led us to sample one of Furst’s. We believe it was Blood of Victory. And we then proceeded to read then all .

Suggestion: read them in any order, but save Night Soldiers for last.

Howard Roark & Sully Sullenberger: The Individual over the Collective

Just watched The Fountainhead, and although the filmed meeting scene between Dominique and Howard posted about earlier has as much power, it can never say the same specific words as the book.

We’d quote the big Gary Cooper courtroom speech, transferred form the book verbatim,  as a Money Quote but someone else has already posted it here, as a life lesson, with which we would heartily agree. I’ll just pluck out some good parts :

  “The ‘common good’ of a collective—a race, a class, a state—was the claim and justification of every tyranny ever established over men. Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism?

***

 “The only good which men can do to one another and the only statement of their proper relationship is—Hands off!
     “Now observe the results of a society built on the principle of individualism. This, our country. The noblest country in the history of men. The country of greatest achievement, greatest prosperity, greatest freedom. This country was not based on selfless service, sacrifice, renunciation or any precept of altruism. It was based on a man’s right to the pursuit of happiness. His own happiness. Not anyone else’s. A private, personal, selfish motive. Look at he results. Look into your own conscience.”

***

     ”I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need.
     “I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others.
     “It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.”

The pilot of this plane was the indiividual with his hand on the controls and the throttle. He decided the pitch of the nose and where in the river to steer to. There was nothing collective about the saving of these lives. And yet they were saved. Would they have been of the choices he made were made buy a committee?

It is people like thi spilot to whom the writer referred with the speech spoken by Gary Cooper’s Howard Roark. And he has a name right out of one of Rand’s books, Captain Chesley B. Sullenberger.

The Fountainhead: The Money Quote – Dominique lays eyes on Howard

I’ll get back to reading Ayn Rand’s The Fountainheadand had to put it down a while back. It flattens out some and gets a bit anti-climactic after Howard meets Dominique. This just happens also to be the most memorable scene in the film as well. But while Gary Cooper is better than good as Howard (he’s still Gary Cooper) Patricia Neal isDominique Francon. 

The episode is also one of the most intense and exquisitely written passages in the book. The liquid cool sado-masochist Dominique gets a brief glimpse of hell, and looking up at her is an unyielding man like none she has ever met:

Because the sun was too hot, that morning, and she knew it would be hotter at the granite quarry, because she wanted to see no one and knew she would face a gang of workers, Dominique walked to the quarry. The thought of seeing it on that blazing day was revolting; she enjoyed the prospect.

 

When she came out of the woods to the edge of the great stone bowl, she felt as if she were thrust into an execution chamber filled with scalding steam. The heat did not come. from the sun, but from that broken cut in the earth, from the reflectors of flat ridges. Her shoulders, her head, her back, exposed to the sky, seemed cool while she felt the hot breath of the stone rising up her legs to her chin, to her nostrils. The air shimmered below, sparks of fire shot through the granite; she thought the stone was stirring, melting, running in white trickles of lava. Drills and hammers cracked the still weight of the air. It was obscene to see men on the shelves of the furnace. They did not look like workers, they looked like a chain gang serving an unspeakable sentence for some unspeakable crime. She could not turn away.

 

She stood, as an insult to the place below. Her dress—the color of water, a pale green-blue, too simple and expensive., its pleats exact like edges of glass—her thin heels planted wide apart on the boulders, the smooth helmet of her hair, the exaggerated fragility of her body against the sky—flaunted the fastidious coolness of the gardens and drawing rooms from which she came.

 

She looked down. Her eyes stopped on the orange hair of man who raised his head and looked at her.

 

She stood very still, because her first perception was not of sight, but of touch: the consciousness, not of a visual presence, but of a slap in the face. She held one hand awkwardly away from her body, the fingers spread wide in the air, as against a wall. She knew that she could not move until he permitted her to.

