June 19, 2008
prurient
Sometimes I find that a word in a completely ordinary context leaps away from the page and stands out. When reading Alberto Manguel's editorial piece on libraries — on his personal libraries — in The New York Times, prurient leaped out at me. From Sanskrit through Latin, it denotes something "marked by or arousing an immoderate or unwholesome interest or desire". It has as its immediate root the Latin word "to itch" as in "to crave": prurire, which the Online Etymology Dictionary suggests has a shade of "to be wanton". The Sanskrit root means "to singe", which conjures up all sorts of Roman poetry. Alberto Manguel is a fabulous author and a writer of breathtaking skills.... Read more
April 18, 2008
A few words on the aroma of death
There ain't nothin' more powerful than the odor of mendacity...You can smell it. It smells like death. — Tennessee Williams, Cat on A Hot Tin Roof CASSANDRA This house . . . It’s horrific! CHORUS Why call out in horror? Is there some vision in your mind? CASSANDRA It's this house— it stinks of murder, blood slaughter . . . CHORUS LEADER No, no—that's the smell of sacrifice, victims at the hearth. CASSANDRA That smell . . . it's like an open grave . . . CHORUS Do you mean the splendid Syrian incense? It's all through the house. CASSANDRA [turning back to the palace doors] No. But I must go. I'll lament my death, and Agamemnon's, too, inside the house. Enough of living! — Aeschylus, Agamemnon The powerful refrain of Mendacity! rings through the film adaptation Tennessee Williams's intense play, but for years I have conflated mendacity and complacency; only after breaking down the words did I better separate their usage. I think I have even gotten a few odd looks when using mendacity during conversation. The section of Agamemnon has some stunning imagery in the original, with the vocabulary of sacrifice suddenly presented in the context of drama. I wanted to write a paper around this, but my knowledge of Greek vocabulary was never strong enough; I have been reading the Agamemnon from a copy available online, but without my annotated copy of Liddell and Scott (available online, but .... not quite the same) and lacking the unequalled references of Smythe's Greek Grammar and Denniston's Greek Particles, I am adrift. That Denniston edited the Oxford University Press text of the Agamemnon is not coincidence: the work is notorious for its complexity and sophisticated use of Attic Greek.... Read more
April 16, 2008
A few maps
While tidying up my desk, I found the following maps: Manhattan & Welsh Guide to New York City (a search on Google for this term does not yield promising results!), which I picked up at the Mid-Manhattan Library a few days ago before a multi-lingual poetry hoe-down; NYC Cycling Map, 2007 edition. The 2008 map is now available online: http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/bikemapfront2008.pdf http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/bikemapback2008.pdf, which really should be in my cycling bag; Andorra (Andorra? Andorra!), which an eager Andorran pressed on me in Brussels; and Biblical Sites in Turkey (at atlas with gazetteer, actually) recently sent me by my parents. Some appealing photographs complementing this book appear in the Biblical sites in Turkey flickr pool.... Read more
April 11, 2008
Donnell Library Center
An encomium of the Donnell Library Center, which is closing to make way for a luxury hotel-condo building; a picture, a thousand words: Seeing these empty shelves stunned me; even though I knew the library was closing, I did not count on having my muscle memory (here is Calvino; here is Wodehouse; here, sometimes, are copies of Murder Must Advertise) thrown off completely. The empty shelves brought home the imminent closing of the library, and I wound up trudging to the Young Adult section upstairs to find a book. Some (adult) fiction remains on shelves adjacent the science and history sections, but most of the collection is headed to storage in anticipation for the summer-time closing of this library.... Read more
April 10, 2008
Much Obliged, Jeeves
One of P G Wodehouse's most outstanding efforts, replete with: the country house; the village intrigue (in this case, an election); the newly-rich; the thieving butler; the do-good putative fianc�e; the haughty millionaire; and a napping cat. I hugely enjoyed reading Much Obliged, Jeeves.... Read more
April 8, 2008
Serendipities
I read and enjoyed Umberto Eco's slim volume Serendipities, a collection of lectures edited for publication. The power of falsity focuses on the legend of Prester John and the impressive force of verisimilitude (a concept that hearkens to my high-school Spanish lessons, reading Borges in Señora Schmerz's classroom). Languages in paradise: what was the primordial language, the tongue used in the Garden of Eden? In addition to the cabalistic obsession with discovering this, wild theories abound since the days of the Greeks. Eco pays special attention to an essay by Dante Aligheri. The essay predates the Paradiso by a decade and presents a different Dorothy L. Sayers died thirteen cantos short of completing the translation of Dante's Divine Comedy; Dante himself died before publishing these same thirteen cantos, andd only after his death did his sons discover and publish them. Or so goes the legend retold by Eco; I can never decide whether he quotes the truth, or even a well-told but unsubstantiated rumour. At one point in his second lecture he goes so far as to quote from an unpublished paper which quotes a manuscript attributed to Abulafia, and this particular attribution made me wonder whether his examination of language was real, or an exercise in fiction. The book has the subtitle Language and Lunacy.... Read more
April 6, 2008
Low Life / desuetude
"The Bowery itself had fallen into desuetude." desuetude: "disuse," from desuetus, pp. of desuescere "become unaccustomed to,". Re-reading Luc Sante's Low Life, an account of New York's nineteenth-century underbelly, has proven a mixed bag. I enjoy the anecdotes and historical tit-bits about ragamuffins, pick-pockets, houses of ill repute, and political antics; but I yearn for more, and perhaps even a highly-illustrated reference to the dissolute Manhattan of yesteryear. An edition replete with maps, historical documents, and larger prints of the photographs Sante already includes would be splendid. In conjunction with my perpetual reading of Burrows's and Wallace's Gotham and of The Power Broker, Robert Caro's monumental biography of Robert Moses (the latter links to his typsecript comments, from The Bridge and Tunnel Club web site), books such as Low Life provide a more digestible, or at least more portable, account of Gotham's yesteryear.... Read more
February 22, 2008
Twinkie, Deconstructed
Twinkie, Deconstructed was a surprisingly difficult book to finish. The author's premise fascinates me: investigating each of the several dozen distinct ingredients in the Twinkie snack cake (that phrase alone makes me shudder). The writing made reading the book painful: the text is rife with mis-spellings and poorly-chosen phrases, and has an abundance of commas, often where instead a semi-colon or colon is appropriate instead. The book also confuses the reader by introducing jargon tens or hundreds of pages before actually defining the phrase or using it in context; I had to look up Maillard reaction after re-reading a chunk of the book to see what I had missed (nothing), and ultimately found a definition towards the very end of the book. Despite the poor editing, Steve Ettlinger tackles a tricky topic with aplomb. His investigation takes him into the bowels of the earth, through monumentally large factories, and into areas made for the industry of food production. By arranging the book so strictly along the ingredients, Ettlinger misses some intriguing connections amongst the processes and ingredients: security, petroleum, and food science. He mentions the importance of protecting the food supply ‐ food colouring especially at risk — from antagonists, but does not discuss what might happen or how; he does not discuss how so many of the ingredients, refining processes, and transport of the Twinkie require crude oil; and he misses out on explaining how and why so many emulsifiers, preservatives, and anti-caking agents fit together into the diminutive snack cake. More fun with Twinkies.... Read more
February 16, 2008
The spirit of socialism is all over the internet / The Vertical Color of Sound
Eric Tamm's magnificent study of Eno is officially and freely available online (download the zipfile). Although most writing about music is like dancing about architecture (a witticism attributed variously to Frank Zappa, Elvis Costello, and Laurie Anderson), Tamm brings history and perspective to Eno's inventive notions about the development and creation of music. Eno's own liner notes to his 1975 composition Discreet Music include an excellent explanation of his process in treating Pachelbel's Canon in D; three of the resulting pieces form the B side of the album.... Read more
February 12, 2008
Wordcraft
Wordcraft is Alex Frankel's examination of the business of branding: of finding words, creative slogans, and stories to express a brand's identity. He presents five case studies: BlackBerry, Cayenne, Accenture, Viagra, and IBM's e-business, each peppered with anecdotes and solid first-hand reporting. The studies veer between business journalism and language commentary; Frankel's practical, straight-forward prose makes them easy to read and to follow. Although far from thrilling, this book was much more informative about brand development and identity than Dana Thomas's Deluxe, and provided more insight into why people want to identify with a brand. It's cool to think that you are part of the same consumer experience as your favourite sports figure, motion-picture actor, or politician ("Bob Dole knows a thing about Viagra.").... Read more
February 6, 2008
Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster
Dana Thomas's Deluxe, sub-titled "How Luxury Lost Its Luster", an exploration of brand-name fashion, disappointed me: I was looking for a deeper cultural history, one that would explore the connections consumers have with marks and brands. Her research focuses entirely on modern and contemporary fashion, and almost exhaustively so. Her presentation of the history of various houses, such as Chanel, Herm�s, and Louis Vuitton does dig into the social aspects of their creation; she avoids the ingrained aspects of our desire for specific luxury goods. She hints at this when she makes a contrast between Herm�s, which does not ostentatiously brand its clothing with its logo; and Gucci, which does. I have a vague recollection of some Aristophanic humour involving slaves who came from the wrong trader, but on the other hand the joke may have only been in an Asterix comic. The desire for association with a well-known purveyor certainly dates back far into history. Aside: "the quality guarantees the brand", as Lord Peter Wimsey pointed out in Murder Must Advertise.... Read more
February 2, 2008
Over the Edge of the World
Voyagers in the Age of Discovery trained in formal schools, where they learned the science of navigation, theories of cartography, and the immense trove of history essential to understanding of exploration. In Castilian Spain,the Casa de Contratraci�n's "School of Navigation [provided] formal training [to] pilot[s], probably from the boastful and controversial Amerigo Vespucci .... Students received credit in the form of beans won from their instructor; if they successfully completed a course, they were awarded a dry bean; if unsuccessful, they received a shriveled pea." Casa de Contratraci�n was the "House of Commerce", and provided the financial backing for the highly-speculative and incredibly dangerous voyages to the Spice Islands. Contrast this to the school in William Langweische's Outlaw Sea, which involved real-world simualations in the South of France, complete with scale-model ships of all varieties. Laurence Bergreen's story of Magellan focuses on his monumental 'round-the-world voyage. Leaving much of Magellan's early story behind, he paints a portrait of a barely competent navigator whose luck and hardheadedness combined to take him most of the way around the globe. Although Ferdinand Magellan's expedition and its findings (yes! the world is round!) are tremendous, they now seem to me more the result of chance than of calculation. Magellan did not have an aptitude for scholarship, and was no master of instruments; his cosmologist collaborator went insane before the ships sailed. He faced many political obstacles, both in the Portuguese empire and in the Spanish court of Charles I, and showed little aptitude for handling the intrigue. . The book itself starts slowly, but once the voyage is underway the excitement begins: cannibals! giants! williwaws! mutiny! exotic islands! spices! update I plumb forgot one of the other exciting passages of this book: Bergreen recounts the punishments that the hapless Magellan metes out in revenge for the first mutiny, and describes a form of torture especially beloved by the Spanish Inquisition. Torquemada was as fond of waterboarding as are the United States Attorneys General. Even as he engaged in the clear acts of torture, Magellan knew that he would receive dishonor upon his return to Spain. Five hundred years later: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.... Read more
