1. I had my first angry parent encounter this week: someone not happy with one of my assignment policies. Sample from the conversation:

“I think you’re being very unprofessional.”
“How so?”
“You have a very poor attitude.”
“Can you tell me how?”
“You’re too terse.”

An unpleasant experience, but an inevitable one. In any case, the policy still stands and my co-workers and boss all backed me up, so I’ll call it a win.

2. From history class this week:

“Attila the Hun essentially partied himself to death.”

3. Finally reached the end of the Revolutionary War in US History. I shared the famous story of artist Benjamin West (who was an American-born artist living in London and a friend of King George despite his pro-rebel sympathies) being asked by the King what he thought George Washington would do if America became independent. West answered that he thought Washington would return to private life. King George answered that, if he did, he would be the greatest man in the world.

I like that story because it reflects so well of both men: Washington for indeed giving up his command and foregoing the chance to become dictator at the height of his power and popularity, and King George for recognizing and appreciating what such a move would mean and how few men would ever take it.

As Thackeray said in The Newcombes, Washington’s courage and nobility were truly worthy of a better cause.

4. I read John W. Campbell’s classic novella Who Goes There? this week, the novella that was adapted as The Thing From Another World and then (more directly) as The Thing. It was good; a solid exercise in building paranoia and sci-fi problem solving (if an alien monster could perfectly imitate a human being, right down to his personality and memories, how would you discover who is real and who is a monster?).

Though I will say I think the film versions were better: the 1951 version has juicy characters and sharp dialogue, while the 1982 version creates more of an oppressive sense of paranoia and makes the Thing much more dangerous. Also, Campbell didn’t impress me much as a wordsmith, though that might be because he opens with a rather dull and pedantic exposition dump from MacReady (who looks nothing at all like Kurt Russell, by the way) that kind of killed the first impression.

5. Something else that stood out was the strong Lovecraft influence. In particular, both this story and At the Mountains of Madness feature an eerie, prolonged windstorm foreshadowing the events to come.

Here’s Campbell’s version:

“And four hundred miles due south is the South Polar Plateau. You
have asked me at various times why it gets warmer here when the
wind rises, and most of you know. As a meteorologist I’d have
staked my word that no wind could blow at -70 degrees – that no
more than a 5 mile wind could blow at -50, without causing
warming due to friction with the ground, snow and ice, and the air
itself.

“We camped there on the lip of that ice-drowned mountain range
for twelve days. We dug our camp into the blue ice that formed the
surface, and escaped most of it. But for twelve consecutive days
the wind blew at 45 miles an hour. It went as high as 48, and fell to
41 at times. The temperature was -63 degrees. It rose to -60 and
fell to -68. It was meteorologically impossible, and it went on
uninterruptedly for twelve days and twelve nights

And here’s Lovecraft:

None of us, I imagine, slept very heavily or continuously that morning; for both the excitement of Lake’s discovery and the mounting fury of the wind were against such a thing. So savage was the blast, even where we were, that we could not help wondering how much worse it was at Lake’s camp, directly under the vast unknown peaks that bred and delivered it. McTighe was awake at ten o’clock and tried to get Lake on the wireless, as agreed, but some electrical condition in the disturbed air to the westward seemed to prevent communication. We did, however, get the Arkham, and Douglas told me that he had likewise been vainly trying to reach Lake. He had not known about the wind, for very little was blowing at McMurdo Sound despite its persistent rage where we were.

Lovecraft is less specific – doesn’t get into the scientific problems with the wind, or even try to claim that the wind was impossible – but just for that reason it creates more of a sense of unease and uncanniness in the reader. Campbell is really too precise, throwing exact temperatures and scientific principles at the reader to try to convey that the wind is unnatural. But the very precision kills the imagination (most people can’t picture the difference between -50 degrees and -70 degrees) and so makes it a matter of raw assertion (“trust me, this shouldn’t happen”). Lovecraft never tells us just how strong or how cold the wind was: it’s rising during their last conversation with the camp and grows worse through the night.

Moreover, Lovecraft sets his narrator at the main camp, away from the epicenter of the wind storm. This spares him from directly describing the worst of the storm and leaves the reader to imagine, along with the narrator, “if it’s this bad here, what’s it like at the other camp right in the source of it?” He also implies the unnatural nature of the wind by noting that it doesn’t reach the ship, meaning it’s isolated to this one region. Lovecraft, as is his wont, leans heavily on the reader’s own imagination to picture a roaring Antarctic wind that blows down out of the huge, frozen mountain range far over the horizon.

To speak anecdotally, Lovecraft’s version stuck with me from the moment I read it as one of the many stand-out images of the story. Campbell’s made me wince a little for how flat it fell by comparison (consider the fact that it stood out as something to talk about in an overall pretty strong story).

6. As a rule, I find less precision in description tends to be better. Not always, but you really need a specific reason to be precise. Telling the exact temperature and speed of the wind makes it less impactful, not more, than simply calling it a roaring wind or a rising fury. Because, of course, most readers don’t think in terms of numbers: they don’t think “seventy degrees below zero” they thing “freezing, polar temperatures.” The latter creates more of an impression in the reader’s mind, because, again, most people can’t picture seventy below, but everyone can picture “freezing cold.” Calling a tree “sixty feet high” is less effective than saying it is a “towering giant of the forest.”

Unless it’s important to be precise, or unless it’s part of the character of the speaker/narrator to be precise, always opt for the more evocative or streamlined approach.

7. Submitted for your approval: the Manichee Manatee: