Fonts for the Memories

[What? It's been a week already?]

Slate had a pair of interesting (at least as far as these things go) articles on typeface* geekery today (here and here). The world of reading aesthetics is, not surprisingly, full of prejudice. For those people who can't go five minutes without thrusting endless rows of the things before their watery, myopic eyes, the presentation of words on the page or the screen matters a lot, and preferences worm their way in to the brain to imprint themselves somewhere just below the level of conscious thought.

For reading, I'm still all about the Times typeface, or one of the dozen usual variants of it. I'm not super particular about it, so long as it's something decently seriffed, stately, fully justified, and proportionally spaced, like in all of those half-remembered novels from my childhood--it's what respectable prose writing should look like, way more serious than the urgently penned capitals of my innumerable dogeared comics, or the vast and random array of ironically emphasized styles of MAD magazine. The aspect ratio might change a little in the book printing, the spacing, the boldness, but it was always something tall and gabled, a font bespeaking decency, old money, dignity.

In those unheralded formative years of mine, after Led Zeppelin's peak roughly, and before Nirvana's, sans serif typefaces had a certain unsavory meaning. They connoted a dated gosh-wow sci-fi feel, dusty and cobwebbed under the banality of actual post-Cold War modernity. They were the guilty pleasures of my parents' day, almost of my grandparents'. I'm grateful for the article's dissection of Arial as a streamlined, zippy-but-dumb Helvetica. Helvetica is the ubiquitous roadsign typeface, with a couple of curves and tails offering the reminder of the old-school sophisitication that must be sacrificed in the name of clarity. Arial, by contrast, needs to have a rocketship underneath it. (Not that there's anything wrong with rocketships.)

I suppose this opinion is thanks in part to my young computer experiences, such as they were. I remember those ugly all-caps early computer displays--a string of pidgin English, delivered in a shout, and followed by a block of a cursor blinking inanely at the end. I always peeked at those early gray boxes in fascination, but the promise of doing cool shit with those mysterious boxes tended to dissolve in five boring minutes of effort. If the programming bug ever bit me in those days (or ever), I'd probably be rich now. I wanted to believe, but I didn't have the patience to become a convert.

Not that I ever got that far from the church though, even while I was a stranger to its deeper mysteries. I learned to type on one of these beasts, bought by my parents out of some sense of obligation to the times. Those Tandys were early advertisers of office utility (and the fact that the Radio Shack brand didn't have an underground network of pirated and swapped games had a lot to do with my parents' purchase). A lie, that. That machine had an evil and primitive word processing program that was already obsolete at the time of purchase. It could produce lower case though, and I remember the dot matrix recalcitrantly whirring out a barely legible mixed typeface for my school reports, some Arial bastard with Roman Is. My poor mother attempted to crank out a number of book manuscripts with that turd, perforated wheel guides carefully torn off, sheets separated and then lovingly packaged. (I transcribed one from its hard copy three years ago for her for Christmas, and keep meaning to follow through with the others). Mom never submitted in Courier (which I admit is a lot easier to scan by eye), but then she also never quite got anything published.

In college, there was, of course, more writing. As an engineering student, I don't think I imprinted quite as strongly as a liberal arts sort might have, and anyway there wasn't any word-wrangling platform ubiquitous enough at the time to lock in my aesthetic. (I got my degree in '94, as Bill Gates was still perfecting his stranglehold on office software tools.) There was a huge network of public workstations (unix-based I think), blessedly with laser printers. Sometimes I wrote lab reports on a program called Slate, but usually I just used a generic text editor. If I was running really last minute and didn't have time for the haul across campus, I borrowed my roommate's typewriter. There was email on campus (and it was new!), and I engaged in some other text-based nerd-tivities I'd rather not disclose just now. None of it used the tired zip of streamlined letters. They were all stately and decorated at the ends, giving my playtime the illusion of respectability.

A lot of the writers interviewed in the Slate (magazine) article are annoying ("my preference of Courier means I'm better than you"), but I am not without my own pretensions. All of my accepted manuscripts have been for academic publications (not as great as it sounds, but pride baby, gotta have it). My graduate advisor insisted that everything be written in Times font for those (usually, I shudder to say, as he suggested words and phrases from behind my shoulder), because that's what the journals expected. I consider Microsoft's version of Times New Roman to be the graduation point of my writing efforts. I mean, I was (am) a second-rate scientist, but I could totally write circles around that guy.

Maybe it would have ended there, but the internets were coming about at that time too, slamming me with that space-agey Helvetica ripoff again. Every online publication seems to use it, and it's grown on me, I admit (I mean, look around). It's tough to read anything for very long on a CRT, and simpler and bolder typefaces help ease the eyestrain immensely. I've gotten somewhat ecumenical in my tastes: Arial (or similar) for on-line reading or for presenting data, Times for prose, Courier to tempt that Damocles sword of the rejection slip. Different fonts for different haunts. I've never been a purist anyway.

Keifus

*Note to self: remember this site

Book Review: The Story of The Stone by Barry Hughart

Grade: A
This one's for august, who is by far the best Chinese historian that I've ever met. I don't know if he intentionally takes his nickname from his scholarship, but I've only encountered one dude for whom that word is a standard adjective. Maybe the big J-Dog bends his eye to the wrong side of the cube every once in a while, and who knows, maybe he even slums it in redneck country long enough to inspire clever English-wielding sinophiles like august and Barry Hughart (who lives in the Arizona). If the Jade Emperor ever does make a visit, I hope he dresses the part...

August ran an excellent series of posts recently on Chinese Daoism, and I'm indebted to him (and Wikipedia) for any understanding of its basic precepts that might have informed my reading. It would be a blast to read a contextual critique of Hughart's work, by someone who could separate from the Daoism from the deism maybe, or to contrast it againt the resurging Confucian ideas that formed the seventh century political backdrop of this novel. (To this western barbarian, it seems a difference between resignation toward the bureaucratic evils of the time and a dutiful embrace of them.) August could certainly do a better job than I at picking apart all of the cheerful and quite intentional anachronisms and historical deviations too.

Not that it's a political novel by any means. It's more its own sort of hybrid of detective fiction, ghost story, love story, and mythic parable, set against the worst sorts of historical horrors--tyrants, murderers, genocidal madmen, endemic corruption. Hughart handles it all with an irresistable light heart. He has a soft spot for the oppressed, for lonely genius, for doomed lovers, and the prose is a masterpiece of understated humor (which doesn't preclude laughing out loud in parts). The Story of the Stone, like his other novels, concerns the adventures of Master Li Kao, an impossibly aged and knowledgable scholar with a slight flaw in his character, and his assistant, Number Ten Ox (the narrator), a peasant with immense brawn, heart, and humility. Together, they traipse about the empire--from imperial and barbarian courts to the tombs of tyrants and boys' hideouts, to the Ten Hells even--solving supernatural mysteries like a debased, crafty Holmes on the back of a gigantic, charming Watson. Part of Hughart's genius is to let real pathos sneak past the tender narration and fabulation now and then, catching a genuine and sometimes heartbreaking glimpse of the rot of power and the nobility of the honest heart.

If there's a fault with The Story of the Stone, it's that it has the misfortune of following Hughart's first novel, which was in many ways a singular work. It had to succeed a story of an ancient China that never was with an ancient China that sort of was, and as such, it takes a couple dozen pages to get its groove back. Like a lot of mysteries (not that I read many) there are a lot of plot points in the air at any time with little help of emphasis, and after a while I stopped trying very hard to follow the twists in the labyrinth, and just let the author walk me through it, enjoying the sights. It's a great ride.

Story as a standalone novel is twenty years out of print anyway, but apparently an omnibus edition was released in in 1998 due to popular demand, which may be even harder to find. (I think Bridge of Birds is still quite easy to get your hands on, however. That book is the only story I've recommended to my mother that she enjoyed, ever. I figure that has to say something about its universal appeal.) Hughart was evidently quite upset with his publishers, and unable to support himself writing for a living, quit sometime after the release of his third novel.