January 30, 2008
As A Man Grows Older / The Confusions of Young Türless
In reading these two novels, I found myself immersed in the psychological turmoil of each book's protagonist. Italo Svevo's As A Man Grows Older reflects some of the author's fascination with the exciting, contemporary field of pscyhoanalysis. The protagonist, a promising novelist himself, becomes infatuated and involved with a flirtatious woman. In Robert Musil's The Confusions of Young Türless, the protagonist is a pubescent student at a boarding school, caught up in the machinations of both his peers and the school administrators. Both novels explore the dense world inside the minds of people in love, capturing the confusion and anxiety of this complicated sensation. I did not enjoy either book, though, for they were both too inwards-looking for my taste.... Read more
January 28, 2008
A Briefer History of Time
Stephen Hawking presents an illustrated, clarified version of his A Brief History of Time. This edition presents the enthralling concepts of particle physics, general relativity, quantum mechanics, and other concepts understood by fewer than a dozen people throughout the space-time continuum. I do love a book in which the author describes physical laws through narration, rather than through explicit derivation of equations. (One exception to this is David Flannery's excellent examination of the square root of two.) Hawking's presentation falls back a little too easily on a Creator, and does not strongly suggest that physics can indeed solve all problems — as I know it does. Hawking describes moments in which he falls back to the notion of non-physical intervention, specifically at the outset of the creation of this universe. After all, how does one explain the presence of energy that became the matter of our universe? What is the answer to "What came before the Big Bang?" The illustrations in this edition struck me as kitsch, which at some level is appropriate for a discussion of cosmology, but ultimately distracted me from the useful passages in the text itself.... Read more
January 23, 2008
In Defense of Food
Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food goes to great lengths to explain why we should eat whole foods, and plenty of leafy greens. My mother's advice, and my parents' general attitude towards food, was "Everything in moderation. Know what you are eating." This assumes that I am both rational and intelligent, which are the same assumptions that Michael Pollan makes. For the past eight years, I have been keeping a record of what I eat. I am pretty happy about it.... Read more
January 20, 2008
Last Night at the Lobster
Stewart O'Nan's Last Night at the Lobster presents the poignant story of closing night at a Red Lobster restaurant in a Connecticut mall reminded me of a story by David Mamet, and of the movie Reach the Rock. The author quickly drew out the characters, delineating their relationships and their habits, and let the quotidian events unfold. One sees the inexorable arc of the story from the first page, but O'Nan's narration allows it to unfold at a welcome pace. He treats the story and the characters with respect, allowing their thoughts and their voices ample space. He gives plenty of room to the manager Manny DeLeon, the romantically-ambivalent protagonist, from whose limited third-person perspective we see the last night at the Lobster. Everyday events at the restaurant give Manny the occasion to contemplate and to reflect. He tries sincerely, if naïvely, to make the day's events perfect for the remaining staff and for himself. The novel is a pleasant, quiet presentation of dignity and everyday people.... Read more
January 17, 2008
Dead Tech, Or, On Decaying Machinery
I recently found an edition of "Dead Tech" reprinted by the excellent Santa Monica booksellers Hennessey and Ingalls. This book presents a series of photoessays on decrepit, abandoned, obsolete, rusting infrastructure around the world: quietly rotting piers in Manhattan, factories in Germany, the quietly beautifulTucscon Boneyard. The latter collection of old United States Air Force craft resides at Davis Monthan Air Force Base, and the pieces slowly parted out to other planes, or sold for scrap. The precious-metal content of a single old Pratt & Whitney spark plug is in the hundreds of dollars, for the gold and platinum within; meanwhile, the shells and fuselages of the airplanes sit in the desert sun. The Dead Machinery community on LiveJournal has an excellent photo pool of everything from rusting Soviet tractors to the insides of old steel mills. Photographer Mark Perrott published an excellent photoessay, Eliza: Remembering a Pittsburgh Steel Mill, on the Jones & Laughlin blast furnace. A series of photographs on flickr show the remnants of jets in Arizona and in California.... Read more
January 9, 2008
√2
David Flannery's book √2 is a beautiful explanation of the properties of this irrational number, presented as a dialogue between a master mathematician and an eager student. The dialogue is in the tradition of Socrates, of Galileo; it is an explication of a sublime concept, presented clearly and logically, with succinct interludes of history and anecdote. I learned more about the symmetry of standard paper sizes in Chapter 2 of this book than I ever thought I might encounter! This book uses an alternative spelling of minuscule: miniscule. Perhaps the result of years of pervasive mis-spelling, many dictionaries now present this spelling as a variant of the original. As a fan of alternatives, I appreciate this; however, the vowel shortening alarms me. Aside: I notice "break" commonly used to indicate the mechanical device used to stop cars, elevators, trains, et c.; will this, too, become an accepted spelling?) Both the author's approach and prose make for a much more enjoyable read than either of the volumes I read (or tried reading) on 0; or π; or e. I really enjoyed this dialogue, and the genuinely useful illustrations and algebra. The final chapter, "Odds and Ends", presents some of the more engaging problems of number theory, including a demonstration of taxicab problem. The discussion and proofs of Pell's Sequence uses simple, clear algebra to show the increasingly-accurate approximations of the square root of two; the awesome power of the Heron Sequence becomes apparent as the dialogue reveals how to rapidly advance through the approximations in Pell's Sequence. The inherent beauty of the numbers is dazzling (although I would stop short of describing some of the algebra as "witchcraft", as does the Teacher in this dialogue).... Read more
January 8, 2008
Big Bang
Simon Singh presents an eminently readable history of cosmology, the search for order and explanation of the universe. His narrative, filled with anecdotes and adventures, enthalled me. I carried the book around for days, savouring it. The story pulls in the snipes Newton took at Hooke, the poor hunchback; the salacious details of Brahe's life; the disappointment of duplication that Alpher and Gammow felt (and Gammow's delightful doggerel, often at Fred Hoyle's expense), and many more. All of these personal details add colour and depth to the already-thrilling story that unfolds as scientists attempt to explain through reason and deduction what they observe. Never before have I grasped so clearly the achievements of observational astronomers, whose painstaking and beautiful work has led us to so detailed an understanding of the beginnings of time and space. Singh puts forth the story clearly and at a very moderate pace. He explains scientific theories brilliantly, simplifying as necessary and carefully relating each new theory to the others. He also uses math effectively, presenting constants in clear narrative context; the end of each chapter also has a two-page summary, which gave me an excellent opportunity to review what he had explained and to make sure I got it. Big Bang is one of the best books I have ever read. Had I read it fifteen years ago, I probably would have my head in the stars at this very minute.... Read more
December 31, 2007
Cosmicomics
Continuing the cosmological adventures I began earlier this week, I am re-reading Italo Calvino's beautiful and magnificent set of stories about the building blocks of the universe. With adventures such as aquatic trips to the moon (to collect its cheese, no less), the romance of evolving sea-creatures, and interstellar games of marbles, these stories use particles in love and galaxies in formation as the characters. The narrator, Qwfwq, frames each of the stories; in some he appears as a character, in others he relates an episode from a relative's life: "Pitch-dark it was, —old Qfwfq confirmed,— I was only a child, I can barely remember it. We were there, as usual, with Father and Mother, Granny Bb'b, some uncles and aunts who were visiting, Mr. Hnw, the one who later became a horse, and us little ones." So begins "At Daybreak", a story about the condensation of matter and about how stars form. The first story, "The Distance of the Moon", is among the most beautiful I have read: its charming premise has both hopeless romanticism and sheer adventure, and the name of Mrs Vhd Vhd the Captain's wife makes me laugh.... Read more
Timothy, or, Notes of an Abject Reptile
Timothy the tortoise can live longer than a Selborn resident, longer than a bishop. He figures from an 18th-century narrative by the naturalist Gilbert White. Drawing from White's natural history, Verlyn Klinkenborg presents Timothy's perspective on the human and animal comings and goings in Selborn. The gentle staccato of Timothy's narration weaves a comfortable, bucolic cloth for a story with neither beginning nor end. Verlyn Klinkenborg is one of America's most insightful and thoughtful writers, and his Timothy, or, Notes of an Abject Reptile makes for superb reading. White's The Natural History of Selborne is one of the most-printed works in English (although Klinkenborg notes that it has just fallen out of print for the first time in centuries); it contains White's detailed notes on his household and environs, and forms the primary source for Timothy's observations and musings in Notes. White also developed the ha-ha, a sunken fence used in landscaping and zookeeping. The Bronx Zoo features a sweeping view across its replica savannah, but a ha-ha keeps the lions confined to their area while the gazelle and impala gallop past. (White would not aspirate the first syllable, pronouncing it "a-ha" rather than "ha-ha"); the San Francisco Zoo used other fences, less effectively.... Read more
December 30, 2007
Aviopolis
Aviopolis combines cultural theory, schematic illustrations, technical photographs, and discourse in a beautiful book -- and I just picked it up for the pictures! The book forms part of a multi-media project published by two students at the University of New South Wales, exploring the concepts of metastability and noplace: the ever-changing physical presence of these cities, which could be anywhere. The Narrator's monologue from "Fight Club" came to mind: "You wake up at Seatac, SFO, LAX. You wake up at O'Hare, Dallas-Fort Worth, BWI. Pacific, mountain, central. Lose an hour, gain an hour. This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time. You wake up at Air Harbor International. If you wake up at a different time, in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?" Reading through Aviopolis, I was struck by its provocative notion that the airport is the city of the future, and that this city could be any place: never mind the strip malls, the homogenized main streets from Frankfurt to Lisbon to Tokyo: the airport, our portal from each city to the next, is everyplace but noplace.... Read more
