I'm taking a beginner's drawing class at North Seattle Community College. Today, we started on perspective. We began by watching a 45-minute video by David Hockney, where he contrasts three paintings: a Canaletto painting of Venice, and two Chinese scrolls painted 70 years apart.

The Canaletto is a classic two-point linear perspective painting. Both of the Chinese scrolls show trips by the emperor along the Grand Canal. The first one, by Wang Hui, is 27 inches high and 72 feet wide! It uses multiple perspective to show scenes, in a manner that is strange to my Western eyes. Hockney demonstrates how effective it is. For example, he shows a corner where two streets meet at right angles. On the "up" street, the viewer is on the left, looking right, at the left side of the houses; on the street coming from the left, we see the right side of the houses. I've made it sound like a mess but it works. The scroll is a marvel of teeming humanity in tiny detail. Most of the figures are scarcely larger than Hockney's fingernail.

He contrasts it unfavorably with a scroll painted of a similar trip by the emperor's grandson, after Western missionaries had imported their notions of perspective. The second scroll is flat and lifeless, though the perspective is more "correct" to our eyes.

Worth seeing if you can find a copy.

On Saturday, I bought Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince at CostCo. On leaving, the checker told me that I had bought the 887th copy at that store. This was 1pm, three hours after opening, so they were selling at the rate of five per minute.

I started reading it last night. After two chapters, when I had seen far too many references to earlier books that I didn't recall, I decided that it was time to re-read the earlier books. I'm a fast reader, but I don't retain material very well.

In the first chapter of the first book, I came across an ironically prophetic statement, made by Professor McGonagall as she and Professor Dumbledore are leaving Baby Moses, er, Harry on the Dursleys's doorstep:

He'll be famous -- a legend -- I wouldn't be surprised if today was known as Harry Potter day in the future -- there will be books written about Harry -- every child in our world will know his name!

This of course was written when J.K. Rowling was an unknown, when the thought of her being a millionaire, much less a billionaire, was unthinkable.

I've been a fan of both Bernard Cornwell and Patrick O'Brian for a number of years. Both are known for their historic fiction set in the Napoleonic Wars.

Cornwell has written 20 books about Richard Sharpe, a rough and ready British Army officer, up from the ranks. Cornwell excels at writing battle scenes, capturing the smells and sounds, the noise and confusion, the blood and the gore. Some of them were turned into a TV miniseries in the mid-1990s, with Sean Bean as Sharpe.

O'Brian wrote 20 novels about Captain Jack Aubrey and Dr. Stephen Maturin of the Royal Navy. The Russell Crowe movie Master and Commander was based on a couple of the books.

I recently finished the latest Sharpe book, Sharpe's Escape. Near the end, there's an advertising section, which says

and The Economist proclaimed Bernard Cornwell, "The direct heir to Patrick O'Brian."

Nonsense! They're both fine writers, in their own ways, but O'Brian is a much better novelist than Cornwell.

The Sharpe books are fun, but formulaic. Sharpe makes an enemy, usually an officer on his own side or the other side; Sharpe is bloody-minded and stubborn; Sharpe fights battles; Sharpe gets laid; the enemy (usually) gets his comeuppance. Thomas of Hookton (The Grail Quest series) is just Sharpe with a longbow instead of a rifle. Cornwell is capable of more ambitious work, such as the Arthur books, but most of his writing is simple adventure fiction.

There's plenty of adventure in the Aubrey-Maturin novels too, but O'Brian is a much keener, more philosophical observer, who brings depth to his characters. Patrick O'Brian's naval mastery does a better job of elaborating on this than I can.