June 15, 2009
Motel Art Improvement Service
The final instalment of the intrepid Bee-Jin's second adventure, "Motel Art Improvement Service" appeared today. I enjoyed the occasional appearance of this comic, which began over four years ago, and read it compulsively. I already await her next appearance ... and wonder whether this adventure will join "Shutterbug Follies" in hardcover.... Read more
January 13, 2009
Borges y yo
I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the roots of words, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Stevenson. Labyrinths is also available online, in English, in a search-able edition. The story Borges and I begins on page 298: Labrynth, Collection of Short Stories Louis Borges... Read more
December 12, 2008
In which I see by my outfit
You have broken faith with the eight million gods of Shinto ... The footless dead will come to you when the grasses sleep and bitch in your ear.... Read more
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
August 19, 2006
Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Marisha Pessl's first novel, helpfully provided with illustrations that underscore the preopossessing mystery surrounding the characters, has echoes of pretension similar to Umberto Eco's fantabulous Foucault's Pendulum, but resonates more closely to Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep. Undoubtedly the product of a fervent, well-read pen with ample verve and imagination, the book, like its protagonist, sits uncomfortably in its own smartness, reminiscent also of Donna Tartt's first novel. Blue van Meer, the protagonist, competes obsessively with her handsome, widowed father in poetry-quoting, pronouncement-making, and other car-tripping episodes as they move from one small third-rate university town to another. A radical professor and writer, her father keeps her at arm's length as they settle in western North Carolina for the majority of the story's action ('action' is exactly the wrong word, for as much of the story happens in Blue's parenthetical citations as in the narrative itself. The text has only three foot-notes, but also several 'Visual Aids', much like the figures of our textbooks). Blue settles in to a cunningly-named clique of elite students at an exclusive prep school, the first at which she has ever spent an entire year. The book has a few, jarring homophone typos: "stationary" for "stationery", "illicit" for "elicit"; and an irritating use of nouns as verbs: "ivied", "jack-o-lanterned", as though Pessl were too lazy to spin our her similies in full phrases. As the events of the narrative lead to the tragedy described on the first page, the death of the clique's adult member, the reader senses the unease which comes from standard family and school troubles, the unease of adolescence. But suddenly Blue finds herself in command, and living up to the promise of epic adventure that she spelled out, again on the first page of the book. Pessl's plot and prose are meticulous, and perhaps even under-achieving.... Read more
August 16, 2006
The Memory-Keeper's Daughter
Kim Edwards has written an eminently readable novel about the very ordinary strife of a family: The Memory Keeper's Daughter">The Memory Keeper's Daughter. A family slowly unravels after the birth of twins, their only children, one of whom the father hides from the mother: the child had Down's Syndrome, and the father feared that it would not be part of the picture-perfect family life he envisioned. He had this image of a Norman Rockwell small-town existence after moving away from his dirt-poor West Virginia family and eventually becoming a successful, educated member of his community in Kentucky. His family was itself ruptured by the death of his sister, who also had a terminal congenital disease. The characters in this book are plain, even as they dissemble and act covertly. They grow gradually, and we can see the shadows cross their hearts well in advance. Still, Edwards's lucid writing makes each of the characters sad, at times blameless: the reader can see their motives, alternatively selfish and selfless, and understand why they act as they do, even if we do not condone the actions. Part of the novel is set in Pittsburgh, and features the magnificent view from the Fort Pitt Bridge (why don't I have a picture like that?!?!). And it features quiet Regent Square. Uncomplicated by heavy metaphor (beestings aside!), but with rather more foreshadowing than I found comfortable, this book entertained me. The difficult decisions that the characters made are the sort that we might each face as we grow, and right or wrong can be very tricky to gauge. And the decision that is wrong now might well be right five years in the future.... Read more
July 30, 2006
Word Freaks and patzer
patzer, a bungler, and specifically an amateurish chess player. I learned the word in reading Stefan Fastis book on competitive Scrabble™ play, Word Freak (note the tactful singular in the title; I first read it as a derogatory plural), which has several dozen words I had never before encountered, and probably never will again, with the exception of patzer. Scrabble™ vocabulary is not conversational, but is tactical: use words to maximize point value, but not to show off vocabulary. For this reason the World Championships attract many players who do not speak English fluently, who acquired it as a second, or third, or fourth, language, and who may not be able to define many of the words they play on the board. At times confusing, other times almost confessional, the book is ultimately a let-down. I enjoyed reading about strategy in the game, but found the author's three-year odyssey through the anxiety-inducing world of competitive game-playing almost patronizing. He tells a good story, and he tells it well, but he undoubtedly takes the perspective that people have to be weird, or unusual, to play this game with this intensity -- and here he goes, crossing over, and feeling himself becoming less socially adept, mawkish, and inept. A widely-read and impressively-travelled correspondent sent this to me last year, but I only uncovered it while excavating books a few days ago. I am going to send it on to my peripatetic Scrabble™-playing sister, who has devised an excellent variation of the game well-suited for pub play. It's sort of like the Anagrams game described in Fastis' book: using tiles from one Scrabble™ set, players draw seven and begin forming words on the table. The words may intersect with other players' words; as soon as a player has used a tile, draw enough to continue with seven. Turns do not exist: play is fast and furious. First person to finish and not be able to draw additional tiles wins. Insert ale as necessary.... Read more
July 22, 2006
Phaidon Design Classics
I finally got my paws on the "special edition" of the Phaidon Design Classics ,a href="http://www.phaidon.com/designclassics/" title="Offsite: Phaidon Design Classics">three-volume compendium of industrial and product design. Incredibly, indelibly, unbeliveably ironic that a book on design comes in such a backwards, poorly-design case. The designer Konstantin Gricic is to blame for this: "The collection comes in a specifically commissioned carrying unit exclusively designed by Konstantin Gricic." Apparently one needs to destroy the case in order to read the books! On the way home, I used the plastic handle to carry the books by the carrier, rather than support them from beneath. The carrier completely fell apart: the plastic dowels holding the top and bottom separated from the base, and the books almost fell out. Surprisingly and embarassingly poor product design. Damned thing is not even recyclable.... Read more
July 17, 2006
A Civil Action
Jonathan Harr's riveting narrative of a massive litigation case pits the small town of Woburn, MA against the Evil Conglomerates of Beatrice and W. R. Grace; the flamboyant and obsessive lawyer who eventually steers the case to the court holds our attention as much as does the medical trauma underlying the suit. Harr was an insider for the duration of the trial, and party to the litigator's various faults and problems. The story has an unsettling sense of failure hanging over it, but one cannot easily say whether the failure belongs to the families who refuse to move away from the toxic waste, the companies who have knowingly or ignorantly dumped the waste, or to the litigator himself. Perhaps each party has some degree of failure. This story is as exciting as any John Grisham novel, and has a plot with elements familiar from each of those books.... Read more
June 24, 2006
The Man Who Ate Everything
Jeffrey Steingarten's The Man Who Ate Everything, a collection of his essays on food (which have won him accolades and prizes, and prompted me to wish that I too were a food(ie) writer) is thought-provoking and workmanlike. His prose does not suffer from elegance, but has an abundance of fact as well as attitude. The combination may in party be due his audience: he is the food writer for Vogue magazine. Several of his pieces on potatoes and frying made me think a lot (a lot more, I suppose) about frites, French fries, et al., and how I wish I had taken a photograph of the Sausmeester place in Amsterdam, because, gee, I take photographs of damn near everything anyway. I cannot wait until Deep Friday at work, when we are going to sizzle everything in sight. I eat everything (kind of). I draw the line at many packaged foods, especially those containing preservatives, artificial sweeteners, and similar branches of all evil (evil is so deracinated these days!). I think of prepared ketchup, mayonnaise, and mustard -- perfunctory condiments, I suppose -- as the items I will not eat. I think that the one time I blanched at a dish for what it was rather than the quality of the ingredients was the afternoon I discovered that andouille is French for "tripe", not for "spicy Cajun-style sausage". More recently, I was unmoved by the ginkgos in a dish at the Slanted Door last week, and pushed them to the side of the plate. Although I have strong sentimental (and negative) associations with the ginkgo and its malodorous fruit, which mashed under my steps along my parent's street, I had never eaten the fruit before. I do eat almost all of the leftovers from our 'fridge at home, and have never been sick from it. Almost never.... Read more
June 10, 2006
Underworld: Sites of Concealment
The photo book Underworld: Sites of Concealment disappointed me: I was expecting more of the mystery of antiquity. I had not realised that this (shrink-wrapped!) book was the catalogue from an exhibition organised by the Office of Science and Art in Frankfurt. The photographs focus exclusively on German basements, dungeons, cellars, pits, and bunkers; too many of the photographs are of military equipment. I wanted more of the fabulous Roman cisterns, like what we saw (and dined in: the Sarn?ç Restaurant) in Istanbul:... Read more
June 4, 2006
Schizo Nr. 4
I was pretty damn happy to find new comic books of the "morally inexcusable" cartoons by Ivan Brunetti at the recently relocated Al's Comics on Market St. I bought a nice-smelling copy of Schizo Nr. 4, resplendent in its beautiful large format. I was looking for "Shutterbug Follies" from beecomix, but finding Ivan Brunetti instead made me quite happy.... Read more
June 2, 2006
Tintin in Tibet
The Dalai Lama will honor Tintin with an award. Tintin is a comic-book character, created by Hergé. One of my earliest memories is of the Thompson twins ("Thomson and Thompson. No, without a p, as in Venezuela. Yes, with a p, as in psychology.") falling down the stairs, probably from "The Secret of The Unicorn" which my mother read to me on a road-trip across the western United States. From these books I developed a keen appreciation of colourful profanity -- I knew coelocanth as a derogatory epithet a long time before I found out it was a long-vanished fish; similarly for carpetbagger, ungulate, troglodyte, and so many more (not only in English, either!). Much of my geography (but not, I hope, cultural knowledge) came from Tintin's travels: to America, India, the Congo; to Shanghai, to Scotland, through Switzerland. In fact, some years ago I arrived on a train in Geneva to see a huge reproduction of Tintin's adventures in that same train station (in "The Calculus Affair"). The many and wonderful translations, not the least of which are Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner's beautiful rendering into English, have become a fixture of my bookshelf. A few weeks ago I put some books on the counter of a bookstore in Amsterdam. The clerk looked at me as she came to the Tintin book, and said: "It's in Dutch. Is that okay?" and I told her how I like to pick up a Tintin in each country, in each language, and she smiled and said she would start doing that for her nephew, who also loves the books. In a case of life imitating art, this award echoes the respect paid Tintin in his adventure "Tintin in Tibet". In that story, Tintin follows his intuition across Asia to rescue his old friend Chang. He gains the respect of a secluded monastery for his devotion and sincerity.... Read more