December 29, 2007
Death by Black Hole
This book covers a topic not readily found in popular-science books: cosmology. With its attendant complications of physics, chemistry, and philosophy, cosmology is a difficult topic to ravel into a book. In this collection, Neil deGrasse Tyson addresses fundamental questions of the development and organization of the universe with just the right amount of detail: the enthusiasm he shows for his topic while discussing how stars form, or the very early timeline of the universe, makes this book very enjoyable. It kept me awake at night, wondering about where the initial energy for the Big Bang originated. The book suffers from two problems: the author's unfortunate sense of humor, which leads to many flip remarks; and from poor editing. Drawing from the author's years as a magazine columnist, the book collects articles without providing coherence. Thus, the reader hears anew every few pages about who Copernicus was, or Kapteyn, or why carbon so easily and abundantly bonds to other atoms; the book also has a handful of embarrassing typographical errors ("it's" for "its", et c.), but I now find this unsurprising about any book, article, or weblog rant recently published. The flippancy detracts from the otherwise-admirable flow of each article; I was especially impressed with the discussion of Lagrange points, where the author's ability to elegantly explain a complex mathematical and physical concept shined. Cosmology is a rich but challenging topic, for the reader but especially for the author. Unlike Steven Weinberg's lucid but technical "The First Three Minutes", "Death By Black Hole" is gripping, enchanting in much the way that the cosmos itself is: replete with mystery and bursts of illumination. I did not understand enough of Stephen Hawking's writing, and too many other writers on the topic bring a lack of expertise or any elegance to their erudition. Tyson, a cosmologist at the Natural Museum of History in New York City, also published a pleasant photoessay on stars in New York City online.... Read more
December 28, 2007
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
This riveting new translation, presented in a side-by-side text with the original on the left-hand side and the modern English on the right, brought new joy to this stirring tale. The translator's preface brought to my attention many of the poetic conventions, devices, and methods that the author, known as The Pearl Poet, brings to this epic: alliteration, especially, is a delightful and strong element of the poetry. In reading this translation, I found myself reading aloud: The New York Times review by Edward Hirsch brought to my attention many of the basic elements of this poem that escaped me twenty years ago, when I first read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (for a high-school English class, perhaps?). In reading Simon Armitage's excellent new translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I enjoyed the work in a way that I have not enjoyed an epic in English since Robert Fagles's translation of The Odyssey. A full text, with notes by J R R Tolkien and E V Gordon, appears at the University of Michigan's web site.... Read more
December 24, 2007
How Right You Are, Jeeves
Tangled love-affairs, mistaken identities, cases of insanity, and overbearing aunts: were it not for the appearance of the coveted cow-creamer, this might be a Shakespearean comedy. This comic novel follows the tried-and-true Wodehouse formula of placing the cheerfully inept Bertie Wooster in a country-house setting, tasked by his genial agèd relative with some ridiculous social task, but bereft of his helpmeet Jeeves. Various engagements fall as Bertie ploughs through the estate, a new pair of white linen trousers meet ruin, and no mice are found in the visiting scion's bedroom, but all ends well as Jeeves, freshly-fed from his shrimping holiday, swoops in to save the day. How Right You Are, Jeeves is another diverting piece of Wodehouse.... Read more
December 15, 2007
Carter Beats The Devil
From the setting in post-'quake, post-Depression San Francisco (thrilling!) to the themes (of romance and adventure, although stopping short of swashbuckling), and especially because of the thrilling series of escapes, I found Carter Beats The Devil one of the most engaging novels I have read. Treading the same landscape of Americana as the Michael Chabon's Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, but with fewer of the deep issues of cultural identity, Glen David Gold has produced an outstanding first novel. The quality of his historical and topical research shines through each page, but he makes the characters -- including the protagonist, drawn directly from current events -- entirely his own. This book is fully on the novel side of historical novel, and the plot, secondary characters and agonistes all come from Gold's pen. His sentences roll together merrily, and his dialogue evokes not only the era but the past-times and trades of the characters.... Read more
December 7, 2007
Class Trip / The Mustache
Two novels by Emmanuel Carrère: "Class Trip" and "The Mustache". The former has an uneven balance between development, climax, and denouement; despite its marvellous premise, the quantities of prose devoted first to the exposition and then to the development threw me off, and I felt disengaged from the first half of the novel while reading the second. The latter of the two novels, The Mustache, however, bowled me over. Wow. This novel combines a phenomenal exploration of a marriage with a existential drama, all wrapped in a powerful narrative with small and muscular plot developments. This is certainly one of the few novels that has so gripped me, and amongst the most haunting. Lighter than Kafka, but sharing the aspects of an increasingly confused narrator, The Mustache focuses very strongly on the character at its core. Starting with the innocuous decision of shaving his moustache, the protagonist falls into an increasingly opaque confusion. He struggles first with his wife and his friends, who swear that he never had a moustache, and slowly descends into a state of ambivalence about whether he had the moustache or not, whether he is who he thinks he is, and whether he can return to his pre-barbered condition. This second novel, The Mustache, is fantastic. It is one of the most thrilling stories I have read, as full of intrigue and plot as a Dashiell Hammett novel; as thoughtful and langourous as a Haruki Murakami story. The author adapted it for the screen a few years ago; the novel itself he wrote in 1985. Although the book does not explore it fully, it touches on a theme I consider essential to the modern urban gentleman: facial hair is a fantastic ornament. Moustache contests! Beard competitions! A man's cheeks and chin are a palimpsest, n'est pas? The book also has a particularly stirring and amusing passage set around Place de la Republique, dear to my heart.... Read more
December 3, 2007
A Christmas Carol / skaiter
Lamely having put off reading any of Dickens's work in high school, I finally paged through The Mystery of Edwin Drood a few years ago, and, in the spirit of the season picked up A Christmas Carol at the library. I somehow avoided Dickens entirely as part of the curriculum, although the free period I mysteriously enjoyed my first year — I probably should have been taking an elective, or a hard science, or something structured — when I felt a twinge of guilt at my ignorance of this part of the canon, I decided to buy a complete set of his works, illustrated, from Oxford. Their lovely edition sold out, however (I did see it on the shelf of a beautiful but out-of-place house for sale in San Francisco some years ago) before the publisher fulfilled my order, and I have used this as an excuse since. A Christmas Carol in particular perplexed me with its use of skaiter, in the sentence "You are not a skaiter, are you?" and with a reference to Ebenezer Scrooge making a "pefect Laocoön of himself with his stockings", which I presume is not a suggestion of the protagonist's sexual impropriety. Otherwise: Bah! Humbug! Were it not for its lofty place in literature, I would wonder. All the same, in fact, I wonder: this story has all the depth and tension of a holiday card; I would call it kitsch, but the introduction to this edition suggests that Dickens was quite serious in his presentation of the Spirits to Scrooge. I think I prefer the various staged or televised performances to the book itself, which did not pull me in to the story at all. Scrooge was all-too-easily convinced of the moral error of his way, and his reform --- well, let me not be cynical. Dickens himself anticipated some of my reaction, noting in the story that Scrooge's transformation was complete and abrupt, but, well, that's the way the story goes. I think that I will return to edgier novels, now.... Read more
The Kitchen Boy
I picked up this paperback from a pile on the sidewalk in Alphabet City, and thought its slender spine suitable for subway reading. It is a horrible, bland narrative, so unsuited to the rich historical and cultural setting of the Russian Revolution. The characters are thin, sketched as caricatures despite the author's desperate desire to make them sympathetic and beautiful. Despite being short (about 225 pages), it took me hours to finish it, because each page felt like a burden. I wanted to finish reading it for the narrative: I was curious about how the fabled "kitchen-boy" who escaped the murderous attack on the Romanovs (that part comes from the historical record) ended up with a lakefront estate near Chicago. The ending came as a surprise (to me, who thought I was so smart and could anticipate it), and the twist ending rewarded my reading through the preceding pages. This book also uses verst, marking three appearances of the word since I first saw it a few weeks ago. I read aloud all of the romanized Russian in this novel, and really like the sound of the langauge with its sweeping yes (the e in Cyrillic) and the sibilant fricative (affricative?) of ц. For the first time, I realised that the consonant ш (sha, IPA /ʃ/ or /ʂ/) has the same voiceless palato-alveolar fricative sound as the Hebrew ש, shin, and the Arabic ﺷ , sheen (which looks prettier in the final form, ﺶ) and closely resembles the two, orthographically. Various non-authoritative online references suggest that the Cyrillic character derives from either the Greek Σ, sigma or from ש. Although my money would be on the language that Cyril and Methodius brought to the region, I wonder how the symbol entered their alphabet. My mind is spinning. Between the Revolution and the Second Great War, many precious cultural and religions objects disappeared from Russia. Amongst them, The Amber Room strikes me as the most curious. An entire room from Catherine Palace, made of massive panels of amber backed with gold leaf, the Amber Room disappeared during the German looting of the city in 1945. A reconstructed room opened a few years ago.... Read more
November 28, 2007
Marcovaldo, or The seasons in the city
This collection of bucolic stories is amongst my favourite by any author. Calvino's imperturbable hero, the eponymous Marcovaldo, spends some of his time dreamily lost in a fog; some of his time earnestly providing for his impoverished family; and some of this time privately fending for himself. None of these aspects lead to any sort of moral; rather, Calvino uses each of the brief narratives as an episode. The spare writing underscores the quotidian nature of Marcovaldo's life. I was so engrossed in this book that I missed my stop on the train to work (while reading "The wrong stop"!).... Read more
November 26, 2007
Manhattan Noir
