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Europe Central

2008-12-04T08:09:00.000-08:00

Dear Europe Central, i've been reading you for a couple weeks, and i think we need to talk about some things. Page ninety is just the beginning of what could potentially be an eight hundred-page relationship. The beginning of a relationship should be full of romance and heady excitement. Mystery, confusion, and a sense of greater things to come you've definitely given me, but i find i'm missing those other charms. And really i'm not sure who you think you are to be insulting my intelligence and education in such an offhand, non-flirtatious manner. Also i sometimes wake in the middle of the night and worry whether or not i can trust you. I play back certain scenes and small things you said earlier and feel a sort of hollow of dread open in my chest. For example, this first-person "I" you keep mentioning: i know you've been with your share of narrators in the past and i'm sure there will be more in the future, but i'm starting to suspect that you're using "I" to be the voice of the entire German People, or worse the Germans and the Soviets, and at some point i'll have to just say enough is enough.

So, i don't know what you've heard about me from other books, but i'm not the kind of person who feels they have to finish a relationship just because they've made it to page ninety or whatever, so i'm giving you fair warning: let's see a change in that attitude when next we spend time together, and it wouldn't hurt to put out with a sign of plot or even an tangible character or two.

Yrs, Elenzil

The Yiddish Policeman's Union

2008-11-03T23:27:00.000-08:00

I'm nearly done with Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union, and it's great.
I read Kavalier and Clay a while ago, and it was good, but i didn't think it was great. The Yiddish Policeman's Union is great. Where K & C seemed to go astray and lose itself in filling the requirements of a pulp comic book, the YPU is much more focused, tighter, and the characters and story-telling benefit from it. I still have some complaints - for example i don't think it was necessary to have the protagonists own personal story turn out unexpectedly to be intimately tied up in the story of the antagonists: doing so sort of dilutes the .. pedigree of the hero's motives, imo, and is unnecessary.

Here's the overview:

the year is 2008.
the place is Sitka, Alaska. The past is one in which we're not sure who won World War II, but we do know that the Jews were thoroughly rousted from Israel and were generally unwelcome the world over, including in the US, and in the late 40s Sitka was essentially turned into a giant Jewish ghetto. .. With the proviso that after 60 years, the chosen people would have to vacate Sitka and move on to places unnamed. So it's 2008, and the next rousting is due.
our hero is a hardboiled cop mourning his lost marriage and the upcoming eradication of a culture he both loves and derides. in good hardboiled cop tradition, he is now living in a flop house, and exploring mourning through the lens of cheap and strong booze. His partner is also his cousin, who is racially half Indian (American) and culturally 100% Jewish, and has a poor but flourishing family.
There's a murder, there's plots, there's backstabbing, there's surprises. There's lots and lots of Jewish words and Jewish this and Jewish that, which i love. I guess it's about one third [Jewish] political story, one third adventure story, and one third Jewish cultural portrait. It's a great mix, and Chabon's prose has only improved since K&C.

Other recent books:
The Crying of Lot 49 - reading this in half-page sprints while lounging on the can. That's the only way i can possibly swallow this stuff.

Words and Rules by Steven Pinker - this is a whole book about irregular verbs. i love irregular verbs, and so does Steven Pinker. but i'm not going to finish the book because he loves them exactly as far as they promote the pedagogical agenda of his theory of cognition.

The Night People by Jack FInney - this came up one day when Vivianna and Mike Plotz and i rode bikes over the golden gate bridge and down into Tiburon, a route which takes you through Strawberry, which is the sleepy little town from which the hijinx of The Night People radiate. It's a great story. It's in a collection titled 3 by Finney, and seems to be the clear best of the lot.

I read The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, by Diana Jones. This calls for a picture. .. Yeah. It was actually pretty fun, a temporary trip back to junior high.

DFW

2008-11-03T22:52:00.000-08:00

re DFW.
it's ironic:
i was having a rough few days and had been feeling poopy for a while and was pondering ways to de-poopify my outlook on things, and i said to myself "maybe i should re-read IJ again. that always cheers me up." and it's true: without fail sitting down to read a page or twenty in IJ has never failed to make me feel like a slightly snazzier person. as if i were granted a temporary gift of some small part of DFW's wit and outlook. the additional irony here is that i was considering this rereading that very thursday just before his death. that evening i was out on the town and both myle and kevin texted me late in the night with the bad news.
one is reminded a bit of Richard Corey, of course. it's eerie and intimidating that someone as smart and definitively successful as DFW could eradicate his own map, as he might say. especially in view of the obvious wealth of knowledge DFW had around depression itself. (If you don't know, IJ deals with many many topics, among them is Depression with a capital D, and its treatment of it is highly informed and insightful) and of course one is also reminded of the constant theme in IJ about the danger and stress of achieving success, of making the cover of Tennis Annual or whatever, of creating one's opus. In many passages the entire raison of the enfield tennis academy is to prepare players to survive their own success in "the show". Haunting and intimidating.

Well, i have more to say but don't really feel like saying it here.

rest in peace, david.

here are the unknown words from that third reading.
many, many more than from the second, curiously.
my rules were: "words which i either don't know at all or i'm not confident enough with to deploy them in a sentence. excluding medical terms and other jargon."
i think this last time around i was more honest about the second part: it wasn't sufficient for a word to merely be familiar: if i would be scared to use it in conversation, then it went in the list. i think also i was more patient and dilligent about actually writing words down.

also there were six additional words i ran out of room to write in the back cover so they're in the front, unphotographed:
p. 952 tucking ("billow and pop like a tucking sail")
p. 952 seraglio
p. 953 kyphotic
p. 965 piaffer
p. 967 Carmelite
p. 969 practicum

GOD DAMN IT

2008-09-18T09:34:00.000-07:00

motherfucking god damn it.
RIP DFW.

The Crossing

2008-04-06T17:59:00.000-07:00

just finished Cormac McCarthy's second book in "the border trilogy", The Crossing. With this one i really have to weigh in and say that i now think Cormac McCarthy is full of shit but he doesn't have to be. Reading The Crossing is like reading some of the best bits of Hemingway with the worst of The Celestine Prophecy and The Adventures of Don Juan's illegitimate child. McCarthy can tell a fantastic story but it's as if he himself doesn't believe that either the reader or the author or both can appreciate anything transcendental without discoursing as if he were Foucault and explicitly defining terms for us.

But in between all the philosophical sophomorism, The Crossing is a great story. Set in the late 1930s and early 1940s, it follows a young cowboy through an epic arc of bereavement as he wanders through barren mexican and spiritual landscapes. If you can find someone who will take the time to just tear out the bad parts, the remainder is a great book by an author with an unmatched storytelling voice.

To his credit, McCarthy's latest, The Road, seemed to do a much better or at least more confident job of communicating interior journeys with way less resort to explicit soliloquy. I also plan on reading Cities of the Plain, the final book of "The Border Trilogy".

The Road, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel, Uncle Tungsten, and IJ

2008-02-24T22:57:00.000-08:00

Just this hour finished Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Probably anybody reading this has already read it and felt the strange feelings one feels when reading that last passage about the past's trout in underwater glens, muscled and smelling of moss in the hand - so evocative! - but for those as haven't, a quick synopsis. The Road is published in 2006, and posits a nuclear apocalypse in say about 2006, followed by a nuclear winter in which the entire world has turned to ash and nothing grows and nothing lives save a very, very few humans* who for the most part are cannibal and entirely wretched. The action follows a father and his son about five years into the post-apocalypse.

Every scene in The Road is predicated on hopelessness. There is clearly, starkly, no future even conceivable. But the book's magic is that it communicates hope and love. I can't/won't really try to describe it further than that. It's good.

The only other McCarthy novel i've read is All The Pretty Horses, and my only complaint about both of them is that they're too damn short. I feel like McCarthy is still writing his Farewell To Arms, and i look forward greatly to his For Whom The Bell Tolls.

* why humans walk the earth when cockroaches and grasses don't is a bit unclear to me, but otherwise the technical points seem pretty solid.

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Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell was loaned to me by Niki, and i'm super glad that it was. Thanks Niki! It's a good two or three inches of solid modern fairy tale telling and i enjoyes every millimeter of it. Set in Napoleonic Brittain (ie, early 1800s), Susanna Clarke's tale is that of a supremely pedantic and spiritually cramped man named Norrell who sets about resurrecting "English Magic", and gets more than he bargained for. (Sorry, i couldn't resist)
If you've ever enjoyed a Piers Anthony or Terry Pratchet novel, you'll likely enjoy this. It's sort of like Harry Potter for grown-ups. I do have to concurr with some folks that the ending is a bit unsupported, but otherwise a fine book.

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Jonathan inspired me to get us a couple kilogram-hunks of tungsten, which is one of the most dense materials available without straying into the truly exotic and radioactive. It's twice as heavy as lead and very satisfying to hold in the hand. Along the way i stumbld on a book Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood by Oliver Sacks. It's pretty much as titled, stories of growing up in pre- and post-world war II London, with a family rich in scientific and intellectual spirit. The sotries are great and also it has a bunch of interesting facts about various elements and science history.

the stack

2007-11-10T20:26:00.000-08:00

this is the current stack on the table.
with like one exception they've all been read, but few blogged.
bottom-to-top (roughly chronological)

Martin Amis - House of Meetings
Hemingway - For Whom the Bell
Lee Smolin - The Trouble with Physics
David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas (unblogged)
Annette Kobak - Isabelle [Eberhardt] (unblogged)
Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby (unblogged)
Robert Righter - The Battle Over Hetch Hetchy
Cormac McCarthy - All the Pretty Horses
William Vollmann - The Royal Family (unblogged, incredibly)
Carter/Sokol - He's Scared, She's Scared (unread, unblogged)
Gray Brechin - Imperial San Francisco
Vonnegut Jr. - God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (unblogged)
Salinger - Catcher in the Rye (unblogged)
Nevada Barr - Hard Truth
William Gibson - Spook Country
Anne Rice - Pandora (would like to say this is unread, but it's not. unblogged)
Rowling - Harry Potter the Last Book (unblogged)
Ann Coulter - Slander (unread, origin unknown, unblogged)
various - Cthulhu 2000 (very, very read, unblogged)
Jack Chalker - The Moreau Factor (unfinished, unblogged)
Gwynn/Blotner - Fiction of J. D. Salinger (unread, unblogged)

spook country

2007-10-27T19:15:00.000-07:00

Spook Country is William Gibson's latest. For those who may not be aware, Gibson pretty much fathered the science fiction genre of Cyberpunk. Think mona lisa overdrive, johnny mnuemonic (sp?), and the matrix. What fewer folks know is that his previous book, Pattern Recognition definitively left cyberpunk and even science-fiction in general well behind (or in the nursery, if you want to be mean) and graduated Gibson into straight-up Literature. And it's an excellent book, you should read it, whomever you are. Spook Country is cut from the mold right next to Pattern Recognition: it's obsessed with contemporary life, especially with the presence and role of branding in our world, stars a down-to-earth, recognizable female protagonist, doesn't rely on jargon, nor (almost) on technological marvels, varies its senetence-structure and uses the occasional big word. In short, it's a great and well-written book, but not that far off from Pattern Recognition.

words: (several not english, i think)

p. 6	semiotics
p. 24	prelapsarian
p. 52	apport
p. 68	orishas
p. 69	Santero
p. 102	Tulpa
p. 117	Cuirass
p. 161	oxford*
p. 208	foxfire**
p. 315	Asanas

* ".. a three-eyelet black alligator oxford in his hand."
** "The late-afternoon sun dressed the passing woords with Maxfield Parish foxfire, and perhaps it was that elliptical flicker generated by the train's motion that called these beings forth."

also, great author photo.

Hard Truth

2007-10-27T19:05:00.000-07:00

Pop gave me Hard Truth by Nevada Barr. It's a sort of niche-mystery, similar to those of John Dunning (ex-cop turned rare book collector), except this is park-ranger-cum-detective-cum-action-hero. Basically, it's a fine story with lots of nice characters and description of Rocky Mountain National Park, but towards the end it takes a turn for the shockingly graphically horrible, and altho i finished it i sort of wished i hadn't. If you're a silence of the lambs person, this might be for you.

For Whom The Bell Tolls

2007-10-27T14:16:00.000-07:00

Like a dog to its vomit, me to Hemingway.
I afraid that i can't say enough good about For Whom The Bell Tolls. This is one of the finest books i've ever read.

From the back of the jacket: "Hemingway did more to change the style of English prose than any other writer in the twentieth century ... and was known for his tough, terse prose." - I take serious issue with
both these statements. Taking the second one first, he may be known for his tough, terse prose, but to say that his tough terse prose is a defining feature is like saying Yosemite is famous for the texture of the granite. Hemingway is all about characters. His people are absolutely believable, and here's what i love most about him: He loves and cherishes each of his characters. Certainly, terrible events befall them and many of them are assholes, but Hemingway always treats the characters with respect and grants them dignity. This may sound insignificant, but i think it's something few authors are able to do. I picture Hemingway cradling each of the people he wrote about in his hands. Which brings us to the first statement above, that he was an enourmous influence on writing last century. That may be, but not enourmous enough. If there are more writers who convey the simple honesty and gentleness of H. in their prose, please, please let me know.

Some specifics about For Whom The Bell Tolls.
The title comes from a John Donne poem, part of which H. quotes as introduction:

No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee. (italics his)

.. picking up this post after it lay fallow for a few months ..

well, instead of just further lauding, let me just say this book is firmly in my Top Seven and move right on to the style of cursing i desperately want to adopt from it, what must surely be known as The Soiled Milk School of Epithets. eg, a Soiled Milk Schooler upon hearing that a compatriot of his is perhaps worried about tomorrow's raid on the bridge: "I obscenity in the milk of thy worry". In response to braggadocio: "I relieve myself in the milk of thy mother". And so on. Look for it by name!

Imperial San Francisco

2007-08-06T23:32:00.000-07:00

I read this a while ago; Michelle got it for me.

Imperial San Francisco - Urban Power, Earthly Ruin, by Gray Brechin is a great history of the abuses of power in the early history of San Francisco. While i'm obviously all in favour of exposing the crimes which underly most american fortunes, i was sort of hoping for a bit more breadth of discussion.

The book primarily recounts the history of the DeYoung's, the Hearsts, the Scott's, and the University in Berkeley as uniformly rapacious and morally bankrupt; with references enough to be convincing, if you need to be convinced of that sort of thing.

All in all well worth the read.

On quick quote about our friend Hearst

In 1945 .. His attorney, John Francis Neylan, was instrumental in breaking strikes while Hearst kept in close touch with him from Europe. During the publisher's visit to Germany that summer, Adolf Hitler invited him to Berlin for a long, private interview.
.. Shortly after [an alleged deal w/ the Nazis], Hearst's Sunday newspapers began syndicating columns by General Hermann Goering and Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, giving 30 million Americans the Nazi point of view without space for rebuttal. Simultaneously, Hearst launched his crusade against treason in the classroom and for loyalty oaths.

One of the most charming aspects of the book is the collection of political cartoons from the old SF newspaper, The Wasp. These cartoons are amazingly biting when cast against the prevailing climate of the times.

All The Pretty Horses

2007-08-06T23:15:00.000-07:00

I picked up All The Pretty Horses at a bookstore one day when i had nothing better to read for the sole reason that the title reminded me of one of my favorite Current 93 songs, "All The Pretty Little Horses". I've no doubt that Cormac McCarthy's title is a reference to the same traditional song/lullabye, which everyone should check out at their earliest etc.

ATPHs put me pretty far off at first.
I didn't even know that McCarthy is one of our american literary giants,
but i sensed the onanistic flexing of great literary testicles of steel and came pretty close to just putting the book down. But i read on. And thank god, by the second or third chapter the narrative voice stopped competing with Hemingway and just started telling a story, and the story was really good.

It's a coming-of-age story of a young man who's sixteen years old and frankly already light-years more mature than i'll ever be, but it's still sweet. He and a friend journey south on horseback in the 1950s from Texas into Mexico and along the way pick up an even younger kid of about thirteen, also on horseback. Along the way they have some fun and love but mostly misadventure, and more than one person end up dead and our hero manages to impart the sense that all this vast emptiness is ripe for meaning nonetheless.

It's beautifully written.

The Poincaré Conjecture

2007-08-06T22:35:00.000-07:00

The Poincaré Conjecture by Donal O'Shea is a great book.
It's a math history book, and i'm a sucker for math history, but this one has a little extra charm because it traces a direct path about a single math problem from it's precursors in ancient times to Poincaré and the other great topologists of the late 1800s and finally to its conclusion in 2002/2003 by an almost unbelievably reclusive Russian mathematician, Grigori Perelman.

Considering that it refused the advances of the world's best topological minds for a century, the Conjecture is an amazingly simple question, and i'll summarize O'Shea's summary here:

Imagine that you live on a very large world, but that the visibility on that world is pretty short - maybe you can only see five miles in any direction at any time. Furhter imagine that the world has only ambient lighting; ie there's no convenient Sun or other absolute referent. And you want to set about building a globe of your world. So you start at some point and map out a 5x5 area, and then move nearby and map out another 5x5, and so on. Eventually, you've mapped out the entire surface of your world - that is, all of your 5x5 maps ajoin to other 5x5 maps and there's no gaps. in other words: you've been everywhere you can be, and made maps of everywhere. Therefore, you know your world is finite. It isn't infinite. Furthermore, you haven't encountered any edges; you haven't fallen off the edge of the world.

To Summarize:
your world is finite, has no edge, and you've got a set of 5x5 mile maps covering every inch of it.

The Question:
how do you know if you live on a topological sphere (like our world), or a donut ?

bear in mind that topologically speaking, a sphere = a cube = a jam jar,
and a donut = a coffee cup = a drinking straw.

The Answer:
[in a very tiny font, which you should copy-n-paste elsewhere to actually read]

what you do, is you start somewhere and drag out a piece of string behind you, go walking as far as you please and come back to where you started. maybe you walk in a five-foot circle, maybe you walk all the way around the world. then you try to take up the slack by pulling in the string behind you. now, on a sphere like our earth, you'll be able to pull the string in all the way so that the loop contracts all the way down to nothing. this will be the case no matter what path you walked. but on a donut, there are paths you can walk where you won't be able to pull the string back to a single point. For example if you walk from the outside of the donut to the inside and then around back to the outside. So if all loops can be contracted to a point, you're on a sphere. If not, you're on something more complicated, like a donnut.

SO, GREAT.

There's a way to tell if you're on a sphere or a donut, and Poincaré proved it.

But here's the conjecture.
This simple method works in three dimensions. But does it work in four dimensions ? Five ? Six ? Spheres and donuts both have well-defined partners in those higher dimensions, but Poincaré was unable to prove the simple sphere-or-donut technique for them, nor was anyone else.

Until about forty years later, when someone proved it was true in dimensions eight and higher. And then ten years later someone proved six and seven. And then someone proved five. All that was left was four dimensions. And despite a huge flowering of topology and no lack of attention, proving the Conjecture in four dimensions remained undone for the next fifty years.

The actual mechanism which Perelman used is substantially complex and i certainly couldn't follow along, but it was definitely fascinating. Somewhat moreso by the shadowy character of Perelman, who refused the Fields Medal, and who has yet to attempt to claim the one million dollar prize set on the Conjecture by the Clay Mathematics Institute.

Bookwise, The Conjecture was great. Admittedly i've got a soft spot for math history, without which this might not be all that entertaining; but by God it's good !

One Flew East, One Flew West

2007-06-16T16:22:00.000-07:00

and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Hmm, here seems to be a sign of how crippled my psyche has become: i both regret not reading Ken Kesey's masterpiece earlier because it's, well, a masterpiece, and also regret having now read it, because now it's no longer out there waiting for me to enjoy it again. .. Or something like that. Basically The Cuckoo's Nest floored me with its honesty and more significantly its insight into the relations between people, and between people and the world. Plus it's very well written. (why do i want to write "well-written" ?)

I've been putting off reading this book for years, figuring that it wouldn't be so awesome. I think i got that impression from watching the movie on TV as a kid with my pops.

For them as don't know, it's a story about a wild and wooly con man & brawler (with red hair and an Irish name, making him sort of a Brody O'Shenanigans) who gets himself commited to a mental hospital in order to get out of regular prison. In the hospital he finds an enemy in the form of the Head Nurse, who represents the will of the system to crush the individuality and spirit of you and me. They duke it out. It's amazingly good.

Gonna try to summarize it with just one quote here,
where our hero McMurphy has just learned than many of the people living crappy lives inside the hospital are there by choice, and could sign themselves out any day they pleased but don't.
The narrator here is the narrator of the entire book, a commited half Indian (american) who can hear and speak but pretends he can't:

I dropped back until I was walking beside McMurphy and I wanted to tell him not to fret about it, that nothing could be done, because I could see that there was some thought he was worrying over in his mind like a dog worries over a hole he don't know what's down, one voice saying, Dog, that hole is none of your affair - it's too big and too black and there's a spoor all over the place says bears or something just as bad. And some other voice coming like a sharp whisper out of way back in his breed, not a smart voice, nothing cagey about it, saying, Sic 'im dog, sic 'im!

Brief Update

2007-06-11T07:12:00.000-07:00

am writing from buenos aires.

have many books to write about,
but will just give a quick list and a one-sentence thing here.

wow, i haven't written anything in here since House of Meetings !?

okay, going backwards.

about to read:

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey.

currently reading:

A Good Man Is Hard To Find by Flannery O'Connor.
This book is awesome. Stories similar to Roald Dahl, but even more violent and bitter, and set in the American South.

The Poincaré Conjecture by Donal O'Shea.
Another math history book. I love the math history.
This one involves the epinomous problem which is simple enough to state and seems quite trivial but has stumped mathematics for a century until ever so recently. It has to do with possible shapes of the universe.

Another biography of Isabelle Eberhardt, but i forget which one.

very recently read:

The Bookman's Promise by John Dunning.
Not as good as The Bookman's Wake, but still fun enough.

The Summons by John Grisham.
Wow! I was expecting poor, but this surpassed. I hoped for at least an exciting plot. Seriously nothing happens, there's no meat, the characters are dull, the plot is sloppily thrown together, it's bad.

not so recently read:

For Whom The Bell Tolls by You Know Whom.
Impossible for me to say enough good about this book.

The Royal Family by William Vollman
This ultimate downfall story traces the path of a man in circa 2000 San Francisco from lower middle class private eye to destitute, via falling in love with a street hooker named The Queen of Whores. Very well written, very crass, very depressing. Interesting because it has a lot of local landmarks and such in it.

.. many others.

House of Meetings

2007-03-11T10:46:00.000-07:00

I've been looking forward with gravity to Martin Amis's newest novel, House of Meetings. I think i need to preface saying anything about it by explaining what i was expecting. I'm not sure where i picked up the impression, but i was expecting House of Meetings to be a fictionalization of Amis's non-fiction book about Stalinist USSR, Koba The Dread. Now House of Meetings is certainly set in the horrific world described in Koba, it has the Gulag, denouncings, etc. But fundamentally it's not historical fiction; it's literary fiction with a particular historical stage, if that makes sense. That is, it's a regular story of brotherly rivalry for one woman. It's a very well written story of brotherly rivalry for one woman, but it's certainly not a novelization of Koba. So, i was pretty disappointed, but only because it didn't match my very specific preconceptions.