May 28, 2006
Naked Lunch
I read the "restored text" of William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, including the famous "Desposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness" that outlines the junky Algebra of Need. This formula, concise and cogent argument remains a powerful element of drug-control politics to this day. Junk is the ideal product ... the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy.... The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. ... 1 - Never give anything away for nothing. 2 - Never give more than you have to give (always catch the buyer hungry and always make him wait). 3 - Always take everything back if you possibly can The narratives of the book, its hallucinatory politics, surreal zoölogy, and painful degradation of character, all fascinate me, but I found myself ill-suited to the fractured "cut-up" writing style that Burroughs pioneered in this book. One of the many deleterious side-effects of reading Naked Lunch is the painful, burning, itchy sensation of Steely Dan. How the hell could a) anyone like this music; b) anyone care enough about this pseudo-jazz rubbish to consistently reproduce it; and c) further devalue the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame by inducting these poseurs? On the other hand, the many interpretations of Burroughs' work, in the David Cronenberg film, various songs by Joy Division and by the Disposable Heroes of Hiphocrisy, "Drugstore Cowboy", and Lou Reed's lyrics for the Velvet Underground all ran through my mind while reading this story. These are testament to the power of the story that William S. created in "Naked Lunch".... Read more
May 27, 2006
Five Go To Demon's Rocks
I read some of Enid Blyton">Enid Blyton's bucolic and context-free stories about young English lads and lasses getting into scrapes over their holidays: Five Go To Demon's Rocks. Famously lampooned as idealistic, bland, and lacking any character-driven plot, the stories remain the best-selling children's books in the UK. They age well, perhaps because they have almost no setting other than the idealised British countryside.... Read more
May 21, 2006
Istanbul: Memories of a City
Orhan Pamuk's "Istanbul", sub-titled "Memories of a City", is wistful and poignant, but manages to be a memoir nor an autobiography. His stories meander, and characters occur and recur, but do not connect in meaningful ways. Some of the problems with this book due to the translator and editor: appositives start with a parenthesis and end with a comma or semi-colon; or the text introduces a Turkish word but does not define it, or even place it in a meaningful initial context. I was looking forward to insight to a period in which Istanbul underwent great political and social change, both progressive and regressive: Pamuk leads us through some of this change from the limited first-person point of view, and does not always add the historical perspective necessary to fill out the details that the narrator missed. Some of the personal anecdotes come so close to presenting the upper-middle-class viewpoint for the changes in Turkey, but the promise is not always realised. I visited Istanbul a few weeks ago. Some of my memories of the city: a boy pulling fish out of the Golden Horn; the tulips between the Haghia Sophia and Sultanahment (or "Blue") Mosques; the view of the Black Sea from a sixteenth-century fortress; and the 1€ fish sandwiches, dressed with a little oil and just off the grill just off the boat just out of the water.... Read more
April 29, 2006
A Pelican At Blandings / Heavy Weather
More Wodehouse. The latest paperback editions of his books features an amazing and unfamiliar young Pelham Grenville, clad in plus-fours and standing on a Aubusson before a rigourously British mantle. A what-not and a deep armchair also figure into the picture. These are amongst the few paperbacks I own that are quite literally falling apart. The others are Dorothy L. Sayers' mystery-novels, and Rex Stout's stories about Tecumseh Fox and Nero Wolfe.... Read more
April 20, 2006
Waiting for the Weekend
After returning from a too-short holiday, I read Witold Rybcynski's essay on the evolution of the five-two split week, Waiting for the Weekend. Rybcynski, now a professor at Wharton, addresses the need for separation of leisure and professional pursuits, but does not delve into why some cultures work to the point where leisure is necessary. Needing balance between the strains of careerism and the pleasures of family has become more precarious, it seems, in our moyen âge. Rybcynski is a sensitive and perceptive cultural historian, and an outstanding essayist. He has also written recently about the notion of place, both in his book Homeand in works on urban renewal. Especially after a colleague and I chewed the fat about the American attitude of compressing leisure into the weekend, rather than taking (and enjoying!) extended holidays -- two or three weeks, or the four- to six-week holidays prevalent in post-war France and Germany, Rybcynski's book impresses me with its précis of economic and social changes that led to the week that we know and love. Although the initial changes were probably brought about through adherence to religious doctrine, more recent developments in the workweek come from economic pressures. The weekend as we formally known it accompanied the industrial revolution. At the beginning of 2006, Madrid repealed the government worker's siesta privilege, partly in reaction to changing economic pressures (read: homogenization of Western workplace culture?). A good study of the development of the Western calendar is David Ewing Duncan's book Calendar (gloriously sub-titled: Humanity's Epic Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year).... Read more
April 19, 2006
The Professor and the Madman
After reading the first few disappointing pages of Stephen Ambrose's Nothing Like it in The World, I returned to the lucid and elegant prose of Simon Winchester and The Professor and the Madman, which I first read when it was published in late '98 or early '99. Taken with the excellent The Meaning of Everything, this forms the poignant half of Winchester's narrative of the human efforts in the production of the Oxford English Dictionary.... Read more
April 4, 2006
Two Years Before The Mast
After an interval of seven or eight years, I picked up Richard Henry Dana's workmanlike de-romanticisation of seafaring life in the mid-nineteenth century. Two Years Before the Mast has many thrilling passages, and much exciting nautical jargon: trowsers included, but mostly the names of the various sails, pieces of rigging, and bits o' ship: ges-warps; the efficient roband for "rope-band"; the ubiquitous oakum, and the unwelcome task of "picking" it; binnacle; studding-sails; usw. His description of the California coast and Santa Barbara is beautiful. Jan. 14th, 1835, we came to anchor in the spacious bay of Santa Barbara, after a voyage of one hundred and fifty days from Boston. ... In the middle of this crescent, directly opposite the anchoring ground, lie the mission and town of Santa Barbara, on a low, flat plain, but little above the level of the sea, covered with grass, though entirely without trees, and surrounded on three sides by an amphitheatre of mountains, which slant off to the distance of fifteen or twenty miles. The mission stands a little back of the town, and is a large building, or rather collection of buildings, in the center of which is a high tower, with a belfry of five bells; and the whole, being plastered, makes quite a show at a distance, and is the mark by which vessels come to anchor. The town lies a little nearer to the beach—about half a mile from it—and is composed of one-story houses built of brown clay—some of them plastered—with red tiles on the roofs. I should judge that there were about an hundred of them; and in the midst of them stands the Presidio, or fort, built of the same materials, and apparently but little stronger. The town is certainly finely situated, with a bay in front, and an amphitheatre of hills behind. The only thing which diminishes its beauty is, that the hills have no large trees upon them, they having been all burnt by a great fire which swept them off about a dozen years before, and they had not yet grown up again. The fire was described to me by an inhabitant, as having been a very terrible and magnificent sight. The air of the whole valley was so heated that the people were obliged to leave the town and take up their quarters for several days upon the beach. From this book I learn that sempstress is a synonym with seamstress.... Read more
Five Red Herrings
The wikipedia has a Scots edition. Ho' diggity. Just as I was refreshing my tastes with Dorothy Sayers's "Five Red Herrings", a tale of artistic ne'er-do-wells in Scotland.... Read more
April 3, 2006
Alphabet in Color
Vladmir Nabokov's Alphabet in Color. Nabokov claimed he could "hear" color: this lavishly-produced book explores his perception of individual letters. After moving to the States, Nabokov wrote in English and translated his work into Russian.... Read more
March 18, 2006
The City of Falling Angels
The City of Falling Angels is John Berendt's collection of vignettes about aristocratic life in Venice. The episodes tie together loosely around the destruction of La Fenice, the fading Venetian opera house, but touch on the lives of the well-known and sociable throughout the city. Berendt once again improbably insinuates himself into the daily lives of the people he meets, finding himself invited to cocktails, protests, celebrations, and into salons and archives out of the reach of most. How does he manage this? Like his previous book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, The City of Falling Angels tells stories of deception and murder amid a dissolute setting, in a city of langorous decay. The nocturnal ambient sound level in Venice is 32dB, much quieter than the 45dB of Milan and other Italian cities. A/V geeks attribute this to the absence of automobiles (!!).... Read more
March 7, 2006
Dracula
The Norton Critical Edition of this astonishing, vivid, and thrilling novel adds to its readability. When reading a book so steeped in jargon (for example, backsheesh, var. baksheesh) I find the inline annotations immensely useful. Similarly for Moby-Dick, for which Norton Critical Ed. I suffered through several incomplete bookshops in San Francisco before turning up the Second Edition in Los Angeles some years ago. And like Moby-Dick, Dracula has strong use of vernacular (Scots brogue, Eastern-European slang and Romany-inflected phrases), as well as the maritime vocabulary that seeps in to any book which employs the ship as a practical metaphor. Bram Stoker articulated the action of this novel through letters, phonograph transcripts, and primarily through diary entries: the protagonists' journals, captain's logs, and newspaper cuttings. Not any part of the narrative is impartial third-person: every paragraph is full of the passion (or dispassion, in the case of Dr Seward) and perspective of its author.... Read more
March 6, 2006
A Shropshire Lad / The Invention of Love
While reading Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love, I fell to thinking about poor, downtrodden Alfred E., and plucked a slender paper-backed copy of "A Shropshire Lad" from the shelf. Woebegone this is, but the collection contains one of my favourite poems: "Terence, this is stupid stuff" in which Housman's alter-ego hears that "Malt does more than Milton can / to justify God's ways to man." And how. I am off for a pint.... Read more
March 2, 2006
Fast-Food Nation
I was re-reading Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, after reading his outstanding collection of essays, Reefer Madness. Prompted by a yearning for beef (steak, a real big slab of it, that is), I started perusing his book, his portrayal of America as a society in thrall to the convenience of cars and seduced by the prettily-wrapped food.... Read more
February 25, 2006
The Jungle
The original published textThe Jungle is available online; but the uncensored edition restores several chapters from the original, serialized issue.... Read more
February 11, 2006
A Taste for Death / The Murder Room
I have been reading more P D James, whose stiff and thrilling detective novels feature haughty antagonists, a steely yet mysteriously charismatic detective, and evocative London settings. Her mystery-writing lessons unravel the icy tone and meticulous research of her books. P D James excels at the sort of mystery that Agatha Christie pioneered, with a closed group of suspects and a geographically restsricted setting. She often further closes her group by involving family members, typically from a mildly dysfunctional upbringing. After the aristocratic London of A Taste for Death and the suburban setting of The Murder Room, I am next going to unpack my copy of Original Sin for its Docklands setting.... Read more