This anthology features noir stories that have a distinctly Manhattan setting: the Lower East Side, Battery Park City, Inwood. It is part of a burgeoning series from Akashic Books, which wants to "reverse-gentrify the literary world". Ironically, one aspect that many of these stories share is that modern Manhattan is a boring, uniformly-gentrified place. Characters in the stories, just like contemporary bloggers, grumble about the ubiquity of storefront banks, chain-store pharmacies, and name-brand "coffee" shops. Jeffrey Deaver contributes a riveting story about grifters and cops on the take in Hell's Kitchen. The anthology's editor, Lawrence Block, has a very different (and less gripping) take on the same neighbourhood, which in his story goes by the more gentrified "Clinton". Liz Martínez's story set in Washington Heights feels more like science fiction, not from its setting but from its ham-handed "guardian angel" appearances of actor-who-died-young Freddie Prinze. The stories set in the Lower East Side and in Yorkville are less engaging, despite the gritty promise of these locales. One might think, Yorkville? But after reading the opening of Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, I am eager for more hardboiled stories set in Yorkville. The ambiguous morality typical of noir stories comes across best in Deaver's story, "A Nice Place to Visit", and in Charles Ardai's "The Good Samaritan", which makes excellent use of its Midtown setting. I'm off to the library to find me some Luc Sante.... Read more
November 24, 2007
The Village of Stepanchikovo
Just a few days after first encountering the word verst, I saw it again on the first page of this short novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Had I read more literature during my high-school years, I surely would have seen this word before -- but this is the first work of his I have read. Modern doctors have diagnosed Fyodor Mikhailovich with epilepsy. Part of this text is available online; I procured my copy at the local library.... Read more
November 23, 2007
Boomsday
Boomsday follows on the heels of Christopher Buckley's amusing Thank You For Smoking, and is itself full of hilarious satire. From the phrase "You can be anyone you want to [in California] , as long as you don't mind being stuck in traffic" to the modest proposal that forms its core. The heroine comes saddled with a weighty name: Cassandra Devine is a self-taught spin doctor by day, and a revolutionary blogger by night. The revolutionary part comes unexpectedly, as does her sudden prominence in national politics. Abetted by a mischievous Congressman, her adventures become legend. Many of the book's elements reflect or anticipate what one finds in the national newspaper: crushing debt ("stagflation" makes an appearance), numerous and unending wars (the US becomes sends its militia to all nations beginning with 'T'), and unending political campaigns. The high-tech hi-jinks add a nice touch, often at California's expense. I feel somewhat petty picking on a book for spelling in a second language, but one plot element is that the energetic Congressman speaks French, a by-product of his Yankee upbringing. In one scene mid-way through the book, he is again corrected to speak Spanish rather than French, but the French sentence he was speaking when interrupted had a mis-spelling. (a-propos of mis-spellings, the iPhone corrected my "minutes" with an errant space to "mi urea". Technology! Thou are more temperate, etc. ) This book's lax editing also results in the mis-spelling of the active ingredient in a worn-out saying (Shineola! ha!) and a minor character shifting names over a leaf. Boomsday brought a smile to my face, and some of its plot twists uncannily reflect the current state of this country. It was not as incisive as Thank You ..., but similarly charming and witty through to the comfortable ending.... Read more
November 20, 2007
Scsh Reference Manual
I sometimes think of books I should write. And when I write a book, I will write acknowledgements. "Jack 'n Zac" cocktails indeed. I am glad that the scsh reference manual is available entirely online, and not only for the laughs and recipes.... Read more
November 12, 2007
722 Miles
&uotA colleague saw me reading a dog-eared copy of Robert Caro's majestic opus "The Power Broker" and suggested I dig into Clifton Hood's 722 Miles. Similar to Caro's work, Hood focuses on the power wielded by the elite of New York City in his description of the New York City subway's early years. That the subway managed to come about despite all of the wrangling and financial obstacles -- a major portion was built around the time of the Great Depression -- amazes me.... Read more
November 5, 2007
Water for Elephants
I enjoyed reading Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants, but ultimately found it unremarkable. The narrative use of tense (simple past for the action in the present, and present for the events of the past) seems backwards, not only because it shfits the emphasis in an awkward way, but because the unsurprising twist at the end misfires because of the tenses. The story is compelling, even if some of the character interactions make little sense (how do the dwarf and the college kid become fast friends all of a sudden, to the point of sharing custody for the old-timer afflicted with jake's walk.... Read more
November 4, 2007
The Janissary Tree
An exciting premise and a lavish setting set up an interesting thriller, in which the protagonist -- a eunuch -- must untangle a murder, a theft, and an insurrection in 1830s Istanbul. The dialogue and the detail fall short, however, and the foreshadowing leads to our knowing too many details before they should be revealed. Unlike Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose" (that pinnacle of achievement in historical thrillers!), neither the literary references nor the setting are put to excellent or hilarious use. The promised interludes of sex and cooking are much less exciting than the reviewer's comments on the flap copy promised, but I have only myself to blame for judging this book by its cover. I did learn several new words: verst, sumptuary, and gelid; as well as a handful of Byzantine Turkish ranks, such as seraskier.... Read more
October 25, 2007
One Good Turn
Kate Atkinson's second novel (a mystery? a comedy of errors? a drama?) featuring the hapless Scotsman-without-a-country Jackson Brodie irritated me. The first third of the novel, ostensibly a setup for a delicate plot rich with characters, jumped about without staying in one place long enough for me to appreciate the personalities or twists introduced; the remainder of the book, building on its themes, instead left loose ends for some of the minor characters, while telegraphing some of the more significant resolution in a way that made me not want to finish the dam' thing. The novel, set in Edinburgh during the Fringe Festival, lacks detail of both place and of dialogue. The author, also a Scot, shows the reader a city full of Eastern European intrigue but lacking in traditional Scotch character. Much like a television drama, the tension between Brodie and his stage-actress lover, the flamboyant Julia from Case Histories, never plays in any satifsying way. No passionate dialogues, no climactic scenes, but rather an assumption that the reader will accept the way in which their relationship develops. This book was nowhere as enjoyable as the Witold Rybczynski essay with the same title, but about the evolution of the screwdriver. Aside: hapless comes into English via Old Norse, from the proto-Germanic root *khapan meaning "convenient, fit". The connotation of being without luck dates back almost a millennium.... Read more
September 17, 2007
The Works: The Anatomy of a City
Kate Ascher of the New York City Economic Development Corporation has written the entirely fascinating and very useful The Works: The Anatomy of a City, which takes the components of a city — New York, in this case — and presents their relationship to each other and to the people of the city; and their role in the massive system that makes up a growing urban area. The transportation, from sidewalks to subways; the utility systems, answering the question "What happens when you turn the tap on a hot-water faucet?"; the bridges and tunnels, which bring vast quantities of New Jersey twentysomethings^W^W^W revenue to Manhattan; and the waterways, which figure into each and every one of the other systems. The volume shows love of the topic: the author meticulously researched the writing, drawing on her professional experience, from projects working on various infrastructure pieces around New York City; the pages have well-illustrated pieces peeling apart street layouts, intersections and traffic systems, and street signs. Each page has a useful design and layout with crisp schematics and judicious use of photographs. In many ways, the book resembles David Macaulay's masterful The Way Things Work, but with a wonderfully specific New York focus. Ascher also has a sidebar explaining the mysterious nitrogen canisters I first noticed several years ago. These silver canisters, about five feet high, sit calmly at an intersection. A small hose connects to a manhole, and is fixed to the ground with gaffer tape. The canisters do not bear apparent indication of ownership, but, Ascher explains, are part of a three-hundred-strong fleet of canisters maintained by Verizon. They pump nitrogen into conduit in order to keep moisture away from fiber-optic lines; moisture attracts particulate matter that degrades optical signals and equipment. The nitrogen in each canister lasts about three days. What perplexes me is why this isn't done underground, with pumps and protected cylinders of the stuff; and why no-one (apparently) tampers with the aboveground nitrogen.... Read more
September 14, 2007
Discover Your Inner Economist
In his new book, Tyler Cowen, the author of the Marginal Revolution blog, discusses prizes versus incentives. These are two faces of a mechanism by which the (economic) world goes round: knowing when to apply them makes all the difference, however. Much of the topical ground in this book resembles Mr Cowen spoke informally at a brown-bag series today, and spent most of the time speaking about incentives versus grants. He used the X Prize Foundation's prizes for manned stratospheric flight and, more recently, unmanned lunar exploration as examples of how incentives can reward, if not spur, practical innovation. He also mentioned the DARPA Grand Challenge, which has so far failed to produce the desired result: a robot capable of navigating a course from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, and touched on the Netflix Prize to improve the DVD rental recommendations. For all of these, he mentioned the winner's curse: over-investment of resources such as time and money, at the expense of finding the correct solution. A counter-example that he did not mention is Dean Kamen's iBot mobility device (and predecessor to Ginger). In comics: Hergé penned The Stratoship H.22, a two-part bandes dessines including Mr Pump's Legacy and Destination: New York. This adventure of Jo, Zette, et Jocko centred on a fabulous incentive ($10 million!) for achieving supersonic trans-atlantic flight. Cowen's book did teach me one useful thing: to abandon enterprises in a short-circuit fashion. That is, don't sit through a boring movie. In this case, don't finish a dull book.... Read more
The Museum of Dr Moses
"The Museum of Dr. Moses" comprises a selection of dull and unexciting "tales of mystery and suspense", which dwell on the psychological but in a surprisingly unexciting way. Not a single one of the half-dozen (of ten in total) stories I read gripped me, neither for the storytelling nor for the story. I have not read any of Joyce Carol Oates's other works, save perhaps the odd story in a magazine here or there; I think that I picked this up by mistake, having confused this author with another.... Read more
Adverbs
