Try and Kill It

Robert Pirkola · 21 Nov 2014, 17:08 · from 2014-November.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: rpirkola at hotmail.com (Robert Pirkola)
Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2014 17:08:30 +0000
Subject: (urth) Try and Kill It
Message-ID: <BAY172-W24BC1AA3E62CDE780D8B35DF770 at phx.gbl>

Well, I was particularly enamored of *Two Years Before the Mast* by Richard Henry Dana, Jr., as it
was full of good information about sailing and ships and how to operate them in general while also
being an amazing story full of interesting characters that give a good account of California before it
became a bustling economy. ?"The Gold?Bug" by Poe was fun for purposes of unearthing some?
of the tropes of buried treasure/pirate lore,
as was *Treasure Island* (which led me to watch the film version with Wallace Beery as Long John Silver
just last night which was a real delight. ?He was given the most lovable send-off that ever a bloodthirsty
murderous dog like him could expect.) ?I am about 40 pages into *Captains Courageous* right now and am
absolutely hooked (my first Kipling I believe). ?*Billy Budd* is supposed to be next but I am rather anxious
to get back to Wolfe. ?I also ordered *A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious?
Pirates* ostensibly written by Captain Charles Johnson. ?It was actually put together by Daniel Defoe and has
passages on several of the pirates mentioned in *Pirate Freedom*'s dedication page so I thought it could
be worthwhile source material, so I'm looking forward to that. ?

I was actually flirting with *On Stranger Tides* while ordering *A General History* having heard
recommendations for Powers from listers. ?I haven't read him myself. ?As for other contemporary
novels of piracy, I have had Crichton's *Pirate Latitudes* laying about my house since his passing
but haven't read it. ?I suppose now is a good a time as any.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net