Orion Reads

quick update

2009-06-01T14:56:00.000-07:00

currently reading Awakenings, a history of "The Sleeping Sickness", which is a form of Parkinson's wherein the victim more or less loses all will. Sometimes mental will, sometimes physical will (ie, you want to pick up the book, but you're body refuses). The author, Oliver Sacks (who also wrote uncle tungsten), reports on his experiments using the drug L-DOPA to 'awaken' such sleepers. I usually don't go for medical books, but this has some pretty bizarre stories in it, and Sacks is actually a pretty decent author. And the words i don't know are pretty bad-ass.

also reading On The Lower Frequencies, a history San Francisco during the last ten years or so told from an unapologetically biased punk-rock & homeless perspective. i love the dude's voice and perspective, and there's some pretty good historical material as well.

have given up reading The Diaries of Jane Somers by Doris Lessing. It's just too slow.

OH ! the thing i'm REALLY reading is Thomas Ligotti's Teattro Grotesco. This book is awesome. It's existential horror, but i can't say anything more about it now because it needs much much more than a short synopsis. I am also trying to make a short puppet-film out of one of these stories, am illustrating one of them, and am writing a piece of short fiction hopefully in the prose-style of them.

Europe Central, Doris Lessing binge, William Taylor Hookin' Me Up (almost)

2009-03-02T19:20:00.000-08:00

I finished the considerable thickness that is Europe Central a month or so ago. I have to say that this was one of the most difficult books for me to get any traction with that i've ever read, and i very nearly put it down. It was literally just a day or two after a threatening love-letter to EC that we finally found some common ground where we could have an exchange of ideas. But that common ground turned out to be a verdant valley indeed, and the price of getting there was worth it. I will criticize the unapproachable parts: they weren't rewarding. With some difficult books, the difficult parts themselves are rewarding: you have an "aha!" or "ooh!" at the end of the struggle. I felt that the difficult portions of EC were more punative or hazing: you have to endure this unpleasant thing in order to get to the good parts. And the unpleasant things were unpleasant indeed: abstract-yet-first-person narrators, reams of thickly-veiled allusions to historical events which this reader didn't have the education to begin to know wtf he was talking about, entire chapters of pith narrated only as reflections of specific passages of classical music. Seriously. Ordinarily i have a pretty low tolerance for literature: there are so many good books out there, that i don't feel any compunction to continue reading a book just because i've started it: i need to be enjoying it. But i've read another work by Vollmann, The Royal Family, and have a very high regard for his prose.

Europe Central is historical fiction taking place in Germany and the Soviet Union spanning about 1928 to 1960, with most of the attention during WWII. It picks out a handful of real historical figures and does a fantastic job of portraying them as real people set in a real war. The passage which has stuck with me most vividly is that of an upper-middle-class german woman who's upper-middle-class, respectable husband is home on a brief leave from the polish front, and as just a part of a marital argument she confronts him with raping polish women: "everyone knows what you men are doing out there". This brought home to me the extreme warping nature of war: middle class men like myself or perhaps yourself become (or became, if it helps make it real) literal rapists.

.. which makes an unexpected segue to Doris Lessing's The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five (as narrated by the chroniclers of Zone Three), in which Lessing presents one of the most mature and credible portrayals of an adult relationship i've ever read, in which a forced marriage between the queen of an enlightened territory (imagine a Waldorf school the size of northern california) and the king of a brutal one (qv "sparta") opens with his immediately raping her and closes with a portrait of real intimacy between the two, and an entirely convincing evolution from one point to the other. Technically Science-Fiction, the book is really about men and women, their relationships, and the realtionships of couples to the rest of society. despite having the world's dullest, most reader-unfriendly title ever, it's quite good. I'm stoked to have discovered another good author to read. What made me decide that D.L. might be a good writer was her famous reaction to learning she'd won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature: "oh, christ." If you haven't seen it, it's worth looking up.

Mykle was surprised to learn that i started my Lessing-reading with The Marriages and told me that some of her other works were much more approachable, especially Winter In July. Fortunately i'd bought up every used Lessing they had in Dog-Eared Books in SF, and that included Winter In July, so i picked that eagerly up next, and Mykle was right. Winter In July is a masterpiece of human portraiture, short stories set in South Africa in the years before and after WWII. It has the tension and insight into social stratification of Flannery O'Connor but while O'Connor's humour is greater, Lessing's characters have more complex relationships to each other. Absolutely read this book if you haven't.