February 2, 2006
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club
After reading Dorothy L. Sayers's The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, I picked up a copy of P. D. James's A Certain Justice. Although half a century and two (one, chronologically, but two for all intents and purposes: in Sayers's mileu, the First War weighs heavily on the characters, many of whom are just returned) wars separate the two, I find James's vocabulary more confusing: peppered with words like obsessional and rambustious, she doesn't evoke an era so much as puzzle the reader. The characters in her book are more complex than Sayers's, although both contend with class issues, civil responsibility, and the changing face of England.... Read more
January 25, 2006
Mac OS X Internals : A Systems Approach
Amit Singh, of kernelthread.com, has an upcoming book on Mac OSX internals. He has a nifty presentation available through his web site; the book itself will take a constructivist approach to examining the kernel, much as Kirk McCusick did with his book on the BSD kernel. Some of the interesting bits he discusses: kernel messages drivers in kernel- vs. user-space, shielding programmers from "gory" details of i/o With the advent of the new Intel core computers, the drivers need to be written in C (-based EFI) vs. the G5 Forth-based Open Firmware. IPC vs Sockets: the former optimized for the local, rather than network, case. Copy-on-write... Read more
January 21, 2006
The Silmarillion
After my annual reading of J R R Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, I found myself interested for the first time in re-reading the tales of The First Age, and of the destruction of Númenor. I found a pleasantly hefty, illustrated edition of The Silmarillion and began anew through Tolkien's cosmogony. Even as he unraveled the mysteries of his world's creation -- John Donne would have appreciated how the spheres came into being literally through song -- he established the characters and tone for the weighty conclusion of his Lord of the Rings story. I also stumbled upon the delightful Crackpot Tolkien Theories page, which collects some of the more loony pieces from rec.arts.books.tolkien, including one that reaches the astonishing conclusion that Tom Bombadil and The Witch-King of Angmar, Chief of the Ringwraiths, are one and the same person. What did Gandalf want to talk about with Bombadil, anyway?... Read more
January 18, 2006
The Great Train Robbery
Kate sent a copy of Michael Crichton's thrilling bestseller The Great Train Robbery. Fascinating for its detailed, fictionalized account of a bank heist, the book contains a delightful amount of early Victorian slang: some rhyming slang, some Cockney, and much from the "criminal class", all artlessly lumped together. Still, the narrative rushes along with exciting twists and characters. The story no doubt inspired pieces of movies such as The Sting, Ocean's 11, The Limey, but the tales of grift, deceit, and ruthless thievery it contains are entirely its own.... Read more
January 16, 2006
Reefer Madness
Eric Schlosser has collected three powerful essays on US policy, on marijuana, migrant workers, and pornography into a collection entitled Reefer Madness". Although his bias in each essay becomes quite clear in the conclusion of each piece, he maintains an even tone while setting out the research, and he recounts the horrific information he uncovers: two-faced American enforcement, which looks the other way when faced with the humiliating treatment of Mixtec workers who cross the border to provide us with cheap fresh fruit, but work almost in a vengeful wrath trying to stem the flow of pornography. He links three topics as components of the seamy underbelly of the American economy, but the policy aspect is what really fascinates me: steely American Justice saving us from the evils of marijuana and from porn, but nowt when the large corporations face labour problems.... Read more
January 11, 2006
The Unix-Haters Handbook
Although this classic, edited by Simson Garfinkel et al., is out of print, one of my office-mates left his copy lying about. It is also available in full online, courtesy Microsoft: http://research.microsoft.com/~daniel/unix-haters.html. Perusing this book brings to mind the old witticism: "Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. I don't think that this is a coincidence."... Read more
Fear and Trembling
Today marks the Islamic holiday Eid al-Adha, the Festival of Sacrifice. When God commanded (or requested) that Abraham take Isaac on a trip over to the mountain, whereupon the head of the latter would be removed by the former as a sign of devotion to God -- well, Abraham snapped his heels together and dressed his only son in his Sunday best. He told his wife Sarah that he would return post-haste, but omitted that Isaac would not require round-trip busfare. Soren Kierkegaard examines this parable in Fear And Trembling, and asks the reader to question the nature of ethics, and of good and evil: are these intrinsic to the cosmos, or determined by the orders of God? are ethics teleological, and this subject to order? I have the Penguin Classics edition of this short work, and -- rare amongst my books -- I marked the inside cover with my name, and with the place and date of each time I have read it: Chicago, 1991; Pittsburgh, 1995; Park City, 2002; Fès, 2002 (wow: I bet I ate some great lamb on that trip!). A similar parable occurs in Greek legend: Euripides makes use of it in his retelling of Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigenia, Iphigenia at Aulis; Plato examines the directives of ethics in Euthyphro, amongst other dialogues.... Read more
January 9, 2006
In which we head for the end zone
The District 5 supervisor, Ross Mirkarimi, hopes to re-zone parts of Haight St between Pierce and Fillmore in order to accomodate the famed San Francisco pot clubs. While his heart may be in the right place, the disproportionate amount of time and energy that his office spends on the legislation for medicinal marijuana has detracted from other, critical problems in the neighbourhood. He has let his attention lapse from the very serious homicide issue; he has dropped the ball on community policing, which for a while in autumn looked like it might actually happen; and, more disconcertingly, has not shown a presence in addressing the problems that make community policing important. The tide of vandalism (graffiti, tagging, smash-and-grab theft) continues unabated, despite vocal community protest. I do not agree with the priority that the pot clubs receive; and, after much observation, no longer feel that they are consistently good members of our community. Despite their pretentions to healing and medicine, they encourage more loitering and traffic, -- I'm thinking of the Vapor Room in particular, because I always have to trip across parked cars, wandering stoners, and dilettantes standing in front of their basement entrance. Why not find a way to integrate marijuana dispensaries into already-legitimate pharmacies? We have several of those, including the Davies Medical Center. I also find the overwhelming number of medicinal marijuana dispensaries problematic: in a neighbourhood without bookstores, a fresh fish market ("Lo-Cost Fish and Seafood" on Haight St. doesn't count as fresh), nor a doughnut shop, how come we have a half-dozen pot clinics? It's easier to get (semi-legally) stoned than it is to get a bunch of flowers or a copy of Moby-Dick in the Lower Haight. The zoning distinction is NC-1 vs NC-2, where NC stands for "Neighborhood Commercial District"; the -2 allows a business to remain open until 2 AM, where the NC-1 requires a specific permit for this. The proposal for this stretch of the Lower Haight also converts the existing Victorian residential (RH-2 and -3) buildings to NC-2, allowing for more basement businesses such as the once-proud Naked Eye, and for the Vapor Room to be open into the wee hours. Will this bring additional commercial traffic into the neighbourhood? Quite probably -- but, without amendments for additional transit and parking, we may see an increase in automotive traffic. Happily, NC-2 calls for street beautification such as trees. While I am glad that District Five comprises a forward-thinking population (limp cheers from the audience), I suggest that our Supervisor make as much noise about the residential problems of crime and vandalism as he does for the commercial, hip issue of for-sale pot. And he should find some city monies for an epidemiological study of why so many goddam fixed-gear riders have glaucoma.... Read more
November 30, 2005
Some Buried Caesar
I was walking past Powell's Books on 57th Street some years ago when I saw the irresistible discards box outside. On the top was a torn paperback with a gaudy illustration: Some Buried Caesar was the title. Efffusive endorsements rang out from the front and back covers: "The best ... unbeatable!". The author: Rex Stout (what a great name!), creator of the irritating, contrary, and iconoclastic detective-gourmand Nero Wolfe. I recognised the name from a review (of what?) that I had read, which compared the author to P G Wodehouse and Rex Stout. Already having read, re-read, and much loved the former, I picked up the latter. I could not have done better: Some Buried Caesar is one of Stout's earlier, "post-Depression and pre-war" mysteries, and shows his strengths beautifully. It features a different setting for the action: usually, Wolfe sits in his custom-made chair in his Manhattan townhouse, keeps to his schedule, berates Archie Goodwin, his Man Friday, and drinks beer. In this, the book starts off with Archie crashing the car en route to show orchids at the State Fair. From there, it is but a hop, skip, and jump to the introduction of Lily Rowan, who graces many subsequent mysteries in small but complicating roles; the revelation that Methodists make the best chicken fricassee (and do'n't hold the dumplings); and that anthrax is a disease of cattle. Really, I had not grasped this latter bit, despite the Gang of Four song, until this book's description of the disease as it ravages a cattle herd. Like Wodehouse, Stout has an easy way with words, and gives his characters such distinctive voices that they become caricatures of themselves. Archie would be the perfect tough guy for a Marlowe or Hammett novel, except that he is in the company of Wolfe, who is too cerebral for straight-up noir; Wolfe, confusingly, is also too decadent, in his quiet little "seventh-of-a-ton" way. He has a rooftop greehouse filled with orchids, a private chef, and brooks no nonsense. Some Buried Caesar is amongst my favourite mysteries; other Wolfe adventures I really enjoy are Fer-de-Lance, the first to feature the detective; Too Many Cooks; The League of Frightened Men, of which I found a first edition in a dusty shop in Palo Alto that burnt down a few days after I raided their selection; and Please Pass The Guilt, one of the later stories but featuring such odd period vocabulary as "balloon-rimmed cheaters". Even Google has not been able to help with illustrating that term.... Read more
November 15, 2005
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
I am very happily reading select Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, in the edition illustrated by Sidney Paget. (To me, he will always be the illustrator, much as Tenniel is to Alice's Adventures Underground, or John O'Neill to The Wizard of Oz.) Complete text is available online.... Read more
November 9, 2005
Almost French
I am adding a widget that shows my current "reading list", thanks to the cheesily-designed website Chain Reading. And I am reading Sarah Turnbull's "Almost French", the satisfying story of an Aussie who implusively moves to Paris for "love and a new life." Everything works out, but slowly, and the travails of French bureaucracy that she related did not make as much of an impression as did the way she ironed out the massive cultural differences with her boyfriend-fiance-husband (there, I spoiled it for you), his friends and family, and builders, neighbours, et al. She also observed some riots, but that's quotidian around Paris now, in'it?... Read more
November 3, 2005
Lady Chatterly's Lover
In a rush on the way out the door this ack emma, I grabbed a hardbound book from the shelf. I sat down in my seat on the bus to find out that it was the stupefyingly dull "Lady Chatterly's Lover," which I had last attempted to read while spending an afternoon in Rockridge (indeed, a receipt from a nice wine-bar in that area served as the bookmark). And I again got about sixty pages into the book and could not suppress my boredom any longer. I turned out the window and watched traffic flow past.... Read more
October 10, 2005
Galahad at Blandings