Keifus

Organization and such
Author: Barry Hughart
Title: The Story of the Stone
Genre: fiction, mystery, fantasy

My Redneck Christmas (Mandolin Photos)

I am not a hillbilly, I swear. I'd never fit in those parts, even if I've grown a certain, um, tolerance for some of the music over the last three years. I have no pickup truck, no hound dog, I'm not religious, and every time I say the word y'all, I intend it ironically. Ah well, this thrills me anyway.


The mandolin my father built is done. I'm going to take a minute here to brag about his work. It's beautiful. I love the color of it (which is of course impossible to see in the photos). The highlights are tobacco brown instead of the usual black/gray/white. The shamrock is a required ornament (I wanted one anyway, as it goes with the brand), and I didn't have any special design for the inlays, other than the monogram. Dad had me looking through catalogues, and frankly, I didn't see any that I liked better than what he usually does.

The top of a mandolin is spruce, and the back is maple. Maple is particularly beautiful when it is stained, and the backs of these instruments--no fancy inlays or cutouts required--are gorgeous. My old mandolin has (below), in Dad's opinion, the nicest-looking back he's made. The finish really brought out the flame pattern. You can see it on the new one too, but the stock he bought for this one didn't have the same striking flames.

It plays great. Dad actually changed the angle on the neck a ballhair, so that the strings are a more constant distance to the frets over the whole length of the fingerboard. This makes them easy to push down (easier to hammer on and pull off too), and my speed and precision suddenly seem a lot better. I keep sliding over the new frets though. The neck is also a little thicker than I'm used to, but it doesn't impede my playing like I thought it might, and I'm not having a problem reaching the G string, so that's fine. With the faster action though, the strings sometimes buzz the frets if I hit 'em too hard (everyone thinks I play better quietly anyway), which may change as the instrument ages. The strings put tremendous stress on the neck (there's a steel truss rod in there), and it may pull up minutely over time.

Of course it's probably wasted on me. I still suck. I shot a video of me playing the thing, but Google video is still "processing" it a day and a half later. (I probably shouldn't have put "hot nude co-eds" in the filename.) It's just as well, trust me. You should learn to play these things when you're young.

Update: Here it is. The tune is called "Kitchen Gal." No doubt I'll regret posting it.


Keifus

Natural Labyrinth

I was reading recently about the ideas of wildlife corridors. Conservationists have been floating the idea around for thirty years or more that the encroachment of habitat can be alleviated by--if large open spaces are out of the question--then by providing a lot of smaller spaces that are interconnected. When there is continuity between environments such that predators can roam, pollen can spread, even where species can migrate long distances, then the impact of human presence can be significantly reduced because the forest creatures are not uncomfortably cornered into shrinking squares of space. Wildlife corridors from Yellowstone Park to the Yukon and along tiger and elephant routes in India are being pursued (no doubt with varying degrees of ineffectiveness).

It's been a (reasonably asked) open question as to just how successful these corridors actually are in preserving species and their habit(at)s. Last year, a study out of UCSB was published in Science (sorry, the link is a report of a report) showing significant improvements in biodiversity as they measured it in controlled swatches of North Carolina woodland. Evidently, that's the first quantitative report of the positive effects of functional connectivity, even though organizations have been acting on that hypothesis for a couple decades.

Ordinarily the idea of pushing a policy based on speculation would really annoy me, but these are policies with pleasant side effects. Living close to minor, local versions of wildlife arteries has really improved my quality of life. The upside of my crappy neighborhood is the illusion of seclusion. The view from my back porch (on the right) occludes most of the neighbors. If you look closely, you can see children crossing the stream on a log. My daughter loves to play down there, and regularly drags her little sister and her neighborhood friends on expeditions "down the bank". (Only one of those kids is mine.)

The woods, such as they are, extend between back yards along two streets. Turn ninety degrees to the right and you can wave at the neighbors across the way in the winter. If you go far enough along the direction of the photo, there is a road to cross, but once you do that, you can meander westward behind the scenes until you get into a state forest. If you cross the street that bounds the east end of the stream, then you're in another sizable chunk of sparsely molested wooded area, cut through only with a railroad and a rarely traveled road or two (and dotted with official and unofficial landfills, and harassed by dorks on ATVs). I've seen deer, foxes, and coyotes that've managed to make their way along the mangy appendage of the state forest to my back yard.

Here is a picture that I took on a walk with my daughter in December through the eastern half of the woodland dumbell. That hill you see was completely forested last spring, but it's being cleared for new developments. McMansions probably, judging from the neighborhood on the other side of the hill. The higher ones should be able to see the roof of the new Wal-Mart that is currently being built a ways down below. [Nah, I don't think it's high enough in hindsight.] Can't stop progress. Maybe those people will work there when the balloon payment on their creative mortgage hits.

If you were ingenious at solving those IQ-test spatial projection problems, you might enjoy crystallography as a hobby. Luckily for me, I was only all right at them, and I'm able to get my kicks from more primitive versions of morphology. One neat thing that's possible in three dimensions is bicontinuity. If you were walking on the monkey bars below (imagine an extended network of them), you could get to any point in the cube. You could do the same thing if you could travel the space between the lines. A lot of bicontinuous structures occur naturally on a microscopic scale. Any system of immiscible phases can have this property, but you can also do cool shit with it on purpose. The picture on the right is a representation of an inverse opal, taken from somebody's presentation on photonic band gap structures. It's made up of the spaces in between close-packed spheres. You can actually fabricate structures like this in the lab by slowly depositing tiny glass balls from a suspension and then filling up the spaces in between.
I love monkeying with the philosophical ideas of bicontinous structures. A viable way to mix civiliztion and nature is one agreeable way to consider it, although as a practical matter, you need to add a third dimension of bridges for the bears and elk to cross the highways that cut through the wildlife corridors. But you can go more universal too. I'm pleased that nature may contain hidden but as yet unseeable dimensions, and I want to imagine networks of activity invisibly occuring in this weblike alternate continuum. We can map our brains like this too maybe, cognitive labyrinths of the human experience, something apart and yet intimately close to the inanimate network of stones and trees. It's even a fine interstitial universe in which to pretend spirits can cavort when the light is just right.

Even if it's better that we mostly confine ourselves in the man-made phases, it's good to know there are others.

Book Review: The Iron Dragon's Daughter by Michael Swanwick

Grade: A
"The intent of the Goddess is neither known nor knowable. She makes us dance, male and female, in ever converging gyres that bring us ultimately each to our own destiny, and that destiny is always the same and never escapable. She does not tell us why."

"'Woe!' he cried. 'Alas for those who seek after Truth, for such is the Goddess's most hoarded treasure. Ah, she is cruel and unfathomable, and bitter, bitter is her vengeance.'"

This one's for ThyGoddess. She wasn't originally chalked up to go first, but she did insist, and some, um, beings you don't want to disappoint. (Plus, I feel like I owe her one.)

**

If you think about it, the old tales were always scary. They were, if not ostensibly, always morality fables, trying to pin the caprice of nature to a human ethical map. If the fairy stories lost their puissance over the last couple hundred years, it's because people found modern things to fear, things of their humanity's own making. At its core, Swanwick's novel uses the lessons and characters of the old tales to capture the horrors of a contemporary setting, and finds that the fit is, um, fantastic. I love this book.

And what god (or goddess) isn't an exaggeration of human qualities? Whether we're talking mercy (the antithesis of nature) or vital randomness (the essence of it), we've painted our pantheon with the mirrors close by, anthropomorphizing the cold universe with all of our human spite and wonder. In the context of the story, it's an open question who painted the spiral universe of The Iron Dragon's Daughter. The novel concerns the early life of Jane, a human girl, trapped in a fey world. She starts off indentured to a factory that would do Dickens proud, filled with sprites and trolls and elves in the roles of workers, supervisors, and plant engineers. It is, of course, a formative story, and as Jane escapes from one setting to the next (high school, college, high society, false hierarchies all) the evil and the drama and the love is captured in startling hyperbole. I've said it before, if you're going to use a supernatural setting, everything is what you do with it. Swanwick uses the hyper-human personae of the supernatural for satire. I mean, if you're a certain sort of reader you've seen factory trolls and the like a hundred times, but in the real world, the scarier goblins are in the bureaucracy, and some of the Swanwick's vignettes with these creatures are classic (failed engineers mutilated for shame, a bibliophile bookseller who can't part with his stock, an ancient professor decanted once a year for a lecture). I can't say that Swanwick's prose is across-the-board fabulous, but when he gets rolling with his synthesis of fantastic and mundane language, he is outstanding. I especially loved the chemistry.

