# 24 Dec 2011, 01:02PM: Discovering An Origin: Yesterday I helped a bit with a Dreamwidth code tour. Every time Dreamwidth deploys a new update to the site, someone writes up explanations of what all the new bits are. Not just a summary of the big changes, but a sentence or a paragraph about every bugfix and improvement. Basically, imagine if release notes had explanations like this summary by ghoti:

Bug 4102: Checkboxes to retain relationships when renaming have disappeared
Category: Misc Backend
Patch by: denise and fu
Description: So when you rename your account, you're supposed to get checkboxes that keep your access list, filters, and stuff like that during the rename. Unfortunately those checkboxen had disappeared. This shouldn't happen anymore. If you got caught in this bug, please tell denise or fu.

for every bug. Then the code tour gets posted in the Dreamwidth Development community, and linked to from general Dreamwidth news posts. This effectively tells customers where their money's gone, showcases the work of volunteers, and provides examples for people who had been thinking of getting involved in bugfixing (a form of babydev-bait). I fear that the Wikimedia development pace is too high and its community size is too large to make this particular method effective for us, but I'm going to keep thinking about ways we could modify this tactic to achieve those goals for us.

I wrote the summaries of bugs 3186 & 3087, which took maybe ten or fifteen minutes from start to finish. It was fun to flex that muscle, remembering how to distill and translate and explain:

Most support requests are visible to everyone, so everyone can help answer them. For privacy, only Dreamwidth staff and trusted volunteers can see support requests in certain categories, like Account Payments issues or Terms of Service violations. But that wasn't clear to regular users on the support ticket submission page. Now it is, because there are asterisks marking those categories.

I remembered writing functional specifications as a project manager, and reading technical specs and translating them into "what this means for your weekend." I thought about my eventual goal of managing a product, a role that requires someone to think from logistical, marketing, design, financial, and technical perspectives.

Then this morning I picked up A Case of Need by Michael Crichton. He wrote it as a young doctor, under the pseudonym "Jeffery Hudson."

I cut a slice of the white lump and quick-froze it. There was only one way to be certain if the mass was benign or malignant, and that was to check it under the microscope. Quick-freezing the tissue allowed a thin section to be rapidly prepared. Normally, to make a microscope slide, you had to dunk your stuff into six or seven baths; it took at least six hours, sometimes days. The surgeons couldn't wait.

The key context you need to understand the emotional valence of the detail, always keeping the reader aware of what's normal and what's a surprise, what's the best practice and what shortcuts people end up taking. Crichton would have written that summary of the private category marking exactly as I did.

So -- just as I learned my long-distance mentorship skills from Beverly Cleary in Dear Mr. Henshaw, I learned my expository skill from Michael Crichton. Embarrassing, given what Crichton got up to in his later years, but I'll take my skill where I can get it.

(If I were smarter I could make a nice comparison among George Orwell, Alan Furst, Michael Crichton, and Ellen Ullman.)

(By the way, someone quoted from that A Case of Need passage in a comment in an FCC filing.)

Filed under: Reading

# 23 Dec 2011, 12:32PM: Diligence And Joy: I get a different kind of understanding, now, out of Paul Ford's "Cleaning My Room," ten years later. When I reread it, I flash back to my old messy apartment in Berkeley, where I sat as I absorbed it the first time. I'm years older than Ford was when he wrote it. I haven't quite been through the journey he experienced, but I've tasted some of the other side. It pairs with "Until the Water Boils."

Filed under: Reading

# 11 Dec 2011, 11:07AM: Constellation Games:

First contact isn't all fun and games.
Ariel Blum is pushing thirty and doesn't have much to show for it. His computer programming skills are producing nothing but pony-themed video games for little girls. His love life is a slow-motion train wreck, and whenever he tries to make something of his life, he finds himself back on the couch, replaying the games of his youth.
Then the aliens show up.
Out of the sky comes the Constellation: a swarm of anarchist anthropologists, exploring our seas, cataloguing our plants, editing our wikis and eating our Twinkies. No one knows how to respond--except for nerds like Ariel who've been reading, role-playing and wargaming first-contact scenarios their entire lives. Ariel sees the aliens' computers, and he knows that wherever there are computers, there are video games.
Ariel just wants to start a business translating alien games so they can be played on human computers. But a simple cultural exchange turns up ancient secrets, government conspiracies, and unconventional anthropology techniques that threaten humanity as we know it. If Ariel wants his species to have a future, he's going to have to take the step that nothing on Earth could make him take.
He'll have to grow up.

Constellation Games is a novel by my spouse, Leonard Richardson. You can read the first two chapters for free. It's now available for purchase as a serial -- for USD$5, total, you'll get a chapter in your email every week. If you pay a little more, you'll get a print paperback, bonus stories, a phrasebook, and so on. And for free, anyone can read the author's commentary, Twitter feed, &c.

This is a great book. I love it. Oh, and for all of December, Leonard's publisher is running a give-one-get-one special. So I encourage you to read those sample chapters and I hope you'll decide to subscribe.

Filed under: Reading

# 04 Dec 2011, 08:18AM: Asymptomatic, Asymptotic: Last night I gave Leonard some alone time to work on a Constellation Games bonus story. I went to Ward III, a Manhattan bar that does bespoke cocktails. They have a menu of predesigned cocktails as well, but if you tell them, "I would love something bubbly with basil and lemon," they think about it and figure something out. I especially appreciate that they are perfectly fine with making interesting nonalcoholic drinks. I don't know a better place to get a bespoke mocktail.

While there, I read a bit of Making Software. One of its editors also cowrote "Empirical Software Engineering: As researchers investigate how software gets made, a new empire for empirical research opens up" in the latest American Scientist, in case you want a taste of his approach. We can now do metasurveys and overviews of existing research into software development, and the science says:

Pair programmers tend to produce code that is easier to understand, and they do so with higher morale. Their productivity may fall initially as the programmers adjust to the new work style, but productivity recovers and often surpasses its initial level as programmer teams acquire experience....
Large meta-analyses and further studies by Hannay and others conclude that a programmer’s personality is not a strong predictor of performance. The people who swear by their beliefs about personality and programmer success have now been given reason to assess their position critically, along with methodological support for doing so....
....the distinctions between the two worlds are often illusory. There are cathedrals in the open-source sphere and bazaars in the closed-source. Similar social and technical trends can be documented in both.... Schryen and Rich sorted the packages they studied within categories such as open- and closed-source, application type (operating system, web server, web browser and so on), and structured or loose organization. They found that security vulnerabilities were equally severe for both open- and closed-source systems, and they further found that patching behavior did not align with an open–versus-closed source divide. In fact, they were able to show that application type is a much better determinant of vulnerability and response to security issues, and that patching behavior is directed by organizational policy without any correlation to the organizational structure that produced the software.

I read about software engineering research while sitting at the bar, over lemon-lime-and-bitters and devilled eggs served with slices of jalapeño. I always love getting to watch people who are good at their jobs, and the craftsmen at Ward III have a particularly explicitly collaborative style with their customers. One of them, Michael J. Neff, blogs at Serious Eats about cocktails and tending bar. He writes thoughtfully about the use of sugar, free-pouring versus using jiggers to measure, why Californians like us find hurricanes so unsettling ("I tend to think natural disasters should be short, violent, and most of all, unannounced."), and the downside of cocktail nostalgia.

Much of the current cocktail trend is based on nostalgia, and it is difficult to say it, but many cocktails that we now call "forgotten classics" are forgotten for a reason. They have the shine of history, and we're told we are supposed to love them, but they're too sweet, they lack balance, and they kind of suck....
...none of us invented the cocktail. Whatever we create now is a collaboration between those who make spirits, those who make cocktails, and those who imbibe them. If we leave behind the drinker, we leave behind the only people who can tell us what works. None of us make cocktails in a vacuum.

No matter what field you're in, it can be hard to hear criticism. It can be hard to switch habits in response to new data, from your customer or from research. But that's what learning is. Disequilibrium -- surprises, failures, jokes, and disorientations -- will always happen. Taking that opportunity to move away from a local maximum towards a global maximum is up to me.

Filed under: Reading Work

# 02 Dec 2011, 07:59AM: Professional Education: Yesterday I bought and read Jeremy Blachman's Anonymous Lawyer because I remembered liking the blog. Strange. I don't usually like wince humor, but the book went pretty fast and balanced out the narrator's ambition and arrogance with quiet subtext. I have recently been letting work swallow up my life, so it was nice to sit on the couch next to Leonard and read a book for a while, even if it was a book about someone who lets work swallow up his life.

Now reading Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It. I swing between utterly loving this book and needing to take a nap.

Many claims are made about how certain tools, technologies, and practices improve software development. But which are true, and which are merely wishful thinking? In Making Software, leading researchers and practitioners present chapter-length summaries of key empirical findings in software engineering...

One of the editors is Greg Wilson, the Software Carpentry dude who wants to teach scientists basic software engineering skills -- talk about doing the Lord's work! I heard about Software Carpentry via Mary Gardiner's "Changing the World with Python" talk (transcript).

Speaking of Python, I'll be in Boston the weekend of December 17th to attend a project-driven introduction to Python for women and their friends. There are still 7 slots left, in case you want to join me. I fear that I'm in that bleh spot, not an utter novice but still too unskilled to make Python do what I want, so here's hoping the weekend gets me over that hump.

Filed under: Reading

# (2) 27 Nov 2011, 04:56PM: Milk Stout, Vanilla Porter: Leonard and I both spend most of our time at the apartment these days, me working for the Wikimedia Foundation, him working on Constellation Games, his science fiction novel, launching Tuesday. (The novel's done, but he's been working on the bonus stories, Twitter feeds, and so on.) So we have to take care to give each other some regular alone time in the apartment. Yesterday he left for several hours, and today I did.

I read the end of a Kim Stanley Robinson collection, first in a park and then over beer and fries at a tavern. I liked the funny stories, like "Escape from Kathmandu" and "Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars" and "Zürich," and upon a second reading still found the end of "A History of the Twentieth Century, With Illustrations" kind of inexplicable. I read "The Lucky Strike" and "A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions" for the second time and loved them all over again. Sensible people sweating out hard choices, that's KSR. Sometimes they find courage, sometimes they don't. Math, history, geology, biology, mining, astrophysics, poetry, music (the best fiction about classical music I've ever read), cleaning, archaeology -- all the disciplines get this gentle, straightforward, clear attention. He's funnier than Vernor Vinge, but Vinge talks about software more, and I'm a sucker for that. And I think Vinge writes about more kinds of characters.

Home, and the electric light on, because it gets dark at freaking four-thirty now. After I hit Post, some together time with Leonard, because we need that too.

Filed under: Apartment Life Reading

# 23 Nov 2011, 12:10PM: Muppet Fanfic: "Tomorrow Is Waiting" by Holli Mintzer.

If you want the truth, it happened because Anji was feeling lazy. Her AI class wasn't all that interesting, nor was it a field she wanted a career in, so there wasn't any reason she could see for trying especially hard. So she came up with a project that didn't look like too much work, and she picked what looked like the easiest way of doing it. Things just got a little out of hand, after that....

Sweet and moving and happy-making.

Filed under: Reading

# (3) 22 Sep 2011, 09:28AM: Sigh: Just finished REAMDE, walked into the study, thudded it onto Leonard's desk, and said with wonder, "I cannot recommend that you read this."

I cannot recall the last Stephenson I read that had fewer ideas, and I include his short fiction in this. And you know those lovely little similes and metaphors and fanciful explanations of technical topics and arias, soliloquies on the nature of things, the Stephenson signatures? Nearly absent. Imagine a Michael Crichton novel that stretches to over a thousand pages. I'm disappointed and a little disgusted. REAMDE is essentially a serviceable technothriller, and that's all. An unworthy followup to Anathem.

Filed under: Reading

# (2) 21 Sep 2011, 07:48PM: Pretty Spoiler-Free, In My Opinion: I'm now 812 pages into REAMDE. It reads as though Cory Doctorow, in preparing to write For The Win, had drawn upon his eleventh grade lit teacher Thomas Pynchon, who had taught him what "puissant" meant and given him Alan Furst novels to read, but also upon the paperbacks that he'd found in the bookcases lining the wall of his social studies classroom, which included Tom Clancy and Where the Red Fern Grows.

Back to it.

Filed under: Reading

# 20 Sep 2011, 10:38PM: UN Convention On the Rights of the Mild: For professional development reasons, I'm starting a four-week course that'll teach me JavaScript/jQuery/CSS/JSON stuff in the context of the Etsy API. This meant that today I read the Etsy terms of use, and had to email the Etsy legal department about multiple errors in it (which, to their credit, they fixed the same day). Some fun facts from that document, and from their other documents incorporated by reference:

Listing guidelines get all philosophical: "You should only state what the item is, not what the item may become or potential uses for the item (for example: yarn should not be labeled as 'sweater,' beads should not be labeled as 'bracelet,' small gift items should not be labeled as 'stocking stuffer')."
"The Vintage category is for items that are at least 20 years old." Well, that settles it!
"You can become a team captain by creating a team or by being appointed by the captain of a pre-existing team." So I thought, "they're missing the third legitimate way to get property: homesteading/squatting!" But then later: "If a captain becomes inactive, doesn’t respond to members for an extended amount of time, or otherwise abandons the responsibilities of being a team captain, Etsy may promote a team leader or team member to be a new captain." So the title must be bestowed upon you, instead of just falling on you once you've mixed your labor with the land. Still, at least there is a way to turn unused powers & responsibilities over to energetic folks, which that suits me.
The API terms of service specifically declare: "The parties hereby disclaim the application of the U.N. Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods." But that's not in the general Terms of Use, lightly implying that it's API users who specifically disclaim the application of that UN convention. Weird. The relevant convention.
"You may price an item how you choose; however, a listing should not be created with an inaccurate price in order to keep it from selling." Isn't it funny how the Terms of Service tell you all the ways people try to arbitrage and manipulate things, all by way of comprehensively delineating what territory's forbidden? In this case, the pricing guideline steers you away from "fee avoidance," where a seller uses Etsy's platform to publicize listings, then sells them outside of Etsy to avoid Etsy's fees.

Speaking of business/arbitrage/game theory musings, today I picked up and started REAMDE, the Neal Stephenson thousand-pager that came out today. I'm on page 283. Themes/references that carry over from Cryptonomicon include: Hakka, Manila, Shekondar, discovering facts that make a job hard but your isolated boss thinks it should be easy, being compelled to do a task under duress, gold, military and hacker habits, silly/revealing business meetings. Carried over from Anathem (and less from Snow Crash/Diamond Age): ikonographies/narratives and the importance of story.

I think the last book I picked up on the day of release was Book 7 of Harry Potter. I was working on a farm in northwest New Jersey and we had to cross the state line into Pennsylvania to get to the closest bookstore that was selling it at midnight. If there were midnight Stephenson release parties where people dress up, I'd expect to have heard about them already, but then again I don't read Boing Boing much anymore.

Filed under: Reading

# (4) 14 Sep 2011, 08:06AM: You: Seven years ago, I received a copy of Yevgeny Zamyatin's We in the mail. I don't know who sent it to me. Two days ago, the same thing happened to my friend Will. Is this a coincidence? We don't know what to make of it. More about the mystery. If this has ever happened to you, we want to know.

Filed under: Reading

# (1) 18 Jul 2011, 11:31AM: An (NCSA) Mosaic Of Colorful Little Bits: I looked at my past, like, eight blog entries and saw that they were pretty thinky pieces. When did my blog turn into Crooked Timber? So, a little miscellany.

Saturday I went to the beach! And now I am parti-colored. I got to see Gus, whose "How We Know What We Know: A personal explication" is riveting, and I wish every interesting thinker would write a similar intellectual memoir. I learned how to play the card game Guillotine, and led a couple of games of Once Upon A Time. When I'm the first player, I like to set up a named pair of characters, in a particular city or setting, with a clear problem. This seems to help when I'm playing with novices, as it gives them something to build on.

Yesterday I had a three-minute dispute with Leonard over whether his three-Sundays-in-a-row habit of ordering the chicken and waffles at the local brunch place meant that was now "his thing."

Leonard bought us a September 1945 issue of The American, a monthly general interest magazine, and we're reading it with Wikipedia or Wolfram Alpha at the ready. Reference material helps contextualize, say, propaganda about how well people can eat despite wartime rationing. "Wait, how does the population density of France in 1945 compare to that of the US?" (Way higher. Thank you, Wolfram Alpha!)

Another bit of reading: Ben Franklin discovering one General Loudoun's astonishing indecision. Loudoun's procrastination slows down the entire economy of the Colonies and keeps mail boats from carrying urgent information back to England. Franklin later writes in his autobiography:

On the whole I then wondered much how such a man came to be entrusted with so important a business as the conduct of a great army, but having since seen more of the great world, and its means of obtaining and motives for giving places, my wonder is diminished.

Punchline: "The Governor General Loudon was a mail steamer and excursion vessel..." Not sure about the namesake, especially because of the orthographical variance, but still mouth-twitchingly funny.

Filed under: Reading

# (1) 29 Jun 2011, 03:00PM: On The Usefulness Of Writing:

About this time there was a cry among the people for more paper money, only fifteen thousand pounds being extant in the province, and that soon to be sunk. The wealthy inhabitants oppos'd any addition, being against all paper currency, from an apprehension that it would depreciate, as it had done in New England, to the prejudice of all creditors. We had discuss'd this point in our Junto [debating and science society], where I was on the side of an addition, being persuaded that the first small sum struck in 1723 had done much good by increasing the trade, employment, and number of inhabitants in the province, since I now saw all the old houses inhabited, and many new ones building; whereas I remembered well, that when I first walk'd about the streets of Philadelphia, eating my roll, I saw most of the houses in Walnut-street, between Second and Front streets, with bills on their doors, "To be let"; and many likewise in Chestnut-street and other streets, which made me then think the inhabitants of the city were deserting it one after another.
Our debates possess'd me so fully of the subject, that I wrote and printed an anonymous pamphlet on it, entitled "The Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency." It was well receiv'd by the common people in general; but the rich men dislik'd it, for it increas'd and strengthen'd the clamor for more money, and they happening to have no writers among them that were able to answer it, their opposition slacken'd, and the point was carried by a majority in the House. My friends there, who conceiv'd I had been of some service, thought fit to reward me by employing me in printing the money; a very profitable jobb and a great help to me. This was another advantage gain'd by my being able to write.

This is from Ben Franklin's autobiography. It rocks pretty hard that, when you own a printing press and your government is fairly loose, you can write a persuasive pamphlet, and distribute it, and thus get a contract to print money.

I first read Ben Franklin's autobiography in eleventh grade, in that spot in the American Literature curriculum where lots of people read Catcher in the Rye or Death of a Salesman or something. So glad Mr. Hatch assigned us Franklin. Success, persuasion, enlightened self-interest and altruism and civic action, data-driven decisions, the perks of being a weirdo -- so much is there.

Filed under: Reading

# (1) 05 Jun 2011, 09:01PM GMT+5:30: A Loose Constellation of Thoughts on WikiLeaks: This is a good time to remind my readers that this, my personal website, does not necessarily represent the views of my employer or anyone else.

Around 2000, I took a political science class with Steve Weber, International Politics perhaps. He said that the major question of international relations was: why isn't there a substantial international alliance of non-US countries countering the US in a battle for global dominance? That's how balance of power works, after all.

Now we see the answer: not countries but networks, like Al Qaeda and WikiLeaks. They use individual countries, the way one uses a coffeeshop that has a particularly lenient free wifi policy. Bruce Sterling once predicted that a really effective global civil society would look "kind of like Al Qaeda, only not murderous," and indeed now you have WikiLeaks. I'm half a year late talking about this (the weird timestamp is because I started this piece in India half a year ago), but after reading all those history of technology pieces, I figure why not.

If you haven't read Geert Lovink & Patrice Riemens's "Twelve theses on WikiLeaks" (formerly ten theses) and Aaron Bady's "Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy; 'To destroy this invisible government'" yet, they're pretty foundational texts. Most recently I read Finn Brunton's "Keyspace", which may as well have been written for me.

Thinking of all the things WikiLeaks is reminds me of teaching "Politics in Modern Scifi" and filling up a blackboard with the names of all the writers the Wachowski brothers ripped off.

WikiLeaks is a crowdsourced panopticon; it's open source, distributed antistatism; it's a descendant of Indymedia, samizdat, Drudge Report, Salon, bootlegs, the Rodney King video, and human flesh search engines; it's as audacious as a terrorist attack, showing what a soft target certain infrastructure is; it's invading the government's privacy just as the government's invaded ours; it's a backswing of the secrecy pendulum.

Brunton muses, "WikiLeaks, and what it portends, is all about working with and managing our points of failure and overload, as human minds and as social creatures." Which makes it rather like Agile software development, and polyamory -- organizational forms deliberately constructed as workarounds for human failings. As the framers of the US (federal) government constructed checks and balances, because we're not angels, so these new systems aim to help us play jiujitsu with our workflows and our secrets. Which, if organizational forms are kinds of technology, are technical fixes to social problems.

Science fiction again: did you ever read Asimov's "The Dead Past"? The one where it turns out the government was right to suppress that one secret?

"Nobody knew anything," said Araman bitterly, "but you all just took it for granted that the government was stupidly bureaucratic, vicious, tyrannical, given to suppressing research for the hell of it. It never occurred to any of you that we were trying to protect mankind as best we could."
"Don't sit there talking," wailed Potterley. "Get the names of the people who were told-"
"Too late," said Nimmo, shrugging. "They've had better than a day. There's been time for the word to spread. My outfits will have called any number of physicists to check my data before going on with it and they'll call one another to pass on the news. Once scientists put [spoiler] and [spoiler] together, home [spoiler] becomes obvious. Before the week is out, five hundred people will know how to build a small [spoiler] and how will you catch them all?" His plum cheeks sagged. "I suppose there's no way of putting the mushroom cloud back into that nice, shiny uranium sphere."
Araman stood up. "We'll try, Potterley, but I agree with Nimmo. It's too late. What kind of a world we'll have from now on, I don't know, I can't tell, but the world we know has been destroyed completely. Until now, every custom, every habit, every tiniest way of life has always taken a certain amount of privacy for granted, but that's all gone now."
He saluted each of the three with elaborate formality.
"You have created a new world among the three of you. I congratulate you. Happy goldfish bowl to you, to me, to everyone, and may each of you fry in hell forever. Arrest rescinded."

That's the fear. The flip side, the hope, you see in Warren Ellis's Global Frequency, the wish-fulfillment fantasy about a vigilante team of experts:

"These are the things I formed the Global Frequency to deal with. The litter of the way we live. The unexploded bombs. There has to be someone to rescue people from the world they live in...."
"Life goes fast. And we seem to spend most of it dancing around all these landmines left in the dirt. All this stuff left over from the last century that some bunch of bastards thought we didn't have the right to know about. Bert? You remember the crap we took from NASA just for wanting to go to space? Like they owned the gate to the world? Screw them all. We'll do what we like. We'll save our own lives and grow our own wings."

Miranda Zero, the leader of the Global Frequency team, is a lot more personally appealing than Julian Assange (look for more wince-inducing media coverage on July 12th).

Relatedly: "On Getting People Mad And Winning Anyway" and "We Are The That Ones We Have Been Waiting For". It is possible to use technology (hardware, software, and workflow processes) to recursively build leadership. I'm learning how.

I feel as though I'm alternating between platitudes and uncracked thought-nuts. It's a nice day out, I see through the window, and I should shower and dress and join it. My thoughts turn to Orwell, the ending of his "Some Thoughts on the Common Toad", which turns even enjoying nice weather into antiauthoritarian resistance:

At any rate, spring is here, even in London N. 1, and they can't stop you enjoying it. This is a satisfying reflection. How many a time have I stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who would stop me enjoying this if they could. But luckily they can't. So long as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a holiday camp, spring is still spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.

Filed under: Reading

# 05 Jun 2011, 10:39AM: Histories: When I was getting my bachelor's degree at the University of California at Berkeley, I took a few courses studying technology in the context of history and political science. The other day I discovered that I still owned a thick "reader" for one of those courses, photocopies of a bunch of articles and book chapters, and settled down to skim through the thing. Sitting on the living room floor with the couch at my back, reading a ream of academic prose and taking notes, I vividly remembered my undergrad days -- except now I have Wikipedia to look up terms like "reverse salient".

I wonder why I found so many of the texts stale. Did I learn it that well the first time around? Were those articles insipid to begin with? Or have the ten intervening years of thinking, conversation, and experience given me so much background knowledge, and intellectual facility with the major issues, that those course materials feel shallow to me now?

(I wouldn't envy a teacher trying to create an equivalent course today, and I'm demonstrably not the target audience. But the Atlantic Tech Canon would be a cool place to start, and there's a bunch of interesting conversation to be had in more specialized courses.)

A few bits that still had the power to knock around my brain:

Hans Jonas: "And here is where I get stuck, and where we all get stuck." From "Technology and Responsibility: Reflections on the New Task of Ethics". To irresponsibly simplify his point: since we can now do different kinds of things, do we need a new system of ethics?

It's always worthwhile remembering the history of technology. Oh the multivariate effects of barbed wire in the North American West! You already know how US telephone companies initially hated "trivial" social use of the telephone, right? Partly because it tied up scarce lines, and partly because the people selling the phones just couldn't grok the importance of ambient intimacy and community connection, a prejudice that probably included some sexism. (If I read Scott Rosenberg's history of blogging, Say Everything, that might prove an instructive comparison.) For a fun medley of related lessons, check out the "Simpsons Already Did It -- Where Do You Think the Name 'Trojan' Came From Anyway?" talk from last year's The Next HOPE.

Cybernetics has the concept of "requisite variety": a well-designed system must have a variety of responses commensurate to the variety of events, stimuli, and situations it will encounter. Do you?

The freshest, funniest voice in the whole collection was Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology, 1977.

But in almost every book or article on the subject the discussion stalls on the same sterile conclusion: "We have demonstrated the relationship between Technology X and social changes A, B, and C. Obviously, Technology X has implications for astounding good or evil. It is now up to mankind to decide which the case will be."
Poor mankind. Although freshly equipped with the best findings of social science, it is still left holding the bag.

Slightly more quotable Winner: "Technologies are structures whose conditions of operation demand the restructuring of their environments." Yep. The last few times I was looking for a job, I half-fancifully decided, if my workplace is not killing an entire industry, the job's not worth doing.

Filed under: Reading

# 25 Mar 2011, 10:32AM: Another Recommendation: "Trouble" by David M. deLeon -- raw and piercing.

Filed under: Reading

# 25 Mar 2011, 09:41AM: Some Short Online Scifi Recommendations: "Saving Face" by Shelly Li and Ken Liu is light and sweet.

"Smaller Fleas that Bite 'Em" by rho is a short, funny sequel to Neal Stephenson's Zodiac: The Eco-Thriller.

"Sisters of Bilhah" by kel is a wrenching, immersive sequel to Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. As the summary says: Sisters of Bilhah is the largest registered charitable organisation in the UK working with asylum seekers and refugees who were citizens of the former United States of America.

"Source Decay" by Charlie Jane Anders is by turns funny, strange, and poignant.

And "(Rising Lion -- The Lion Bows)" by Zen Cho speaks to me as perfectly as if the author were next to me on this couch. My heartstrings turned into leashes and I willingly follow the author wherever she goes. (I fear my RSS feeds or blogging software will break if I try to copy the title with its Unicode characters intact; apologies.)

Filed under: Reading

# 17 Feb 2011, 05:10PM: Thumbs Up, Sarah Glidden: Just finished Sarah Glidden's touching, heady, funny memoir How To Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less. She went on a Birthright Israel trip, determined that they wouldn't brainwash her, and had her views confirmed and challenged. Recommended.

For a taste of Glidden's style, check out her graphical travelogue, available to read at her site. She's Kickstarted funding for a new book documenting being embedded among traveling reporters, which is already conceptually neat. Looking forward to reading it.

Filed under: Reading

# (1) 31 Jan 2011, 12:31AM: The Long And The Short Of It: If you enjoyed Babysitters Club and have more than an hour, Baby-sitters Club The Next Generation #6: Byron and the God of California will reward your readership. It reads like Ann M. Martin, plus profanity and sex.

If you have less time, check out The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen's Window by Rachel Swirsky:

It was then that I knew what she would say next. I wish I could say that my heart felt as immobile as a mountain, that I had always known to suspect the love of a Queen. But my heart drummed, and my mouth went dry, and I felt as if I were falling.

Science, magic, betrayal, gender, a wooden robot, academe, empathy, and change, constant change. This is what speculative fiction can be!

And if you have only a minute, a recent 101-word Anacrusis might be to your taste, on procrastination, linguistic scientist-adventurers, cognitive hazard, or specfic litcrit.

Filed under: Reading

# 24 Jan 2011, 11:18AM: Atul Gawande, "Better": I keep recommending in-person that people read Atul Gawande's Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, so I ought to write about it too. I describe it, tongue-in-cheek, as a secular self-help book. Gawande, Michael Lewis, Malcolm Gladwell, This American Life, my ex-boss -- who else gets lyrical about process improvement?

"Process improvement" is such a dry term for it. As Gawande puts it, success and improvement require diligence, ethics, and ingenuity. Mom points out that these match up against three old-school Hindu virtues:

Diligence = karma
Doing Right = dharma
Ingenuity = atma

That last might seem strange except for Gawande's definition. From the introduction:

...ingenuity -- thinking anew. Ingenuity is often misunderstood. It is not a matter of superior intelligence but of character. It demands more than anything a willingness to recognize failure, to not paper over the cracks, and to change. It arises from deliberate, even obsessive, reflections on failure and a constant searching for new solutions.

This book enraptured me, in my late twenties, thinking about capability and courage, the way I didn't even realize science fiction, procedurals, and competence porn enraptured me as a teen. This is the opposite of ER. As I've mentioned in terms of systems thinking and interpersonal responsibility, I used to think that medicine was about heroics, not hygiene -- godlike individuals with huge responsibilities, not teams, not scientists who are good at changing their minds.

And as I get older, I understand diligence and perseverance better, and have a greater capability for them. I appreciate food or software or prose more when I've tried my hand at making it; I appreciate consistency, stamina, grit more when I've seen them from the inside.

Atul means "a lot" or "very," my mother says. I read aloud several portions of Better to my mother. I read aloud his commencement address on becoming a positive deviant. The book version is better than the speech he spoke.

The published word is a declaration of membership in that community, and also of concern to contribute something meaningful to it.

And I read aloud to her the incidents Gawande observes so vividly, the moments one person tries to persuade another. A doctor and a patient, a vaccinator and a resister. Mom says the prose is so beautiful it reminds her of Kannada. I liked every case study in Better, but the ones that stick with me described a Karnatakan polio vaccination drive and two cystic fibrosis clinics. They marry "How can I provide for this right thing to be always done?" with Trollope-level interpersonal power struggles.

In a job interview the other day, after the interviewer praised me for a moment of candor, I said, "I'm not an engineer, but I have an engineer's honesty, I hope." What's that Lincoln line that Obama quoted? I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. (Clever playing with "bound," there.) The joke I make about my Indian parents is that it would have been okay for me to turn into a doctor, because a doctor is an engineer of the body. Conversely, then, if engineers are like doctors, then who am I to them? A hospital administrator, a lab director, a nurse, a paramedic, a journal editor, a public health officer, a research assistant, a med school counselor, and Michael Crichton?

Filed under: Reading

# (3) 06 Dec 2010, 08:10PM GMT+5:30: Quotes: First a bunch of little snippets from my recent instant messenger conversations:

Oh, the new movie Black Swan isn't an adaptation of the economics book? It's about ballerinas? BLAH TO THAT. I mean, there's a Freakonomics movie. And surely you saw that summer blockbuster The General Theory of Employment, Interest, And Money. I think Keynes got a best screenplay Oscar nod for that one.

Leaving the house is magic.

[After saying "didn't mean to nag, just correct for lag," I sought a rhyming followup or rephrasing.] You disconnected from the server, I repeated my line further. Just checking dropped packets, didn't mean to make a racket. DOGGEREL AWARD HERE I COME?

"oh yeah" like "OH yeah" or "oh, that would be a good idea" or Kool-Aid man bursting through a wall?

I am reading about Privilege Denying Dude, etc. while a young Indian woman sweeps my room. Right near me. COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

I thought we were not-bothering buddies. I RESCIND MY HIGH-FIVE

And now quotes from recent issues of The Caravan:

It was 20 years ago that I experienced for the first time while reading, the strange combination of soaring and falling natural only to the economies of debtor-states.
...those of us who criticise the Western media for bestowing magical Taliban-defeating powers on Karachi's Ecstasy-popping 20-somethings...
Just outside Italian Village, I found a Dairy Queen fast-food restaurant, filled with Kurds talking rapidly on Bluetooth headsets. A spokesman for Dairy Queen told me his company had no restaurants in Erbil, and he suspected another Dairy Queen operator in West Asia had gone rogue and set up shop there as a freelancer; just as a mushroom cloud in North Korea bears the marks of the influence of AQ Khan, an ice cream cake in Kurdistan implies the assistance of someone with mastery of Dairy Queen technology in Istanbul or Bahrain.
And so it was, in this entertainment vacuum following the Hindi ban and without a decent replacement, that something unexpected happened in Manipur: the Koreans moved in.

Filed under: Reading

# (1) 29 Nov 2010, 10:55PM GMT+5:30: Longbows & Longboxes: Read some Amar Chitra Katha comic books today.

The Vivekananda biography starts: "Nineteenth century India. The spirit of Hinduism lay hidden under a debris of rituals -- rituals disowned by the Indian intellectuals and scorned by the ruling British." Still disorienting when the word "Chicago" appears in the text, and cutting when an American calls him the n-word.
Illustrators I like include C.M. Vitankar & P.B. Kavadi. The latter's work in "Sati and Shiva" (Vol. 550) includes great facial expressions on Shiva, and an awesome eye-roll by Sati just before her ultimate I-hate-you-dad glare: "I am ashamed to call myself your daughter. I will cast off this body of mine as a worthless corpse." Dad ends up killed, then resurrected but with a goat's head. Sati reincarnates as Parvati ("Shiva Parvati," Vol. 506, with a mint-green Shiva).
Shiva sure does like the "put some animal's head on him!" solution to reanimating the dead. Elephant, goat.
"Shiva Parvati" features Shiva-in-disguise talking to Parvati and dissing Shiva: "Oh-h! Lady, I know Shiva. He is covered with ashes and serpents deck his body, which is clothed in foul-smelling hides. How can your sweet and tender self become his bride? He is deformed, uncouth and poor. His ancestry is unknown." Leonard suggested it would be easier if Shiva would just show his birth certificate. I'm especially amused at "Lady, I know Shiva," which I can't help hearing in a Brooklyn accent.
Birbal is so manipulative & devious! I read Birbal stories as a kid and just caught the cleverness, but now I'm imagining all-caps cables from or about him in a Wikileaks document dump.
The story of Kacha and Devayani, with its endlessly resurrecting demons and cleverness with loopholes, reminds me of Battlestar Galactica.
From "Rani of Jhansi" (Vol. 539), from Indians' complaints about the British just before the rebellion in 1857: "Our ancient handloom industry has been ruined by cheap British cloth." Guy sticks to his talking points. Um, I was about to try to find the IRS's old kids' site to compare prose, but I got distracted when I saw that the IRS lets you simulate twenty different tax scenarios. "You've heard of reality TV. Now it's reality taxes! Apply what you've learned by putting yourself in the shoes of 20 different taxpayers while you explore the ins and outs of filing tax returns electronically!" Must resist...

Filed under: Reading Taxes

# (1) 26 Nov 2010, 12:07PM GMT+5:30: Speculative Filk & Short Fiction: As with The Autograph Man, I have a couple book titles that now fall into melodies in my head.