After the delightful experience of re-reading Psmith in the City, I picked up a copy of Galahad at Blandings from a going-out-of-business second-hand bookstore (why are the works of Wodehouse available only erratically in the States? I should have bought the lush stack I espied at Dutton's tidy new location in Beverly Hills). The going is a bit slower than the other Blandings books, which I recall with great fondness as being especially light. Wodehouse famously said of his novels: "I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going deep down into life and not caring a damn". I have a faint memory of our sixth-grade English teacher reading Psmith and Mike aloud to us, emphasizing that the initial "P" was silent, and spurious (our hero Rupert could not abide having such a common name on his uncommon character), but I cannot imagine how such a book, filled not only with anachronistic English school-boy humour but also with many mentions of typical British institutions, came across to eleven-year-old Americans. No wonder Anar says that I have more affectations in my language than she does after three-odd years of living in London. Galahad is the epitome of a type in Wodehouse: dashing and socially clairvoyant, he is uniquely able to negotiate the social strata "without a bean to his name". He brings sundered hearts together through the most outlandish schemes, and always emerges himself unscathed.... Read more
October 4, 2005
Psmith in the City
Books with climactic cricket concepts: Dorothy Sayers's Murder Must Advertise: a match between an advertising firm and a teetotalling advertiser; Sarah Caudwell's The Shortest Way to Hades: a match between Artists and Writers in Corfu's Esplanade; and P G Wodehouse's Psmith in the City: a match featuring our hero's amanuensis and helpmeet, Mike.... Read more
September 24, 2005
everything i ate
Nico sent me a copy of TUCKER SHAW's "a year in the life of my mouth", or "everything i ate", a lavishly-photographed chronicle of last year from the menu of a Manhattan hipster. Plenty good-looking snaps of meals (well, take-out) at John's, Sammy's, the 2nd Ave Deli, and pushcart after pushcart.... Read more
September 22, 2005
Save Twilight
A volume of selected poems by Julio Cortázar, with a beautiful sepia-toned photograph as the cover illustration. One imagines the setting to be a Parisian garret. ... somewhere I have an unfortunate, never-completely-read, worn and dog-eared copy of Hopscotch, the daring English translation of Cortázar's Rayuela.... Read more
September 18, 2005
The Mysterious Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
I picked up a 60p paperback at half-price from a stall at Spitalfields Market and read it on the flight back. Spine-tingling, from the inhumane horror of the decaying morals of the title character and from its effect on his lifelong friend, Dr Lanyon.... Read more
September 10, 2005
How Not To Use the Cellular Telephone
Umberto Eco's essay on How not to use the cellular telephone springs to mind whenever I think about how sensitive I am to the buzzing slab of metal in my pocket, to the chirp of the pager on my belt, to the ringing of a bluetooth headset. Thanks to Amazon for providing the searchable text and scanned pages of How to travel with a salmon, his excellent and hilarious collection of essays. I was a little surprised to see that his latest novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, does not appear in English translation by the formidable William Weaver. The subject puts me off, too: an apparently-trendy work in which the protagonist loses his personal memory, but remembers exactly each comic book, novel, and printed word he has read. The work unfolds partly as a graphic novel. Although neither the cultural synthesis nor collage-like accumulation of information is foreign to Eco's novels, the modernity rubs me the wrong way. Eco has written about memory and isolation before, in both The Island of the Day Before and in Foucault's Pendulum.... Read more
September 4, 2005
Thus was Adonis Murdered
Reading the late Dame Sarah Caudwell's delightful epistolary mystery novels featuring a quartet (or quintet, or sextet) of New Square barristers, I recalled picking up The Sibyl in Her Grave from a sidewalk sale in La Jolla five years ago, probably just after it was published. The Edward Gorey cover illustration caught my eye, and the curious title excited my imagination.... Read more
September 3, 2005
The Fever Trail
Mark Hongsbaum's account of the discovery, cultivation, and exploitation of the cinchona meanders too much to be captivating. The story wanders through thrilling and mysterious places: the cordillera, Tucuman, Kew Gardens, and Panama.... Read more
August 31, 2005
Goodbye, Kepler's.
Kepler's bookstore in Menlo Park has closed, after fifty years. Bookstore closings bring sadness: "It's like a relative in the family dying," Roy Borrone, owner of Cafe Borrone next door to Kepler's, told the Weekly late Wednesday morning. He said he relocated his restaurant from Redwood City to Menlo Park to be adjacent to Kepler's when it moved across El Camino Real to its present location in the late 1980s. Neil Gaiman remonstrates us: "Remember, if you have a local bookshop you like, buy your books there. Otherwise it could happen to you." I say that this goes for any local shop: flowers, groceries, clothes, whatnot.... Read more
August 29, 2005
In which we read a maghrebi detective story
Jonathan Smolin's translation of Abdelilah Hamdouchi's The White Fly is available at the Words Without Borders web site.... Read more
August 1, 2005
In which we know that malt does more than Milton can
My word! Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love blew me away. The dialogue is crisp, witty, full of verve: the characters leap off the page. I am very sorry that I skipped this play when it had its North American premier at San Francisco's ACT. The play tells the story of the class-bound classicist A E Housman, whose poetry, especially "A Shropshire Lad", shaped much of my understanding of metre and form. Housman travels down the Styx as he shakes off this mortal coil, and meets characters from his past. Sad, wistful, and terrifically funny.... Read more
July 9, 2005
In which I take a mundane journey
Kate Pocrass has been collecting stories and minor adventures in San Francisco for three years, and has published the first volume resulting from her Mundane Journeys project. One can call 415 364 1465 for a selection, updated weekly, or thumb through the pocket-poet-sized book, which is quaint and quirky and smacks of utter uselessness. But she did it, not I, so props to her. Adah Balinsky's marvellous Stairway Walks in San Francisco is another favourite San Francisco book.... Read more
July 6, 2005
In which I am exposed to the elements of murder
After another enthusiastic reading of Dorothy Sayer's romantic piffle, Strong Poison, and watching the filmed dramatisation of the inept adolescence of Graham Young in The Young Poisoner's Handbook, it came as little surprise that I jumped on a recent Oxford title, "The Elements of Murder". Much of the narrative, half popular science and half murder-mystery, unfolds through inane run-on sentences reminiscent of an enthusiastic high-school scholar who has done a vast amount of research and simply cannot wait to express everything on paper. At times, I suspected that the author and his editor were founding members of the Royal Society for the Conservation of Commas, so infrequent was the use a comma when changing subjects in a complex-compound sentence. To his credit, he works in many useful, and sometimes significant, historical nuggets: "Seaweed is also rich in arsenic and on the remote Scottish island of North Ronaldsey there is a breed of sheep which feeds exclusively on seaweed and they appear to thrive on it." He tells the story of the Styrian peasants who reportedly took arsenic regularly, to improve their complexion and to aid their respiratory systems. He credits the defence of Mary Ann Cotton, a noted poisoner, with using the story of the Styrians at her trial. (Anachronistic? I wonder how widely known the Styrian legend was in mid-19th-century England.) Other of his questionable writing: the excitable etymology. "The name merury, by which we known this element, comes from the name of the planet and its first recorded use was by the Greek philosopher Theophrastus around 300 BC." In fact, the association of the planets and metallic elements did not occur until 1500 years later, during the alchemical writings of the Middle Ages. Aside: I have a vivid memory of a National Geographic issue on mercury, which featured a striking photograph of a man floating on his back in a pool of quicksilver.... Read more
July 4, 2005
Nicholas
I picked up a copy of Anthea Bell's new translation of Nicholas, the classic illustrated story of a puckish French school-boy. The elegant, cloth-bound Phaidon edition features the charming illustrations by Jean-Jacques Sempe. Goscinny died in 1977, but both the Nicholas series of books and the phenomenal Asterix comics, produced in collaboration with the devilish Albert Uderzo (whom I met unexpectedly at Hamley's in London), have become classics, in no small part due to Bell's lyrical and humourous translation.... Read more
June 30, 2005
Notes from Undergound / The Double
I began reading Fyodor Dostoevsky's novella "The Double", and, like many of the secondary characters, I find myself bewildered. The edition I have (one of the Penguin Classics series) feels a little heavy in the rendering, but frankly Dostoevsky's prose obscures his tale of a man possessed by madness (if that is, in fact, what transpires). I'm going to go back to Tolstoy's "Master and Man" for my next Russian novella, and then to Mikhail Lermontov's "A Hero For Our Time" or Nikolai Gogol's short stories.... Read more
June 28, 2005
In which I get no forrarder
After a few recent trips by 'plane, I have re-(re-)read much of Dorothy Sayers' oeuvre featuring the monocled 'tec Lord Peter Wimsey. Much to my chagrin, I found myself feeling much like this rabbity protagonist when I found my carefully-arranged bottles of port all upended and cleaned, just as in the scene from her stage-play Busman's Honeymoon in which the provincial charwoman Mrs Rundle does ditto damage to His Lordship's carefully-swaddled bottles. My case was perhaps less severe, but also hilarious. "Never you mind that, Mr. Bunter. I'll soon 'ave them bottles clean." "Bottles?" said Bunter. "What bottles?" A frightful suspicion shot through his brain. "What have you got there?" "Why," said Mrs. Ruddle, "one o' them dirty old bottles you brought along with you." She displayed her booty in triumph. "Sech a state they're in. All over whitewash." Bunter's world reeled about him and he clutched at the corner of the settle. "My God!" "You couldn't put a thing like that on the table, could you now?" "Woman!" cried Bunter, and snatched the bottle from her, "that's the Cockburn '96!" "Ow, is it?" said Mrs. Ruddle, mystified. "There now! I thought it was summink to drink." ... "You have not, I trust, handled any of the other bottles?" "Only to unpack 'em and set 'em right side up," Mrs. Ruddle assured him cheerfully. "Them cases'll come in 'andy for kindling." Dorothy Sayers novels make excellent, and riveting, reading. Interspersed with quotations from the classics, endless piffle, and quaint, feudal Old England ('though they take place Between The Wars), the mysteries rise far beyond the stereotypes of the genre while maintaining the classic whodunit form. Almost all are murder mysteries, excepting perhaps "The Nine Tailors", which is a stupendously beautiful book. And people do die, perhaps outside the scope of the narrative, but the novel is more of a study in character than a murder-mystery.... Read more
June 26, 2005
A Man in Full
I read Tom Wolfe's gripping and lengthy American panorama, A Man in Full, without learning any new vocabulary. (Although, through Kunstler's review of Wolfe's latest, I did learn the appropriately vivid egestive. Now why ca'n't Kunstler afford a proof-reader, or at least some software that has a spell-check function?) A Man in Full's crafty sub-plot with Epictetus itself elevates the novel to approximately the level of John Grisham, which is to say, not very high. And Grisham does courtoom and big-ego drama much more effectively than does Wolfe. In comparison with Wolfe, Grisham wins, hands-down. Whom would you rather take on a plane trip? Oh, Grisham, I reckon. Both writers have a horrible way with plot, but Grisham at least has his characters utter believable conversations. And Grisham writes about place and character in a way that feel real. But surely you are aware of Mr Wolfe's long contributions to American culture, and his witty skewering of everything from architecture to corporate America? Yes, and I figure that Grisham does ditto without actually setting out to write his novels with such a pretentious checklist. Wolfe is very proud of the quality of "reporting" that he brings to his work, subverting the assumption that the novelist should write what he (sic) knows. In this, Truman Capote out-does him. Wolfe just ca'n't win, except, perhaps, on the sartorial front.... Read more
May 18, 2005
Excepting every four hundred years.