Daniel Handler's 2006 novel Adverbs presents several disjoint episodes in a rambling narrative about love. Love, he proposes, is in the adverbs, not the nouns: barely, briefly, arguably his characters fall in and out of each other's lives, in and out of "different types of love". The writing is crisp at times, but the rambunctious nature of the plot and the too-similarly-named characters present a more modern view of the world than I enjoy. Handler drops seemingly-familiar names in each story, suggesting that they appear previously or subsequently; one or two times he breaks through the wall and states explicitly that the character is non-recurring, or should be familiar to the reader. I found myself spending an uncomfortable amount of time asking, "Is this the same Tomas from clearly? The same Andrea from immediately? The motivation for this book might be in the physical nature of love: thus, adverbs; Handler brings us close to several physical encounters, but does not dwell on them. His characters tend to the sad and unfulfilled, even when in love — or in a relationship, at least — wanting more, wanting something else. Brief fantasies creep into each story, demonstrating that love is also about what isn't there and what cannot possibly be: fulfillment, redemption, magic, satisfaction. His characters also spend a lot of time drinking cocktails with fabulous names, including the Suffering Bastard, a Hong Kong Cobbler, and ad hoc creations such as a "mouthful of champagne followed by a sip of chianti". I first had the Suffering Bastard at a particular bar in San Francisco, a bar which in fact makes an appearance towards the end of the novel. The famously stylish and moody bartender there recently left, I hear, in a fit of pique about infused liquors (she made her own, and they are delicious and quirky). Aside: for an amusing anecdote about the bartender's quirkiness and temper, consult the always-first-person Yelp review.... Read more
September 11, 2007
Good Reads
Sun Yung pointed me to Good Reads, which led to the following widget: ... which suggests yet another Flash-y thing-y to incorporate somewhere into this part of the site. I like it, but I don't know how much.... Read more
September 8, 2007
The Big Oyster
Once again, Mark Kurlansky has chosen an awesome topic and produced a mediocre book: see Salt and Cod. The Basque History of the World was an exception to this unfortunate outcome, in which his research and curiosity fall flat because of the writing. In The Big Oyster his prose again has many run-on sentences, mostly confusing compound constructions; the flow of the book is confounded by the intermittent, typographically-offset recipes he includes. The history itself is fascinating: the humble oyster played a tremendous role in New York's economy and culture through the nineteenth century, and a pivotal role in understanding our effect on the New York Harbor through the twentieth. The author presents riveting anecdotes and stories about Dutch, English, and American development in the city, all the while describing how Manhattan Island, Long Island Sound, and the Hudson estuary provided bountiful bivalves for us to eat in many preparations, build into roads and houses, and export to other nations. As with other books that present a bygone and more sylvan portrait of America I felt nostalgic: I can't quite picture farms at 14th Street, or a trip to Turtle Bay taking a weekend from the Battery. I also have a hankering for oyster, and not just the tired sort one finds at the annual Oyster Festival (aside: I had some lovely photographs of the Oyster Festival from a few years ago, on a sunny afternoon in Dumbo, but can no longer find 'em. Pre-flickr.).... Read more
September 5, 2007
Heat
Bill Buford and his characters, Dario Cecchini, Mario Batali and Marco Pierre White, cavort and revel in excess through this fascinating journey into becoming a professional chef and restauranteur. Buford initially applied for an externship at Batali's restaurant, Babbo, but eventually followed the ages-old advice, and travelled abroad, to learn from the teachers of his master. Batali is a restauranteur, as is White: both are skilled chefs, but both also run massive for-profit establishments, and are concerned with the curious intersection of their food and their money. The bottom line not only means getting the right pizza-dough recipe, as was the problem for Batali's new restaurant, Otto, but also turning a once-cursèd venue into a splashy dining area (ditto, Otto). Cecchini is a butcher to whom Buford becomes an apprentice, and he revels in the quirkiness of his trade. He must also be a paragon of virtue to the slow-food establishment, for his preparations take days and days of careful, manual labour. Or mere seconds of expert knowledge, of where to slice through tendons and across massive pieces of flesh. Buford doesn't comment on the slow-ness of things, thank goodness; much of his narratives gallops along with his characters, whose language and carriage leap off the page. Buford has a knack for nuance, and plays out his frustrations and triumphs through the many other chefs he meets. The lively dialogue and the entertaining scenes work well together to present his progression from an aspiring home chef to a lowly intern and prep chef, to a skilled butcher's apprentice.... Read more
September 2, 2007
Freakonomics / Blink
I read Freakonomics and (most of) Blink; I had not read Malcolm Gladwell's previous book, The Tipping Point. Both books address the insight of experts; Blink demonstrates how domain knowledge enables an expert to make a very rapid judgement, and Levitt and Dubner indicate how experts enjoy privileged information, which equates to an economic advantage. Gladwell's experts are sociologists who can tell, in seconds!, whether a marriage will last to five, fifteen, or infinite years; Freakonomics has experts who can sell a house or organize a xenophobic rally. amazon_ad_tag = "commadammit-20"; amazon_ad_width = "468"; amazon_ad_height = "60"; amazon_ad_logo = "hide"; amazon_ad_product_images = "hide"; amazon_ad_link_target = "new"; amazon_ad_border = "hide";//-->... Read more
August 24, 2007
Ghosts / Willow St. and Orange St.
View Larger Map Ghosts is the second novella in Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, and the most accomplished. With a remarkable narrator and a deft plot (once you accept the premise, that is), Ghosts follows a pair of young men in late '40s Brooklyn as one, a private investigator, shadows the other from across Orange St in Brooklyn Heights. The history of the neighbourhood dances through the plot: Walt Whitman , Henry Ward Beecher (including an apt description of the statue commemorating his abolitionism), and the buildings themselves.... Read more
August 20, 2007
City of Glass / Our Man in Havana
Two books about protagonists who step uncertainly into worlds of their own creation. Both become caught up in the horrible side-effects of their actions, just as time travellers invariably are. Paul Auster's City of Glass has a few clumsy portions, including the jarring insertion of the author as a character and scapegoat — I feel as though I am missing a joke somewhere. Elements of the plot, aspects of the characters, and the ongoing indirection of stories-within-the-story and oratio obliqua serve as the hallmarks of Auster's style. A protagonist makes an abrupt decision to do something lifestyle-changing; characters are suddenly intimate, intellectually or physically, with each other; and at least one instance of a rediscovered but marginal manuscript crops up. Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana is masterful, with witty, clear dialogue and subtle scenes of action. His characters dance through the pages, sometimes literally.... Read more
August 5, 2007
In which I am unsuccessful at procuring books
All of the nearby branch libraries close on Sunday, so I went — as an expedient! — to the local outpost of a particularly noxious chain bookstore to pick up some reading material. I picked up an omnibus of Dorothy Sayers's stories (including her most famous creation, Lord Peter Wimsey; the redoubtable Montague Egg; and a handful of other previously-uncollected works) but was unhappy to later discover numerous errors. Some I noticed because I know the originals; some I noticed because they crept in as errors in transcription (in railway time-tables, for instance, or in an illustration involving a misspelling which a subsequent editor, probably a computer, corrected so as to make the illustration nonsensical); others happened in the translation from The Queen's to the American English, and are jarring but not outright wrong. I also bought a paperback edition of Graham Greene's fantastic Our Man in Havana, which I have been aching to re-read, especially since I have learned that Carol Reed's excellent screen adaptation is not available on DVD in the United States (but is in Region 2: perhaps another reason to move to Spain?). update I returned the book, realised that the book-seller did not ask why I was returning it, and borrowed a copy from the library in order to note the especially offensive passages. I will badger the US publisher, HaperPerennial.... Read more
July 26, 2007
Travels in the Scriptorium
Sophie Harrison's review of Paul Auster's most recent excursion into modernity touches on some of the salient points: the deliberate unfolding of a very physical plot (with some bumps; unless I misread, the protagonist, a cunningly-named Mr Blank, discovers a method of locomotion twice); the prominent reappearance of characters from Auster's previous books; and a willfully obscure approach to the oratio obliqua that frequently appears in his work. In this book, we have not the satisfaction of The Book of Illusions, not the implied, subtly beautiful closure of The New York Trilogy. The mélange of characters suggests that Auster has uncovered a box of notes (index cards? A particular notebook? a few odd pages of typescript?) and slapped this book together. It is not quite satisfying, and too much comes through a sly tone in the narrator's voice, or in the sudden dialogue of the visiting characters. Travels ... feels both unfinished and uninspired.... Read more
July 24, 2007
Innocent Blood
The story in Innocent Blood is gripping and ultimately very sad. One of P D James's few non-formula mystery novels, it begins with a mystery that uncovers a murder already solved and suggests a murder yet to happen; although the actors are all laid out for the reader to see, the tension and thrill build throughout the story. The sad ending is marred by one of James's typical mentions of sexual peccadillos, but this is overall one of her most impressive works. Although I always enjoy reading the Dalgliesh mysteries (less so the Cordelia Grey stories), they have stock characters and hackneyed concepts that always come down to class or ideological struggles; James's characters are all too often hidebound, predictable, and stiff in their expression. She describes rather than invokes them, which leads to a very prescriptive sort of book: she shoves much of the character detail down our throats, leaving little for interpretation (side note: this edition of Innocent Blood includes a Readers' Guide, with all of two questions. James really does not leave much to the imagination, which is an odd sort of rigidity for a mystery novelist).... Read more
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
In this relatively early (1926, a few years after the début of Hercule Poirot and his mustaches in The Mysterious Affair at Styles) novel, Agatha Christie subverts the still-young detective genre with a tour-de-force. She relies on none of the formulaic pieces of conversation that pollute her later books; few of the archetypes, although the bluff military type, Hector Blunt, makes an appearance, as does the secretly-down-on-her-luck young woman in the character of Flora Ackroyd; and none of the infuriating plucked-from-the-air contrivances that mar the later Poirot books. Almost all the clues are apparent, the single piece being a telegram that Poirot dispatches in a way that is invisible to the reader. Re-reading this novel, Agatha Christie's formidable reputation becomes real. I place this next to the A B C Murders and the weird Cards On The Table as her foremost mysteries.... Read more
July 21, 2007
On a glass of ice
