>Who should I thank? My so-called ``colleagues,'' who laugh at me behind my back, all the while becoming famous on my work? My worthless graduate students, whose computer skills appear to be limited to downloading bitmaps off of netnews? My parents, who are still waiting for me to quit ``fooling around with computers,'' go to med school, and become a radiologist? My department chairman, a manager who gives one new insight into and sympathy for disgruntled postal workers?

>My God, no one could blame me -- no one! -- if I went off the edge and just lost it completely one day. I couldn't get through the day as it is without the Prozac and Jack Daniels I keep on the shelf, behind my Tops-20 JSYS manuals. I start getting the shakes real bad around 10am, right before my advisor meetings. A 10 oz. Jack 'n Zac helps me get through the meetings without one of my students winding up with his severed head in a bowling-ball bag. They look at me funny; they think I twitch a lot. I'm not twitching. I'm controlling my impulse to snag my 9mm Sig-Sauer out from my day-pack and make a few strong points about the quality of undergraduate education in Amerika.

>If I thought anyone cared, if I thought anyone would even be reading this, I'd probably make an effort to keep up appearances until the last possible moment. But no one does, and no one will. So I can pretty much say exactly what I think.

>Oh, yes, the acknowledgements. I think not. I did it. I did it all, by myself.

https://scsh.net/docu/html/man.html

Fair enough, it may be that the warning is just a generic one slapped on all their old repeats, but I do think that commissioning a new ten minute introduction from Mary Beard is going above and beyond. I haven't seen it so didn't want to speak too much on it, but from what I gathered it's a mixture of measured praise and blame for Clarke's eurocentrism.

>I have Civilisation in hardcopy

It's a good series, I would recommend it if you haven't already seen it. (My biggest gripe with the BBC rebroadcasting it is that it prompted them to take down from youtube the copy I was in the middle of watching!) By the way, for a more xenophilic production of similar scope, you might wish to take a look at The Silk Road[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silk_Road_(Japanese_TV_ser...

[0] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-is-the-bbc-censuring... They also commissioned a ten-minute preface talk by Mary Beard but as I couldn't watch this myself (it's only on the BBC iplayer for which I will not sign up) I shall refrain from comment.

As a lagniappe (not a word we have in my country, by the way), I share this rather cruel Pound story which may nonetheless, as it did me, amuse you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auberon_Waugh#Waugh.27s_views (2nd paragraph, or look for 'Pound')

It's worse than I thought. They've already managed to mimick the median HN user perfectly!

Oh, I see. We actually discussed Pound about four years ago - just a little back and forth about the ABC of Reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24196681

>What's your explanation of why Pound went Fascist?

I'm not sure I particularly have one; I haven't read any of his longer political or cultural (i.e. non-literary) works. I just think it's silly to correlate an approach to translation that you dislike with fascism. Especially as I'm not sure it even makes sense on its own terms: I can only read your comment as 'lazy translator? Figures that he would be a fascist', but if I imagine the type of translation a fascist would approve of, the approach I picture is fastidious, fussy, concerned with fidelity to the point of stickler-ishness. (Isn't that from where we get 'grammar nazi'?)

And oh, well, since you ask I'll take a shy at it: my vague sense is that he became fascist because saw a society in decline due to it becoming more and more a sham society: opulence without virtue, power without vigour, money no longer tied to actually existing goods. (Of course, all of this shades easily into antisemitism.) He saw fascism as the answer; It's easier to see in retrospect that it wasn't.

Graffiti is already plural, or at least uncountable.

Not Asimov's Nightfall?

I really think this is a dying art, by the way. If you see a Shakespeare production, at least here in the UK, the actors older than about sixty are able to imbue the lines with that underpinning iambic rhythm; the younger actors don't know how or don't bother. For me, that means they don't really catch that song-like quality. I really think those older actors might be the last generation to properly know how to scan.

>Some of the best political speeches have that kind of song-like rhythm, although they aren't verse. I'm thinking of e.g. Churchill, or the Gettysburg Address.

Incidentally, somewhere I came across Arthur Quiller-Couch discussing this. He used as his example this speech of Edmund Burke, which he claimed achieved its power by means of hidden iambic pentameter:

>The calculation of profit in all such wars is false. On balancing the account of such wars, ten thousand hogsheads of sugar are purchased at ten thousand times their price. The blood of man should never be shed but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for our family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for our kind. The rest is vanity; the rest is crime.

He points out that three fragments are actually iambic lines:

>Are purchased at ten thousand times their price... >Be shed but to redeem the blood of man... >The rest is vanity; the rest is crime.

Of course, this was in a time when the audience's ear (though perhaps not conscious mind) would be better attuned to that rhythm.

edit: there's actually a great example in the article: "No man’s pie is freed from his ambitious finger".

  Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
  Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.