The crime of not being the book i wanted aside, House of Meetings is an excellently written tale of two brothers and one bombshell. The narrator ends up in the Gulag soon after WWII, and a year or two later, his younger and much uglier brother (who has meanwhile married the bombshell) lands in the same prison camp. As usual, Amis's lead characters are .. baroque ? Magnificent ? Luridly Three Dimensional ? Ever the master of the anti-hero, the narrator is basically an asshole, having "raped my way across europe" as part of the soviet army, and of course, coveting his brother's wife.

So some examples of Amis's wonderful prose.

Describing Zoya, the bombshell, and whom the brothers both refer to as "The Americas" (as in north and south) because of how she's shaped:

So, to encapsulate: Zoya, unlike "all the others," I saw as indivisible. Being indivisible was her prime constituent. Each action involved the whole of her. When she walked, everything swayed. When she laughed, everything shook. When she sneezed - you felt that absolutely anything might happen. And then she talked, when she argued and opposed, across a tabletop, she sedentary belly dance of rebuttal.

.. So obviously the prose is pretty good.

I think that's all i have to say on this one.

The Battle Over Hetch Hetchy, The Bookman's Wake

2007-02-11T10:46:00.000-08:00

i read these two a bit ago. Let's start with The Bookman's Wake by John Dunning. Dunning has a series of mystery/detective novels with a cute twist: the obligatory retired cop has left the nation's finest to open a bookstore and spends his time becoming embroiled in murder and mayhem all centered around [valuable] books ! Brilliant ! Obviously mystery readers love books, so there you go. If you're looking for some not-too-bad fluffy detective stuff, The Bookman's Wake (and i'm sure the other Dunning books) are just about perfect.

The Battle Over Hetch Hetchy: America's Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism was a great read for me. I visited Hetch Hetchy for the first time a couple years ago, and my visit has been retroactively improved quite a bit by this book. For those who don't know, Hetch Hetchy Valley lies within Yosemite National Park, just slightly north of Yosemite Valley itself. The valley was much beloved of the famous John Muir, and was apparently a second Yosemite in scenic value: think rolling meadows flanked by the soaring granite bones of the very earth itself. (purple prose mine) The valley was dammed in the 1920s to provide water to San Francisco, and is now flooded. As a result, San Fransisco has some of the purest tap water in the country, and also generates quite a lot of electricity as well. (Which is then sold to PG&E, who then sells it back to the city and the public) And really, San Francisco water is *good*. The only better tasting tap water i've ever had was in Iceland, so i'm at a loss to explain the ubiquity of Brita water filters in this town - this water is coming straight from the sierras ! Anyhow, on to points of historical interest:

One interesting thing i learned was that San Francisco politics about exactly on hundred years ago was notoriously corrupt, which helped sustain the monopoly of the then only water game in town, the Spring Valley Water Works. When a comparatively above-the-table mayor was elected (James Phelan), he and Spring Valley became enemies. Phelan was the major passion behind damming Hetch Hetchy, and Spring Valley was naturally against it, as it meant an end to their monopoly. Now the interesting part: enter John Muir and half the Sierra Club. I say half because that's about how many were opposed to the dam; the other half thought it was a great idea. So but now we find Muir and the conservationists on the same side of a battle as the corrupt Spring Valley Water Works. This association was manipulated to great end by the opponents of conservation.

Another interesting thing is that in the 20s, San Francisco put forth ballot measures several times to buy the electrical lines owned by PG&E, so that the city could directly distribute the power being generated by Hetch Hetchy. And several times, the people refused to vote for it. We were that close to having actual public power.

Third, in discussing the pros and cons of undamming the river (and almost exclusively the pros), Righter never once mentioned that there's now an established lake ecosystem in the valley which would be destroyed with the dam.

Altho the book is very much predisposed against Hetch Hetchy dam, my personal opinion on breaching it remains that it's a bad idea. Apparently SF can get all the water it needs from other sources, but that just seems like shifting the load. What's done is done, and the main advantage of breaching the dam would be to recover a beautiful valley. In the uncertain global climate conditions facing us, i favour stability and think it would be foolish to give up an established and excellent source of renewable power and water in exchange for yosemite II.

Oh yes, thanks very much to Michelle for seeing this book and thinking i might enjoy it !

Currently i'm reading: Two Anthologies of Science Fiction and For Whom the Bell Tolls. On deck are Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin, and Martin Amis's latest, House of Meetings. I should mention that i await House of Meetings w/ breath bated. It's apparently a fictionalization of Amis's earlier non-fiction work about the horrors of the Stalinist USSR, which affected me greatly.

A Wrinkle in Time, Johnny Magic and the Cardshark Kids, Madame Bovary

2006-12-28T15:51:00.000-08:00

Hillary gave me a copy of Madeline L'Engle's famous A Wrinkle in Time. You wanna some quick reading ? Wow, this book can really be plowed thru. It's as good as you remember it being back in 6th grade, (7th? 5th?) except a good deal less uh wonder-inducing. Definitely this time around i was more charmed by L'Engle's technique as a young-adult's author than by the story itself, but it's still definitely worth rereading. When i first read it, i didn't have the patience/maturity to be interested in the sequels, A Swiftly Tilting Planet and A Wind in the Door, but i'll definitely give them a shot now if they come my way.

So Brandon Bird drew this image of Harrison Ford playing the Magic: The Gathering card Black Lotus: .. which rules, so i printed it out and stuck it with unusually powerful magnets to the outside of my work area at work. Which it was then commented upon by Liz, our project manager, and i frankly was a bit shocked to learn that a project manager and a female, no less, not only recognized magic, but said shit like "yeah! black lotus! tap to add four mana of any color!"* So we talked about Magic and a few days later i found a copy of Johnny Magic and the Card Shark Kids on my desk. It's by David Kushner. Frankly, the writing is terrible. I don't just mean the missing hyphenation in "Card Shark"**, either. I'm talking the *narrator's* voice using terms like "hot babe" and "totally awesome". - Maybe i don't read enough sports writing to appreciate the style. Anyhow, the story itself is pretty interesting: There's a kid who's a serious geek/loser at school: brainy and weird; ergo serious misfit. He finally discovers Magic as a venue in which he excells, and eventually becomes the game's recognized world-champion. From there his interest in cards leads him to join up with a team of lawyers-turned-blackjack sharps. The team was pretty cool, with lots of different roles being played at once, disguises, etc. Then he and some other Magic-heads turned to the World Tournament of Poker, in which our hero didn't actually do so well, but a buddy of his took second. Along the way he totally transforms from fat outcast to trim and handsome man of the world. ..That about sums it up. Also, the narrator has a serious crush on the guy. If you're interested in Magic, it's an interesting book. Otherwise i'd give it a pass.

* possibly not actually said by Liz, but potentially.
** a quick google informs me that apparently the unhyphenated "card shark" has entered the american lexicon as an acceptable idiom. Ditto every other -shark and -sharp word. What's happening to this country.

Meanwhile, i've been slowly working through Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Frankly, i feel a little let down. I was expecting to be shocked, outraged, or at least titillated. At the time i suppose it may have provided all three, but to a modern reader it's less a story of moral bankruptcy than just one woman searching for romance over and over again in relationships where it almost by definition can't be found, and along the way throwing tantrums with her entire life, and how debt can kill. It reminded me of Wuthering Heights but with less drama. Flaubert's prose is for the most part medium (modulo Mildred Marmur's translation from the French, of course) but one passage did, uh, resonate with me, let's say.

Monsieur Bovary, upon discovering a fake receipt placed in his boot by Madame, in order to cover up one of her many affairs:

"How the devil did this get into my boot?"
"It probably fell from the old bill box on the edge of the shelf." From that moment on, her existence was a continuous string of lies, in which she wrapped her love as if in layers of veiling in order to hide it.
Lying became a need, a mania, a pleasure, so much so that if she said she had walked along the right side of the street yesterday, one had to assume it had been the left.

Persepolis 1 & 2

2006-12-28T15:11:00.000-08:00

After the non-fiction on Iran and the Holocaust,
i needed something a little lighter,
and ever the literary hook-up, Sarah once again provided with .. yet more non-fiction about Iran, but this time in comic-book form! So much easier on the spirit. Persepolis 1 & 2 are comic books by Marjane Satrapi which tell the true story of her childhood in Iran during the Islamic Revolution of 1979, adolescence in exile in Vienna, and return to Iran in the late 80s. Persepolis 1 covers the childhood and beginning of exile, and 2 covers the rest. While they're both excellent books, the first was a lot more interesting because it dealt more with topics i'm unfamiliar with: namely seeing one's nation internally overtaken by religious extremists. 2 technically had more action perhaps, but it's the familiar themes of adolescent isolation, frustration, sex and drugs, etc. All in all tho, these books are excellent. The first one is successfully told from the viewpoint of a child of eight or so thru early adolescence. The events of the adult world are filtered thru this viewpoint: her uncle's death as a revolutionary has significance only to the degree by which her uncle is a more romantic figure than her friends' uncles, for example. Or how the sudden requirement that all women wear The Veil (which was actually outlawed in the 40s, then required with the rise of extremism, required in the late 70s.) affected a teenage Satrapi mostly in how it prevented her from dressing in the latest western fashions: Torn jeans, leather jackets, etc. Imagine trying to be a punker while wearing the veil!

Anyhow, the books are very well-done personal and political history.

Eichmann in Jerusalem

2006-11-27T22:16:00.000-08:00

Eichmann in Jerusalem, A Report on the Banality of Evil is Hannah Arendt's interpretation and analysis of the 1961 trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, Nazi bigwig, for crimes against Humanity, war crimes, crimes against the Jewish people, etc. The case was sensational and notable because it took place nearly two decades after the Nuremberg Trials, because Israel had kidnapped Eichamann from Argentina in order to try him, because the trial was in several respects without legal precedent, and because Eichmann himself was terrifyingly both a mass murderer of inconceivable scale and also quite clearly an Everyman.

To cut to the chase, the trial lasted about half a year and found Eichmann guilty of several mortal crimes. The appeal was comparatively brief and found him even more guilty, and Eichmann was swiftly executed.

Eichmann in Jerusalem is extremely difficult to reduce:

Firstly it's a significantly technically involved work: If The Oxbow Incident can be considered a mature introduction to the concepts of Justice, Jurisprudence, and Due Process, then E. in J. could be a doctoral thesis on those topics. Many of the significant things Arendt has to say here approach meaningless in reduction, but unfortunately they're significant nonetheless.

Secondly it deals with what i think is probably the most emotionally entrenched and charged material i've yet encountered; it's pretty much impossible to have a discussion about some of its topics unless the other person has also read the book, and even then. Part of this is definitely due to my own emotional entrenchments and flimsy grasp of history.

So i'm going to aim even lower than a Cliff's Notes, and just summarize a few things about the book.

For starters, Arendt's prose voice is abysmal. I'm a big fan of long and convoluted sentences, but i realize now that i've been spoiled by certain authors who lack a flair for utter butchery. I was extremely close to disowning readership of this book within the first chapter, but fortunately Sarah encouraged me to persevere. The following gives you an idea of what the reader is up against. This is straight quoting:

... The basic idea that made all this possible was of course not his but, almost certainly, a specific directive by Heydrich, who had sent him to Vienna in the first place. (Eichmann was vague on the question of authorship, which he claimed, however, by implication; the Israeli authorities, on the other hand, bound [as Yad Vashem's Bulletin put it] to the fantastic "thesis of the all-inclusive responsibility of Adolf Eichmann" and the even more fantastic "supposition that one [i.e., his] mind was behind it all," helped him considerably in his efforts to deck himself in borrowed plumes, for which he had in any case a great inclination.) The idea, as explained by Heydrich in a conference with Göring on the morning of the Kristallnacht, was ...

- As my eleventh grade english teacher Ron Lowe would have written in red: "Huh?". However, Arendt is nothing if not intentional, and altho you may have to read most passages four times, they're usually worth the effort.

Regarding actual content, Arendt said many things which gave me pause, but as mentioned, most of them are far too complex [for me] to reduce or simplify without gross distortion. One question which she does not actually directly present but which occurred to me in the reading is disarmingly simple: why did the Nazis want to exterminate the Jews ? I typically have found it useful to analyze most conflicts and exercises of power in economical terms: where is the money ? Asking this question usually provides digestible answers. The Mexican American War, the American Civil War, The American War of Independence (if you're a Zinn subscriber), obviously the various American - Persian Gulf Wars, the CIA-backed Iranian Coup of the 60s, the Crusades, Colonialism, et the list goes on. In general, large-scale exercises of power have a dollar-sign on one side of them. But i'm having difficulty finding the money behind the policy of extermination of the Jews. The disenfranchising of the Jews: obviously; there's money there. The deportation of the Jews concomitant with the confiscation of their property: obviously; there's money there. But pretty early in the course of the holocaust the policy switched from getting the Jews out of Germany to keeping them in and killing them; and further than that, to actually importing them and killing them. These incredibly mass transportations of people required vast expenditures of energy and money on the part of the German government. Since Jews had already been deprived of their property and were struggling to leave the country, where was the economic gain in collecting & killing them ? Unfortunately i'm coming to the conclusion that there wasn't one, that the collection and killing were not economically motivated. The motivational void left by the absence of economics is what is chiefly terrifying me about Arendt's summary of the haulocaust. The alternative seems to be hatred, but i'm loathe to ascribe mere emotion as the motivating force behind such huge actions.

So i'm stuck in that department. Probably i just need to become more cynical.

The other huge uncomfortable take-away i got from Eichmann in Jerusalem is even more difficult to talk about: the notion of Jewish complicity.

Because i know i can't approach a proper treatment, i'm going to make this brief and crude, again just sampling things from the book. to wit, When making an area judenrein ("free of jews"), the nazis regularly relied on and received the assistance of the leaders of the jewish community. This is, i think, most commonly explained as the leaders attempting to minimize the destruction which they knew was impending. But i found it disturbing and uncomfortable that this apparently well-known item of history was, well, so unknown. Certainly i'd never heard a whisper.

Apologies for the length of the following quote. This is the bulk of page 118:

In Amsterdam as in Warsaw, in Berlin as in Budapest, Jewish officials could be trusted to compile the lists of persons and of their property, to secure money from the deportees to defray the expenses of their deportation and extermination, to keep track of vacated apartments, to supply police forces to help seize Jews and get them on trains, until, as a last gesture, they handed over the assets of the Jewish community in good order for final confiscation. They distrubuted the Yellow Star badges, and sometimes, as in Warsaw, "the sale of the armbands became a regular business; there were ordinary armbands of cloth and fancy plastic armbands which were washable." In the Nazi-inspired, but not Nazi-dictated, manifestoes they issued, we still can sense how they enjoyed their new power - "The Central Jewish Council has been granted the right of absolute disposal over all Jewish spiritual and material wealth* and over all Jewish manpower," as the first announcement of the Budapest Council phrased it. We know how the Jewish officials felt when they became instruments of murder - like captains "whose ships were about to sink and who succeeded in bringing them safe to port by casting overboard a great part of their precious cargo"; like saviors who "with a hundred victims save a thousand people, with a thousand ten thousand." The truth was even more gruesome. Dr. Kastner, in Hungary, for instance, saved exactly 1,684 people with approximately 476,000 victims. In order not to leave the selection to "blind fate," "truly holy principles" were needed "as the guiding force of the weak human hand which puts down on paper the name of the unknown person and with this decides his life or death." And whom did these "holy principles" single out for salvation ? Those "who had worked all their lives for the zibur [community]" - i.e., the functionaries - and the "most prominent Jews," as Kastner says in his report.

* what is "spiritual wealth", and how does one dispose of it ?

So that's obviously troubling stuff.

Every time i learn more about the Holocaust, fewer and fewer groups seem to emerge untarnished. If you're interested in losing a bit more faith in humanity, i can't recommend Eichmann in Jerusalem enough. Indeed, a report on the banality of evil.

All The Shah's Men

2006-10-14T23:33:00.000-07:00

Sarah is taking a student-run course at Berkeley on the modern history of Iran, which led to some discussions in the living room, which led the Matthew bringing out All the Shaw's Men - An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror by Stephen Kinzer, 2003.

Long story short:
During the late 1800s, Iran had the misfortune to get a string of crappy kings who sold the wealth, rights, and resources of Iran to various buyers in England and Russia in order to fund their own opulant lifestyles. Notably in 1901, Muzzaffar al-Din Shah sold to William D'Arcy the exclusive right for sixty years to Iran's natural gas and petroleum. Oil had not at that point actually been found in Iran, but lots of it was found in 1908, which prompted the formation of the Anglo-Persion Oil Company. (Later named the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, later named British Petroleum.) In 1919, the British imposed the Anglo-Persian Agreement, under which "the British assumed control over Iran's army, treasury, transport system, and communications network." Let's read that again shall we. In 1919, the British imposed the Anglo-Persian Agreement, under which "the British assumed control over Iran's army, treasury, transport system, and communications network."
Fast forward past a series of puppet prime ministers and de facto puppet shahs to 1951, when Mohammad Mossadegh was unexpectedly elected prime minister of Iran and soon thereafter nationalized the oil industry. Not without reason. The Brits were taking all the oil, only kicking back like 10% of the cash, not letting Iranians see the books, running a deplorable shanty town, and generally being pricks. Obviously the Brtis were upset by the nationalization of their free oil, and a world crisis ensued.
The Truman administration seems to have legitimately done everything in its power to negotiate a solution to the crisis. The Brits mostly wanted to invade, but the USA wasn't having it. However Truman didn't run again, and Eisenhower came in. Meanwhile, this is the Cold War and there's lots of worry that since it can't run the refineries w/o British skill, Iran will be forced to seek support from the Soviet Union, which recall also purchased large portions of Iran's other resources back in the early 1900s, and the Soviets will then take over Iran and get all the oil and another communist satelite to boot. Whether the USSR actually had any schemes along these lines is still an open question, but they certainly could have. So. England and Churchill put the fear of the Reds into Eisenhower and basically convince the CIA (nee Office of Stategic Services) to stage a coup and overthrow Mossadegh. England can't do it itself because all British diplomats and therefore agents have been expelled.
America implements the coup by using a well-established (by the Brits) network of paid ruffians to stage protests against Mossadegh, which Mossadegh refused to crack down on until it was too late, and of course by bribing a coalition of politicians.
The coup was a near-failure, being actually discovered and thwarted the night it was happening, but thanks to the perseverence of the CIA operatives, they tried again the next day and succeeded. The Shah officially approved the coup, altho he fled the country as soon as it seemed to fail, but he was restored to Shah-dome afterwards. Naturally, Britain and the US were given substantial interest in Iranian oil.

The book's title is a misnomer, becuase the Shah is portrayed as having almost nothing to do with the action, and least of all with instigating the coup. The Brits and the CIA nearly had to threaten him to approve it, in fact.

By and large an extremely fascinating book, and pretty well written too.

Up Next!

Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, aka "A Report on the Banality of Evil", which covers the 1961/1962 trial of the high-ranking Nazi official Adolph Eichmann.

Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, a graphic novel about growing up as girl in Iran during the perdiod just following that covered by All The Shah's Men, specifically w/r/t the Islamic revolution which overthrew the Shah in 1979.

This is My Best, an anthology of short stories by selected authors, chosen by the authors themselves as "their best" work.

The Beautiful and the Damned, In Our Time

2006-10-13T19:17:00.000-07:00

I was just getting started in a Mark Helprin book when i realized that i might die tomorrow and would have been reading Helprin while there was still Fitzgerald i hadn't read. So i swapped up for The Beautiful and the Damned. Like most of Fitzgerald, it deals with the trials, vanities, sins, etc, of the very rich, who can sometimes be difficult to work up much empathy for. Fortunately, also like most of Fitzgerald, the writing is excellent.

Basically it's the story of a rich young man and the gorgeous young woman he marries, neither of whom ever bother to develop a career, or even a job or even a skill for that matter, choosing instead to lead a life of wild dissipation under the expectance of an avuncular inheritance of railway baron proportions. Our heros's initial wad of cash dwindles rapidly, the young man becomes an alchoholic, the dissipation grows ever wilder, and finally the uncle dies but has taken a turn for the philanthropic and religious in his sunset years, and punitively leaves them not a cent. Our heros contest the will and get more desperate, more alchoholic, more dysfunctional, and older. Finally things are truly awful. Like they're craping together five dollars for milk but of course the young man spends it on rye, and finally we have a scene where the hero is reduced to a state of literally infantile misery, sitting on the floor bawling, when we learn that after like four years the appeal of the initial contesting of the will has been upheld, the will is broken, and our bawling babe owns a gazillion dollars. But! It's too late. He's never right in the head again. We presume his wife has lots of affairs.

So it's a tale of downfall and squalor, and along the way it occured to me that altho Hemingway's characters also suffer greatly and fall down and do shitty things and have shitty things done to them, somehow the big H. always gives the characters a sense of dignity. I always feel that H. cradles each of his characters in his hands, holding them close to his chest, even tho terrible things are happening to them. But there's a distance between Fitzgerald and his characters, and sometimes a sense of cruelty. For example, here is a passage in which the young wife has decided that one of them *has* to get a job, and she's applied as a movie actress with a man who years ago doted on her and begged her to be in film, but whom she has more or less jilted in favour of the hero. Some days after her tryout, the 29-year old Gloria gets this letter from the man who once sought her hand:

My Dear Gloria:
We had the test [film] run off yesterday afternoon, and Mr. Debris seemed to think that for the part he had in mind he needed a younger woman. He said that the acting was not bad, and that there was a small character part supposed to be a very haughty rich widow that he thought you might --

Desolately Gloria raised her glance until it fell out across the areaway. But she found she could not see the opposite wall, for her gray eyes were full of tears.

Hemingway is likely to have the exact same thing happen to Gloria, but he wouldn't drag her pain thru the streets like that. Don't get me wrong, i love Fitzgerald, and i know this is a book intending to stab at the rich, it's just interesting. Especially as they were buddies.

.. Which led me to re-read Hemingway's In Our Time, a short collection of short stories. Actually i'm not sure i've read it before, but i've definitely read the stories before. They cover a bunch of the Nick Adams stories, My Old Man, which is a portrait of a crooked jockey from his loving son's point of view, various other gems, all of which are punctuated by single-paragraph stories generally illustrating humanity at its worst. It's a wonderful book, see my impression above of H. cradling his characters in his hands.
I need to re-read For Whom the Bell Tolls soon.