Finally i had an awesome personal event center around a book a couple weeks ago. I was in one of my favorite bars, which has a new bartendress whom i imagined i shared a certain affinity with, and one fine sunday afternoon had resolved to try to make a date with her. I know that hitting on bartenders is pretty much the tackiest thing under the sun, but .. well, i guess there's no but. I aimed to do it. So we were having a great chat as usual, and she knows i'm a reader (i read parts of all three of the above while chatting with her) and suddenly asks "hey! do you like poetry?" - which, with very, very few exceptions, i don't: poetry gives me a dull headache. John Donne and William Taylor jr are pretty much the only poets i read with gusto. So i was in a tough place: i wanted to have a shared interest with her, but i didn't want to have to read some awful poetry. So i philandered with "well.. i like some poetry", and she dashed off into the back and returned with a thickish book and passed it over to my cringing hands with "well check this out". .. And it turned out to be Bill Taylor's Words for Songs Never Written ! I have been meaning to get a copy since it came out, it's a book of compelling physical and poetic beauty, as Bill's work is absolutely top notch. He writes mostly about street life in SF's Tenderloin district, and portrays and evokes beauty in places where i can only sense a small rumor of it. Prostitutes, the lonely, and bartenders make frequent appearances, but so does non-ironic commentary on the loss of what i personally have loved the USA for. you'll have to read the poems to find out. Anyhow, so i said "hey! do you know Bill?" and she: "no, do you?" and thus i was able to wake-board a little bit on the power of Bill's charm and my coolness of knowing him. She read a couple poems out loud, i read half the book to myself, and as i was leaving i wrote my info on the receipt (dog-eared, again) which was still inside the book and gave it back to her with "my number's in the book if you ever want to hang out". The appropriateness here sort of demanded it. Naturally and sensibly, she of course demurred, citing just getting out of a long relationship, but she did seem excited to have a phone number in the book. So, thank you, Bill ! (as a post-script, the failed hitting-upon doesn't seem to have soured the bartender/client thing, and we're still jawing on sunday afternoons)

As another final status-update,
in bed i'm re-reading Have His Carcase by Dorothy Sayers, whom i love. The Diaries of Jane Somers, also by Lessing is being read from the throne at the rate of about two pages per day, and the book in the backpack, which is always the main book, is currently Teatro Grottesco, by the master of contemporary existential horror, Thomas Ligotti. - Which reminds me, i am also working very slowly on a short story of my own, a horror vignette in the Lovecraft mythos, set in sinister San Bernadino, California. I'm at the point where i can just barely see the entire plot arc, and should "soon" have the first draft done.

Europe Central

2008-12-04T08:09:00.001-08:00

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

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

Yrs, Elenzil

The Yiddish Policeman's Union

2008-11-03T23:27:00.001-08:00

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

Here's the overview:

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

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

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

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

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

DFW

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

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

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

rest in peace, david.

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

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

GOD DAMN IT

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

motherfucking god damn it.
RIP DFW.

The Crossing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the stack

2007-11-10T20:26:00.001-08:00

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

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

spook country

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

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

words: (several not english, i think)

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

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

also, great author photo.

Hard Truth

2007-10-27T19:05:00.002-07:00

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

For Whom The Bell Tolls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imperial San Francisco

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

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

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

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

All in all well worth the read.

On quick quote about our friend Hearst

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

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

All The Pretty Horses

2007-08-06T23:15:00.001-07:00

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

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

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

It's beautifully written.

The Poincaré Conjecture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SO, GREAT.

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

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

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

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

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

One Flew East, One Flew West

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brief Update

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

am writing from buenos aires.

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

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

okay, going backwards.

about to read:

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

currently reading:

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

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

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

very recently read:

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

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

not so recently read:

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

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

.. many others.

House of Meetings

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

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

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

So some examples of Amis's wonderful prose.

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

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

.. So obviously the prose is pretty good.

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

The Battle Over Hetch Hetchy, The Bookman's Wake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Persepolis 1 & 2

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

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

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

Eichmann in Jerusalem

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

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

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

Eichmann in Jerusalem is extremely difficult to reduce:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So that's obviously troubling stuff.

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

All The Shah's Men

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

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

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

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

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

Up Next!

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

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

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

The Beautiful and the Damned, In Our Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Helprin

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

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

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