I'm impressed with the structure of this story too. As it develops, it grows a feeling that the world's coming apart at the seams, even while the story retains an overall coherence. Jane graduates from one society to another, escapes each really, and in each setting, the stakes get higher, ultimately threatening the consensus reality itself. She goes through several iterations of a life's drama (without losing the overall dramatic arc), and the drama is exaggerated to frightening proportions. She's a heroine (a self-made chemist!) with tragic flaws (a thief, a floozy). The situations are at times shocking--sexual, violent--but I found myself biting my lip as Jane struggles to find her destiny each time, all the while losing to a growing and nearly unavoidable temptation. She breaks through each wall, bodies (literally) in her wake, to find herself living the same story in a new setting. It would spoil the book, perhaps, to reveal what the established reality is (or isn't), but even the ending is not conclusive.

The Goddess of this book is something like a prime mover or a demiurge, and favors the human girl stuck in fairy world. The final loop takes us through a double thick layer of metaphors for hope and fatalism--does the universe give a shit or not?--and it's favorite source of quotes for me. Where has Jane been? Is she really free? What's it all mean for any of us? Read it. I've seen this done before, but rarely this well.

Right now I'm grooving on...

• ...bluegrass instrumentation, country influences, acoustic sonority, demanding instrumental part writing, and meandering melodic phrasing.

In other contexts, I've found myself to like

• pop metal qualities, a subtle use of vocal harmonies, repetetive melodic phrasing, extensive vamping, minor key tonalities, and dirty guitar solos
  
• varying tempo and time signatures, meandering melodic phrasing (again!), mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation, a composed melodic style, and many other similarities identified in the music genome project. (This station is not yet well developed.)

This Pandora website kicks ass.

Five More Thoughts (Contrarian Bullshit Ed.)

Some time ago, Demosthenes2 wrote a Fray post on three levels of thinking.* It was one of those that stuck with me, and I sure wish I could find a cite for it. As I recall it anyway, level one thinking involved sucking down wholly packaged ideas--usually without chewing--and regurgitating them loudly--often without provocation, at the dinner table. Having moved past dogmatism, the sophomore(ic) level two thinker lives to poke holes in every established manner of thought. Level three had something to do with mature independent blah blah something. That guy does like to go on.

1. Contrarian Bullshit and Statistics
The engineer in me loves to conflate mature analysis to number-crunching--not that you can't lie with statistics or dazzle with pie charts or anything--but low-level thinkers have a tendency to not really weight anything properly, to follow one possible chain of cause and effect and proclaim away as though it were the only important one. And some of the lying trends are sometimes falsifiable, which is a good reason to poke at them. If you don't have the time, and need a rule of thumb, however, the number of links in the causal chain is usually a pretty good depth gauge for the bullshit.

Playing in the real world--or at least the sometimes verisimilitudinous worlds of policy and economics--means that all such chains are hard to follow because you can't control the inputs very well, and you don't understand the initial conditions (damn butterflies with their incessant wing-flapping). More, there are human casualties to the approximations. The fact that lives are quantized does matter, and while you can't account for all the anomalies in any analysis, minimizing the bad consequences of policy is as important as maximizing the good, as Claude Scales has suggested here. (Hippocratic policy beats hypocritical policy.) Acting on models of spherical, frictionless, er, humans with no external forces can have deadly consequences, and simplifying assumptions should be thrown around with great care of the context.

But that doesn't mean that speculation and conjecture can't be interesting and fun. (Especially considering that otherwise it's "work".) Context, as always, is everything.

2. Solar Desalinization
Considering ensemble effects, the whole round earth is a fine place to draw a control volume. If you do a heat balance on the earth, you're really down to four effects: solar radiation absorbed, solar radiation reflected, heat radiated out to space, and heat energy generated at the surface. Your initial condition is the surface temperature at whatever time you call zero. (Since the temperature distribution across the ball of the earth is impressively not flat, it's probably better to draw your control volume as a shell, which means you'll have some boundary conditions too, at the bottom of the crust say: constant temperature or close enough.)

Most people are aware that this is a good-enough way of looking at global temperature balance (some argument about all the factors that change the globe's reflectivity and absorptivity remains), but it's also a limit on how much energy is available to do stuff. There are really only two sources that are not finite: there's mining heat from the earth's mantle (that should last a while), and, whether it's biomass or silicon, there's solar. The cool thing (so to speak) about solar, is that it doesn't really affect the heat balance (unless there's enough spread out to really affect the absorption coefficient). It just gives that energy something to do on the way down its natural path. And what's life anyway, if not a pointless little whirligig kicked up in the dust of the universe's insensate march toward heat death?

I was thinking about fresh water yesterday. Maybe that will cause more wars eventually than the oil will. Wouldn't it be great if we could efficiently desalinize seawater? Wouldn't it be great if that energy was completely renewable? Duh, Keifus: this one is already working, and adding technological steps may make it more controllable, but it sure ain't going to make it more efficient. If we wanted to increase the generation of fresh water, we'd have to lower the reflectivity of the oceans or something, warm up the...

And you thought the butterflies caused trouble!

3. Research and Development
Solar sounds like a good place to sink our research dollars, eh? But who would fund that sort of thing? Having dabbled in the area (I'm supposed to be a professional researcher, my bosses would prefer me to be a professional negotiator, but dabbling in half-ideas is basically what I do), it's my understanding that there was a lot of venture capital sunk into solar power in the seventies, and the technology grew a lot of stigma because it didn't achieve much return very quickly. Plus, oil got cheap again.

By common agreement, solar power needs to drop to about $1 per Watt to become competitive with fossil fuels, and for the time being, you're stuck with either low efficiency or expensive materials. (Ignore, for now, the matter of all that open space you need to gather it.) Cheap, efficient solar? Maybe possible, but at least a decade off, depending on the oil. You can still get funding for solar R&D: aerospace is a driver (you can't carry a jerry can on the back of the shuttle), and the commercial market's slowly getting grown. Looking twenty years out, you'd think that it would be a huge opportunity, given climate change and oil scarcity. Can we count on investors to think in quarter-century time scales? What do you think.

What caused the decline of corporate R&D? Was it economic or was it cultural? Could Bell Labs have existed without a telephone monopoly? Possibly not, but I fear that the investment culture has become short-term (and the intellectual culture has devolved). It's as though that great post-war manufacturing and innovation surplus (that my parents' generation mistook for their deserved way of life) has been slowly cannibalized. Maybe it was inevitable, but it's an article of faith with me that we could have sustained the boom longer if we kept priming the front end, with a better eye on the horizon. Right now, basic R&D gets mostly funded by (1) the military (which doesn't do real basic at all) and (2) by universities, mostly on the government buck. Even though I'm turning anecdote into data here (hi, hipp), not to mention recycling thoughts (a five-trick pony, that's me), I've seen agreement among my more assiduous peers. R&D is a toughie for the level 1 and 2 libertarian types.

4. Foreign owned: who cares?
Oh, but by monopoly or luck, we once did R&D, and by the Good Ford, the U.S. was the king for a while there. It was pointed out to me yesterday that Toyota and Honda are the new saviours of the American auto industry. Evidently, our crumbling manufacturing infrastructure is desirable to those who'd like to develop new markets, and, I presume, the shipping costs are less if they're building cars for American markets in America (who else is dumb enough to buy SUVs en masse?). There's some yellow streak (not that kind) in me that's annoyed that this isn't being done by American manufacturers, but lets face it: 401k or no, I'm no member of the ownership class. I'm not the sort of person that can network his way to success. Sadly, I need a job.