Words in The Beautiful and the Damned
wabbly	p.40
Baedeker	p.43
sardonic	p.75
bilphism	p.76
soupçon	p.92 (this word is awesome)
invidious	p.99
guttapercha	p.107
mountebank	p.136
halcyon	p.137
fatuous	p.267
darkling	p.300
benignant	p.344
rill	p.358 (rivulet)
sempiternal	p.362
recondite	p.365
caravan series	p.365
continuity	p.399 "he produced a typewritten continuity"
"yeast" fortune	p.415
perspicacious	p.417
gin rickey	p.421
Words in In Our Time
none, really

Helprin

2006-10-13T18:52:00.000-07:00

I think i finally have Mark helprin out of my system. Jeeze. I've debated a lot with Sarah why i keep reading him when i always just complain about it. I think the reason is that i'm looking for dirt. As i wrote earlier, there's something fishy about all this cheese. So. I gave up quickly on rereading Winter's Tale. I condend that it's a perfidious ode to plutocracy disguised as a lovely fairy tale for gutter punks. Note that i was in New York recently and Rob and i went to Grand Central Station to verify that there are constellations and light-up stars on the roof, and indeed: . It's a gorgeous building an Peter Lake's hiding place is plausible. Janina and Sarah recommended i try A Soldier of the Great War instead, which i did, and i have to admit that it seemed pithier than W's Tale. In fact it seemed fine. It made nice reading by the banks of the Russian River. However, around an eighth of the way in i realized that if i died tomorrow, i would have spent my last days reading Mark Helprin while there were still books by Fitzgerald which i hadn't read yet, and dropped it like a hot potato. A month or so later i picked up Ellis Island & Other Stories, shorts by Helprin, which thanks to their brevity were pretty consumable, altho i still tended to skip the last 15% or so. I think Helprin fans and foes alike can take Ellis Island or leave it. The best moment in the book is a Salingeresque scene between a young boy and an adult, when the boy describes a fantastical circus he saw before he was born and asks the adult if she's ever seen a circus like that and for once she takes him on an equal footing and confesses "'Yes,' said Mrs. Friebourg, 'I have seen a circus like that,' and, for a moment, the room was silent." - I'm a sucker for that stuff.

Words in Ellis Island:
abseiling, p.26
plutocrat, p.139
springe, p.145
davening, p.160
motility, p.196

The Professor and the Madman, fin.

2006-10-13T18:37:00.000-07:00

The Professor and the Madman is the story of the main editor of the OED and his relationship with a civil war veteran quite rightly ensconced in a British insane asylum. Specifically Bethlehem Asylum, from which we have "bedlam".
It's a good book, but i think i didn't quite finish it. I stopped somewhere around page 200 of 240. The parts which most interested me were the descriptions of the process of compiling the OED, which took like eighty years and loads of work. Basically the OED put out the call to the public for submissions of exemplary citations of words, any words, big words, small words, but particularly exemplary. From the thousands and thousands and thousands of submissions, the editors traced the histories of each meaning of each word. - Except for the editors it was pretty much like Wiktionary. One of the best contributors also happened to be criminally insane man. That's pretty much the story.

Quantum Physics

2006-10-13T17:59:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note on Quantum Physics: Illusion or Reality by Alastair Rae, 1986 (first edition, not pictured). Jonathan gave this to because it helped him understand some aspects of quantum entanglement. I wasn't quite so lucky however, and still fail to be convinced of "spooky action at a distance". Yes, yes, i hear it's been actually observed. I guess what i don't understand is the explanation. I begin to suspect it's one of these genuinely complex and technical topics which simply can't be boiled down to layperson's language and still carry the weight of the argument.

.. which segues nicely into A Life of Erwin Schrödinger by Waler Moore, 2003 !
I think due to the previous book i got to wondering about the history of the Schrödinger's Cat puzzle, and ordered the biography. And now from email:

so for once i sort of followed thru on a thing
and have what i think is the answer here,
and it's Einstein.

according to "A Life of Erwin Schrödinger" by Walter Moore,
in 1935 Schrödinger was a professor at Oxford
and was further developing/exploring his somewhat
wildly successful Wave Equation, which as i understand it
was very good at describing particles as superpositions of waves. (!)
this description was (i think) integrated over time;
that is, it described not only the particle's present,
but it's past & future as well.
- i'm sure i'm mangling this.

Einstein was a fan of the Schrödinger Equation,
but felt that it was an incomplete model of actual reality.
In a letter to Schrödinger, Al wrote something along the lines of
Consider the situation of a pile of gunpowder which *may*
explode in the course of a year: the equation would describe
a superposition of both exploded and unexploded gunpowder, and
"There is no interpretation by which such an [equation] can be
considered an adequate description of reality."

- clearly the genesis of the Cat,
and indeed Schrödinger soon published a paper which included:
"One can even construct quite burlesque cases. A cat is shut up
in a steel chamber, together with the following diaboloical
apparatus, etc ... This inhibits us from accepting in
a naive way a 'blurred model' as an image of reality ...
There is a difference between a shaky or not sharply focused
photograph and a photograph of clouds and fogbanks."

.. which actually leaves me more confused than before
about whether Schrödinger actually wanted to assert that
the cat is both alive and dead.
It certainly sounds like he *didn't*.

Like most biographies i've read, A Life Of Erwin Schrödinger is good but not particularly valuable for its own sake, unless you happen to be yenning (?) for information about you-know-whom.

Basically Erwin's arc can be summarized:
Academically brilliant yet frustrated by underachievement until he's about 42, circa 1926, and formulates the Theory of Wave Mechanics, which see above. Thereafter quantum physics fell into two camps: the Copenhageners, led by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg which insisted on all this spooky action at a distance and the determining power of the observer etc, and the non-Copenhageners, led by Albert Einstein and Erwin. Frankly, the substance of their disagreement entirely eludes me, but i'm sure it was there.

Other interesting things about Erwin: he kept two wives, even when living in America or Britain, and had frequent additional mistresses. He was an avid bicyclist, commuting by bicycle even in torrential rain.

The Lore of the Unicorn

2006-10-13T17:31:00.000-07:00

I usually avoid unicorn "lore" because it tends to be soft and pappy. Most fiction involving unicorns also leaves a bad taste in my mouth. (Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn excepted, of course.) Odell Shepard's The Lore of the Unicorn, 1930, however, is literally the most scholarly book i've ever read. Words like "research" or "academia" just don't fit the bill. It's undiluted scholarship going on here. Did you know that the King James Bible contains seven references to unicorns ? Or that just about every culture on earth has a mythical one-horned beast much like the unicorn ? Or that alicorn (unicorn horn) was commonly sold for ten times its weight in gold for several centuries during the middle ages ? Or how formally the classical story of the unicorn hunt (where a maiden lures the unicorn and then the huntsmen leap out and kill it) parallels the Christ myth ? - Shepard delves *exhaustively* into these topics and about a zillion others. However, be prepared for passages in French, Greek or Hebrew which carry actual substantive content and which are not translated. He assumes an education in letters, but even without one i thorougly enjoyed the book.

resaddling

2006-10-13T17:02:00.000-07:00

i'm not sure why i haven't been posting.
i've certainly been reading.
i've moved once or twice,
with new living styles each time.
but i doubt that's it.
it's probably the old orion-killer, unnovelty.
the glamour of a reading diary wore off, i imagine.
but! i'm giving it another shot.

Creationism

2006-08-22T07:10:00.000-07:00

Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe by several folks from The Wetherfield Institute, which Mom mailed and asked me to read.

.. In which extent i've failed; i haven't actually read it, but i've read most of it.
It's been a couple months since i stopped reading, having either gotten the main idea or having had my fill. This was a difficult book for me to read because obviously i'm heavily predisposed against the theses involved, but read it anyhow. (see "Winter's Tale" below) During the reading, i was inflamed w/ the spirit of scientific rhetoric and made numerous, copious, and i now realize often illegible notes in the margins, which amounted to plans for troop movements or quarterback hand-offs or what have you in the battle against the book. I debated the merits of enacting these maneuvers in this "Orion Reads" blog versus establishing a new forum along the lines of "Orion Rebuts". Fortunately, time healed all passions, and a simple review is what remains.

But let's get this out of the way:
obviously the origin of life is a deep and wonderful mystery which will probably and possibly properly never be divorced from mysticism. Noone's arguing that good old life is nothing short of entirely stunningly beautiful.

Also,
let's get this out of the way too:
arguments against intelligent design often beg the answer.
it's so, and trivially defeated:
consider a world which is in fact influenced by intelligent design.
posit for example a rat-maze.
if some of the rats were to argue that the maze is not just a random series of walls cast up by cage-techtonics but is actually an intentionally manufactured environment just right for the stimulation of rat-kind,

Science and Evidence presents several shortcomings in current scientific understanding. They're valid shortcomings. But excepting Michaell Behe these guys are arguing that minor fluctuations in the noise of scientific results justify major ontological positions.

Wethersfield Institute Statement of Purpose
The purpose of the Wethersfield Institute is to promote a clear understanding of Catholic teaching and practice and to explore the cultural and intellectual dimensions of the Catholic Faith. The Institute does so in practical ways that include seminars, colloquies and conferences especially as they pursue our goals on a scientific and scholarly level. The Institute publishes its proceedings.
It is also interested in projects that advance those subjects. The Institute usually sponsors them directly, but also joins with accredited agencies that share our interests.

The book contains three mostly-concerted essays which begin with William Dembski's essay on his amazing method of detecting whether or not a given set of data contains evidence of design, then on to Stephen Meyer's essay about how our particular biology and physics are way too complex to have ever happened by chance, and finally on to the much more interesting essay by Michael Behe regarding the resistance to intelligent design which seems to be endemic to the established scientific community.

1. William Dembski's paper, "The Third Mode of Explanation" is largely discountable. Dembski claims that he has a method for detecting evidence of intelligent design in any given dataset. Any undergraduate information theorist will tell you that this is trivially disprovable. (eg consider comparing a stream of genuinely random data against an optimally encrypted or compressed stream of "intelligent" data. Proofs which equate these situations are legion.)
Furthermore Dembski does not in fact present the core of his amazing intelligence detector, he instead refers the reader to a separate paper.
Furthermore he challenges what he claims to be a pillar of the "evolutionary complex" school of computer algorithms, an example by Richard Dawkins in which a sequence of random letters "evolves" into a target sequence of ordered letters. But this is an incredibly poor example of simulating evolution. It's more like an exemplar of simulating intelligent design. Frankly, i could program a much more meaningful simulation of evolutionary complexity in about a day and a half. So Dembski's criticisms here are valid, but he certainly stoops to conquer.

2. Stephen Meyer's "Evidence for Design in Physics and Biology" is way more grounded than Dembski's stuff. It's essentially a presentation of several failings in the currently popular scientific theories of the origin of the universe and life on earth. While Stephen has definitely sone his homework and presented it pretty well, in the not-actually-that-big-picture it's pretty inconsequential. He addresses significant problems within physics and biology which have been revealed in the last ten or twenty years. His constant argument is that you can have a system which is, and i quote, quote quote, "irreducably complex".
- by which he means, for example, the flagellum of a sperm. apparently there are about twenty moving parts which make up the flagellum, and if any one of the twenty were to go away, the remaining nineteen would be not only lonely but entirely useless. So the obvious question is: how could evolution produce twenty mutually-dependent parts ? Surely there had to be a first part, then a second part, etc, etc. Which is a deeply valid question. .. but he's trying to prove a negative: that it's impossible for it to have evolved without help. Does he really think that in forty years the evolution of a flagellum by natural means will seem as inconceivable ?

3. I have to go to sleep.

[two months pass]

Essay Three was by far the most interesting and valid of the set. The Scientific Status of Intelligent Design, again by Stephen Meyer basically explored biases against intelligent design within the scientific community and science itself. I've got about a foot of books to blab about here, so i'm going to cut it rather short.
Basically Stephen has some valid points here. It's true that the vast majority of mainstream science rejects theories involving intelligent design a piori, which practice is clearly not itself scientific. Posit, for example, a petri dish of scientists which *was* in fact created by intelligent makers. Obviously they're making a mistake if they refuse to admit the possibility. So we've got that out of the way: you have to admit the possibility of intelligent design, or else you're putting on blinders.
However, it should be taken up only as an explanation of absolute last resort. Historically, all scientific appeals to a Creator have only held up for a handful of years. This is the well-known God of the Gaps, in which any aspect of nature not [yet] accounted for by science (a gap) is attributed to a creator. However, the gaps keep getting smaller and smaller and smaller, shrinking from everything millennia ago to, now, apparently flagella. I'm still keeping my money on science.

.. And that's all i've got on this.

The Professor and the Madman

2006-07-18T08:30:00.000-07:00

this just in, from les étagères de Sarah - "The Professor and the Madman - A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary"

w00t !

Winter's Tale again, A Scanner Darkly

2006-07-15T16:58:00.000-07:00

Rain mentioned loving Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin, which convinced me that maybe i should give the book a second go. It's been a few years since it swept thru the Santa Cruz Pergolesi crowd like wildfire, and i read 90 or 95 percent of it back then before deciding that going on was good money after bad. So but maybe my spectacles had changed since then, so when i found myself at a bar on Upper Haight with no book in my backpack i went down the street and got it, and..

If we were rats i'd say "There's something fishy about all this cheese, friends, and i wouldn't eat it if i were you".

Which is to say that i distrust Winter's Tale. I get the feeling that Helprin is giving us candy, true, but at the same time secretly convincing us to stop worrying and just love the market economy. I could go on, but i'm stopping with that.

Went to see A Scanner Darkly last night, the new movie-adaptation of Phillip K. Dick's novel. I think Logan put it best when he observed that most movie-adaptations of Dick's work (Bladerunner, Total Recall, Minority Report, etc) don't really follow the original text very closely, but that unfortunately, A Scanner Darkly does. I totally agree. The book was not really worth reading (i unfortunately read clear thru to within 20 or 30 pages of the end) and the movie holds true to that. Unless you're interested in drugged-out self-absorbed presentations of drugged-out self-absorbed people. The special effects were neat and distinctly revealed way more processing and synthesis than i expected, which is impressive, but at the same time they weren't really compelling in any way.

but enough!

still soon to come: unicorns, creationism, and quantum physics.

also i need a new book, as i'm nearly done with the last scrap of printed material in the house i'm willing to read, which is a copy of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (think Isaac Asimov's or Analog SF) from 1992. Which thank you to Nevada for that!

consider the lobster

2006-07-05T21:32:00.000-07:00

Somehow i went ages without posting about David Foster Wallace's latest, Consider the Lobster.

I feel i haven't much to say about DFW anymore. if it is writing that you like, he's the best. nobody writes better. Lobster, the book at hand, is a collection of essays and articles, and is no exception. These follow in the spirit of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, altho with possibly varying degrees of success as far as the original patrons of the essays may be concerned.

The title piece, for example, seems to be Gourmet's ("The Magazine of Good Living") attempt to cash in on the sparkling prose of A Supposedly Fun Thing's Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All, in which somebody (Harper's?) commissioned DFW to spend a few days at the Illinois State Fair and write about it. The results are absolutely charming. So Gourmet ditto'd-up with a paid few days at the Maine Lobster Festival, the results of which are desirously picaresque and charming until about half-way thru the essay, when our hero DFW turns to the pretty much inescapable question of the morality of boiling lobsters alive. Henceforth it pretty much reads like PETA propoganda, except two orders of magnitude better written, which made this reader pretty deeply happy and self-satisfied. It actually wasn't so much the self-satisfaction of the vegetarian-over-meat-eater, as more just Huzzah!ing at DFW's big old middle finger in the face of Gourmet, The Magazine of Good Living. - I've since mentioned several of the moral arguments DFW presents to friends who enjoy lobster, and concluded that sans more evidence i possibly can't weigh in any stronger than i can on any other um, issue of mortal gastro-dominion, and probably the less said here the better.

So but the title essay was actually far from my favorite.
One of the problems i have with DFW is that it's all so good that my favorite is pretty much defined as whatever i read last. -With the exception of The Broom of the System. So maybe i should just run a quick summary of the essays.

* Big Red Son, for Premiere Magazine - DFW is comissioned to attend the Annual Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas. Basically the Grammies or whatever of the porn industry. It's pretty horrifying, and you can easily empathize with poor DFW, altho he surely had some idea when he took the job. One quick quote here, in which "we" and other first-person-plurals are, fyi, referring to DFW:

Burly casino staffers stand taking tickets and being very discouraging about anybody trying to bum-rush the show. The crush of bodies out here entails a degree of physical contact that [male porn groupies] never even dreamed of. ... A suspicion that we'd has all week but decided was unverifiable is now instantly verified when one of yr. corresp[ondant]s get accidentally shoved against a starlet and is jabbed in the side by her breasts and it hurts.

[italics his]

* Certainly the end of Something or other, one would sort of have to think, for The New York Observer - This is a review of John Updike's recent book Towards the End of Time. Basically DFW tears into Updike and says he hasn't written a single non-masturbatory word since the late 60s. Personally i've only read The Poorhous Fair, and loved it, but i have a feeling he may be right. Interesting Harper's Index-style statistics DFW cites: (It should be noted that Updike's novel is posing as Science Fiction, set in a near-future apocalyptic world)

Total # of pages about [fictional] Sino-American war - causes, duration, etc: 0.75
Total # of pages about deadly mutant metallobioforms: 1.5
Total # of pages about flora arounf Turnbull's New England home, plus fauna, plus weather, and how his ocean view looks in different seasons: 86
Total # of pages about Mexican repossession of US Southwest: 0.1
Total # of pages about Ben Turnbull's penis and his various thoughts and feelings about it: 10.5
Total # of pages about [life in Boston after a nuclear war]: 0.0
Total # of pages about prostitute's body, w/ particular attention to sexual loci: 8.5
Total # of pages about golf: 15
Total # of pages of Ben Turnbull saying things like "I want women to be dirty" and "She was a choice cut of meat and I hope she held out for a fair price" and ... "The sexual parts are fiends, sacrafacing everything to that aching point of contact" and "ferocious female nagging is the price men pat for our much-lamented prerogatives, the power and the mobility and the penis [sic?]": 36.5

So all told, i'm highly disinclined to read this recent Updike before going thru more of the canon.

It might also be noted that July's issue of Harper's has a similarly cutting review of the even more recent Updike novel, "Terrorist". Robert Boyers comes to similar conclusions as DFW regarding Updike's ability to comment on the contemporary world.

* Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness From Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed, for Harper's. - An essay about the deep humor in Kafka. Would probably have meant more to me if i had actually read much/any Kafka, but an excellent essay none-the-less.

* Authority and American Usage, for Harper's. Allright. Me reviewing this essay is where you will see real restraint. Basically folks, there is a war raging in America and the world today over not only what is grammatically correct, but what is theoretically grammatically correct. The two sides are The Prescriptivists and The Descriptivists. The basic delineation is that Descriptivism holds that Proper Grammar is however the language is *actually* used, while Prescriptivism says that P.G. is how the language *ought* to be used. Picture say popular Hip-Hop versus English Teachers. DFW and myself are Prescriptivists. Many of my best friends are linguists, and consequently Descriptivists. The pleasure of reading a rhetorician such as DFW finally break down and stoop to conquer a little bit *on your side*, well, possibly again the less said the better. Deeply satisfying. I guess i should also add the the essay itself is a review of the book A Dictionary of Modern American Usage by Bryan Garner. Who is also prescriptivist.

* The View From Mrs. Thompson's, for Rolling Stone - an essay recounting the days immediately after 9-11, during which DFW happened to be in Bloomington, Illinois. The basic thesis is that Bloomington, Illinois is a good altho sedated place and far removed from the politics of The United States of America.

* How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart, for The Philadelphia Enquirer - The story of DFWs celebrity-crush on Tracy Austin, tennis star. I confess i sort of missed exactly how she broke his heart. I'm not sure if it was by turning out to be a child prodigy and no more, or by having a terribly 'auto-biography' ghost-written about her. It's a great essay tho.

* Up, Simba, for Rolling Stone - Possibly the most interesting essay in the set, Up Simba is DFW's story of being embedded with the John McCain 2000 presidential campaign. It's a fabulous piece but the big takeaway is that while McCain is clearly terrifying in his right-wing politics, he possibly, in the opinion of DFW, has something which no other presidential candidate since possibly Anderson has had*, which is basic earnestness. ie that when McCain says he wants to "show america's youth how to belive in something larger than themselves", that he in fact means it. Most of the pro-McCain opinion comes from his famous time spent as a prisoner of war in Vietnam in 1967: Basically McCain was shot down while bombing Hanoi, landed in the middle of downtown Hanoi, obviously the guy who was just bombing them, was beat-the-crap-out-of, and thrown in prison in Hoa Lo. Where his wounds were untreated, etc. And then after being barely alive for a few months, the North Vietnamese suddenly offer to simply let him go, as a gesture of good-will or whatever to McCain's father, a US Admiral. And the catch is that McCain, barely alive, refused the offer of freedom because "The US military's Code of Conduct for Prisoners of War apparently said that POWs had to be released in the order they were captured, and there were others who'd been in Hoa Lo a much longer time, and McCain refused to violate the Code". He was then beaten and remained in prison for four years.
* - i should note that i know absolutely nothing about the Anderson campaign. i'm not sure why i said this. i feel i heard it somewhere.

So, much is made of this, McCain's apparent belief in something larger than himself. And possibly rightly. It's a great essay covering not just this but the freakish mechanisms of presidential candidacy and image-management, etc.

* Consider the Lobster, for Gourmet - see above.

* Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky, for The Village Voice Literary Supplement - Essentially a lauding of Dostoevsky and his recent biographer, Joseph Frank. All very good.

* Host, for the Atlantic Monthly - a rather extensive portrait of Los Angeles conservative talk-radio host John Ziegler, of KFI. Okay. The good lord knows that i love DFW's use of footnotes. Mmmm, even the footnotes have footnotes! It's like cake! So whoever decided it would be a good idea to take DFW's trademark footnotery and make it GRAPHICAL AND MODERN AND CHALLENGING TO THE READER'S WHOLE VISUAL SENSE OF JUST WHAT IS A FOOTNOTE ANYWAY is no friend of mine. The actual perps of the footnote->graphical chicanery are Marie Mundaca and Peter Bernard. - what were you guys thinking ? the footnotes are *already engaging* guys. no need to try to make a static book "hyperlinked" to itself or whatever you were going for. If i want annoying self-conscious typography i'll pick up a high school poetry 'zine. Enough cannot be said negative about this, imo, obviously.
So, typographical manglings aside,
the story itself is great, threading the ins-and-outs of the very big business of AM Talk Radio. We cruise the dial from technical mechanics to high-level business models to actual polemic. For the tenth time in this review, a great essay.

.. and that wraps it up.