Some years ago, I had the thought to write a book on ice. In addition to a prècis of the chemical and physical properties of ice, I wanted to focus on the social aspects of the thing. Ice separated classes, divides the restaurants of different countries, and made possible the cocktail. Chemical ice makes possible the global distribution of once-local delicacies; ice as a physical force has shaped our neighbourhoods and our continents. Ice has great importance to scientific and political issues: at the Earth's polar caps, it represents a bank of fresh water that might be used to share water with arid countries; in relatively unexplored areas of the world, the ice is a time capsule that contains undisturbed microörganisms from tens of thousands of years. For extraterrestrial explorers, ice holds the promise of past or future life; for terrestrial explorers, ice is a wonderland, full of adventure and excitement from the skating-rink at Rockefeller Center to glaciers in New Zealand. I wanted to examine not these, but the social history of the stuff. In literature and in popular culture, ice has connotations beyond its physical properties. My outline and notes did not amount to much of a book, and I have long since filed the idea next to my Great American Novel (iteration one: the road trip, but not On The Road) and my examination of the language of sacrifice in the Greek dramatic corpus (I got to examples one and two, the second of which I wrote with the title, "The Religious and Poetic Imagery of Wine-Drinking in the Cyclops of Euripides"; the first is yet unfinished; I wandered into a critical examination of The Cyclops itself, and never recovered. I wonder why, to this day, very few critical studies of the sole surviving satyr play exist). I no longer have my notes; they were on a computer that was lost, reformatted, stolen; they were merely a handful of citations, from mid-nineteenth-century travellers' accounts of encountering ice in American hotels, from sea captains who dragged shiploads of the stuff from Canada to points south, and so on. ... The social aspects of ice are evasive, subtle, and would require more diligence to unearth than I have in me. I would be quite happy to travel to Florence and look for the bar where Camillo Negroni adulterated the Americano (Campari, Vermouth rosso, and soda) with gin, to see whether he had his served up, with a famously thin layer of ice atop, or on the rocks, in an elegant tumbler (after dozens of Negronis, I still cannot decide). I could walk the far reaches of Nunavut and see how the ice has shaped the land -- and how that, in turn shapes the people (for that matter, I could walk through San Francisco, or New York, and see ditto. But I have never visited Nunavut.) I could walk through Buenos Aires (which recently had its first snowstorm in almost a century) and talk to wharfers who unloaded ice from ships a few generations ago; I could find the communities in Russia and in Scandinavia and in Manchuria where people need to cope with moving about on ice almost every day of the week. Marco Polo reported on people who skated along the ice, with curved shoes. A few years ago, Mariana Gosnell's book Ice: The Nature, the History, and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance appeared, and I figured the market for books on ice was probably saturated. I started reading this book, but it was both sufficiently different from the book I wanted to write and more meandering; I did not get very far. All of this came to mind as I filled a glass with pieces of ice from the automatic icemaker in the refrigerator (there's another book: On refrigeration. This would be both a social and scientific book, but not as much about the physics or chemistry of refrigeration, but about the public-health aspects.). I enjoy drinking water from an iced glass: as the ice melts, the clear taste of the water refreshes me. This is one of my indulgences: the energy and expense of ice.... Read more
June 11, 2007
On The Road
A few months ago, I re-read parts of "On The Road", but didn't finish the whole novel -- I simply couldn't! the fuss over Kerouac did not move Cheryl Salem, a 44-year-old mother of two who grew up in the house where Kerouac was born and called in the ad for the apartment to the Lowell Sun. That Kerouac once lived there did not seem that big a selling point, said Salem, whose family has owned the property for two generations. "A lot of people don't know who he is," she explained, shrugging her shoulders. "People seem to care more about the washer-dryer hook up," added Salem ...... Read more
June 6, 2007
Iliad
Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies is using a robot in Venice to scan a thousands-year-old manuscript of Homer's Iliad: "As each page was photographed, the classics scholar on duty in the hallway outside the workroom would examine its image to make sure all the text was legible."... Read more
May 19, 2007
In which we see shadows of Mole People
A few years after reading Jennifer Toth's Mole People, watching the film Dark Days, and generally getting quite excited about the decaying, Gothic life in the rail tunnels of New York City, I read some commentary on the book's veracity. Joseph Brennan, a self-professed rail buff and "abandoned sites" aficionado, wrote a fact-based critique of Toth's topology and geopgrahy, finding fault at 'most every turn; similarly, popular myth-busting madman Cecil Adams gives us The Straight Dope on the book and its lack of reproducibility.... Read more
May 14, 2007
A Shropshire Lad
One of my very favourite volumes of poetry, both for its compact and practical attitudes and for this edition, which fits neatly in my pocket -- any pocket. Housman is best known for To An Athlete Dying Young, When I Was One and Twenty, and the beautiful advice of LXII, "Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff": And malt does more than Milton can To justify God’s ways to man. Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink This is by way of explanation for the pile of empty bottles and growlers lying at the kerb, and for my not having read anything else these past few days. UPDATE: The power of text search reminded me that I last read this collection just over a year ago, in concert with Stoppard's play The Invention of Love.... Read more
May 7, 2007
Elective Affinities
One of Goethe's more famous quotations comes from his novel(la) Elective Affinities, which I first read after a review of Tuffaut's Jules et Jim mentioned that that Jeanne Moreau's character symbolically read this book. None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.... Read more
April 9, 2007
Dance Dance Dance
Billed as the sequel to Murakami's "A Wild Sheep Chase", "Dance Dance Dance" follows the same, nameless, virtuous character through an exploration of mortality, individual responsibility, and contemporary Japan. As new buildings replace old overnight, and money buys almost anything, the protagonist meets character after character who have almost oracular presence in his life. He needs to interpret their messages and fit each into his life, while avoiding the supernatural world he discovered towards the end of A Wild Sheep Chase. The actors and their conversations are pensive, yet not plodding; the narrative is plot-, rather than character-driven. Murakami strikes an amazing balance between the eccentric characters and the haunting images that accomany their quotidian activities. I found that the conclusion arrived unexpectedly, and I needed to trace back to falling action, which was itself fraught with anxiety and the promise of more convolutions in the story. Dance Dance Dance is more frenetic than its predecessor, and also less beautiful; the plot is joyful and captivating, and makes the book a pleasure to read. It is a very different pleasure from A Wild Sheep Chase, however.... Read more
March 25, 2007
Hell
I picked up a paperback edition of Dorothy L. Sayers' translation, with notes, of Dante's Inferno. In her Introduction, Sayers laments that the book requires an introduction at all, or the notes necessary to acquaint the modern reader (this was just before the second Great War) with Dante's personal voyage, his literary allusions, and the politics of his time). I cannot make my way through Dante, even after reading a half-dozen editions in both English and Italian, without good notes. I always forget which Pope he is mocking, or which small-minded politicians he takes a jab at. I enjoy the rhythm and beauty of the poetry most when I am paying attention to the words as much as the larger meaning of the text, usually when reading in the original. Aside: The irony of purchasing books from Cody's, an independent book-seller, with my corporate bookstore (amazon, that is) credit-card, was not lost on me.... Read more
March 24, 2007
The Tintin Companion
While reading through the first two volumes in the lovingly-produced Hergé Archives, Tintin in The Soviet Union and Tintin in the Congo, I decided to read through The Tintin Companion. I found myself richly rewarded: I had never realised the extent to which Hergé's original black-and-white comics (dessins) and the subsequent colour publications in French reflected the political topics of their day. The politics remain, however, in The Blue Lotus, published for the first time in English following Hergé's death in 1983: the plot closely follows the Japanese exploits in Manchuria, and the occupation of Shanghai, and the subsequent dissolution of the League of Nations. Publishers requested Hergé to make his settings more anonymous: the made-up nation of Khemed, a substitute for Saudi Arabia complete with the dynastic ruler, Emir Ben Kalish Ezab. I have written before about what a tremendous influence the Tintin books are especially on my vocabulary and knowledge of places. Tintin in the Congo is available in colour in the original French, as well as several other European languages; as far as I know, the colour edition is not available in English. The black-and-white portfolios feature an excellent translation by the team of Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner, and almost exactly the same plot. Tintin in the Soviet Union, the first full adventure with our hero the reporter, shows quite clearly that the author had not found his voice: the plot is full of stereotypes, has Tintin constantly finding himself in impossible situations, and has crude ideas about other countries (Hergé had not, at this time, visited the Soviet Union). Similarly, the adventures in The Congo is full of racial and class stereotypes, some of which disappeared during the transition from black-and-white to colour; one cannot blame the author for working within the national and ethnic stereotypes of the day, nor can one laud him for paying attention to detail. The Tintin Companion shows the depths to which he eventually goes in obtaining excellent detail about the people, settings, and ideas for his subsequent books; even The Blue Lotus, which has some terrible language (mostly spoken by Americans!) about the native Shanghai population, shows more sensitivity towards character development.... Read more
February 18, 2007
Red Hook
Artie Cohen, the protagonist of "Red Hook", a piece of 21st century New York noir comes across as a latter-day successor to Rex Stout's hardboiled Archie Goodwin: a tough man of the street, knowledgeable about New York City in its infinite permutations. Artie, however, is sensitive and slightly nervous, less cock-sure. He screws up his loyalty, unevenly distributes his friendship, and anxiously calls in favors. Author Reggie Nadelson's other mystery stories are not consistently available in the States (the recent "Fresh Kills", for example, is something I will pick up from an airport bookstall sometime). I bought this book after reading the jacket copy, which includes an endorsement from Salman Rushdie. The title called to mind the rapidly-gentrifying warehouse area along Brooklyn's waterfront, and much of the action in the book takes place there, along the soon-to-be-redeveloped High Line, in the Meatpacking District, and at Hunt's Point. I have a delicious photo of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge somewhere, the bridge with a massive Evergreen container ship heading to the Bayonne docks perhaps.... Read more
January 29, 2007
Waiting For Godot / Krapp's Last Tape
Several texts by Samuel Beckett are available online, including Waiting for Godot (in Basque as well, which has a certain deliciousness to it) and Krapps Last Tape. I first read Krapp's Last Tape because of a class at Boston University -- I was sitting in on an English seminar, considering the school, expecting great things. Wow! The teacher screened a grainy, black-and-white print of "Eh, Joe?" and after that I tried reading everything Beckett.... Read more