Prompted by a technical discussion about date formats, I dug out a copy of David Ewing Duncan's superlative "Calendar: Humanity's Epic Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year", and found the author's blog. As for the automated manipulation of the calendar, a colleague pointed out this tit-bit o' unix fun: (salim@xampanyet) ~ % cal -3 9 1752 August 1752 September 1752 October 1752 Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 1 2 14 15 16 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 29 30 31 30 31 Just as we find the railroads behind the standardization of clock time, we might credit the Church for the standardization of the calendar, done so that everyone can hunt Easter eggs at the same time.... Read more
May 13, 2005
Ocean Shore Railroad
I received a copy of the long-awaited Ocean Shore Railroad, part of the "Images of Rail" series published by Arcadia Publishing. The historical notes on the idealism and history of rail along California's Highway 1 bring a tear to my eye: the right-of-way is now occupied by motorways, but the scenery of beaches and mountains remains beautiful. By the bye, construction has begun on a new, $270 million tunnel at Devil's Slide. After the tunnel is opened, the unused 1.2-mile portion of Highway 1 will be converted into a hiking and biking trail with parking on both ends.... Read more
May 7, 2005
In the beginning
Kate sent a copy of In The Beginning, a history of the King James translation of the Bible. The initial chapters of the book chronicle the travails of other translations, and of the political and economic forces that drove translation. The author jumps about a little, and tends to the didactic rather than the scholarly in the structure of paragraphs, but does provide an amusing bit of verse about Martin Luther: Devil: Monk on the latrine? You shouldn't be reading matins here! Monk: I am purging my bowels While worshiping almighty God You can have what goes down While God gets what goes up. In a twist that Ericson would love, Luther apparently had his philosophical breakthrough on the cloaca (in polite Latin).... Read more
April 29, 2005
Fudgeripple Pouchhappy
While looking for a copy of "The Man Who Stole The Atlantic Ocean", I found that the Main Libray now has wireless internet access. Spiffy: perhaps I'll work there today, although the library does not have the book (which is no longer in print, but available for $15 from online secondhand booksellers). A synopsis of the book: fat retired beach-goers find thmselves social outcasts, and take their revenge by secreting the Atlantic Ocean in the basement of their New Jersey club-house. The illustrations -- line drawings, if I remember aright -- of the protagonist, a Mr Fudgeripple Pouchhappy, delight. Eventually, kids save the day. While we're discussing infrastructure in San Francisco, why is the SFPD's online crime map application so lame?... Read more
April 17, 2005
Lusitania
In search of a yarn about seagoing shenanigans, I picked up Diana Preston's Lusitania (with the coy sub-title "An Epic Tragedy"). The third sentence: "... they found that the flashes were not the desperate signals of a last, despairing survivor ... ." And again, a few pages later: "The story of the Lusitania is, above all, about people -- whether British, German, or American, whether afloat on the liner, submerged in the submarine, or enmeshed in the various government machines ashore." This sort of vocabuulary-deprived writing hurts my brain. I intensely dislike launching into a 500-page book when the author cannot write sentence tightly enough to avoid repeating root words. I'm not looking for synonyms, I just want expressive, clear history. Although the author has an extensive section of citations, the writing style seems more like Zagat's than like an academic work. Sentences are peppered with single-word quotations, or built from phrases enclosed in quotation marks. The author capably relates the technical history involved in the sinking of the Lusitania, and the exciting naval developments leading to Germany's challenge for maritime supremacy. Sometimes she presumes historical knowledge I don't have, and this made the first few chapters rough going.... Read more
April 13, 2005
What hath God wrought?
"If I needed to build a 3,000-hole golf course on Mars, this is the man I'd call." Has to be the best endorsement ever. This article chronicles the adventure of laying fiber across three continents, under the ocean, and the amazing convolutions political and mechanical therein.... Read more
April 11, 2005
Reading round-up
Over the past few days, I've been sick abed and working the page-turners: P.G. Wodehouse (the Jeeves Omnibus, including "Carry On, Jeeves" and "The Inimitable Jeeves"; I wish I had some Blandings books handy); John Grisham ("The Chamber"); Stephen King ("Pet Sematary"); Dorothy Sayers ("Clouds of Witness"); and a very, very unwieldy paperback ed. of Cervantes' "Don Quixote". Anna and I walked down to the main library and I read through a stack of shorter Jean Merrill books, but, alas, "The Pushcart War" was unavailable. For a public library, the SFPL has a dearth of available popular titles, and its small collection is oddly scattered to the branch libraries. I find this library system creepy for its inability to hang on to copies of books: of 10 copies of "The Pushcart War", not a single copy was available for circulation, and only one was actually checked out. To its credit, the SFPL has a netflix-like reservation system, and I can even choose the branch to which desired titles will go for my convenience.... Read more
April 4, 2005
The Client
On a rainy Saturday in Pittsburgh*, I raided a friend's bookshelf and came up with a comfortably worn paperback of John Grisham's The Client. I read it the rest of the day as I shuttled back and forth on the bus and subway, and came close to completion overnight while watching the time change. This morning, as I waited for a car to take me to the airport, I raced to finish the book: "Okay, 30 pages, about half an hour." I could so do that. And then I realised, as I turned the last leaf, that a sheaf of pages had dropped from the cheap glue at the end of the binding, and I wouldn't finish the page-turner. Undaunted, I figured that the newsstands at the airport would have the book, and I could stand quietly in a corner and discover how Grisham, never the master of the powerful ending, wound up this book (which is quite good: Grisham writes great legal thrillers, much better than Scott Turow). Frustratingly, the three shops at the terminal had almost every other of his books (really: the one on the ground floor had almost a dozen thick paperback titles by him). I was totally foiled, stymied, thwarted. And by the time I get to the library, I'll have forgotten all of the exciting action of the preceding 75 pages. * Not really in Pittsburgh; I just really like the phrase, from one of P.G. Wodehouse's wickedly humourous novels. I wish I'd been reading Wodehouse instead.... Read more
March 28, 2005
Mole People
I finally read Jennifer Toth's emotional account of underground homelessness in New York City, Mole People. Toth was cutting her teeth as a journalist during the daring research and writing for this book, and sometimes the writing reflects lofty literary goals. At other times, the phrases become repetitive and the stories too brief to impart meaning or much empathy. She pursued a remarkable and difficult story, and the book is a stirring testament to that. "Mole People" reminded me of Dark Days, the film so acclaimed at Sundance a few years ago. I hadn't the chance to see the film during its short run (at the late Castro?), but I really wanted to. Turns out that one can now obtain Dark Days on DVD... Read more
March 11, 2005
The constant expansion of a single moment:
This article in the New York Times discusses Gregory Rabassa and Clarice Lispector, providing my first biographical glimpse into Lispector's writing. An incontrovertible liar who wrote in Portuguese! I first read her "Água viva" during a world-literature course at Pennsylvania State Univ., taught by one of her other translators and champions, Earl Fitz.... Read more
March 6, 2005
Suitable for Arabs and old gentlemen
I started on Andrew Lang's edition of The Arabian Nights Entertainments, which provides a child-safe retelling of the classic shenanigans: "In this book the stories are shortened here and there, and omissions are made of pieces only suitable for Arabs and old gentlemen." The ribald pieces omitted, the anthology still makes riveting reading, and Ford's pen-and-ink elegantly illustrates the adventues of Sinbad. However, I'd like a more thorough, and unexpurgated edition. Some of the breathless reporting seems drawn straight from Herodotus, Homer, or Marco Polo: "In one place I saw a tortoise which was twenty cubits long and as many broad, also a fish that was like a cow and had skin so thick that it was used to make shields."... Read more
February 24, 2005
Last Chance to Taste
I began reading Gina Mallet's wistful Last Chance to Taste, about the declining importance of food in our culture. I'm ambivalent: are we so leisurely that we can inspect and fetishize our food (well, obviously, yes); but so coddled that we have already forgotten than many of our parents' generation, immigrant or no, faced food shortages even relative to their parent's generation? The embargoes and rationing of the Wars; the lack of air shipping; At the same time, I strongly believe that we must pay close attention to our food sources. We must eat locally-grown and -obtained food, in season and organically grown. I'm all for sushi, but don't like the chemicals added to it so that it retains its colour.... Read more
February 1, 2005
Not endorsed by Tallulah Bankhead.