I saw DFW speak briefly/indirectly on the occasion of the release of this book, about eight months ago in San Francisco, and at that time he expressed the idea that basically any writer of salt and/or conscience could more or less have no topic except the current erosion of liberty under the Patriot Act and other post 9-11 fallout. Together with the rather 'serious' topics in this book (Lobster, McCain, Mrs. Thompson's, Host) i feel that our friend may indeed be leaving the comparatively fanciful fields of Infinite Jest for somewhat darker pastures. Martin Amis obviously took a similar turn with Koba the Dread. While i'll naturally mourn such a transition, at least i know the writing and the grammar will be top-shelf all the way.

north by northwest

2006-07-02T10:29:00.000-07:00

why was the information withheld from me my whole life that Hitchcock's North by Northwest is one of the best movies ever made ? That is all.

coming soon - Unicorns, Lobsters, Creationism, Quantum Physics, and possibly black-market Salinger ! okay, maybe not *black* but distinctly grey.

the proposition

2006-05-29T13:36:00.000-07:00

just a quick jot while it's still fresh in the old noggin.

we saw Nick Cave's The Proposition last night.

i think it can be highly likened to Murder Ballads - it's gorgeous, extremely finely-crafted, well produced, well performed, replete with internal integrity, etc, but at the end of the day it's still a bunch of romantic songs about people killing people, and i just don't enjoy listening to it any more.

about two thirds of the way into The Proposition, i woke to the fact that just because it's gorgeous and finely-crafted, i still don't need to watch it or confuse "gorgeous" for "should be watched" or "should have been made". but i hung in there. until i realized that a rape scene was imminent, at which point i fled the theater. actually i pushed and shoved my way out of the theater and i apologize to my friends for that.

it's a pity because the australian frontier racial & other cultural stuff was pretty darned fascinating and well-done, and the movie in general was incredibly powerful. i believe that Cave can generate that same emotional power & beauty without the vehicle of penultimate violence, and i hope he does so in future films.

also,
one final nit with the hip violent movie industry in general,
specifically Cave the immensely popular Tarantino:
guys, can we dispense with the whole rather tired image of The Deeply Evil And Violent Man Cum Mystical Sage, please ? thanks.

Looking for Jake

2006-04-29T01:05:00.000-07:00

I expect this will be the last China Miéville book i read for a while, because i think i've read everything published to-date.

Waiting for Jake is a collection of short stories, one of which was the germ of my entire interest in Miéville. Months and months ago, Waiting for Jake was lying around the coffee-table as Mykle and Kai read it, and i picked it up one day and read the story Certain Events in London, which has to be one of the finest science fiction short-stories of all time. I leafed thru a few of the other stories but didn't really find them very engaging except Details.

Four or five months and as many full-length novels later, i read Waiting for Jake front-to-back with barely a word or two skipped here and there and enjoyed every bit.

Certain Events in London remains for me the stellar piece: it presents the idea that there exist certain autonomous streets which phase in and out of existence, living complex and mysterious lives of their own, and even having ramances and violent fueds amongst their alley selves. "The Via Ferrae", i believe they're called.
The story is presented in meticulous Lovecraftian style, with the primary narrative being more or less journal entries which spend most of their time relating hints and clues from other accidentally-found documents. Very indirect, tantalizing, and convincing.

You know how sometimes a cloud looks like something or more specifically how there will be a face in the shag carpet or in the cracks and marks in the ceiling ? Details posits that it doesn't just *look* like a face; it actually is a face, a real presence, which is only manifest in rare just-so circumstances. It goes further to tell the story of one poor person who becomes adept at seeing the faces in seemingly random patterns, and unfortunately can't stop seeing a particular face and being, which forms in the noise of clouds, leaves, bricks, stucco, etc, and more or less hunts our hero down.

The rest of the stories are good as well.

If you like them i really recommend checking out Thomas Liggoti, as i think by and large he's still got a leg up on China in the existential-horror department.

So Much is Burning

2006-04-29T00:50:00.000-07:00

I more or less can't bear poetry. I love that it exists, and sometimes if i have like a surplus of energy it's allright to read, but it's pretty much never allright to listen to. Unless it's Bill Taylor. Bill's poems get a lot of praise, so i'm not going to replicate that praise except to say that it's all justified and more. He's hands-down my favorite poet.

So Much is Burning is a forty-four page book of poems and photographs by Bill mostly on the topic of living in San Francisco's gritty Tenderknob district. They're all excellent. Most of them are depressing.

At the Corner

It is mid afternoon
and I am already tired of the day
just another thing wasted
another sad mistake
and at the corner of Geary
and Leavenworth
the sky is a perfect blue
above the bus stop
where the strung out
red-haired prostitute waits
her crazed eyes almost
but not quite
beautiful.

exaltation of larks

2006-04-28T23:45:00.000-07:00

An Exaltation of Larks by James Lipton.

It's pretty much common knowledge now or at least amongst those who have interest in both grammar and Nick Cave, that just as one refers to a "school" of fish or a "pride" of lions, that one can refer to a "murder" of crows. Published in 1968, Lipton's book argues that in fact it's not merely that one *can* refer to a murder of crows, but that to refer to an anything-else of crows is downright grammatically incorrect. He unfortunately doesn't quite make it clear what he means by this, but it's tantalizing. I can't believe, for example, that the sentence "I was mocked by a council of crows" is incorrect. I just can't. You could have a council made up of crows. End of story. What about the more generic "a group of crows" ? - It's certainly more correct to say "a school of fish" than "a group of fish", but is "group" actually incorrect ? I don't know.

None the less, he argues very convincingly that the following terms are 100% squarely in the grammatical canon, and that it is always at least more correct to use these words than the generic "group".

Apparently the history of these words goes back to at least works printed in 1320, with the authoritative text being The Book of St. Albans, printed in 1486. Apparently these words were way more important back then because hunting was way more important as a courtly sport. The idea being that if you were an up-and-coming courtier and said that you'd "spotted a fabulous group of lions" today, you'd have shamed your family name for all history. As such, The Book of St. Albans was a courtier's primer, more or less, and contained a relatively large chapter listing some one hundred sixty four various names of groups of huntable animals and other presumably non-huntable things like doctors and maidens.

Before getting to the good stuff, i should add two things: If you manage to get hold of a copy (thanks to Sarah for mine), be sure to actually read the introduction because it's quite well-written and really sensitizes the palette for the stuff to come. Second, Lipton points out that there is in fact no name for these types of words. He proposes the term "Venereal Words", because apparently venereal is archaicly associated with the hunt. I think it's a horrible word euphonically and associatively and am not using it. Third, there's a chapter in which Lipton proposes a bunch of new terms such as "a trip of hippies" and "a dilation of pupils" (published in 1968, recall) which i more or less skipped, and none of the words below are from that section.

Reminder: these are all 100% grammatically correct.
In fact more correct than just "a group of blah".

An exaltation of larks.

A murder of crows.

An unkindness of ravens.

A skulk of foxes.

A business of ferrets.

An ostentation of peacocks.

A tidings of magpies. (!)

A boquet of pheasants.
- so gorgeous!

A host of sparrows.
- akin to a host of angels, meaning an army.

A clowder of cats.

A smack of jellyfish.

A pencil of lines.
- let's hear it for the abstract !

and now into the people.
be warned that most of these are pretty anglo/masculo/affluo-centric.

A sentence of judges.

An impatience of wives.

A dilligence of messengers.

A proud showing of tailors.

A boast of soldiers.

An impertinence of peddlers.

A poverty of pipers,
and A neverthriving of jugglers.
(serves 'em right)

A rage of maidens
(this apparently comes from an archaic meaning of "rage" which was not "anger" but "wantonness")

An incredulity of cuckolds.

A foresight of housekeepers.

An illusion of painters.

A goring of butchers.

A drunkenness of cobblers.

and finally a comment on the popularity of the catholic church in england circa 1400:

A superfluity of nuns,
and An abominable sight of monks.

djuna barnes - the Thread makes no Conquest of the Needle

2006-03-26T11:02:00.000-08:00

I picked up Ryder off the bookshelf pretty much at random, having not particularly heard of Djuna Barnes one way or the other before, and to those who say i don't like any book unless it's by you-know-whom, i say: oh yeah well i like Djuna Barnes!

Ryder is amazing. Written in 1928, it presages the current vogue for faux-victorian novels by pretending to have been written in say the 1870s. Ryder was censored when it was first published (in America), both passages of text and illustrations being elided. It was reprinted in 1979, and Djuna decided *not* to repair the censorship. In the 1990 version, all the illustrations have been restored, but the missing text is still missing; in its place are start asterisks.

Anyhow, it's primarily about sexuality, and especially it's viciously anti-patriarchical. Which i normally consider fine topics but not ones i'm particularly interested in reading about personally, thank you all the same. But Djuna's prose - my god. It's amazing.

Allright, check this out. Warning: it's crass and lewd. Like all of Ryder.

Wendell speaking to his mother:

... "the angels play the tympanum, the devils twang, with pleasure, the human gut, the humble Scotsman wheezes at his bags, and the Austrian thumps his mandoline; and I amuse me with half-a-dozen instruments, but it is only diversion and a practise, for my real glory is the merry music I've struck up with my spherical, timbersome pipe of a single stop, the core of the codpiece. How many notes fly through a woman at its orchestration! Grave notes, and half notes, and demi-semiquavers, all clinging to the beam of her interior, and ripening after nine months, to fly forth duly harmonized, like a good war-song of the early pagans, or those rollicking dances that set peasants bobbing and flinging many a shapely leg up in a hornpipe, or," he added, with a melancholy pause, "stillborn like a rush of grace notes, too hurried for the voice to catch, and then silence and a Christian burial."

- stillborn like a rush of grace notes. holy cow.

or, Barnes on society's treatment of the rape victim.

... Who told you, Hussy, to go ramping at the Bit, and laying about you for Trouble ? What thing taken from your Father's Table turned you Belly up? What Word in your Mother's Mouth set your Ears outward? Bawd! Slattern! Slut! Who gave you rope to turn on ? Slain you are of Slumber, and your Family mown down before that Sword of Sorrow. Thy Brother weeps amid his Diapers, and thy Father behind his Beard!
...
Great things by Little are thus brought to Dust. Fair Rome sees Men come buttoning up her Appian Way, and an Ass brays over Babylon. Strong Nations rise and come to Flower under the Hee of one Emperor, and are brought low by the Haw of the next.
...
Oh Fie upon you! What have you done, but make some Pimpish Fellow a Braggart and a Nuisance in all the Streets that run a Blind Alley! And shall the child, Girl or Boy, stand in after Years a little at the Pump, and say aught that shall contradict the Wry Proportion of its Begetting? 'Tis such who Poison Wells, and make the Hackle rise on every Pubic Inch [sic?], and do split the very Bells by which we tell the Time!
...
Have not all Philosophies of Avoidance been Penned for you? Do not Mathematics, take them where you will, prove there is always a Deviation that brings down a Marvellously Different Total, an you had wished? Has not Science proved that no Bodkin takes the Riband but at will, and the Thread makes no Conquest of the Needle, and the Needle has not a leaning to the Thread?
Have not Logicians, from Seneca to Plato, settled it, that no Proposition may come to a Head an there be Wit for evading? Shall not a Council of Women, such as we, make clear to you in a Sitting that had you a Vocabulary of Movement the Case had been a Riddle still and not a Certainty?

.. and it goes on for pages and pages, this passage. (Capitalization Djuna's)

or, last one, Amelia in unwelcome childbirth:

When the young lamb puts its head sideways forever, and the herd is short by four feet, when the fish goes no more in the way of fins, when the feathered bird gives back to the sky his part in it, and comes fast climbing down to earth, grieve they ?
..
I fall to weeping for the two bare heels that took me for a nest to ripen in. Be not yourself a moment till I get that moment's peace in which to think of you! You do not trust me? It is well. No mother would be mother ever an she could, in mid-fight, throw herself a moment out of scent, so I, like any soldier in any war, cry loud, `Long live that which can in no wise be stemmed!' And love you that you forged the coin of hate in my own mint, and stamped it with my name. Out, monster, this is love!"
(Dr. Matthew O'Connor holds the baby up, slaps it resoundingly on its most unaccustomed bottom, turns it over, glancing) "A Boy!"

So there you go. The prose is amazing. You definitely have to not be overly concerned with knowing precisely what's going on in the plot, however. It wanders all over the place without too much regard for getting anything done or making a remotely tight seal. - At one point, after a longish chapter written in verse, comes Chapter 11, which is titled "However, for the Reader's Benefit".

I tore thru Ryder and quickly turned to Nightwood which was conveniently on the same bookshhelf in the hall. Nightwood however, and Ladies Almanack which is appended to it, i can't bring myself to read. The spark just isn't there. The sentences are still long and contorted, but the effect is one of a messy ball of yarn rather than a celtic knot or something. I can't believe i just made that analogy. Anyhow, one's interesting and engaging, one's not.

Ryder may be one of the very few books which i'll read more than once.
That short list would then be:
The Works of Salinger
Infinite Jest
The Silmarillion and other Tolkien
Peanuts
The Brothers K*, The Idiot*
Ryder*

* I haven't actually read these more than once yet, but expect to.

mathematical puzzles

2006-03-26T10:36:00.000-08:00

At the Game Developers Conference i ran across a small booth run by the small press publishers A K Peters. I'd come to the booth for a particular computer book, but i stayed for the esoteric math stuff! Books on origami (both representational and non-), straight-up math books, math-history books, math puzzle books, wow. In addition to a bunch of other regular computer books. They were all quite good. So: A K Peters, right on.
Anyhow,
so i picked up Peter Winkler's Mathematical Puzzles - A Connoisseur's Collection. And wow, am i out of my league. These are all puzzles in the Martin Gardner tradition, but i only managed to get i think about half of one right in the whole book. (Except the section on geography)

Here's a relatively straight-forward one:

Three coins are put into a bag: a coin with both sides "heads", a coin with both sides "tails" and a regular "heads/tails" coin.
You reach into the bag and bring out a coin at random and flip it.
If it comes up heads, what's the probability that if you turn it over, the other side is also heads ?

here's a harder one:

Associated with each face of a solid convex polyhedron (such as a cube, a pyramid, ehatever) is a bug which crawls along the perimiter of the face, at varying speed, but only in the clockwise direction. Prove that no schedule will permit all the bugs to circumnavigate their faces and return to their initial positions without a collision.

- i mean, jeeze.

anyhow, that's all.

Oh i should also add that i thought the puzzles and solutions could have been presented more clearly. I often found myself not knowing what was being asked, or in the few cases where i went ahead and did some work to determine an answer, i discovered that i'd misunderstood the question.

The New Pearl Harbor

2006-03-20T20:43:00.000-08:00

So i went out and got David Griffin's The New Pearl Harbor - Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11. It's a summary of various other works which, as the title suggests, indeed raises disturbing questions about etc.

I've resisted looking into the conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11 for a couple years now. The reasons are i think fairly simple and obvious: a distaste for the hysterical voice. So Griffin's book seemed approachable, non-hysterical, and by repute, well-put together.

I'll cut to the chase. Basically i've become convinced that there are indeed several questions which are more than niggling points such as analysing the president's face as he sat with the schoolchildren. (eg Farenheit 911)

Here are what i consider the main points which The New Pearl Harbor raises.

Why weren't the planes shot down.

The FAA and the various branches of the military have extremely well established proceedures which are followed when a commercial jet liner goes off course, as the 9/11 planes did. It's important to emphasize that these proceedures are followed when a plane goes off course, not if a plane should ever go off course. These proceedures are actually invoked relatively often; they are routine, not exceptional. These proceedures include the immediate scrambling (launching) of fighters from the nearest air force base, who intercept the off-course plane, signalling it etc, etc, and with standing orders to shoot the plane down if it doesn't cooperate. Jet fighters are typically scrambled within minutes of an airplane going off-course. On 9/11 however, nearly half an hour passed before fighters were scrambled. When the fighters were scrambled, they were not called from the nearest air-force base, (which had planes in readiness) but from a much more distant base, some several hundred miles farther away than neccessary. And even then, the fighters which were now allegedly chasing after airplanes who had been confirmed as hijacked and were currently heading towards New York and the Capital flew at approximately one quarter their maximum speed. The fighters did. Fly at one quarter their maximum speed. After planes which had been confirmed hijacked and were headed towards New York and the Capital.
In the case of the alleged plane which crashed into the Pentagon, these discrepencies between standard operating proceedure and proceedure on 9/11 are even more marked, due to the 30-or-so minute lead which the WTC crashes had on the Pentagon crash.

There's significant evidence the WTC towers collapsed due to controlled demolition

The evidence is eyewitness accounts of firefighters in the building reporting hearing explosions, an abundance of fine concrete dust classically indicative of explosives, the rapidity with which the buildings fell, and the infeasability of the crashes causing a structural collapse.

Furthermore, what everyone knows but noone really thinks about (at least i didn't) is that Three, not Two WTC towers collapsed, all in pretty much the same fashion, but airplanes only crashed into two. Even the official FEMA report on WTC-7 (this third tower) concludes "the best hypothesis [of the tower's collapse] has only a low probability of occurance".

Furthermore, the structural iron from the rubble was extracted and sold overseas for scrap with unprecedented speed, and in the case of forensic evidence, illegal speed.

That is, the iron which could provide conclusive physical evidence of the use of explosives in collapsing the towers was hustled out of the scene.

There's no shortage of evidence that what hit the Pentagon was not a Boeing 737, but something much more like a cruise missile without a warhead.

For example, photos of the Pentagon facade before it collapsed showing a tiny little hole thru which a great big 737 (and its wings!) are alleged to have passed.
For example eyewitness testimony that there was no airplane wreckage inside the pentagon - "some small pieces... but not large sections... [T]here's no fuselage sections and that sort of thing."

Lots of misdirection, changing stories, and clear lies on the part of the government

I won't go into these. They're there.

Lots of evidence of foreknowledge, repression of investigations of Al Queda, etc

Eyes on the prize - who benefits ?

This one answers itself.

So, that's about it.
My opinion: yes, there's definitely stuff which deserves full and well-funded official investigation.

you've done it again, charlie brown

2006-03-20T20:29:00.000-08:00

Peanuts not only bear rereading and rereading for me, but it gets funnier every time. How is that ? Magic, is how.

So You've Done It Again, Charlie Brown is no exception. It features the awesome Linus/Snoopy vulture cycle.

mieville, ed wood, some crappy russian horror movie

2006-03-13T20:55:00.000-08:00

movies first.

Sarah, Robert, and I went to see um Night Watch, a russian horror flick about ancient armies of good and evil coming to a final sort of apocalyptic battle. What can be said. Well, it was in russian. There was gut-churning Shaky-Cam (tm). Um. Can't really say much for the story. Actually all three of us decided to just leave about half-way thru. There's not much here, folks. Go see Final Destination 3 instead.

Michelle and I saw the apparently newly released colorized version of Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space last night, in the truly amazing Castro Theater. Um. What's to be said. It was Plan 9 From Outer Space. But in color. We slept thru about a quarter of it, but would have slept thru a lot less had it not been like 37 degreed in the amazing Castro Theater.

Moving along to books,
i confess that i didn't in fact rush out and get that 9/11 book;
instead i slunk along Mykle and Kai's bookshelves and read not one but two books by China Mieville. I get a strange feeling when i embark on a Mieville book because he was born in 1972, just like me. So at the same time as i'm reading, anticipating writing underwhelming reviews of say King Rat, i also have to bear in mind that he wrote it when both he and i were 25. Which, jeeze. Nice job, basically.

So.

King Rat,
probably my favorite Mieville book to date, which probably shows some perversity on my part. i mean, in the introduction he makes call-outs to the folks who introduced him to jungle and break beat music, and you just get this sinking-gut feeling that not only is there going to be lots of slop about jungle music, but jungle music is going to be found to be transcendantly important. and lo, in the end, it is indeed the drum and it is the bass which save the day.

and yet this is my favorite Mieville novel to date.

i think the reason is that while his later works are more virtuoso performances or whatever, he exercises exactly zero self-restraint in them. it's a world without bounds. there are no bounds. from a physics point of view, you could say that Perdido Street and Iron Council do not conserve energy. As sytems. Which is certainly a less limiting way to structure things, but even tho there's fewer (no) restrictions on possibility, that doesn't make it more fertile or rich, and certainly makes it less fun to engage with. It's like playing games with a precocious five-year old. It's loads of fun, and their leaps of fancy are refreshing and amazing and stuff, but after a while you begin to yearn for some semblance of the contractual nature of more adult games. Perdido Street and Iron Council enter into very, very few contracts with the reader. The result, for me, is more or less the same as an author writing "And suddenly there's a tidal wave, and everything is swept out to sea." Or in Mieville's case: "And suddenly there's a Time Golem*, and everything is frozen for ever". - The density of unprecendented events within the book's universe is just too much. I can only get excited about one or two events which Change The Nature of The World As We Know It Forever per novel, and China puts in like three per chapter.

* You know, a Time Golem. Jewish golems are made of clay, but golems made of iron, wood, rope, or meat are not unheard of. And in Iron Council, you'll meet golems made of [insert list of increasingly immaterial and abstract things here], culminating with a time golem. Well, jeeze, why not a Will Golem ? Or a Victory Golem ? Or a Golem Golem ?

So except for King Rat. King Rat has exactly two events which Change The Nature of The World As We Know It Forever, and one of them happens a long long time ago in the body of the Pied Piper of Hammelin legend.
Which leaves one in the present story.
Which, believe it or not China, sometimes less really is more.

Okay, so King Rat is premised on the idea that the Pied Piper legend actually happened, and further that the Pied Piper was a sort of megalomaniacal eternal corporeal spirit who desires nothing less than to "Make the entire world dance to [his] tune". And further posits that there are matching eternal corporeal spirits who are kings of various kinds of beasts, the chief of which are Birds, Spiders, and the chief-most of which is Rats. There is no King Human. So it comes to a showdown in modern London between the Kings of Rat, Bird and Spider and the Pied Piper. It's actually pretty good, and not nearly as ruffle-cuffed as i've made out. There's some violence and gore. And, unfortunately, a literally fanatical loving of Drum-and-Bass music.

Iron Council takes place in the same universe as Perdido Street Station, about sixty years later. It's basically a tyranny-rebellion story, where the lords of the land have been conquesting a railroad out into the wilderness, with which to bring commerce/dominion, except that a revolt takes place at the head of the in-construction track, and in this universe is unprecendented because it actually succeeds, and the various misfits in the rebellion take over the train and drive it into the wild. - How do you drive a train into the wild ? You lay more track in front of it, of course. Where do you get the new rails ? You dig 'em up from behind you. - Which is sort of neat, this sort of ephemeral railroad track. We're talking about a couple thousand people. That's really the only interesting stuff. The rest is, as mentioned, a succession of increasingly abstract golems, battles, horrors, and, um, particle effects.

I feel i should also add that Mieville has much more three-dimensional female characters than most male authors, and his portrayals of sexuality are also a lot more mature than same.

I have three (3!) more books to report on, which i'll do in the next post.

Blindness, Greg Bear, Final Destination 3, Pride and Prejudice

2006-02-19T09:56:00.000-08:00

I finally finished Blindness by Josè Saramago. Sarah was pretty much dead-on when she described it as "lord of the flies for adults". The basic story is that everyone in a large city goes spontaneously blind. But not all once, it begins with one man and spreads to his doctor, and a few other people. The good doctor notifies the autorities of a contagious blindness, and the authorities round up the known blind and their partners and quarantine them in an abandoned asylum or something, which is where the Lord of the Flies stuff really gets going. I won't go into the details; you've surely read L.O.T.F. It's fairly horrible, and i gotta say somewhat repetitious and heavy-handed and i wouldn't have slogged thru it except that Josè is basically a really good writer. Eventually they escape the asylum and make it out to the world, where by now everyone is blind. Oh i forgot to mention the main character, the good doctor's wife, for reasons unexplained has not gone blind. She seems to be the only seer in all the land. The world at large is not much better than the asylum, but at least there it's just horrible squalor and not so much of the outright villainy of the asylum. I can't actually tell you how it ends because i couldn't get up the will to read the last ten or so pages, but i'm pretty sure it's a powerful portrait of the strength of the human spirit.

