Re: [ATM] re; Best book to learn mirror making

[Woodchuck <djv@bedford.net>]

On Sat, 16 Oct 2004, Mark Holm wrote:

> Ah yes, Richard.
>
> Richard has a point buried in his sarcasm.  The ATM 1, 2 & 3 books are
> over 50 years old.  Some portions date back into the 1920's or 30's.
> That is long enough that many things in them are seriously out of date.

Why, some of the illustrations go back to the 1840's!  I even seem
to recall a picture of Newton's Telescope slipping by the Ministry
of Memories.

 ...
> Texerau has a tendency to make dogmatic statements.  Some of the authors
> in the ATM books are even worse this way.  These statements have an
> amazing ability to get under Richard's skin.  Read any of these books
> with an open mind, realizing that there are many ways to skin a cat, and
> better methods have often been found.

This style of writing (indirect, passive voice, authoritative-sounding
statements, assertiveness) is called "written English" or in Texereau's
case, "written French".  These are two languages that are dead on
the one hand and I presume dying on the other.  Once such languages
were used exclusively for scientific or technical printed matter.  There
still exist "written German" and "written Russian".  ("Written Czech",
for a good example, even has a separate pronuciation and grammar, but
the Language of Heroes is too obscure for wide use.)  In "written
English", "written English" was written "literary English".

When first I read Texereau I thought, "Ah, Franco-techno-[explitive
for the ultimate organ of digestion] style!  What a treat!" Pictures
of Dr Texereau suggested I was on the right track: heavy-rimmed Art
Nouveau spectacles, Pompadour'd hair, a certain style of dark suit,
a certain set to the mouth.  I could smell the Gauloise cigarettes
in my mind.  This would be a welcome dose of French rationalism
and clarity, a relief from the Teutonic style I was accustomed to
at the time.

Since those days of darkness and authority, however, men have learned
not to write, but to record extempraneous speech, making themselves
the court-stenographers of their thoughts.  This in itself is no
evil, if one's thoughts were forged in the mold of the classics,
and ordered themselves elegantly and expressively, and could be
revised before recording -- a fine example being the writing of the
immortal GIBBON, who would compose each paragraph aloud, before
writing it down once.  (He seldom rewrote).  The limpid prose of
many a Frenchman stands also in neglected testimony to the art of
written language, even extending to fiction, such as the exquisite
opening paragraphs of Flaubert's "Madame Bovary", even when translated.

But since the advent of cultural Bolshevism, and the enlightenment
that has sprung forth like Demeter from the anatomy of Zeus, though
from a region nearer the seat of his stool than the Seat of his
Reason, men must not only write as they think, but think as they've
been told, instructed in this artlessness by people called "teachers",
themselves too often incapable of either thought or writing.  In
these less knighted, indeed benighted, times, men must write as if
they and their readers were small children, producing sentences
that assert nothing, that offend no one, that exhibit nothing that
can cause a charge of elitism or even forethought to be lodged
against them in the new Peoples Courts, including the dread vice
of orthography, which we now know leads all too often to the tragedy
of punctuation.  And God forbid that a sentence might ramble, that
is, have subordinate clauses or a semicolon.

One must abase and efface oneself in every phrase, for that is the
only way to communicate.  Computer programs even exist to force
this liberation upon those still under the influence, nay! still the
slaves of the Tyrant of Grammar, the Cruel Mistress of Style, and
the Fickle Bitch-Goddess of Taste.

Old Way:  "Thus it has been observed since the days when men still
disputed mastery of the earth with rough beasts, that twice two is
four, and I commend that axiom to your memory".

New Way:  "well...and stuff...if u do the math and stuff...  yull
cee that and like 2 and two is fore...but that duznt mene theat ur
opinion is rong so what do u think..."

Let me put it another way: those who are intimidated by the
old-fashioned style usually misapprehend that there was a time when
the truth was thought best identified by argument about it, rather
than by consensussing [sic], that is, by teasing it forth from its
infallible lairs of the minds of novices in the very art being
probed.  Thus, before the cloud of modern conversational prose style
"darkened the face of learning" [Gibbon], truths were put forth as
assertions.  In one's schooling in an art, one took these assertions
and applied them, testing them with mind and hand.  If they failed,
they were discarded.  New books were written from time to time,
when the fabric of the old had become too moth-eaten.

"Today everyone is a genius, but no one can draw a hand." (Cezanne).

For some reason, the same textbook served to teach geometry for two
thousand years, all across the world.  (Euclid).  Then skoolteeches
discovered "royalties", publishers discovered "lobbies", and printers
revealed to the world glues, papers and bindings that would fail
in a year; not a flaw, since the ideas committed to these emphemeral
tomes can seldom survive a year's attention, so rapidly does knowledge
accumulate in these enlightened times.  Soon geometry was not taught
at all, as is evident from every thread here concerning "where
should the diagonal go".  Books were replaced at first by pamphlets,
then pamphlets were replaced by broadsides, and finally literacy
was itself replaced by the recitations of shamans.  The recitals
of shamans are now collected electronically and indexed, so that a
trip through the internet replaces a trip through a library.  Sic
transit gloria mundi.

> Kriege & Berry's  "The Dobsonian Telescope"  is very well organized and
> written.  It is primarily about the mechanical end of big Dob's.  You
> won't get an absolutely cutting edge Dob working from their plans, but
> you won't be in the dark ages either.  There is a fairly good appendix
> on mirror making, especially large, thin mirror making, by Bob Kestner.
> It's not really an introduction to mirror making, and isn't as complete
> as a beginner should have, but is a good help for the big stuff.

Oh, and thank you, Mark, for writing well!

Dave
-- 
        In each of us, there burns a soul of a woodchuck.
        In every generation a few are chosen to prove it.

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