Simon Singh's new book, "The Big Bang" sounds like another laugh riot. What I mean is, he has written two eminently enjoyable books about math ("maths", he would say), and this little number on cosmology promises to be a good read.... Read more
January 21, 2005
January 17, 2005
wish that I could push a button
I'm re-reading Michael Frayn's Headlong, a mischevious and enjoyable story about a man who becomes obsessed with his land-rich neighbour's art collection. Is is a Brue(h)el?, he wonders. And the book is richly in the present tense, even as the action shifts from the present to the recent past to the more-distant past: Frayn artfully uses simple language to build his story. By contrast, Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent is another problem altogether, a confusingly-written legal thriller which takes place in an uncomfortable present tense. The verbs switch sometimes into the perfect, but overall the narrative has little sense of its place in the time of the book. And the story, too, is disappointing: the vocabulary feels stilted, overly-researched, pretentious. Not the legal jargon, but the characters' language. The author's attempts at vernacular amount to little more than stereotypical jive-talkin' (without the ultimate apostrophe, even: jive talkin he would have written).... Read more
January 3, 2005
Neither fish nor fowl
Picked up a marked-up and well-beaten copy of the Norton Critical Edition of Shakespeare's Henry the IVth, Part I. Perhaps now I can get to the bottom of Act II, Scene I. The much-beloved Seminary Co-op Bookstore, Chicago's labyrinthine repository of all that is printed for the social sciences and humanities, has a special section for the Norton Critical Editions, and their distinctive spines leap out from bookshelves wherever I look. After leaving Chicago, I was distressed to discover that other bookshops don't keep their Nortons all together in a special section, and spent two frustrating weeks looking for a NCE of Moby-Dick before uncovering one at Dutton's Brentwood Books.... Read more
I read it with some fava beans and a nice Chianti
After sorting through some of my more recently-shelved books, I was happy to see a copy (first printing, uncut, no less) of Thomas Harris' third instalment concerning Hannibal Lecter. I devoured the book, with its sporadic and unnerving lapses into the present tense, much as its protagonist might devour a seasonal white truffle. Hilarious horror, mocking macabre, and silly suspense. I wonder if the movie is any good: apparently the author went through several revisions, pre-publication, with the director and stars of the previous film incarnation, Silence of the Lambs (which had a pivotal scene filmed down the road from where I grew up in Pittsburgh!). A tender side-story involves a curious character who wants to see all the extant paintings by Jan Vermeer. I half-assedly tried ditto several years ago, only to find myself staring at nothing at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. I did see some beautiful works in DC, NYC, and London, but have yet to see any of the Dutch or German holdings.... Read more
December 31, 2004
Adventures underground
I picked up a copy of Randy Kennedy's Subwayland; this book collects his excellent column from the New York Times, which came to an end last year.... Read more
December 25, 2004
McDonald's Book Shops Reopens
Although I thought that McDonald's Book Shop had shuttered its doors for good, a report from the Chronicle informs me that the owner was looking for a buyer and renovating the building. And what atmosphere: "McDonald's, on Turk Street between Market and Taylor, is surrounded by residential hotels, liquor stores and porn shops. Junkies and alcoholics cluster on the sidewalk out front, shouting obscenities at one another and at passers-by." The shop boasts more than a million shabby items for sale in San Franciso's Skid Row.... Read more
December 22, 2004
Ashes to ashes
Brewster Kahle wants to complete the circle of Google's Print service: once physical media are available online, make the books, movies, concerts, et al. available at cost to people everywhere. The social and policy aspects of the internet archive are phenomenal. Their first colo is in Alexandria, where once Ptolemy took all of your books for his library (and returned to you a faithful copy, but a copy).... Read more
December 16, 2004
Thick enough to cut with a knife
The same day that the New York Times published a front-page scoop on Google's project to digitize library books, the nearby city of Salinas announced that it will close its three public libraries, including the John Steinbeck Library. For lack of $775,000 annually. Anna has student-taught in three schools in the San Francisco Unified School District; not a one has a library or librarian.... Read more
December 7, 2004
Apropa't
I have long felt a kinship to Barcelona, and was happy to find in today's mail a copy of Robert Hughes' recent study of the city, sub-titled "The Great Enchantress".... Read more
December 6, 2004
Follow, follow, follow
Read a handful of L. Frank Baum's Oz books over the weekend, in the Del Rey reissues from the '80s. The trade paperbacks unfortunately don't do justice to Jno R. Neill's beautiful line illustrations: reduced in size and on inferior paper, one can't make out a lot of the detail. Was Baum describing a Socialist paradise in his books? Another question: where does the abbreviation "Jno" for John originate? It's how Neill signs his ornate illustrations; it's also painted on the station-cab in Market Blandings, where many an interloper alights for hijinks at Lord Emsworth's estate.... Read more
November 29, 2004
(Past) Progressive writing
I picked up a copy of J P Dunleavy's Fairy Tale of New York, a rollicking book written mostly with participles. I really liked his Wrong Information Is Being Given Out At Princeton, with its antihero Stephen O'Kelly'O, and the succinct, vindictive Lady Who Liked Clean Restrooms. The narrative portions of the book remind me of William S. Burroughs in their lucidity, and in the way both authors eschew complete sentences.... Read more
Dr Dolittle
Despite the high praise accorded to Hugh Lofting's Dr Dolittle, I found it an excrescence, especially compared to its contemporaries. The level of sophistication does not approach Lews Carroll or Kenneth Grahame, as Hugh Walpole suggests in his Harper Trophy edition.... Read more
November 27, 2004
Bug book
Susan lent me an anthology of writing about insects: Insect Lives, "Stories of Mystery and Romance From A Hidden World". It contains passages from Exodus, the selfsame that JZ swore pointed to manna as being "insect shit!" in his trademark first-year lecture.... Read more
Amar Chitra Katha online
I read a lot of these classic Indian stories in comic-book form from Amar Chitra Katha when I was younger; it's how I learned many of the stories from the Mahabharata, and about Ashoka and Tansen.... Read more
November 23, 2004
Warning labels for books
Like Mad Magazine, but funny, these warning stickers for textbooks should come in handy in a Fight Club sort of way... Read more
November 20, 2004
Words Without Borders
Words Without Borders is the online magazine for international literature; supported by the US National Endowment for the Arts, its editorial board includes Chinua Achebe, Edith Grossman, and William Weaver.... Read more
November 14, 2004
rub-a-dobe
I suppose that Adobe Books in the Mission needs a shtick to attract some attention. We will be celebrating the opening of this enormous art installation. For one amazing week in November, Adobe Book Shop in San Francisco has agreed to allow it's estimated 20,000 books to be be reclassified by color. Shifting from red to orange to yellow to green, the books will follow the color spectrum continuously, changing Adobe from a neighborhood bookshop into a magical library—but only for one week. Adobe Bookshop in San Francisco’s Mission District, and all of its contents, will be transformed. It will take a crew of 20 people pulling an all - nighter fueled by caffeine and pizza all following a master organizational plan - but come Saturday morning it will be like a place that would only exist in a dream. Adobe galls me. The staff's general lackadaisickal attitude towards their books -- piled on the floor, with bugs all over them -- is one thing, but the overall shabbiiness of the shop speaks to a general disrespect of books, of people, and of the admittedly-dirty neighbourhood. Brian, who ran the late, lamented Chelsea Books, stepped away from the disintegrating Adobe more than a decade ago.... Read more
November 10, 2004
Oblique Strategies
At Moe's in Berkeley, I found a Loeb of Longus' Daphnis and Chloë. This story was the reason I wanted to study Greek in college. I have another Greek edition around here somewhere, but so far my favourite edition is Christopher Gill's translation, in B.P. Reardon's Collected Ancient Greek Novels. The Loeb editions have a well-deserved reputation as a compromise: the handy pocket-sized cloth-bound book with the miserable translations. And while they prayed, they laboured too and cast about to find a way by which they might come to see one another. Poor Chloe was void of all counsel and had not device nor plot. For the old woman her reputed mother was by her continually, and taught her to card the fine wool and twirl the spindle, or else was still a clocking for her, and ever and anon casting in words and twattling to her about marriage. -- III, §4... Read more
October 26, 2004
Who has the best housecoat?
Read This Paragraph At my local Barnes and Noble, there is a huge wall of Java books just waiting to tip over and crush me one day. And one day it will. At the rate things are going, one day that bookcase will be tall enough to crush us all. It might even loop the world several times, crushing previous editions of the same Java books over and over again. And This Paragraph Too This is just a small Ruby book. It won’t crush you. It’s light as a feather (because I haven’t finished it yet—hehe). And there’s a reason this book will stay light: because Ruby is simple to learn. But Don't Read This One! Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby is released under the Attribution-ShareAlike License. So, yes, please distribute it and print it and read it leisurely in your housecoat. In fact, there will be a contest at the end of the book for Best Housecoat. It’s a coveted award and you should feel honored to even read about it! (Especially if you are reading about it in your soon-to-be-prize-winning housecoat.) I really like the straight-forward nature of ruby, and contributions like Why'sadd to this enjoyment.... Read more
October 25, 2004
in all ways remarkable
Began reading a comprehensive edition of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. This particular edition, a nice hardcover example of which I found while tidying my room, contains facsimile pages from recently-discovered textual addenda. Although the manuscript reproductions are perhaps most satisfying to a more scholarly attitude than mine own, the included period illustrations accompany the text beautifully.... Read more
October 22, 2004
An indictment of the people and the President
Bumped into Adam yesterday, who loaned me a copy of Sleepwalking Through History. I read with some alarm the first two chapters, on Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, and titled "The Loser" and "The Winner" respectively. As Carter spent a sleepless final week in office, negotiating the terms of release for the Iranian hostages, Reagan showed little inclination to do other than sleep and party his way to Inauguration. I blame the subway: Appearing on ABC's "This Week With David Brinkley" after the [arms procurement] scandal began, Arkansas Senator David Pryor described it this way: "A few yards from here is Connecticut Avenue, and we all see the beautiful hotels and office buildings and grand shops, but underneath there's a subway system that is running day and night where people are getting on and they're getting off.... Some of the poeple that are getting off that subway ... have either been with the Department of Defense or with a private consulting firm. They go to a contractor. They're in the Pentagon private consulting firms or their own contractors, and they're all sloshing around in the subway system with all of this money and we're in trouble because of it."... Read more
October 18, 2004
The LA literary conspirarcy
As I was being bodily removed from Dutton's Brentwood Bookstore, I picked up a copy of David Fine's Imagining Los Angeles, a literary tour of L.A.. I'm only a couple of chapters into it, but the writing suffers from being overly derivative, especially of Mike Davis' excellent surveys of post-modern representation of the city, and suffers from poor editing. I also received a sizeable volume of literary L.A., Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which holds a lot of promise. It's in the same series as the volume on Baseball edited by Nicholas Dawidoff.... Read more
October 9, 2004
I'm a Marxist and I read.