Income inequality is way up (look at the BLS). Level 1 market types say, "hey, the economy's growing, so stop whining," but even while profit creeps up, wages remain stagnant (anecdote + Paul Krugman), and CEO payscales skyrocket unconscionably. So if it's Toyota's providing the yahoos a salary or if it's GM, do I give a shit who the owners are? Not really. In fact, I feel a little kind of good about sticking it to the man.

(Except that I don't think Toyota hires a lot of American scientists.)

5. Electability
Just for the record, I fucking hate politics, but since I'm speaking of oil and vision, wasn't there a guy running for office who actually faked caring about those things sort of convincingly? What was his name again?

I thought Al Gore was all right. Sure, he was a dork (ahem), but he was a hell of a lot less innumerate than his challenger, more aware of the world, and, sighing or not, light years ahead on the articulation scale. Reading about his support for Iraq bombing in hindsight disappoints me, but still, he was the best Pepsi product I can remember. His wife was a scold, but I'd put up with her too if I were Al.

So. Level 1 political thinking: it's the party platform, vote for the team, Yankees suck. Level 2: Supply side contrarianism, issues voting, and--wait--how does voting for the "electable" guy fit in? Is that bullshit too? Look, I supported Kerry in '04, and it was, like most Kerry supporters, not because I loved the guy but because I thought he was the least obviously flawed candidate. Saying that electability is bullshit is likewise bullshit. Electability ain't so much guessing what your fellow citizens will vote for so much as it is guessing who's going to go down easier with the media. The press will crucify the candidate who they can't imagine getting laid in high school. The electable guy or gal is the one that the reporters aren't slavering to deconstruct into a teenage clique. Gore in 2000 got hoisted as the moody chess champ against the avuncular high-functioning retard. No contest.

So in 2008, who's the one most likely to going to sweet-talk the press and provide them free drinks? That's who's electable. And thus is the lowest common denominator reached.

Good night, everyone.

*UPDATE: D2 mentions that it came from an essay by William Golding (yes, that William Golding) called Thinking as a Hobby. I got the levels backwards (figures), but as our Greek friend says, it's definitely a good read.

UPDATE2: Claude pointed out the link. Don't ask with what.

Introducing my "Books for Buds" project

I was asked recently how I generate my reading lists. The answer is that I used to follow a couple of science fiction groups as a recommendation engine, and also pick up the occasional suggestion from more general discussions. I'd pulled out a few buy-on-sight authors from the ghetto (a lot of whom are underappreciated), and I'm still happy to scratch that speculative itch when it arises, but my tastes have expanded a lot in the past decade, and I've come to value the second sorts or recommendations more, where I've honed less of an instinct. (Publishers will almost always package the genre-bridging stuff idiosyncratically, which is helpful; I wish I knew the name for the disciplined-but-intriguing writing I tend to enjoy.)

So I'm looking out to my you--my online readers, acquaintances, nemeses, compatriots, heroes, friends--to help re-stock my to-read pile. Or in some cases, to elevate the priority of some of the books that have been gathering dust down there for years. The idea is that I'll read a book that calls to mind a person (or personality) that I know online, for one reason or another. It could be a common posting theme of theirs, a reminder of a specific conversation, a book that I know was important to them, a play on their name, or a book that jibes with how I measure their character.

Given the rate at which I read, it won't happen all at once. It'll be probably be an ongoing thing. I've got an incomplete list of books chosen for posters, but what they actually are will be a surprise. Maybe you've got a book that you feel represents yourself or someone we know? I'm looking for recommendations for people not yet on the list, and they all aren't set in stone yet, either. Feel free to make suggestions here, or email me at keifusx@yahoo.com

Here's the list of posters for whom I've already chosen books to read:

• Archaeopteryx (tentatively)
  
• Artemesia
  
• august
  
• bacon
  
• daveto
  
• Ender
  
• Gregor Samsa
  
• hipparchia
  
• IOZ
  
• MsZilla (tentatively)
  
• Splendid Ireny
  
• switters
  
• TenaciousK
  
• ThyGoddess
  
• twiffer
  

Some were obvious, but some took a while to choose. So you can see why help would be appreciated. Fortunately, I don't read particularly fast.

Keifus

Doorways to Elsewhere IV: Review of Ægypt by John Crowley

Grade: A
Sticking with the external theme here, Crowley's Elsewhere, in a trivial geographic sense, circumscribes the Litchfield Hills, the Catskills, nips western Massachusetts, and maybe the southern tip of the Adirondacks. It includes New York City, sort of by reluctant default, but digs its magic out of the distant and wooded suburbs. Ægypt strays to different continents, and it's a whole lot bigger than eastern New York state, but it's hard to imagine that magic manifesting in any place other than the (fictional) Faraway Hills. (I'll admit that gives it a certain personal appeal.) In previous novels, Crowley has let the mythology of the British Isles immigrate to the Northeast. This time, it's legends of the Renaissance.

Given these aspects of the setting, I'm tempted to compare this novel to Winter's Tale, by Mark Helprin: it's filled with a similar sort of magic-infused history, swinging similarly wide, epic loops. It's got a common quality of breathless observation that's beautiful but ends up all going down the same. With no special destination evident plot-wise, it was an easy enough novel to put down, and it took me twice as long to read as something this length normally would. But of the two, Crowley is really the superior writer. Where Helprin couldn't help himself from pouring it on ever thicker, Crowley prefers to meander inward (and the deeper you go, the bigger it gets). Crowley is better at remembering the childlike dimension of wonder. And as the shape of the story finally begins to resolve itself, it does get more gripping. It's all about having faith that the author is in control.

You could probably say that Crowley pointedly goes nowhere at all. The plot, such as it is, mainly involves a Renaissance historian (or alternate historian) moving from the city to the hills to write a book. This book, most likely. In one of the several self-referential nuggets, he "'would attempt one more book...a book composed of groups ambiguous but clear, great solitutes that look on and look away from each other; a book empty and infinte at its center...' Actually, though...these enormous thoughts were a little premature." And certainly a little bold. Ægypt tries to straddle the transition between any number of mystical dichotomies, and the door between fiction and reality is just one of them. (Whole sections of the novel are excerpts from other fictional histories of magic.) It recursively bridges dreams and waking, heaven and earth, cosmos and microcosm, reality and memory (the universe itself is the ultimate mnemonic palace of the universe). The author character delves richly into Hermetically flavored magic, a Renaissance vision of occult Egypt (Ægypt) brought into being--or maybe into acknowledgement--by nothing more than it's belief. It imagines a universe permeated and held together by countless angels, significant of numerology, full of heretics, Elizabethan sages, and astrological mutterings. In 400 pages, John Crowley takes us through one single door, across which nothing changes but history, and even if it looks exactly the same on either side, the transition is astounding.

[Note: This novel hasn't been in print for some time. The structure suggests that this it is missing several parts (the sections are named after houses of the zodiac and there are only three), presumably as sequels, and he's published others in the same universe. I've not read them yet, but alarmingly, it looks like Crowley's been descending into (more) verbose plotlessness. I'll reserve judgement.]

Obligorati
Author: John Crowley
Title: Ægypt
Genre: fiction, magic realism, contemporary fantasy, fantasy, alternate history

Meditation

I abscond beneath the ashen knoll
lock the lucid sun behind
its long light grasps at my rabbit hole
and harries the dusty nooks of mind
casts shadows on the fitful sparking globe
races to find thought's chasm rent
compressed to microcosmic nodes
and exploded into firmament
where seraphs link their hundred arms
infiltrate the vast creation
quantum sparks, estranged and charmed
dancing cogs of divine rotation
Angels still hold crystal spheres aright
refracting certain speeds of light

--

I'd say this got about halfway to where I was trying to go. The angels are in the details, I think.

Nods to two of my favorite poet bloggers, and to the forgotten bards of Ægypt.