Billy Joel's "Great Wall of China":

We coulda gone all the way
to The Left Hand of Darkness
if you'd read a little Ursula K. Le Guin

They Might Be Giants' "Mink Car":

I had sex in a Glasshouse
sex in a Glasshouse
written by Charlie Stross [pronounced "Strouse" causa rhymi]

Thanks for recommending Glasshouse, Danni and (IIRC) James. I'm a few chapters into it now, so, just past the second sex scene (hence the filk). So far this is the most enjoyable Stross I've read, with neat ideas and a compelling POV character and mystery, up there with the clever "Down on the Farm". I never got into Accelerando, the other Laundry story of his I read didn't hook me (yet another creepy-funny take on Santa Claus), and The Family Trade felt dumbed-down. I find The Family Trade's origin story more interesting, and C.C. Finlay's July 2010 Futurismic story "Your Life Sentence" is a better woman-on-the-run story.

Speaking of that, some short online pieces I've liked recently:

"Private Detective Molly" by A. B. Goelman, 4 June 2007, Strange Horizons. I'm a sucker for hard-talking detectives, and talking robots.

I grab my trench coat and fedora from the closet before looking around the room.
That's when I see my new boss. Four feet of trouble. Brunette variety.

"Death and Suffrage" by Dale Bailey, from the 2007 anthology The Living Dead. "The dead had voted, all right, and not just in Chicago." Not a postapocalyptic zombie story; instead, politics and a compelling droning dreary nightmare feel. Like The West Wing meets World War Z.

"Talisman" by Tracina Jackson-Adams, 19 August 2002, Strange Horizons. Is this urban fantasy, except rural? Horses, a family feud, dark ceremonies in the wood. I don't usually like fantasy, or fiction about horses, but Jackson-Adams got me with high stakes, slow-burn reveals, and believable emotion and characters.

"How to Make Friends in Seventh Grade" by Nick Poniatowski, 21 June 2010, Strange Horizons. "I wasn't mad at you for losing the rocket. I was mad at you for being such a nerd. I'm not your friend, and I never was." Hurts so good. One character's wish fulfillment, but not the POV character's.

I'm halfway through the great Machine of Death anthology (free to download). The Camille Alexa and J. Jack Unrau, David Malki!, and Jeffrey C. Wells stories especially stick with me.

It was a good salesman voice, keen and enthusiastic, and it bore shockingly little resemblance to the one he'd been using his entire workaday life up until that day about two months ago, the day Simon now liked to call "Torn Apart And Devoured By Lions Day."

"Hokkaido Green" by by Aidan Doyle, 1 November 2010, Strange Horizons. Bittersweet fantasy about emotions and trafeoffs.

A brown bear entered the clearing. It walked upright and carried an old-fashioned miner's lantern filled with fireflies. It waddled towards the pool, looking less like a predator than like an elderly sumo wrestler tottering uncertainly towards a bout with a reigning champion.

In the comments, I welcome your thoughts on the linked stories, or additional filk on spec-fic titles.

Filed under: Comedy Reading

# (1) 18 Nov 2010, 06:36PM GMT+5:30: Four Short Story Recommendations: One thing I do while I should be hanging out with my mom, or sleeping, or writing, is read short science fiction and fantasy stories online. A few recommendations to close some tabs:

Jo Walton's "Relentlessly Mundane", 23 October 2000 in Strange Horizons. Just right in the way that Walton always does, realistic and inevitable and surprising all at once.

Jane hated going to Tharsia's apartment. It was hung about with tapestries and jangling crystal windchimes and a string of little silver unicorns, and it reminded her of Porphylia and everything she wanted to forget. If Tharsia had been able to get it right it wouldn't have been so irritating; it was just that little silver unicorns look so tacky when you've been used to the deep voices of real unicorns and great silver statues that speak and smile. Jane's own apartment was modern and spartan. Her mother approved of how clean it was but kept giving her houseplants and ornaments to, as she put it, "personalise the place." "You always look as if you're going to move out at any minute," she said. Jane threw them away. She didn't want personalised; she wanted functional and clean, in case she moved out at any minute. Eventually her mother gave up, as she had long since given up complaining about the huge belt-pouch Jane always kept on, and Jane's lack of a boyfriend since Mark, and her working out too much. Jane's apartment stayed bare and devoid of personality. The room she liked best was the shower, brightly lit and white-tiled with copious amounts of hot water flowing whenever Jane wanted it. She had missed showers most of all, in Porphylia.
She walked briskly up the three flights. Tharsia's apartment would irritate her, but she could deal with the irritation. At least walking up the stairs would be exercise, partly making up for the fact she'd missed her fencing lesson to come here today. She'd make the time up. She knocked. The bell, she knew from experience, rang a ghastly madrigal, a tinny parody of the tunes the minstrels used to play in the Great Hall. She couldn't understand how Tharsia could be content with this. Well, she wasn't content, of course.

"Hwang's Billion Brilliant Daughters", by Alice Sola Kim, November 2010 issue of Lightspeed. Haunting and sweet. Found via Julia Rios -- thanks, Julia!

When Hwang finds a time that he likes, he tries to stay awake. The longest he has ever stayed awake is three days....
Whenever Hwang goes to sleep, he jumps forward in time. This is a problem. This is not a problem that is going to solve itself....

And now two that I read aloud to my mother. "Little Brother™" by Bruce Holland Rogers, 30 October 2000 in Strange Horizons.

But then, while Mommy went to the kitchen to cook breakfast, Peter tried to show Little Brother™ how to build a very tall tower out of blocks. Little Brother™ wasn't interested in seeing a really tall tower. Every time Peter had a few blocks stacked up, Little Brother™ swatted the tower with his hand and laughed. Peter laughed, too, for the first time, and the second. But then he said, "Now watch this time. I'm going to make it really big."
But Little Brother™ didn't watch. The tower was only a few blocks tall when he knocked it down.
"No!" Peter said. He grabbed hold of Little Brother™'s arm. "Don't!"
Little Brother™'s face wrinkled. He was getting ready to cry.

Short but cutting.

And Cat Rambo's "Magnificent Pigs", 27 November 2006, in Strange Horizons.

Three years later, on a rainy September afternoon, my parents died in a car accident and I returned home to the farm to take care of Jilly. A few townfolk felt I shouldn't be allowed to raise her by myself, but when I hit twenty-one a year later, that magic number at which you apparently become an adult, they stopped fussing.
The insurance settlement provided enough to live on. It wasn't a lot, but I supplemented it by raising pigs and apples in the way my parents always had and taking them to Indianapolis. There the pigs were purchased by a plant that makes organic bacon, pork, and sausage, and the apples by a cider mill. I didn't mind the farm work. I'd get up in the morning, take care of things, and find myself a few hours in the afternoon to work in my barn-stall studio.

The Rambo story made me sniffle as I read it to Mom, and after the ending, Mom asked me to write a fan email to Rambo telling her how moving it was.

Filed under: Reading

# 29 Oct 2010, 01:25PM: When Fluff Fails: From last night, not posted till now:

Tonight, instead of going to sleep at a reasonable hour, I quickly read Neal Shusterman's young adults' dramedy novel The Schwa Was Here. Washington, D.C. bookstore dude, why did you recommend Shusterman to me when I was disappointed you didn't have any more Gordon Korman? Shusterman is okay, with some good lines and observations in Schwa and Unwind (horror YA sf), but the prose isn't quite as well-crafted, and I think Shusterman's not as witty. (Not to mention that the central premise of Unwind is unbelievable and Shusterman never quite earns the reader's suspension of disbelief.)

And now I'm up late thinking about invisibility, mortality, legacy, and other cheering topics. What else did I bring to read? Earth: The Book is also somewhat depressing, but it's mightily funny and cutting and erudite as it depresses. Finished that yesterday. My luggage also contains a Star Trek branded novel about Kahless. I guess I'll go to sleep.

Filed under: Reading

# 14 Oct 2010, 01:53AM AEST: The Hyperlinks I Forged In Life: Disregard the timestamp on this entry, which is leftover from a draft I began on the other side of the world, when the Elizabeth Moon controversy broke. Everything feels unfinished, uncertain, temporary. I finally upgraded my laptop to Lucid Lynx -- yes, half a year after its release. Leonard and I finished watching the first season of the new Reggie Perrin and like it, but not as much as the brilliant original Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Gordon Korman's new young adult novel Pop is the most moving thing he's ever written. I talked with my mother on the phone and she sounds happy in Mysore. I feel like I'm on a road trip on a conveyor belt.

Some links.

Roleplay scenarios to train concealed-carry weapons permitseekers.

Everything Scott writes, of course, but especially him and his readers discussing what's exhausting about running a web publishing organization.

Kate Beaton's Maurice "the Rocket" Richard for Kids made me cry with happiness.

A few weeks ago, speculative fiction author Elizabeth Moon wrote an essay arguing, among other things, that groups of minorities in the United States are responsible for assimilating and seeming non-threatening (a simplification, of course, since if she had written it that baldly maybe she would have understood how absurd her argument was). She then shut down the comment thread on her post and hid all the comments from public view, thus effectively deleting the conversation by which many readers were trying to discuss how and why she was wrong. Yasaman's response on civilization, the meaning of American citizenship, and pride spoke to me, and I thank coffeeandink and Jed for collecting several other of the many thoughtful responses from around the Net. My old Berkeley friend Shweta Narayan, in response, detailed her experiences of assimilation; I had a much, much easier time of it growing up, so hearing her experience is sobering and edifying. And, as usual, Liz Henry tries to build on our dismay to get us to contribute to relevant, productive causes.

Elizabeth Moon is currently one of two Guests of Honor at next year's WisCon feminist sci-fi convention, which has of late been a locus of anti-racist activity. Thus: additional controversy, which I am not attempting to cover systematically in this idiosyncratic selection of links. What can the organizers and participants do to mitigate the implications? Many ask: should she remain a GoH? And it's not like she's the first GoH in WisCon history to have held some abhorrent views, but it's not just about her words, but her actions: the attempted erasure of opposing voices.

I am, right now, deliberately making no plans regarding travel in 2011 so that I can stay free to make plans to take care of my mother. I might go to WisCon, and to other gatherings that honor people who have said or done some things I find breathtakingly wrong. Been there before, will be there again. I was at the GUADEC where Richard Stallman did the sexist emacs virgins comedy act, for instance. But I have my own reasons and needs and tolerances and trade-offs, and will aim not to proselytize others who differ.

On a completely different note, a tearjerking story about family and machines.

Filed under: Reading

# (1) 30 Sep 2010, 10:20PM: Unclear: All I have is small thoughts, right now, in-between thoughts as I shower or eat or pause before reading another chapter to my mother. (The Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. A Mahabharata retelling, which means that today I checked an incident with the C. Rajagopalachari and Amar Chitra Katha versions when I doubted Divakaruni's version. Nope, she didn't entirely make it up! And why did I never before connect the hatejoke "Die In A Fire" with the Pandavas' house of lac?)

Or sometimes I have a conversation with Mom or a friend and from that kneading and churning emerges a small idea. I discovered today, while talking with a friend about integrity, something about how I think about the value of truth-that-hurts. When an honest friend says something that reminds me of my faults, it hurts a little. Sometimes I can use that information to improve myself. But, even if I can't or won't or don't, I still take that pain as part of the price of honesty, as I would pay a regular insurance premium. I pay by taking those little cuts, because the promise inherent in that transaction is that if I need to ask an important question someday, to make a big claim, I can trust without question that my friend will answer it in good faith.

Other:

Of course "lavender" comes from the root "to wash." We just unwrapped and started using a block of lavender soap in our shower/bathtub, and after someone's bath the scent of it floats around in the bathroom like a blessing.

Elisa visited yesterday and talked with Mom and me about health, Fred Astaire, the lessons we learned while growing up, &c. She highly recommended The Band Wagon so we watched it that night. I called her during a pause to babble excitedly about how great it is. It's especially superlative if you've just watched a bunch of the interchangeable musicals like Follow the Fleet for contrast. (Huh, those & Agatha Christie & P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves & Wooster stories: what 21st-century media is like that, enjoyable, will sort of hold up decades from now, but all the individual stories blur together and the reader/viewer can't recall which ones she's seen?) The Band Wagon has complicated, unusual characters and dances, and a plot more mature and interesting than the run-of-the-mill. I loved: the stylized gangsters' getting-shot dance in a stylized Times Square subway station; the for-once unadorned silence after a "spontaneous" song-and-dance (the beer-drinking song at the cast party); Charisse and Astaire's silent "Central Park" dance. That last one nearly made me cry, it was so beautiful.

Tonight we watched Singin' in the Rain, which (no one told me!) was about artists trying to keep pace with technological change, and (like Band Wagon and Sullivan's Travels) about the superiority of comedy to drama. Melinda and Melinda was fairly unnecessary, it turns out. Singin' is fun, but Band Wagon made me want to watch it again immediately.

They aren't actually small thoughts, and I know that. They are little flashes and seedlings that grow when I am not looking. They pop up and shy away and ebb back in between warming tortillas and unfolding the sofa bed and thanking Rachel for recommending Regeneration. (I picked up Inherent Vice at the airport on the way to Australia, and Regeneration at an airport on the way back to New York. Loved the former -- read aloud a paragraph about a run-down casino to everyone I could buttonhole -- and am loving the latter. Then there's Trading in Danger, the entertaining-but-Mary-Sue-ish Elizabeth Moon I bought in Melbourne 50% on the strength of its cover. Before she said things I disagree with and need to discuss when I have time.)

They run away with me when I give them a chance, my thoughts; they are vines that grow in fast motion and ensnare me. This connects to that connects to the other, in a net, a web, and soon enough I don't want to say anything because it couldn't be enough. And everything I say is insufficient to the emotion in a single phrase my mother read aloud this morning, to the texture of the light bouncing off the ceiling light fixture this afternoon, glossy with a sheen like oil, like the fat in cream.

It's a different rhythm and cadence of thought I must sink into when I am caretaking, as different as travel is from work and work is from plain old unemployment.

I am writing this long blog entry because I haven't the time to write a short one. Or -- to blaspheme -- what else is there to do, when stuck, but to write long posts, have think long thoughts, and pray long prayers? So I can't seem to decide whether I have lots of time or none -- it's a temporal illusion, like an optical illusion, deceptively slicing up a quantity to make it change size. But shape does change size, experientially -- that's what affordances are all about.

Oh dear I'm rambling some more. Almost time to unfurl the sofa bed. Post.

Filed under: Reading

# (3) 22 Sep 2010, 10:56AM: Beginning To Think About A Formative Influence: Suresh Naidu visited the other night and, of course, inspected our bookshelves. "You're the only household I've ever seen that had every Stephenson, including the Baroque Cycle, but not Snow Crash. The Big U and not Snow Crash?!" Snow Crash was on another bookshelf because it didn't physically fit on that one.

When someone asks me, "Who are your favorite scifi authors?" I sometimes say, "Depending on who's asking, Neal Stephenson or Ursula K. Le Guin." But that's unbalanced, because I deeply adore Le Guin's The Dispossessed but have read only five of her thirty-plus books, while I've read nearly everything Stephenson's published in book form. (Speaking of Le Guin: congratulations, Jed!)

I am trying to remember the timeline on how I discovered each of these authors. Did someone recommend The Left Hand of Darkness to me my freshman year at Berkeley? I know I had that used paperback by my junior year when I taught it. (Note: I find that syllabus incredibly embarrassing since I'd have much more diverse and interesting works and questions if I taught it now; Andy's syllabus is cooler.) Seth Schoen gave me a copy of In The Beginning Was The Command Line sometime in 1999, I think. And then I bought Snow Crash at Cody's Books on Telegraph, and started reading it as I walked home to my apartment, and came home to discover that my flatmate Nikki had moved out with zero notice, after living with me for six weeks, leaving a note on the refrigerator whiteboard telling me "you know why." I did not know and still do not know why she moved out; it is one of the mysteries of my life, like why sociology lecturer Andrew Creighton laughed at me that one time when I guessed that the video clip he'd just shown us was "modern dance?".

Oh right, Stephenson. Then I got Cryptonomicon and I didn't read it linearly the first time, I just dipped in and read random chapters.

I think I've had about fifteen conversations about Neal Stephenson and his work in the past month. Not surprising when I've been to the World Science Fiction Convention, but then there was Tennant Reed, the climate change policy wonk I ended up chatting with at the Melbourne airport when our flight to LA was delayed. Not a WorldCon attendee. He's a Tolkien fan; I'm not. I introduced him to Pynchon, whom he hadn't tackled yet. But we quoted lines from the first chapter of Snow Crash at each other verbatim. It's in The Atlantic's thought-provoking "Tech Canon", and it's in the geek canon. (Speaking of The Atlantic and thinking-about-tech: I am a fan of Biella's Anthropology of Hackers syllabus & explication.)

This is just spadework, right now, this entry, just clearing some brush so I can really think about what Stephenson has meant to me. There's a way in which In The Beginning Was The Command Line got me the job at Fog Creek Software. There are satirical scenes in Cryptonomicon that I initially read as erotic. I could go on and on (as he does!), and at some point I should.

Filed under: Reading

# (1) 31 Aug 2010, 10:36PM: "Going once / Going twice / Won't these gentlemen suffice?": Something like a full day on airplanes, and I skipped getting sick. But then I caught my host's cold, so instead of exploring Melbourne on the last day before WorldCon starts, I'm yawning out from the living room at a sky smeared with indifferent shades of grey, like used paintbrush-cup water drying on newsprint. I sit crosslegged on a couch, under four thin blankets, consuming lemongrass ginger tea, toast with peanut butter and banana (Australia has peanut butter! despite Leonard's declaration that it's the American marmite), and comfort media. I'm listening to Tally Hall's Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum (post title from "The Bidding") and reading Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice. Fortunately I've already read the prerequisite Stephenson, Owen Hill, and Nathanael West, and seen The Big Lebowski, so I can keep up and laugh as Pynchon riffs on "a hippie walks into a noir." And then there are Worldcon-related tweets and the AussieCon 4 LiveJournal community, and Finn's old winter thoughts, which match my physical climate.

More "responsibly," I'm pondering things to do in Melbourne. I'm especially interested in the immigration museum and hot-air balloon rides, the tramcar restaurant, and visiting Puffing Billy. Watching Three Thousand for more idiosyncratic, local, and one-time events happening between 7 and 13 September, and welcoming suggestions.

Yesterday was great, till I got sick. Danni led me onto train and tram to Fitzroy, which seems to be like San Francisco's Mission District. I bought a few cards and a button at Incube8r, and mooned over some jewelry from Limerence: very simple excerpts from working watches, the first steampunk I've ever seen that made me Get It. The name's enchanting and accurate. We visited a Friends of the Earth (acronymises to FOE) shop where an "It's Time." shirt indirectly caused Danni to explain Gough Whitlam to me. The shop allows people to stick small housing-related ads onto the window, facing out. I looked to my left and saw a short set of sentence fragments that I couldn't instantly read, set (to the reader) left-justified and ragged-right, and flashed back to the Pegasus bookstore at Shattuck and Durant in Berkeley, poems all over its windows -- where I first read Adam Zagajewski's "Try To Praise The Mutilated World," right after the 2001 terror attacks.

Drinks with Danni, Steph, and their friends at Polly's (recommended for service, ambiance, and selection), where I acted tourist and asked for AUTHENTIC Australian or Melburnian liquors or cocktails. Liquors: not so much (another bit of indigenous culture that got wiped out?). Evidently 1806 serves a "Japanese Slipper" cocktail, invented in Melbourne a whole twenty-six years ago. "[C]an be ordered safely in most countries where Midori is available." In other countries: peel it, it's the feds!

A fine faux lamb bolognese at Vegie Bar (recommended for food, veg friendliness, and buzz) (warning: it is a restaurant and thus the site is all in Flash or some other obstructive doesn'tworkalike). We talked about Askers vs. Guessers, the Melburnian ex-Perth crowd, neighborhoods, travel, computers, clients, footnotes and punctuation, booze, &c. I found myself asking "what?" a lot, sometimes because Australians speak very quickly, or because of crowd noise, and sometimes because I did not know whether I had heard a proper name, a bit of slang, a mistake, or a standard English word I would recognize were it written down. After India, it's a relief to be in a foreign country where nearly everyone speaks a variant of English, but I do feel loud, overbearing, obvious, a quarter-beat off. I'm five feet one, yet socially, I lumber, stumbling into things, an SUV among bikes.

Tram to train home. The Parliament train station played music over the public address system, random 80s stuff. Now I'm listening to the Mountain Goats, Tallahassee: more comfort music. Time to forage for lunch. No pub crawl for me tonight, I suspect. Pynchon, email gardening, the indoor life, intoxicated only by pseudoephedrine, if I can convince a nearby chemist I'm not looking for meth precursors.

Filed under: Reading

# (15) 23 Aug 2010, 08:26AM: Science Fiction That Argues Back: Julia and I were talking yesterday about Maureen McHugh and her excellent, searing novella The Cost To Be Wise came up. The Cost To Be Wise is in part a critique of Star Trek's Prime Directive and noninterference policies like it. This reminded me of how Nancy Kress's great Beggars in Spain novella is nearly explicitly a response to Ayn Rand, specifically Atlas Shrugged (I wouldn't say the expanded book and Beggars trilogy are). Several characters in Beggars in Spain follow Yagaiism, which reads clearly as this universe's Objectivism.

This got me thinking: what scifi interestingly critiques previous scifi? Cory Doctorow has a series that explicitly does this:

In spring 2004, in the wake of Ray Bradbury pitching a tantrum over Michael Moore appropriating the title of Fahrenheit 451 to make Fahrenheit 9/11, I conceived of a plan to write a series of stories with the same titles as famous sf shorts, which would pick apart the totalitarian assumptions underpinning some of sf's classic narratives.

A few other examples: Leonard makes the case that the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Measure of a Man" responds to the original series's "Court Martial"; it "puts one of the underlying themes of TOS on trial and shows that it hasn't held up well." ("on trial" - zing!) And lots of fanfic does this, like "Second Verse (Same As the First" by Friendshipper/Sholio. "The power disparity between the 'Lanteans and the other peoples in Pegasus is something I think about occasionally, but it's never addressed on the show."

It's all a shared discourse, sure. We talk about themes we've read and play with them. "Another End of the Empire" by Tim Pratt, for example, is responding to a common fantasy trope. But I'm interested in hearing about science fiction and fantasy that says, "In this specific work, there is a specific ideological failing that I will now use, or refute, and that idea will be a primary premise for my story." Do you have a favorite bit of speculative fiction that's like that?

Filed under: Reading

# (1) 19 Aug 2010, 01:33PM: Sorry, Yet Not, For The Length: I closed the lid of my iBook G4 at some point this summer, maybe in June, and didn't open it again till I came back from India, with my Linux laptop unavailable. I'd been timesinking (otherwise known as keeping up with RSS feeds) via NetNewsWire on that 5-year-old Mac, and I suppose I accidentally experimented with simply dropping that part of my life, for a time. Some friends' or writers' blogs, I followed manually, and some I just forgot about; Identi.ca, Twitter, LiveJournal and Dreamwidth fed my pipeline steadily enough; I just stopped trying to follow a lot of the stream.

I supposed I vaguely thought it would build up, the backlog. I'm usually a completist. I get anxious about reading every word, seeing every episode, rewinding if the phone rings and I miss five seconds of dialogue. (I'm an asshole about no talking when we're watching something together. The pause button gets employed a lot.) But today I started up NetNewsWire and there weren't ten thousand new items, there were like 1400. Quirks of settings and configuration, of RSS feeds simply no longer carrying such long-past items, so my reader had never retrieved them -- I have missed a big stripe of the stream.

And that's fine. There is no complete. Some of that stuff I will never know about. Some I'll hear about in other ways. Some might have changed my life. Some might have just amped up my anxiety, added yet more I Shoulds to my dark cloud. I was living a different full life instead, meeting new friends at conferences, whiling away long afternoons in the living room in Mysore while my mom slept, reading poetry aloud into a recorder for a friend on the other side of the globe, frittering away precious irrevocable moments in other ways. Maybe not better, but different, and different is its own kind of better.

Edinburgh for me was always the randomizer, the place I hitched to every year, camped out in, and came out in some other country, six weeks later, with hungover and overdrawn, with a new skill or passion or someone sadder or more famous or just more fuddled and dumber than ever.

I feel like I started traveling this year in April, or January, and never stopped. Traveling, and writing harder, and meeting new people who knock me to pieces, and trying and failing to volunteer better and make things socially. (Try again, fail better, when I have a moment to breathe, in November.)

This post started as a letter to one of those people, so I could talk about how looking at these RSS feeds now, I have a different pruning hand. I'm more prone to cut the Must Keep Up! politics and tech firehoses. And my eye has changed. I catch my breath when I see a gem of prose or thought, especially a phrase of love or anger that punches through. I get overwhelmed with happiness when someone articulates something just so, or when a precise, vivid illustration-in-words works its magic on my mind's eye. Insight and beauty -- did I get inured to them, mixed in with the sod and dross, or was I not noticing them? How much have I changed, my God?

I could hear the lilt and awe in Scott Rosenberg's voice when I read him saying "There's so much that's fun and unexpected in Perfecting Sound Forever:..." and it made me want to collect the pretty marbles as I read instead of just letting them fall to the floor. A stream, caught for once, another form of completism, but maybe less neurotic and more about joyous sharing.

...your books do not love you. They are objects, and not morally superior to any other object in your house. Again, books are not morally superior to any other objects. They are just heavier.
...like all good hells, the eating down the pantry hell is all the worse because it is a hell of your unique making.

The study has its limits, of course; we are strongly multivariate bags of chemicals, after all.

The tie from this book to my own interests should be clear, but if not, I should make them explicit: free and open source software often thinks of itself as being sui generis, but in fact it is part of a history (in this country) of retreat from established economic structures with the intent of creating parallel systems that would eventually compete with or replace those established structures with something simultaneously individually empowering and socially just.
(A laugh-out-loud The Big Caption.)
The argument I have always seen against dropping the use of such words always boils down to "But I'm a word nerd, and I think I should be able to use any word I want. Not using that word cuts a hole in my lexicon, and demonizes it, besides. Also, I like that word."

That's not word-nerdery. That's laziness. That's favoring metaphor over precision, generality over specificity. A real word-nerd would keep searching until they came up with a more correct, more fitting descriptor. If the situation you're involved in actually resembles a death-march? Then by all means, go ahead and use that word. If not? Head back to the well and drop the bucket. Surely you can come up with something better than that.

Finally I suggested that Alex design her own coin. Her first reaction: "But it's against the law!" No, I explained, it's only against the law to make copies of real coins trying to fool people. I drew the circles for her and helped with some of the spelling. Here you have the results: the Alex 1000 dollar coin.

i have been meaning to write an article about the whole experience
for some time now
maybe pitch it to some of those magazines
that run personal-narrative articles

you know the kind of article i'm talking about
they begin in medias personal res
and then gently flesh out a few details
and toward they end they circle some greater truth

like a dog who's worried there's a trap somewhere near the food dish.
I thought about how it is with this kind of high joy, that there has to be a kind of recklessness, a forgetting, in order to fly like that.
On all sides of the political spectrum of homeschoolers, I tend to see an unrealistically rosy view of families. Parents care more about their kids than anyone else ever could, and parents know what’s best for their kids’ education. Yeah. I know too many parents who use crack to buy into this one; disillusionment about the awesomeness of families is an occupational hazard for me. There will always be parents who are disengaged and/or incompetent and/or malevolent. We will always need a default educational system that is not dependent on parents knowing or caring about what is best for their children, and it needs to be as good as we can make it because those kids are already starting out with two and a half strikes against them, and they deserve a chance.
I was terrified. It may have all been about anticipating the roaches that I suspected were all over our new apartment. It may have been the foreign sturdiness of the word, "wife."
My own guess is that a rule like this breaks one of the important criteria for a rule of justice that are there in some versions of Rawls - that the social decision rule has to be justifiable to everyone in society on their own terms, otherwise it's not really a society. If you have an overarching rule about priorities, it's going to create what Kenneth Arrow calls "positional dictators" - ie people whose position in the current allocation of resources gives them a status such that the social utility function is wholly determined by theirs. More importantly, there are going to be loads of people whose priorities are nowhere near the social priorities and who therefore have no chance whatsoever of seeing their particular hobbyhorse being funded. People like that are eventually going to get pig sick of making their contribution, because they're going to believe (correctly) that the society they're in isn't working for them.
"In this town everyone's rich. So when everyone's equal serendipity becomes a status symbol." ... Maybe telling them "no" trashed their delusion that life should just be one series of effortless moments after another.
"Yeah, they never show you at home what they can do."
We're both fans of public transit, something we discovered the first time we met; we talked about our favorite AC Transit bus line (the 51) the first time we had dinner, and celebrated a subway-accessible wedding a year and a half later.
Subjectivity Isn’t Sustainable... Sometimes it takes extra time and effort to describe and document situations that appear obvious or hard to describe. We should at least try. Failing to do so keeps all the power and decision making with the people who know.
Then, to our utmost surprise, the captain stepped down from the platform and continued: "My wife and I struggled for a long while, and we just adopted a child last year. It is life's greatest gift. And so, it is my pleasure to do this for you. Won't you please give me your hands so that I can fingerprint them?"
I recently told a reader that if forced to choose, I would sacrifice every video game in existence for the works of Shakespeare and not give it a moment's thought. Such mental experiments are folly. It's likely that if we ever do lose the works of Shakespeare it will be at the same instant we lose all the video games and everything else.
I like universal health care not for any moral reason but because it encourages job mobility, enterpreneurship, takes the burden off our manufacturing industries, and leads to cheaper health care costs. I like to spend money on education because it makes our workers competitive in the international market. I want cap and trade because reliable humans tell me that the long-term costs of climate shift will be worse than doing nothing. I want solar power so people with thousand-year-old grudges in countries half a world away stop yanking us around. I want to cut defense spending so we can move it to border control and humint resources. I favor separation of church and state because, like Thomas Jefferson, I don't want people of faith to have other faiths shoved on them by the power of the government.
I'm a goddam 1972 Republican.

As I read these, copy and paste these, sitting for hours on my nice couch in my American apartment -- Philip Glass, Ray Lynch -- all my tactile senses drift away, I live in my mind, and you can tell, because the quotes get less and less sensual and beautiful, more and more cerebral and clever. That former, pain and breathtaking joy, that's what I got some of this summer, by leaving things I knew and breaking my heart open more and losing my mind a little. I don't want to just have had a vacation from this straitlaced intellectual life, one that doesn't stick.

Perhaps this should have been a letter after all, personal and quiet, about sun and grass and ants constantly getting onto my skin, about enthusiasm and the hope in knowing time will pass, I don't know. More like this.

I want my writing to be good enough for you. I want my living to be good enough. I don't know what I'm losing in this change, I just have to do what I can't not do.

The first day we met he informed me that the essence of our work was learning to get out of our own fucking way. I am learning that out here--how to get out of my own fucking way--and really listen to what I care about, what I truly ache to say. ...
It is almost 11. There is nothing out there but the terrible night.

I scramble around for words to shape and convey how I'm feeling and all I have is what already exists. It is a little late in life for me to decide to invent a new language to love the world with -- isn't that sort of conlang pursuit more suited to the 18-25 demographic, or poets? Isn't this sort of rather embarrassing love letter to discovery and change more suited to Dreamwidth?

Screw it. Jim Blandy said, musing to me and Amber Case at the Mozilla table at Open Source Bridge, "every good thing I've ever done has been unauthorized." Post.

Filed under: Reading

# (2) 13 Aug 2010, 07:29AM: An Ecstatic Patron of Recurrent Light: I first read The Great Gatsby in eleventh grade, Mr. Hatch's American Literature class. Every few years I reread it. I read it a few years ago, after moving to Astoria, and got a richer sense of place out of all the geographical references and touches. I'm rereading bits of it now.

Wow, those party scenes are much more informative, funny, and tragic when you've had friends, and been to parties you enjoyed, and not been the most awkward person in the room. In fact, all the interpersonal stuff is. I'm kind of wondering how it was that I loved this book so much for its aesthetics and psychological insight when I was so completely undeveloped on those fronts. And it's not like Anjana Appachana (Incantations and Other Stories), where I liked the work half a lifetime ago and now it seems obvious. I loved Gatsby then and I love it now, but I can't easily reach back to what I saw in it then, because every page feels fresh now.

I was rereading the end of Chapter 6 ("He broke off and began to walk up and down a desolate path of fruit rinds and discarded favors and crushed flowers....") and remembered Mr. Hatch -- I could call him Sam now? -- reading it aloud to us. "Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!" I remember his greying hair, his two desks stuffed with essays and handouts, the green chalkboard, the classroom's chairdesks in two sets facing each other. (And him, and how he influenced me, but that's several thoughts too many for this was-supposed-to-be-short post.) For his class I wrote an essay about Gatsby, comparing him to Karna from the Mahabharata. It was perhaps the high-water mark of my overachieving high school nerdery, being way longer than the minimum and including a six-page appendix summarizing the Mahabharata with special emphasis on Karna's origin, trials and fate. Cue knowing mockery from classmates. Perhaps they meant it as friendly, mostly.

My parents showed it off to their Indian visitors; their daughter wasn't into bharatnatyam dance or the sitar or classical singing and her Kannada sucked, but at least she was oddly interested in the mythology. I wonder how many printouts they made. "Just like her father," I bet the aunties and uncles said.

I came across that essay last week, while sorting through some boxes. Maybe I'll ask Leonard to read it, to tell me whether it'll make me wince to see what I thought of Fitzgerald and Vyasa before I was even really sentient as a critical thinker. I can barely bear to read my ten-year-old blog entries!

I know what I see in Gatsby now; I saw something else, something valuable and beautiful, ten-plus years ago, and I expect I'll see yet a different face in the next decade. That's a classic for you, one that rewards new orbits with fresh discovery. I now see it through layers of history: Long Island in the 1920s, Tokay High School in the nineties, Queens from the 2000s. Can't repeat the past? ...borne back ceaselessly...

Filed under: Reading

# (1) 11 Aug 2010, 03:37PM: From "I Have A Tambourine" to "LOL Warmongers" (Really Just Listen To The Talk): After making some absurd, thrice-removed-from-original-text inside joke with Leonard, like "I never Medipren I didn't like," I told him about Biella Coleman's & Finn Brunton's talk at HOPE about pleasure in political spectacle, lulzy media, Anonymous vs. Scientology, etc.

"I was reminded of our injokes when they talked about exploitables. BUT NOT ENOUGH! I shall hold them hostage and force them to give their talk again, with more discussion of exploitables! Bright lights in their faces, rivulets of sweat --"

"Or you could just talk to them," Leonard broke in.

Pause.

"They won't even know they've been captured," I mused diabolically.

Anyway, Biella and I were already acquainted before the talk (via Seth), and now Finn and I are pals, which is why they greet me during the Q&A around 58:30. I can recommend Finn's talk on spam and metagaming and his essay "Why I did not kill myself in January of 2010" along with the rest of his writing, and Biella's 1998 FLOSS memories, Precor ethnography, and full lulz talk (more work than I can summarize). And the HOPE talk.

Filed under: Reading

# 11 Aug 2010, 03:07PM: Some Preliminary Thoughts On My Adoration Of The Week: Mysore is a few hours' train, car, or bus travel from Bangalore. Conventional wisdom says Mysore is a small, quiet city, with colleges and parks and long afternoons sipping coffee with friends and relatives.

But a few days ago, with welders fixing a gate on our street, I couldn't get away from the noise, it's been louder and more annoying than anything I have to put up with in Astoria. Which makes Mysore noisier than New York City.

Also, I hit myself in the face while waving away a fly or mosquito.