Today I learned the word "rivalrous", which means "emulous", or "eager to surpass others". Resources that cannot be shared are rivalrous. I also picked up three long-time favourite classics of economics: The Marx-Engels Reader; de Tocqueville's Democracy in America; and Mr Adam Smith's "truck, barter, and trade" (the po-mo title of "On The Wealth of Nations"). Outside of a dog, a man's best friend is a book. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.... Read more
October 5, 2004
(all the barbers were anarchists)
Began reading George Orwell's stirring Homage to Catalonia, while listening to Modest Mouse. I first heard this band while sitting at the Albion (now the Delirium) with Mark Athitakis on a mid-day bender some years ago. I can't remember why Mark was excited to find them on the juke-box, but I do remember (and have repeatedly proven) that they make great drinking music.... Read more
October 2, 2004
Tell me, where all past years are
Anna was sweet to pick up a book for me from the Children's section of the San Francisco Public Library. The book: "Archer's Goon", a masterful work by British novelist Diana Wynne Jones, whose books I've loved since reading "Howl's Moving Castle," with its conceit from a Donne poem, and its milliner's-daughter heroine. "Archer's Goon" is a subtle masterpiece, with sewage, finance, education, and words as public resources, each "farmed" by a shadowy sibling of the family in charge of the town.... Read more
September 26, 2004
Serpents in Paradise
Began reading Dea Birkett's Serpents in Paradise, but the writing really isn't very good -- although the material, a woman's journey to and stay on remote, legendary Pitcairn Island, deserves much better.... Read more
September 22, 2004
We will meet in the place where there is no darkness
Re-read Nineteen eighty-four in a beautiful paperback facsimile first edition. These things happen," he began vaguely. "I have been able to recall one instance -- a possible instance. It was an indiscretion, undoubtedly. We were producing a definitive edition of the poems of Kipling. I allowed the word 'God' to remain at the end of a line. I could not help it!" he added almost indignanty, raising his face to look at Winston. "It was impossible to change the line. The rhyme was 'rod.' Do you realise that there are only twelve rhymes to 'rod' in the entire language? For days I had racked my brains. There was no other rhyme." The precepts of doublethink, once a symbol of Totalitarian regimes such as Stalin's (and the mustachioed Big Brother of the book bears an eerie metaphorical likeness to him), makes me wonder: are we actually at war with any country?... Read more
September 19, 2004
Waller and Steiner: "The more you buy, the more you save!"
For the past month, I have not seen the Santa-hat-wearing fellow who sells books each Sunday mid-day at the corner of Waller and Steiner. He stopped me one morning out on the stoop, while he was negotiating three shopping carts laden with his stock-in-trade, and asked if I wanted to sell him the stuff I was putting out onto the sidewalk. I told him he could take it all in exchange for three books. I wonder if he's moved to another intersection? Have we fallen from favour? (He brought levity to the oddly grimy corner, and also kept it neatly swept. He gave picture-books to kids.)... Read more
Path Between the Seas
Reading the grueling story of the Panama Canal, as told through David McCollough's Path Between the Seas.... Read more
September 2, 2004
The Music of Chance
A quiet morning, re-re-re-reading Paul Auster's Book of Illusions. Is this to modern fiction what math-rock is to rock & roll? Word of the day: span.... Read more
August 30, 2004
... a girl's best friend?
After Shawn, forever singing the virtues of audio books, praised Diamonds, I picked up a reading copy and sat down with it yesterday afternoon. Alexander the Great, on his march into India, is said to have heard about a pit filled with diamonds. The pit was guarded by serpents whose gaze would kill a man. Alexander, eager for the diamonds, ordered that his men be given mirrors. When they approached the pit they held up the mirrors and turned the reptiles' gaze back on the snakes themselves, killing them. Alexander then ordered sheep to be slaughtered and their carcasses flung into the pit. The diamonds stuck in the fat. Vultures swooped down and devoured the diamond-studded flesh, and afterward, as they flew away, expelled a rain of diamonds into the hands of Alexander's men.... Read more
August 29, 2004
Sleeping Beauty
Re-read Danny the Champion of the World, in an edition illustrated by Quentin Blake. Although I'm particular about illustrations, Blake's idiosyncratic pen-and-wash style illuminates Dahl's wise story of a boy being raised by his clever father. The father enjoys poaching, and what's bred in the blood means that the boy invents a new approach, so fiendish that it means that they will eat their pheasants and wreck the reputation of the local land-lord / capitalist. Not quite a party-line parable, but the villagers do defeat the local tyrant and celebrate in the quiet, studious way of village-folk. Also made into what sounds like an excrescence of a television movie.... Read more
August 12, 2004
You don't sound like much of a prince
Tracked down a library-bound copy of Jay Williams' Petronella, illustrated by Friso Henstra; although the book is still in print, the new illustrations can't possibly have the captivating curves of Henstra's buoyant princess and enchanter. Now I have to find a copy of their other collaboration, "Forgetful Fred."... Read more
August 2, 2004
Fever in
Sick abed today, I read through some Golden Age mystery novels: two (of the few tolerable) by Agatha Christie: Death in the Air and Cards on the Table (others I like include The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and The A.B.C. Murders); and a perennial favourite, Dame Dorothy Sayers' Murder Must Advertise, a novel which transcends genre fiction.... Read more
July 30, 2004
Brideshead Revisited
I picked up a copy of Peepshow: The Cartoon Diary of Joe Matt, a slightly self-righteous, R.-Crumb derivative yet still original confessional comic. I opened it up to a random page, and found a diary entry entitled "How to be cheap." Perfect, as I had bought the book from a vagrant who's a regular at the corner of Waller and Steiner on Sunday mornings: he collects leftover books from all around San Francisco and resells 'em, $1 a pop ("Each book a dollar! 7 for $5! 15 for $10! The more you buy, the more you save," as well as keeping that particular corner clean.... Read more
July 17, 2004
Complete & Uncut
After a harrowing trip home on the J-Church, I debarked at the corner of Church and Duboce and walked in to the Out of the Closet shop to look for a copy of a book: Stephen King's Complete & Uncut "The Stand". I read the cut-for-weight version about 20 years ago, but thinking about germ warfare lately has caused this novel to reënter my mind. To my surprise and delight, I found a crisp hardcover, dust jacket in Brodart even, with the promotional bookmark tucked neatly inside it. Perfect! Just as I picked it off the shelf, the lights dimmed and a clerk announced that the store was closing; "Please bring purchases to the counter."... Read more
July 6, 2004
The power of independent booking
After many years, I finally picked up (and read!) a copy of Mr Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, Lawrence Weschler's essay on the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City. I have enjoyed a membership at the musuem for several years -- one look at their unequalled collection of title="Offsite: My Secret LA">Hagop Sandaljian's microminiature sculptures convinced me! --... Read more
July 4, 2004
You let me get a pregnant elephant ...
At Dutton's in Brentwood, arriving five minutes just before they shut for the weekend, I came across Raphael Patai's The Children of Noah, an account of ancient Semitic seafaring adventures.... Read more
July 3, 2004
In massalia there were no networks
Surprised to find an outpost of a local independent bookstore at the airport, and happily picked up Cunliffe's The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek. Need to find a copy of Mark Buchanan's Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks.... Read more
June 27, 2004
On the origin of cities
Having heard that this year's National Spelling Bee winner took the prize with autochthonous, I wondered where I might stumble upon that word. The answer: on the first page of the Introduction to Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 -- the year that Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island, and The Bronx united as boroughs of New York City. This 1100-page volume, the first in the self-billed definitive history of the city, has a table of contents that runs to ten pages. Once you have a city, you have to decorate it: Image a city where graffiti wasn't illegal, a city where everybody could draw wherever they liked. Where very street was awash with a million colours and little phrases. Where standing at a bus stop was never boring. A city that felt like a living breathing thing which belonged to everybody, not just the estate agents and barons of big business. Imagine a city like that a stop leaning against the wall - its wet.... Read more
June 21, 2004
The place of salt
The place-name wich indicates a place where salt was made. The citation states that it is merely a variation of wick. Mark Kurlansky suggests this definition in his unsatisfying book Cod.... Read more
June 19, 2004
A world in which MUNI is on schedule.
Riding MUNI and staring distractedly out the window, I imagined the multiverse, that in some orthogonal world the driver had sped up and whizzed past these buildings (are they there in the other world?) a little faster, we'd hit a different sequence of lights. ... or that the buildings were slightly taller, the light hadn't distracted the driver, causing him to slow down. Or that the buildings were painted a different colour; that the cars hadn't changed lanes, forcing the trolley to slow down; that I had caught a MUNI driven by an auto-pilot; that MUNI had precedence over autos; usw. Walking home, I found a copy of Michael Crichton's "Timeline", a novel with quantum mechanics as its trope.... Read more
June 12, 2004
A short-term effect?