K

Angel in My Armor, Sister in My Soul*

I admit that I haven't been paying much attention for the last five or ten years. When Christina Hoff Sommers proclaimed a war against boys, and when the various pundits of that heady pre-2001 era chimed in about the denial of boyishness, I confess that that it struck a chord. Not because I felt particularly failed by the educational system (although it could be said that I'd failed it), but it was an affirming message to someone who was not very satisfied with conformity, not particularly ambitious about his career, had never really experienced this sexism thing at his level of the monkey tree, but who'd just suffered a pretty toxic dose of some nasty Andrea Dworkin-style feminism. I never did read Sommers' book, but followed some similar discussion in Salon, Camille Paglia and the rest, nodded a few times, and got on with life.

In a soberer frame of mind, I'd say the sensitive new age guy (SNAG) was already a caricature by the time he became easy fodder for punditry or parody (a fine line, there). If my keen analysis of popular culture is correct, then his intellectual heyday was between 1972 and 1983, precisely spanning Alan Alda's turn as Hawkeye Pierce, and, coincidentally enough, the first decade of my life. A bad guess, evidently: I just heard that the wussification of the American male has continued unabated. Not only is he growing up completely neutered, that emasculation is the cause of murderous rampages, not just here, but throughout the world. Cho's problem? Didn't have a manly outlet. That's the problem with the Arab world too. If only our young men could get some nookie beat their chest and fight stuff in a constructive way, all our problems with violence would be solved!

According to the NRO blurb (and thanks to IOZ for spotting it):

[Camille] Paglia believes the [high] school Cho attended would have been no better equipped to deal with frustrated young males. 'There is nothing happening educationally in these boring prisons that are fondly called suburban high schools. They are saturated with a false humanitarianism, which is especially damaging for boys...' Cho is a classic example of 'someone who felt he was a loser in the cruel social rat race,' Paglia says. The pervasive hook-up culture at college, where girls are prepared to sleep with boys they barely know or fancy, can be a source of seething resentment and alienation for those who are left out.

It's comforting for frustrated men (and their mothers) to attribute violence to (sexual) frustration. But the idea that we live in singular times of male impotence, or in singular times of American violence is (thus far) inaccurate. Not only is the cause unlikely, the alleged trend is the starkest bullshit. Here are some data I plotted for homicide rates in the last century (sources here and here**). In all of the articles I could find, my crackerjack cultural analysis of SNAG's ascendendance coincides neatly with a decrease in homicide. Oooops!



According to the papers I've found that play with these and other data, there have been three big violent crime surges in the last couple of centuries, starting, roughly, in 1850, 1900 (the start of my plot), and 1960. I'd be hesitant to ascribe any of those rises or falls to simplistic masculine ideals (I'm suspicious of arguments using abortion too), but wussification has correlated pretty well to the decline of the later one, falsifying the Paglia blather effectively. It's perhaps more likely that the hagiography of the Roosevelt- or Kennedy-esque big swingin' dicks is the bigger problem. A real man fights and kills. It took particularly senseless wars to collapse those silly avatars. Viet Nam birthed SNAG, and we remembered the Maine to the pointless expense of lives in 1898.

The obvious problem with Paglia's opinion--other than the pesky facts--is that it fails to observe that it's always been harder for the boys who aren't particularly assertive to get laid. Nice guys, they say (forgetting it's a marathon, this life), finish last. Eventually, my reaction to Dworkin feminism went somewhere other than Sommers suggested. The rebuttal to the blamers that I settled on--which has become one of my hobby horses, really--is that men suffer from ridiculous feminine ideals as much as women do from ridiculous masculine ones. Yeah, it sucks that women are held to images that center on the improbable body of a 16-year-old naif, and the mind of a 40-year-old hooker, but it also sucks that men are held to some unlikely ideal which is both entirely self-absorbed and also primally sensitive to women's needs. The sensitive rebel that can only be tamed by the right woman is equally unlikely as the sexually proficient madonna that can only be seduced by the right man. Both gender ideals are awful, and both genders suffer for it. Can a man be man enough in that paradoxical circumstance? Well, we aren't bombing the living fuck out of Iraq because our leaders felt they needed to live up to feminist ideals. I don't think the problem's wussification.

Most of my favorite people have managed to define themselves beyond the obvious gender ideals. Sure, some of my favorite men are shit-kickers (and some of my favorite women aspire to be hotties), and I have moments of toeing the turds myself. Nothing wrong with it. We're not immune, and there are bases for stereotypes. But while a role may sometimes fit, it's not the end-all. The machismo ideal bugs the shit out of me. Self-centered idiots really piss me off. I don't feel the slightest inadequacy regarding my empathy. I'm not at all uncomfortable with my "wussification". We all have a measure of each of the dumb ideals in us. Good thing for society.

My feminine side is on the couch watching Oprah, occasionally pushing aside a breast to scratch my knee. --Al Bundy

[Late note: this post does not really address gender equality other than in a personal fulfillment/social interaction sort of way. Certainly more positive attitudes about the diversity of gender roles are connected to equal treatment of actual gendered individuals. Maybe in some other post.]

K

*my anima is doing just fine, but there's no accounting for her taste in music.

** I found a data set from the U.S. Department of justice too, on violent crime rates in the nineteenth and twentieth century, but it was condensed, and I didn't want to explain to my IT guy why I needed the latest version of WinZip, stat. It contains historical data from New York City and England. Apparently it's been frequently used for gun control arguments, which is not anywhere I want to go today.

Fear, Loathing, and I-95

[Has it been a week already? I'm going to lose both of my readers at this rate. Blame the weather--I've been busy performing hard manual labor.]

Trundling around the hamster wheel, I found hotheaded denial from Michael Chertoff that the War on Terror is so totally not some bullshit made-up campaign, like certain nutty former policy-makers might have you believe. No, those airplane hijackers were part of a global movement, and we must fight it! It's difficult to say which global movement, of course (unless you're bold enough to use the I-word), but it's war, dammit. Meanwhile, John McCain, once a maverick^TM and now struggling to recall an identity that seven years of capitulation to the absurd foreign policy justifications took from him, told me on the radio this morning that he's got every confidence that if we don't succeed in the Iraq war, they (Isla-- shhhh!) will follow us home.

At another of my usual stops, twiffer became the 4,097,234th blogger to opine on the Virginia Tech shootings, noting, quite reasonably, that, um, this isn't exactly common and stuff, horrible as it is, and despite what editorialists would prefer to say, maybe we should avoid overreacting.

It's not common. Although Jake Weisberg latches onto the "regularity" of school homicides, school violence is pretty rare. There are, on average, about 20 school-related homicides per year (see the graph), and out of about 60 million Americans between 5 and 19 (according the U.S. Census bureau), that makes the rate of school shooting about 3e-7, on the order of a hundred-thousandth of a percent. A school homicide is nearly a hundred times less likely to occur than a murder in the workplace, according to these data (unsurprising? I see a tradeoff between immaturity vs. availability of weapons, especially for the under 10 set). I've got a thousandth of a percent chance of being gunned down by a disgruntled someone at work in any given year (although maybe a little better than that here).



Roughly speaking, my annual odds of getting killed in a traffic accident are about a hundredth of a percent, or one in ten thousand. That rate is enough that in a moderately-sized community, it'll make for an impressive headline every couple of months when it happens to (hopefully) someone else. I take this as a good point of reference for risk assessment, call it the I-95 test. Driving on the highway represents a sufficiently low level of risk to my life that I consider it basically beneath notice. How does a homicide at school shooting to driving on the highway? My kids are a thousand times safer there than in the car with me.

It's harder to generate a yearly stat on terrorism, of course, at least of the kind that John McCain thinks is lickng its jaws in New York harbor even as I write. How ridiculous depends over how many years you wish to average a one-time event. Even so, in 2001, you had a better chance of having a skyscraper fall on you than having your office-mate go postal, but you were still 200 times more likely to die in a flaming car wreck.