From some incoherent early morning notes a few days ago:

Electrical current is out upstairs. Sound of water pouring into tank (I hope). Dogs barking intermittently; make me that rat.

Geckos, not feeling all aggravated at ants, eating off banana leaves 3 times in a week, tea tea tea, the idea of too many cooks in the kitchen is hella alien.

"Make me that rat"? I think I was remembering how intermittent, unpredictable rewards and punishments drive lab rats crazy. It sounds like a prayer, though. Batter my heart. Make me that rat.

A few days later:

It's the perfect temperature, and breakfast is long over and lunch is thankfully at least an hour away, but dust from old papers stuffs my nose and the workers' noise turns my energy and creative attention to mush. All I want to do right now is grab you -- yes, you, reader, whoever you are -- by the lapel and read to you large extracts of R.K. Narayan.

I have written all the following essays because I had to. I had to write to meet a deadline every Thursday in order to fill half a column for the Sunday issue....I had not the ghost of an idea what I was going to do. As [my editor] had left me to do anything I wanted within my column I started writing, trusting to luck; somehow I managed to fill the column for nearly twenty years without a break.
-p.8, A Writer's Nightmare: Selected Essays 1958-1988

Anyone who's ever written a weekly column sees, at this moment, straight into Narayan's heart. Somehow, from all the frantic tuggings and scribblings, you end up with a body of work, and there are some gems in there, and how did that happen?

Narayan died two days after Douglas Adams did. He'd been honored by lots of governments and academies, and nominated to the Rajya Sabha (India's upper house of parliament). One of the most touching columns in the collection is a remembrance of Indira Gandhi, who made time to talk with him about books, the environment, and urban development. Then there's the obligatory "how they ruined the movie version of my book" story, and Thurber-y stuff about losing an umbrella or how the morning newspaper gets snatched up and torn to pieces by every relative or neighbor except the subscriber.

He'd lived in Mysore and spent lots of time in Berkeley and New York, both of which he loved. For comfort, the last few weeks, I have been writing and emailing and instant-messaging and phone chatting with friends in NYC and the Bay Area, so when I read Narayan getting nostalgic about 14th Street and the Campanile, Washington Square and Telegraph and Sather Gate, I felt that enchanted expat camaraderie wash over me like a pleasant alien bath. It means even more coming from someone who articulated Karnataka so particularly well:

Even adjoining cities, such as Mysore and Bangalore, to take an immediate example, have antagonistic temperaments although they come under the same State administration and partake of the same culture, separated only by an 85-mile concrete road, which you can cover in two hours; and yet what a difference! Strangers who have passed through, inadvertently say, "I was in Mysore," when they mean Bangalore! This sort of slip distresses a true Mysorean and a Bangalorean equally. For the shades of prejudice between the two cities are not mere gradations in a chromatic scale but well-defined conflicting colours. In the shops of Mysore if any commodity is unfairly priced, and you ask for an explanation, pat comes the answer, "It is all due to Bangalore, where they have put up the prices." The Bangalorean thinks, "God, nothing will prosper in Mysore. People are too sleepy and impossible. Once, when I was in Mysore, I tried to get a plumber to fix the tap in my bathroom and for fifteen days no one turned up. In Bangalore...."
Bangalore hotels, taxis, water supply, and the colour and composition of masala dosai are categorically disapproved of by Mysoreans. "Mysore is dull" is balanced by "Bangalore is getting so congested that it will choke itself one of these days". If a Mysorean admits certain deficiencies in Mysore, he'll always trace them to the fact that it has no spokesmen either in Delhi or in Bangalore, most of the Ministers (at least till recently) being men of other districts, which is the reason why Mysore is without a train connection to the South through Chamarajnagar-Satyamangalam (a distance of only 45 miles through an oft-observed track), an airport, a broadcasting station, and a broad-gauge track. No one in authority has any feeling for Mysore. There is also a comforting view adopted sometimes that Bangalore is a sort of filter keeping out undesirable industrial elements, leaving Mysore to live in its pristine glory.
-p. 148, from "Pride of Place"

As with Lavanya Sankaran, I find here an enchanting and rare specificity. I can always find English-language writers showing off their familiarity with Berkeley and Manhattan, but then it's no longer an in-joke, just sophistication. Narayan as South South Asian:

It is childish to imagine that by sending us Hindi forms you are making us more Hindi-conscious. Shall we supply your post offices with forms and stationery printed in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada? That would at least give this whole business a sportive and reciprocal touch.
-p.28, "To a Hindi Enthusiast"

Go read it, whether you want to grok South India because it's your home, or because it's not.

Filed under: Reading

# (5) 28 Jul 2010, 04:31PM: Method Of Loci: I sit in my father's old office, in the chair his typist used when he came every morning to take dictation (memoirs, articles, essays, books, email, whatever struck my father's fancy. We kept telling him to concentrate on the memoirs, but he always had some new project to push).

The great big shelf built into the wall above the door was nearly full of newspaper-wrapped bundles of books, packed in batches of five or ten each. Nearly all of them were copies of books by my dad. He was, I realize now, our household's own Asimov, prolific and polymathic. He wrote about the history of Kannada, about the Bhagavad Gita, recently a set of essays about sparrows in literature and the word "sparrow." Today my sister and I used the ladder and brought down about eight hundred books, our fingers turning black with newspaper ink. We'll be giving a lot of these away at the service on Sunday.

I hear rain outside. No surprise; it's monsoon season. I can't see it, since it's 1am -- just the reflected shadow of the curved metal bars in the diamond-patterned window panes, by the light of two white fluorescent tubes above. Every so often the power fluctuates and various devices beep.

To my left and behind me are five dark gray metal bookcases, reaching nearly to the ceiling. Each case has nine shelves, including the top, bolted. I think these are the sturdiest bookcases I have ever seen. They are completely filled with books. Nearly all the titles I can only sound out slowly, since I barely know Kannada and don't know Hindi. It looks like he had a complete set of F. Max Muller's Sacred Books of the East.

Just behind me is a pink plastic chair. I think Dad sat in it while dictating. Three thin cushions lie on the seat, and a green acrylic blanket slumps over the back.

Of course there are closets set into the wall, also filled with books, and a computer desk with books and notes on every free horizontal bit of wood, and a dining-style wood table in the middle of the room, piled with books, surrounded by upholstered wooden chairs whose seats serve as book-pile pedestals. Rounding out the table's inhabitants: notes, a phone that doesn't work, a white-and-maroon mug of pens ("First West Coast Kannada Sammelana: April 1996, Los Angeles"), newspapers, a magnifying glass, folders, plastic bags ("plastic covers" they would say here) full of who-knows-what. Under the table and in the corners, cardboard boxes sit, half-full of office supplies, brochures, clippings, I wish I knew because we are going to have to sort all this out.

My dad got broadband, at my sister's cajoling, in case she and I had to suddenly drop everything to visit them. If the house switched from dialup to a speedy Internet connection, she reasoned, we'd be able to work from India remotely. Now that's come true and he can't appreciate it. He'd been asking in recent months for us to set up Skype (he called it "Spike") on his computer so he could video chat with his daughters. I put it off.

While debugging the wifi the day I arrived, I pulled out my blue Ethernet cord (don't get on a plane without it) and plugged it into the router. The wifi works now, but I like sitting in the typist's chair in the office, plugged in. My sister gives me a look of disbelief when I say I'm going to go do my internetting in Dad's office. "It's so crowded," she says. "Aren't you uncomfortable?"

She forgets that I'm the girl who loved to take stacks of "Jack and Jill," "Cricket," and other children's magazines into a cardboard box and sit for hours, reading. I once moved the box into the closet, leaving the door a crack open for light, and got so absorbed that I didn't hear them calling me, and they thought I was missing. My mother hated that. She told me I should never get so lost in something that I couldn't hear someone calling my name. I might have learned hyperfocus if it weren't for that, I think bitterly, unfairly. "Code fugue" is what we called it freshman year of college, in Freeborn Hall, when hackers lost themselves in the trance state. I bet my dad found himself in code fugue many a time, when he was developing that Hindu astrology starchart-casting program in GW-BASIC. I think I helped with the colors.

One reason it's unfair to resent my mother is that her edict is probably not the reason I'm not a hacker -- the true bottlenecks were elsewhere, I think, but that's not what I mean to dissect now. And another is that the Harihareswara children had one excuse that absolutely, without fail, got them out of chores, eating, or nearly any other obligation: "I've been struck by inspiration and I have to write this down NOW." The parent always retreated so the child could return to that struggle we all knew, instantiating the private golden world onto the unforgiving page. She and I remembered this a few days ago while telling visitors about our childhood, and looked at each other, realizing with a start that we'd never abused this privilege.

What did it do to us, growing up in a household that put out a magazine every other month, edited anthologies every year, organized book tours for author friends, accumulated boxes of books in the garage the way some families end up with seas of cheap toys? We learned to treat writing as sacred and easy.

If I am sitting in the typist's chair, then I can imagine my father sitting behind me, reading something, taking longhand notes, looking around for Post-It notes to annotate the text. I don't hear him, but then I am wearing headphones.

I wish he were here, to organize his damn notes, to tell us what his system was. But he would have been impatient with us. He had things to do.

Filed under: Reading

# 28 Jul 2010, 06:00AM: From My Father's Library: 20th Century Kannada Poetry (Selections)
Edited & Translated by Sumatheendra Nadig
1983

M. Gopalakrishna Adiga
"A Common Man"
p.59

How dare you call me Common Man; Your dad
is common, in the company of my father
your grandfather and your great grandfather
                   who are dead.
Hey you, tell me if you know my name. Does
                   your father own
this face, this stance and this lashless
God's-eye mind of mine? Faraway you sit in your
airconditioned room and conduct
my funeral rites with your generalisations.
If you have any guts, come out
and look at my palm; look at the
unique mounts, crosses and lines. I will show you
how in this broken lantern the sooty wick
lifts up its burning head.

You are the wooden handle of the axe
which has forgotten the flowering, fruit bearing tree.
For you everything is the same. A group
means a flock, a flock means sheep
and sheep means mutton. Where is the humanity
in you to call each one by name, feed
and fondle it with endearing words? you know
only to number us and fill up the trucks by the
meat factory. You know only to apply the
same brand name to all the cans. You dream
of tasting me only from the can.
For a piece of bread, you bastard, you
have allowed them to scrape off your nose and face.
You are the tailless fox for whom variety
is sour. You hold the foot rule and
Scrape off everything until it becomes common.
You, worshipper of the shapeless black money's
jingle, what is the name of the machine
in your chest? Come on, breathe out.

Everything that can breathe has its own history,
its special smile, its own evolution
and direction. It will escape your map
and lift up its flag of individuality
until it can build a tower of light.
I may be an eczema-stricken farmer in torn cloths,
                part of a chorus,
or a come-what-may-I-don't-care factory
                worker in sooty clothes,
or a limping thrusting-forward beggar on the street.

2.

Did you call me a common man? You are mistaken.
Beware, I don't stretch my hands for the handcuffs.
I will bite and tear the noose round my neck
while I close my eyes and muse. Your pistol may
threaten me to march to its tune but I
will be dancing to a different tune in my mind.
I am a free-born soul.
You, worshipper of commonalities who has scraped
off your face to wear the mask of Hiranayaksha

Your only ambition is to stick to your chair,
Therefore either you chisel off the faces of others
or keep them in jails. But look, look! there
the great boar is sharpening his tusks,
waiting for the proper time.
I am the Narasimha caught up in a pillar.
I am also waiting
for a proper time.

It's uneven but I love "Everything that can breathe... / ... tower of light", "Beware, I don't stretch my hands for the handcuffs", and "I am the Narasimha caught up in a pillar."

Filed under: Reading

# (1) 16 Jul 2010, 11:14AM: (I Say, While Reading About Zombies): Last night I was told that if you read Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France side by side with Paine's Rights of Man you get two different perspectives on the French Revolution and it's really cool. When I say this it sounds like I'm recommending putting pop rocks in your Diet Coke, doesn't it.

Filed under: Reading

# (3) 30 Jun 2010, 01:23PM: Foo Camp, Generosity, and Surrender: A few Foo Camp-related notes and links. Leigh suggests this Twitter search should you like to look through that particular collective stream of consciousness. (Cuttingly funny link I found via that search: It Must Be a Marketing Problem.)

Thanks to Scott Beale of Laughing Squid for the photo of me with frickin' Steven Levy (yes, the one who wrote Hackers) and Chad Dickerson, CTO of Etsy. Chad and I met at a Salon.com retreat, the first year I worked there and his first year as a Salon alumnus. I'm the one who looks like Geordi LaForge; to my right is the desktop support guy who did a poetry fellowship at Stanford. Oh, those early Salon memories.

Selena Marie Deckelmann led a Foo Camp discussion about the ethics of endless permanent logging: "Forgetting should be built into our applications by default," she suggests. This ties into Danny O'Brien's Open Source Bridge keynote, in which he told us we need to change logging defaults on Apache and the like to be more sensible to protect dissidents. And that reminds me of some threads floating through my Foo Camp experience: We're the ones creating others' user experience. That's hospitality, that's generosity, that's the natural authority and dominance that happens, or that we take on because it needs to happen and we're the ones we've been waiting for. We have an obligation to take care of the people who depend on us. Where we have power and strength, we need to recognize that and use it responsibly, not just flee from and resent it. And where I say "we" I mean "I."

On generosity:

After I arrived in San Francisco but before heading to camp, I realized I'd need a warm jacket in Sebastopol, and hadn't brought one. Long story short, I ended up with an eight-year-old's maroon fringed hoodie, as seen here (again, Scott Beale of Laughing Squid). Got a few compliments, though the sleeves were a bit short. I happened to mention this situation in front of Bubba Murarka, who then literally lent me the coat off his back. I don't think I had a single conversation with him all weekend, which means that someone from Facebook gave me a tangible benefit without requiring any personal information. Just kidding! We talked about getting our parents to accept it when we date & marry white people. I think.

At the camp, I was supposed to share a tent with Leigh, but the tent she'd borrowed would have been rather too cozy. As we were making arrangements to store our luggage in Thor's tent (interrupted by scifi recommendations of course), a guy I was talking with mentioned that he'd brought a six-person-sized tent and was sleeping in it alone. I gracelessly invited myself in and David Forbes proved himself a generous host who easily outgeeked me on tax history. David, the book I mentioned is Conversion and the Poll Tax in Early Islam by Daniel Dennett, Jr. From the Introduction:

...Nevertheless, all the contributions to the literature of Muslim taxation within the last forty years have been monographic in character and limited in area to particular provinces of the Arab Empire, with the result that there is no single work to which a student who might be interested in the general problem to turn; and if he attempts to master the secondary literature, he will discover so many conflicting data and opinions that his confusion will be increased rather than resolved. This book, therefore, attempts to present a broad view of the system of taxation as it existed in East and West throughout the lands once subject to the Persians and the Greeks, and it is based on all the evidence the writer has been able to discover. It is not, however, a synthesis of the latest opinion, for, as the reader will presently discover, I have views of my own and an axe to grind....

Anthemic! Also, David, in case you're wondering how I knew to get you Gouda, popcorn and orange juice from the Lucky supermarket down the road as a host gift, it's because it takes five seconds to Google you and you mentioned them on FormSpring.

Also in the gifts-from-strangers category: the contagiously enthusiastic Dan Shapiro ran a session in one of the tents with miraculin tablets. Incredibly simple demo: let a tab dissolve on your tongue, swish your saliva around, then taste something sour like lemon juice or vinegar and it'll taste sweet. I knew it'd work, but I hadn't anticipated how joyous, convivial, and transformative it would feel, like a secular communion. Is this what psychedelics are like? You've hacked your senses and now pain is pleasure, sour is sweet, perspective is topsy-turvy, wrong is oh so right. The most numinous scheduled session I experienced.

What is it that makes us more receptive to gifts and transformations? Built-in boundaries, trust, security, self-esteem, love. Sometimes it's harder for me to accept a gift than a setback. One useful concept from Christianity, I've found, is grace -- the undeserved good thing, the good thing one can't possibly deserve, but there's no point in fighting it. Surrender. Minutely I move closer to being willing to lose myself, because every time I do, I'm still there when I come back, and more whole than before.

Speaking of pills: I use melatonin to help me sleep on planes or when jetlagged. On the flight back to New York, I offered it to my rowmates. The fella on my left said, "No thanks, I lived through the sixties and took enough pills from strangers."

And that made me laugh, but also reminded me how egalitarian and generally Californian the whole thing was. Tim O'Reilly made I think 3 cumulative minutes of speeches between his opening and closing, and the closing included his request that we do as he'd done, creating more value than we capture. Imagine what generous things we can do! The joy transforms me and I marvel at it.

Filed under: Reading

# (1) 14 May 2010, 10:40AM: Catabacklog: I am homesick. In other news, I seem to have read several books and not mentioned them here. No longer!

Dear Genius (Nordstrom) cover Ursula Nordstrom's letters (Dear Genius). Blew my mind every twenty pages as I started thinking of childhood classics (Trumpet of the Swan, for example) being made by people. And she was amazing at coaching, criticizing, and cajoling creative people from afar. Transferrable advice for my career.

Deepness (Vinge) cover A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge. Won hella awards and rightly so. Immersive, cerebral, satisfyingly huge. I love how there's "hard sf" here (the physics of space icebergs) and "soft" stuff like multiple well-realized alien sociologies and characters.

Confessions (Berkun) cover Scott Berkun's new public speaking book, Confessions of a Public Speaker. I just skimmed this since right now I think I need to concentrate on executing instead of reading inspiration or tips. Nice wackiness sidling in at odd moments -- who doesn't hate non-classy chandeliers? -- and a few ideas I needed to hear as I prep my Open Source Bridge talk (like exactly how to ask audience members to do some small-group discussion).

Red Carpet (Sankaran) cover The Red Carpet: Bangalore Stories by Lavanya Sankaran. I picked this up in the Manhattan public library when I was looking for Dorothy Sayers. Most English-language Indian fiction isn't about Bangalore, so this is an ultra-specific YES YES SO RIGHT YES. Sankaran hooked me a few pages in by using the Kannada/English slang "one-thaara," ("a kind/type of") which I'd never seen written down before. The title story is so sweet!

The File (Garton Ash) cover The File by Timothy Garton Ash. As a grad student, he lived in West and East Germany. After the reunification, he reads his Stasi file, compares it with his own notes and memories, and interviews the Germans who informed on him. Riveting, funny, a quick and rewarding read.

For The Win (Doctorow) cover For the Win by Cory Doctorow. Along the same lines as Little Brother -- thriller/polemic -- and I liked it about as much, although the ending seemed abrupt. I thought I'd just read the first few pages... and then ended up reading all of For the Win when I meant to be working, although I skimmed the "here is how economics works" bits. The bits set in India sounded fine to my diasporic ear, for what it's worth. Available as a free download, of course.

cover for The Good That Men Do Star Trek: Enterprise: The Good That Men Do, by Andy Mangels & Michael A. Martin. If you know about the stupid and wrong thing that happens in the last episode of Star Trek: Enterprise then you may also know that this is one of the books that retcons it. I liked the plot and the relationships, but the writing was flabby. Funniest example:

In fact, Trip didn't recall, but he made no response, busying himself instead with the various controls that were arrayed before him. As the vessel's numerous interlocking systems continued powering up, Trip continued to study the consoles, hoping against hope that he wouldn't reveal his imposture to Ehrehin by appearing hesitant or bewildered by the flight instruments and indicators. Fortunately, Romulan instrumentation was fairly streamlined and straightforward, lacking an excess of confusing redundancy.

Most satisfying individual sentence in which the authors get in a few digs at the plausibility of the canon story:

Trip felt as though they were being almost too arch with these exchanges, but hoped that upon a close investigation of Enterprise's security logs, no one else would notice just how dunderheaded this entire piracy scenario really was.

Leonard saw the framing device, in which Jake and Nog from Deep Space Nine investigate implausible goings-on in canon, and decided there should be an entire series of such stories: Jake & Nog: CanonCops! Jake & Nog chould investigate "Similitude" from Enterprise and figure out why Phlox really decided to kill that sentient species. Maybe he's Section 31. And the warp 10/salamanders incident from Voyager, the de-evolving from "Genesis" (The Next Generation), and the Genesis Device (films) make no sense separately, but CanonCops! could retcon them into coherence.

While talking about The Good That Men Do, I mentioned to Julia that I should recommend a few Star Trek branded novels. Diane Duane is always a good bet: Doctor's Orders, The Final Reflection, and Spock's World are strong, and Doctor's Orders and Spock's World help me understand McCoy and Spock better. The Kobayashi Maru by Julia Ecklar tells how Kirk, Chekov, Scotty, and Sulu faced impossible tests when they were Starfleet cadets. None quite as memorable as "Lunch and Other Obscenities", but good. A Stitch in Time by Andrew J. Robinson is a deep, deep dive into Garak and Cardassia, written by the actor who portrayed Garak. It hints at Garak's queerness, if I recall correctly. And the anthology Tales of the Dominion War has a few stories I liked, about the fall of Betazed, a Romulan spy on Deep Space Nine, and a neutral race of engineers helping fugitives McCoy and Scotty.

When I was about fourteen, I used to really love Peter David's novels. Imzadi is a classic (and taught me completely legitimate therapeutic technique), Q-in-Law and Q-Squared are gripping and fun and make the canon universe make more sense, and Vendetta has a very creepy last page. But then I grew up and disliked his Arthurian novel and his She-Hulk and Babylon 5: Crusade work -- forced, glib, smarmy. So I can't say whether I recommend the stuff I read as a teen, and am a bit afraid the suck fairy has visited it. Same with Spartacus.

Of other interest: Dark Passions, one of those mirror universe novels that's just an excuse to turn all the Trek women into Hot Bi Babes. Ghost Ship, memorable to me chiefly because Picard decides to spend several hours in a sensory deprivation tank to help him make an important decision. Ultra-strange scene. And I have not yet read Planet X, the Star Trek/X-Men crossover novel, but realistically it's only a matter of time.

Filed under: Reading

# (2) 26 Apr 2010, 07:25PM: Thoughtcrime Experiments, One Year Later: Today is the one-year anniversary of Thoughtcrime Experiments, the free scifi/fantasy anthology Leonard and I edited last year.

Thoughtcrime Experiments got a bit of recognition in the form of award nominations. We made the British Fantasy longlist (voting closes 31 May). The Variety SF blog loved Ken Liu's "Single-Bit Error" and considered it one of the best short stories of the year. And Patrick Farley's "Gaia's Strange Seedlike Brood (Homage to Lynn Margulis)" has made the Ursa Major shortlist. We'll find out if he won next month.

Another form of recognition was the sharings, remixings and adaptations we hoped would happen when we released Thoughtcrime Experiments under a Creative Commons license.

LibrisLite, an ebook-reading application, includes our anthology as a free sample book. Marshall T. Vandergrift made a hand-crafted ePub edition, Arachne Jericho made ePub, Kindle/Mobipocket, Microsoft Reader, and Sony Reader editions, and manybooks.net provides the book in many formats. Andrew Willett's short story "Daisy" received a lot of love this way, including an audio recording read by Ian McMillan and an upcoming project I can't mention yet. A fan also read it aloud at a storyreading party.

Mary Anne Mohanraj and Sumana Harihareswara at WisCon in 2009 (To the right: E. J. Fischer's photo of me with Mary Anne Mohanraj, author of "Jump Space.")

We were also gratified to see people thinking about, reviewing, enjoying, and linking to individual stories and illustrations.

"Jump Space" by Mary Anne Mohanraj got substantial thoughtful attention, such as Rachel Chalmers's review:

"Even cooler, the story they sort of chose for me is "Jump Space", which I purely love. It's a head-on collision between the Heinlein juvenile adventure stories I adored as a kid - the Have Spacesuit Will Travel or Space Family Stones - and a thoroughly 21st century set of attitudes towards love, sex, dating one's professor, marriage, faithfulness, jealousy, prostitution, slavery and even raising children (my main preoccupation these days and one that Heinlein tended to rather idealize...)

Erica Naone's review of "Jump Space", in part:

I think the anthology is trying to explore a wider variety of human elements and viewpoints than are seen in the typical science fiction anthology...
Mary Anne Mohanraj's "Jump Space" has some of the most fully realized relationships that I've seen in science fiction.... the theme of love's simultaneous strength and fragility was emphasized against the backdrop of space. Love and family seem even more accidental and precarious when the universe is so large.

Mohanraj wrote a post about what she did wrong & right in "Jump Space". Hugo Schwyzer posted about "Jump Space" and academic ethics (specifically, on initiating professor-student romance), to which Mohanraj replied.

Rachel Chalmers's review continued:

I liked "Jump Space" so much that I was startled to find a story in Thoughtcrime that I liked even better. It is "Single Bit Error" by Ken Liu. Can't tell you much about it without spoiling a rather excellent surprise, but wow, it's just a stunner. Weaves together theoretical computer science and existential philosophy in a way I've always thought could be done, but never quite managed to do or see anyone else doing...
You should allow for my extreme bias in favor of my friends; despite this utter lack of objectivity I recommend this anthology to anyone who's interested in the best and bravest modern science fiction.

Bio Break by Brittany Hague (To the left: "Bio Break" by Brittany Hague.)

Kit Brown wrote: "I really liked Daisy by Andrew Willett and Single Bit Error by Ken Liu. I also loved Robot vs Ninjas by Marc Scheff and snagged it to add to my desktop wallpaper rotation."

Erin Ptah's illustration "Pirate vs. Alien" also got some attention: "More silliness may be found in this picture by Erin Ptah, wherein a buxom pirate battles a well-endowed alien who appears to be preparing to give himself a shave."

Lynda Williams says of "The Ambassador's Staff," a short story by Sherry D. Ramsey: "Well put together, goes down smooth, and captures my feelings about too little sleep and too much coffee, to boot. Allegorically speaking."

Sam Tomaino calls Thoughtcrime Experiments "an anthology filled with stories that I enjoyed thoroughly". And Jane Irwin of Vogelein liked it, especially "Daisy".

Erica Naone's thoughtful reviews of several Thoughtcrime Experiments stories are another useful resource; I can't quote them all here or they'd take up half the post!

One manybooks.net reviewer says:

When I saw the "mind-breakingly" description, I thought to myself, "No way, that is just too ambitious." Well after reading the first five or six stories, I must say I agree. This seems to be another example of really good authors publishing under the Creative Commons. Welcome to the future.

Other readers posted about the Creative Commons and DIY facets of our project interesting:

rollicking....The anthology wears its DIY cred on its sleeve and even has a how-to appendix and all the source code for the website is gank-able. It’s available as a free download or POD book. Keep Circulating the Tapes!...
They're publishing because they want to give back to the community. They have no illusions about reaping financial gains from these transactions, and that's okay. We all do things for love that we would never do for money....
The point of Thoughtcrime Experiments is its punk/hacker ethic. You don't have to wait for Gardner Dozois or any of the other 'masters of the genre' to make an anthology for you, you can go out there and do it yourself. If you can't find a magazine publishing SF you'd like to read, and feel they're all publishing the same tired stuff, Much like their punk predecessors at 'Sideburns' they have an appendix on "How we did this". It's the three-chord diagram for a revolution in SF.
Now, it probably won't catch on. Just because punk happened, doesn't mean one can start a revolution every time one is needed. But imagine if it did. Imagine if the kids started getting together, and producing their own SF magazines. Imagine if SF became, for some small portion of the population, the new rock-and-roll, or at least the new indie-rock....
But it's not just the anthology that's interesting. Leonard used this entire project to better understand the editing process. His conclusions are quite interesting for writers. Basically, that we don't suck as bad as we think we do just because we get so many damn rejections...

Times Square by David Kelmer (To the right: "Times Square" by David Kelmer.)

Another author talked about our anthology while considering commodification, scarcity, and publishing. And Freedom to Tinker noted,

Still, part of the new theory of open-source peer-production asks questions like, "What motivates people to produce technical or artistic works? What mechanisms do they use to organize this work? What is the quality of the work produced, and how does it contribute to society? What are the legal frameworks that will encourage such work?" This anthology and its appendix provide an interesting datapoint for the theorists. (See Leonard's response.)

Jed's repost of our call for submissions, and his announcement once we were out, also commented on the ripples our project might send out: "So I'm hoping, as Leonard and Sumana are hoping, that in addition to providing a good read, this anthology will inspire others to embark on new publishing ventures."

If you want our thinky thoughts about the whole venture, you might be interested in Sharon Panelo's interview with me, my length anthology retrospective and thoughts on scifi publishing, more such, and Leonard's many interesting posts on the stories, the process, and what we learned about the field. And I hope we get that Hour of the Wolf radio show interview up for download/reading sometime soon.

To finish up the link roundup: Grasping in the Wind, BoingBoing, Tor.com, John Scalzi, Baby Got Books, and Locus also notified their readers of our existence, for which we are grateful.

The book's still up. Read or download it for free, or buy a paperback for USD5.09 plus shipping. I'm arranging to have about seventy copies for sale at cost at WisCon.

If I missed your review, please post a link in the comments!

Filed under: Reading

# 31 Mar 2010, 01:41AM: GNOME Video Site, Mysterious Bugzilla Upgrade Patron, Mallard, Acire/Quickly, An Interview & A Goodbye: I'm an editor and the release coordinator for GNOME Journal, which just released its 19th issue.

This issue has six articles:

Will Kahn-Greene introduces the GNOME Miro community, a website that brings GNOME-related videos to users.
In November 2009, I released GNOME Miro Community. I'd just had a hard time finding GUADEC 2009 session videos, and Participatory Culture Foundation had just released the Miro Community curated video collection and search platform. So I decided to create a Miro Community focusing on GNOME-related video, so the next person will have an easier time finding things....
My article describes why and how Canonical paid tens of thousands of USD to upgrade the GNOME bugtracker.
GNOME bug-wranglers can now enjoy Bugzilla's per-product permissions, duplicate prevention, localization, and myriad enhancements from the last few years. And Bugzilla users will get to enjoy several features that started with GNOME's modifications. The browse.cgi view gives you a dashboard view of a project's outstanding bugs and patches. Users can indicate the status of an attachment to a bug (e.g., "accepted-commit_now" or "needs-work"). Everything Solved also developed a stack-trace parsing extension, traceparser, for Bugzilla 3.6. All in all, Everything Solved upstreamed more than forty features or bugfixes.
Stormy Peters interviews an Igalia cofounder and member of the GNOME Advisory Board.
Sometimes we the small open source consultancy companies can be seen as working right in the middle of two very different worlds: the evil empire of companies wanting to make profit, and the pure and ethically oriented free software community. But at the end there are a lot of shared interests and huge potential for the win-win. The main challenge is to find the people in key roles of big corporations or institutions that really understand how free software works, the dynamics of the community, and the right way to approach a project and have influence (as opposed to control) in its future.
Jono Bacon describes Acire, Quickly, Ground Control, and the whole toolset for whipping up quick one-off Linux desktop apps.
While most GNOME developers know that Quickly makes it easy to generate GNOME projects and package them for Ubuntu, Quickly actually has a template-based system, which means you can write any kind of application in it (this could include KDE applications and packaging for other distributions). What I like about Quickly is that it automates much of the repetition surrounding software development and it ultimately allows you to deploy software to your users. This instantly allows opportunistic developers to feel a sense of success around their projects as they can develop with ease--and deploy to real users with ease too.
Shaun McCance explains Mallard, a new XML syntax for writing user documentation and help.
A Mallard document is a collection of pages. Each page stands on its own. This is different from traditional documentation formats, where a document is a linear sequence of chapters and sections. The idea is not new. Encyclopedias have been organized around self-contained topics for centuries. When the idea is applied to documentation, it's called topic-oriented help. Users can read what they need without reading an entire manual.
Jim Hodapp writes his last Letter from the Editor.
Well, it is a sad day for me to say that I am leaving the leadership role of Editor-in-Chief; my ability to devote the time and energy to bringing the best content to the GNOME Journal is currently not possible. But it is a happy day that I’m passing on that role to Paul Cutler.

Paul, Jim, the authors and I put some hours into this and I think it's worth it. Check it out.

Filed under: Work Reading

# (1) 26 Mar 2010, 02:55AM: Gussied-Up Link Blogging: I am accumulating draft posts as I focus my days on GNOME Journal work, errands, and preparing for conferences and other appearances. So, very little blogging; even my Ada Lovelace Day post will be days late. But I can at least mention some interesting links.

"The reason this exists is because every time we watch Parks and Recreation we sing 'Jabba the Hutt' along with the theme. So naturally we had to make this video." I like the way you think.

This New York Times article on China's cyberposses, or "human-flesh search engines", was scary and enlightening.

Searches have been directed against all kinds of people, including cheating spouses, corrupt government officials, amateur pornography makers, Chinese citizens who are perceived as unpatriotic, journalists who urge a moderate stance on Tibet and rich people who try to game the Chinese system. Human-flesh searches highlight what people are willing to fight for: the political issues, polarizing events and contested moral standards that are the fault lines of contemporary China.

It also led me to feel less sympathy for an Encyclopedia Dramatica moderator.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, as often, eloquently states something that gets my head nodding:

But I think any sort of conservatism intellectual critique of liberalism and minority rights, really has to reckon with American conservatism's appalling record on that front...
Moreover they have used a skepticism of change, to mask a defense of institutional evil...
There is a fundamental problem here, one that can't be elided by pointing out the differences between "true" conservatism and Republicans. A bias toward time-tested, societal institutions almost necessarily means a bias toward institutional evil....

Derek Powazek's recent foolproof guide to nurturing houseplants reminded me of a heartwarming houseplant story he once wrote.

Filed under: Reading

# (2) 14 Mar 2010, 10:18PM: Web: About eleven years ago, I saw a link from Slashdot to a geek humor site called Segfault. I started reading it, then started reading the homepage of one of the editors. Leonard Richardson. He posted something new nearly every day, like a diary. (I didn't know the word "blog" in 1999.) He shared funny lines from his friends, his mom, his colleagues. I kept reading.

About ten years ago, I started reading Joel on Software. Just a few years previous I'd discovered Gerald Weinberg, specifically his The Psychology of Computer Programming, and loved it. So this Joel guy was talking about things I found interesting, and was introducing lenses, metaphors, models that immediately spoke to me. Fire And Motion. Ben & Jerry's vs. Amazon. The Law of Leaky Abstractions. Managers as the developer's abstraction layer (I later heard the synonym "windshield"). Smart and Gets Things Done. The iceberg problem in software development. Five Worlds. Architecture astronauts. I could go on.

Almost exactly nine years ago, I saw a funny line ("Those guys are gods of applied physics!") in an article on SFGate, decided that Leonard guy would appreciate it, and sent it to him. He and I started corresponding, and then hanging out. I went down to Bakersfield with him one weekend to help his mom move. Eventually we started dating.

About four years ago, I saw another pivotal blog post. I was living in San Francisco, in my third year working for Salon, and realizing that I'd like to go into management, and this Joel guy announced that his company was looking for me. Well, for someone who wanted to lead geeks, not necessarily a programmer. I saw that post, then woke up at 3am the next day, thinking, "I have to apply."

I applied, thinking I hadn't a chance in hell. Joel phone-screened me. I'd been told to prepare a short lesson ahead of time, on a topic of my choosing. So I came up with my stand-up comedy lesson plan, which I still use today. He asked whether, if accepted, I could move out to New York the next month. I hesitated a second or two, then said sure. They flew me out for an interview. I got an offer and said yes. Fog Creek paid handsomely to relocate my household. Leonard, who had left Collabnet to work on Ruby Cookbook, came with me. He'd never seen New York before we arrived in January of 2006.

