The return of the airship?

Long ago, John McPhee’s book The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed made me a fan of airships.

Now an article in The Guardian gives one more reason why it may finally be time to bring back the dirigible: global warming.

A recent report on mobility by the Smith School, for example, quoted an estimate by one developer, UK-owned SkyCat, that it could carry twice the weight of strawberries from Spain to the UK of a standard cargo plane, with a 90% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, much of which is from avoiding the huge fuel burn a jet engine uses to take off.

Other benefits included the possibility that airships would not need to use airports if they were fitted with “lifts” to pick up and land cargo. This in turn would reduce the need for trucking goods to and from transport hubs, and allow less well-connected areas, perhaps in inland Africa, to take part in international trade, said [Sir David] King. For the same reasons the blimps could also be used to reach devastated areas in need of humanitarian aid, he said.

A link from one of the comments let me know that it’s already possible to take a trip on a next-generation zeppelin in Germany, Italy, and (someday soon?) in San Francisco and New York.

Updike’s rules for reviewers

An old friend, and editor at the Library of America, just reminded me of the rules for reviewers that Updike set out in the foreword of his 1975 collection Picked-Up Pieces.

One of the advantages of owning an almost complete set of Updike is that I was able to take down my copy of the book, see the rules in context, and add a little more. So here they are, words to live by:

Apologies, if any, would be tendered to those authors, like Grass and Gombrowicz, who came to me coated with a muffling murk of missed nuances—dusty plaster replicas of statues whose pure marble glowed in an inaccessible museum. But even when the visibility was poorest I tried to give each book the benefit of a code of reviewing drawn up inwardly when I embarked on this craft, or ("a man should have a trade,” my father used to insist) trade.

My rules, drawn up inwardly when I embarked on this craft, and shaped intaglio-fashion by youthful traumas at the receiving end of critical opinion, were and are:

1.) Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2.) Give enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3.) Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis.

4.) Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending. (How astounded and indignant was I, when innocent, to find reviewers blabbing, and with the sublime inaccuracy of drunken lords reporting on a peasants’ revolt, all the turns of my suspenseful and surpriseful narrative! Most ironically, the only readers who approach a book as the author intends, unpolluted by pre-knowledge of the plot, are the detested reviewers themselves. And then, years later, the blessed fool who picks the volume at random from a library shelf.)

5.) If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never try to put the author “in his place,” making of him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys of reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.

Easier said than done, of course. Here and there filial affection for an older writer has pulled my punch. Fear of reprisal may have forced a grin or two. In a few reprehensible cases I may have dreamed of sleeping with the authoress. In other cases irritations of the moment added their personal pepper.

Cronching with Thoreau

Despite his knowledge of several languages, Thoreau’s spelling could be erratic. Torrey and Allen cleaned up most of it for the 1906 edition of the Journal, but I noticed that they retained the verb “to cronch.”

Dec. 8, 1850: “The dear privacy and retirement and solitude which winter makes possible! carpeting the earth with snow, furnishing more than woolen feet to all walkers, cronching the snow only.”

Jan. 2, 1853: “… we pick our way over a bed of pine boughs and twigs a foot or two deep, covering the ground, each twig and needle thickly incrusted with ice into one vast gelid mass, which our feet cronch as if we were walking through the cellar of some confectioner to the gods.”

March 21, 1853: “What shall I name those run-out pastures, those arid downs, where the reindeer lichen fairly covers the whole surface, and your feet cronch it at every step?”

July 11, 1854: “I heard Conant’s cradle cronching the rye behind the fringe of bushes in the Indian field.”

Sept. 1, 1859: “The ox requires the meadows to be shorn for him, and cronches both blade and stalk, even of the coarsest grass, as corn...”

There’s some cronching in Walden, too.

Or on a Sunday afternoon, if I chanced to be at home, I heard the cronching of the snow made by the step of a long-headed farmer ...

He [a barred owl] could hear me when I moved and cronched the snow with my feet, but could not plainly see me.

Perhaps it was a standard spelling in those days?

Thoreau drops off a corpse

I understand that in 19th century New England, death was a more accepted part of the daily round than it is for most of us today. But even so, this entry from Thoreau’s Journal of May 29, 1859, seems a little offhand.

Sunday. Thorn bushes and the Ranunculus bulbosus are apparently in prime.

Coming out of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery to-day, where I had just been to deposit the corpse of a man, I picked up an oak three inches high with the acorn attached. They are just springing up now on all sides.

The republican swallow at Hosmer’s barn just begun to lay.

Surely there’s more to this story? Thoreau’s father had died on February 3, at a time when the ground may have been frozen too hard for burial. Is it possible that the family had to wait until late May for burial, and that Thoreau is referring to his own father here?

Ranunculus bulbosus, by the way, is a type of buttercup (also known as St. Anthony’s turnip). A republican swallow is better known as a cliff swallow. Why republican? Here is the editors’ footnote from the 1906 edition of the Journal:

This bird was then a comparatively recent addition to the avifauna of eastern Massachusetts, whither it had spread from its early home in the West. The name “republican” was given to it by Audubon on account of its social nesting habits. The notion that its irruption into the East was coincident with the rise of the Republican Party, and that this gave it its popular name, is, of course, a false one.

Thoreau himself was buried in Sleepy Hollow less than three years later. Not far from his grave is the Melvin Memorial, created by Daniel Chester French to honor three brothers who died in the Civil War.

Redburn

I recently got around to rereading Redburn, in the yellowing Anchor paperback with the Edward Gorey cover that I picked up last year in Saranac Lake. I can’t say it compares with Moby-Dick, but on its smaller, more intimate scale it is still very satisfying.

I enjoyed rereading the description of the glass model of a ship that helped inspire Redburn to go to sea, and especially the eerie passages in which Redburn in Liverpool, carrying his father’s old map and guidebook, seems to be tracking his father’s spirit through a city that has utterly changed:

At last, when I found myself going down Old Hall-street toward Lord-street, where the hotel was situated, according to my authority; and when, taking out my map, I found that Old Hall-street was marked there, through its whole extent with my father’s pen; a thousand fond, affectionate emotions rushed around my heart.

Yes, in this very street, thought I, nay, on this very flagging my father walked. Then I almost wept, when I looked down on my sorry apparel, and marked how the people regarded me; the men staring at so grotesque a young stranger, and the old ladies, in beaver hats and ruffles, crossing the walk a little to shun me....

But dispelling these dismal reflections as well as I could, I pushed on my way, till I got to Chapel-street, which I crossed; and then, going under a cloister-like arch of stone, whose gloom and narrowness delighted me, and filled my Yankee soul with romantic thoughts of old Abbeys and Minsters, I emerged into the fine quadrangle of the Merchants’ Exchange.

There, leaning against the colonnade, I took out my map, and traced my father right through Chapel-street, and actually through the very arch at my back, into the paved square where I stood.

So vivid was now the impression of his having been here, and so narrow the passage from which he had emerged, that I felt like running on, and overtaking him around the Town Hall adjoining, at the head of Castle-street. But I soon checked myself, when remembering that he had gone whither no son’s search could find him in this world.

One of the curious features of the novel is the contrast between the impressions of the vulnerable young Redburn, the son of a bankrupt merchant, and the more jaded point of view of Redburn the narrator, presumably the veteran of more sea voyages. The chapter titles, for instance, are clearly the work of the older Redburn—like the one from which the passage above is taken, which is headed “With His Prosy Old Guide-Book, He Takes a Prosy Stroll Through the Town.”