Who should we really be afraid of? It's not like history's got any shortage of shit going bad, and fast. If you're a civilian in Iraq, your odds of dying in combat are about 65 thousand/20 million/4 years, or about a tenth of a percent, a hundred times more likely than I am to rack up my Subaru. The annual odds of dying there as a result of the war is over ten times higher than that, better than one in a hundred, and that's to say nothing of the kidnappings, threats, desperation, poverty, and general lawlessness. You are probably acquainted with a hundred people. That's like taking half a dozen kids from every school in the U.S. and putting a bullet into them.

Anyway, the people telling you that we're in mortal danger over here are the same ones saying everything's just fine turning a corner over there. And no, I don't trust them.

Keifus (This is depressing. I'd never make it as an actuary.)

UPDATE: I guess no one's saying it's peachy in Iraq, and I should be careful about glib reasoning. Okay, early in the war, I remember bullshit about casualties being similar to Detroit murder rates, and just recently there was General Petraeus telling the Washington Post that "Iraq is going to have to learn – as did, say, Northern Ireland – to live with some degree of sensational attacks." But still.

Petraeus' comment is, however, a little hard to stomach, considering the United States' inability to live with any measure at all of sensational attacks is at least one reason we're so busy blowing shit up over there.

Yesterday's news also had an item about a bombing at the Technical University of Baghdad. The radio mentioned some 200 casualties there so far (trying to grab this from memory, OK), and reports have, unsurprisingly, the Iraqi University system in shambles. The casualty rate may be exceeding 1% among what's left of the intelligentsia, but people are still going to the University. Would an annual 1 chance in a hundred of getting killed be enough to keep you away? (Compare it to the roughly 0.00001% shot in the U.S.)

I suppose in Iraq, the odds aren't much better outside of university, and it's not like there's a lot to do. But still.

UPDATE II: I also submitted this article to Wikifray and (especially) Slate, thinking any resident pedants might see some holes in my admittedly rough reasoning. That version of the post ended up being a whole lot more coherent.

The Disapproval Network

"You're such a whore, Phil."

"Keifus! How can you say that? Dr. Phil is not a 'whore'."

"Are you kidding me? Listen to him shill. What the hell is it this time? Some weight loss crap*? In the name of intervention? The dude's totally shameless...and not exactly the slimmest guy in the world, I might add."

"I don't care. He's not a whore. Look at that little girl crying. You can't fake that sort of compassion."

"Compassion? The knob's exploiting the poor kid's emotions on TV like that. If he really cared about these people, he wouldn't be embarrassing them on national telelvision. But you know, Sweetie, anything for ratings. The whore."

For some reason, my wife doesn't like watching TV with me very much.

I've got kind of a love/hate relationship with the medium. While I enjoy some television programming outright, I choose to apply a relatively high standard if it's purporting to keep my attention between the crass ad breaks. I'm for a free market (with some big caveats), but that doesn't mean that I'm not bloody tired of all the consumerism jammed into every goddamn crevice of my life. I hate the way TV shamelessly angles for the susceptible: those primetime ads at least attempt to entertain me between the allegedly superior programming, but children's telelvision, and the crap on the emotion-pandering-on-the-cheap world of daytime TV just offer up a barrage of inferiority complexes. So when I'm stuck in that hell, I take every perceived opportunity to unleash my inner prick. You know, make my own entertainment. And anyway, Phil McGraw is a fucking whore, and deserves to be called on it.

My libertarianism is more of a pursuit-of-happiness than a laissez-faire stripe. I'm all for that free speech, and for as little government power over individuals that can leave an overpopulated society still functioning. The government will make no law abridging the freedom of speech, but communities can still pressure people to behave, and national television makes the network homogeneous. The TV lessons range from acceptable (friends matter!) to sketchy (love the cops!) to awful (the solution to violence is more violence!). Since we have shit that needs to be peddled and TV, even with cable, is a broad brush, we get the lessons most easily absorbed by the most, and it reinforces the values of the dumbest of us. Sex is bad, says the tube (but we can't get enough--what are our neighbors doing?!). Ditto killin' people. Ditto our opinions on who's not to be trusted, and who can't be punished enough. Don Imus didn't survive this long because he had a good radio voice. He got adopted as some brand of jowly bullshittin' culture reinforcer, a dinosaur remembering the semi-mythical good old days when the uppity mice were kept away from the eggs.

Dr. Phil's message could be worse, I suppose. Self-actualization is one thing, but I could do without the busybodies chasing around the poorly actualized. One of the more odious Dr. Phil guests is a retired detective, who spies on and professionally confronts people. The segment I remember showcased a teenage bride in a sketchy (possibly illegal) relationship with an older man. The camera followed the citizen police into the home, caught his shouting match, filmed him dragging the young woman out to the car. Meanwhile, the mother tearfully milked the Nielsens back in the studio. It worked out well for the young person. On camera it always does, but how many wannabe citizen soldiers have been heartened to bust the doors down on nonconformists?

If the free market means that I have to put up with marketing, then the free exchange of ideas means that insecure people will constantly try to shame you with their loud voices. Good arguments wouldn't rule the day even in libertarian la-la land. Even then we'd have to listen to the chorus of the disapproval network. And don't get me wrong, it's not conservative ideas about community that I'm attacking here (although I'll happily single out a couple of 'em if pressed), but rather the means of reinforcement: by peer pressure, by accentuating insecurity, by barrage.

The prices of freedom, I tells ya.

K

*It was probably something else last time I was watching, actually, but the diet aid dominated the Google search. Phil-endorsed Shape Up! supplements were something he was actually called on by consumers. The handful of shows I watched had him hawking either his books or somebody's self-help or emotionally-sanctifying product of some kind. In Phil's defense, the books are a lot less bad than the television.

Doorways to Elsewhere III: Review of There are Doors by Gene Wolfe

Grade: A+ (what the hell)

"'You're a goddess.' It took some effort for him to force the words to his lips; he made the effort and they came. 'You live forever.'...

'There are many forevers'"

This is a beautiful book, a love story, a story of being lost and of lost love. Wolfe, recognizable here but playing somewhat against type, tries for lovely, whooshing prose, nailing the tone pretty much out of the gate. The narrative voice is lovestruck, lonely, bemused, but determined. It uses some strategic repetitions (you can see that above), touches some troubled or faulty memories, and never refers to the protagonist by name. These effects add to the somewhat ethereal sense of bifurcation, the airy remove of someone who's somehow watched himself step down the wrong path. There are Doors is less deliberately obfuscatory than some of this writer's work, but the plot moves about in a way that is like a coherent dream.

The story opens with a woman's goodbye. Her note, her farewell, tells the protagonist to avoid doors--it could be any topological hole really, anything closed on four sides, but some of these portals will be significant. Do not seek her through these portals, she says. He does anyway.

Given the title, and the opening warning, the theme of doors seems, at first, to be underplayed. It's one that holds some magic for me, that inadvertant passageways could take you somewhere quite unintended.* The woman is from a mirror earth, but Wolfe only presents a couple of the significant doorways to this Elsewhere world (much like our own, but with some nontrivial differences). But that's just the overt meaning--and with Wolfe you can usually delve a little--more deeply, doorways are how the plot works. On the other side, the protagonist travels through a lot of mundane versions of them, but each passage alters the setting dramatically. It's disorienting at first, as it's intended to be, as he ducks suddenly between psychiatric institutions, shops of Eastern medicine, theaters, cars, hotels, into and out of sleep. Between each portal is a little one-act play, and you can almost hear the behind-the-scenes clattering as some higher being seems to be swapping out the scenery for the next improvisational vignette. Elsewhere feels very much like a sophisticated, but ad hoc, set, transitions justified on the fly. Is his displacement a symptom of mental illness? Is his goddess real? I often like some ambiguity in these sorts of exploration, and I suppose there's still room to question the author's reality(ies), but Wolfe comes down as clearly as could be hoped for a story like this. If the explanations didn't gel at the end, this book wouldn't have been quite the same, not quite as good. It's so much easier to open mysteries after all. But for all that Wolfe can be episodic, he almost always knows where he is going. This one is well recommended.