Leonard and I were unhappy that we were moving so far from his mom. Frances had been fighting HIV for more than a decade, and had lived far longer than the doctors had ever predicted, but her health was still perceptibly declining. So I told him he should fly back once a month to see her. But he didn't get much of a chance to do that, because her health started getting much, much worse a few months after we moved. Leonard flew back and spent several weeks with her as she died. I took some time off to go be with her; later I discovered that Fog Creek had quietly, kindly given me those days for free, and not counted them against my paid time off.

Of all the job perks I ever got at Fog Creek -- relocation, half a Columbia Master's paid for, lunches, Broadway tickets, unlimited sickleave, Metrocard, a great library -- that one sticks with me most.

Oh man, this thing is getting long. Anyway. I learned a lot from Joel, before, during, and after my time at Fog Creek. I appreciate his decisiveness, his straightforwardness, his species of eloquence and encouragement, his financial generosity, his entrepreneurial spirit, and his insight. Sure, it wasn't all roses and sunshine, but he changed my life, mostly for the better.

A few days from now, Joel Spolsky will retire from active blogging, ten years after he started. Leonard and I are married, and still live in New York, and will for the next year at least. We still miss Frances terribly. Segfault's been gone for nine years. My Fog Creek salary subsidized Leonard's work on Ruby Cookbook, then RESTful Web Services. I have a master's degree in tech management and am looking for my next job in that field. Fog Creek was 6 or 7 people when I arrived, and now it's thirty or more. All those articles of Joel's are up on the web, ready for us to reread or brandish or rip to ribbons.

And so are my archives, and Leonard's, and Frances's.

It really is a web, isn't it.

Filed under: Work Reading

# (4) 12 Mar 2010, 11:52AM: Fanfic Recommendations: Some fics I've liked:

Erin Ptah's Colbert Report archive includes "The Thing With Feathers", the fifth time Jon terrified Stephen, and "In Time".
"Theories About Nuclear Winter" by hollycomb (continued in Part II), the best Calvin and Hobbes Susie/Calvin fic ever. The end still makes me cry.
"Second Verse (Same as the First)" by Friendshipper/Sholio. "The Marines call it the Planet of the Willing Virgins, you know." I don't know much about Stargate but this still kicked me in the gut (here's a warm-fuzzy chaser).

And recently I've tried out some Psych fic, most of my favorites centering on the relationship between Lassiter and O'Hara:

Elisa, these two reminded me of your discussion of useful vagueness in sex scenes, which reminded me of this analysis (caution, includes shoulder-biting).
Flirting. Possibly my favorite of all the tension-on-the-job stories.
Carlton almost majored in theater.
Someone has nothing to do on Christmas.
Buzz/Carlton? Sure.
There's a lot of schmoopy they-know-each-other-so-well fic. Exhibits A, B, C, D, E.
Do they comfort each other after trauma? Sure do!

Filed under: Reading

# (2) 02 Mar 2010, 11:45PM: Some Books: Recently read, don't want to forget:

A Year Without "Made In China" by Sara Bongiorni: a quick read, finished in a few hours (long after receiving it as a gift, I'm embarrassed to say). The author gets caught up in edge cases and logistics, as you always do when you make a rule-based change to your lifestyle (sometimes that heightens your appreciation of the intention you're manifesting, and sometimes it fogs it). She makes it engaging, but don't look here for recommendations on finding non-Chinese-made alternatives. Much more a memoir than a how-to.

World War Z by Max Brooks: I started reading this before bed and had to finish it before going to sleep, or else zombies would haunt my dreams. Hard horror (like hard fantasy), first-class worldbuilding, grim satire, chills, thrills, relentless inevitability yet surprises and twists on every page.

The Carpet Makers by Andreas Eschbach: seems to start out a family-scale fantasy, expands into space opera, epic in scope but always personal and believable. Empires fall and rise, investigators work on eons-old mysteries, and you see bits and pieces from several perspectives. Very good. Translated from the German.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin, as I mentioned a few days back.

I've also reread most of Bury the Chains and The Left Hand of Darkness. (Jo Walton's book reviews make me feel better about spending time rereading for pleasure or curiosity.)

Filed under: Reading

# (2) 28 Feb 2010, 04:13PM: Making The Hard Look Easy, Feminism, and The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms: Mary Anne Mohanraj recently wrote about sprezzatura, the nonchalance and easy grace that make all one's accomplishments seem effortless. She mentions that she's trying to cut down on that behavior, because she thinks its deception causes harmful expectations and self-loathing in others.

Mohanraj's post instantly reminded me of an ex. He told me of a compliment he'd once received: "You seem to be gliding through life." What does it say about me that I'd think of that as an insult, not a compliment? My take was: If you aren't visibly struggling, you're not working hard enough, your life is easy, and you're probably spoiled, lazy, and uncurious. How much of that is my workaholism? How much is insecurity, or resentment of privilege, or ignorance of my own privilege? Stupid female-socialized insecurity and self-sabotage for the sake of fitting in is, as I stipulated, stupid, and harmful both to the speaker and the hearer. But there's a difference between struggling to appear effortless and batting away compliments with a stick. I'm gonna quote myself from a column I wrote a few years ago:

There are people who say there's no such thing as arrogance, who would see nothing wrong with saying they're awesome, to whom humility, embarrassment, hubris, etc., are useless concepts that get in the way of efficient markets....
There is this thing called kindness, and it includes not eating a Snickers bar in front of a hungry person, and it includes not bragging about your skills in front of people who are trying valiantly to accomplish what you attained, especially if you got there without much effort....
Am I an expert at anything now? The larger my realm of experience gets, the more insignificant my tiny efforts seem.
What do I deliberately practice? What skills have I mastered? And what did my parents give me, in nature and nurture, that let me leap ahead?
I have no perspective on my own expertise, and no expertise on gaining perspective.
When something great happens in my life, I tend to think it's because of luck and discount my own effort. I aw-shucks my own accomplishments. And then I envy successful people instead of admiring them.
Envy comes from impotent desire. Role models get admired, the admirer assuming that he can get there too.

That's the difference, too, between destructive and constructive acknowledgments of one's accomplishments. Compassion, and hope.

Related essays that sprang to mind included some notes on protection and mentorship by Bitch Ph.D. She says that her strengths include calming students' and junior academics' anxieties by telling them the profession's unspoken rules, such as "No one reads everything they cite." I might turn her paragraph below into my new anthem:

I don't believe in unwritten rules, or at least I don't believe in not telling people what they are; I don't believe in meritocratic bull****; I don't believe that making people paranoid is the way to get them to do good work; I don't believe that competition need be cruel. I'm an extrovert, I'm honest, and I don't like to lie.

(Some thinking on meritocracy, in case you take reflexive umbrage at Bitch Ph.D.'s dismissal.)

When you're perceived as successful, you can more credibly criticize the system you've mastered and the game you've won. For example, because she takes the effort to look femme and stylish, she can awaken students to how much work goes into performing femininity: they "think more critically about why they spend so much time on their appearance, and what the costs and benefits of it are." This goes back to Mohanraj's hope that she can use others' compliments as an opening to encourage them, rather than discourage.

These days, I just keep trying to expose the work under the beauty.... I cheated and used a pre-made sauce for the base -- let me show it to you. Exposing the hard labor (or the clever workarounds) that are necessary to trying to do it all, for the sake of family, of profession, of self, of community. I believe that labor offers a different kind of grace.

Speaking of labor: On the difference between labor and work, via Dara. "What is your work now?" may go into my toolbox of party questions, as "what are you reading?" and "what are you obsessed with?" aren't surefire conversation-starters.

Mohanraj is Guest of Honor at this year's WisCon (feminist science fiction/fantasy convention, late May, Madison, Wisconsin). So I can barely segue into talking about some speculative fiction that's caught my eye.

"Sundowning" by Joanne Merriam is a little bit like "The Second Conquest of Earth" by L. J. Daly (both good, same magazine, five months previous): interesting female point-of-view character trying to outwit or outwork a terrifying antagonist.

Got an interesting fictional take on the Ramayana? An anthology is seeking submissions.

I got to go to the launch party for The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (Book One of The Inheritance Trilogy) a few nights ago. And then I inhaled the entire book over the next 24 hours. To quote another reviewer, it's "full of danger, sensuality, and wonder." And it works as a self-contained book, by the way.

Reasons I wanted to read this book:

the author's thinky posts about fantasy at The Magic District
the author's post, "Warriors who don’t make war":

Yeine is a warrior who never makes war.
Or at least, she doesn't do it in any conventional sense. That's the point. Yeine comes from a warrior culture. In her land, serious disputes are resolved in a straightforward and efficient manner: with a knife-fight. She’s pretty good at it...
...a character who, out of habit, draws her knife in tense moments... then puts the knife away. She learns of a military threat and must deal with it diplomatically, economically, logistically, even magically -- but not militarily....
similarly, her thoughts on Yeine as postfeminist
the sample chapters one, two, and three
she and Leonard used to be in the same writing group
Her story for Haiti, "The Effluent Engine" - lesbian steampunk gun-toting spy drama in New Orleans
all the stuff she wrote and said during WisCon last year, and around RaceFail

So it was overdetermined that I'd read the book. I'm glad to have loved it as well.

Filed under: Reading

# (2) 21 Feb 2010, 11:50PM: Life Update That Might Very Well Do Better As A Bulleted List: Sorry, I haven't blogged in the past week (except microblogging & linking). Since last Sunday, I:

visited the Merchant's House Museum with Beth, went to a fun storyreading and met new Dan, had a lovely talky dinner with Rupa, gossiped and saw a Jane Austen exhibit with Julia, breakfasted with her and Moss and Mirabai, submitted a conference proposal, met Elizabeth Yalkut, visited Yahoo! Labs New York to hear lightning talks by Yahoo! researchers, bought Diana Abu-Jaber's Origin, tried stout-based hot chocolate, went to McGinty's to celebrate a peer's escape from an abusive situation (and ended up talking Python & PostgreSQL with her sister & Beth), ate a jar of pickles (and drank the brine) while reading in Union Square Park, talked with Joe and Elisa and Brendan on the phone, introduced Leonard to new Dan, walked around Astoria with Pat and helped him find no-kill mousetraps and explored the Socrates Sculpture Park and brought him home to Leonard (where we all squeed), there's probably more but it's not in my calendar.

I remember reading Gordon Korman's Zoobreak and Maureen F. McHugh's Mothers and Other Monsters, and a bunch of TVTropes (won't even link! admire my civic responsibility) and some Lassiter Psych fanfic. Also watched several episodes of Psych. Is there a more intertextual dramedy on the air?

Thanks for the McHugh, Julia! And for warning me about the DESPAIR NOOOO in "The Cost To Be Wise" and the BLATANT FANSERVICE in Psych: "Death Is In The Air." Although no warning is quite enough.

Filed under: Apartment Life Reading

# 29 Jan 2010, 12:18PM: "Of The Other Insectoid Worlds, I Shall Say Nothing": Just finished Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker after a year or two. I was reading it at about two pages a day. But more happens in two paragraphs of Stapledon than happens in most entire novels. Entirely ordinary example (Ch. 8, "The Beginning and the End," Section 2, "The Supreme Moment Nears"):

The supreme moment of the cosmos was not (or will not be) a moment by human standards; but by cosmical standards it was indeed a brief instant. When little more than half the total population of many million galaxies had entered fully into the cosmical community, and it was clear that no more were to be expected, there followed a period of universal meditation. The populations maintained their straitened utopian civilizations, lived their personal lives of work and social intercourse, and at the same time, upon the communal plane, refashioned the whole structure of cosmical culture. Of this phase I shall say nothing.

Filed under: Comedy Reading

# 28 Jan 2010, 11:06PM: Grace: Comfort music: Tally Hall's Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum, They Might Be Giants' "Thunderbird" (from Spine). There's a moment in "Thunderbird" that always snatches my heart and holds it up to the light -- Linnell's "am" in

Man oh man my throat is dry
Man are you thinking what I
am
well what about it then

Comfort TV: InfoMania, Rotten Tomatoes Show, Psych, Leverage. Eitan and I stood in toe-numbing cold for hours yesterday to get standby tickets to Colbert, and got in. You can hear me in the audience, the only one clapping when Arthur Benjamin reveals why 2520 was his childhood favorite number. I thought more people would be with me on that one.

N.K. Jemisin's third gripping sample chapter for her upcoming fantasy novel The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is up, my ex-boss is spreading the gospel that software testing is a neat career for nonprogramming geeks, Erin Ptah's "Castle Down" is highly entertaining magical Colbert/Stewart slash, and John Darnielle is (as always) passionate and enthusiastic about something:

Well, I stumbled across it somehow, I'm not sure how, and I watched it, and I had one of those experiences you have sometimes with a band you've never heard playing a song you don't know. One of those transformative reaffirming experiences, which you then get religious about, even if religious isn't exactly the word you'd use but trust me it's the word you actually mean: you start thinking, everything should be like this all the time, anything that's not like this is a ridiculous waste of time, I want peak experiences and only peak experiences because life is all about peak experiences and people who consent to have less than constant peaking epiphanies all the time are missing out, etc., etc., all infantile nonsense of course but as feelings go a bracing & pleasant one. The permanent reoccurring 19th summer is a nonstarter as a governing aesthetic stance, but as a tool in the kit it's not without some merits.....
...[the song] becomes a radiant source of self-regenerating power and wonder and lights start to go off in corners of the room where a guy didn't know there were actually any lights, and the guy goes, wow, this is so cool, I didn't expect to run across anything this cool today and I'm so glad I did, I'd really love to run across more things like this during my daily walk down toward the grave.

Filed under: Reading

# 26 Jan 2010, 06:01PM: Working And Thinking Together: Karl Fogel's essay on "the transformative effect that good tools can have on a team's ability to collaborate" informs my hesitance to respond to this Ask Metafilter question.

What is the point of thought experiments in moral philosophy? The violinist and the IV, the cable car and the fat person, the pharmacist and the sick spouse. One commenter calls them an intuition pump, which feels right to me.

Filed under: Reading

# 06 Oct 2009, 10:12PM: Half-Sentence Reviews: Tricked (graphic novel) by Alex Robinson and Whip It (film) are more gripping & fun than they have any right to be.

Filed under: Reading

# 03 Oct 2009, 09:04AM: "Not Ordinarily Borrowable: Or, Unwelcome Advice" by Thomas Thurman: My colleague Thomas Thurman wrote a light fantasy story called Not Ordinarily Borrowable. It's 106 pages, available as a print-on-demand book via CreateSpace (like Thoughtcrime Experiments), and delightful. You can read the first chapter online (and Google Books has the first half of the book but after that you'll have to buy paper or ebooks; I got to read a PDF on a mobile device, and it was fine). Excerpt:

Now in order to become a doctor of something, there is a simple rule to follow. You must find out something new, something nobody in the world has ever seen or known or thought before. You might suppose that with all the many people there are in the world, and with all the thinking that goes on every day, it must be difficult to find a new thing never thought before. But everyone has ideas every day, and there are so many different ones that, sooner or later, everyone must find something new. You yourself saw something nobody had seen before the last time you cracked open the shell of a nut.
After you have found out your new thing, you must write a book about it, a big, heavy book called a thesis. Then, last of all, you must explain your ideas to the other scholars, and the other scholars must be happy with your work. One day, when Maria had finished doing all this, she would be allowed to call herself Dr. Maria, and allowed to wear a scarlet robe instead of her black one. That way, everyone would know how hard she had worked to find out something utterly new.
But that day was still quite a long way in the future, and Maria still had a lot of work ahead of her before it would come.

Maria goes on an adventure that features a dragon, a bike, a mayor, and missing library books. It's charming. Lucky me, I got to call up Thomas yesterday on work pretenses and babble at him for twenty minutes on the following topics:

Every minor character has light but consistent and sensible characterization! And no one's an idiot. And since some of them are kind and smart and others aren't, I can't trust my reflexes regarding who will join Maria on her adventure, and how they'll behave. I wouldn't say my expectations are subverted so much as put aside lightly. It's a light book.
The story carried me along; it's great when a plot feels surprising, but inevitable in retrospect. Again, it's sensible and logical, down to the level of individual interactions. My suspension of disbelief never got rattled.
The setting! Lightly fictionalized Cambridge University! Biking through English villages and asking if anyone's seen a dragon! Incidentally, my favorite story about a grad student's thesis research since "Jump Space".
It's lovely to get a fairy tale that doesn't make me cringe in its gender issues. It's a matter-of-fact given that all the women and men in Not Ordinarily Borrowable are people, and how refreshing that is!
I'm going on and on about mechanics and "wow, he didn't get that wrong," but really I'm just enchanted that a colleague of mine just popped this much fun out and reading it was a high point of my week. It's like the universe left me a bonus.

If you enjoy Naomi Novik's Temeraire books and/or the Hereville comic How Mirka Got Her Sword (Yet Another Troll-Fighting 11-Year-Old Orthodox Jewish Girl Comic), you might like Not Ordinarily Borrowable (and vice-versa).

Filed under: Reading

# (1) 01 Oct 2009, 03:18PM: Useful Links: MediaBugs, Scott Rosenberg's awesome new nonprofit, is hiring a Drupal designer and an associate director/community manager.

My pal Stuart Sierra [who's an expert on The Cloud and graduates from Columbia next year with a master's in CS, (cough) recruiters (cough)] gives two talks on Clojure and Hadoop in the next few days.

My Collabora colleagues will appear at a bunch of conferences this month, usually giving talks: Maemo Summit in Amsterdam, Boston GNOME, and an embedded Linux conference in Grenoble.

I've now discovered that LWN, formerly Linux Weekly News, is invaluable in grokking the entire Linux ecosystem. It's helped me get an overview of areas I thought completely inaccessible to a nonprogrammer. Everything's free to read, except special subscriber-only content that goes public a week after publication. But a subscription's just $5 per month, less if your company gets a group rate, and it's way worth it. (Valerie Aurora writes for them quite a bit.)

What We Know So Far plays NYU on October 9th. Thanks, Biella. By the way, she has the best troll excuse ever:

So I am about to violate list rules but as an anthropologist, I am well aware that violation and transgression can be productive activities...

In November, a bunch of Colbert Report writers talk at the Paley Center; I'd like to go.

If you live nearish Oxford in England, and you'd like a fancy costume or dress sewn for you, may I suggest my colleague's wife Karianne? She might also available for FLOSS translation/community work, if you can drag her away from the horse farm.

Jen & Zed are rockin' intelligent simplicity at Frugal Culture, from philosophy to finance to recipes to politics to education.

At Year of No Flying, Anirvan & Barnali are spending a year traveling without airplanes, "traveling across continents, and talking to people exploring solutions to transportation and the climate crisis." They just crossed the Pacific on a container ship.

My colleague Thomas Thurman has a new light fantasy book out: Not Ordinarily Borrowable, "the story of a scholar whose studies are interrupted when her library books are stolen by a dragon." I have the PDF and hope to read it this weekend.

Flea of One Good Thing, sadly, has to move her blog; email her this week if you want the new URL.

Filed under: Reading

# (1) 30 Aug 2009, 09:59PM: Game: I got Leonard & Martin to read Michael Lewis's Moneyball recently. (By the way, Brendan, I think you'd like Martin's blog, if you're not already reading it.) I'll read anything by Lewis. In Liar's Poker, Moneyball, The Ballad of Big Mike, In Nature's Casino, Serfs of the Turf, and other works, he explores social histories of arbitrage. What kind of person perceives new opportunities in established systems? What kind of person embodies a new opportunity? Where do their values, histories, aims, and rules differ from or align with the establishment's?

I especially appreciate the light touch Lewis brings to these questions. In his stories, those questions are implications, excursions from the narrative. Malcolm Gladwell foregrounds those questions and uses his characters and anecdotes as props; he seems to overreach because he's going for the universal. Lewis stays in the particular, telling one story well and rarely addressing his larger themes explicitly.

But there is one passage in Moneyball, one Lewis marks with "there will be a lesson in that", that fills me with expanding religious fervor each time I read it:

As the thirty-fifth pick approaches, Eric once again leans into the speaker phone. If he leaned in just a bit more closely he might hear phones around the league clicking off, so that people could laugh without being heard. For they do laugh. They will make fun of what the A's are about to do; and there will be a lesson in that. The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you've never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It's a luxury. What begins as a failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job.

Another resonant quote from the next page (116):

"You know what gets me excited about a guy? I get excited about a guy when he has something about him that causes everyone else to overlook him and I know that it is something that just doesn't matter." - Paul DePodesta

And from Martin:

Obviously that's fun to read just from a "nerd power!" perspective, but it's also fascinating to think of all the other industries still out there, plagued by chronic inefficiencies (i.e. opportunities) and just begging for the right nerd to come along and revolutionize them.

Filed under: Reading

# (3) 13 Jul 2009, 03:15AM: Fun Short Scifi: "Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs," by Leonard Richardson, Strange Horizons, 13 July 2009.

"I want to buy a gun," said the Thymomenoraptor. He moved his foreclaw along the glass case of pistols, counting them off: one, two, three, four. "That one." He tapped the case; the glass squeaked.

"Why would a dinosaur need a gun?" asked the shop owner.

"Self-defense."

The owner's gaze dropped to the three-inch claw that had chipped his display case.

"These are killing claws," said the dinosaur, whose name was Tark. "For sheep, or cows. I merely want to disable an attacker with a precision shot to the leg or other uh, limbal region."

"Uh-huh," the owner said. "Or maybe you figure humans shoot each other all the time, but if someone turns up ripped in half the cops are gonna start lookin' for dinosaurs."

Tark carefully pounded the counter. "There used to be a time," he said, "when gun dealers would actually sell people guns! A time . . . called America. I miss that time."

"I don't sell to foreign nationals."

"Racist!" The gun dealer flinched but said nothing. "All right, look, just give me this periodical, okay?"

"I got ripped off," said Tark a little later. "That periodical contained neither guns nor ammo."

Leonard wrote it and Jed edited it, and it would thus have a special place in my heart even if it weren't hilarious.

Filed under: Comedy Reading

# 28 Jun 2009, 03:46PM: Four Cool Stories: Tim Pratt's genre-subverting Another End of the Empire, Jeff Soesbe's quiet and moving Apologies All Around, Jennifer Linnea's eerie glimpse Second-Hand Information, and Sergey Gerasimov's hella Russian The Most Dangerous Profession.

Filed under: Reading

# 26 Jun 2009, 04:33PM: More Anthology Notes: Two weeks ago I posted a long entry about Thoughtcrime Experiments (a scifi/fantasy anthology Leonard and I edited), the market for and marketing of short speculative fiction, and my interests in future projects. I mentioned that small publishers can market to readers via new technologies and communities, at the cost of some sweat and little or no money.

Case in point: In case you didn't want to deal with CreateSpace, you can now buy a print-on-demand paperback of Thoughtcrime Experiments for $5.09 directly from Amazon.com. (Note to self: figure out how to tell Amazon that Leonard and I are not the book's authors but its editors, and that people can download the Kindle version for free.) We've also shown up on GoodReads and LibraryThing.

I encourage anyone who enjoyed a story in the anthology to Delicious, Facebook, Tweet, Reddit, Digg, blog, mashup, podcast, email it around, and otherwise share your enthusiasm. Reviews on your blog or on LibraryThing/Amazon/Goodreads/etc. are very welcome and I should do a review roundup post next week.

Each story stands alone on its own page with its own URL. I assume that reading the anthology as individual webpages, or as a PDF/mobile ebook, or as a paperback, influences whether people see each story as standalone or as part of a whole. I wonder which view is better for this anthology, where there's so much variety in subject and style.

I also have some new, if weak, stats. Leonard usually articulates these kinds of musings on his own blog, but in this case I'm the one who broke out the spreadsheet a while back to get a very rough sense of the Thoughtcrime Experiments gender/ethnicity breakdown. (I was prepping for my WisCon panels.) Out of 200 distinct authors who submitted pieces, author names look like:

Gender

14  Hard to tell  ---- 7%
59  Female ---------- 30%
126 Male ------------ 63%

Ethnicity

186 White ----------- 93%
14  Nonwhite --------- 7%

Of course, that's going by the names authors gave us, which might have been pseudonyms, and I can't tell anything about whether authors are transgendered or cisgendered from their names, and many people of color have names that I read as white. I wish I'd tried harder to recruit nonwhite authors; I wrote to a few relevant blogs/mailing lists/workshops/interest groups but not as many as I could have, and I got several bounce messages I should have followed up on.

We published nine stories. I believe four were by women and five by men, and at least two of the nine authors were people of color. Rachel did us the kindness of posting a review in a LiveJournal community whose goal is to get readers to consciously seek out books by people of color. Again, yay Internet!

Filed under: Reading

# 12 Jun 2009, 08:57PM: Let's Hear It For (Labors Of) Love: Here is another narrative of my WisCon: something I learned from editing and publicizing Thoughtcrime Experiments, and what that makes me want to do next. It's long (the longer the post, the more I feel I'm leaving out), but there's some filk silliness at the end. (Title hat-tip to the Smokin' Popes; cue up Destination Failure while reading this, it'll take about that long.)

I arrived with ten copies of Thoughtcrime Experiments and nearly immediately gave away or sold them. I probably could have sold fifty, if I'd had them. I made about 200 copies of my flyer (seven-megabyte PDF, used a canned iWork Pages template) and people eagerly took them. I got to show contributor Alex Wilson Erica Naone's reviews of the stories, including her review of his "The Last Christmas of Mrs. Claus." In the "Was It Good For You?" panel, I mentioned three stories that made me feel unusually at-home: Connie Willis's "Even the Queen," my fellow panelist K. Tempest Bradford's "Élan Vital," and Mary Anne Mohanraj's "Jump Space" from the anthology I just published, squee!

Throughout the convention, people sounded receptive when I chattered about the anthology. Several people told me how exciting they found our project, and a few made noises about following Leonard's instructions and conducting the experiment themselves. And a few people said: "what are you doing next?" or "when you do it again next year..." A flattering boost and a natural assumption, but not a completely justified one.

Do I want to do it again? Good question!

In the "Was It Good For You?" panel, I observed that some editors and authors start with a vision they need to express (my nickel version of auteur theory), and some start wanting to respond to a community's need for certain viewpoints or stories. The way Leonard and I divided up anthology work reflects that division. He did line edits, pushed for more variety in the art, exhausted himself tweaking the layout to perfection, indeed conceived the project in the first place. I publicized the call for submissions, recruited artists, read slush and wrote rejections, and promoted the finished book electronically and in person.* My revealed preferences: sociable work. I want my work to make others happy. (When we got the first galley proofs from CreateSpace, I said it's real. But the reality of the literary marketplace is socially constructed, and foisting Thoughtcrime publicity onto hundreds of minds at WisCon transmuted the book into something more real.)

But how many people experienced any happiness from Thoughtcrime Experiments? A few thousand downloads and page hits, maybe ten thousand fleeting "oh it's neat that they did that" impressions. Is that enough? Would I spend my energy on a sequel anthology for a readership of less than, say, fifty thousand?

I mean, when I promoted the call for submissions, and when I went to WisCon, I couldn't help but see how many quality small presses and mags our genre enjoys. Shimmer, Goblin Fruit, GUD, Ideomancer, Small Beer, Electric Velocipede, Clarkesworld, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine**, Strange Horizons***, Verb Noire, Aqueduct... I'm just going off the top of my head. Some are electronic, some are print, some are more regular than others, but it's not like any one part of Thoughtcrime is new. Rejected Quarterly plus Creative Commons licensing (already done by Stross/Doctorow, not to mention Strange Horizons & others) plus easy online reading (several abovenamed pubs) plus good payrates (several again) plus gumption (passim). Thoughtcrime is a tiny fish in the pond.

When I see us in context, of course we've gotten maybe 4 emails of praise and 10 blog mentions from people who don't know us. What kills me is how little attention all these presses get. If Leonard weren't an author seeking markets, he wouldn't have started Thoughtcrime, and I wouldn't have heard of most of these presses and magazines. I'd see Tor's and Orbit's stuff in the bookstores, and maybe if BoingBoing or Tor.com or Making Light**** said something really positive about a particular story online I'd go click.

The ease of publishing doesn't mean readers automatically get hooked up with content they'd enjoy. Publishing is a binary switch, off to on, and new technology makes it cheaper to pull that switch. But publicizing -- marketing -- is analog, and really lossy. I'll only persuade a percentage of my desired audience to go read x, and I'll only ever hear about the fraction of that percentage that somehow signals back. Logs and analytics just tell me about impressions, not lasting impressions.

I am like the googolith person to observe, "it's a shame awesome indie stuff doesn't get as much mindshare as the mainstream does! It is almost as if having a large, established, for-profit publishing apparatus is good at turning capital into reputation, accessibility, and distribution!"

But just as I should be less in love with originality when appraising my past work (so what if Thoughtcrime did no one new thing? It combined a bunch of those things for the first time and it's a damn fun read), I don't have to put auteur-y novelty first on my priority list when allocating my future efforts. Why should I just turn five or nine stories from 0 to 1 on the publishing meter when I could get thousands of great stories from 1 to 2 or 5 or beyond?

Well, that "beyond" would be pretty tough. One assessment that sounds oppressively real: "The problem for SF writers and publishers today isn't that there's not a mass audience for high-end SF storytelling; it's that there are immense numbers of other diversions on offer for those hundreds of millions of people." Why should a person read at all, and if she reads why should she read the particular work I adore and want her to read? What particular need would I be uniquely fulfilling in her? Because that's where marketing starts: identifying or arousing a need.

I can reckon how a person might go about increasing the mindshare of any given indie scifi publisher among people who already consider themselves scifi fans. It's never been a better time to be a publisher or a cheapass reader; Amazon, Bookmooch, ManyBooks, Goodreads, DailyLit, the Kindle, blogs like Tor.com and BoingBoing, and other resources help hook up readers with the abundance of awesome fiction that already exists, for free, online. (If you are a cheapass scifi reader and you are saying, "Where do I start? SHOW ME THE FREE STORIES," Futurismic's Friday Free Fiction weekly roundup will get you started.)

Indie publishers still need a little marketing to get into many of those channels. Search engine optimization, some tech hairdressing, and time writing the equivalent of press releases come to mind. I can see a path to getting a rabid scifi fan to taste something new. I'd grow the market a little (rewarding!), but also displace the readership of my rivals, Big Publishers and other small presses (kind of disheartening!). I actually don't know how zero-sum the economics of this project would be, and am curious; I'd want to collect a lot of metrics, and set a quantitative goal in hopes of avoiding existential despair.

But the project of turning nonreaders into occasional sci-fi readers, and occasional readers into rabid readers? Unsolved and incredibly exciting. I'm wondering who else is doing this, and how; comments welcome.

I would like to make the pie higher, as the saying goes. Thoughtcrime Experiments will never be a huge slice of it in any case, and I'm not so delusional as to think it's objectively the tastiest portion.

So Leonard and I have different ideas for what's next (not that either of us is about to start anything; our jobs, writing, travel, friends, worries, etc. are consuming us for now). He's tentatively interested in doing what Brendan dares us to call Again, Thoughtcrime Experiments. I'd help again if he wanted. We found stories we loved and made them more real, and I love doing that. But my ambitions point me in another direction: scaling up.

* It wasn't till like three months into Thoughtcrime that I realized I was following in my parents' footsteps. My parents did a zine! Amerikannada, the literary magazine my parents ran for several years, printed fiction and nonfiction by the Kannada-speaking diaspora in the United States. The Amerikannada logo was a hybrid eagle-lion. They've been editing and writing and celebrating Kannada literature for decades, but I remember Amerikannada specifically because I got to help with kid-friendly mailing chores. After Leonard and I had an argument about art direction, I felt like I'd unlocked a memory of another editorial argument, conducted over my head as I pasted stickers to envelopes in the rec room of the first California house. I have no idea whether that's memory or invention, and indeed know nothing of how Mom and Dad divvied up the work, ran submissions, decided on timetables, or made any of those editing/publishing decisions I now find fascinating. I should ask them.

** You can sing "Andromeda Spaceways" to the same meter as "American Woman." As long as you're here: "Goblin Fruit" works as "Stacey's Mom" ("Goblin Fruit / is made of hemp and jute") and I always want to sing "Clarkesworld" to the tune of "McWorld!" from those old McDonald's ads.

*** Strange Horizons is a special case all on its own. When I started realizing that they've been publishing quality fiction and nonfiction weekly for more than seven years, paying pro rates, and generally been ahead of every curve I thought I was exploring, I couldn't believe that I hadn't been a fangirl earlier. I'm feasting on archives now, especially their reviews. You can start with Anathem and Little Brother, and then see if you find this analysis of Ted Chiang's work and this West Wing analysis as thought-provoking as I do.

**** I have been reading the Nielsen Haydens for like six years or more. Patrick and Teresa taught Leonard at Viable Paradise, and Patrick gave Leonard advice before we launched the anthology. We thanked them in the acknowledgments to Thoughtcrime. Teresa reminds me of my late mother-in-law, Frances, in a lot of ways. And yet, and yet.***** Nora speaks better than I could.

***** I meant to write about WisCon racism discussions weeks ago. Explanation seems impossible, so I'll sum up. Thank you, Rachel Chalmers, for putting my head straight when I saw you in January. Thanks to all the antiracists who have put spoons into this discussion, in education and anger both. And thanks to WisCon 33 and its participants, for being the place where I had drinks and panels and meals with uncountable fans of color. (Pleasantly disorienting: the meal where I was the only heterosexual and the only monogamist but not the only woman or person of color.)

My perspective on race in fiction has shifted. The short edition: if you write or edit or critique fiction, looking out for lazy racism is no longer optional. Analogies: 1. The feminist infrastructure is strong enough that sexist writing gets a bunch of flack, and the antiracist infrastructure is getting there. 2. An antiracist lens is going to be a usual mode of critique from now on. This is part of the new normal. The discourse has shifted. Someone trying to pretend this is a fad or a personal attack is like the RIAA lashing out to protect business models that no longer work. Some thoughts on problems and solutions in an upcoming post, I hope.

Filed under: Reading

# (2) 12 Jun 2009, 06:11PM: Should I Go to Think GalactiCon?: I had such a great time at WisCon that I'm now considering sneaking a weekend at a like-minded science fiction convention: Chicago's Think GalactiCon, two weekends from now (the end of June).

This year's Think GalactiCon is the second, following an inaugural con in 2007. The programming schedule, the activities (intro to LARPing, block printing), and the general attitude look right up my alley. And I can afford it, especially if any Chicago-based friends want to put me up (although renting a hotel room wouldn't be a hardship).

I met Isabel and other TG organizers or con-goers at WisCon, and they made lots of encouraging noises. It really looks like they're trying to take the WisCon vibe and focus to a new level, working on all the -isms: sexism, racism, classism, imperialism, speciesism, ageism, ableism, homophobia/transphobia, and so on. Panels include:

Anarchism and the Superhero: Anti-Crime Direct Actionist or Enforcer of the State?
Gender and Sexuality in Fan Fiction
Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations...Or Not? [Star Trek]

... as well as multiple panels specifically about the current discussion around issues of race in genre fiction. "Race & Ethnicity in YA," "RaceFail '09," "Cultural Appropriation," and "Why Are These Brown People Harshing My Squee?" (That last title makes me guffaw even more than the WisCon panel title "Something Is Wrong on the Internet!" did.)

So, I can afford it, I could probably swing a half-day off work to travel late Friday, I know and like a few people who are going, and I'd probably enjoy the conversations. On the other hand, July 3rd-18th I'll be off in Europe on business, so pumping more travel in less than a week prior might be exhausting.

Musings and suggestions welcomed!

Filed under: Reading

# (1) 13 Apr 2009, 07:10PM: Words And Constraints: I am not yet ready to publicly join the conversation on cultural appropriation in fiction. However I wish to draw your attention to Rachel Chalmers's warm, smart, funny book reviews, which she posts in a LiveJournal community whose members seek to read more books by people of color. 1, 2, 3, 4 so far. The Atlantic should get Rachel to replace whatever they have Hitchens doing.