After Blindness i decided i needed some schlock, so i'm reading books by Greg Bear. Specifically: Darwin's Radio and The Forge of God.
Darwin's Radio is basically a medical thriller, which is a genre i never thought i'd set foot in, but apparently it's come to pass. Cutting right to the schlock: When the species as a whole is under stress, our DNA unlocks parts of itself which via pheremones turn each of us into a node in a giant computer which decides what the best next evolutionary step for the species is, and then implements it. Actually, i don't mind stuff like that. It's all good, right ? Why Bear has to have 90% of his characters be 100% motivated by sex, tho, is beyond me.
Moving right along to The Forge of God, it's an alien invasion book which is allright. Not great, but allright. Possibly it was doomed to non-greatness because it's a prequel, which i think is always a tough row to hoe.

Sarah and Tomy and I went to see Final Destination 3, ON PURPOSE! We actually made plans. FD3 follows closely on FDs 2 and 1, and if you like seeing annoying teenagers killed with Rube Goldbergian malignity, brother this is the movie for you. I think they plow thru 9 in detail, some of them twice, some of them thrice, and many incedentals. Nuff said. Oh wait, also, there's boobies.

Michelle and i were going to some celebration of cursing at Edinburgh Castle Pub last night, but it was sold out, so we walked over to the Great American Music Hall to see The Devil Makes Three, but it was fifteen bucks a pop and i for some reason was loathe to call the guys to see if we could get in free, so we wandered over to a movie theater and saw Pride and Prejudice (at nine and a half bucks a pop. Plus popcorn etc. Have you ever noticed that movies and show venues are similar in that they really gouge you for popcorn/drinks ?). P & P was probably as definitively good production of P & P as there will ever be. For what that's worth.
btw, not this one:

but this one:
.

P&P et ilk are full of amazing mansions. Castles. Marble columned amazements of castles. These dwellings are invariably inherited or stolen or foreclosed or whatever, but i've never heard a story of their making. Obviously somebody in the Darcy clan had to one day go By Jum, I'm Going To Build A Bloody Great Big House. It seems like those might make interesting writing, too. If you're into that sort of thing.

Up Next:
Kraddy is reading The New Pearl Harbor - Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 by David Ray Griffin, and i thought i'd give it a go.

DFW, Blindness, Crossword

2006-01-22T10:25:00.000-08:00

I finally finished you-know-whom's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. I'm not sure why it took me so long to finish, it's an excellent book, i was laughing right up thru the very last paragraph.

Sarah handed me Blindness by Josè Saramago, translated from the Portuguese. She said that it's a really good book but i might not like it because it's so depressing, which is always enticing so i'm looking forward to it. It won the Nobel Prize in 1998. The Boston Globe has a blurb on the *front* cover which reads "A shattering work by a literary master". - I thought 'shattering' had been outlawed from book-cover-blurb use ?

I spent several hours yesterday making a Crossword puzzle. Have you ever tried to make a crossword ? It's incredibly difficult*. Even using such phenomenal resources as oneacross.com and onelook.com, which allow you to search for all words matching a given pattern (eg at onelook, "*nz?l" will get you a list containing benzyl, hanzel, and if it were a famous word, elenzil) it's still really tough. So basically my crossword is going to have a lot of clues like "A greek prophecy dispenser, misspelt", and tons of acronyms. But still, it's fun. At 17x17 i think this is the largest one i've ever made, and i think it has the fewest black squares too. I'll post it here once the clues are ready.

* The real difficulty is in maintaining symmetry in the black squares. If that weren't a requirement, it'd be relatively straight-forward. I've looked at various crossword-making softwares out there, but they're not so great. The main problem is the wordlists. Even if they've got immense wordlists (which they don't), you're still not choosing the words yourself. How folks made crosswords back before not only there was oneacross but before computers is entirely astounding to me.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

2006-01-18T20:06:00.000-08:00

so i've been reading (slowly) The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon.

Comic book fans: forgive me, i'm not well versed in the field.

it's sort of a historical fiction documenting the arc of a comic-book team which i think is meant to be sort of an amalgum of the authors of Batman and Art Spiegelman, author of the famous Maus.

In any event,
it's the WWII story of an american jewish boy and his czech cousin who comes over as a refugee. really it's the story of the cousin, who actually does have amazing adventures, whilst the american cousin more or less hangs around the fringes.

It's a good book. It's fun. Especially if you're not too much of a stickler for thematic um cohesion.

It's not however a great book, and i'm surprised it won the Pulitzer. Maybe i'm missing something in the reading. My gripe here is that it seems to me that Chabon started out w/ just a plain idea for writing a historical fiction history of Spiegelman, and that was well and good, but he (Chabon) felt maybe it needed some thickening up, so he introduced the American Cousin, and then it needed some more thickening up, so he added in homosexuality, vigilante justice/terrorism, coming of age, marriages of convenience, random items of heartbreak, and, weirdly, antarctica.
These are all noble themes, but somehow they just seem like filler in this book.

On the plus side, reading the book and the new issue of Kevin Carhart et al's Mmmm, oooh! inspired me to draw another short comic for the next issue of Mmmm, oooh! so i'm pretty grateful to it for that.

In other news,
i weirdly found myself skipping a booksigning/talk by David Foster Wallace a couple days ago. What's becoming of my inner sycophant ? It's a damned tragedy.

king kong

2006-01-03T11:53:00.000-08:00

i heard somewhere that the new king kong was pretty good, so Michelle and i went to go see it, but it's really awful. really, really awful awful awful. 'nuff said.

pynchon, lewis, wallace, byat

2005-12-28T19:09:00.000-08:00

i'm still reading, you know.
just very, very slowly.
my commute is now 100% by bicycle,
which doesn't leave much time for reading,
and apparently it's not important enough for me to actually go and Make time in the rest of my life for it.

anyhow.

the surprise:
i can't stand Pyncon! After 46 pages i've lumped him in with whomever wrote The Illuminati thing.
A quick quote from The Crying of Lot 49 may exemplify:

What the road really was, she fancied, was this hypdermic needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of a freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner L.A., keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain. But were Oedipa some single melted crystal of urban horse, L.A., really, would be no less turned on for her absence.

- basically the shit i am giving is very, very small.

Too many commas, a tedious and dangerously top-heavy metaphore, and basically a set of obsessions (drugs & sex) which i have pretty much no interest in reading fiction obessed with.

kai jsut handed me um The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon. With a recommendation. So maybe that will save me.

I was bummed to discover that Pynchon, one of the greats, is someone i can't stand.

Wallace: A supposedly fun thing i'll never do again- going good. actually it's going excellent but fear of a broken-record appearance keeps me from saying more.

Lewis: Rereading/watching The Lion/Witch/Wardrobe. Appreciating much more than ever before the influences of Tolkien on Lewis. (They were literally best buds)

A.S. Byatt: The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye - A book of short new fairy stories which i loved until the title story which is rather postmodern.

quick update

2005-11-14T19:21:00.000-08:00

finished Fingersmith by Sarah Waters. It was pretty good. Actually it was almost great, but i got a slightly bored about two-thirds thru. But pretty good. I got it from Kai, who lurves it.

It's basically a story of Victorian crime, lesbianism, and mostly deception, deception, deception. We also watched Tipping the Velvet, also by Waters, and i think judging from the movie that Fingersmith is a better book than Velvet, as it has a broader range. Broader dynamic range, i'm going to say, even tho it means nil.

Skimmed thru parts of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World with Michelle, and we both decided it's not worth reading. Too obscufatorally loquacious. (-ially ?) My bottom line for fiction is that if it's not enjoyable to read, don't read it.

Am still reading Staggolee Shot Billy and it's still pretty interesting.

I think i'm about to re-read DFW's Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, because i recall loving it. I think i recall loving it in Oslo. In a park in Oslo ?

Found a brand-new copy of O'Reilly's Mac OS X in a Nutshell on Haight Street. So it's up-for-grabs if anybody can use it. It looks like a guide to the unix-aspects of OS X.

MOVIES
------

Most notably, caught Serenity before it left the theaters and i think this is one the best Science Fiction movies i've seen since Alien. It.. it takes it's Sci-Fi semi-seriously, which so few movies do. Most 'science-fiction' movies are just action movies set in the future. Anyhow. Quality stuff. I think tho i have to recommend watching the Firefly series before the movie which follows it.

Chicken Little was fun, but less fun than i was hoping.

Wallace & Grommet : The bunny movie, see Chicken Little above.

Me and You and Everyone We Know - wow. weird and good. i think. yes. weird and good. i recommend it. i think.
today i just snagged myself a ))<>(( t-shirt, so i'm stoked. i think.

trip master monkey (kingston), stagolee shot billy (brown)

2005-10-24T22:37:00.000-07:00

A while ago i read Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior(1976) and basically loved it and only wished that it had been about something more relevant to my own life as a white guy. The writing was superb and i wanted to check out more by her. So Michelle kindly picked me up her (Maxine's) 1989 book Tripmaster Monkey: his fake book. Which basically wow what a let-down. I should have known from the antagonistic and opaque title that the book itself would be antagonistic and opaque.

Who's that guy who was the first to write a novel and then throw all the pages in the air and recompose them in random order ? Capote ? Well, let's say it the deserialization of a book. There are certain books which are untransformed by deserialization: that is, each page pretty much can come between any two other pages without changing the overall structure or feel. The last Tom Robbins book i tried to read definitely fell into this category. I think it was Jitterbug Perfume.

Anyhow: Tripmaster Monkey is homomorphic under deserialization. I can't for the life of me tell the difference between any two pages. Granted this is after reading only about 40 pages (Chapter one and a few other pages). But i really tried. I really wanted to have another wonderful Kingston to read, but when i closed in in exasperation for the fourth time, i figured i'd had enough.

Instead, i am stealing Stagolee Shot Billy from our living room. I think it's Kai's. By Cecil Brown, it's a history of the famous eponymous song, and looks to be pretty interesting. Apparently the basic facts of the most common version (Stagolee shot Billy over a five-dollar stetson hat) are pretty much totally rooted in an actual, court-documented event in St. Louis, circa 1895. Brown analyzes how various versions of the song contain elements of race struggle, class struggle, law-enforcement struggle, etc. How white folk coopted the figure of Stagolee (The original Stagolee's name was "Lee Shelton", nicknamed "Stack Lee") into* a white man, not the black man he was. And i'm not sure what else. It looks pretty interesting. 228 pages before the footnotes and such.

* "coopted into" ? is that okay ?

this blog has moved to http://orionreads.elenzil.com

2005-10-24T22:07:00.000-07:00

this blog has moved to http://elenzil.com/orionreads

.. which getting the old location (http://orionreads.blogspot.com)
to redirect to the new location was a bit tricky:

1. set the publishing location back to blogspot.
(this did not work for me at first, but i waited a
day or two and tried again and it was fine)

2. edit the template so that the line
<body>
looks like
<body onLoad="document.location='http://elenzil.com/orionreads';">
if your <body> line isn't EXACTLY "<body>",
don't follow these directions. find someone helpful.

3. republish the blog
- this will cause the old location to forward to the new,
but you're not done yet.

4. set the blog back to publishing at the new site (http://elenzil.com/orionreads)
- this may trigger a republishing.
if so, the template gets pushed to the new site,
which means the new site forwards to the new site in an infinite loop!
oh no! the space-time thingy is in peril!

5. re-edit the template to back how it was.
that is, change <body onLoad="document.location='http://elenzil.com/orionreads';">
back to just plain old <body>.

6. in blogger control panel thingy under publishing,
specify an archive location!
without this, i wasn't getting any archives.

6. republish one last time.

you heard it here, folks.

Infinite Jest, Black Hole

2005-10-22T15:48:00.000-07:00

So i finally finished David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest for the second time.
What can i say. The world is divided into two kinds of people by this book, and as a member of one of them, i think it's impossible to explain the awesomeness of the book to anybody of the other kind. - You (i) end up just seeming obsessed and rabid, and i have a suspicion it's not pretty. Not attracive.

Anyhow. So i'm going to try hard to do the following only once:

This is the best book ever.

Besides just general bestness, it's also primarily one of the funniest things i've ever read. I laugh lots. Wallace's writing style, in addition, makes pretty much all other authors except maybe Amis seem to be unintroduced to anything beyond the power paragraph.

I think a lot of people may be intimidated by the size and uh vocabulary of IJ, but they really shouldn't be. The size is a wonderful thing because it's a wonderful book. And the vocabulary, it's not so bad. One thing *not* to do is keep a dictionary handy, because you'll be referring to it like half the time and as Mike pointed out, end up getting distracted and spending a lot of time reading the dictionary for it's own sake.

Kai spotted the comic book Black Hole by Charles Burns coming thru used at her bookshop, and wonderfully nabbed it for me. Black Hole has been published as seperate comic books over pretty much the last decade, and has finally been released in one big hardcover. It's basically one of the most disturbing comic (and story) i've ever read. It makes me itch and feel uncomfortable. Don't read it before a job interview. I'm a big fan of the Downer-type comics such Ghost World and Optic Nerve, and this is definitely in that category.

It's the story of a group of high-school kids in the early 70s where there's a disease going around a lot like AIDS in that you get it via sex. Except unlike AIDS, it mutates your body in some unpredictable and varyingly horrific way. For example tentacles on your ribs, a mouth on your throat, or possibly a cute tail. The disease carries extreme stigma, and the kids who have it bad all live out in the dark dark woods, living on junk food.

So that's the plot, but the real despair and creepiness is pretty plot-independant, and you can get it from just one page.

Here's a frame from Black Hole which i think sums up the mood fairly well. Except add in mutation.

So.

infinite list of unknown words

2005-10-07T21:51:00.000-07:00

so this time thru infinit jest,
i've been keeping in the back a list of words which i don't know but think i should. This is different than just words i don't know, note.
For example, antipyretic or anxiolytic (p. 984) are words i don't know, but i don't really feel like it's my business to know them. but fulvous and erumpant and cathected (p.'s 93, 155, 654) are different stories. i feel like i Should know those words.

So. What follows is the list.

To forestall a possible slew of dictionary.com links,
if you feel like enlightening me on any of these words,
by all means do, excpt that i'm not really interested in what d.com has to say, or wikipedia or any other online source. what i really value in learning the definition of a word is hearsay. first-hand accounts, so to speak. and plus as my friend jennifer informed me, dictionaries are not always right.
(i've gone ahead and linked each one to google images tho)

note a few of these are words i "know" but he used them in ways unfamiliar to me.

also at the bottom is a small list of other lists of unknown words from IJ.

so.

the Infinite Jest list of words from i don't know but should,
in order of discovery:
(i don't know why there's this big gap here)

wen	p. 4
kekulean	p. 5
lapidary¹	p. 7
presbyoptic	p. 11
espadrille	p. 15
martinet	p. 15
(hypo)phalangial	p. 16
etiology	p. 17
odalisque	p. 988
stelliform	p. 1058
activally	p. 1058
pedentive	p. 91
amaneunsis	p. 92
fulvous	p. 93
semion	p. 101
acutance	p. 102
agnate	p. 151, 382
praxis	p. 155
erumpant	p. 155
sub-rosa	p. 220
caliopsis	p. 241
apotropaic	p. 243
jonquil	p. 258
revenant	p. 260
concupiscience	p. 992
argot	p. 268
sedulously	p. 271, 287
nictated	p. 272
egregulous	p. 272
lordotic	p. 1003
strabismic	p. 290, 291, 905
ascapartic	p. 290
apical	p. 290
attar	p. 290
adit	p. 291
ephebe	p. 292
ibid	p. 1021
xerophage	p. 1006
solecism	p. 1006
Anschluss	p. 311, 777
bradys-	p. 313 (later defined on p. 1022)
nativity²	p. 314
codicil	p. 315
annular	everywhere
à-Clef	p. 316
grise	p. 332
venulated	p. 362
vulgate	p. 1026
selvage	p. 366
Q.v.	p. 985
cunctation	p. 368
etiology	p. 370
prolix	p. 370
adipose	p. 383
jejune	p. 385
mafficking	p. 429
picric	p. 456
morendo	p. 461
misprision	p. 465
teratoid	p. 486
dihedral	p. 495
cerise	p. 513
ambit	p. 1037
psoria-tic	p. 582
anomic	p. 586
adante	p. 586
prandial	p. 634
distaff	p. 1046
cathected	p. 654
mucoidal	p. 657
anaclitic	p. 1048, 695
aspic	p. 1050
furcated	p. 1051
fictile	p. 694
catexic	p. 707
katexia	p. 751
parturient	p. 789
cerise	p. 790
liebstod	p. 863
strabysmic	p. 905 (vs strabismic, p. 291)
sinciput	p. 950
finial	p. 950
seraglio	p. 952
antigen³	p. 965

1. "Director of Composition: 'I made in my assessment [of a paper] deliberate use of lapidary and effete.'"

2. ".. because it was in fact not Mario's real eyelid - that had been sacrificed when [his] fist stuck to his face like a tongue to cold metal had been peeled away, at nativity - but...".
it must somehow mean birth.

3. "A certain number of hysterical pre-competition rumors about the Québec Jr. Team and the severity of the weather circulated and were refuted and shifted antigens and returned."

Other people's lists of unknown words:
http://anchorpoint.blogs.com/amythoughts/2005/08/infinite_jest_v_1.html
http://illquill.blogspot.com/2004/08/fun-with-faux-words.html

Oh look, an index to the whole book - how handy!
http://slacker.com/~cco/members.aol.com/russillosm/ijndx.html

Gaiman

2005-09-30T12:29:00.000-07:00

I'm on this like vitriol roll.

I thumbed thru the copy of Gaiman's new Anansi Boys, and more or less thought it was pretty fluffy. I've never been a Gaiman fan tho. I think he's doing an excellent job of sort of taking up the mantel of Douglas Adams. Whom i loved in junior high but pretty much no longer have the patience for.

To mediate the vitriol,
i thumbed thru Early English Lyrics: Amorous, Divine, Moral and Trivial (london, 1966) last night at Jennifer and Tanya's place. It's a collection of poetry circa 1400, and the amorous section especially had some pretty piercing pieces. I was shocked to come upon the following poem, because i thought it had been a creation of my favorite band, Current 93:

Western wind, when will thou blow
The small rain down can rain?
Christ, if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!

It's gorgeous.

I was impressed when i asked Tanya if she knew if "Westen wind, when will thou blow" is a famous poem or one she's heard of, and she immediately quoted the rest of the verse.

Another was a love poem where the guy is all "Yeah my heart is crushed because my girl done left me for another, but also it's nto so crushed because the other guy is really a good guy, way better than me, so if she's happy, i'm happy". - which, ow.

Elsewhere in the non-vitriolic department,
after detouring thru Perdido Street, i'm back with Infinite Jest and i love it.

South Pole

2005-09-27T16:52:00.000-07:00

I'm leaving in two weeks for the south pole of the earth.

I'll be taking Infinite Jest because i'm still not finished.

I think i'll also take The Bible because i've never read it and i'd like to read the bible's account of Jesus. It's fascinating to me how many different versions of Jesus there are in the world today. There's the Jesus of Dofstoyevski, who is basically a martyr but not so much of a saviour; there's the Jesus of the born-agains, who (literally?) enters into your heart; there's the Jesus of mainstream american christianity who apparently "Saves!" with a twangy accent; there's the jesus of Salinger, who is pretty much indistinguishable from Buddha; of course the Crusades; and c. The various flavours of Jesus basically span a really wide range, so i feel i should sit down and read the darned thing and get an idea for what they're all based on. Plus there will be plenty of time down there for reading, i suspect. I guess i may not actually Take one, there's probably one there.

For the rest of my reading diet, i think i'll be relying on what other visitors have left over the years, which should be a fairly interesting collection.

For more info on what i'm up to, visit elenzil.com/ohpolar.

Perdido Street Station, Tony Takitani

2005-09-27T16:38:00.000-07:00

Mike and Nevada brought me down a copy of Perdido Street Station by China Mièville. As i think i mentioned earlier, i read his short story Reports of Certain Events in London and absolutely loved it to pieces. That story is basically the tale of "feral streets" which appear and disappear in regular city neighborhoods and which are only perceived by a certain group of people who have somehow started looking really hard. The interesting part is that the streets seem to have a society of their own, which the humans try to tease out. For example the streets sometimes appear in disarray, as if attacked, or there may be evidence that two streets have joined forces and perhaps even bred! So very abstract and intriguing stuff, and Mièville basically writes a decent paragraph, so it was a wonderful read. Perdido Street Station unfortunately really doesn't have the high-level abstraction i was hoping for, however. As far as i'm concerned, it's a luridly textured monster story with a large helping of "Steam-Punk" mixed in. (Which if there's one thing i find really turns me off, it's steam-punk.) Perdido Street Station is basically like an H.R. Geiger painting: it's fabulously textured, it's dark, it's organic, it's well executed, but really, what's the point ? There's little there to really engage the imagination.

I want to add that China's monsters, these "Slake-Moths", are basically Leaf-Cutter Ants. Leaf-cutters fertilize and farm fungi and then eat it, which is pretty much what the slake-moths do with human dreams*. Similar to my complaint about The Cave, there's basically no motivation or character to these monsters besides Hunger. Granted, The Weaver is a pretty neat monster, as far as motivation goes. Actually The Weaver may be one of my favorite monsters of all time. It's basically a gigantic god-like multi-dimensional spider who views time, space, society, human events, relationships, etc as a giant web, and who's sole motivation is to make the pattern of the web "as pretty" as possible. Which is pretty neat.

* Well really, human nightmares. China: couldn't you've given them an appetite for All sorts of dreams, not just bad dreams ? That seems like a pretty arbitrary and tedious decision there.