Keifus

*Damn you Gene Wolfe, you articulate bastard you. I wrote this story, even, almost, to the how and the why of it. Sure, the one I put together was pretty amateur, and you know, you wrote this one almost twenty years before that. But damn, it was my favorite.

Obligorati
Author: Gene Wolfe
Title: There Are Doors
Genre: fiction, science fiction, contemporary fantasy, fantasy

Doorways to Elsewhere II: Review of Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock

Grade: B+ (charitably)

If Ysabel failed due to the lack of a compelling narrative voice, then Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood succeeds on it, just barely. The premise is sketchy: there's a wood in England that's bigger on the inside than on the outside. It's driven one man to obsession, and threatens to do the same to his sons. The wood is inhabited by mythological beings, mythagos as indicated by the title, that are heroic archetypes, taken from the cultural subconscious. When the British Isles still were covered by the post-glacial Wild Wood, these heroes emerged from it, as needed, from the brains of the various cultures.

A background like that, and it's all what you do with it. Holdstock resists a sentimentalist's or escapist's approach, at least in the first half, and reveals the story as the compiled diary of the protagonist, Steven Huxley. The diary voice is fairly well done: Steven writes in a convincing nineteenth/early twentieth century mode (the story is set at the end of the second world war). The prose has the appropriate shadings of purple where expected, a convincing disaffection when describing emotion (which strikes me as English) but a lot of exclamation points. Better, the diary framework offers a nice unreliable narrator kludge to keep the story moving along, and to avoid dwelling overlong on the obvious questions that would trouble any sane person in a situation like that. It's sometimes nice not to have to dwell on every single doubt that flutters through a protagonist's brain.

The first half of the book unfolds pretty well: the wood is mysterious. It consumed Steven's father, who became some kind of mythic being himself, and then his brother. The mythagos it generates are real, people who speak and reason, and love. Attempts to breach its perimeter are rebuffed in convincingly creepy confusion, and time passes oddly for those who do pass through its borders. It recalled the genius of Crowley's Little, Big: the farther in you get, the bigger it gets. Which is something you can feel in the woodlands, where different views can appear a totally new landscape, fractal like a coastline, space filled up in twists and turns.

But when Steven gets in, all that suggestion unfortunately must be put though the paces of the plot. Too bad. Within, the wood is quite mappable, and rather than being complex, it is just huge, with various mythagos, whole societies of them, living in different parts of it. While the ambiguity worked fine in the first half, the second half suffers because Holdstock didn't reveal what the whole thing is. When the mystery of the place was stripped away, I wanted answers instead of haphazard musings: how do these roaming heroes deal with one another? Do they fight? How do they view themselves, the outside? How about other cultures? Where the hell is the ocean in these myths of the British Isles? Holdstock furthermore invents lost cultures at a rate to outnumber the remembered ones. They're not uninteresting, but with the wealth of actual ancestral lore, why not use it?

Steven, as he travels inward, becomes an archetype himself, the kinsman of the dreaded Outsider, with a destiny of his own. It's a fine Freudian mess he's gotten himself into (Daddy neglected him for the obsession, became a primitive woodland god, and his brother stole his mythago gal more or less to act out on the old man), and while it's sort of all there, Holdstock doesn't toy a lot with the psychological angle either. Too bad, it might have been fun to hold it up against the epic.

Obligorati
Author: Robert Holdstock
Title: Mythago Wood
Genre: fiction, contemporary fantasy, fantasy

Pregnancy TV?

I read a Slate article today. Evidently, there's a pregnancy-themed sitcom on ABC in the works.

It sounds absurd on the face of it, right? A woman's pregnancy will only get you through a season of programming, unless you take a truly weird take in which she's eternally preparing her nest, or has a new one just in time for every sweeps week. It's not a cartoon: sitcom kids aging is part of the deal.

But it's not like focusing on a year in the life is an unusual marketing ploy. To move all those beauty supplies, consumers are pursuaded to twist themselves to a mythic ideal of an eternally 18-year-old body. Gotta convince the tweens they need to look older, convince the twenty-somethings they're too fat and wrinkled and the forty-something men they should still be rutting like rabbits (note to self: re-evaluate on 40th birthday). (Of course developing all those products takes chemical engineering as much as advertising, so I guess it's nice that something's driving the economy these days.)

We pass through those famous couple of years hardly realizing it, even those of us who are pretty enough to achieve the body ideal. Even shorter than the traipse though the adult/teen threshold are those ten or twelve new baby months. Yeah, the passage takes about as long, but the magic rubs off a hell of a lot quicker. Without marketing, the saccharine thrill of being new parents evaporates completely by the time Junior finally starts sleeping through the night. Sure, people may have more, out of biology or carelessness or love, but I don't think most second-time moms get pushed into spending a fortune on this stuff. (I could be wrong.)

But there's a whole pregnancy industry, a bizarre time-like loop that exists betweeen the moment you find out the blessed news and the time you decide you're sick of midnight feedings. There are pregnancy magazines, pregnancy books, pregnancy party supplies, and baby registries full of endless pregnancy products. It's a pregnancy lifestyle that they push. The magazines are surreal. Covers of celebrities shooting across the sky in their moment of pregnancy fame, doing their gravid photo spread. It's a lifestyle that no one lives in very long except for the editorial board. Maybe if they push it hard enough, women would want to get pregnant again just to relive the magic.

Can Underbelly last as a sitcom? They'll have to either get an audience of well-conditioned pregnancy groupies, or else replenish the demographic every couple of months. I'd call it an insane strategy, but outside of television, there's a pretty good record of it working.

Keifus (meh. I tried to make it interesting)

Clementine

[I don't know about this one, I really don't.]

Like a flower, you advertise
clothe yourself
in brilliant orange.
You fill with moisture
a waiting womb, gravid
soon to be plucked
by a convenient lover
who won't be troubled
by your faithless seed.

I have no such compunctions.

I probe your skin with my finger
ungently
feeling for the point
that will yield.
I plunge into the breach
and strip you bare
spread and ravish you
without ceremony.
I fill my mouth with your soft flesh
my head with your floral scent
before devouring
and forgetting you for another.

Doorways to Elsewhere I: Review of Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay

Grade: B-

This is the first of a series of four (or maybe five) book reviews. The connecting thread is meant to be about passages from the modern world into the fantastic, a theme cliched enough to have metastasized into a modern subgenre or two, and generally consistent with a vaguely western European Roman-era mythology, back before the Wild Wood got systematically hacked down for farmland and you could find hidden pools and spooky old oaks where spirits might still hang out. Some people's hearts crave the sea, but I like the trees, maybe heakening some ancestral memory (if you believe that crap). I'd rather see the sun turning the leaves to fairy gold than witness thirst-induced mirages in the distance on the endless open water.

I tried to pick books that didn't suck (I do as a rule: life is short), but the first two (or three) of them compare better as lessons in writing, a lesson in voice, than they do on mythic themes. Ysabel was the how-not-to example. Normally, I like Guy Gavriel Kay. He's not afraid to try for beauty in his prose, and in most of the stories I've read, he manages to serve up melodrama that doesn't feel cheap. It's a nice trick, but his normal milieu--writing mythologized versions of history (his last novel was a gorgeous retelling of the life of Alfred the Great)--lends itself to that operatic sentiment. His latest has a contemporary setting, from which he tries to peek into the magical corners of history. I was looking forward to see what he'd do with more mundane tools, and it was, unfortunately, a more mundane story. It starts out nicely enough, with light tumbling through the fields and forests of Provence, but the sun goes down a little too soon.

We find ourselves in the viewpoint of 15-year-old Ned Marriner, who spends his time jogging, joking with his cardboard gang, acompanying his famous father, learning about himself, and being a Basically Good Kid. It's Ned's point of view that really dooms this story. The kid observes far too little, and banters lamely far too much. The text reads like a not-particularly-inspired character exercise. There's nothing very remarkable about Ned's voyage and discovery (even though there are remarkable things he's discovering), and most of the supporting cast seem to be hauled up and out of the stock character bin. Ned feels like some safely realized version of a young person--he doubts himself, gets into some PG-rated trouble, finds an innocent love interest,* and is never, ever an insolent self-involved little prick. It reads like the author tried to write something safe for parents to give to their teenagers, and instead just made it boring.