Psychological complexity of the kind I look for in books is an artefact of the bourgeois novel tradition as an outgrowth of an emerging leisure class almost by definition....
You could read it [Octavia Butler's vampire story Fledgling] as a provocative and extremely effective satire on venture capitalism, if you were, say, me.

Today's my last day before the new job starts. I spent part of it in a park working on a poem that rhymes and scans.

Filed under: Reading

# 11 Apr 2009, 07:50PM: This Retrospective, In Retrospect, Has A Theme: An abbreviated diary of the past few days, mostly for future Sumana's use:

Wednesday I went to Supper and the Sci-Fi Screening Room with a journalist who opines that it's his God-given right to drink scotch at his desk when he's on deadline.

Thursday I saw Tim Wu, Stuart, Jena, and Hailey as we hashed out next steps and plans for AltLaw. I stopped by Midtown Comics after; Hal had put aside the new Ambush Bug compendium for Leonard.

Friday night: Matt Weinstein, an old Berkeley pal, came to town, so I met him and some friends of his at The Silent H, a shockingly good Vietnamese place in Williamsburg. At Queensboro Plaza on the way there, I talked to a guy who was reading Cryptonomicon on the platform, and envied aloud that he's on his first reading. At the restaurant I met a Captain-Hammer-shirt-wearing friend of his who cemented his worth by trading Cryptonomicon references and quotes with me for twenty minutes.

This morning: breakfast and The Met with Anne and her sister Sarah, Anne being a woman I met online when I sought WisCon attendees who'd let me sleep on their floors. We got along great and I'm sure I'll learn a lot about scifi fandom from her. At my place, this evening, I did some career coaching with my friend Rebecca and helped her improve her LinkedIn profile.

In conclusion, dorkiness got me everything I adore in my life.

Filed under: Reading Work

# 10 Apr 2009, 09:58AM: The Latter Link Includes Dick Van Dyke Non-Pun Joke: Today, looking at the tax documents, I saw Leonard's name next to mine and felt awe again that we're really seriously married. Mega-married! proclaimed Leonard. We conjectured that maybe the government should let same-sex couples get married but reserve MEGAMARRIAGE for heterosexuals couples. This is in keeping with John Holbo's thinking. By the way, here's a great comment in that thread that explains the rhetoric of same-sex marriages "contaminating" the shared marriagestuff pool.

And one of my new favorite blogs does a good Sarah Haskins impression in taking apart advertising narratives for laughs:

Oh, and do complete the circle of gender obliviousness, let's not forget the countless "home security service" ads pitched, hard, on men's programming about how your hot-looking but down-home wife is by herself in your big house with all the glass windows and no curtains and she's lovingly wiping invisible crumbs off the some-kind-of-expensive-substance counter and there's a man behind her, and because she's cleaning the kitchen with no lights on it's too dark for her to notice, and he's got ropes, or an ax, and he's really big and the music's getting all dumm-dumm-doom-y... and... oh if only you had locked her inside a secure perimeter before you went... wherever it was in that big SUV and/or first-class plane seat and you keep dialing and dialing to warn her about the big guy who's right behind her right now only she's deaf and... and...
And meanwhile on average women are safer when there aren't men there to protect them. Because ... the number of 911 calls about home-invasion injuries is dwarfed by the number of plain old-fashioned domestic violence calls.

Filed under: Reading Religion

# 07 Apr 2009, 08:01PM: "Also airport bathrooms.": As Leonard and I read submissions for the anthology, we compiled some tips for writers. Leonard has them up on his site.

Filed under: Reading

# 07 Apr 2009, 07:17PM: A Tiny Anthology: If you liked my most recent poem (the Linton Johnson one about BART), you might like these:

on my right pinky finger (near the end of the page)
on chess
"Consistency Bias," on coercion and memory
on buildings and the ephemeral
on watching journeys from a window

Most of these are sonnets on various schemes.

Edited 25 Nov 2010 to add my Garrison Keillor event introduction.

Filed under: Reading

# (1) 07 Apr 2009, 01:23PM: Five Books (With A Little Cheating): Years after Zed and Rachel C. (Update: and Erica Olsen!!) tagged me with fairly similar book blogpostmemes, I respond. Hugo Schwyzer did a similar one once that I'm taking this opportunity to link to, and I've posted other book recommendation lists elsewhere.

Number of books I own: This is one of those that blurs when you enter into a book-sharing household/partnership. We share, for example, all the Neal Stephenson. I have about 400 books, not including the hundreds of Amar Chitra Katha comic books and other such single issues, and then Leonard has bookcases more.

Total number of books I've [ever] owned: Probably a thousand. I know I left a lot in California.

Last book bought: I think that's the 1962 Cherry Ames "annual" I saw while walking by a bookstore in Cambridge, UK. It was in those one-pound boxes outside the door, in the front of the stack, and it instantly caught my eye. I thought, Rivka Might Like This! But it turns out she doesn't want it, so I'll be BookMooching it or something.

Last book read: Reread: I just reread several chapters of the great Vikram Seth book A Suitable Boy. I can always reread Haresh's battles in the shoe industry, the harrowing aftermath of Maan's and Firoz's confrontation at Saeeda Bai's, Professor's Mishra's scheming around Pran's promotion, Lata, Amit, Mrs Rupa Mehra, Kalpana, oh look I just reread another hundred pages.

Fresh read: started Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars ebook.

Last book finished: Reread: an old Cat and Girl anthology. Classic, funny, incisive.

Fresh read: I read and finished the ebook of Scott Sigler's novel Infected, which was more horror-y than I like in scifi.

Five books that mean a lot to me:

Children of the River by Linda Crew. I read it my freshman year of high school, as an elective in our Romeo and Juliet unit. A Cambodian girl who was perfectly happy in Phnom Penh adjusts to life as a farm laborer and student at an Oregon high school. Her aunt and uncle, her foster parents in the States, want her to study hard and avoid boys. One comes easier than the other. There's a passage where she can tell that a guy's gaze across the classroom means that he could watch her all day with affection and awe. I wrote in my Double-Entry Journal for class that I simply couldn't imagine that ever happening to me. My teacher asked, "Why not?" and I had no answer. And the relationships between Sundara and her aunt, her brother, and her Khmer community helped me get perspective on my family and their friends.
Special shout-out here to the similarly themed nonfiction oral history Bamboo & Butterflies, which opened my eyes substantially. There's an anecdote about an abortion and another about punctuality that still stay with me, fifteen years later.
Imzadi by Peter David. I adored Star Trek and when I was a teenager this was one of the best Trek stories I'd ever watched or read. And there was graphic sex! SO COOL.
The Mahabharata. In comics or in prose or in drama or in critical essays or in any other form. There's so much there. One reason I never really got into the Epic Fantasy Tolkien/Jordan/Martin stuff is that I already had a mythology, stranger and larger and more exciting than anything a single author could spin out.
American Taxation, American Slavery by Robin Einhorn. I took an American History class with Prof. Einhorn my first year at Berkeley, and felt stupid and astonished when she used the changing price of slaves to inform her explanation of pre-Civil War economics. Her influence led me to consider grad school in tax history. American Taxation, American Slavery, which came out a few years ago, is dense and academic and brainbending. It prepped me to read Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves. It gave me a tremendous respect for the importance of institutional competence in government agencies. And it refuted damaging "taxation=slavery" rhetoric, not least by diagnosing it as projection by slaveowners.
Special shout-out here to academic texts The Social Animal by Eliot Aronson, the most lucid textbook I've ever read, and The Psychology of Computer Programming by Gerald Weinberg, which has informed my management style substantially.
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. I read it in college, in that first apartment with green carpet and fake wood panelling on the walls, first in little random chapters, then -- maybe, finally, years later -- cover to cover. Just reread most of it on Saturday. I've been interrogating the pro-startup, anti-employee bent of my tech culture recently, and rereading Cryptonomicon reminds me that Randy cofounds a startup and gets to have awesome adventures! A zillion Stephenson phrases and images and metaphors and scenes have made themselves part of me. The ending of In the Beginning...Was The Command Line (Seth gave me my copy) stands next to the opening of the original GPL as a clarion call. How can I express how deeply Cryptonomicon is constitutive in my identity?

I figure the statute of limitations is under three years, so I won't tag anyone and coerce them into posting with this template, but I bet my in-laws would enjoy doing this if they haven't already!

Filed under: Reading

# 02 Apr 2009, 09:13AM: Me In Other Media: The Thoughtcrime Experiments anthology, which Leonard and I are finishing up now, got me into Your Favorite Thing About The Recession from The Morning News. It's also a big reason Sharon Panelo interviewed me about free culture. It's paraphrased, but includes me talking about DRM pain points and the GEICO "Tiny House" ad.

Filed under: Reading

# 01 Apr 2009, 07:40AM: The Long View: Throughout Jody Procter's memoir Toil: Building Yourself, a diary of his work helping build one specific house in a small Oregon city, Procter aches for the weekend, feels hopeful and buoyant working through Friday afternoon, and buys himself little treats at the 7-11 on the Friday drive home. The rhythm of building tension and weekly release thrums over and over again. The end of the March 17th entry:

I have been taking my watch off or leaving it in the car to try to keep from looking at it. 10:56. 2:05. Seeing those dead hours in the middle of the day demoralizes me. Now, this afternoon, I put my watch on, the better to savor the slow pace of the last hour and a half of the week. The sun has disappeared. The clouds rolls in. A few sprinkles fall and the air is cool and fragrant with the budding flowers of spring and the moist, freshly cut grass of the golf course. I am happier and happier as the final minutes of the work week tick by.
On my drive home I think, if you could only bottle that Friday after-work feeling and sell it to people, you could make so much money you could stop work and then you would never have that Friday after-work feeling again. Unless you indulged in your own product. And probably, after a while, you'd get addicted to it, it would lose its kick, it would turn out to have negative side-effects and all would be lost and in ruins. You would lose your fortune and have to go back to work and then some Friday you would be driving home and you would have that Friday after-work feeling all over again.

Filed under: Reading Work

# (2) 26 Mar 2009, 11:51AM: Links: I usually keep stuff like this in Delicious but I wanted to bring a few things to your attention.

Dreadwhimsy is incredibly short stories inspired by weird photos.

Flea of One Good Thing linked to her six-year-old son's blog, Shut Up I'm Six. What more do you need from, say, games journalism than the following?

hay guys type in wizard101 and you will git a cool game its about a life but in a computer and you have to fight bad guys its cool i like it do you?

Forever's Not So Long is a very short, poignant science fiction movie whose final shots will stay with me for a while.

Waiter Rant, in Las Vegas, shows a person having an inappropriate emotional reaction, then analyzing it. I love that. Dara discusses a dormant skill cropping up again.

...that poem, which I thought I had left composting in the backyard of my brain, to feed future poems but not ever to remerge. Surprise. It's back, shuffling its overwritten zombie stanzas up the stairs, dropping rhymes like clods of earth all over the kitchen floor.

Despite the abundance of exclamation marks, this fantastical history of Quizno's is worth reading till the end.

Firefox now has a Kannada release!

A hilarious Trader Joe's FAQ, and a beautiful song/ad for Trader Joe's (or, as my mother calls it, Trader's Joe).

I had no idea that this program existed to help me travel late Saturday nights!

Ganesha helps Alison Bechdel unclutter after decades of doing her monthly comic strip.

Susan Senator, dealing with her autistic son's move out of her house, writes about the changes that only experience and time bring:

We go into things seeing them only in two dimensions: what we've seen from the outside, and what we've heard/read. Those are the two dimensions. When we enter into the thing, the big thing like marriage or childbirth/adoption, we then experience the addition of the third dimension. We go deeper. We go through some kind of pocket of time and in-the-moment action, and then suddenly we are on the other side....
When it was over, it was over, and I was on the Inside.
So when you go through something as intense as childbirth/adoption and suddenly there is a baby where there wasn't one before, you are just pulled inside out and a whole new consciousness surrounds you.
Then you get used to it. Then you get good at it. Then you enjoy it. And then they are ready to go. And suddenly, there you are, in two dimensions again, looking outward at their leaving you, not knowing how it will feel, only guessing by what others say/do and what you have heard/read.

She strikes at a reason I read so avidly, and that I gain such comfort from reading memoirs of work and parenthood. I can only guess at what those other lives are like, seeing flattened perceptions of their experiences. But if I sort of go through time along with them, watching and listening to their observations over the weeks and years, then I get a little bit of that third dimension from Alyson and Kristen and Susie, Rivka and Rachel, Flea and Susan, and now Claudia .

So parents don't talk in high-pitched baby talk because they like to, but because it works. If I try to explain to the Peanut that I need to put his socks on before I feed him, "I need to put your socks on" doesn't work. Now if I say "I need to put on your little sockies on your little toesies that are soo cutie" in a high-pitched voice with lots of animation (think smiling like crazy, waving the socks around), then I'll get an extra few seconds to put the socks on before he starts screaming. The only problem is that after talking in such a manner for 10+ hours, it's hard to turn off when I talk to an adult (aka, the husband).

And tomorrow night I get to see another Paul, Storm, and Jonathan Coulton concert. Whooo!

Filed under: Reading

# (2) 24 Mar 2009, 12:06AM: 'Well, I'm back,' she said: I finished Toil by Jody Procter, read Five Point Someone by Chetan Bhagat, and got most of the way through Infected by Scott Sigler during my journey back home (via bus, subway, rail, airplane, AirTrain, rail again, subway again, and a lot of foot).

I can of course recommend the company of those I saw in the UK (Paul & Sarah, the Collabora team, Rachel, Rachel & her friends, Holly & Kevan, Avedon, Joseph). I can also recommend the London Transport Museum, a Chalmers-guided Best Of tour of the British Museum, the taster flights of beer at Porterhouse near Covent Garden, Rainbow Cafe on King's Parade in Cambridge, and any food Holly makes, especially cakes. Maybe I can link and elaborate when I wake up.

Filed under: Reading

# (1) 16 Mar 2009, 03:15PM: Dara, Your Style/Substance Thoughts?: These Anacruses are not technically Bad Pennies, but Ana, @job, Taggert, Chronastromy HQ Officer Training: Final Exam, MAXBETTY92, Branford, #13102099, and The Musical all deserve to be grouped together. Any others?

Filed under: Reading

# 16 Mar 2009, 02:40PM: BART-Approved: Not only did Seth translate into Latin and many friends enjoy my poem "BART Spokesman Linton Johnson", but Johnson himself just wrote me and said he loved it! Yay!

Okay, moment of validation over, back to errands.

Filed under: Reading

# (2) 13 Mar 2009, 01:15PM: Citation Needed?: Some of you adore footnotes, right?

Filed under: Reading

# (4) 05 Mar 2009, 09:05AM: A Fuss: Ned Batchelder pointed to John Hodgman's condemnation of "meh" in one-off blog comments and tweets.

By definition, it may mean disinterest (although simple silence would be a more damning and sincere response, in that case)... But in use, it almost universally seems to signal: I am just interested enough to make one last joyless, nitpicky swipe and then disappear...

I think Hodgman is basically right here.* Another way to put it: "It's incredibly easy to make people feel embarrassed about having been enthusiastic about something, and 'I don't see what the fuss is about" is an effective tool with which to accomplish that task and shut a conversation down."

After submissions closed for Thoughtcrime Experiments (we've chosen the final stories, by the way!), Leonard defined our scoring process as: "From A to E the tiers are 'absolutely not', 'no', 'eh', 'yes', and 'yes!'" Note that the middle tier is "eh", not "meh". "Meh" is "I don't care" but "eh" is "I could go either way."

Batchelder praises Hodgman for "fighting the good fight for sincerity and engagement." Brandon Bird also recently mentioned "the new sincerity" and I'm into it -- earnest, enthusiastic passion is to me part of what makes a person worth talking to.

I expect a certain level of honesty, openness, engagement, and willingness to stand by one's statements in any conversation -- it's jarring to try to converse with people who don't share those values. I'm thinking when I vociferously challenged a claim by someone at my sister's housewarming -- he said that all TV is mindless because it dictates how you interact with it. Another conversant sort of stepped forward and said, to cool down the discussion, "I think we didn't mean for this to get...so..." meaningful? heated, to his eyes, because I showed that I cared and thought the other person was genuinely wrong about something important? I backed away. I probably should have shown more empathy and hospitality in conversing on a level that made the other guests comfortable -- direct challenges to statements of opinion do come off as angry and impolite, in some situations. But "meh" still isn't the answer to that; diplomacy is. And that I need to work on. My first year in college, a dorm-mate suggested I work on "something that starts with a t and rhymes with tact." I'm better, but evidently not great. Eh.

*(Disclaimer: JS, I still value and enjoy the flask you gave me that has "meh." laser-engraved onto the side.)

Filed under: Reading

# (4) 04 Mar 2009, 09:35AM: Poem: "BART Spokesman Linton Johnson": I wrote this in September 2008.

BART spokesman Linton Johnson
You speak for the trains
You must say so many things
Joyous and doleful
When the trains are stopped
Or when ridership is up
Or when the stations cry out for murals or bleach
You hear what the tunnels say
They whisper in your ears as you ride
Like a regular passenger
Out of uniform, out of sight
The seats and the cars plead with you
The turnstiles and ticket machines click and tick
As you watch the security cameras
They thank you for saying what they cannot
Each conductor drives one train
And announces its stops and destination
Only you sing of BART the whole
From Dublin to Pittsburg to Fremont to Richmond to SFO
Your heart MacArthur, centered above the freeway
Sing of the vessels that carry us from desk to bed
Speak for the trains
BART spokesman Linton Johnson

Filed under: Reading

# 28 Jan 2009, 06:41PM: Make It No: Martin, newborn pub brawler, finds that the ST:TNG episode "Tapestry" speaks to him. He calls the theme among these episodes obvious. I'm guessing he saw that they are about leadership/organizational behavior. And thus if I had written Make It So: Leadership Lessons from Star Trek: The Next Generation, those are episodes I'd use as illustration.

You think I'm joking? I'm totally not joking. And this was prefigured in Euler, er, postfigured in Danny O'Brien.

I've read Make It So. It's supposedly a series of logs spoken by Picard, but the whole voice is wrong. Captain Jean-Luc Picard doesn't go for bulleted lists. And he wouldn't be so reductive as to choose one virtue (e.g., Focus, Urgency, Intellectual Honesty) to bolt on to his discussion of each episode.

Make it So rightly considers the leadership and career issues in "Tapestry," "The First Duty," "Chain of Command," "Lower Decks," and "The Drumhead." However, it also wastes time awkwardly shoehorning management lessons into "Coming of Age," "Darmok," "Encounter at Farpoint," "Peak Performance," "Relics," "Starship Mine," and "The Wounded" when it could be addressing "The Pegasus," "Allegiance," "The Game," "The Masterpiece Society," "I, Borg," "Ensign Ro," "Loud as a Whisper," "Samaritan Snare," "A Matter of Honor," "The Ensigns of Command," "Disaster," "Rightful Heir," "Lessons," and even the Troi subplot of "Thine Own Self." I'm really surprised the talky, ham-handed Picard impersonator didn't take on "Ensign Ro," "The Masterpiece Society," and "Allegiance," since they have more interesting things to say about organizations and management than "Starship Mine," "Relics," and "The Wounded" do.

What are the real leadership lessons of TNG? Other than "watch out for worm creatures taking over your superiors"? A few: You can't do a first-class job with second-class people (cf. every guest star in a uniform); everyone needs to be able to pinch-hit (away teams, "Disaster," "Starship Mine," "The Best of Both Worlds"). Explain your reasons and listen to suggestions when you can, so your colleagues will trust you when you can't ("Chain of Command" and "Allegiance"). The first duty of a Starfleet officer is to the truth. The mission has to take priority over individuals ("Lower Decks," "Darmok," "Lessons," and possibly "The Masterpiece Society" if you look at it from the perspective of the utopians).

Anyone else want a go?

Filed under: Work:Management and Leadership Reading

# (2) 26 Jan 2009, 05:33PM: Getting Back Into Sorts: I'm nearly over my illness, but am delaying my next Boston trip till (probably) next week. Today I've been recuperating while reading Alan's War (Alan Cope and Emmanuel Guibert) and submissions for Thoughtcrime Experiments. By the way, Leonard's put photos and narration of our Per Se experience online.

Filed under: Reading

# (4) 01 Jan 2009, 09:26PM: Host: We've been having friends over this week for food, Dr. Horrible, Wii Music, and conversation. When I look back on 2008, some of my best memories are of extending and receiving hospitality, sharing my enthusiasms and learning new ones.

We've also been fortunate enough to enjoy some financial comfort, and since we live in a tiny apartment, have found ourselves leaning towards spending on experiences like travel and dining that don't take up any room. I've probably spent less this year on books than I have any year since I started college -- thanks, library.

I did however grab an issue of "Haute Living" from Daniel when Leonard and I ate there this summer. Just now I rolled around laughing at the ads for stuff that even the Wall Street Journal thinks is excessive. One resort is "home to the world's only 'tanning butler' -- a gentleman who roams the pool to ensure those hard-to-reach places are effectively oiled" (p. 172), leading me to ask, "Is this man employed by the hotel?"

We don't have room for more stuff, so we avoid stuff-buying. If you're rich, you just buy a storage yacht! It's refreshing to see that, while Leonard and I may be more well-off than we're accustomed to, we're not rich jagoffs.

But, near the end of the magazine, I ran across an unexpectedly intense meditation/parable on hospitality and luxury from Eric Lepeingle, a yacht broker.

A client who has everything and can buy whatever he wants was in Cannes to visit the yachts. His manager comes in and says he wants to have the most perfect French experience possible. I say to myself, I'm sure he's already eaten at all the big three-star Michelin places. He knows where they are. He doesn't need me to bring him to a restaurant. So I call my wife and ask her to go to the meat shop and buy a cote de boeuf and organize everything and tell her that I'm coming to the pool with five people and we're going to barbecue with us. So I tell him, 'Tonight you're going to have a real French experience.' He asks what that is. I tell him, 'It's called home.' 'What?' the client asks. 'Come home,' I tell him, 'Why do you want to stay in your hotel, only to leave just so you can go to a restaurant with everyone in black and white, and get served in the exact same way you always do. The only thing I want is to have a good time.' So he says, 'You know what, you're the first person I've dealt with that has invited me home.' His eyes don't look the same way they usually do. They're smiling. You cannot do that in New York, in the office. You work all year for that one moment.
-"The Pleasure Broker" by Jeremy Lissek, Haute Living Florida, June/July 2008, p. 187.

Luxury is ....

Filed under: Reading

# 09 Nov 2008, 09:37PM: How They Did "How He Did It": The Newsweek behind-the-scenes reports are indeed awesome, and I, like the Broadsheet women, have been using them as methadone post-election-season. However they raise troubling questions.

What tidbits would campaigners share with the long-term reporters but not the regular reporters? What were the criteria?

What are the things that interested parties wouldn't share even with the long-term reporters, or that the reporters still declined to publish? What will never come out, or only when someone dies or an administration ends?

Did the campaigners and other reporters start treating the long-term reporters as priests for confessional, or plant gossip with them as you might place artifacts in a time capsule?

Filed under: Reading

# (3) 10 Oct 2008, 09:54AM: Notable: If there's one iota of wisdom I remember from Reader's Digest's "Quotable Quotes," it's that good stories feature ordinary people doing extraordinary things or extraordinary people doing ordinary things. This model explains to me why superhero comics get so boring -- if everything's extraordinary, then nothing is -- and yet another reason why plotless character studies written after Jackson/Hemingway/Fitzgerald get on my nerves (more complaining here).

Fortunately, real life comes chock full of the ordinary/extraordinary reversals. And there's never been a better time to capture them. We mundanes document ourselves with blogs and cameras, strip-mining our lives for something memorable. And paparazzi hunt down the ordinary moments of celebrated characters so we can watch them get the paper or carry a garment bag from a car to a hotel.

By the way, I saw those Obama photos and remembered Leonard of five years ago:

My doomed attempt at a photo op to create a surge of populism for my gubernatorial campaign.

If Obama Pics Daily is any measure, Leonard just needed a better photographer (viz., someone other than me). (For more recontextualization foto fun, compare Kris's silly alterations to their sources. Or just make a macro of scary finger-wiggling Obama.)

The reason that Quotable Quote's been in my mind is because of John's hilarious account of his trip to a megarich client on a private jet, and our conversation about it last night. He said it was surreal and completely outside the realm of any experience he'd ever had before; he found himself asking, "Is this really happening?" And indeed, whenever I've heard truly joyous or terrible news, or undergone a remarkable experience, the biggest surprise is that it's taking place in the same context as the rest of my boring life. No soundtrack, no paparazzi, no preface, just time ticking by at one second per second the same as anywhere and anywhen else.

Filed under: Reading

# 04 Oct 2008, 12:30PM: Subjects And Objects In Geek Careers: I love reading Derek Lowe's In The Pipeline to glimpse the shape of the biochem industry: what's inherently hard, what's common, and what's revolutionary. The grammar is familiar if the nouns aren't. This came through quite clearly in his recent post, "Hard Times: A Manifesto".

The more I think about all the research layoffs that have been going on for the last year or two around the industry, the more I think that we really are seeing a change in the way drug discovery is being done....
Everyone knows - including the people in Shanghai and Hyderabad - that the difficult, high-level research is still not being done there. That'll change, as the human and physical infrastructure improves, but the bulk of the outsourced chemistry is methyl-ethyl-butyl-futile stuff. It's "Hey, make me a library based on this scaffold structure" or "Hey, make me fifty grams of this intermediate"....
So improve your skills. Learn new techniques, especially the ones that are just coming out and haven't percolated down to the crank-it-out shops in the low-wage countries. Stay on top of the latest stuff, take on tough assignments. Keeping your head down in times like these will move you into the crowd that looks like it can be safely let go.

The comment thread includes much sniping at US firms that hire immigrants. According to protectionists, there is some static number of jobs available for research chemists, forever, and the only effects of "allowing" a US-based organization to hire a chemist who was not born in the US are to drive down wages and deprive a native-born US citizen of that job. They also hold that long-term benefits to the industry and country from immigrants are a myth, unnecessary, slight, or past.

I find these sorts of attitudes astonishing, not just because they're angry and incoherent, but because in a software developer they would betray a complete lack of initiative. There is no way to simultaneously hold these views and to conduct one's career with the attitude of an entrepreneur. Analyzing opportunities, targeting positions and markets, networking, and generally taking initiative means viewing situations as dynamic, not static. What's growing? What's dying? How can I ride that wave? And if someone is thinking that way, then naturally she recognizes the likelihood that an immigrant's discovery or shoestring startup will create a new and profitable micro-industry, and that US universities gain tremendous value from being world capitals of science research.

I'm interested in constructing a software equivalent of srp's list of biochemistry dogmas ripe for profitable questioning:

1) Rational drug design is the best way to find good treatments. We should try to target precisely one receptor with one molecule.
2) We need to understand the mechanism of action of a drug in order for it to be successful.
3) Drugs that are safe and effective in humans are likely to also be safe and effective in animal models. (We know that the converse is false, which is why we use rigorous human testing.)
4) The incentives of the FDA and patients are very well aligned.
5) The discovery of new therapeutic regimes using combinations of existing off-patent drugs does not deserve to be rewarded.

Filed under: Work:Management and Leadership Reading

# 28 Sep 2008, 06:11PM: Haze Outside, Malaise Inside: Seeing old friends makes me feel homesick. Going to more free culture events here may help. Also, distractions! Like HOWTO/memoir books about other professions!

Zac Unger's Working Fire, about a guy who basically leaves academe to become a firefighter, is short, switching between journalist-clear and memoirist-thoughtful. My ex's dad was a firefighter in Stockton, probably still is. When I try to remember what he looked like, I think of my old boss Leonard Pollara of Upper Meadows Farm. I once had Thanksgiving dinner in a firehouse with his family and remember feeling very nervous and out of place. Unger had the same fears but got over them, partly through competence, partly by adapting his social self and making friends.

I'm nearly done with Jane Addams's Twenty Years at Hull House, which chronicle the doubt, missteps, victories, and idealism of the young and middle-aged Chicago community organizer from the turn of the century. I was reassured when Addams talked about her long, hazy post-college period before starting Hull House. I haven't come up with my Big Project yet -- I'm not just waiting to be struck by certainty, I'm searching for what my unique value even is -- and every day I feel like the clock is running out.

Filed under: Reading Work

# 20 Sep 2008, 01:22PM: Buffet: While updating my list of books to read I came across some snatches I'd meant to blog:

The DVD for The Matrix should include a deleted scene where Morpheus, who has shipped a cell phone to Neo, keeps reloading the FedEx tracking page so he can call as soon as Neo signs for it.

If you travel the elevated trains in Queens, like the N, W, or 7, you can hit Refresh on your list of available WiFi networks over and over to see what people name them. Best so far: Bob Loblaw.

The Boston science museum apparently collects ships in a bottle by accident, because people think they collect them. Leonard's late grandmother Rosalie had the same problem with frogs.

I signed up for Tor.com, which now offers lots of free short fiction, and tasted a bunch of their ebooks during jury duty. I've learned that they publish a lot of stuff I don't like, and some that unexpectedly grabs me.

"The airlines, on the other hand, said they were simply following a list provided by TSA."

See? A list, not THE list. This guy's just on the "[expletive] you" list, not the "we actually think you're a terrorist" list.

And another quote I've been saving:

He feels isolated in the midst of friends. He feels what a convenience it would be, if there were any single person to whom he could speak simply and openly, without pulling the string upon himself of this shower-bath of silly hopes and encouragements...
-Nightingale, "Notes on Nursing"

And an extremely vague recipe for mango ice cream that I believe I got from my mother:

make/get mango pulp
put in a jar
add milk, sugar, cream
grind almond and cardamom into the mix
grind the mixture: it thickens
then pour into ice cream maker

If you try it, let me know how it goes. Actually, let Leonard know, since he can do something with the info.

Filed under: Reading

# (2) 17 Aug 2008, 10:57PM: Diary of Happy Summer Weekends: Finished Thomas Lynch's moving, dense The Undertaking: Life Stories from the Dismal Trade and was going to recommend it to Rachel Chalmers until I saw she already loved it. Leonard summed up some of our thoughts on Anathem and I'll share more when it comes out in a few weeks. Best moment may have been on page 3 when I cried with happiness that an author I so completely trusted was about to ravish me anew. I'm currently reading the short and insightful In The Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing by Walter Murch, which among other things addresses a Leonard-Brendan conversation from five years ago.

I got a bit more How to Design Programs work in and watched a wrenching Bab5 with Leonard. Egg creams are not all that. Yay for getting to see Adi, Caroline, Evan, Stuart, and Mollie; Mirabai, get well soon!

Sometime soon I need to visit the beach, or the summer will have passed with zero real wave-entrancing. Evan took Leonard & me west of the Westside Highway and we just gaped at seeing a single powerful wave cross from New Jersey towards us. Leonard, are you thinking of writing up some of our boat-related conversation with Evan?

Adi and Caroline have me completely beat on "Indian parents aren't so hot on the kid's white significant other" stories. Falling-down laughing at these tales was even better because we got to hear them in the Shakespeare terraces of Central Park, where my wedding proceeded many seasons ago, blessed by all relevant parental units. By crazy random happenstance, the very first evening I met Adi I also met the story's antagonist.

Mollie, who works in an emergency room, informed me that around two percent of the kids she sees with really bad injuries had parents who Did Everything Right -- no neglect, no abuse, just unavoidable. As I consider possible childbearing, that's just enough to let me keep worrying. Also I just read The Undertaking.

Filed under: Reading

# 03 Aug 2008, 10:33PM: Log: L. Sprague de Camp's entertaining Lest Darkness Fall moves really fast. This is probably true even if you haven't just read a 900-page Neal Stephenson novel. I nearly mentioned Lest Darkness Fall in my brain candy recommendations to danah boyd, but fear it's not trashy enough.

William Ball's A Sense of Direction is fantastic and as soon as I return it to the library you should check it out. As I suspected, it has a mix of great inside baseball on directing plays (e.g., three pages on how to structure and practice curtain calls so that actors don't get their egos in a twist) and transferable advice on managing creative folk.

We learn in threes. The first step of learning is discovering; the second step of learning is testing; and the third step of learning is pattern-setting.
The actor will learn to relinquish his fear when he sees that the director never causes another actor to be frightened.
...a question from an actor is not a question. A question from an actor is an innocent bid to draw the director's attention to something unresolved. When the actor asks a question, a wise director doesn't answer the question. The answer to the question is not in the director; the answer to the question is in the actor. Answer the question by asking another question. Allow the actor to resolve the difficulty. He already has the best answer in mind before he asks the question.
Always begin rehearsal on time. There are some directors who like to gossip and joke and waste the first ten or twelve minutes. This awakens a sense of sloppiness in the actor and gives him the feeling that the work is not important.

For future reference, I'm also a fan of advice on pp 58-59, 66, 102-104, and 108 of the 1984 edition.

This weekend (among other activities) I went to a fun party, watched a lot of Babylon 5, saw a friend's wife and new baby, read the de Camp, ate Leonard's excellent sour cherry cobbler, walked around a lot, filed a bug or two on Miro, and rented movies to foist on my fellow jurors this last week of grand jury duty. All this and I still spent hours dinking around on the Web. So there, anxieties!

Filed under: Work:Management and Leadership Management and Leadership Reading Work

# 01 Aug 2008, 06:50PM: Noooo: Today we watched I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry again, because people tried and disliked Perfume and the original Night of the Living Dead. My Connie Willis novel, Lincoln's Dreams, disappointed mightily; it would have been fine as fifteen pages instead of two hundred. I desperately skimmed issues of O: The Oprah Magazine, Family Circle, National Geographic Adventure, the AARP magazine, the magazine for US radiologic technicians, and Antiques. Thank God for the Mad I bought on the way in.

Filed under: Reading

# (2) 18 Jul 2008, 10:48PM: Learned This Week: Josh Fruhlinger appears on Jeopardy! in an episode playing this coming Tuesday. Come over to my place if you want to watch it!

The text prediction on my phone thinks that "leopardy" is a word.

Josh, as a science/tech writer, is also the plot-device/worldbuilding uncle from Asimov's story The Dead Past.

Some people wet a toothbrush before putting toothpaste on it, and some don't.

Even good people can't resist making an obvious joke about Governor Paterson's blindness.

I was reminded that one incident can lead to multiple legal charges. Prosecutors can slice ten seconds' worth of actions into infringements of several laws in different degrees.

I have an easier time reviewing written notes than memories of purely oral instructions. If I won't have the safety net of any written instructions, I have to take notes on the oral instructions or repeat them back to the teller, especially if there are steps that seem like duplicates. This is a repeat lesson from my time on the farm last year.

Witnesses often have to give approximate times, durations, or addresses. Numbers in general are hard to remember.

I give people the impression that I am smart and read a lot of books, and am possibly a doctor or lawyer.

The 1928 version of the NPR-listening vegetarian body-piercing liberal was "card playing, cocktail drinking, poodle dogs, divorces, novels, stuffy rooms, dancing, evolution, Clarence Darrow, overeating, nude art, prize fighting, actors, greyhound racing, and modernism."

Some people would rather sit around and do nothing, and complain of being bored, than read.

Filed under: Reading

# 14 Jul 2008, 05:26PM: Service: For jurors and cops, the job erratically swings between moments of tremendous responsibility and stretches of consuming boredom. Thurber is a fine antidote to the boredom; I finished 356 pages of his short stories and essays today while getting processed into a grand jury and commuting an hour each way.

Last summer I spent two weeks doing physical labor and this summer I'll spend a month doing intellectual labor: evaluating evidence, critical thinking, all that buzz. I may diagram arguments in my juror notes the same way I did in high school debate.