Michelle and i went to see Toni Takitani, which is a movie adaptation of a Huraki Murakami short story. DO NOT SEE THIS MOVIE IF IT IS REMOTELY WITHIN YOUR POWER TO NOT DO SO. It's pretty horrible. Basically nothing happens except the audience is informed that PEOPLE ARE LONELY. Which is a fine message, but there really wasn't enough um.. pudding under the sugar crust to cushion the message. I think the worst part is that 90% of the story is told via narration, and not just narration but narration with sad, slow, sad, slow piano music playing in the background only when the narrator is speaking. It pretty much robbed me of my soul for an evening.

weird reading/travel coincidences

2005-09-08T19:52:00.000-07:00

this is really just me kind of bragging about how much i've travelled lately, but maybe if i write that right at the front it'll like not be so.

so i've made 4 flights in the last um 8 or 9 months:
marseilles, philadelphia, boston, and am currently in houston.

in marseilles, i was reading The Destiny of Isabelle Eberhardt, which large portions of take place in marseille.

in philly i forget what i was reading. not much, i think.

in boston however, i was reading Infinite Jest, which large portions of take place in. like specific street intersections and stuff. like the giant "Citgo" neon sign.

and now in houston, i'm still reading IJ, which has no portions in texas, But it does refer to the "Whataburger" fast food chain, which i'd assumed was fiction, but lo! Houston is crawling with Whataburgers.

that's all.

kim stanley robinson sucks

2005-09-08T00:11:00.000-07:00

i just want to say real quick that Kim Stanley Robinson (red/green/blue mars trilogy, antarctica) is one of the crappiest authors going in quality science-fiction today. he's got a real flair for addressing the tedious, the tediously political, the tediously psychointerpersonal, and especially the tediously geologic. KIM: What is it with you and describing every pebble in every layer of strata of every crater or glacier on mars or antarctica ? you describe them well, but once or possibly twice is enough. Per Book mind, Not Per Page. your interest in political and interpersonal intrigue is promising, but WOW do you make it uninteresting. I think it might do you some good to write a real flight-of-fancy novel. Break free from the near-future stuff you've been doing with mars & the cold place. write about time travel or aliens for gosh sakes. Posit a future with no senate-sub-committee analogues. (He actually writes about senate sub-committees, folks) Or maybe just take some drugs or something. PLEASE, stop producing crap like Antarctica. Thank you.

i should add that since Mykle is unexpectedly and disappointingly not going to antarctica this season, Kai got him K.S.Robinson's Antarctica sort of in-lieu, and it's been hanging out in the bathroom. i haven't actually read it, but i've thumbed thru it at leisure, and which see the above.

Martin Gardner, The Cave, Bullit

2005-08-31T15:09:00.000-07:00

Have finished Martin Gardner's Penrose Tiles to Trapdoor Ciphers. While there were a few chapters i skimmed extremeley lightly, by and large it's a great book if you like math. I like that on the one hand he'll have a chapter about Trapdoor Ciphers (The early name for RSA encryption or Public-Key encryption) which is fairly gnarly stuff, and then he'll have a whole chapter just about the difficulty of teaching the concept that a Negative time a Negative is a Positive. eg -2 * -2 = 4.

I was happy to find a whole chapter devoted to Wythoff's Nim, a penny-removing game which thoroughly obsessed me for about two or three weeks earlier this year. The game turns out to reveal amazing, and almost horrifyingly unexpected properties of the Golden Ratio. The Golden Ratio folks. Fear it, love it, know it.

I continue to love Infinite Jest, but i should really stop reporting that. Unless i explicitely say that i am no longer loving I.J. to pieces, you can assume that i am. (phrase stolen from Martin Amis' line in Money where he says pretty much the same thing about 'unless i explicitely say i am not lighting another cigarette, etc.)

Saw The Cave with Mykle and Michelle. Even tho i was expecting it to be worse than i was expecting, it was still worse than i was expecting. I mean, it's a bad hollywood flick about monsters waiting in a cave for hundreds of years for humans to come along so they can eat them. I'm so sick of monsters which have no motivation but hunger. Come On. Subterranean triphibian monster things and all you can give them is an insatiable appatite. No culture, no curiosity, no nothing but hunger. Jeeze. I don't care if the human only want to blow them up, but .. anyway. i cease. I recommend it if you're into that sort of thing.

Saw Bullit in a public park in San Francisco's North Beach with Mykle and Kai and Michelle and this guy Mark. It was much better than i was expecting. Especially the photography. Nice attention i thought to light and shadow and such. McQueen's character was suprisingly convincingly sensitive. Or maybe i'm just a sucker for that sort of thing.

Infinite Jest, Martin Gardner

2005-08-26T15:23:00.000-07:00

Well,
i'm re-reading my hands-down unqualifiedly favorite book, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.
Which is about 1,080 pages of smallish type, and which is also pretty
much totally engrossing, so altho i think the hot reading action on this blog
is going to pretty much dry up, that does not mean there is no hot reading action going on! What hotter reading action is there than IJ, really ?

Where else do we get introduced to words like "Gynecopia" (Orin Incandenza's pick-up strategy #7 "..always works. It's pretty much a gynecopia.") ? How about "the terminally pulchritudinous" ? (In description of a woman who, logically enough in the interest of public safety goes around wearing a veil all the time).

You should read this book.

Don't let the crazy word-play daunt. Ignore it if you have to. It's still one of the funniest and best-written books of all time.

And it's LONG. That's 1080 pages of pure reading pleasure.

I'm writing down the words i don't know but which i think i should.
Words which, eh, so what if i don't know them, i'm not writing down.
The list is about 50 by page 300, so that's, what, a word every 6 pages ?
At this rate i can expect um 180 unknown words.
Words like "fulvous", "praxis" and "sub-rosa".

so.

In the bathroom, i've been reading Martin Gardner's Mathematical Carnival, and am starting now on his Penrose Tiles to Trapdoor Ciphers. Mathematical Carnival is a nifty book full of puzzles from his well-known Scientific American column Mathematical Recreations. The puzzles are probably not of much interest to the non-mathematically avid, but they're really not that hard. Very few of them actually require doing any math. Penrose to Trapdoor is more mathematical, altho also gleaned from the same S.A. column. It has inspired me to finally beg my girlfriend Michelle to buy me a set of physical penrose tiles, which she more than graciously is doing. Yay!

So, that's about it. Lots of reading, not much blog-posting coming up.

trundling

2005-08-10T09:55:00.000-07:00

Finished A Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich, it was good. It was much less heavy-handed than i expected, which is good. That is, while it's not exactly pulling punches*, you don't walk away crying. Or wouldn't, even if you were me.

* I'm actually not entirely convinced that it is not pulling punches. The book gives little sense of the scale of incarceration in Stalin's USSR, nor the paranoia attendant in the populace. Which perhaps is reasonable, since Solzhenitsyn spent most of those years in the gulag, not in public. Amis paints a much more bleak and horror-ridden portrait of those times and places, and i wonder if Solzhenitsyn (i'm going to pronounce that "sol-zhen it sin", just so you know) was encouraged (or not) to water down the account.

Back to The Martian Chronicles.

Oh! Also !
Put it on your calendar, Monday, November 28, David Foster Wallace and Rick Moody will uh be at the Herbst Theater in SF. $18.50.
http://www.cityarts.net/n.moody.html

hmm - blogger here is screwing up my entries. it keeps substituting like open-font tags for close-span tags or something.

one day in the life of ivan denisovich

2005-08-09T00:48:00.000-07:00

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn is a 1962 Russian novel about life in the Stalinst Russian gulags. Apparently it was quite notable when it came out, being one of the first published and government-approved criticisms of Stalinist Russia. Solzhenitsyn was himself a gulag prisoner for about a decade after WWII, and the novel is a condensation of his experience, portayed as a single day in the life of a ten-year prisoner of. Solzhenitsyn's novel is obviously a more fine-grained account of the gulag than what Martin Amis was able to put into Koba The Dread , and surpisingly One Day in the Life is also a substantially softer, more human account of the gulags. Which is a very unexpected sentence to find one's self writing. Personally, i suspect that Day in the Life was more or less censored and watered down, either preemtively or postemtively by Solzhenitsyn.

So, a summary.

I think basically the gulag as described by Solzhenitsyn and to some degree coroborated by Amis's research can be fairly accurately compared to the Nazi centration camp but without the torture. In the gulag you weren't expected to live, you were treated like literal shit, but your basic humanity was to some tiny degree recognized. Amis might disagree.

A Day in the Life was politically approved by Kruschev, as it fit well with his program of condeming the shit that went down in the Stalin era. According to the forward and introduction, it was a pretty big deal wen published in 1963.

Also, finished Tom Sawyer; it was good. It's a lot more sugary than Huck Finn, as everybody knows. Twain's Indian-hating sure comes thru again:

"It's all plain enough, now. When you talked about notching ears and slitting noses I judged that that was your own embellishment, because white men don't take that sort of revenge. But an Injun! That's a different matter altogether."

Harry Potter 6

2005-08-04T15:16:00.000-07:00

I have finished Harry Potter 6, and am frankly sad it ended. Is this wrong ? Possibly. But if there's one thing i'm world-famous for, it's brutal self-honesty. Can i say brutalic ? Anyhow. H.P.6 is pretty much just fine. It's the.. the what. The brie and ritz-crackers of reading material. I have to admit i'm getting a bit tired of the foibles of Harry and Ron; Hermione is much easier to hang around, readerwise.

So am now rolling thru Tom Sawyer.

I had to pretty much drop Infinite Jest because it's just too physically unweildy to bring along on my daily bike/bart commute.

I look forward to starting Perdido Street Station by China Mieville, which Kai, whom i know loves to see her name in bold, got for me and which Mykle is currently reading with every appearance of enjoying it, so that's very good.

Michelle is reading Catcher in the Rye and in talking about it last night i nearly teared up thinking about how beautiful that book is. I'm that pathetic, yes.

Muddled

2005-07-25T10:29:00.000-07:00

Am a bit at loose ends bibliographically just now.

Am currently reading:
Tom Sawyer
Life on the Mississippi
The Martian Chronicles
Harry Potter 6
A new book of short horror stories which i can't recall the name of
Inifnite Jest.

It's a long list.
Books on the list which i've currently lost: Sawyer, Mississippi, Chronicles.

The most exciting for me is the short horror,
primarily because it contained a China Meiville short about Feral Streets of london, alleyways which ooze in & out of existence where previously there was an unbroken row of houses. It was really well-writ. So i may be looking in to his full novels.

Ligotti - in a foreign town

2005-07-18T11:28:00.000-07:00

Oh also, Michelle got me a new copy of the Thomas Ligotti/Current 93 book/cd In a Foreign Town. It's a small book, more of a booklet, which is with a CD. The idea is you listen to the CD while reading the book, because they're both creepy.

The stories are, i think, more finely crafted than those in Songs of a Dead Dreamer.

They all take place in "A town near the northern border", and involve the themes of metaphysical disappearance, public collusion, identity, etc. Actually, make that: metaphysical disappearance, metaphysical public collusion, metaphysical identity, and metaphysical etc.

Needless to say, i loved it.

Twain, Tolkien, Kingston, Bradbury, Twain, Twain

2005-07-18T11:06:00.000-07:00

It's been a while!

Finally finished Tolkien and The Great War. Basically, the author says that WWI was a heavy influence on Tolkien's works, which doesn't really come as a surprise to anyone, but it's nice to have it all spelled out. Also there was a lot of info about WWI which i hadn't known. - which doesn't really come as a surprise to anyone, but it's nice to have it spelled out.
Interestingly, the author considered Tolkien's early work such as primarily The Book of Lost Tales and The Cottage of Lost Play to be superior to the later Silmarillion, which basically tells pretty much the same stories but with an additional few decades of simmering. His point is mainly that the earlier versions had a whimsy, vivacity, and sense of wonder which gave way before the overpowering monolith of the Great History in the Silmarillion. I think the most easily recognized example is the loss of the comical Tevildo the Cat scene from the lay of Beren and Luthien.

Finished Woman Warrior, and i think i read every page. Excellent writing, and as Jenn See suggested, i will be on the lookout for Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey.

Twain
- I'm not sure what it is with me and Twain lately. I finished Puddinhead Wilson, am currently reading Tom Sawyer and Life on the Mississippi, and plan on reading Conneticut Yankee the next time i come across it.
After reading Puddinhead, i feel i have to take back some of the criticisms i made earlier about Twain's antirascist status. While i still feel that humor is primary to Twain, he does lead the story into realms of notable black/white race relations.
He still hates the red man, tho.

Am also re-reading Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, which i read long ago in junior high, i believe. Bradbury is really not normal science-fiction. He's much, much less interested in science than most authors of his era (Asimov, eg). For example, in The Martian Chronicles, the crews of the first three rocket ships to land on Mars are destroyed in the following way:

A native martian couple has been having domestic friction, mostly because the wife has been having dreams about having an affair in a few days with an alien who will land from the stars. The husband is jealous, and when the day comes, he makes the wife stay at home to entertain "The Joneses", and goes out to where the rocket has landed, and shoots the two crewmembers and comes home.
A year later, the second rocket ship lands, and the crew make their way to a martian town, but everyone they introduce themselves to can't be bothered with the first Earthmen and pass them off one by one until they arrive at an insane asylum full of first Earthmen. The head doctor finally plays along with our heros and lets them bring him to their rocket ship. Now on Mars, insane people can project their insanity telepathically, so to cure the patients and himself, the doctor shoots all of them.
A while later, the third rocket to mars lands and discovers that their childhood hometown is there, along with their dead loved ones, back to life. All the crewmembers go to their individual homes with joy, and in the middle of the night are killed, because it was a trick.

.. and so on. Bradbury's Mars isn't just strange from a scientific point of view (in fact it's entirely familiar scientificall), it's strange from a metaphysical point of view.

It's a bit frustrating, honestly, as a guy who likes his hard sci-fi.
I've currently lost it, but i expect i'll finish it anyhow.

tolkien twain kingston

2005-06-27T22:40:00.000-07:00

am still reading the Tolkien/WWI bio. it's incredibly interesting, altho i suspect absolutely only if you're a pretty serious tolkien nut. if the only elvish you know is in the movies, you probably won't be interested. it's actually kindled a desire to read, who would have thought it, some WWI history books, and while i'm at it, i should really just read world history again. does Zinn have a world history book ?

michelle got me Puddinhead Wilson, i think to make fun of me. i was enjoying it quite a bit until i lost it. i think it's under the bed. i'm approaching the decision that Twain's reputation as a racial activist is largely undeserved. this is solely from light readings of his books, mind, not any serious research. as an author he strikes me as first and foremost a humorist, and all other themes are distinctly subservient. if it's funny to show the hypocrisy of whites, he'll write it. if it's funny to show the ignorance of slaves, he'll write it. perhaps his interest shifted by the time he wrote Huck Finn, but his other writings don't really seem to hold up the mantle of racial radical. i welcome dialogue on this.

have started Maxine Hong Kingston's famous Woman Warrior. I feel i may have tried reading this before. She writes so well that i partially wish i were chinese american and could feel more relevancy to my life. Why wasn't Maxine Hong Kingston born a white middle class computer geek instead of confused chinese american second-generation girl ? So, it's hard for me to pay attention for whole chapters, but each page is a pleasure.

TOM SWIFTY OF THE DAY

"We've got to get rid of that Danes girl!" Tom declared.

god that's funny.

andrew vacchs

2005-06-27T22:24:00.000-07:00

Andrew Vacchs was at A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books in sf this evening, touring re his new book Two Trains Running. I.. was about to write that i'm not really a Vacchs fan, but i have read at least ten or so of his books, so i guess i defacto am. For those who don't know, Vacchs is a child-abuse activist who prosecutes child abuse cases and writes gritty, violent novels which deal with the same cause in which the child abuser always ends up horribly dead. The books are famously formulaic, but really it's hard not to get behind them, especially when bad things come to bad people.

(author, not character)

I expected him to be intense in person, and he is, but much more approachable and easy-going than uh, i expected. He did not actually read from his new book (which is Not a Burke novel) but instead pretty much just talked about whatever, which was pretty cool. He fielded questions on anything but the audience primarily asked what he thought of various current events, etc.

Yes, he talked about dogs. No, he didn't talk about cars, full-figured women or blowjobs.

Those interested in child advocacy and more will find lots of relevant stuff at vacchs.com.

John Updike

2005-06-20T16:34:00.000-07:00

Michelle recommended that i pick up John Updike's The Poorhouse Fair at a used book sale we were at, and i did and boy am i glad. It's such a treasure to find a good author whom you haven't read yet. The Poorhouse Fair is a very well written portrait of aging, basically. Altho to some degree i ahve the sense that it may not be about that at all and i'm not reading deep enough! Haha. Anyhow. Updike's tone is for the most part breezy and comfortable, and he only strays into overt metaphysics once or twice.

Am back to Tolkien and the Great War, which is good.

Michelle also happened upon a copy of Songs of a Dead Dreamer which seems to be the same edition as the one i have but in worse condition, for sale for about $100 on the internet! huh!

Go blow off some steam by making up a few Tom Swifties !

Ligotti, on Tolkien, John Updike, Jonathan Lethem

2005-06-14T18:41:00.000-07:00

I think i finished the Ligotti book. If not i'm pretty close. (I love falling asleep reading)

Most of the short stories in Songs of a Dead Dreamer are good but only barely. A few i'd skip. And a few are existentially creepy like nobody's business. Among these really good ones, which i'd recommend to anyone, are:

* Alice's Last Adventure
- the story of a now late-middle aged authoress of a series of popular spooky children's adventures. alice is now cynical and alchoholic and when small things start to stand out to her as extremely strange, nobody (neither us nor she) knows if she's just going nuts or if the demons are coming for her. this story is a *masterpiece of understatement*. if there's one thing i can't stand it's an author with a sledgehammer in his hand, and here ligotti is with his lightest touch.

* Dream of a Mannikin
- This unfortunately can't be done anything remotely like justice in, i think, fewer words than the story itself. Ligotti is real good at imparting the yes, you may in literal fact be dreaming right now and awake at any moment or worse. This is a crisp, powerful, and deeply haunting short story. Essentially it's the story of a psychologist who receives a patient who is recommended to her by her lover & professional rival, who has often tried to make the psychologist interested in Other Planes of existence and such, and the upshot is that this patient is having deeply disturbing multi-level dreams wherein she first dreams that she is a little girl putting clothing on puppets (shades of her real-life job as a dresser of store-window mannequins) but then in the dream she falls asleep and dreams that she is a puppet, being none-too-kindly dressed and walked about the stage by some unseen god figure. She then wakes up from this second-level dream not to the first-level dream, but to reality which is attended by much disconcertion exaggerated by a conviction and glimpse of a mannequin's head receding into the headboard of her bed. Naturally when our hero tracks down the place of work of the patient, she finds nobody is employed there by her name or description, but there is a mannequin in the shop window which is dressed in the clothes the young patient was wearing. Meanwhile this is only the groundwork for the layered relationship between our two psychologists, and it really goes from there and gets creepier and creepier.

* Notes on the Writing of Horror
- Pretty skillfully done, this takes a pretty obvious idea and does it very well so that in the end you really are somewhat disturbed. It's not going to sound good here, but it is. Ligotti writes as a famous writer of horror composing a small article on the topic of how to write horror. He begins with a simple horror story and demonstrates how it can be rendered in various flavours: Realistic, Gothic, Experimental. (The story is one of a man about to go on a Big Date, but unfortunately buys a pair of haunted trousers which necrotise his legs in the middle of the ghetto.) However after the three traditional styles he moves on to "another style" and "the final style" during the course of which the article begins to be really scary in itself.

Am reading Tolkien and the Great War by John Garth. If you're not a Tolkien fan, this will bore you to tears. If you've read The Book of Lost Tales or The Lays of Beleriand etc, it's pretty interesting stuff. It's the most detailed biography of Tolkien i've read so far, which isn't really saying much as i haven't read any straight-up biographies of him, but it certainly casts light on some stuff in the Letters which were a bit foggy at the time.

Am about halfway thru John Updike's The Poorhouse Fair. I think this is the first Updike i've read (readen?) and it's pretty good. It's a close-up portrayal of old people and regular people at a Poorhouse in New Jersey, circa 1950. Am enjoying it immensley.

I bought Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude a while ago, but after thumbing through it i don't think i'm going to read it. Which is strange because i loved As She Climbed Across the Table and of course Motherless Brooklyn.

A Confederacy of Dunces, Thomas Ligotti

2005-06-07T11:56:00.000-07:00

Well, it's official. A Confederacy of Dunces is, in fact, the most charming book i've ever read. It's basically a story about a fat offensive bombastic antiachieving slob named Ignatius and his misadventures in colorful New Orleans. Some folks are too irritated by Ignatius as a character to read the book, and honestly, i can't fault them; you'll probably love or hate this book and it's not one where i'm going to argue that my side is right.

Ignatius speaking with a hot-dog vendor:

Ignatius chewed with a blissful savagery, studying the scar on the man's nose and listening to his whistling.
"Do I hear a strain from Scarlatti?" Ignatius asked finally.
"I thought i was whistling 'Turkey in the Straw.'"
"I had hoped that you might be familiar with Scarlatti's work. He was the last of the musicians," Ignatius observed and resumed his furious attack upon the long hot dog. "With your apparent musical bent, you might apply yourself to something worthwhile."
Ignatius chewed while the man began his tuneless whistling again. Then he said, "I suspect that you imagine 'Turkey in the Straw' to be a valuable bit of Americana. Well, it is not. It is a discordant abomination."
"I can't see that it matters much."
"It matters a great deal, sir!" Ignatius screamed. "Veneration of such things as 'Turkey in the Straw' is at the very root of our current dilemma."
"Where the hell do you come from? Whadda you want?"
"What is your opinion of a society that considers 'Turkey in the Straw' to be one of the pillars, as it were, of its culture?"
"Who thinks that?" the old man asked worriedly.
"Everyone! Especially folksingers and third-grade teachers. Grimy undergraduates and grammar school children are always chanting it like sorcerers." Ignatius belched. "I do believe that i shall have another of these savories."

It's a darned shame that John Toole killed himself at thirty-two.

Am currently reading (devouring) Songs of a Dead Dreamer by Thomas Ligotti, which Kai, bless her, got me from her bookshop. I didn't think he actually had any books, just appearances in strange places. It's a late-80s book of existential horror, which really is beyond me to describe. I try to paraphrase the feeling by paraphrasing a segment from I Have A Special Plan For This World, by Current93 with words by Ligotti:

.. they're sort of koans of Horror.

Unfortunately several of the stories still rely on just very bad essentially physical things happening to good people, but there's enough of the existential in there to make me love it. I suspect that Ligotti's later work is more distilled and distances itslf further from the simple physical terror genres. At least i hope so, as the physical terror genre doesn't do much for me.

A Confederacy of Dunces

2005-06-02T14:50:00.000-07:00

Am about halfway thru John Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. I think it's possibly the most charming book i have ever read.

On the horizon: Kai just found me a Thomas Ligotti book in her bookshop ! This guy is so impossible to find, but writes the best horror i've ever read, including Lovecraft. I like both of these gentlemen because they write about horror, not merely terror.

A Wild Sheep Chase

2005-06-01T12:40:00.000-07:00

Another Murakami! I've now read three Murakami's: Hardboiled Wonderland, Norwegian Wood, and A Wild Sheep Chase. I love them all, but think Hardboiled Wonderland remains my favorite, followed by the Sheep Chase, and finally, lovingly, by Norwegian Wood.

I'm not sure what to say about A Wild Sheep Chase.
There's a distinct same-ness to Murakami's characters and tones, and it's a wonderful sameness, and Sheep Chase has it.

Keeping to broad strokes,
there's plot, there's some action, there's lots of humor, there's mysticism (i think), and there's um, Magic, and of course Strangeness.

Highly recommended.

See what i thought of Norwegian Wood here.