January 24, 2007
In which we see the places
Google Books now offers summary pages with books and maps extracted automatically: Around the World on A Bicycle, Just Keep Pedaling: A Corner-to-corner Bike Ride Across America, " title="Offsite: Google Books">French Revolutions: Cycling the Tour de France, Miles from Nowhere: A Round the World Bicycle Adventure.... Read more
January 17, 2007
Uncommon Carriers
The prolific John McPhee has collected his essays on transport into a nice volume, Uncommon Carriers. He is at his best writing about his time spent as "part-owner" of a shining eighteen-wheel hazmat tractor-and-trailer combination, and the story of his rides with Don Ainsworth form bookends to his adventures behind towboats, ocean-going vessels, and a dory.... Read more
January 14, 2007
Ripley Under Water
Perhaps the most chilling of Highsmith's Ripley novels, "Ripley Under Water" features an antagonist who is as unscrupulous and amoral as Tome Ripley himself, but has only the most mysterious of reasons for his harassment of the novel's charismatic and vulnerable protagonist. Highsmith's writing is precise, descriptive, and gracefully plotted; this is also the first edition that properly adds the accent and diaresis to Mme Ripley's name, Héloïse. Curiously, though, this edition uses "trimmers" rather than "secateurs", a word I learned in the creepy"The Boy Who Followed Ripley".... Read more
January 11, 2007
The Snail-Watcher and other stories
I was delighted to find a copy of this anthology of Patricia Highsmith's short stories, collecting stories on a theme from 1945 to 1970. I have been looking for one of these, "The Quest for 'Blank Claveringi'", for some time, since reading it in another anthology (along what theme, I cannot recall; it may have been a science-fiction or horror book or magazine) when I was quite young. The story made a huge impression on me, for the economy of its language (although in re-reading it this morning, I needed to consult a dictionary for nacreous and crepitation) and for the inventiveness of its plot. Most of these stories do not appear in either of the two recent paperback anthologies.... Read more
January 10, 2007
Ripley Under Ground
I am continuing a rapid reading of Patricia Highsmith's terrifying and beautiful Ripley books, about a disturbingly amoral protagonist. "Ripley Under Ground" picks up the narrative some years after "The Talented Mr Ripley" left off, and Tom Ripley has married a pretty French woman, settled in the country outside of Paris, and runs a clever forgery scheme based in London. Although Ripley's actions are often selfish, motivated through greed or through a plain desire for self-advancement, he is compelling and even likeable (as his first victims discovered): he has social graces and faults, can be enchanting in company and awkward, and does not appear outwardly psychopathic. Different from the cultivated yet bizarre personality of Hannibal Lecter, Ripley is in no way a social misfit, and this makes his crimes, especially the murders, all the more mystifying. Highsmith's narrative has beautifully-constructed sentences, a broad and comfortable vocabulary -- she mixes French, German, and Italian conversation in a pleasant and non-pretentious way, to add flavour to the dialogues.... Read more
January 6, 2007
One Good Turn
One Good Turn, Witold Rybczynski's latest essay, describes the quiet and beautiful history of the screwdriver. Perhaps it is Rybczynski's writing itself that is quiet and beautiful: he uses lucid, descriptive phrases to draw out the historical and social elements of the screw itself, and supposes the existence of the machine necessary to work it. Historical evidence, in writing and in archaeology, proves surprisingly scarce for the device, and no reliable mention appears until a few hundred years ago. Rybczynski is one of my favourite writers: he chooses his subjects carefully and writes extremely well. His vocabulary and sentence-formation are superlative.... Read more
December 20, 2006
Our band could be your life
God bless YouTube. I found dozens of short pieces of Minutemen concert footage, including a seafaring concert, "Joy at Sea", in gorgeous sepia-toned grainy video; the video for "This Ain't No Picnic" (with the antagonist airplane pilot, Mr Ronald Reagan!); and some amped-up concert footage. The site has a slightly confusing but very pretty acoustic version of "Corona" -- confusing because of the Mike Watt spiel at the beginning and subtitles in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. Plus seeing George Hurley sitting in front og a pair of bongo drums on the floor is kinda unsettling. (I first saw him play on my twenty-first birthday, at Lounge Ax; he was part of the Red Krayola touring ensemble. No stranger than Mike Watt picking up bass and hitting the road to Iceland with The Stooges.) Joy at Sea was a concert-on-a-boat based from San Pedro (but of course!) on June 15th, 1984. Our Band Could Be Your Life is a book by Michael Azerrad about the American punk-rock scene, and takes its name from the Minutemen song "History Lesson Pt. II". I made a small update to punkrock dot virji dot net (old page here) and will take advantage of the ample bandwidth that YouTube has. Tomorrow is Mike Watt's forty-ninth birthday (Happy Birthday!). Rumour has him talking with Greg Ginn about a reissue of the original, forty-five track "Double Nickels on the Dime", including all three covers and all four "car jam" bits. Oh, and "Little Man With a Gun in His Hand." That would be all sorts of swell.... Read more
December 15, 2006
Nature Girl
Carl Hiaasen's latest takes the reader through a romp in the Everglades with a dysfunctional cast of characters: a conflicted half-Seminole, half-Irish runaway with a propensity for inadvertent kidnapping; an odiferous, lecherous fishmonger with a disfigured hand, the result of a botched plastic surgery, itself the result of a vengeful attack; a drug-running vice-mayor, on a quest to protect his trippily unstable ex-wife from the fishmonger's affections; the ex-wife herself, the novel's protagonist, Honey; and the half-witted unwitting couple she has snared in order to teach a lesson in manners, all brought about as the result of an unwelcome telemarketing call that interrupted her dinner. Into this tableau wander a private eye seeking triple-X-rated evidence of infidelity on behalf of the telemarker's pizza-heiress wife; a rambunctionous co-ed who wants to stick it to her family; and Honey's twelve-year-old son, wise beyond his years. The plot is at times painfully contrived, at times delightfully hilarious; the book has engaging characters, honed by years of Hiaasen's reporting for the Miami Herald. Next to Pittsburgh, Florida has the weirdest collection of criminal misfits and nutcases in North America. Hiaasen's writing is as giddy and easy-on-the-eyes as Elmore Leonard's or Damon Runyon's, and inhabits much the same world of happy-go-lucky misfits and haphazard criminals. Without pretenses to literary excellent, Hiaasen achieves in his writing what almost every November novelist sets out to: a memorable read.... Read more
December 12, 2006
The Importance of Being Earnest
I read one of my favourite plays on a round-trip bus ride to work: The Importance of Being Earnest is at turns hilarious and provocative, and is at all times very silly. Point the first: I wonder if Michael Bond took the creation story for Paddington from Oscar Wilde's class satire? Point the second: I always have to look up the pronounciation of chasuble when reading Act II.... Read more
November 18, 2006
The Three Investigators
One of the more enjoyable series of books I read was The Three Investigators series, which followed a formula familiar to readers of The Bobbsey Twins, The Hardy Boys, McGurk, et c. Unlike these other series, the Three Investigators lived and breathed 1950s Los Angeles, and so the narratives consist of thrilling chases down LA freeways (to San Pedro piers, no less!), adventures in the old, unused subway tunnels around the city, and many realistic locations. The flavour of old Hollywood appears in the character of Alfred Hitchcock, the gutsy trio's sponsor. At times improbable -- the unlimited use of a gold-plated Rolls and chaffeur, appropriately British? -- and raw, such as the difficulties faced with double de-clutching when hi-jacking a bus in order to stop a bank robbery. The use of real locations and realistic plots (well, mostly realistic) combined with the everyday travails faced by working-class boys appealed to me, and I still enjoy the books today.... Read more
November 13, 2006
Building Big and Rome Antics
I read through two recent books by David Macaulay, the eminent and whimsical author of books about -- well, mostly about engineering topics, but he sneaks in the odd bit of drama (or humour!), sometimes in his text, sometimes in his comfortably loose line drawings. Rome Antics and Building Big both demonstrate Macaulay's wry humour and keen grasp of the details in the big -- very big! -- picture. He tackles the massive pieces of manufactured infrastructure that we have added to the natural world: bridges, dams, tunnels, and skyscrapers, paying special attention to the planning and construction details. This becomes even more interesting when he explores ancient bridges and tunnels, as he unravels the story of their construction. His narrative, both in words and in pictures, engages the eye and the mind. Although I chuckled at the description of the several tunnels which make up The Chunnel (Northbound: Croissants. Soutbound: Crumpets.), he included pertinent yet out-of-the-way details that add depth and colour to the story of construction. Rome Antics follows a pigeon as it carries a timeless message through modern Rome. The pigeon perspective is charming, and the spare use of colour adds a remarkable piece of drama to the story.... Read more
November 12, 2006
Uncommon Grounds
I have read several books, fiction and non-, about coffee, and Mark Prendergast's Uncommon Grounds is not only the lengthiest, it is undoubedly the dullest. Clocking in at around six million pages and zero fact checkers (his chronology and vocabulary are especially error-prone), I do not think I am going to finish the book. I read the first 120 agonizing pages, and then skipped around to check out pieces that especially interested me, such as the genesis of Peet's and of Starbucks.... Read more
November 10, 2006
Thunderstruck
Thunderstruck has the hallmark parallel stories of Larson's tremendously good "The Devil in the White City", about the Chicago Exposition and the cruel murderer H H Holmes, in its interleaving of the advent of wireless radio and the murderer H H Crippen. The foreshadowing becomes a little heavy-handed in this book, and this detracts slightly from the amazing detail. The story of Marconi -- did you know that he won the 1909 Nobel Prize for Physics? -- and his obsession with the wireless radio, which matched his detachment from his family -- is fascinating, and dovetails neatly with the emotional decline of "Dr" H H Crippen and his eventual capture via wireless. The capture itself entailed a daring guess at Crippen's escape route and means, a cross-Atlantic chase, and a triumphant success for Scotland Yard. Thunderstruck is not as compelling a book as was The Devil in the White City, but it is a damn good yarn.... Read more
October 23, 2006
office
While reading the delightful exploits of working-class sleuth Montague Egg in Hangman's Holiday, I came across an unexpcted usage of the word office: "We had the office he was expected this way," spoken by a police-sergeant describing how they suspected that one of the men in the bar-parlour of an inn was a criminal. This usage may be the same as illustrated in the Cardshark online definition of office in their Gambling Glossary: "A secret signal passed from a gambler to his confederate".... Read more
October 12, 2006
Let's Learn Maori
A recent edition of Bruce Biggs's (apparently well-known and classic) text on learning the Maori language has some revealing sentences. To describe the conditional tense, the book proposes: "Whenever the Queen comes to New Zealand, the Maori people suffer a disaster." And to illustrate the concept of ownership: "Please restrain your octopus. The fishermen are coming soon." Te Taurawhiri i te Reo Māori, the official New Zealand site on the Maori language, has an interesting Flash-based interface.... Read more