The initial processing room had several bookshelves full of paperbacks, complete with two copies of The Fountainhead.

Filed under: Reading

# 30 Jun 2008, 08:18AM: Spoiler! I'm Numb And Sad: Just read Y: The Last Man, final trade paperback collection of the monthly issues. Why does tragedy still shock me? I had to hunt around on the web to find people as sad as I am to help me process my grief.

Filed under: Reading

# 27 Jun 2008, 08:14PM: Friday Night Blights: Yesterday: woke for an hour ear-li in the mornin' thanks to Leonard's incoming illness and a foolhardy attempt to start sleeping an hour early. This morning: wrong number woke me at 4 and I couldn't get back to sleep. Insomniacs take note: Hulu is adding a bunch of new shows and movies this summer, and now carries The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.

I've just read The Puttermesser Papers (disappointing), The Fire Inside: Firefighters Talk About Their Lives (quick and moving), and the third trade collection of Action Philosophers! (funny; requires attention and serious reading comprehension). Am now on Peter Falk's autobiography -- yes, the Columbo guy. It's hilarious. Less autobiography than compilation of two-page anecdotes.

I worked probably ten hours today, yet still have an hour of work to do before I can call the week finished. At least I have a nice relaxing stint of jury duty soon. I got summoned for a grand jury; if I'm picked for the 23-person panel, I might serve for two weeks to several months.

Filed under: Reading

# 22 Jun 2008, 10:02PM: The Invalid Coughs Piteously: Am siiiiiiick. Leonard characterizes my amount of whining as "not more than is seemly" and has been providing very homemade chicken noodle soup (seriously, made noodles from scratch and turned a whole dead chicken into soup) as well as tea and whatnot. Napped extensively, reread Zodiac: The Eco-Thriller and watched some over-the-top Psych. I should construct a Grand Unified Theory of Easy-To-Digest Media For The Sumana Sickbed. Criteria include: funny, not too original, happy ending.

Funny typo in my incoming email: "Sumana: Thanks for conforming." I'm assuming he meant "confirming" but why risk finding out what he really thinks of me?

Filed under: Apartment Life Comedy Reading

# 19 Jun 2008, 04:14PM: Semifinal Thoughts: Zed wrote me several weeks ago with some research on Trollope and the "metropolitan moon". He gave me permission to post it so here goes:

The context was a spat between Trollope and the Anglican church over
Trollope criticizing how badly rural curates (or deans) were paid. As
Leonard notes, a metropolitan is an Anglican archbishop. So it's just
a reference to curates being envious of archbishops' riches. Holly, in
your comments, quotes the relevant passage, but missed that a dean is
the lowly underpaid figure.

Also, the phrase alludes to Hamlet.

Hamlet, Act I, Scene 4 (Hamlet addressing the ghost of his father).

Angels and ministers of grace defend us!
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn'd,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou comest in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee: I'll call thee Hamlet,
King, father, royal Dane: O, answer me!
Let me not burst in ignorance; but tell
Why thy canonized bones, hearsed in death,
Have burst their cerements; why the sepulchre,
Wherein we saw thee quietly inurn'd,
Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws,
To cast thee up again. What may this mean,
That thou, dead corpse, again in complete steel
Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon,
Making night hideous; and we fools of nature
So horridly to shake our disposition
With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?
Say, why is this? wherefore? what should we do?

What he meant by alluding to Hamlet, and why it should be profane
(simply because he's suggesting the deans are violating the
commandment against coveting their neighbor's ox?) still escape me.

But at this point, I think it was totally not a sex thing.

Filed under: Reading

# (2) 05 Jun 2008, 01:55PM: Aside: I'll be offline for much of this weekend at a retreat in San Antonio. It looks like my 10-year high school reunion, scheduled for next weekend, is cancelled for want of RSVPs. I'm managing three to five projects right now, double the number I had last month at this time. Dance Dance Revolution seems to be getting harder, probably because I've raised the difficulty level to Difficult. I want to talk with my California friends sometime soon. Born Standing Up by Steve Martin is thoughtful and funny and helps me understand artistic innovation. I've been reading Making Light comments by Abi Sutherland, especially for insights about software testing and motherhood. And Susan McCarthy's Becoming a Tiger is refreshing my love of life -- not just my life, but of rambunctious, smart fauna in general.

Filed under: Reading Religion

# (2) 02 Jun 2008, 09:10AM: Quick Reviews: Paddleboating in the Jefferson Memorial basin: harder than I'd thought. Iron Man: extremely fun. The fake Wired cover near the start stakes the claim that Tony Stark has the most badass gadgets EVER. Which he does. Silas Marner: I'm two-fifths through it and need to finish it to make sure Dunsey Cass gets his comeuppance. And nineteenth-century British lit always makes me incredibly grateful for the Internet and the Greyhound bus.

Filed under: Reading

# (1) 26 May 2008, 04:00PM: Bookishness: I have now inhaled Scott Westerfeld's Uglies trilogy, complete with a night where I stayed up till 1:30 reading in bed while Leonard slept, just to finish Specials. Now I'm reading the companion novel, Extras, which makes me laugh out loud and wince at how familiar the attention economy feels. And this weekend, Leonard and I acquired huge stacks of cheap used books in Brooklyn. It's so nice to have more time to read fiction!

Speaking of nominally young-adult fiction, my friend Sabrina Banes has a new blog about YA fiction matters. I'm hoping to cause her to love Gordon Korman.

Also, Sabrina connived Leonard and me into going with her to the Little Brother signing this evening, starring Cory Doctorow and co-starring the Nielsen Haydens. Speaking of the attention economy. I'll be meeting people who have higher Technorati rankings than I do! I'll be wearing my oldest Electronic Frontier Foundation tee shirt, for cred.

Filed under: Reading

# 21 May 2008, 11:59AM: Media Experience Revue: Since my mom is in town, I actually bought full-price Broadway tickets for once in my life. Tonight's showing of Curtains will star David Hyde Pierce and hundreds of dollars of my money in the form of fedoras and whatnot.

Zed and Jen: Leonard and I have bought and begun to watch Black Books, basically because you sold me on it by showing me the pilot when I stayed with you in January. It's like a sitcom, only good!

I've been binging on decades-old Nancy Kress (most famous for the awesome Beggars in Spain novella) from the Columbia library. She loves writing about lawyers, journalists, wives, genetic engineering and gene therapy, reincarnation, class, and upstate New York. I'm not enamored of her endgames in her novels, but nearly everything else is good.

Now I'm indulging in my friend Susan McCarthy's Becoming a Tiger: How Baby Animals Learn to Live in the Wild. Susan was a neighbor and confidant of mine in SF and I miss her! But now she has a smart and funny blog about animal behavior that will remind me to call her more often. The book is chock-full of retellable anecdotes and sounds like her, making me smile on every page.

Filed under: Reading

# (4) 04 May 2008, 09:42AM: Tips, Modesty, and The Magic Word (Julie Andrews): My sisters-in-law have started putting longer essays and tipsheets on Associated Content (Susie, Rachel) . Susie writes mostly tips for domestic productivity and happiness. I especially like Susie's tips on beginner sewing projects using scrap fabric and reusing old, worn-out clothes, and her lists of tips on useful things to keep in the car, starting a meal swap group (a.k.a. once-a-month megapotluck), housewarming gift ideas, and setting up and maintaining a cleaning schedule. Now I just have to follow through!

Rachel's living in London, which led Susie to write up tips for reducing an expatriate's loneliness. Rachel mostly writes expat- and traveler-themed articles, like tips on planning a backpacking trip, a pros-and-cons piece on using guidebooks, and gift guides for expats and itinerants. This November, I'd like to use Rachel's tips for succeeding at NaNoWriMo. And it was neat and exciting to read her citizen reporting from the Democrats Abroad presidential primary.

Sadly, not all the stuff on Associated Content is as useful and cool as my family's work. Women have posted creepy Bible-related comments on an article on the history of pants in women's fashion. I never understood why skirts were more "modest" than pants until I read these comments. I'd figured: it's easier to have sex while wearing a skirt! Wouldn't pants, which would need to be removed, be more modest? But no, these women inform me: the lines of the leg-tubes draw the male gaze right to the forbidden area! They know where it is! They can't help but think about it! But wait, isn't mystery sexier? Wouldn't men actually obsess more over the invisible, unknowable skirt-covered crotch? Ridiculous.

If these women want me to wear skirts, they should turn their energies towards convincing mainstream America that God gave all his children leg hair and never meant for half of them to constantly battle it.

As long as I'm talking about my sisters-in-law, I should mention that Rachel recently recommended Lying About Hitler by Richard Evans and saw a stage production of The Sound of Music. Rachel, I saw a home-taped video of the film a zillion times when I was a kid, and I must have always fallen asleep around the wedding. When I was a teen, I then actually saw the ending with the escape and was like, "Oh! So it was all about Nazis!"

Also, when I was five, my mom took me to try out for a local stage production of The Sound of Music as Gretl, the tiny daughter. I said the lines Gretl had said in the movie instead of the lines they were giving me for the play. I didn't get the part.

Filed under: Reading

# (6) 06 Apr 2008, 10:29PM: 19th Century Slang Help Request: I'm reading Trollope's autobiography and need help understanding this passage:

The [clerical] critic, however, had been driven to wrath by my saying that Deans of the Church of England loved to revisit the glimpses of the metropolitan moon.

What's a "metropolitan moon"? Ever since I heard that you can anagram "subtext" to "butt sex" I feel slightly more foolish for assuming things I don't understand are about sex, but -- is this about sex?

Filed under: Reading Religion

# 01 Apr 2008, 09:08AM: Mallory: "Mallory," a near-future sci-fi tale by my husband Leonard, is published at Futurismic. I absolutely love it and hope you do too.

Filed under: Reading

# 24 Feb 2008, 03:32PM: Bloggers Who Give Me A Glimpse of Another World: include John Rogers on screenwriting and TV/movie production, Derek Lowe on research chemistry, Dara Weinberg on theater direction, Camille Acey on Slovenia, Beatrice Murch on Argentina, and Martin Marks on some kind of weird architectural concrete molding job. You know the hype saying the Net lets you read the gossip and shorthand stories of people in different countries and jobs and situations? It's true!

Filed under: Reading

# 16 Feb 2008, 12:00PM: Tax History Saved For A Future Post: In the last few months, I've seen and read a few things and had opinions on them. Here we go.

I Chose a Parson is a 1956 memoir by Phyllis Stark, an American woman who went to Gustavus Adolphus College, married a seminary student, had two kids, and helped her husband as he rose to a bishopric in the Episcopal Church. I got it for a few bucks at Sam Weller's in Salt Lake City, in the cheapo-books room crowded with out-of-print manuals and histories and children's primers, where the pipe on the ceiling's dripping into a bucket on the floor. Never was there a greater diamond in the muck. Stark writes with the dry eloquence of the Brits and the earthy humor of the Midwest, and every page has a great anecdote. I kept reading stuff to Leonard:

In the original list of repairs new pews had been included, but later that item had been deleted because, as usual, expenses were exceeding the original estimates. I felt very strongly, however, that the new beauty we were seeking to achieve would be completely lost if the crude and wretchedly uncomfortable pews were to remain. With the hope of persuading Leland to press the point, I presented the case to him a good many times, but without success. Then one day I decided to drop my reasoned approach and try instead a more feminine technique.
'Darling,' I said sweetly, 'I've got my heart set on new pews.'
He pulled me up short with the trenchant reply, 'That, my dear, is the only part of your anatomy that will ever set on new pews.'
I'm glad to say, however, that the other members of the committee were more amenable to my importuning, and before the repair work was finished, not only did we have new pews, but also new kneelers upholstered with the best quality surgical foam rubber!

I think Rivka and Rachel would especially like this book. And I have more to quote from it in another entry.

Ratatouille is good. The animation of water is amazing. I got creeped out by all the rats. The critic's flashback is moving.

Juno is not the most comfortable movie to watch with my Mormon in-laws. The banter is great and all the actors were spot-on. I could have done with a less monotonous soundtrack. For the first half of the movie Jason Bateman is basically Michael Bluth, but he and Michael Cera really break out. Ellen Page makes me want to see the upcoming Smart People which is evidently this year's Little Miss Sunshine. Some people find Juno's choice to bear the child unbelievable, but I can see a bunch of reasons, implied strongly or subtly, why she'd do that. However, I do want to find a comedy-drama that is specifically about abortion, just to see if it can be done.

An Affair To Remember: Leonard and I saw the Cary Grant/Deborah Kerr version. All the annoying plot devices of screwball comedy without actual chemistry. That Italy scene takes forever! And the second half is a huge Idiot Plot. From my recollection Sleepless in Seattle is a much better film.

An American In Paris: I had an argument with Will Franken about this movie. I couldn't stand it because the lead, Jerry Mulligan, is a sleazeball stalker. Evidently Will wishes men could be more "romantic" in that manner today and feels castrated by feminism and the need to take a single rejection as a final rejection. I pointed out that I've been the aggressor in every romantic relationship I've ever had, and have been rejected many, many times. And yet somehow I got a husband without stalking him! And lots of men and women find each other without sexually harrassing each other!

Will asked, basically, what if it's love? What if you're in love with someone and they don't love you back? Isn't it just and true to persist in professing your love? The answer is no and it's a contradictory question anyhow. One-way romantic "love" is obsession, infatuation, lust; love is a conversation, two minds meeting as one. And how can you love someone if you don't respect their wishes (namely, "stop asking me out")?

The average Futurama is better sci-fi than the average Star Trek: Voyager.

Scott Westerfeld's Uglies is great, easy-to-read teen-focused sci-fi. The characters make sense while growing and displaying new depths, the worldbuilding is exciting, the action scenes and dialogue are all page-turners, and now I have another trilogy to finish, which I can't afford right now. See you again in May, Westerfeld.

If you can believe it, The Matrix was on American Movie Classics the other day. This is kind of embarrassing for me. I taught The Matrix enthusiastically in my Politics in Modern Sci-Fi class and in my prior Politics of the Midlife Crisis class. I still think the plot and visuals are fun and interesting, but most of the dialogue and acting hasn't held up well for me. I do still like Keanu Reeves's part, though.

The September 11th film anthology was on Sundance and I TiVo'd it mainly to watch Inarritu's segment. It was unbearably evocative and I couldn't watch the whole thing. The whole collection is worthwhile: see it with Brendan and followed by the original Shall We Dance?

Filed under: Religion Reading

# 30 Jan 2008, 01:06PM: Sending Creates The Recipient?: Once I start my job at Behavior tomorrow, I'll have a mailing address for packages, one that doesn't depend on Leonard being home during the day and doesn't reveal where I live. Thus, this week I've given out my not-yet-existent address (Sumana Harihareswara c/o Behavior) twice. These packages shipped before the person/address combo existed, but by the time they arrive I'll be there. This says something to me about networking architecture, ephemerality, lazy evaluation, worse is better, and Le Guin's lines from The Dispossessed:

"To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past; therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future. If time and reason are functions of each other, and if we are creatures of time, then we had better know it, and try to make the best of it. To act responsibly."

Filed under: Reading

# (1) 30 Jan 2008, 10:20AM: Idiosyncratic Feminist Book Recommendations: Leigh Anne Wilson of the fabulous One Good Thing blog asked for recommendations of feminist books, especially history and fiction, for a college women's resource group's library. I love recommending books! So I made a little list.

Wilson had already recommended Gavin de Becker's The Gift of Fear so Leonard and I can just make oblique references instead. I think I lent my copy to Zack Weinberg five years ago and I don't know where it's gone. And others had already covered Atwood, Butler, Kingston, Tan, Ensler, bell hooks, and other well-known authors. I recommend:

A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, which I think Rachel gave me. Ulrich shows you and explains to you the cryptic diary of a New England farmhouse wife and midwife. Combines the most gripping bits of "Little House" with historical analysis.

Our Bodies, Ourselves. Just essential. The handbook to my body. Every girl should get a copy at puberty. The bits online are not enough -- she's gotta be able to flip through it and browse.

Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women's Changing Lives by Dr. Anna Fels. Points out that the childhood or adolescent desire for fame is often a precursor to a more nuanced ambition, combining the urge to master some domain or skill with the desire for the recognition of one's peers or community. She also notes that women, especially, feel the need to hide that wish for fame instead of developing it into a healthy passion to guide our careers. Just blew my mind in the best way, and massively helped me guide my career development.

Children of the River by Linda Crew. A moving young adults' novel about an Asian immigrant teenage girl and her conflicts with family and a suitor. Helped me a lot when I was a young teen.

Anjana Appachana's Incantations and Other Stories are short stories about Indians in India and abroad, stifled by or breaking through class and gender mores. When I was eleven, it gave me a new way to see Indian womanhood. Looking back I think the writing isn't as subtle as I'd like, but it was great for teen me.

Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown. The classic lesbian coming-of-age story, messy and sexy and all mixed up with class and race.

The She's Such A Geek anthology. Great mini-memoirs about the intersection of gender politics and a particular field's attractions and annoyances.

Ellen Ullman's work, such as her memoir Close To The Machine and her novel The Bug. Same attraction as above, with reliably deft writing. With "The Bug" it looks like Ullman has the Great American Girl Geek Novel title locked. Excellent, suspenseful, evocative, emotionally accurate.

Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves by Adam Hochschild. A really inspiring tale of the British abolition of the slave trade and slavery. Reminds us that social justice battles are winnable. And reminds us of the historical connection between civil rights and women's rights.

Everything by Diana Abu-Jaber. Frances loved Crescent and I think my sister rereads it every year. One of my better recommendations while working at Cody's.

Asra Nomani's Standing Alone in Mecca: An American Woman's Struggle For The Heart of Islam, with reservations.

In Code: A Mathematical Journey by Sarah Flannery. An Irish girl discovers math with the help of her dad, and makes international headlines with a discovery about cryptography. A nice memoir partly because there's nearly nothing depressing in it. I wrote when I first read it:

She's the type who can confidently approach a hard task and try at it and try at it and count her failures as learning experiences and live with the humility and keep going until she succeeds, self-esteem intact. I'm the other type. I've met quite a lot of that Sarah Flannery type over the years, and I always envy them, and now, maybe if I can just accept that I'm not like that, my envy won't have to get in the way of being friends with these people.

Now I know that's bollocks and I can indeed attempt and achieve hard tasks. It just took a while to find out what working style works for me, and to recognize my own self-deprecating patterns and stop assuming anything I've done wasn't hard.

Alison Bechdel's Dykes To Watch Out For comic strip collections and Fun Home memoir. DTWOF is a deep and broad look at the left and LGBT culture in America from the last two decades, and a great story. Fun Home is Bechdel's personal history, artful and edifying about queerness. They're clear, funny, and poignant, and they address lots of LGBT/feminist/left ideas in easy-to-read cartoons.

An old Secrets of Loveliness by Kay Thomas or similar girl's manual from the fifties or sixties. The reader gapes at what we used to tell girls, and what we still do. I bring it out to shock guests sometimes.

Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher, Ph.D. Puts a name to the pressures American girls face, and does some old-fashioned feminist consciousness-raising. These stories made young women, like me, say "that's me." I read it in high school journalism class. Probably heavy-handed for a lot of women, though, and looking back I wonder about the research.

Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed and Left Hand of Darkness. I taught the latter. Classic feminist/political what-if sci-fi about understanding the other and power structures.

"The Phantom of Kansas" by John Varley. I read this gender-fluid murder mystery set on a lunar colony when I was twelve and it still stays with me as a musing on sex and identity.

Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan. When you've read all of DTWOF, here's the serialized graphic novel to try out. You can read the first issue for free. The last man on earth tries to figure out why all the men died, and why he's still alive. A Sorkin-esque dystopia. The last issue comes out soon.

The Diamond Age, or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson. What sort of education could transform any girl into a strong, independent woman? That what-if, among others, underlies this scary, funny, infuriating, and I think overlooked Stephenson.

Find some anthology that includes Connie Willis's short story "Even the Queen." Menstruation sci-fi. Hilarious. I taught that too.

Nancy Kress is a sci-fi author who thinks about genetic engineering and human relationships. Her main characters are often women.

Joanna Russ's sci-fi usually explores gender and power.

Others, such as my husband, tell me to tell you about Shari Tepper's science fiction, especially The Gate to Women's Country, and Lois McMaster Bujold, A Door Into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski, and Elizabeth Bear's Carnival. I haven't read them yet. Nor have I read nearly enough Alice Sheldon nor her celebrated biography, James Tiptree, Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips. But people recommend it highly. A bunch of Sheldon's work is available online for free and "The Screwfly Solution" is just indispensable.

Comments are open for you to tell me things, but comment over at One Good Thing too.

Filed under: Reading

# (1) 06 Jan 2008, 11:31AM: Ramayaddayaddayadda: Last night I conversed with Leonard about the humor project that's been in the back of my mind for years: a comedic retelling of the Mahabharata akin to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Once Leonard drew my attention to the number of essential characters in the story, I realized that the Ramayana is much more manageable as a first attempt, not to mention more plausible in a purely textual form; I can't imagine doing my Mahabharata without sound or pictures. And I actually have ideas for reworking the four major characters, and the whole crazy situation with Rama's moms and dad. (Think Rama as Reginald Perrin, Sita as Cat and Girl's Girl, and Ravana as a cross among the Borg, Dr. Evil, and Indie Rock Pete. And Hanuman as T-Rex played by Michael Cera.) I should probably bang ideas around with Shweta and my sister.

Ashok Banker also did his Ramayana first, with amazingly intricate and extensive worldbuilding and a serious cast of fully realized characters. I bought most of that series, specially ordering the third and fourth books from abroad, because I loved the concept, but I couldn't get past book two and ended up selling even the unread books to the Strand. I ragged on the first few books of his Ramayana retelling in an MC Masala column in 2005, and he found out about it and wrote me an excellent note thanking me for reviewing it! Solid, and exemplary. His purple prose weighed down the story, I'd said, and Rama, Sita, the evil queen, etc. were completely good or bad with no shading. And, now that I think about it, not nearly enough humor.

Now he's working on the Big M. The Mahabharata just naturally has more complex characters and motivations -- Banker chose to stay true to Rama's perfect heroism and sacrificed conflict. But I probably could have dealt with that, if I could stand the voice. The wordy overdescriptive style sadly continues in this excerpt from his upcoming Mahabharata treatment. But at least there's a hint there that the line between good and evil runs down the center of every human heart (to borrow the line from Solzhenitsyn).

I see from other short fics Banker has posted on his site (I enjoyed a fantasy Western with a six-handed Indian woman and an expat pilgrimage story) that he can do vigorous and concise. I guess the grandeur of the epics turns him grandiose, which is a shame. He has a likable voice and he groks Creative Commons, so I am rooting for him personally, but I'll have to turn elsewhere, possibly inward, for mashups of my epics.

Which reminds me. Krishna as a talkative taxi driver who drives around in a chariot/cab/ice cream truck. What do you think?

Filed under: Reading

# (3) 05 Jan 2008, 02:10PM: Gems: I post lots of little links in the del.icio.us account that Leonard and I share, and that keeps this blog from just being a mass of commentless links. But every once in a while I wish to celebrate bits of the net with/at you. Here!

If you can't get enough Randall Munroe, his LiveJournal should absorb you for ten to twenty minutes. Munroe's experience of Cryptonomicon and mine concur: "I keep picking it up to glance through and then accidentally reading through to the end." Sadly, Knuth, Stephenson, et al. are probably too busy with their magna opera to enjoy the thrice-weekly distraction of Munroe's work.

The soldiers' truce of 1914 -- I knew about it, but it turns out I didn't know a tenth of the story. Tremendous.

And, in a discovery almost certainly irrelevant to your life and to mine, I think Pseudonymous Kid's mom's dad lives where I used to live.

But the real hot tip of this entry is Yishan Wong's Reddit comments. Wong works at Facebook, his wife just had a baby, and I'd rather read his comments on Reddit than blog posts by jwz or Steve Yegge. Examples:

Abortion clinic bombers are the only terrorists who can accurately be described as "hating us for our freedoms."....
It's not one bad programmer. PHP makes bad programmers worse, but it also forces good programmers to have to be kind of bad just to get things working "okay."
What's remarkable about PHP is that it's the best PHP programmers who are the ones most vocal about how awful it is....
Just for irony's sake, I use [the powerful chip in the Sony PlayStation 3] to crack the encryption on my Blu-Ray discs.....

But the bit I really love, the bit that throws Paul Graham into the water, is Wong's encouragement and HOWTO on learning to work hard.

...One bonus effect is that you learn what smartness really does for you: it's a multiplier. It doesn't give you success for nothing (i.e. 5000 x 0 = 0), but if you apply smarts to a work ethic, your output is multiplied (i.e. 5000 x 10 = 50000). So a smart person who learns to work hard benefits far more than a mediocre person who works hard.
This benefit becomes very addictive: "whoa, by sheer force of will I can essentially call into being wealth for myself!" and that's what keeps you from backsliding....

That's going on my reread-regularly list.

Filed under: Reading Work

# (4) 02 Jan 2008, 04:03PM: Yay For Our Common Heritage: According to a blog that watches the public domain, as of yesterday lots of works became free for all of us to reprint, remix, and generally be creative with. Depending on the country you're in, the magic year is probably 1937 or 1957 (the date of death of the author). Some of the authors whose works passed into the public domain yesterday:

Russian novelist, playwright, and essayist Yevgeny Zamiatin (a.k.a. Zamyatin), author of the very weird dystopia We, written as Soviet Russia was beginning to show its true colors. I have bought one copy of We, and received one as an anonymous gift mailed to my workplace. And soon you can read it for free! Think Gogol.
American composer George Gershwin, of George and Ira Gershwin.
Bengali scientist and author Jagadish Chandra Bose. This is the kind of guy you thought died with the Englightenment. Wrote sci-fi, did groundbreaking physics and botany, all while Great Britain had India under its boot.
French author Jean de Brunhoff, author of the Babar elephant books.
American fantasy and science fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft, creator of the Cthulhu mythos. Whoooo! Scary!
Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi, who freaking invented the radio (basically) (and oh yeah was a Fascist).
American statesman and Nobel laureate Elihu Root, arguably one of the 100 most influential people in US history.
Scottish novelist and dramatist J.M. Barrie (except for Peter Pan).
French composer Maurice Ravel, famous for Bolero -- or is that chunk of work waiting till 2015?
Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler, a collaborator and rival of Sigmund Freud.
American novelist Edith Wharton, author of about a zillion books including The Age of Innocence and The Buccaneers. No one except my sister and me remembers the Masterpiece Theatre presentation of The Buccaneers, featuring a guy exclaiming with a weird aristocratic accent, "I'm not a monster!"

As a celebration of our love for public domain literature, Leonard and I gave a Christmas gift to a few of his family: the Project Gutenberg best-of DVD. Leonard burned them and I decorated them with the label "Civilization: A DVD Archive."

For a measure of the long tail, check out the top 100 books downloaded from Project Gutenberg over the last 30 days. Half of them I'd never heard of before. Makes me wonder whether Leonard or I will be on that list someday.

It's your past, your cultural heritage, your public domain. Promote it, celebrate it, and use it, or we will lose it.

Filed under: Reading

# 10 Dec 2007, 05:40PM: To Reread At Least Once A Year: "Cleaning My Room," by Paul Ford. And his "Until the Water Boils."

Filed under: Reading

# 07 Dec 2007, 09:06PM: Instant Comedy: While riding public transit or what have you, visibly reading a copy of The Prince imbues all your other actions and aspects with new weight. It's comic shorthand on the level of having a character buy an enema as part of some varied selection at the drugstore.

Filed under: Reading

# 20 Nov 2007, 05:46PM: Cornucopia: Headed to the comic book store to pick up MAD Magazine and found new trades of She-Hulk and Ex Machina, yay.

Filed under: Reading

# (1) 15 Nov 2007, 11:01PM: What Slash Taught Me About "Stephen Colbert": You might think that I began reading Stephen Colbert fan fiction because the writers' strike is keeping his show off the air.* But it was two weeks ago that I started seeking it out. I'd had two or three recent dreams where Colbert was trying to teach me something -- math, management skills, ethics. What did that mean? I turned to The Colbert Report fanfic to help my conscious mind understand the themes in The Colbert Report that my subconscious was chewing on.

For background: like other fans, I didn't watch Colbert's show when it started out. This, despite a very friendly and funny call from a Report staffer when I worked at Salon Premium, back when the Report was just starting in 2005. He asked for a free subscription, a perk Salon and probably most major media outlets give their colleagues. We joked about Adam Carolla's car-like name and I wished him luck. But I wasn't watching. I thought The Colbert Report would be a one-trick pony and rather boring until that White House Correspondents Dinner speech.

Then I started tuning in and didn't stop. The Daily Show is parody but The Colbert Report is satire, the thumbnail conventional wisdom goes. "What's happened to The Daily Show?" one asks as Colbert looks comparatively hotter. "The Secret Agenda of Stephen Colbert", one speculates as his show nails not just the forms but the underlying conceptual dysfunction of reigning ideologies.

But that's all stuff you can get from watching the show, or reading nonfiction commentary. The Daily Show/Colbert Report fanfic brings subtexts to the surface. Sometimes it's just porny fanservice slash, fulfilling Wally Holland's critique. Or HOT fanservice. But sometimes you get psychological meat.

Erin Ptah specifically aims in her fiction to humanize the superficially despicable character that Colbert plays. Ptah comments:

He's clueless in a way that is (usually) charming. He's well-intentioned. He craves attention and approval. He's fragile and plagued by self-doubt. He always tries to do his best. He has a streak of childish innocence.

The theme of attention-seeking and approval-seeking resonates with me, and I hadn't expected it. The real Stephen Colbert is the youngest of eleven children and lost his dad and two brothers when he was a child. He freely admits a huge attention-seeking drive, but he'll act silly on stage without fear of embarrassment. The Colbert persona is a tremendous narcissist and that may be the only urge of his that he isn't in denial about. The real Colbert is aware enough to declare how lucky he is in an interview with Larry King: "[My character has] got a tremendous ego. I get to pretend I don't."

Once I really start thinking about how Colbert constructed an attention-hungry persona that screens his private, attention-hungry self from exposure -- because being authentic 100% of the time may turn you grey (cf. Jon Stewart) -- I want to digress a lot. His mask reminds me of customer service habits that prevent burnout, and the doubly-indirected attention-seeking reminds me of Anna Fels's insights on attention as a necessary component of mastery. But you get my point. There's a lot here. Another pervasive lesson in the Colbert character is the undermining of authority's assurances. It's always Opposite Day, so his blessings and curses are inimical to real-life value. What Ptah calls well-intentioned cluelessness goes hand-in-hand with pretzel logic:

"Well, there you are!" Stephen replied, triumphantly. "Only a man who was petrified of finding out he was gay would avoid having sex with men!"

How more succinctly could we put a neocon's wiretapping rationalizations than in this Colbert Report ad slogan? "I'm looking over your shoulder, but only because I've got your back." Well-intentioned cluelessness all the way.

You see the character's innocence come through when his character breaks. The fanfiction, as a rule, either shows Stephen or "Stephen," and so doesn't explore the space in between; Ptah's "The Thing With Feathers" is an exception (explicit example with implicit discussion throughout).

The best discussion, then, is a fan video: "Don't Stop Me Now/Don't stop me/'cause I'm having a good time!" Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now" juxtaposed with three and a half minutes of Colbert breaking character. The character breaks are almost never outbreaks of seriousness when he's forcing jollity. It's his genuine pleasure breaking the serious mask.

And that's how you know he is having a good time. He wears the character lightly, breaking at least a little bit once an episode or more. It's great to see him smile for real! There's a lesson: the power of a genuine smile. And it makes you wonder how anyone could see those breaks and not recognize them, see the show and not know it's a parody.

Speaking of which, disturbing comments on a behind-the-scenes clip. People express their shock that it's an act. Liar! they cry. Or -- and I quote -- "HAHA! colbert exposed!there u go stupid liberals"

Amazing.

And as for the character always trying to do his best, and probably failing, he's not alone in that. For a fan fiction piece that explores this, I recommend Ptah's "Expecting" -- at the very least you should see the trailer.

So, if Colbert is showing up in my dreams as a teacher, what are my lessons? In some ways they're the same lessons I learned from sitcoms: be straightforward and honest to avoid drama. Low-probability embarrassments will happen, so get over it. Be kind to outsiders. But in sitcoms we learn to be kind and honest to others; Colbert is telling me to be kind and honest with myself.

* Leonard and I made muffins yesterday morning and I brought them to the Writers Guild picket line in midtown. Gawking report: John Oliver looked exhausted and a standup comic whose name I can't recall gave me a smile. Then, near Rockefeller Center, I saw paparazzi surrounding a car and asked a gawker who was in there. She finished snapping her cameraphone shot and turned to say triumphantly and definitively, "Celine Dion!"

Filed under: Comedy Reading

# (1) 13 Nov 2007, 10:50AM: Just Read And Recommended: Books on the inadvertent themes of the US public school culture and acclimating ourselves to otherness.

John Scalzi's Agent to the Stars, available for free online. A pleasant, fast-paced, and funny if sometimes jarring read. Hollywood agent Tom Stein gets tapped to introduce aliens to Earth.
Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus by Orson Scott Card. An imagination of how and why Columbus did what he did, and how our history might have been different. Card and Scalzi (at least in the book of his I've read) both love the "everyone lays their logic and advantages out on the table" conversations, which gets tiresome in a House, M.D. kind of way but does avoid the "everything's subtext" New Yorker-fiction problem. Also, in the New Yorker-style stories we often say that nothing happens, but really we're saying that there's internal character change that doesn't translate into change in their relationships or the external world. In Card and in Agent to the Stars, character change is muted compared to the changes they implement in the world, and it all happens quite fast -- partially because no one communicates nonverbally and communication signals never get interrupted by the beautiful noise of emotion or symbolism.
Schooled by Gordon Korman. Capricorn Anderson, at thirteen, lives on a commune with his grandmother. When she falls and breaks her hip, he has to go mainstream while she recovers, which means a tremendous culture clash at his new home and school. Less zany than the 1980s Korman -- instead of a troublemaker with a straight-man sidekick, Cap is just an earnest kid buffeted by amoral, well-meaning, or malicious strangers.
As in Jake, Reinvented, Korman's retelling of The Great Gatsby, he's interested in how student mobs inside schools treat their leaders and outsiders, and what switches their attitude towards a particular newcomer between adulation and scorn. (This is not to mention the actual mob psychology he examines in Son of the Mob and its sequel.) Both Korman's No More Dead Dogs and Schooled also feature stubborn truthtellers and alternate among their points of view and those of their peers and authority figures. Were Korman to take a darker turn he'd write Avi's Nothing But The Truth, the scary realistic docu-style drama about a kid who becomes a political football because of a classroom misunderstanding.
Among Schoolchildren by Tracy Kidder. Kidder does documentaries. This one studies a fifth-grade class in a Massachusetts industrial town over one school year. Moving, insightful, empathy-inducing, and sort of incomplete in the way good documentaries feel. You get to know the people and you know their lives are continuing, so you wish you could keep following them to know what happens. This is the Truman Show fallacy.

Filed under: Reading

# (3) 07 Nov 2007, 03:09AM: Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Making Out: Once upon a time, I watched that OK Go treadmill video once a day for a week because it cheered me so. I'm currently there with times Stephen Colbert has broken character, set to "Don't Stop Me Now" by Queen. Evidently "Don't Stop Me Now" is a popular montage tune on YouTube, mayhap inspired by that scene from Sean of the Dead.