Saints and Strangers

2005-06-01T12:34:00.000-07:00

Saints and Strangers is a collection of short stories by Angela Carter from the late 60s thru early 80s. Janina and Patrick told me to get it at the Strand. The back cover says she has an "distinctly unique voice" and for once, a back cover is dead on the money; Carter's prose is really incredibly different and refreshing. It's not a prose you can read without paying attention.
I'd say about a third of the stories are Excellent, a third are Good, and a third i just skipped.
One story covers the day in the life of the involved characters of Lizzie Borden's famous act, just up to the commencing of the act. It's an incredible story, well worth the cover price alone.

American Prometheus

2005-06-01T12:15:00.000-07:00

I finished a bunch of books lately.

American Prometheus, the 2005 biography of Robert Oppenheimer was only the second or third biography i've ever read, and much more massive than the other two combined. I picked up the book because since late childhood, .. well.

okay.

sometime in high-school i had what i think was a formative dream. (a literal sleepytime dream, not a "I Have A Dream" dream) Actually it was a nightmare. By high-school i already self-identified pretty strongly as both a scientist and a left winger, and i had this nightmare where essentially i was one of the scientists who worked on the Manhatten Project. In the dream the Bomb was a small witch's cauldron of sort of boiling silver liquid, and i think we even delivered it on broomstick, but the emotional feeling of guilt the dream delivered packed a powerful punch and i think has stayed with me my whole life.

So i've been vaguely obsessed with scientists' guilt over the A & H-Bombs for some time, and pretty much all i knew about Oppenheimer was that he pretty much symbolized this, and of course is famous for his words just after the first A-Bomb test: "Now i am become death, the destroyer of worlds." Other than that, i knew pretty much nothing about Oppenheimer, nor did anyone i asked.

So.

Oppenheimer was clearly a genius, a sort of rennaissance man who loved poetry almost as much as he loved physics. His early life was pretty dismal: at one point he literally left a poisoned apple on his mentor's desk. But he picked himself up and became a rapidly rising star in atomic physics. In the 30s he flirted with various Communist Party um, causes.

The war loomed, and just before it, the fact that an A-Bomb was possible was realized, and Oppenheimer was chosen to lead the American bomb effort.

He succeeded, and approved of the bombs (plural!) being dropped on Japan, even tho he was aware at the time that the Japanese were essentially defeated, and probably aware that they were merely seeking acceptable terms of surrender.

After the war he was extremely influential in Washington, and devoted his efforts to curtailing development of atomic weapons, especially the hydrogen bomb, which is some 1,000 times more destructive than the atomic bomb.

Eventually however, he made enemies in Washington and was put to an absurdly rigged trial and his security clearance was revoked in the early 60s. This pretty much crushed him and marked a turning point for american science: Up to then, it seemed as if scientists who developed weapons had a legitimate voice in the use of those weapons. Afterwards, it was clear that scientists were expected to shut up and do their jobs.

My evaluation of Oppenheimer's character is that he was essentially a genius and a good and compassionate guy, except he was unfortunately enamoured of power, and respected it too much in others, and lusted after it himself.

There ya go.

[edit]
I forgot to mention that i think the book itself is not very well written.
I'm pretty unfamiliar with the biographical genre,
but the writing stuck in my craw several times.
Notably the narrator was a pretty opinionated guy.
He'd say thing like "Weil was typical of the bloated egos Oppenheimer ecountered at the Institute." (p. 385) - Which while it may certainly be true doesn't seem like a very narrator-like thing to say. And so on.
Or here: "Quite bluntly, any attempt to label Robert Oppenheimer a [Communist] Party member is a futile exercise - as the FBI learned to its frustration over many years." (p. 136)
That may be a useful summary of stuff, but i just feel the narrator shouldn't go around just asserting things. - Hmm. Or possibly i should be More mistrustful of the slick narrator whom you never notice. Anyhow.

The Time Traveller's Wife

2005-05-23T14:48:00.000-07:00

Finally finished a book !

I read The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger as a sort of diversion from the Oppenheimer bio. It's quite the popular book right now, on remainder tables everywhere.

The premise is that there's this guy who has temporal teleportitis, which means he randomly and without warning or any control travels to a more-or-less random place and time in his own life. So like, he won't go to ancient rome, but he will go to last week at work, or the time when his mom died when he was a kid, or to twenty years in the future to visit his own widow.

Layered on top of that, Niffenegger writes a fairly basic true-love story.

Things i liked:

The writing was okay.
The basic concept.
That Niffeneggar chose the simplest model of time-travel, where you can't change the past. I appreciated that she did this, because i think the more complex model of a mutable past would have thrown the book solidly into Sci-Fi, and while that may itself be an interesting book, this book wasn't really about that. I also doubt Niffeneggar's ability to pull it off.
The scene where our hero finally convinces a doctor that his problem is real, by the method of accurately predicting the birth of the doctor's baby, including Downs Syndrome. That was successful drama.

Things i didn't like:

The writing was okay.
Really, just okay.
I felt the story is a patchwork of various topics which were unrelated except that they're all things Niffenegger has always wanted to write about: The Drama of Childbirth, Alchoholism, Audrey Niffenegger's Dream House, Audrey Niffenegger's Dream Man, Audrey Niggenegger's Punk Rock Taste in Music, etc. They were just sort of uninspired and really served little purpose except to fill pages.
I guess that's it really.

All in all, a fine/decent first novel,
and there may be more coming from Niffenegger, but she needs to tighten her focus and write really About something, versus jumping around the house like Jeffy or whomever in Family Circus, leaving a dotted trail of a book from one favorite object to another.

American Prometheus

2005-05-12T11:39:00.000-07:00

I'm about halfway thru American Prometheus, the 2005 biography of Robert Oppenheimer. As i haven't really read much biography, i'm not sure if it's good or not. The information is definitely amazing, but the presentation seems a bit weird.
It'll be going along telling facts and events and then suddenly the narrative voice will become weirdly oppinionated or colloquial.

Quick summary of things i've learned about the bomb -

The fact that uranium is fissionable was discovered around 1939 by german physicists. This was the moment when the idea of nuclear explosions first came about.
Because so many jewish physicists had been persecuted by the nazis*, there was a large scientific community in the united states which both opposed nazi germany and knew a lot about atomic physics.
Research towards the bomb was started quite early, before 1941 i think. The motivation on the part of Oppenheimer et al was to build (and use) the bomb before the nazis did.
A shocking number of otherwise stand-up pacifists worked on the Manhatten Project.
Only one scientist quit the project after the war in Europe ended.
The U.S. knew Japan was seeking to surrender, and wanted to use the bomb before Russia declared war on Japan, becuase they figured Japan would surrender if that happened and then we wouldn't get to demonstrate the bomb to the Russians.
Oppenheimer & friends approved of the Hiroshima bomb. Why ? He'd convinced himself and others that the only way to deterr the world from a nuclear arms race was to actually use the bomb. Go figure.
Oppenheimer blah blah, genius, amazingly charismatic, blah blah.
More to come.

* Do i capitalize nazi ? - i guess i definitely don't capitalize it right after i just didn't capitalize jewish, huh.

I'll soon be starting The Time Traveller's Wife, a story by Audrey Niffenegger. The premise is that there's this life-long couple, but the guy has temporal teleportitis. That is, he uncontrollably teleports in time. So sometimes their together and he's 50 and she's never met him before, sometimes vice-versa, etc. Mykle said he heard it's poorly written. We'll soon see about that. It happens to be the current book for Michelle's book club.

Twain, LeGuinn, Robert Oppenheimer, The Strand

2005-05-05T13:14:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since i wrote here,
mostly because i thought i wasn't really reading anything,
but it sneaks up on you.

I finished reading Twain's Roughing It. I didn't actually read the last fifth or so, but i was finished with it anyhow. It's nice, but i finally got bored a bit before he goes to Hawaii.

I'm nearly done with The Compass Rose by Ursula LeGuinn. I think one of my favorite things about LeGuinn is how i continue to find books by her which i haven't read. This book is a collection of short stories from about 1972 to 1985 or so. Most of them are typical LeGuinnian excellence, but there's a couple duds. My favorite so far is Intracom, which portrays a goofy spaceship crew on a goofy interstellar mission. The crew are all basically comically incompetent, and there's lots of simple gender humor. (The only male is named Mr. Balls, for instance) Finally an alien develops on board and threatens to waylay the entire mission, but the crew decides to accept this and pretty much sacrafice their unknown mission to the well-being of the alien monster. Altho there were many clues i only realized pretty close to the end that it's an allegory for pregnancy. It's a rare sample of 'clever' writing which satisfies rather than annoys. If you can grab that story, it's super. Even tho i've now given it away. Oh, The White Donkey is also one of the most beautiful unicorn stories ever written. And shortest; it's like three pages. It was included here.

I've started American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. It's a 2005 biography of Robert Oppenheimer, whom i feel like i should know about for some reason. I think i want to identify with him. This is only the second biography i've ever read, i think.

I once saw a movie that was just a collection of films of nuclear explosion tests. It may have had a classical music score. I'd like to get hold of it again. If you totally remove them from any context they're amazingly beautiful. And thus crushing, because you can't remove their context.
http://www.nevadasurveyor.com/atomicbomb.

Over the weekend Michelle and i visited Patrick and Janina in Philadelphia, and went to The Strand bookstore in New York. - I'd apparently never been in a bookstore before. In about an hour the four of us spent close to $500. ($200 being Janina) Basically that store has every book, cheap.

Mark Twain, Kung-Fu Hustle, Martin Gardner

2005-04-26T10:18:00.000-07:00

I've been reading slowly lately, not sure why.

Saw the Kung-Fu Hustle, it's fun. Not as fun as Shaolin Soccer, but fun.

I've started reading one of Martin Gardner's collection of mathematical puzzles from Scientific America.

I recently almost finished The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories by Mark Twain. It's no Huck Finn, but it's pretty good.
I didn't finish it only because i lost it.

The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

I'm not sure why this is such a celebrated story. Yes, it's well-written and pretty funny, but it's only like ten pages long and not as funny as other stuff by twain.

The 1,000,000-Pound Bank Note

A story about a man who has literally nothing to his name except an uncashable 1,000,000-Pound bank note. I wonder if this was partial inspiration for Fitzgerald's Diamond As Big As The Ritz. Moderately entertaining.

The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg

Now this! This is good stuff! I confess it gets a bit messy towards the end, and i skipped probably the last quarter of the story, but i'll remember enjoying this over chips and salsa for the rest of my days.

The Mysterious Stranger

This is a strange one for Twain. Published only posthumously, it's a pretty hard-hitting allegory which rips open the rotten underbelly of humanity with much more directness than Twain's usual style. It's almost science-fiction or fantasy, i guess you could call it magical realism. Essentially he sets up several naked vignettes of human visciousness and pettiness and comments on them directly.

I'm also about halfway thru Twain's Roughing It. This apparently is the admittedly embellished but basically true story of Twain's youth in the American West. It's pretty good stuff, and deeply charming if you have any affection for the Western deserts. He also makes pretty free with his opinions, and says Mormonism is stupid, in pretty much so many words, and his racism towards Indians is pretty embarassingly displayed. When i read some of his passages describing Indians, i keep waiting for it to become clear that it's tongue-in-cheek or in some satirical mode, but it's not. Twain's racism seems to be adressed here: Mark Twain, Indian Hater.

Below are two quotes from the book, the first a pleasant Twainery, the second his description of the "Goshoot Indians"

Twain on the Humboldt river:

After leaving the Sink, we traveled along the Humboldt river a little way. People accustomed to the monster mile-wide Mississippi, grow accustomed to associating the term "river" with a high degree of watery grandeur. Consequently, such people feel rather disappointed when they stand on the shores of the Humboldt or the Carson and find that a "river" in Nevada is a sickly rivulet which is just the counterpart of the Erie canal in all respects save that the canal is twice as long and four times as deep. One of the pleasantest and most invigorating exercises one can contrive is to run and jump across the Humboldt river till he is overheated, and then drink it dry.

Twain on Indians:

On the morning of the sixteenth day out from St. Joseph we arrived at the entrance of Rocky Canyon, two hundred and fifty miles from Salt Lake. It was along in this wild country somewhere, and far from any habitation of white men, except the stage stations, that we came across the wretchedest type of mankind I have ever seen, up to this writing. I refer to the Goshoot Indians. From what we could see and all we could learn, they are very considerably inferior to even the despised Digger Indians of California; inferior to all races of savages on our continent; inferior to even the Tierra del Fuegans; inferior to the Hottentots, and actually inferior in some respects to the Kytches of Africa. Indeed, I have been obliged to look the bulky volumes of Wood's Uncivilized Races of Men clear through in order to find a savage tribe degraded enough to take rank with the Goshoots. I find but one people fairly open to that shameful verdict. It is the Bosjesmans (Bushmen) of South Africa. Such of the Goshoots as we saw, along the road and hanging about the stations, were small, lean, "scrawny" creatures; in complexion a dull black like the ordinary American negro; their faces and hands bearing dirt which they had been hoarding and accumulating for months, years, and even generations, according to the age of the proprietor; a silent, sneaking, treacherous looking race; taking note of everything, covertly, like all the other "Noble Red Men" that we (do not) read about, and betraying no sign in their countenances; indolent, everlastingly patient and tireless, like all other Indians; priceless beggars-for if the beggar instinct were left out of an Indian he would not "go," any more than a clock without a pendulum; hungry, always hungry, and yet never refusing anything that a hog would eat, though often eating what a hog would decline; hunters, but having no higher ambition than to kill and eat jackass rabbits, crickets and grasshoppers, and embezzle carrion from the buzzards and cayotes; savages who, when asked if they have the common Indian belief in a Great Spirit show a something which almost amounts to emotion, thinking whisky is referred to; a thin, scattering race of almost naked black children, these Goshoots are, who produce nothing at all, and have no villages, and no gatherings together into strictly defined tribal communities�a people whose only shelter is a rag cast on a bush to keep off a portion of the snow, and yet who inhabit one of the most rocky, wintry, repulsive wastes that our country or any other can exhibit.

Movies: The Downfall, Sahara, Wisconsin Death Trip

2005-04-11T15:52:00.000-07:00

Mykle and i were in Denver with little to do, so we saw The Downfall and Sahara.

The Downfall is a portrayal of the last two weeks or so inside Hitler's bunker.
The Cinematography, Acting, Sets, and general Production are top-notch, excellent.
It's quite depressing.
I have some reservation about the humanizing of high-level Nazis, however. With the exception of a very few apparently bad eggs like Hitler & Goebbels, the Nazi elite are pretty much presented as reasonable, human characters, and in some cases downright compassionate.
I hear the Jewish community finds this offensive, but i feel that all communities should find this offensive. Even without the holocaust, the German motivation in World War Two was the same as in all wars of agression, and the leaders of a war are pretty much by definition horrible people.
So - that's the Downfall. An excellent movie with some questionable humanizing portrayals.

Sahara is a really, really good bad movie. It's all about ex-navy surfers with a wry Harrison Ford Grin^tm.

Wisconsin Death Trip - gag. This is one horrible movie. It's really more like a slideshow. It's really more like a slideshow of questionable original worth thrown up in the air, shuffled, and put into the projector with a crappy piano soundtrack and half an hour's worth of "Behind The Scenes" directorial masturbation. I won't even say what it's about. Okay. It's allegedly a documentary about a series of murders & suicides in wisconsin in the 1800s. Write bad reviews of this movie where ever you can.

We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families

2005-04-11T11:32:00.000-07:00

By Philip Gourevitch, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families is a collection of stories, interviews, news summaries and commentary about the 1994 Rwandan Genocide and its aftermath. Philip visited Rwanda many times during 1995-1998, and cultivated relationships with a variety of people, including the poor, near-heads of state, and relief workers. The movie Hotel Rwanda is based on a part of this book.

Summary.

Rwanda contains two ethnicities, Hutus and Tutsis. The Tutsis have historically been the more economically well-off, and number about fifteen or twenty percent of the population. According to Gourevitch, the Hutus and Tutsis lived in harmony until European colonialism (Mainly from the Dutch) asserted its backward ways on the natives, notably subjugating the Hutus to the Tutsis. Thru much confusion since then, Hutu/Tutsi strife ended up in 1994 with the Hutus dominant and supported most notably by the French. In 1994, for reasons which remain unclear to me, the Hutus massacred about 800,000 Tutsis in just a couple months or less. The strange thing is that unlike Nazi Germany, the slaughter was carried out by a large percentage of the Hutu population itself, and was not even remotely secret. So you have perhaps 30% of the population as murderers, and undoubtedly more as abbetters.

Calls for international aide were famously ignored.

Finally the largely Tutsi army which had been training across the border was able to invade Rwanda and win. During this battle the French apparently directly helped the Hutu immensely.

After this war, hundreds of thousands of Hutus fled Rwanda to 'refugee camps' in Zaire and elsewhere. They fled for three reasons.

They were Genocidaires (instrumental in the genocide) and feared Tutsi retribution.
They were innocent Hutus (innocent = did not kill anyone in the genocide) but who feared Tutsi retribution.
They were innocent Hutus directly threatened by the Genocidaires to flee, to provide a human shield and camoflage for the real instigators. (Threatening in this case, means the killing of one's family)

The international aid community unfortunately mangled its handling of these camps and basically behaved as if everyone in the camps were in category two: innocent Hutus. In fact, the camps were highly organized military camps actively importing weapons and continuing to carry out the slaughter of Tutsis and undesirable Hutus across the border in Rwanda. The humanitarian organizations in charge of the camps were aware of this, but continued behaving as if they weren't. The difficulty in closing the camps was that innocent Hutus *would* be killed by the Geonocidaires if they left the camp. The new Rwandan government promised a new, integrated society, and seems to have made as good as possible on that promise, but at the time, innocent Hutus could not know that, especially under the propoganda broadcast by the leaders of the Hutu Power.

Finally the Rwandan government could wait no longer for the international community to stop supporting in essence the continuation of the genocide, and moved militarily to close the camps.

This is where i lose the thread.

The camps were largely closed, but new ones kept being set up and humanitarian aid kept going horribly, horribly awry. Revolution in Zaire was involved, with Zaire emerging with a new government and its old name, The Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Philip Gourevitch: would a timeline have been too much to ask for ? Maybe a timeline with a channel for each of the major players in this story ?

At the close of the book, Rwanda is largely re-integrated, with many people living literally down the street from people whom they saw kill their family. The relative peace present in this situation is largely credited to the far-sightedness of the new Rwandan government.

The overall tone is hopefull for the next generation of Rwandansa and believes that all of Africa is finally shaking free of the lack of autonomy imposed by the old colonialism.

Gourevitch writes fairly well, altho i have to say Analogy and Parable is not quite his forte.
The book is stronger without his soft analysis.

All in all a fine book, highly informative and fairly well composed. I recommend.

All Tomorrow's Parties

2005-04-08T12:36:00.000-07:00

I forgot that i finished All Tomorrow's Parties by William Gibson recently. Basically it was kind of a let down after Pattern Recognition set me on a Gibson spree. It's a fine book, and Gibson's cyberpunk is as usual well done, but really it's only fairly well done. The technology and characters are pretty archetypical and familiar. Also there's sort of a blank spot where the climax is supposed to be. Something happened, i know, i think, but i have no idea what it was. "Everything Changed" was an often repeated phrase, the characters seeing some sort of entire paradigm shift in the world, but i frankly missed it even 'tho i was looking. - Was it just the Pinoccio machine-made-flesh of the virtual girl ? I suppose so, but Gibson sort of left it as a crumb at the edge of the table after eating a large meal of definitely weird but basically random and unrelated characters and plot elements. So, worth reading if you like cyber punk, but probably not otherwise.

I also read a small 1960s book of short stories from Weird Stories magazine. Some of them were pretty good, some weren't. Weird Stories published Lovecraft in his day and as such is a pillar of horror & science-fiction genesis. Highly recommended, 'tho mostly for its pre-1960 charm.

Am winding up We Wish To Inform You. Summary to come.

All Tomorrow's Parties

2005-04-04T11:37:00.000-07:00

Am about halfway thru Gibson's All Tomorrow's Parties. It's good.

I saw Sin City over the weekend. What was i thinking ????
Way too violent for poor little O. I did not, however, walk out, but i'm not sure why not.

Still reading We wish to inform you. The actual genocide is done and he's talking about the uh, humanitarian effort which followed and how it went terribly awry.

Little Otik

2005-03-30T17:10:00.000-08:00

Michelle picked a beauty with the Czech film Little Otik. It's about a man an a woman who are totally barren and who are obsessed with having a child. The man digs up a tree root in the backyard and fashions it into a baby boy doll for the woman, who totally and completely and redundantly accepts it as her very own real baby. That's the begining. The cinematography is beautiful, the actors are amazing, the story is pretty good, and on the whole it's really really good.
http://www.filmforum.com/archivedfilms/otikshow.html

The Dispossessed

2005-03-29T12:03:00.000-08:00

Finally finished Ursula LeGuinn's The Dispossessed. Like most of LeGuinn's science fiction, it's an exploration of aspects of human society and relationships. In this case, she presents an entire planet which is a functional anarchy. While it's true that she carefully sets the stage to bring up various aspects of anarchy and avoid others, it's still a beautiful portrayal of what is, after all, the most civilized social structure going. As always, the society and characters LeGuinn creates are exceptionally real and believable, and the story slides easily into your head like a delicious chocolate truffle.

A quick summary. There's a planet in space much like present-day Earth, and an Anarchist revolution erupts. To quell it, the revolutionaries are given the planet's large moon to inhabit. So, many thousand colonists go live on the moon. Our story takes place about two hundred years later and is primarily a portrait of the issues and hardships encountered in building a functional anarchy.

They have no possessive words in their language (altho some get introduced in translation).
No property, of course.
There word for 'work' is the same as the word for 'play'.
She asserts that a person's desire to do good work is at least as much motivation as profit.
Drudge jobs are shared by everyone- once a week or so you peel spuds or recycle shit.

The weak spot in her allegory, in my opinion, is that the planet itself is not very hospitable. It's dry, barely fertile, essentially a desert. It's well known that communities in harsh environments tend to have a higher degree of cooperation and mutual trust. In the words of Lauren re living in a small Arctic town, "People have to watch out for each other here, or everyone would die."
So LeGuinn is really avoiding the problem of anarchy in a surplus.
Nonetheless, i think it's a useful, if limited, exploration.

Along the way there's some beautiful gems of interpersonal relationships, sex, and creativity. She even manages to introduce some future revolutionary science without going into too much detail, which always breaks it in other books.
Anyhow. A good book.

Read a bit more of A Room of One's Own. I have to revise my earlier opinion that it was all poppycock; i think just the first bits are poppycock. After setting the table for a while she finally takes the covers off the dishes and starts doing some man-bashing.

Started We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, by Philip Gourevitch. I'm only about four pages in tho, so nothing much to say. Rwanda is small! It's only about two hundred miles across.

Music.
I don't really want to write much about music in here.
So i'm not. But i got some new CDs and have some opinions on them. Just so you know.