Reading the Vintage Book of Amnesia, edited by Jonathan Lethem (whose Motherless Brooklyn I loved; unhappily, I haven't enjoyed any of this other books, excepting the fantastical, short, and tortuous The Shape We're In). Aside from the beautiful "Nightmare" by Shirley Jackson and the whopping six-page story by Donald Bartheleme, many of the stories disappoint me, including Lethem's own contribution. An essay by neurologist Oliver Sacks discusses the physioloigical underpinnings of amnesia while describing the sad case of "The Last Hippie."... Read more
June 11, 2004
The ships are getting restless
Perusing The Outlaw Sea and thinking of .... Read more
May 31, 2004
Reading day
Engineers of Dreams Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation Vintage Book of Amnesia The Secret Life of Lobsters Locust... Read more
May 27, 2004
Pirates of the Malaccas
Reading Giles Milton's account of the bloody Spice Wars, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. His loose collection of anecdotes prevents the book from being a strong history, but some of the anecdotes relate very exciting incidents from the struggle amongst the feckless Dutch, cunning Portuguese, and desperate British. During this time of intrepid, daring, and stupid exploration, the Dutch innvoated map-making technology. Today, this online mapping tool produces interactive maps (with nearby transit stops marked!) for almost any address in the European Union. James Lancaster, who inadevertently created the trading triangle between England, Gujarat, and the Spice Islands when he pillaged Portuguese carracks in the Indian Ocean, ran into weather on his return to England: Even Lancaster felt the end was near. Descending into his cabin, he penned a letter to the Company in London, a letter whose unfailing spirit would become legendary among the sailors of the East India Company. 'I cannot tell where you should looke for me,' he wrote, 'because I live at the devotion of the winds and seas.' And then, sending the letter over to the Hector, he hade her head for England leaving his own ship to her fate. The Hector's captain refused and shadowed the Red Dragon until the storm finally abated. And so, side by side, the ships sailed first to St Helena and then into the English Channel. When the adventurer Wm. Hawkins arrived in Gujarat to arrange English trading rights, he found strong pro-Portuguese sentiment, backed by Shah Jehangir's official pact with Portugal. Hawkins was annoyed but placed his trust in tact and diplomacy. He sent a polite but firm letter to the Portuguese command reminding him that their two countries were at peace and asking that 'he release my men and goods, for that we were Englishmen.' The commander was in no mood to be lenient and sent Hawkins a return letter 'vilely abusing His Majesty [King James I] terming him King of Fishermen, and of an island of no import'. Worse still, he described Hawkins as 'a fart for his commision'.... Read more
Library of babel
I'm working on a bibliography of books about bridges.... Read more
May 24, 2004
Decaying machinery
Photographs of urban decaying mechinery in the sublime Forgotten Substations and Eliza.... Read more
May 14, 2004
A subway named möbius
Many years ago, I read a collection of science-fiction short stories that included A J Deutsch's "A Subway Named Möbius:" in this story, a new addition to the Boston T resulted in a topological anomaly, and the train carriages went missing on the track. An Argentinian crew moved the story to the labyrinthine subway of Buenos Aires; I can't find this on disc, though. ... this seems to be the most popular story associated with the author; it turns up all over the web, but very little else does!... Read more
May 12, 2004
A matched control subject
The subject of a landmark case in scientific ethics as well as the physiological basis of sexual identity died last week.... Read more
April 27, 2004
H is for hapax legomenon.
When I was seven or eight, I read an odd book: I cannot recall the title, but remember that the cover illustration had a gaudy painting of a dark room with a brain in a jar, and a boy standing in studied amazement. The story told of the young boy and his relationship with the brain, which could answer anything; one of the curious bits of trivia it knew as that Jane Austen's posthumously-published Northanger Abbey makes the first printed reference to rounders as "base ball". What is the technical term for the first occurrence of a word or phrase? Karen Joy Fowler has written a book in the first-person plural, titled The Jane Austen Book Club.... Read more
April 26, 2004
Lauding laudanum
Several years ago I read Althea Hayter's excellent Opium and the Romantic Imagination; today I picked up The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics.... Read more
April 14, 2004
There and back again
It's been a while since I had any seafaring adventures. I picked up a copy (signed first-edition) of Caroline Alexander's latest, The Bounty. The story of Capt Bligh and the Bounty has long fascinated me, and now I'm learning new details: May 1 brought an extraordinary diversion: two sharks were caught and in the belly of one was found a prayer book, "[q]uite fresh," according to Lieutenant Clark, "not a leaf of it defaced." The book was inscribed "Francis Carthy, cast for death in the Year 1786 and Repreaved the Same day at four oClock in the afternoon." The book was subsequently confirmed as having belonged to a convict who had sailed to Botany Bay in 1788 with the first fleet of prisoners consigned to transportation.... Read more
April 7, 2004
L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.
World War II flying ace Antoine de Saint-Exupéry disappeared somewhere over the Mediterranean, on a spy mission in '44. Succinctly, he wrote a beautiful story that profoundly affected many, and has led to much thought in many languages. It took me a long time to learn where he came from. The little prince, who asked me so many questions, never seemed to hear the ones I asked him. It was from words dropped by chance that, little by little, everything was revealed to me. The first time he saw my airplane, for instance...he asked me: "What is that object?" "That is not an object. It flies. It is an airplane. It is my airplane." And I was proud to have him learn that I could fly. He cried out then: "What! You dropped down from the sky?" "Yes," I answered modestly. "Oh! That is funny!" And the little prince broke into a lovely peal of laughter, which irritated me very much. I like my misfortunes to be taken seriously.... Read more
April 3, 2004
Achilles, heal thyself.
Roy and Leslie Adkins' stirring account of Jean-François Champollion's life, spent in pursuit of hieroglyphics, revealed that this young linguist, hailed as a genius from a very early age, struggled with German. Of all the modern languages (French, English, Italian, the latter two necessary for reading scholarship) and the oriental and african languages (Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, Chaldean, Persian, Greek, Latin, Demotic, and especially Coptic), he encountered problems with the most structured of modern European languages? I didn't realise that the decipherement of the Rosetta Stone didn't take place for many years after Champollion's discovery. Although the Adkins' book tosses in odd bits of sensationalism (describing the work of an English antiquariam, "... he was a homosexual ...") and often irrelevant and unedifying asides, it is a decent account of the struggle to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. At times they attempt to cast Champollion and Young as fighting mano a mano, but they would do better to focus on Champollion and his stalwart brother, Jean-Jacques. They present the historical context of the Royalist upheaval in France very well.... Read more
March 31, 2004
Think globally?
File under "another one bites the dust": The strong-willed Chinook bookshop in Colorado Springs, CO will close forever on its 45th anniversary. When I was a wee lad, I often wandered down to the underground Pinocchio Books a few blocks from my parents' house in Pittsburgh. A few months after the first mega bookstore (a Barnes & Noble, which we had previously known only as a catalogue-based seller of remainders) moved in, Pinocchio closed. A store that sold Winne Ille Pu and a large assortment of Tintin comics, as well as a spectacular selection of children's books, I loved walking down there to browse and sometimes buy. The shop moved to Boston, where it fared little better.... Read more
March 28, 2004
I wish that I could push a button.
I'm often irritated by narrative written in the present tense. The tense doesn't immediately turn me off a novel, though: I really enjoyed Michael Frayn's Headlong : A Novel, with the immediacy of the protagonist's plunge into obsession captured by the tense. And now that I'm again re-reading Tunnel Vision, I realise that it, too, uses the present tense for most of the frantic narrative (the thing that irritates me about this book -- you know there has to be something -- is that it's set in a sans serif type). Tunnel Vision tells the story of a tubespotter (think trainspotter, but with an obsessions focussed on the glorious London Underground) who bets his wedding and honeymoon that he can journey all 260-odd stops on the Tube in one day. With a drunken tramp as his Virgil and the dodgy signals of the Tube as his nemesis, our hero desperately tries to beat the clock in order to meet his fiancée at the Eurostar.... Read more
March 13, 2004
Manuscripts never burn.
Unlike Jorge at the spetacular conclusion of Eco's "The Name of the Rose," the crazed idealist at the end of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita declares that "Manuscripts don't burn." Saw the A.C.T. production of ditto; the staging was magnificent, and the themes of the novel resonated clearly. A little on the long side (3+ hours, with intermission -- coffee! mints!), the play was quite liberal in its interpretation of Bulgakov's witch- and satanic imagery. I didn't notice the sign reading: "Caution: This play contains adult content. Nudity." until leaving the theatre.... Read more
March 8, 2004
Here's Johnny.
After many, many years, I finally watched the Stanley Kubrick adapation of Stephen King's novel The Shining. The book that Jack was writing contained the one sentence ("All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy") repeated over and over. Kubrick had each page individually typed. For the Italian version of the film, Kubrick used the phrase "Il mattino ha l' oro in bocca" ("He who wakes up early meets a golden day"). For the German version, it was "Was Du heute kannst besorgen, das verschiebe nicht auf Morgen" ("Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today") For the Spanish version, it was "No por mucho madrugar amanece más temprano" ("Although one will rise early, it won't dawn sooner.")... Read more
March 2, 2004
Ramblings from an un-named state in the West.
Began reading Truman Capote's Music for Chameleons. Now I wonder: the deliberately-titled "Nonfiction Account of an American Crime" novella which marks his entreé into the nonfiction novel genre (did he create that? as he more-or-less claims in the Introduction) bears the mark of verisimilitude as does, say, Fargo, which starts off with the title "Based on a true story." And of course it wasn't. Never mind that the incident which sparks all the crime is a land-grab for water rights. I would like to find a nice, short biography of Capote. I never finished either Rexroth's Autobiographical Novel or the biography which I have started several times in the past six years -- and Rexroth has long fascinated me, in his writing and in his life. He lived just down the street, on the same block as I live now.... Read more
February 26, 2004
Is our librarians learning?
The Palo Alto Daily News ran a story reporting that the Redwood City Public Library has learned a lesson from San Francisco. Librarians preparing for the upcoming $45,000 renovation of the Schaberg Community Library simply discarded unwanted titles, and did not coöperate with a local resident who tried to take them to other community organisations.... Read more
February 22, 2004
A rubaiyat you could be proud of
Began reading Amin Maalouf's Samarkand, which chronicles the adventures of a young Omar Khayyam. The novel, originally in French, mixes a fantastic modern-day tale of the manuscript's redisovery with an account of its creation, just as the Seljuks were advancing across Persia.... Read more