In the comments, we see hordes of teenage girls noting that it's only n years till they can legally schtup Stephen Colbert. And indeed when we get to see Colbert's genuine smile it's quite winning. And this video is three and a half minutes of just those endearing moments, so of course it's cracktastic and attracts those gals. Maybe there are fanboys among the SQUEE! contingent too, but in their Twitter-length comments they'd have to justify why Colbert would divorce his wife AND TURN GAY for them at their 18th birthdays, and that takes a little longer than 140 characters.

The vid does not drive me to YouTube-comment-posting levels of lust; nonetheless, I enjoy The Colbert Report quite a bit. Certain episodes ("American Pop Culture: It's Crumbelievable" and the Decemberists shred-off) I've watched several times, and I maintain that "The Word" is changing how people understand Powerpoint. But I did not seek out the literary criticism, fan homages, fan music videos (aww), and fiction about Colbert written by amateurs until a few days ago. My reasons and findings: forthcoming.

If you don't know about slash and other fan fiction variants, or even if you do, there's no better intro than essays by Teresa Nielsen Hayden (whom I still haven't met!), such as: "Fanfic": force of nature; Squick and squee; Namarie Sue; and finally Punditslash. There is also a relevant xkcd cartoon in which the critical impulse turns into the creative impulse in four panels.

In case you think all slash is wrong, let me introduce you to the Very Wrong Slash community on LiveJournal. But what makes slash "wrong"? In the immortal Arrested Development distinction of "hot wrong" vs. "regular wrong," slash is only regular wrong if the author can't make her borrowed characters' actions believable. And it's easier to write fiction that's hot wrong using borrowed characters, because subversive and hot is like metahumor -- it works best when it's subverting something you have always taken for granted, not just taking a newly introduced idea one step further. And that varies by reader, like any taste or kink.

Example: I found this explicitly sexual Goofus & Gallant slash a little unbelievable, and it didn't overturn my mental furniture. In contrast, the moment I saw the name "Alton Brown" I said "Oh my God" aloud.

Alton grasped the edges of the counter, then moved his left hand along as if looking for something. He pressed a hidden button under the lip of the counter, and a shallow drawer concealed above the other drawers popped out. In it were .... could it be? Mike stopped [redacted] for a moment in sheer astonishment. Labeled in Alton's neat handwriting were half-a-dozen small screwtop jars: chocolate-cayenne, raspberry coulis, pineapple-mint, unflavored, cinnamon-clove, ginger-mango. There was also a stash of gloves and a beautifully polished marble french rolling pin, the kind that tapers. Alton cleared his throat. "Um, I've never liked the feel of the glycerin-based lubes, so I infuse my own silicone lube. I was.... I was hoping you'd like....." His voice tapered off, but this time it wasn't uncertainty, or ONLY uncertainty. It was invitation.

See, that helps you calibrate your standards for wrongness. Test yourself on this premise: alternate universe slash where Sarah Vowell, the casts of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, Anderson Cooper, Keith Olbermann, and Tina Fey attend a high school where Jerry Seinfeld and Will Ferrell teach. Or crossover Colbert Report-Harry Potter fanfic (no sex, mind) where the Stephen Colbert persona is the new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor. Might it be hot-wrong in some nonsexual sense of the word "hot"? It's certainly funny.

Author's Note: I'm not sure if this counts as a fanfic, a parody of a fanfic, a fanfic of a parody, or all of the above. Whatever it is, I just had to write it.

Slash folks sometimes argue over which pair of characters belongs in a couple -- which is the One True Pairing? Troi/Riker or Troi/Worf? Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, or Stephen Colbert and Tad, his building manager? (Self-conscious Mahabharata slash could have some fun defining Draupadi's OTP.) What pair feels right?

But that feeling of OTP rightness fits, in good slash, with the elegant subversion that makes it pleasurably wrong. Erin Ptah's wonderful and Pratchett-influenced "The Thing With Feathers" is an example. The way she borrows Colbert and Stewart, they belong together -- yet she rearranges the reader's universe, disorienting and reorienting my experience of The Colbert Report.

Some people write RPS, or Real Person Slash, about celebrities. I find this more icky because now the writer is objectifying a real person. The layered nature of reality on The Colbert Report allows writers to play with RPS and Fake Person Slash in the same story, so some FPS lands in the RPS community and it gets weird. Weirder, anyhow. And that's as close as I come to the reflexive anti-fanfic stance I've seen in a few folks: Fan fiction is cheating, since you're not making up the characters or their universe. And you're stealing someone else's work, and you shouldn't publish it, and probably it's stupid for you even to be writing it, much less reading it.

It makes me happy to read good fiction, fan or pro. And it's edifying, although what I've learned about The Colbert Report will be in a future post. But is all of fanfic stealing, cheating, regular wrong?

Nope. Maybe it's my generation and the affordances of technology, including how we determine what is important or relevant. But smarter theorists than I, not least The Presidents of the United States of America, have long noted that all work is at least a little derivative. We emulate role models, we pass along memes, and we share. OK Go borrowed most of those treadmills.

Filed under: Comedy Reading

# (1) 08 Oct 2007, 11:45AM: I'm Disappointed In...: Colson Whitehead and Justin Lin. I'd enjoyed John Henry Days and Better Luck Tomorrow, so I eagerly dove into Whitehead's new book, Apex Hides the Hurt, and Lin's new film, the mockumentary "Finishing The Game". "Your single likeliest choice, statistically speaking, is a book by an author whose other works you've read and enjoyed, because you know it's a good bet that you'll enjoy this one too." That's what I'm saying, Teresa Nielsen Hayden! For example, I'm eager to read anything that Gordon Korman puts out: adventure serials, standalone zany-school-antic tales, reworkings of The Great Gatsby (really!), anything. And I basically feel the same about Neal Stephenson, Leonard, Michael Lewis, and Tracy Kidder.

But Apex was just a dim reflection of John Henry Days, complete with unnamed city slicker narrator ambiguously helping a country town trying to reinvent itself. It wasn't as funny, moving, deep, incisive, or anything. It was shorter, though.

And Finishing The Game had a great trailer, but it spread attention over too many characters, slowed its pace too many times, lost the funny, and completely broke tone in the last ten minutes. It did make me want to see This Is Spinal Tap again, though.

A guy in the credits: Sergei Sorokin, probably this guy. The name made me think of what The West Wing would be like if Aaron Sorkin had been writing within Soviet Russia. Martin Sheen is...Leonid Brezhnev!

Random thought from today's handball-playing with Leonard: Lydia the DRM'd Lady. Chastity belts are DRM.

Filed under: Reading

# (2) 25 Sep 2007, 09:01PM: Notes From Classes: One of my classes has me reading The World Is Flat by Thomas "Airmiles" Friedman. I can skim it quickly because Friedman isn't talking to me, he's talking to the average American (specifically a non-techie whose parents were born in the US). Were I taking notes, they would read:

Chapter 1: Crap I already know
Chapter 2: Crap I already know
Chapter 3: Crap I already know
....

The professor has us reading it for the anecdotes, especially so he can brag/give details about the ones where he was involved. I skim fast enough to get them, but wince at the errors, e.g., p. 95, "BitTorrent is a website..." Leonard noticed one:

"Wow, CollabNet was founded in 2004?!" [p. 112]
"Did you know that for 4 years you worked for a nonexistent company?"
"It felt like it."

Cheap shots give the best ROI! Anyway.

In the storytelling workshop I took this last weekend, Mike Daisey (the teacher) made an interesting point. We tell stories to ourselves and each other all the time, to make sense of things. And when we use stories to work through our issues, to process numinous or terrible memories, certain tactics help. We explain, we repeat, we lick our wounds, we figure out what symbolizes what, we explicitly create morals and lessons. But irreducible mystery, lessons left ambiguous and unsaid, make for better art. The way you tell an artistic story requires that you leave undone things you'd do when telling a therapeutic story.

I can see this. But this means that there are certain tendencies in the artist -- as Elisa DeCarlo put it, you have to keep your guard down internally and externally -- that don't bode well for my concept of mental health. The artist has to stay intimate with disturbing thoughts, and avoid explaining away their power.

Flea and Leonard (in "Mud") are only two of the artists who have lamented that it's hard to create art while content. And this reminds me of other hypotheses floating around my brain, like a similar hypothesis about the cognitive habits that make good programmers and bad friends/coworkers/citizens, or the old chestnut about the incompatibility between ambition and contentment.

So: if you have a choice, what do you choose? And if you don't have a choice in how you've been built, then how do you adjust and learn to live in your own skin?

Filed under: Reading

# (2) 15 Sep 2007, 01:42AM: "How can I provide for this right thing to be always done?": I've had some recent success in using spam as a source for recommendations, but more useful by far were Crooked Timber and Ask Metafilter. Speaking of CT, title ideas for your blog posts and a game theory question of sorts.

Thanks to "foobario"'s Ask Metafilter recommendation, I'm currently reading the Project Gutenberg text of Florence Nightingale's On Nursing and it's tremendous. This post's title comes from it. I thought it would be like Martha Ballard's diary, but instead it has a lot in common with Spolsky or my business-ish textbooks. Nightingale focuses on executive energy, attention, and putting the proper processes into place such that patients (employees) have the resources and quiet they need to get better (do their work). Once you get to a certain administrative level, instead of solving problems ad hoc you have to think strategically.

But it's still fun to solve a good puzzle, or to hear a good problem-solution story.

On New Year's Day, 2002, I was working on Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach -- Adam P., that's the exercise I mentioned at lunch the other day. I met Zack Weinberg on January 2nd, when we were both living in Berkeley.

Now we're living on opposite coasts. I go to Columbia, where Zack did his undergrad. He lives in/near San Diego, where my sister did hers. OK, maybe that's too forced.

Zack criticized The Atlantic, at least the 2003-era Atlantic Monthly. I've been subscribing for at least a year since I find it good for long trips, so Zack, I'd be very interested in hearing what it was you found unimpressive. I try not to pay too much attention to Hitchens or Flanagan, but Fallows and Bowden seem solid. Am I wrong?

And it's light enough for good not-class reading, a.k.a. cardio-machine reading. Elliptical, stationary bike -- the machines in the Columbia gym have little perches just big enough for paperbacks or magazines, but there's really no way I can take notes during the experience. Some people have beach novels; I have Colson Whitehead's fun and moving John Henry Days and Atlantics from the past ten months. And once I've finished the mag, I can leave it in the mag-swap slots on the wall under the clock, next to the Columbia Spectators and Entertainment Weekly that people bring in. ("So that's what Chuck's about!")

Speaking of Fallows -- James Fallows, former Microsoft employee, current China correspondent -- he had an interesting article in the July/August issue: "China Makes, the World Takes." I can't glibly agree with the cover headline, "Why China's Rise Is Good For Us." Fallows does what the business folks would call a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) for the economic relationship between China and the US.

Right now, it's the half-automated processes, like snapping a part onto an electric toothbrush, where Chinese manufacturing excels. At the beginning (design, branding) and end (retail and service) of a product cycle, IP-heavy firms based in first-world countries do great. Manufacturing is a cost center; design and retail are revenue centers. It's classic division of labor to offshore the parts of your business where you have no competitive advantage, can't add value for the customer, and can't make profit for yourself.

That's how US businesses are thinking strategically. And Chinese manufacturers, optimized for cheap prototyping and quick turnaround (hmmm), can do quite well partnering with such firms. But the Chinese government is thinking strategically at a higher level of abstraction. How can China become a revenue center? How can China add value? By building or enticing the institutions that grow intelligent, cosmopolitan executives and entrepreneurs. So the government, being in charge, provides that these things will be done. Schools, Microsoft design labs, whatever you could imagine the frickin' communist dictatorship of the PRC coercing or encouraging. China's not content with being China; China wants to be India too.

Filed under: Work:Management and Leadership Reading

# 10 Sep 2007, 02:28PM: Reviews: Surprisingly unappealing: The Good Husband of Zebra Drive. Sort of predictable.

Surprisingly rewarding: Psych, Harvard Business Essentials: Strategy.

Filed under: Reading

# 03 Aug 2007, 07:43AM: Ogden Nash = Hen Gonads: Turns out that my pal Hal just read the diabolical poetry/playwriting parody The Holy Tango of Literature, which includes some of my favorite Modern Humorist bits. I loved "I WILL ALARM ISLAMIC OWLS" when I read it a zillion years ago; just now I read "KIN RIP PHALLI" and nearly woke Leonard up with laughter.

Anyway, I just realized that author Francis Heaney is the Francis I know, the sweetiepie of Rose White, and that I've had multiple meals/meetings with them since moving to NYC (they're friends with the EFF crowd we knew in SF). Wow! And Holy Tango is under a Creative Commons license.

In other poetry news: Jon Carroll alerts me to funny Billy Collins poetry criteria.

Filed under: Reading

# 13 Jul 2007, 03:17PM: Here We Go: In this week's MC Masala column, Leonard talks about making pesto, and I talk about the Indian tulsi plant.

Leonard used the garden as a trick to get himself to exercise. His hours of plantings, weedings, waterings and harvests yielded about five meals' worth of food. But he still remembers sharing those green beans with our neighbors. And that yard went from dead gray dirt, where not even weeds grew, to a beautiful green/brown profusion.
My mom gardened everywhere she lived, too. I remember the flowers best. All our houses smelled of jasmine -- Leonard included a jasmine vine in our backyard to make me happy. But she always made sure to grow one herb: Tulsi, or 'holy basil.' We ate it and we used it in Hindu ceremonies. No wonder I latched onto its cousin, the sweet basil that we usually mean when we say 'basil.'

I finished Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle. As always, some nice metaphors and insights, but I didn't get enough jaw-dropping moments out of the thing, and it got to the point where any clump of description longer than a few sentences tripped me up. Still: an awesome achievement, and the dialogue where Daniel Waterhouse meets Mr. Orney is deadly hilarious. Also, I recently read Isaac Asimov's crazy Murder at the ABA. Harlan Ellison didn't sue for libel?! And An American's Guide to Doing Business in China: Negotiating Contracts And Agreements; Understanding Culture And Customs; Marketing Products And Services by Mike Saxon is fascinating, especially in the vivid, deep, broad stereotypes of China and the Chinese.

I'm off for two weeks for my own exercise and green/brown profusion. Via WWOOF, I'll be working on an organic farm a ways northwest of here. Mostly tending tomatoes, I believe. I got a sun hat and some shreddable shorts and jeans at the thrift store. I leave tomorrow. If my schemes work out I'll still get a copy of the seventh Harry Potter book the day it comes out and read it before spoilers get to me. Also if my schemes work out my first time ever doing agricultural work will not maim or kill me.

Filed under: Reading Work

# 24 Jun 2007, 11:19AM: Off to MoCCA: Today I visit the 2007 MoCCA Art Festival. Comics to get, or get autographed, include:

Ryan North's stuff
Raina Telgemeier's stuff
Alison Bechdel's stuff
Action Philosophers!
David Malki!'s stuff
Nothing Better
And stuff I haven't heard of yet that will empty my wallet

Filed under: Reading

# 19 Jun 2007, 01:05PM: Notes On Attention And Shyness: An inadequate excerpt from Sarah Brown of Cringe, on hopes laid bare in a teenager's diary:

You want someone you like to come into your room and ask you if you've read all those books and which was your favorite and who is this in this photo and when was it taken, blah blah blah, you want that tractor beam of attention, that teenage feeling.

I'm reading "MU Tales", an addictive serialized novel about a shy girl starting college, and "Nothing Better", an addictive webcomic about a shy girl starting college and they're helping me understand what it's like to be pathologically shy.

But I'm also thinking about the other side of that coin: show-offiness. What's the basis for our scorn of attention-seeking? If it's about selfishness, does it inevitably turn into "Harrison Bergeron"? Is it a collective effort to treat conversations as ends in themselves instead of a means to an end? From The Big Kahuna:

It doesn't matter whether you're selling Jesus or Buddha or civil rights or "How to Make Money in Real Estate With No Money Down." That doesn't make you a human being; it makes you a marketing rep. If you want to talk to somebody honestly, as a human being, ask him about his kids. Find out what his dreams are - just to find out, for no other reason. Because as soon as you lay your hands on a conversation to steer it, it's not a conversation anymore; it's a pitch. And you're not a human being; you're a marketing rep.

These quotes, links, and thoughts underly my upcoming column on attention-seeking and modesty; that'll be this coming Sunday.

Filed under: Reading

# (2) 04 Jun 2007, 12:42PM: MC Masala, and Le Weekend: A May 20th column on coffee rituals (citing Neal Stephenson) and a nice little column from yesterday, on my sister's graduation, dancing, food, and an old album.

It could be that the main reason I play Dungeons & Dragons is so that I can tell people at work, "At D&D yesterday we destroyed an undead dragon skeleton," and make them laugh.

We did indeed destroy an undead skeletal dragon. My fifth-level thief with charisma, constitution, and intelligence below ten was not the deciding force in the battle (rather an understatement). I think I'll create a new character soon, perhaps a fighter or a magic user, since our adventures are rather confrontation-intensive. We do travel a lot...Ranger? I'll also need to find an in-story explanation for how s/he runs into our party. This requires more thought.

Also this weekend: got my column off early (YES!) and finished The Confusion. Now, The System of the World, which starts off promisingly, but I did have to flip ahead many pages to find any glimpse of the character whose dramatic pledge we see in the last paragraph of The Confusion. Wrap it all up with a bow, Stephenson! I have faith.

It was way easier to understand The Confusion than to understand The Quicksilver, partly because the middle book had more action (Quicksilver had to set the foundation (ha ha mercury is a horrible foundation)), and partly because I actually read it straight through with no breaks longer than a few days. I read Anna Karenina in a few hours every afternoon one high school summer -- this is also the best way to read The Baroque Cycle.

Filed under: Reading

# 16 May 2007, 03:04PM: Please Turn To The Next Book When You Hear This Chime: I've finished Quicksilver and gone straight into The Confusion. Boy, I'd appreciate that now-defunct Baroque Cycle wiki right about now. As an alternative I would also accept a decent tenth-grade World History course that, as promised, covered Europe up to the present day, instead of the version I got that ended substantive instruction around 1600.

Leonard is reading a biography of Samuel Pepys, so both of us had to seek out relevant primers. Were we really dedicated we'd use a more scrupulous source than Stephenson + Wikipedia to grok European history. "Yes, the moral decay of the kids these days, it's horrible." Leonard's historian sister Rachel is probably shaking her head in shame right now.

Anyway, the 900-page Quicksilver is not as imposing as I'd feared. The intellectual bits don't melt my brain; the science and math we now get in high school, and I've read enough philosophy to follow the arguments easily.

However, keeping track of the exposition gets formidable. The reader has to keep a lot of data readily accessible in her head, so I don't recommend that you read it as I did (read 100 pages, six-month hiatus, start again and read 250 pages, four-month hiatus, try to continue from bookmark and eventually backtrack 50 pages). For example, about 50 pages from the end, two characters allude to something that happened eleven years prior, and I couldn't figure out whether Stephenson had mentioned it (and I'd forgotten) or he was being coy. The surfeit of aristocrats leads to the same problem I had in reading Tolstoy: remembering that "Peter Shale" and "Count Vlogistaire" and "Rocko" are the same person. I didn't see the Dramatis Personae relational database till the end of the volume.

I realize that I sound whiny, but I liked Quicksilver; today I blarghed about it and Stephenson in general for about ten minutes at Michael. Stephenson knows how to make me laugh and ooh and turn the page. I'll quote my upcoming column on amateur anthropology:

On the level of plot and setting, it's about seventeenth-century Europe, political intrigues, scientific discoveries, banter in coffeehouses, and the movements of markets. But it's also about the false distinction between people of thought and people of action -- to paraphrase Einstein, thought without action is lame and action without thought is blind. And it's also a giant meditation on a theme that Stephenson can't stop thinking about: what it takes to "condense fact from the vapor of nuance", to quote his earlier book "Snow Crash."

For future reference, once I've finished the series: Andrew Leonard's Salon reviews of Book 1, Book 2, and Book 3. I think Andrew Leonard really gets Stephenson, so let's see if I'm (and he's) right.

Filed under: Reading

# 08 May 2007, 08:10AM: Tiny Updates: The Elephantmen comic is okay.

My mom is visiting us. Last night we watched Altman's The Company. I fell asleep. Is there a plot in there? I've read a couple of reviews now and evidently I missed the Altmanesque point. But we liked Gosford Park so much!

I'm reading Quicksilver again, after dropping it in favor of schoolwork a few months ago. I had to backtrack several pages to remember all the moving parts but I'm back in it. I'm even reading it on the subway, which is kind of ridiculous since it's a thousand-page hardback.

Filed under: Reading

# 05 May 2007, 10:26AM: Free Comic Book Day: Via BoogaBooga: Salon's guide to the samples you can grab on Free Comic Book Day (which is today). The Fantagraphics Unseen Peanuts collection looks the coolest.

As long as I'm hawking comics, I may as well put down for posterity the stuff I've bought. I mostly got these at Midtown Comics at Times Square, with a smattering from Forbidden Planet NYC, Comic Relief on Shattuck (formerly on University) in Berkeley, and Comic Outpost (warning: music starts playing if you click that link) on Ocean Avenue in San Francisco.

Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan. If you don't count the Amar Chitra Katha and four or five random superhero or PSA comics I read when I was a kid, Y was my intro funnybook. I believe Sheerly Avni is to blame. Volume 9 of the anthologized trade paperbacks comes out next week -- Wednesday, specifically. It will probably sell out, if my experience is any guide. It collects issues #49-53, and since there will be a total of 60 issues, that means there's only one collection to go, maybe two. I like knowing that reading Y is not an open-ended commitment.
Ex Machina, also by Vaughan. Recommended even by people who aren't me.
Runaways by Vaughan. Notice a trend?
The Escapists six-issue limited series by Vaughan, and the third Michael Chabon Presents: The Amazing Adventures of The Escapist volume, which contains an Escapist story by Vaughan
Doctor Strange: The Oath, issue 1 of 5, by Vaughan - I should get the rest of these.
Pride of Baghdad, a standalone graphic novel by Vaughan
Fables volumes 1-3. Hal at Midtown recommended the series, but it got boring so I didn't finish the third collection, but maybe I'll try again.
The 9/11 Report graphic adaptation (terrific)
Action Philosophers volumes 1 and 2, as well as some single issues. So awesome.
She-Hulk (the hilarious 2000-era reboot), volumes 1-4. Collecting this gets confusing because of changing series names and issue renumbering. Hey, at least I'm not trying to keep up with Marvel's Civil War.
Telgemeier's two Baby-Sitters Club graphic novels
DC Universe: The Stories of Alan Moore, including the legendary Batman story The Killing Joke. Highly recommended.
Superman: Red Son (great)
Batman: Detective 27 (bleh)
Alan Moore: Top Ten, volume 1. Not compelling enough to keep reading.
"What Were They Thinking?" from Boom!; Leonard and I love this series.
Three Tales from the Public Domain issues from the possibly defunct Baaar-Sum Comics. Also a Leonard favorite.
Cthulhu stuff from Boom! for Leonard. He's the judge of that.
Issues of Ambush Bug and Son of Ambush Bug - also for Leonard.
A few issues of The Nightly News by Jonathan Hickman - basically Chomsky meets Tufte.
The first two issues of New Universal by Warren Ellis and Salvador Larroca. Maybe I should just read Transmetropolitan like everybody recommends before going further with this admittedly entertaining story, since New Universal looks pretty epic and therefore time-consuming.
Some of the new Indian Virgin comics, e.g., Sadhu issues 1 and 2. Boring, if pretty.
Marvel's Spiderman: India, volume 1. Blah.
Dr. DeBunko: Debunker of the Supernatural, issue #1, by Chris Wisnia, from Salt-Peter Press. Very funny.
Elephantmen issues 1-3, which I got because one had Ganesha on the cover, and which I have not actually read. I'll remedy that this weekend.

I'll do a different list sometime for the webcomic collections. And I've read some classics (most noticeably Watchmen and some great Batman tales) that aren't on this list because I borrowed them. Given that, wow, this was a longer list than I'd expected to write. No wonder Midtown Comics is still in business.

Today's recommendation: Find your local participating comics store, get the Peanuts sampler, and buy the first volume of Ex Machina, an issue of Action Philosophers or What Were They Thinking?, or the paperback DC Universe: The Stories of Alan Moore. Unless you already have comics predilections, in which case you should comment on this entry or write your own blog post with recommendations and arguments. (Zed, thank you for She-Hulk -- now give me more!)

Filed under: Reading

# 26 Apr 2007, 01:28AM: Horcrucio!: The PDF of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows that's floating around is in fact Melinda Leo's very nice "The Seventh Horcrux". Markers: more sex and profanity and overall emphasis on personal relationships than in HP1-6. And something ineffable. Rowling is very concrete. Lots of proper nouns.

Filed under: Reading

# (3) 17 Apr 2007, 10:34AM: Riddle Me This: I work in a software firm. I am the only person there, except the office manager, who is not a born-and-bred computer geek. They play video games all the time. Yet I'm the only one who regularly walks in reading comic books, and who makes Star Trek references that no one understands at the lunch table. Worst....stereotype....ever.

Note on my objective weirdness: I've also been bringing in MAD Magazine to put next to Linux Journal for bathroom reading.

Filed under: Reading Work

# (1) 11 Apr 2007, 10:11AM: "Stephen watched the samosa being smothered.": I have posted over 160 links, without meaning to accumulate such a repository, to the del.icio.us account that Leonard and I share. Here's something that might not get posted there: the Colbert/Stewart slash that made me think Colbert/Stewart slash was awesome. I've been thinking JS/SC is the One True Pairing; what's all this Colbert/Olbermann nonsense? More evidence of OTP status from SilentAuror.

I assume people who regularly read and write slash about real-life celebrities, especially ones they admire, have some well-articulated set of ethics about it -- I'd appreciate knowing about it.

Filed under: Comedy Reading

# 01 Apr 2007, 10:22AM: Ironically, I Spent Longer Writing This Than I Meant To: So Adam Parrish and I have different readings of a recent essaylet by Aaron Swartz. Look, I've never read any of this Steven Johnson stuff, so I can't speak to Swartz's* criticism there. But when he says "need to stop pretending that this is automatically a good thing," I think it's clear he's not saying "Steven Johnson," but "we as net mavens," and only after that calls Johnson and Doctorow apologists for shorter=better. He probably includes his previous self in that group.

Also: It's not like Swartz's completely dismissed/dismissing entertainment that contains farts (Arrested Development, The Daily Show, what have you). The gibe about "pictures of cats with poor spelling on them" is not about either cat pictures or misspellings, Adam -- it's about that particular leetspeek/catpic subgenre of internet humor, although I will concede that that sentence is the third- or fourth-weakest sentence in the essaylet.**

As I see it, Doctorow's piece says to writers, "people will read works on the screen if they fit the affordances of the screen and continuous partial attention; if you want people to read the kind of thing that doesn't, give them enough onscreen for them to like it and decide to move to the appropriate medium." Swartz is saying to technologists: "tech right now is making it easier to come down with Dorito Syndrome, and the trend is only increasing, and we should stop it." Although I am not currently in a position to act on Swartz's suggestions, I do read Reddit, so I see where he's coming from and find the gist of his argument quite plausible.

Adam, on the other hand, you're in a prestigious tech/creativity Master's program, so maybe you hear all the time about new technologies that create new affordances for enjoying long-form content and community. What am I missing?

* (I feel weird calling him "Swartz," since he's slept in my living room, but house style tells me to refer to people by their last names while discussing their ideas.)

**First: "Similarly, no one (Doctorow included, I suspect), actually prefers blog posts to novels, it's just that people tend to have more short chunks of time to read blog posts than they do long chunks of time to read novels." I think there are certainly people who prefer blog posts to novels, especially (and this feeds into Swartz's fear) if they've never exercised their capacity to gain enjoyment from longer works.
Second: "Doctorow's conclusion? Blogs are just better." I think that's too broad a reading.

Filed under: Reading

# 31 Mar 2007, 11:39PM: The Three Skills of Adulthood: Now, I foist upon you an extended excerpt from Rachel Chalmers's "I follow my nose":

...It occurs to me that all the really important decisions of my life - who to marry, where to work, when to sprog - were made on the basis of my gut. I think there are three sets of skills necessary to modern adulthood. The first is mastering administrivia; taxes, visas, passports, job applications, budgets, credit card bills, doctor's appointments, admission forms, financial aid. A second and quite closely related skill-set concerns your performance. These skills involve figuring out what's expected of you and serving it up, ideally with a twist that no one would have thought of but you. Bedrock director Jimmy Fay summed it up as "Say your lines and hit your marks." Haim Ginott's variation is my oft-cited parenting mantra: "Don't just do something; stand there."
Gut feelings fall into a third, seldom-used group of skills. For me, the only way not to get paralysed by the sheer earth-shatteringness of big decisions is to make them behind my own back, as it were, or in some other form of massive denial. Jeremy and I have long described our relationship as "the one night stand that went horribly wrong." We pretended we were only moving to California for a year or two....

Filed under: Reading

# (4) 30 Mar 2007, 11:01AM: The Horror! (x2): Morning work discussion included proposing which films, and which films' special effects, still hold up on contemporary viewing. Suggested watersheds in special effects: Star Wars, Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, The Matrix. Candidates without a broad consensus: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Jaws, The Blair Witch Project, Toy Story. I found Blair Witch quite frightening while a colleague found it amusing; I noted that a work of horror, as in porn, either pushes your specific buttons or it doesn't.

I don't generally read or watch horror, for fear of nightmares. I did pick up High Cotton: Selected Stories of Joe R. Lansdale at Borderlands once when a bookshop employee suggested it as a gateway drug to horror. I appreciated it, but it didn't expand my comfort zone. I still can't trust the squick to stay in its little box, going away when I close the book. I fear that it will attack again when I'm asleep, defenseless.

Yesterday I saw a trailer for a new horror film called Vacancy. Intellectually, I can decompose the premises, viewpoint and structure of the movie. It reminds me of Blair Witch and The Truman Show, and of what I've heard of Saw and Hostel. Viscerally, I can tell that Vacancy would actually push my buttons and scare me -- even the trailer is memorably scary. At least, it pushes my specific buttons.

Before "boundaries" became an in-vogue pop-psych word, I had already decided that I wasn't going to watch or read horror because it might make me uncomfortable, especially in ways I couldn't control. But every once in a while I peek over the edge. Blair Witch, Lansdale, an afternoon in the Pegasus bookstore at Durant and Shattuck reading Carrie.

I guess I'm trying to figure out what people get out of horror. Is it a thrill ride? Is it a reminder of the nearness of oblivion or hell, like "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (Slacktivist name-check) or Camus? Is it catharsis or feeding for bloodlust?

Filed under: Reading

# 30 Mar 2007, 11:01AM: QOTD: In a discussion about She-Hulk #1 this morning: "Robert's Rules of Order are not a suicide pact." -Leonard.

Thanks for the recommendation, Zed.

Filed under: Comedy Reading

# (3) 28 Mar 2007, 07:54AM: "Leonard's Still Asleep" Digest: Leonard is still asleep, so I can't draw his attention to these:

A groan-inducing pun about Ender's Game.
Sadly, the only way to get Seth to write a blog entry is to make an error in modifying a Latin-cum-English phrase. For all I know he's been gritting his teeth over "Cogito, Ergo Sumana" for ages.
"The algorithms of Matt Cutts!"
Andrew and Claudia, I miss you.
From the outside, I can imagine the American habit of supporting political arguments by making reference to "The Founders" seems bizarre, if not necrophilic. A rational interpretation of this belief is that Americans think these million-year-old dudes in powdered wigs were some kind of prophets, or supermen, capable of pulling eternal truths - inaccessable to mere mortals - from the ether, and distilling them into perfect words to endure for all time. The Bill of Rights as the new Ten Commandments, or something like that.
And you'll like the kicker, Leonard.
NSFW (unless you, like Leonard, work from home) Chris Rock bit on prescription and illegal drugs.
Likable guy? "Oh, far from it. No one likes me. Will you be my friend?"

Filed under: Reading

# 25 Feb 2007, 01:35PM: Did You Mean: I'm reading Roy Porter's book The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity for my class on emerging technologies. My group is studying the introduction of digital patient records, so I'm reading the Porter to give us a historical context for how medical institutions got more bureaucratic, and how processes and institutions changed once we needed/started using charts in the first place.

It's a terrific book, really comprehensive and littered with great anecdotes and quotes, but among the drier texts I've read recently. The past few times I've sat down to read it at length, I've reliably gone 50-75 pages, then conked out. Either I have tremendous sleep deprivation or I'm bored, which means I'm boring (Frances's dictum, "Only boring people are bored").

Yesterday I saw a pattern and exclaimed about it to Leonard. There's some received wisdom that everyone believes because it's traditional, and then someone new comes along and sees with new eyes and makes a new model for how the body works, and there's a flurry of new experimentation and theorizing, and then that model calcifies and becomes the new received wisdom for a few hundred years until the next experimenters come along.

Leonard reminded me that I had basically just reiterated the thesis of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Oh yeah. I read that book, didn't I? Ten years ago.

It's a good thing that we don't have little demons following us around all the time, humbling us with prior art every time we think we've thought up something original. Well, not good for innovation, but good for my personal ego. As Leonard commented (unrelatedly) yesterday, "I never know what sentence that I say is going to throw you into an existential crisis."

Filed under: Reading

# 24 Feb 2007, 10:25AM: Concentration: One of the things I like best about Hugo Schwyzer's blog is that he regularly posts poetry, such as W.H. Auden's "A Walk After Dark." Poetry requires the most concentration of anything that comes into my RSS aggregator, and so reading it gets me closer to understanding my colleagues who read and understand code all day.

Filed under: Reading

# 16 Feb 2007, 05:30PM: Phillip Robertson: I used to work at Salon, which means that I got to meet a lot of writers and editors. I had lunch with Cary Tennis a few times, hung out fairly regularly with Page Rockwell and Farhad Manjoo and Katharine Mieszkowski, etc. But the most alien experience was talking with Phillip Robertson.

He's a war correspondent. He didn't seem like an adrenaline junkie when I had lunch with him once or twice. At times I tried to say things like "Stay safe" or "Have you considered not going?" because, as much as I value his reportage, I kind of know him now, so I also value his life and limb.

He was on the ground in Iraq for the turn there from bad to worse. The Salon archives of his stuff comprise half the most memorable work Salon published while I was there. Substantial reading for the weekend.

Filed under: Reading

# 08 Feb 2007, 09:12AM: Minimalism: Just got off the column for this Sunday. Something I had to leave out: Mike Daisey wrote about his time at Amazon in his book 21 Dog Years (based on his monologue) and talked about dot-coms and minimalism in architecture for a paragraph.

I don't know what it is about tech companies and exposed ductwork -- they love the stuff. It's as though the building's guts reflect an inner anxiety writ large, so that at any point in the day any of us can look up at the exposed piping and exclaim, "We're so busy, look how hard we're working...oh God, please, we're almost profitable, we're working so hard that we don't have time to cover up these ducts! They had to be exposed! That's how dedicated we are!"

Filed under: Comedy Reading Work

# (1) 30 Jan 2007, 11:10AM: Historiography: From The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity, by Roy Porter:

Writing this book has not only made me more aware than usual of my own ignorance; it has brought home the collective and largely irremediable ignorance of historians about the medical history of mankind. Perhaps the most celebrated physician ever is Hippocrates yet we know literally nothing about him. Neither do we know anything concrete about most of the medical encounters there have ever been. The historical record is like the night sky: we see a few stars and group them into mythic constellations. But what is chiefly visible is the darkness.