Incident at Loch Ness

2005-03-21T09:50:00.000-08:00

Even tho i knew Incident At Loch Ness would be good, i was unexpectedly extra happy with it. I laughed a lot. Werner Herzog is a german art-house film maker who's productions are notably esoteric and bizarre. The only Herzog film i've seen is Heart Of Glass, in which Werner, who happens to be a master hypnotist, literally hypnotizes the entire cast before each scene. The movie is acted by the hypnotized, and largely written by them as well, as Werner lets most of the story follow the hypnotized hallucinations of the cast. It's also one of the most visually gorgeous films i've ever seen. So there's that. Apparently he made another film about some people moving a large boat over a mountain with very primitive uh equipment. Logs and horses and such. To make the movie, they actually moved a large boat over a mountain with very primitive equipment. Heart of Glass also features a scene where a medieval glass foundry burns down, for which they actually built a full-scale, working medieval glass foundry and then burnt it down.

So that's Werner Herzog. Art-house.

Incident at Loch Ness presents itself as a documentary crew following Werner Herzog around as he begins a documentary on the Loch Ness Monster. Werner of course, does not believe in the monster, but is interested in the psychological genesis and maintenance of such beasts. For some reason the producer of his film is a big-hollywood movie guy (Zak Penn, writer for X-Men, Elektra, Last Action Hero, etc) who has his own ideas of what film they're making, and high-brow hilarity ensues. I don't want to give stuff away, but it's really, really funny.

Read some more Dylan Thomas, and that's enough of That.

Getting back in to Le Guinn's The Dispossessed.
One example of language sans possessives: they refer to a mother or father figure not as "my mother" but as "the mother". Mykle reports that possessives are not entirely eliminated from the language, which is a bit disappointing, but we'll see.

The Ring Two

2005-03-20T13:01:00.000-08:00

A more formless and blobby movie would be hard to find.

huck finn

2005-03-18T09:49:00.000-08:00

I finished Huck Finn last night. I nearly missed by BART stop doing it.

I find myself slipping 'reckon' and 'waller' into my everyday speech, even tho i don't think those words were used particularly often if at all in the book. Especially not waller. But there you have it.

I'm still puzzled as to what Huck & Jim's plan was. They were heading down the Mississippi (is there any word more of a joy to spell out loud or on keyboard ??) towards New Orleans. I mean, what were they thinking ?

I laughed pretty good in the section where Jim is prisoner in a shack and Tom Sawyer and Huck are scheming to get him out except Tom doesn't want to do it any simple, easy way - he needs to do it as a proper prisoner adventure, and goes about Creating obstacles to overcome. My favorite is how he knows (from reading) that a proper prisoner adventure includes lots of vermin with the prisoner, and seeing as how Jim's shack is basically vermin-free, Huck & Tom go and collect about fifteen rats, twenty or so snakes, and a whole mess of spiders and release them in the shack. that's *funny* !

which i will now pad this blog with.

IN the morning we went up to the village and bought a wire rat-trap and fetched it down, and unstopped the best rat-hole, and in about an hour we had fifteen of the bulliest kind of ones; and then we took it and put it in a safe place under Aunt Sally's bed. But while we was gone for spiders little Thomas Franklin Benjamin Jefferson Elexander Phelps found it there, and opened the door of it to see if the rats would come out, and they did; and Aunt Sally she come in, and when we got back she was a-standing on top of the bed raising Cain, and the rats was doing what they could to keep off the dull times for her. So she took and dusted us both with the hickry, and we was as much as two hours catching another fifteen or sixteen, drat that meddlesome cub, and they warn't the likeliest, nuther, because the first haul was the pick of the flock. I never see a likelier lot of rats than what that first haul was.

We got a splendid stock of sorted spiders, and bugs, and frogs, and caterpillars, and one thing or another; and we like to got a hornet's nest, but we didn't. The family was at home. We didn't give it right up, but stayed with them as long as we could; because we allowed we'd tire them out or they'd got to tire us out, and they done it. Then we got allycumpain and rubbed on the places, and was pretty near all right
again, but couldn't set down convenient. And so we went for the snakes, and grabbed a couple of dozen garters and house-snakes, and put them in a bag, and put it in our room, and by that time it was supper-time, and a rattling good honest day's work: and hungry? -- oh, no, I reckon not! And there warn't a blessed snake up there when we went back -- we didn't half tie the sack, and they worked out somehow, and left. But it didn't matter much, because they was still on the premises somewheres. So we judged we could get some of them again. No, there warn't no real scarcity of snakes about the house for a considerable spell. You'd see them dripping from the rafters and places every now and then; and they generly landed in your plate, or down the back of your neck, and most of the time where you didn't want them. Well, they was handsome and striped, and there warn't no harm in a million of them; but that never made no difference to Aunt Sally; she despised snakes, be the breed what they might, and she couldn't stand them no way you could fix it; and every time one of them flopped down on her, it didn't make no difference what she was doing, she would just lay that work down and light out. I never see such a woman. And you could hear her whoop to Jericho. You couldn't get her to take a-holt of one of them with the tongs. And if she turned over and found one in bed she would scramble out and lift a howl that you would think the house was afire. She disturbed the old man so that he said he could most wish there hadn't ever been no snakes created. Why, after every last snake had been gone clear out of the house for as much as a week Aunt Sally warn't over it yet; she
warn't near over it; when she was setting thinking about something you could touch her on the back of her neck with a feather and she would jump right out of her stockings. It was very curious. But Tom said all women was just so. He said they was made that way for some reason or other.

We got a licking every time one of our snakes come in her way, and she allowed these lickings warn't nothing to what she would do if we ever loaded up the place again with them. I didn't mind the lickings, because they didn't amount to nothing; but I minded the trouble we had to lay in another lot. But we got them laid in, and all the other things; and you never see a cabin as blithesome as Jim's was when they'd all swarm out for music and go for him. Jim didn't like the spiders, and the spiders didn't like Jim; and so they'd lay for him, and make it mighty warm for him. And he said that between the rats and the snakes and the grindstone there warn't no room in bed for him, skasely; and when there was, a body couldn't sleep, it was so lively, and it was always lively, he said, because they never all slept at one time, but took turn about, so when the snakes was asleep the rats was on deck, and when the rats turned in the snakes come on watch, so he always had one gang under him, in his way, and t'other gang having a circus over him, and if he got up to hunt a new place the spiders would take a chance at him as he crossed over. He said if he ever got out this time he wouldn't ever be a prisoner again, not for a salary.

lookout for fantods

2005-03-17T13:10:00.000-08:00

Two of my favorite words of popular parlance turn out to be in Huck Finn: Fantods and Lookout. As in "I know this tie will give your girlfriend the howling fantods, but it's not really my lookout, man."

Howling seems to be DF. Wallace's contribution, but other than that they both occur pleasantly in Huck Finn.

One thing i don't get about the story is what they're dang plan in. Huck and Jim go south on the river, hoping to get to Ohio, is it ? But then they miss the turn-off and end up going deeper and deeper south. This is the second or so time i've read it and knew to be on the lookout for The Plan, but i just don't get it. Well i'm about done, maybe it'll become clear.

Norwegian Wood

2005-03-14T19:40:00.000-08:00

I finished Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami a few days ago.
It's pretty good. As i wrote earlier, it really reads like classical music.
It has the wonderful Murakami spareness, which like in Hemingway and Salinger i always feel a bit mistrustful of its soothingness. (More sentences only a mother could love to come, i'm sure) - Because the characters often have a sameness of tone to each other and to the narrator. Altho Murakami does this much less than H or S.
For some reason i began reading it again immediately after finishing it; like the next day or possibly that evening. I think this would be great, i certainly appreciated the early action (so to speak) much more after having been around the characters and narrator for a while. However i've gotten whisked away by Huck Finn.

What's to say about Huckleberry Finn ? Everything you hear is true; it's a supremely excellent book. If you haven't read it in the past 5 or so years you're missing out.

From our bathroom i stole Dylan Thomas - Collected Poems 1934 - 1952.
I'm not much of a poetry lover. I mostly can't stand poetry. (I loved it in high school 'tho.)
My favorite poet is by far William Taylor Jr. I tried to read thru some E. E. Cummings a while ago, as it seemed like he should really be My Sort Of Thing, and while they were excellent, i just stopped reading. So i found Dylan Thomas and read a few and there's a breaking of cadence which i find fascinating, like a hole in the ground, so i'm going to pursue it a bit further.

Sarah has given me We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Enemies, but i haven't started it yet.

I picked up Ursula leGuinn's realist sci-fi novel of a functional anarchist planet, The Dispossessed, and would probably be (re)reading that instead of Huck Finn except Mykle stole it from the bathroom. I wanted to reread it because i remembered the folks on the anarchist planet have removed possessives from their (ha) language, and wanted to see again how she went about it.

a room of one's own

2005-03-08T12:35:00.000-08:00

wow, difficult reading. this is like reading poetry- you really have to pay attention. for example you have to sit (or stand and lurch if you're reading on MUNI) and worry out the significance of the courses of a fictional meal. ordinarily i wouldn't spend a second over an author's description of cornish hens and a fabulous pudding, but Woolf goes on for paragraphs and paragraphs about them and even points out that she's doing it explicitely to the reader, so i think it must be some poetical signifigance of poultry. is the significance only that the men's college had fancy food and the women's plain? i can't believe she'd put so much words in if that were all. i don't think it's for me. (a room of one's own, virgina woolf, stolen from michelle)

Dr. Jeykll and Mr. Hyde

2005-03-07T10:07:00.000-08:00

I picked up The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in an awesomely tatty used bookstore in West Portal. Who knew it was by Robert Louis Stevenson ? (Kidnapped, Treasure Island) I have one major complaint about the book: Too Short! It's barely eighty or so smallish pages, which is a shame because the prose is sometimes nothing short of resplendant, such as these lines from the first couple pages:

He was austere with himself; drank gin when he was alone, to mortify a taste for vintages.

..

His friends were those of his own blood, or those whom he had known the longest; his affections, like ivy, were the growth of time, they implied no aptness in the object.

- Hot hot hot!

(These were perhaps the best lines in the book, but the rest is nearly as good)

Anyhow, it's a fine book. If you've read The Portrait of Dorian Grey you'll be very at home with Jekyll & Hyde, it's essentially the same story, written five years earlier (1886). What was up in victorian england with all this obsession over living a double life of moral bankruptcy while sneakily having a seperate copy of yourself pay the piper ?

Am still enjoying Norwegian Wood. It's sort of like classical music.

Read the first couple pages of Huckleberry Finn, and my mouth is *watering*. But i've promised myself to finish norwegian wood before that dessert.

iDEATH

2005-03-02T15:57:00.000-08:00

having forgotten Norwegian Wood at home, i took Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America with me to lunch today.
it has three books in it - TFIA, some poems, and In Watermelon Sugar. I'd already read 45 or so pages of TFIA and felt i (didn't) get the (non) point so i skipped up to Watermelon Sugar and the first thing that struck me was how weird it was to be reading this essentially poetry written in uh 1968 which kept referring to a thing called iDEATH. (I think it's some sort of lodge or cafeteria in the story.) I couldn't stop thinking iPod, iBook, Mac, etc. 'i-' is the new 'e-'. I wonder how many of the macintosh designers thought of iDEATH during their long arduous sessions around the design room table.

in any event, pax Janina, i won't willingly return to Brautigan. it's sort of like eating unsweetened butter for me - there's not much texture and i keep trying to chew it but there's not much to chew either. i keep running the pages between my teeth and around my tongue because it seems like there'll be a lump of saltiness or a bit of saltine in there, but i just can't find it. On the other hand, it's the perfect book for keeping at work, because i know i'll never finish it and so hence it will always be here, but at the same time it's good enough to get me thru those twenty minutes of mexican food on the days when i've forgotten my regular reading at home.

i did quite enjoy The [something] Mine Disaster or whatever. No, not that; i haven't read that. what i did read and quite enjoy was The Hawkline Monster. But i have a suspicion he's low on such linear stories.

And Furthermore.. analysis sucks

2005-03-01T13:23:00.000-08:00

And even when i can't fault the analysis of a beautiful piece of writing, is it even right to perform that analysis ? Yes, it's true that For Esmè with Love and Squalor has some very nice symetries between elements of squalor and elements of love, now that you point it out. So why do i feel cheaper ? I have a suspicion that possibly we'd have better writers in the world if writing and literature programs were outlawed. No. That's not true. But for heaven's sake, just read a story for the story now and then folks. I'm pretty sure most authors write for readers, not for critics.
Okay. Diatribing done.

Salinger Analysis, Pattern Recognition

2005-03-01T10:58:00.000-08:00

I finished Gibson's latest, Pattern Recognition with almost as much regret as i've ever finished any book. It's quality stuff. I highly recommend this to anyone who has friends who need to realize that the science fiction genre ain't what it used to be and now quite frequently counts as straight-up literature.

* Pattern Recognition in particular isn't actually sci-fi at all. In fact you'll find it at the book store under Lit, not Cyberpunk. The story is set in the present, not even 'twenty minutes' in the future, and while it does involve technology, the technology is Always off-stage and easy to ignore. Our heroine uses plain old Hotmail and Google, for instance.

* Gibson can Write! If you're one of those people who don't really read for story so much as naked quality of writing (and you know who you are you filthy buggers) then you should really check this one out. Maybe not his previous stuff so much, but Pattern Recognition is just gorgeous.

* The story is good.

At a tiny bookshop in North Portal i picked up Huck Finn, Dr. Jekyl & Mr. Hyde, and The Fiction of JD Salinger, a 1958 monograph by Frederick Gwynn and Joseph Blotner, university of pittsburgh press. I think i've never really understood before why authors hate critics. Who do these guys think they are ? They don't seem to be willing to just say "i didn't like it" and so they couch their opinion in all these big (but not really that big, fellas) words. For example they don't like Zooey because it's got too much religion and spirituality in it and not enough literary novelty and thus doesn't qualify as literature apparently. Well, whatever, who cares. It's possibly a story ABOUT religion and spirituality guys. What makes you think authors always care about pushing the envelope of literary structure ? Literary structure is great, i agree, but sometimes there's content. Just because the core concept that everybody in the world is Seymour's Fat Lady and that the Fat Lady is jesus isn't that original doesn't mean it's not worth taking another stab at expressing. That's like saying 'sunsets have already been painted, why pain sunsets?' or.. well etc, you get the point.
On the positive side, i learned that Salinger in fact does have more published stories than the four think books, but they apparently haven't been collected since appearing in Colliers etc. How do i go about finding these ? Gwynn & Blotner say that these other stories pretty much suck, but they also say that Zooey is the worst of Saligner's stories, so who are they to me.

Am back into Norwegian Wood now.
I wonder how much of Marukami's tone is dependant on the translation.

Hotel Rwanda

2005-02-28T13:00:00.000-08:00

(apologies to sarah and jennifer, to whom this was originally an email)

saw hotel rwanda last night.

it's v. well done.

i leaked a bit during the movie and actually broke down and sobbed about half an hour *after*.

it's a bit overly cinematographic (cinemagraphic?) at times, but i'll give it the benefit of doubt and assume that was done to make it more mainstream digestible.

anyhow.

it didn't really give me much of a feel for the history of the events tho.

so i want to read We Regret to Inform You.

eberhardt again

2005-02-23T11:10:00.000-08:00

The Oblivion Seekers is a short book of very short stories by guess whom, Isabelle Eberhardt. Actually the stories are so short that they read much more like poetry to me. It's a good book. Her outlook is simultaneously exultant and grimly morbid. The stories are mostly thinly-veiled autobiography taking the form of various scenes from Isabelle's travels in North Africa. She pushes the idea that the best life of all is the life of a tramp, and seems to believe that it's society's duty to support the tramp. I'm not sure her philosophy totally holds water for me. I'm not sure i would use her philosophy to carry water from the oasis back to my tent, let's say. But. There's some very good stories about n. african life and the description is excellent. Beautiful without being purple.

Am about half way thru William Gibson's latest, Pattern Recognition. It's set in the present for a change, not even the very-near future, and employs no science fiction. Well almost none. Really it's more like magical realism than SF. Basically there's a woman who is physically allergic to successful brands. IE she puffs up and gets weird in the head when she sees the Michelin Man. She subsequently makes her very comfortable living off of this strange talent by evaluating logos for marketing firms; if she can't stand to be near it, they know it's a winner.
The plot is thickened by a mysterious film. I may be grasping here but the film aspect reminded me a lot of 'The Entertainment' from Infinite Jest. That is, a mysterious film which has sinister implications for all of society. But enough plot summary ! The bottom line is that Gibson is a Good Writer. I enjoy about half of the cyberpunk genre, but usually only for all the hip edgy ideas and action scenes. Gibson's writing on the other hand stands firm by itself without the butresses of amazing cyberpunk goodley-boo. So. Thumbs up on that.
Unfortunately i've left it at michelle's house.

Have started Murakami's Norwegian Wood. The first few pages are very nice. I'm not sure why i haven't read more Murakami, since i loved The Wind Up Bird Chronicle. It was pretty much right up my alley. Unfortunately i lost it somewhere in the bed last night, so today i'm reading Eco. Oops - just remembered i haven't real TWUP Chronicle! I read Hard-boiled Wonderland/End of the World.

Eco: I started The Name of the Rose, but have leapfrogged quickly to Foucault's Pendulum, which i definitely may not finish. Eco may simply not be for me. His floridity is not a floridity i seem to enjoy.

orion reads his passport

2005-02-23T10:36:00.000-08:00

my passport is due to expire
and i think you have to 'surrender' the old one unless you want to pay like fifty bucks or more.
also i learned form Lauren that if you say have a baby in a foreign land, you may have a need to know everwhere you travelled to in the last decade. hence, here's the stamps i have in my passport.

sadly missing is iceland. i really *tried* to get a stamp there, but they really just didn't care.

also this is weird. there's quite a few things missing, like norway in 200407, or at least one more geneva stamp, or the SF re-entry stamp for the same trip. hum.

los angeles
19950704

san francisco
19961007
19970730
19980505
19981011
19990518
20020228

sydney
19950503
19950704

tokyo
19960929
19961007

amsterdam
19970710

denmark
19970716

vancouver
19981009

paris
19990512

geneva
19990512

toronto
20001103

london
20010401

norway
20020226
20020228
20030729
20030812

barcelona
20040603

germany
20050119

marceilles
20050202

sixteen magical tales about the most wonderous of all creatures - UNICORNS!

2005-02-17T20:10:00.000-08:00

Michelle found sixteen magical tales about the most wonderous of all creatures - UNICORNS!, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois in the uh dollar-bin at the library i think (except there's no library markings in it). It's a pretty mixed bag:

introduction by avram davidson: NO
The Silken Swift by theodore sturgeon: NO
Eudoric's Unicorn by L. Sprague De Camp: YES
The Flight of the Horse by Larry Niven: SURE, WHY NOT, REALLY
On The Downhill Side by Haral Ellison: NO! SCREW HARLAN ELLISON!
The Night of the Unicorn by Thomas Swann: YES
Mythological Beast by Stephen Donaldson: YES
The Final Quarry by Eric Norden: YES!
Elfleda by Vonda McIntyre: WHAT?? NO.
The White Donkey by Ursula LeGuin: OF COURSE, YES!
Unicorn Variantions by Roger Zelazny: NO
The Sacrafice by Gardner Dozois: NO
The Unicorn by Frank Owen: YES
The Woman The Unicorn Loved by Gene Wolfe: GOOD TRY BUT NO
The Forsaken by Ben Evans: YES
The Unicorn by T.H. White: YES!
Intoductions to Each Story by Dann and Dozois: NO!!

Well, that's the short and sweet. Most of the really good ones are pretty short.

Here, possibly surprisingly, is an excerpt from Eric Norden's The Final Quarry, which made me think perhaps i should go find more by this Eric Norden person. It's a bit weird and questionable re especially the whole Christian thing, but really you don't often find this much epicness so competently expressed in only one longish paragraph.

[scene, a murderous rogue asking after the location of the last U. from a classical filthy hermit wise-man in a cave]

"Listen to me, my son," the priest continued, the ancient words falling with liquid precision from his lips, "this beast you seek to slay is the last guardian of man's innocence. Unicorns live on thoughts of beauty, and the radiance of their sould has fallen like sunlight on the world for thousands of years, even before the Old Ones were dreamed into substance on Olympus." The priest's voice fell even lower and the mad eyes filmed with grief. "But the day Christ died on the cross the king of the Unicorns took it upon his race to suffer penance for the act, for otherwise God's wrath delivered on the heads of man would indeed have been terrible. And so on that day, while the heavens shook and the earth trembled on the brink of chaos, he ordered all the females of his race to die, and in great silver flocks they mounted the heights of Thessaly and threw themselves to death on the crags below, singing the ancient songs as they fell. Their voices reached the ear of God, and the tears of Christ rained upon Greece for three days and three nights, and beauty crept into the dreams of everyone."

He is mad, thought Deverish feebly, why does he keep looking at me, why does he not let me out into the sunlight ?

"Since then," the priest went on, "the remaining unicorns have died one by one, always by the violence of man's hand, because Christ in his love has spared them pain or illness or suffering or death, save that inflicted by his own tormentors. And with the death of each unicorn over the centuries, something of beauty, something of innocence, has gone out of the world, and a candle has been extinguished in the heart of every man, and the darkness has grown. This poor tired beast you plan to kill is the sole custodian of that ancient, guttering flame. When he is slain the last light of God's mercy is snuffed out, and even children's hearts shall become soiled, and wonder will die slowly, strangled until it becomes only a word, and innocence shall never return. A vast darkness hovers over the earth, peopled with the horrors of the apocalypse, and this beast is man's last solitary light. So God intended it and so it shall be. Go and destroy him."

Heaven Eyes

2005-02-16T10:16:00.000-08:00

Heaven Eyes was a bust, altho i finished it in about a day. It might be good young adult fiction, it might not. I can't tell. Kai says that she couldn't even get thru one chapter, and that Skellig, also by David Almond is much better.

Am reading now an anthology of 'sixteen magical tales about the most wondrous of all creatures- Unicorns!' Joy! Published in 1982 it .. could be worse. I've only skipped one and a half out of two and a half stories so far.

Stiff - The curious lives of human cadavers

2005-02-15T12:19:00.000-08:00

Have finished Mary Roach's Stiff. It's pretty good. Especially if you like gross stuff. Disection, Weapons Testing, Car-Crash Testing, Rotting, Eating, Composting, Other kinds of Rotting.
As Lucia put it, she writes with just the right amount of irreverence and jokes so that you're able to keep your distance (and keep reading) while at the same time not being too flip and levitous.

Also, i have to add that of the various ways of being disposed of after i'm dead, Susanne Wiigh-Mäsak's organic composting is very appealing. They freeze you in liquid nitrogen, vibrate you to powder, freeze-dry you and then compost you. It's fabulous. You can be mulched in under the tomatos.

And of course she somehow missed life gems.

Have started Heaven Eyes by David Almond. Initial impressions are that it may not really be for me, but i think i'll finish it. It's about a trio of foster home children who run away, so far.

Demolished Man

2005-02-12T19:41:00.000-08:00

Have finished Demolished Man, and for ridiculous 50s science fiction, it's pretty darned good.

Sarah loaned me Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach. I've just barely started. So far Roach seems to be a fine writer. I might get too grossed out to finish.

In the bathroom we currently have an Andy Goldsworthy photo book. The man who's leading my proper life.