Monday, May 10, 2010Kobo vs. Gutenberg; alien wardrobe malfunctions

Kobo is the stripped down e-book reader recently introduced by the Chapters/Indigo bookstore chain in Canada.  I've been using mine for a week now. 

No, not to read current novels or nonfiction releases.  I'm a hedonistic reader; I prefer creamy white paper bound at the spine, thank you very much.  I bought the Kobo because I wanted a cheap and convenient platform for reading e-pub files from Project Gutenberg.  Project Gutenberg has made available more than thirty thousand public-domain texts, many of them long out of print and otherwise difficult to track down, free of charge.

A sampling of the texts I've downloaded this week:

My Days and Nights on the Battlefield, by Charles Carleton Coffin.  Ostensibly a history of the Civil War for the audience we now call "young adult," this derives from Coffin's own battlefield reporting.  What makes it distinctive are the vivid, detailed descriptive passages.  Cairo, Illinois, the gunboat troops embarking on a crisp day in 1862 . . . the next best thing to time travel.

After London; or, Wild England, by Richard Jefferies.  Post-apocalyptic England, circa 1885.

The Great God Pan, by Arthur Machen.

The Profits of Religion, by Upton Sinclair.  I read The Jungle recently and it made me curious about Sinclair's Progressive Era radicalism.

A Hazard of New Fortunes, by William Dean Howells.  Not much read these days, but he was an important American writer in his day.  He also wrote a Utopian story called A Traveller from Altruria.

Rootabaga Stories, by Carl Sandburg.  Whimsical almost to the point of toxicity, but fabulously strange and oddly sensual.  "And both of the children had the shadows of valleys by night in their eyes and the lights of early morning, when the sun is coming up, on their foreheads.  And the hair on top of their heads was a dark wild grass.  And they loved to turn the doorknobs, open the doors, and run out to have the wind comb their hair and touch their eyes and put its six soft fingers on their foreheads." Better to hunt down a paper edition, however, with the wonderful illustrations by Maud and Miska Petersham.

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In other news: If you've been following the peculiar controversy around Stephen Hawking's public suggestion that it might be dangerous to contact an extraterrestrial civilization, Canadian politician and former Defence Minister Paul Hellyer has weighed in.  Aliens "have contributed considerably to our knowledge," Hellyer said.  "Microchips for example, fibre optics, they are just two of the many things  that probably came from crashed vehicles."

In other words, if it's too complicated for me to understand, aliens must be responsible. 

Other possible alien technologies include Sudoku, the zipper, the IMF, and the plot of Lost.

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A few posts back I offered some classic science-fiction illustrations of "Ruined Liberties."  This week, a couple of examples of Artists Unclear on the Concept of Space Helmets.  Galatea, left, appears to be wearing the dome from a 1920s stock-market ticker.  As for the guy taking a cigarette break, right . . . well, it is a John D. MacDonald novel.