The story here is that Ned stumbles on some magical rivalry that has been going on for a couple of millenia: back in the days of the old forest, a Roman and a Celt fell in love with the same woman, and have been returning to fight for her affection over many lifetimes. The mechanics of this affair aren't abundantly clear, but are developed enough for the conclusion to work, barely. The better parts of the novel are the historical musings on this theme (Provence has always been a battleground, coveted by rival cultures, and Kay remains a good historical researcher), and in the characters of the two men and their titular love. When Ned stumbles into supernatural settings, the plot seems to swing into gear again, and these bits are interesting too. More action, more of the interesting people the story's ostensibly about, more of the good description, and less of the dull protagonist voice would have saved this one.

Keifus

* I did like this character, but that's because I was projecting a lot onto her. I like cute nerd girls. (Good thing.)

Obligorati
Author: Guy Gavriel Kay
Title: Ysabel
Genre: fiction, contemporary fantasy, fantasy

Notes to my boss

1. Friday morning wasn't the ideal time to suggest a complete structural format of the proposal. Telling me that you "don't see any way you can complete this today" both underestimated my imagination and overestimated the depth of the commentary.

2. I don't come in on weekends as a rule, not unless there's a good reason. I don't live very close by, and going through those motions doesn't prove anything I really want to prove. I do not understand the urgency of submitting this Sunday evening when the deadline is Monday afternoon. At any rate, I'm still waiting for your final review, so maybe I can, you know, plan stuff with my family this weekend.

3. Actually boss, we got hired to do a "science project." It'd help a lot with my ego if you'd find some other term to use as a pejorative. I realize we've got to please the people in the upper channels, that they want immediate results^TM, but still, a science project is what we did in the first phase, and reasonable minds might think that completely ignoring the science project parts, could be grounds for dismissal out of hand.

4. "No one cares about all that stuff." Can you humor me by letting me assume that at least one technical person is going to evaluate this thing?


See you tonight, boss!

Love,

Keifus

[Yeah, I'm being hard on the guy. If the data were at all impressive, we would have ridden that horse in.]

Five More Thoughts (Psycho Smart Ed.)

Don't be threatened by the title, this post is meant to be about smarts, and believe me, it's meant to be ironic. If it makes you feel any better, you can snicker to yourself about the brilliance I actually display--it is mostly about me after all--but I'm aiming for unseriousness here. So what if it's Tuesday.

1. Brightness, after all, is a curse. I'm doing okay in the faculties department, at least relative to the general population, and in some rare cases, I even know when to shut the fuck up to avoid looking like a dolt. But I'd so much rather be a genius. It would make life so much easier.

Certainly, I'm no physical genius. I'm okay at some sports (and miserable at others), but certainly I'd be unlikely to achieve a competitive level even if I wasn't too old. Never had that killer instinct anyway. I play music, but even though I can bang out a tune, sort of, I can easily project an arc that has an asymptote well short of art (best I can hope for is a stuttering voice, which as it happens is good enough for me). I always wanted artistic skills, but even more than the music, my pen yields sketches that at best are "identifiable." In high school, I was bright enough to skate entirely, and even college required only select applications of effort. Grad school killed me though, as it was evident that I'd reached a level at which real study was required. If I were a brilliant scientist, then I'd have breezed right through that and right through a post-doc, publishing with reckless abandon, really making a mark. Even though I've managed to milk an occasionally clever streak, for most of my career I've had to slog hard for nuggets in order to succeed. Unfortunately, I'm not a genius of self-motivation either. No, there I'm totally retarded.

It's good to be a all-around above-average type and all, but I'm jealous of brilliance. I'd settle just for something really cool to stand out from my peers. I suspect any one of you I can point at can multiply big numbers on demand, read 200 pages per hour, recite the most obscure trivia, woo women (or men), aim, make the hard sell, memorize long numbers, perform convincing sleight of hand, bend your joints backwards, play brilliantly by ear, put people at ease, hold absurd amounts of liquor, find level and plumb by eye, bloviate. With six and a half billion people in the world, people with distinctive brain skills will rise up and concentrate to a high degree to the somewhat better levels of discourse, and stumbling awkwardly through them myself, I keep bumping into all you damned savants.

2. Well, maybe one thing I can claim is some minimal writing skill. One way I deal with my essential laziness at work is that when my schedule is full of desk tasks, I can crank out reports and proposals in a third the time that anyone else can, leaving me lots of time to scrawl crap like this.

Right now, I have a big one going on. I shouldn't be anywhere near the blog, but one thing about getting into a writing mode, is that it's actually hard to stop. I love it when my brain's in high gear--wish I could do it at will. When I go to bed tonight more words will be chasing each other around my skull. It'll stop when I get tired enough.

3. My older daughter keeps a journal for school. It's designed to keep the children in form for the writing assessment part of their evaluation testing, but it's cool, it's a good project, and my little girl--child of two engineers--is pretty good at it. I was looking through it recently, and here's what she had for her November entry:

"I'm thankful for my dad because there are already two monkeys in the family, and it's good to have at least one real person..."

Like any good father, I take every opportunity to compare my kids to lesser primates, but to tell you the truth, I don't find actual monkeys (by which I mean apes--chimpanzees--monkeys are more like squirrels that can smile) very funny at all. Staged simian hijinks always seem a little sad to me, the underlying coercion doesn't escape my notice. But the Platonic "monkey" is still pretty amusing though. The pure essence of monkeyness spends lots of time masturbating, chattering, and flinging poo. Comedy gold.

Amusing. I sometimes like to believe that I have muses. All those voices in my head, it's a barrelful of monkeys in there. Fun like that, and with a lot of flying turds.

4. That last thought was pretty shamelessly recycled, but I'm gambling that anybody who's gotten this far (either of you) didn't catch the original. If you're all tired of that thought, consider it scribed for posterity then.

We all have our own series of little performance routines, but depending on how big's your repertoire, how much you change it up, and how skilled you are at singing it, it can grating over time for anyone. One of the few upsides of meeting new people is the prospect of a fresh audience. Last week, I had such an opportunity, to meet some long-lost offshoot of my in-laws' hopelessly complicated family tree. It was fun to see my wife's parents pull out their classic material--hadn't seen it in quite a while ourselves--and be reminded that some people are best when you first get to know them. (A problem with knowing people for a long time is that you lose energy for the fun dances, or else you try your friends out as a focus group for dangerously untested material.) It was great to see them spewing out mock-philosophy with friendly enthusiasm, and just to see the general animation. Naturally, I held myself bemusedly above the fray, benignly aloof, accessible just outside the clamor. That's a big part of my act.

5. It's funny how we meet people, what with the few degrees of separation and all, contrasted with all the billions of us. I know I've read this before (probably from one of you crazy savants) that even if we find one person in a million worthwhile, that still makes for a handful of hundreds right here in North America. Blogging, and upon a time Fraying, it's like I'm chipping away at the several hundred who have similar interests and mindsets. I link to X bunch of people, who connect with Y, who… One drawback to this model is that folks like us probably pop up a little more frequently than in the ppm range.

But say there's a couple thousand that, by criteria I don't entirely understand, I'd really rather get to know, and a good couple million that I wouldn't mind in my general circle. It can't be done. Even with the help of the internet, our little communities can only reach so far. Couldn't even hope to meet a signifiant fraction of them.

This drives me batshit. In a way, it's like everything I've ever tried to organize. You'd really like detailed information for every entry, with proper cross-references, and detailed notes for all. In truth, you really end up filling those things as they're relevant. If there's anything that keeps me from going over the edge into obsession though, it's a profound sense of "good enough," call it a fundamental laziness or else call it (as I prefer) a measure of wisdom to be content in the first local minimum that's pretty comfortable and has a reasonably good view. Even though this makes me a poor carpenter and scientist, it does keep me more sane. Even though there's a maddening sensation in the back of my mind that so much is always left incomple