 

She saw his mouth and the silent contempt in the shape of his mouth; the planes of his gaunt hollow cheeks; the cold, pure brilliance of the eyes that had no trace of pity. She knew it was the most beautiful face she would ever see, because it was the abstraction of strength made visible. She felt a convulsion of an­ger, of protest, of resistance—and of pleasure. He stood looking up at her; it was not a glance, but an act of ownership. She thought she must let her face give him the answer he deserved. But she was looking instead, at the stone dust on his burned arms, the wet shirt clinging to his ribs, the lines of his long legs. She was thinking of those statues of men she had always sought; she was wondering what he would look like naked. She saw him looking at her as if he knew that. She thought she had found an aim in life—a sudden, sweeping hatred for that man.

 

So if we ever find ourselves in consultation with a cosmetic surgeon and they ask what kind of face we want, we’ll ask for that “abstraction of strength made visible” one. Yah. 

The Spies of Warsaw

If you haven’t read any of Alan Furst’s fine works of espionage starting with his latest will not be a bad move. Or save it for later and read any of the others in any order (with one exception.) Those who have read one or more of them will know what to expect, a completely plausible, minutely researched situation where an ambivalent (that’s not to say insensitve) main character is caught up in a critical episode leading up to or during World War II. In this case the time is 1938 and the place is the doomed city of Warsaw. Your hero is a French military attaché who finds love, as Furst’s characters usually do, while risking his neck for some possibly valuable bit of information about German intentions, at a time when the world was pretty confident that Nazi ambitions could be contained.

Once you read one of these gems you’ll want to read them all. That they are structually similar should not put one off. This one differs a bit in that the hero is not quite as ambivalent as most of the others. Our only recommendeation, repeated from an earlier post, is that you either read Furst’s Night Soldiers first, or preferably save it for last. It has more of an epic quality, and gives a definitive top-to-bottom look at communist recruiting techniques during the period. It does differ from the others in its scope, and may be regarded as close kin to the recent film, The Lives of Others.

The Ionian Mission

Every once is a while the harmonic convergence of cultural consumption merges to form, well, a blog post. Two and you call it coincidence. Three is rarer, and worth noting. Call it blogorhythm.

We just finished the next work in our campaign to read all of the Patrick O’Brian Age of Sail masterpieces, The Ionian Mission. Captain Jack Aubrey’s ship is skirting the coast of Greece and he writes in his serial letter home that his daughters should be asked to find Epirus on the map. What are the odds, that the name for an ancient and obscure Greek province should appear in two consecutive modes of media consumption, a computer game and a historical novel?!

And further, Aubrey then advises that his son George should also be led to learn about the deeds of Pyrrhus, “‘for it would be a great shame, was George to be found ignorant of Pyrrhus when he grew up.’”

The next sentence O’Brian writes is a thought that has likely crossed every father’s mind: “Jack had never been a hypocrite until he became a father, and even now it did not come easy.”

Yes.

And while we’re about it, earlier in the book O’Brian, via Doctor Maturin, a smoker, dashes off what may be the most eloquent praise of tobacco ever written. In his cabin, after a huge breakfast “in the Naval fashion” Aubrey invites Maturin, who’s about to embark on a risky mission, to smoke:

“If you have finished Stephen, pray smoke away. I am sure you bought some of your best mundungus in Mahon.”

“If you are sure you really do not find it disagreeable,” said Stephen, instantly feeling in his pockets, “I believe I may. For me tobacco is the crown of the meal, the best opening to a day, a great enhancer of the quality of life. The crackle and yield of this little paper cylinder,” he said, holding it up, “gives me a sensual pleasure whose deeper origins I blush to contemplate, while the slow combustion of the whole yields a gratification that I should not readily abandon even if it did me harm, which it does not. Far from it. On the contrary, tobacco purges the mind of its gross humors, sharpens the wits, renders the judicious smoker sprightly and vivacious. And soon I shall need all my sprightliness and vivacity.”

Spies of Warsaw

Speaking of Alan Furst, his latest will be out come June ‘08. Click below for a good deal on the hardback preorder.

The Spies of Warsaw: A Novel