October 10, 2006
The Basque History of the World
Against my intuition, I ordered a copy of Mark Kurlansky's Basque History of the World and started reading it. Kurlansky's research, experience, and writing all shine in this history: he interleaves the contentious political and nationalist struggles of the Basque with well-researched, concisely-written pieces about Basque culture -- the typical beret, the recently-formalized yet still-isolated language -- and in doing so, underscores the unique cultural and political contributions of the Basque people. I was very happy to find that Google Earth has excellent satellite imagery and map coverage of Basque country, and the online version includes the beautiful subway stations!... Read more
October 9, 2006
ENIAC
Scott McCartney's ultimately disappointing book ENIAC, "The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer", meanders through the lengthy ENIAC, a computer designed to facilitate the production of trajectory books for the United States Army. McCartney briefly describes the history of computers, including Babbage's Difference Engine, before he delves into the convoluted intellectual and business history of the computer itself. He staunchly defends the two maverick engineers, John Mauchly and Pres Eckert, who led the ENIAC team at the University of Pennsylvania, and casts their efforts in a happily sentimental light. I was more interested in the technical aspects of ENIAC: of the concept of stored programs; of magnetic tape for storing data; the use of which Eckert pioneered; and of the parallel-processing units. These receive some attention, but light detail, in McCartney's book. The book also ends very unhappily, as did the lives of the two protagonists. Neither succeeded in business, and together they filed and lost the patent on the first computer. Each lost a wife under tragic circumstances -- indeed, Mauchly's wife died during a midnight bathe off New Jersey, and this mysterious incident led to the U S Army denying Mauchly the security clearance necessary for his computer company to obtain vital government contracts. But the story I wanted to read was not in this book: this was much more of a human-interest story than anything else.... Read more
The Westing Game
One of my very favourite books, a delightful puzzle by Ellen Raskin, is The Westing Game. A few years ago, while poring through the stacks at a second-hand bookshop in Fairfax or thereabouts, I found an autographed first edition of the book, and picked it up to re-read it. It's a complex, thrilling book, which picks up the pace and then pauses to let juicy details emerge, and then speeds up again. The writing is rich but never too complex, and has all the non-politically-correct sorts of details that could never appear in a so-called children's book today. The Wikipedia entry on Ellen Raskin has some great pointers to other internet resources; the entry for the book itself has most of the plot detail, but is useful after-the-fact. The University of Wisconsin has a few manuscript pages online.... Read more
October 7, 2006
Cod
When I first read Mark Kurlansky's Cod, a "biography of the fish that changed the world", I did not enjoy the book. His writing jarred me. Despite the great idea, of framing historical events such as the discovery of America and the American Revolution, in the context of our relations with cod, his run-on sentences and peculiar transitions wore on my nerves. I am enjoying the book more on this second reading, but still find Kurlansky's writing amateurish, inelegant. He has an excellent theme, and innovatively organises the book not strictly around a historical timeline, but also around cultural phases concerning the cod. He examines the discovery of North America from the fisherman's perspective, and how trade routes through the Bay of Biscay, the Irish Box, the North Sea, and ultimately to the Newfoundland and Maine seaboard. Kurlansky intersperses recipes, anecdotes, and songs about the fish: ugly though it may be, its flaky white flesh has inspired much in the way of food and even some Catalonian creation myth. When I was but a wee lad, I saw autumn come in to Pittsburgh as the leaves in the parks nearby turned colour, as the wind picked up and blew the falling leaves in bright swirls, and as the Italian grocers in the Strip District unloaded wooden boxes of what looked like ... wood. Turns out that the stiff, pine-coloured contents of the crates were bacalao, the peculiar dried, salted cod known and loved throughout the Mediterranean. After several days of soaking in a tub, the fish would be ready for cooking. Or one could leave it dry and chip bits of it into a dish for flavour. Or one could use it to settle an argument, and hit an opponent upside the head.... Read more
October 5, 2006
Three Men in a Boat
I finally read Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat, often described as a classic. The book gracefully unrolls the story of a boating-trip down the Thames, with its attendant comic misadventure. The first sentence sets the dry tone for the book: "There were four of us ...", because the boat holds the three men -- and Montmorency the dog. A grade-school friend gave me his copy of this many, many years ago -- maybe twenty! -- but it still sits on the shelf. I picked up a paperback reprint while travelling, and found that the book's narrative neatly suits the reading of a few pages while on a train or while waiting for a flight. P G Wodehouse pays homage to Jerome in Psmith in the City, setting an exciting political meeting to the scandalous retelling of an incident from Three Men in a Boat.... Read more
September 18, 2006
Laughing Gas and A Gentleman of Leisure
I had ordered a copy of the newest hardback reprint of A Gentleman of Leisure, ostensibly to replace the paperback I bought at Grand Central many, many years ago -- on my first (or second?) visit through New York City. It may well have been the first time I read Wodehouse on my own: my parents avidly read his novels, and took Jeeves and Blandings books on family trips, from which they sometimes read aloud, but I had not read any of his books in high school. I preferred Kerouac and Burroughs and Artaud. Laughing Gas I just picked up at a rummage sale in Howth. A Gentleman of Leisure and Laughing Gas are both hilarious, and both are set in Wodehouse's adoptive United States. The action in Laughing Gas is almost entirely in Hollywood, which forms the slapstick backdrop for this novel and also for Evelyn Waugh's deliciously funny "The Loved One": Hollwood in the '30s was so chock-a-block with expatriates, it seems, that you could hardly swing a cat without beaning a half-dozen monocled, bowler-hatted gentlemen. A Gentleman of Leisure has a sublime plot, although it superficially resembles many of Wodehouse's comic romances. Our protagonist seeks to win the hand of a woman he has only seen across the rail between first- and second-class accomodations in trans-Atlantic passage, and also to settle a dilettante bet about his capability for larceny.... Read more
September 7, 2006
Cabinet of Medical Curiosities
I read Jan Bondeson's outstanding history of science book, Cabinet of Medical Curiosities: this title became a bestseller for Cornell University Press. Dr Bondeson has choice phrases that draw in the reader, such as "the Jesuits had always been enthusiastic gigantologists" in a discussion of the proportions of antedeluvian Man (was Og a 300-cubit behemoth who strode behind Noah's Ark?), as well as a stunning collection of prints and drawings to illustrate his discussion of rabbit-breeding women, toad-vomiting prelate's sons, snake- and lice-infested royal personages, and, of course, children with tails. Bondeson's writing is engaging, and his historical breadth is impressive: he collates south-east Asian tellings of stories very similar to the familiar Scandinavian, English, and Gaulish tales; he provides ample, but never overwhelming, evidence of the medical and physiological bases for the various phenomena; and he has a strong sense of fun. He enjoyed writing this book, and I really enjoyed reading it.... Read more
September 1, 2006
The Cuckoo's Egg
Clifford Stoll wrote this tense and thrilling account of how he tracked a hacker from his Berkeley UNIX system. This was one of the first episodes of computer forensics, and has become perhaps the most famous. An astronomer, Stoll had the role of sysadmin thrust upon him, and found himself tangled in an international mess. His book includes some tantalizing technical details showing how assumptions in UNIX made for easy hacking. Stoll now sells Klein bottles and continues work with computers and telescopes. The Electronic Frontier Foundation maintains an online copy of his Stalking the Wily Hacker, the ACM article in which he first published the forensic techniques.... Read more
August 25, 2006
My Dark Places
James Ellroy's superb confessional work dances around every other piece of autobiography I have read. Ellroy's staccato style, reminiscent of a telegraph minus the STOPs, lays bare his ugly emotions, his raw desire, and his rich ascent to society after the gruesome murder of his mother. Ellroy digs deeply into his unravelling mind as he examines the circumstances of her death. He looks hard at the Los Angeles (and area) Sheriff's Department; at the LAPD; at the local law enforcement; he digs into his father's unruly life; and finally he spends more than a year working intimately with a former cop to re-open the investigation into the killing. Many of the details are lurid examples of Los Angeles noir: the Black Dahlia killing; the Bloody Christmas episode; and the infamous cocaine-deal murders surrounding "The Cotton Club"; Ellroy digs up myriad other incidents, and sprinkles them liberally through his narrative. The narrative: imagine William S. Burroughs amounts of physical and mental cruelty in the story, but with a much greater grasp on the narrative flow. The development that Ellroy shows in his characters as the story progresses amazes me: he has a phenomenal understanding of the characters, and of the world of Los Angeles crime.... Read more
August 22, 2006
The Golden Spruce / albedo
John Vaillant's first long work of non-fiction, The Golden Spruce, tells the riveting story of Grant Hadwin, a renegade logger; the sad tale of the Haida and the Haida Gwaii, the Americans native to a gorgeous set of remote islands in the Pacific Northwest; and the epic of the majestic, luminous, and biologically unique golden spruce. A fantastic set of circumstances produced the Golden Spruce, and an equally interesting set produced the man who swam across a freezing river, chainsaw on his back, to cut it down. We could not see the forest for the trees, he said: allowing lumber companies to clear-cut old-growth forest while leaving token, unique trees like the Golden Spruce was a hypocrisy. Why fetishize a single tree? We should preserve the entire forest, and not small stands: the massive ecosystem of a forest requires massive land. Curiously, Hadwin the assassin might not have realised the strong connection the Haida have with the tree, which they believe to contain the incarnation of a boy who, fleeing his moribund village, looked back despite his grandfather's warning. The tree was itself several hundred years old, and a biologically admirable specimen. From Vaillant's book I learned the word albedo, "The fraction of incident electromagnetic radiation reflected by a surface, especially of a celestial body." (Alternatively, it's "the spongy white substance on the inside of a citrus rind" -- perfect! I can drop that in conversation quite nicely.) Vaillant describes the proud history of the Haida, their ties to the land, and the recent revitalization of Haida Gwaii, their native islands (also known as the Queen Charlotte Islands). He discusses the social, environmental, and psychological factors that shaped Grant Hadwin, a rugged individualist who claimed to have cut down the tree -- and then subsequently disappeared. The story gripped me from the first I heard about it, almost a decade following the incident.... Read more