Filed under: Reading

# (1) 24 Jan 2007, 02:54PM: Why Booze Is Safer Than Heroin But More Dangerous Than MDMA: "The Toxicity of Recreational Drugs" by Robert S. Gable explains: for any given drug, there's a dose that's usually lethal, and there's a dose that usually produces a high. How different these doses are, i.e., how much you have to mess up on your dosage to get into trouble, is a good gauge for how toxic the drug is. Booze is actually really bad by this measure; just ten times the effective dose is often a lethal dose. The DARE program I went through decades back talked a lot about the pot/booze/tobacco gateway-drug triumvirate without ever explicitly saying, "Thanks to historical contingency, two of these are legal but restricted, and one is THE DEVIL WEED." The more I find out about the three, the less I like the "one of these things is not like the other" aspect.

Alcohol thus ranks at the dangerous end of the toxicity spectrum.... Indeed, if alcohol were a newly formulated beverage, its high toxicity and addiction potential would surely prevent it from being marketed as a food or drug.

Check the chart. So the tiny 5:1 ratio of Median Lethal Dose to Median Effective Dose is one reason why heroin users are at such risk of dying by OD. And the psilocybin, LSD, and marijuana ratios are much safer:

The least physiologically toxic substances, those requiring 100 to 1,000 times the effective dose to cause death, include psilocybin mushrooms and marijuana, when ingested. I've found no published cases in the English language that document deaths from smoked marijuana, so the actual lethal dose is a mystery. My surmise is that smoking marijuana is more risky than eating it but still safer than getting drunk.

Probably the funniest phrase in the American Scientist article: a section header entitled "Other Ways to Invite Death."

Filed under: Reading

# 09 Jan 2007, 10:59PM: Discoveries: I've used the phrase "the cult of authenticity" many times; I didn't realize that I didn't make it up. Vikram Chandra did, in a long and interesting piece from seven years ago in the Boston Review.

Whatever you do felicitously will be Indian. It cannot be otherwise. If Bholenath speaks to you, put him in your painting, or your story. The inevitable fact that some reader in New Jersey will find Bholenath's tiger skin and matted hair "exotic" is wholly irrelevant. To be self-consciously anti-exotic is also to be trapped, to be censored. Be free.

Also, Peter Krause resembles my old boss. No picture of him there; never mind.

Filed under: Reading

# (1) 31 Dec 2006, 09:33PM: Jonathan Coulton Song Reminds Me Of Leonard Blog Entries: "The Future Soon" reminds me of

"Oh but it's not the future yet Giblets" you say, "You just need to wait til the video of the present becomes the kitchen of the future." Maybe it was the present this afternoon but now it's the future and still no kitchen!

Coulton is sort of an uncredited coauthor of John Hodgman's career. Leonard just bought and read Hodgman's The Areas of My Expertise while I was finishing Asimov's Foundation and Empire and starting on Second Foundation. I ended up taking a New Year's Eve nap.

I used to lurve Asimov. I used to be a twelve-year-old girl. Susan Calvin is, after all, cranky and brilliant and awesome, sort of Housian. It's only after growing up and trying to read stuff written between 1942 and 1953 that I feel the datedness. People untold centuries from now talk and act like middle-class white US men from the 1950s, as though the most revolutionary technology only inserted the word "space" into our sentences and grew tobacco on Vega instead of in Virginia. I know, it's supposed to be a retelling of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but still. At least Battlestar Galactica is nearly self-parodying in its present-referentiality, without as much self-indulgent wish-fulfillment.

Cause it's gonna be the future soon
And I won't always be this way
When the things that make me weak and strange get engineered away
It's gonna be the future soon
I've never seen it quite so clear
And when my heart is breaking I can close my eyes and it's already here

Nonetheless: Happy New Year!

Filed under: Reading

# (1) 29 Dec 2006, 01:35AM: Overdose: I just stayed up a wee bit too late, waiting for the Internet to work again and finishing up In the Company of Cheerful Ladies and Blue Shoes and Happiness. Blink, blink. I bet my mom would like them.

Filed under: Reading

# (2) 12 Dec 2006, 02:08PM: Cheery: Woke up today grumpy and Leonard cheered me up by making up songs and playing them on the guitar. Then I bought four cans of Herdez Salsa Ranchera and ate the whole thing with bread and chips at work this morning. Perspiring, and feeling much better! On the Irish national standardized test:

The week of those exams, I dreamed I was flying. It marked the height of my sense of competence; the time when I was good at what the whole country seemed to value as the most important thing in life. In secondary school I knew exactly what was expected, and it barely troubled me to deliver it. I had a butter-wouldn't-melt demeanor and the only key to a school costume room, and most days I skipped a few classes there with selected pals. Schoolwork came so easily to me that I expected everything else to, and so when it turned out that I lacked natural talent at the violin, I refused to practice. Because I was uncoordinated, I dossed PE class every chance I could, and barely tapped a volleyball when I did show up. When I came fifth instead of first in a national school fiction contest, I gave up writing short stories.
It took a long time to unlearn this refusal to fail.
And of course, to my disappointment, life has been nothing like school. Only one company -- whose obsession with SAT scores pointed to their eventual implosion -- ever asked for my Leaving Cert results. In the self-inventing industries of the last ten years, there were no set texts.

There's a note at the end about Paul Graham. I want to write a scathing essay on why Paul Graham's notes make my blood boil, but no one would listen and it wouldn't change anything, including the temperature of my blood.

But the salsa has cheered me.

Filed under: Reading

# (1) 03 Dec 2006, 04:53PM: MC Masala on Comics:

I eventually developed a theory of comic strips: The more punchlines in the last panel, the better they were. The likes of "Shoe" or "B.C." have maybe one punchline per strip. "Dilbert," "Zits" and "Foxtrot" have two. "Get Fuzzy" will have three or more punchlines per strip. "Luann" or "The Born Loser" have about zero.
"The Family Circus," "The Lockhorns" and "Born Loser" often start off disadvantaged in this metric, with their single-panel format. At least "They'll Do It Every Time" and "The Family Circus" try innovations in divvying up that one panel.

There's more here but I figured I should provide you a list of links to the gateway webcomics I recommend in the article.

Filed under: Comedy Reading

# 10 Nov 2006, 10:41PM: I Haven't Read Any Scott McCloud Yet: You may have noticed that my column runs on Sundays, while it used to run on Thursdays. This means that it's no longer in the same section as the comics. Not that I read newspaper comics much anymore, but I'd probably pony up for a "Zits" or "Get Fuzzy" collection.

When I was a kid, reading the comics as I ate breakfast before heading to the bus stop, I was fond of "Zits" and "Foxtrot." I saved them for last. I eventually developed a theory of comic strips: the more punch lines in the last panel, the better they were. The likes of "Shoe" or "B.C." has maybe one punchline per strip. "Dilbert," "Zits," and "Foxtrot" have two. "Get Fuzzy" will have three or more punchlines per strip. "Luann" or "The Born Loser" has about zero. Like "The Family Circus," "The Lockhorns" and "Born Loser" often start off disadvantaged in this metric, with their single-panel nature. At least "They'll Do It Every Time" and "The Family Circus" try innovations in divvying up that one panel.

Nowadays, I get comics off the web and in graphic novels and comic books. I'll probably write a recommendation list for a column soon. The Comics Curmudgeon provides me with funny-paper snark.

And have I mentioned that "Bit Torment" is a terrible comic book?

Filed under: Comedy Reading

# 10 Nov 2006, 12:33PM: Bookworm & Sandworm: Man, Diana Abu-Jaber's next book won't be out for another year. To tide me over, I reread my interview with her from last year.

Do you watch television at all?
I kind of watch vicariously through Mr. Scott. He sits in the living room, I sit in my office, supposedly working, but usually playing computer solitaire, and I hear him in the other room laughing. And then, when something's really good, he'll go, "Honey, you gotta see this!" So I'll go running in there, and usually it's South Park or it's Survivor, or -- oh, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. I watch that a lot. Yeah. Yeah, I love that show. But I don't like it as much - Queer Eye for the Straight Girl, do not like as much.
Really? What makes it not as good? The team that's making them over?
I don't feel like that particular cadre has quite got it down the way the Fab Five does. I feel like -- I'm sorry, I'm getting a little esoteric here.
That's quite all right! No, this is exactly the sort of hip, edgy, high-culture/low-culture combination that Saucy is built to create.

Other stuff in the interview -- cooking, writing habits, and what it's like living in Portland vs. Miami. Saucy seems defunct, but Bookslut has a Brian K. Vaughan interview this month.

Upon rereading the Abu-Jaber interview, I missed working in a bookstore, where we talked about books and authors all the time, engaging in the discourse of literature. Sometimes at Fog Creek we talk about books, fiction and non, but as with so many conversations I've had over the past year, I have to swim upstream against binary dichotomies and dismissiveness. Even at Cody's Books in Berkeley, California, the snobbish side of indieness never came out this much.

Benjamin has commented on my habit of assuming my colleagues have read certain books, ones I consider classics (Ender's Game, The Left Hand of Darkness, Jane Eyre). Often they haven't. And I've never seen Zoolander or played Halo. But I read more contemporary comic books than any of the nerds here. Just last night I bought an Action Philosophers, a mashup MST3K-y book called "What Were They Thinking?!", and an issue of "Bit Torment," whose title is the best part of it.

I'd like to believe I'm the Russian Lit Major but I need to bone up way more on tech. In the meantime I can talk about books and Star Trek with Leonard. Currently reading Diane Duane's I'm-told-it's-a-classic Spock's World, which he recommends. Pretty good.

Filed under: Reading

# 30 Oct 2006, 06:05PM: Greenback-Colored Glasses: The business-y reports we have to write for my Corporate Finance class got to me when I was rereading P. Larkin's "This Be The Verse". The first two lines are "Executive Summary," the second half of the first stanza is "Analysis in Detail," the second stanza is "Historical Considerations," the next two lines are "Summary," and the last two are "Recommendations."

Filed under: Comedy Reading

# 08 Oct 2006, 02:08AM: "How do you remember a truth that will cause clinical depression?": Are these the lessons of Auschwitz? What else must I be sure to recognize?

Our moral hearts, like our physical ones, are weak and prone to disease. If we acknowledge this and determine to exercise them, we have a chance to live. If we deny it and insist our hearts are failure-proof, we let the disease in at the door.
Like fragments of a hologram, each of us contains an image of the whole of our species; each of us participates in all of the beauty and all the evil of being human. We all participate in the music of Mozart and the murderousness of Mengele. If, in the morning, you look in the mirror and you say, "I have the face of a murderer," you have placed yourself in a position to begin the work that needs to be done.

Filed under: Religion Reading

# 05 Oct 2006, 11:47AM: Missing Frances: I miss Frances every day. Today I read a few of her old weblog entries.

A student today said she can tell that I like the class. I'm glad she thinks so. I'm glad she can't tell that I go beat my head against the wall after I leave them. Thank goodness it looks like I like them.

And I reread her "On Being a Single Parent", which isn't about that so much as it is about how to thrive.

I basically had to start over at CSUB because I didn't have enough units in any one subject to do anything with. One of my uncles and one of my brothers helped me, I started a Mary Kay business, and between those financial sources and part time teaching at CSUB and then at BC, I eventually acquired enough units to qualify for a credential. This was a very difficult thing to do and I am very proud of myself that I accomplished it during a time I had small children, a terminally ill husband, when I was living in a city where I was a stranger and considered an outsider not only by his family but also by members of the church. I learned during this experience that if I can go back to school and graduate, I can do anything, and in my opinion, so can anyone else.

I am so lucky to have had her in my life. I try not to think about her scrapbooks because it just makes me ache more. At least we have her blog.

Filed under: Reading

# 08 Sep 2006, 07:23PM: Sensitive: Jon Carroll makes coffee and spins an awesome column out of it. I went back to Northern California for a week, for the first time in eight months, and drank booze with my editor and had a big party and went to a computer convention and I don't know what all, and I've made half a blog post out of it. I'm feeling as slow-witted as the narrator in Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, which I'm almost done reading. Why should I be rooting for [*SPOILER*] the mentally ill aunt, who is a horrible parent, to keep custody of her niece?

Anyway.

Kathy Sierra reminds us that every stranger, every customer, is having that tedious, routine interaction with us for the first time. Why did I find this so moving?

Filed under: Reading

# 04 Sep 2006, 01:42AM: Steve Yegge & "Clothes For the Soul": I generally enjoy Steve Yegge's blog posts; you can find lots of adoring swooning to that effect in my archives from the past year. Recently he posted some thoughts that weren't out of the ordinary for him: "Clothes for the Soul", he called it.

A few of his claims:

The ability to use technology to change the human body, cosmetically and in less visible ways, is growing.
Lots of people in the US get squeamish about such actions, especially regarding being open about having such work done on one's own body.
We shouldn't be so squeamish; all the squeamishness springs from stupid, nonapplicable, irrational sources.
Other radical new ideas that cause defensiveness in people, ideas which Yegge also wishes to promote, lie in the technical realm; once people understand/agree with the "Clothes for the Soul" thesis, it will be easier for Yegge to get those readers to understand and accept those revolutionary tech ideas.

Please do let me know if you think I'm leaving out something absolutely essential, or misrepresenting these claims.

Well, I have thoughts on how our bodies and minds and social relationships interact. Anyone who's read sci-fi, or been nonwhite in the US, or nonmale or nontall or nonthin, has done a fair bit of musing on the topic. I've read an interesting NYT article on gender transitioning. I've thought about how awesome an orgasm-button implant or "a truly effective aphrodisiac for women" or "a neurobiofeedback machine that could help women learn to be superorgasmic" would be. But I think about tradeoffs, too. I think about the monoculture problem, and tonsillectomies and thalidomide, and gender imbalance and destabilized societies, and the fact that the mind is what the brain (receiving information from the rest of the body) does. And if we could flip, ad hoc, through all the bodies that the human race could offer us, would we take advantage of the available diversities of experience? Or would we have a race to the bottom, ending up with a severely narrowed point of view, a new and more stifling conformism? Well, outsiders will always play with 0wnz0ring their bodies, with drugs, tattoos, piercings, Atkins, and beyond; they'd dare to experiment with out-of-fashion body types, but I doubt most people would buck the crowd.

But! Even considering the problem with mind-body duality, or taking any kind of nuanced view on the unalloyed good of the cutting edge in bodymod, puts me on the wrong side of Steve Yegge -- because he raises the logical rudeness shields at the end of his piece and throughout the comment board. He condescends to people who ask questions, or who are addressing the world as it is, not as he imagines it might be. He calls them sheep.

The point of the article is that YOU are a SOUL. Your body -- including your race, gender, genetic makeup, all the things I know nothing at all about as we interact through the internet -- they're effectively just accidents. They don't matter. So you should be able to change them.

I would indeed like to be able to change some things about myself, in my mind and in my body, and am making slow progress towards them.

But, if I am a soul, I am a contingent one. An accident, a sperm and an egg meeting, created me. In fact, nearly all births of humans have been accidents in that way. And the accidents - gender, race, geography, teacher lotteries, weather, accent, car crashes, books being checked out from the library -- make us who we are. The accidents do matter. I can't extricate my soul from my past any more than water can extricate itself from wetness.

Yegge writes, "You're holding on to notions like 'race' and 'gender' that may literally be meaningless words within 100 years." He later takes off the qualifier:

...notions of "race" and "gender" are going to be obsolete in 100 to 200 years, hence racism and sexism will be roughly equivalent to pants-ism and shirts-ism...

It would be completely awesome for men to be able to switch into women, physically and psychologically, with a quick bit of outpatient surgery. I'm talking the ability to conceive and give birth, lactation, height and weight shifts, Venusian temperament, longer lifespan, the whole deal.

But until everyone can have kids, or no one has to (the dependable existence of willing incubators?), gender has a lot to do with who can depend on never getting pregnant and who can't.

Steve Yegge's focus on cosmetic Swatch-watchability tells me he thinks he's a brain in a jar. This is weird, since he's so aware of his body in another context. Then again, maybe he just thinks of it as a tool to manipulate.

He notes that he can't tell a person's race or gender over the Internet. Is he also blind to class in text? In his audience? (Race, gender, and class: the interconnecting triumvirate of historical analysis.) And does he think we won't have face-to-face contact in two hundred years? An interesting claim, but I'd want to see a plausible roadmap to getting rid of all our meatspace social needs.

And heck, there is pants-ism! And shirts-ism! If I go shirtless on a hot day, I'm breaking rules. If I wear pants instead of a skirt or dress, some people think I'm less womanly.

Generally speaking, though, I think it's pretty obvious to most rational people that the trend is towards having control over how you look, and there's nothing wrong with making yourself look better. If a change makes you happier, then it will almost certainly make the people around you happier too.

Well, who decides what's better? The "duh" answer is "you do, duh," but I am not an atom. Society influences me, and just as sexism in India and China plus sonograms turns people to selectively abort female fetuses, lookism in the US plus easy bodymod might have ill effects.

But Steve Yegge has declared logical rudeness on anyone who asks for clarification or details on his utopia. He strongly implies that anyone challenging him simply doesn't understand his claims. From the comments:

Jay, poor Jay, you're really having a rough time. I'm sorry this is so hard on you! Take a deep breath. Thaaaaat's better. Calm.

And there's more of that in the comments. I was really shocked and disappointed by the disrespect Yegge shows to people who challenge his claims; he calls them mad, scared, or uninformed.

I wouldn't have paid as much attention to his post and associated comments had he not earned so much respect from me with his many previous posts. The way he's treated his commenters on this seems out of character for him, so maybe this whole exercise is a prank. Either way, I'm wincing.

Filed under: Reading

# 02 Aug 2006, 06:43PM: Comic Sense...Tingling!: India-centric comic books. I've now read an issue of The Sadhu (interesting) and a collection of the first few Indian Spiderman issues (Brian K. Vaughn has nothing to worry about there). I'll try out Devi, Snake Woman, and maybe Brothers, but I've had enough of the Ramayana for a long time.

The artists and critics in the SFGate article loudly and persistently recognize the awesome, canonical work Amar Chitra Katha did; for a long time, it was the first and last word in Indian comics.

Filed under: Reading

# 17 Jul 2006, 04:29PM: Need Some Wood?: Some great posts on Crooked Timber recently: "I space object!", a validation of my use of "flatmate", UK vs. Britain vs. England, hilarious self-parodying corruption defense, and an explanation of the current Middle East crisis.

Speaking of timber: some folks at the Fog Creek lunch table recently recalled all the weird Bush quotes from that town-hall-style second debate from 2004. "Internets" has stuck around. People still remember "You forgot Poland!" and, to a lesser extent, "I own a timber company?....Need some wood?" But the Dred Scott decision derision didn't stick in their minds, and many don't realize that Bush was probably using "Dred Scott" as a coded reference to Roe v. Wade.

Filed under: Reading

# 13 Jul 2006, 07:38AM: And Hanging On The Car Door Handle Was...A NetNanny!: Want to hear a horror story about control freak managers?

...The engineers were placed out of the loop regarding what was happening in the standards committee and when they finally agreed on a standard, our hardware could not support it....

Filed under: Reading Work

# 11 Jul 2006, 11:16AM: Faith in the Memory of the Unseen: In case you didn't see it last week, a lovely and thought-provoking article on memory from the NYT. Includes "dual processing," "neurological," "memory" and "double perception" theories, déjà vécu, presque vu, and jamais vu.

Filed under: Reading

# 26 Jun 2006, 04:23PM: Stories and Wages: Do you remember that great Vampire Domestication PowerPoint? The creator has a bunch of free short stories for you to peruse. "Mayfly" is creepy.

Also: EFF is looking for a Staff Technologist to join Seth and Meetup is seeking a UI Developer. Man, either of those jobs would be awesome - not for me, though.

Filed under: Reading

# 26 Jun 2006, 11:59AM: Tunnel: Now that I have read A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Malkiel, I can understand Daniel Davies on beta and his lyrical allusions to what Gladwell would call the black swan. A Davies bonus: calling something "risk aversion" when it's "pessimism."

Filed under: Reading

# 18 Jun 2006, 11:51PM: Go Robin Einhorn!: Yay yay yay! Professor Robin L. Einhorn, who jumpstarted my interest in taxes and economic history in the first place, has published her big new book on the effect of slaveowners' tax avoidance on the structure of the US Constitution and government. American Taxation, American Slavery is going to be awesome! This follows her earlier work Property Rules.

E-dawg, Einhorn's latest is the book I've been meaning to recommend to you. Everyone else: for more tax geekitude and hilarity, read my thoughts from three years ago, and for the tasting menu for U of Chicago Press, read assorted excerpts.

Filed under: Taxes Reading

# 21 May 2006, 03:07PM: Incredibly Valuable Reads: "[W]e also want our creations to be out of control....We want pride, but more than that, we want astonishment."

"The lie of everlasting novelty: a different take on the case against porn."

Kameron Hurley almost died because she didn't know she'd developed diabetes.

Filed under: Reading

# 04 May 2006, 12:51PM: Enjoying A Fine Chabon: Despite feints to the contrary, neither Leonard nor I has read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. Leonard gave it to me to read on the plane(s) back from Bakersfield. I felt gauche reading it in public but now, 2/3 into it, I don't even mind people seeing me read it on the subway. Maybe a good strategy for me with these pop books is to start reading them at home so I get hooked enough to be ok with looking like an illiterate fool on public transit.

Chabon really loves the word "spavined" -- maybe the big twist ending will be where he finally uses it to describe a horse. That is my only carp (Karp?) with this book.

Filed under: Reading

# 16 Apr 2006, 03:23PM GMT+5:30: Brian K. Vaughn & Bernie Hou: I have started spending regular cash at Midtown Comics to get the compilations of Brian K. Vaughn's comics Ex Machina, Runaways, and Y: The Last Man. I grew up on Amar Chitra Katha and only recently have I graduated to the grown-up stuff. Man, it's fantastic.

One issue of Ex Machina includes a reference to Midtown Comics itself. Disorienting.

Alien Loves Predator also helps me feel at home in my new city.

Filed under: Reading

# 02 Apr 2006, 07:53PM GMT+5:30: In The Application Of My Seat To A Chair: Lunch (and dinner and Wikipedia and writing and conversing with Riana and Leonard) have helped me feel better.

Riana wrote about caffeine addiction, social acceptance of same, and prostate cancer (among other things) earlier this year, on the same day that Wikipedia featured an article on prostate cancer on its main page. This reminds me of Daniel Davies's musings on caffeine and the US. Both essays are amusing and edifying.

Back to the grind.

Filed under: Reading

# 01 Mar 2006, 04:41PM GMT+5:30: Time Capsule: Fog Creek just rearranged some furniture. Probably the most minor effect of this was that I espied a copy of Linux Journal whose cover article was titled:

Podcast And Reel In The Blogs And Wikis

Every once in a while I try to imagine myself as a person from a really long time ago, like 1990, seeing that sort of sentence with a high jargon-to-common-word ratio.

Currently I'm reading a Christmas gift from Leonard's sister and mother, the very good A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. Ulrich interprets a diary of a Martha Ballard, a New England housewife and midwife from colonial and Revolutionary times. Ballard was resourceful, sturdy, and smart (as far as we can tell), but "Podcast And Reel In The Blogs And Wikis" might seem a sentence from a foreign language to her.

Filed under: Reading

# 25 Feb 2006, 03:48PM GMT+5:30: Old Love: "Crush" by Carol Ann Duffy.

Filed under: Reading

# 04 Feb 2006, 09:57AM: Running Cliches Through The Cuisinart: Hey Leonard, how did Collabnet work out for you?

Like Leonard, I got book-reading as an initial task at my new job. I accidentally powered through Influence and the Carnegie way too fast because I also read them recreationally. Boy, were they good.

Cialdini's Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion and Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People approach salesmanship from different angles. Carnegie quotes Jesus and Lincoln a lot and focuses on specific tactics you can use to make others more amenable to your requests. Cialdini talks at a more theoretical level but includes examples from scams, sales, and studies to teach the reader to defend herself against manipulative techniques. Where Carnegie advises the reader to get the customer to start saying "yes, yes, yes" to a string of initial questions, Cialdini cautions the reader against the urge to accede to disproportional requests just to be consistent with earlier statements or behaviors.

Both authors mention that sincere persuasion is nothing objectionable. Carnegie stresses that it's also more powerful than sleazy tricks. I'll be using tips from both authors to do honest sales work for Fog Creek.

On my way out the door Friday I borrowed a copy of DeMarco & Lister's Peopleware, which I probably should have read years ago. I delayed reading it to read Book 6 of Y: The Last Man (a page-turner but not as politically awesome as earlier books, and with less captivating badinage, and more gratuitous skin, but I'll keep reading the series). I was especially struck by Chapter 3, "Vienna Waits For You." It quotes Billy Joel's song "The Stranger," [Belated update -- whoops, Zed reminds me that "The Stranger" is the name of the album and not the song] which made a huge impression on me when I saw it for the first time in 13 Going On 30.

But you know that when the truth is told
That you can get what you want
Or you can just get old
You're gonna kick off before you even get halfway through
When will you realize
Vienna waits for you?

Now, I was evidently not alone in thinking that the Vienna of the song was the dreamed-of wish, a paradise of our own making, the chance of happiness here on earth if we would only get up the gumption to reach out and grab it.

I'd not considered another view. DeMarco and Lister:

The Vienna that waits for you, in Billy Joel's phrase, is the last stop on your personal itinerary. When you get there, it's all over. If you think your project members never worry about such weighty matters, think again. Your people are very aware of the one short life that each person is allotted. And they know too well that there has got to be something more important than the silly job they're working on.

The bit in the song about dreams not always coming true speaks to the Peopleware view, while I find support for my interpretation in this bit:

....it's the life you lead
You're so ahead of yourself
That you forgot what you need
Though you can see when you're wrong
You know you can't always see when you're right

Here's where I pull a species of cheap conclusion trick: the fact that contradictory well-grounded interpretations of this song can exist is a testament to the enduring power of this classic! And maybe they don't contradict at all somehow!

(If you Google for "vienna waits for you", the top results are for tourism in Vienna. So the various Austrian tourism councils probably don't lean towards the Vienna=death side.)

Something like a decade ago, I was denied a spot as a page editor for my high school newspaper because (I was told) my people skills were insufficient. They were right. I was told to read Carnegie, which I did. They made up a copy-editor position so I could learn and practice editorial skills that year, which I did. The next year I got to be a page editor.

Carnegie was great for me because it systematically spelled out reasons for tactics that other people (e.g., my parents) advised haphazardly. Instead of just bumbling through a billion use-cases I got to learn the rules of the thing. Why shut up and let other people talk? Because they like to talk about themselves and their own problems and triumphs, just like you do, and if you listen to them they'll like you. That sort of thing.

My dad once told me to stop bringing books to read when we went to family friends' houses. "Bringing a book to a party is like bringing a sandwich to a dinner," he said, and I got it. And my mom tried to get me to listen better: "Listen to what people mean, not just what they say," she said, but I didn't get it.

My mom and dad tried their best, but I needed a handbook, something to memorize and apply, with lots of examples, and Carnegie helped a lot.

I wonder, in the same fashion as Leonard, how little teenager me would feel if I told her: the next time you read How to Win Friends and Influence People, it'll be to brush up, not to become a functioning member of society. You'll have self-confidence, a great job, a paid newspaper column on the side, a wonderful boyfriend, and a posse of superlative friends, who miss you because you've just moved to New York. Vienna waits for you.

Filed under: Reading

# 25 Jan 2006, 07:37AM GMT+5:30: Readings: As I was going through a cold this week (am currently 90% over it), I read Jane Austen's Persuasion, whose title I love. Persuasion is very fun for the first 90 percent of it but then once the endgame becomes obvious it is less compelling.

I also read Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, which is fantastic. Anna Karenina revealed to me why people love epic soap operas, and Casterbridge is smaller in scale but no less epic in the scope of human emotion explored. And it is funny.

Casterbridge couldn't happen today, I think, what with all the bureaucracy and open access to information the First World enjoys. It's like Jane Eyre in that way.

The town of Casterbridge is a minor town somewhere in England, like Stockton. Now I live in the equivalent of London. A weird thing to get used to.

At the Friends of The Library store in San Francisco's Fort Mason, I bought a cheap Blues Traveler CD, entirely because it has "Hook" on it. "Hook" was my first experience, possibly aside from Weird Al and songs from Broadway musicals, with meta songs. It blew my little teenage mind. I still like it.

Filed under: Reading

# 01 Jan 2006, 04:43PM GMT+5:30: Gotta Stand Up To Start Moving Forward?: According to some estimates, every six months in the Bay Area, I've made some new amazing friend whom I am now leaving behind. I arrived in August of 1998 and met Seth; most recently (basically) Eric. He lent me Daniel R. Headrick's Tentacles of Progress, about the infrastructure that empires lay down in conquered lands.

The Fashoda incident of 1898 (see Chapter 4), which had only a temporary impact on international diplomacy, was the turning point for Dakar. In response to the British threat, France decided to build a harbor in West Africa for its cruisers, submarines, and torpedo boats. The project took ten years and cost 21 million francs (£ 840,000). Deep dredging, over 2 kilometers of new breakwaters, and a dry dock made it a harbor fit for cruisers. By 1908 Dakar was the finest naval base between Cape Town and Gibraltar.

This passage struck me. The leaders of France made hard decisions and plans, and ten years later they had an awesome artifact and tool. They made their bet and won.

I've been afraid to bet. I've been loathe to predict or plan, to even cautiously strategize a career or make any long-term commitments. And now I'm locked in for the next three years. I've discarded other options and shaken off paralysis.

If you could save your mother, but at the cost of killing your father, would you do so? What if the situation were reversed? What if your great aunt would die, but your father would live, but he would have cancer, but that cancer would go be cured by a doctor, but that doctor eventually creates a supervirus which wipes out 1/3 of the Earth's population. Would you date that doctor?

I can't live like that anymore, second-guessing every move.

Joe is one of the friends I'm going to miss. Last night we saw a whole show of good comedy, in which none of the four comics disappointed; how often does that happen? It started with stand-up and so it shall end.

San Francisco's Bay Area was the first place I chose to move, and the first place where I made myself a home. Now it's the first place I'm leaving completely on my own. From November of 2002: Sumana stands up.

Filed under: Reading

# 28 Nov 2005, 11:29AM GMT+5:30: Reading Lists: An alternative (of sorts) to Personal MBA. Of Mr. Spolsky's tentative list, I've read:

part of The Mythical Man-Month
The Design of Everyday Things (a.k.a. The Psychology Of Everyday Things)
Microserfs
Ben & Jerry's: The Inside Scoop
21 Dog Years: A Cube Dweller's Tale (formerly 21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com)
Dale Carnegie's How To Win Friends and Influence People

Filed under: Reading

# 15 Nov 2005, 06:22AM GMT+5:30: It Always Comes Back: I thought Alan Furst's Dark Star would be a science-fiction novel, probably because I confused it with the film of the same name. Now that I'm two-thirds through, I've firmly convinced myself that it's Yet Another Europe-in-the-1930s Spy Novel, and a very good one. I like it much better than I liked Tim Powers's Cold War spy novel Declare, not just because there's no woo-woo fantasy, but because Furst does not hide from the reader important facts and memories attached to his viewpoint character.

Spoilers: Our protagonist, a Soviet journalist drawn/coerced into espionage, travels Europe in the guise of writing for Pravda. Szara witnesses Kristallnacht and reports back to his spymaster:

"And Germany?" [Goldman] asked.
"In a word?"
"If you like."
"An abomination."
Goldman's mask slipped briefly and Szara had a momentary view of the man beneath it. "We shall settle with them this time, and in a way they will not forget," he said softly. "The world will yet thank God for Joseph Stalin."

Pre-WWII Europe seems to have unlimited reserves of irony.

Filed under: Reading

# 02 Nov 2005, 04:50PM GMT+5:30: Sweet Lyrics: Reading Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, a novel in sonnets. I like recognizing the scattered nice (precisely fitted) rhymes, and familiar external and internal locations. I adored A Suitable Boy as I loved Anna Karenina. This one, I don't know yet, but there are some wrenching passages about love:

"...Quit bugging
Me, will you, Ed -- I'm sick of lugging
This tragic burden week by week.
Some light refreshment -- so to speak --
Is what I thirst for. Ed, I love you,
But don't exhume this; there's no sense
In scouring ruins. Why condense
The happiness that floats above you
By seeding it with doubt and pain,
Crystals that force it down as rain?"

and

As Phil talks on, his eyes grow radiant.
Ed thinks of the first time they met.
The weeks have warped the placid gradient
On which his even wheels were set.
Neither the sense, at every meeting,
Of his heart's full and rapid beating,
Nor the abrupt and scalding rush
Of redness to his face, the flush
When he feels Phil's eyes resting upon him,
But something infinite and slow
And tide-like holds his life in tow.
The salt of human love upon him,
To it his leached will yields control,
Whether it stings or heals his soul.

Filed under: Reading

# 23 Oct 2005, 10:44PM GMT+5:30: Didion on Schiavo: You have probably already read Joan Didion on the Schiavo case and watched Didion illustrate, but carefully leave unanswered, more precisely formulated questions about that particular tragedy and the end of life. That piece makes me want to read Life's Dominion and The Year of Magical Thinking.

Filed under: Religion Reading

# 20 Oct 2005, 09:46AM GMT+5:30: "Waiting Waiting Waiting": I laughed out loud at Spamusement! today. Incidentally, the other web comics comprising my daily comic trawl are: Achewood; Toothpaste For Dinner; Something Positive; and Dinosaur Comics.

Filed under: Comedy Reading

# 30 Sep 2005, 11:16AM GMT+5:30: Uplifting, Inspiring, Secular Art: I'm listening to Dar Williams, "What Do You Hear In These Sounds," and I see Jon Carroll:

It's the making, I think. The making is the important part. If you are lucky enough to be able to make something and earn a living, you should keep making it, because the ability to make something is a gift.
It's the only time we get to feel like gods: when we make something. Of course, not everything we make is good, but God himself has the duck-billed platypus to answer for....And then we do something else. As Samuel Beckett said, we "fail better."

Filed under: Reading

# 01 Sep 2005, 10:13AM GMT+5:30: Phillip Robertson Is Braver Than I'll Ever Be: I have the freedom to yammer on about literature. I'm not in Iraq.

Hajji Qais had been on Al Mutanabbi street for 10 years and the vendors all knew him. He sold greeting cards for births and anniversaries along with Christmas and Easter gifts, cologne and pens. He wore a beard and was also known as a devout Sunni who had no problem hiring Shia workers or spending time with Christian colleagues. Aside from stocking a few items related to Christian holidays, there was nothing unusual in his shop. He wasn't a known member of any political party, and he was, according to his neighbors on Al Mutanabbi Street, a generous man who often gave money to the poor.
No one in the district will speak openly about who killed him, including his own son.
Ahmed Dulaimi, a young guitarist for Iraq's only heavy metal band, told a story that has been going around Baghdad these last few weeks. There was an ice seller selling ice from a small shop on the sidewalk in the Dora neighborhood. One hot day, a man came up to him with a gun and said, "You shouldn't be selling ice because the Prophet Mohammed didn't have ice in his time." Then the gunman shot the ice seller dead. This story terrifies Iraqis but they often laugh when they recount it, because it is absurd that anyone would get killed for selling ice or shaving a beard. It is also true that the ice-seller anecdote follows a pattern of killings around the capital where Islamic militants have regularly assassinated Iraqis for violating strict, and utterly random, codes of behavior. The point of the ice-seller story is that now, anyone in Iraq can be killed for any reason at all. After Hajji Qais was killed, more than one person mentioned these spontaneous assassinations, and they spoke about them the way they'd describe a sandstorm, an all-encompassing thing that no one can stop.

Filed under: Religion Reading

# 25 Aug 2005, 01:35PM GMT+5:30: Recommended Books: An acquaintance asked for book recommendations. I thought of a few. I'll share them here:

"The Twinkie Squad" by Gordon Korman
"The Way We Live Now" by Anthony Trollope
"The Bug" by Ellen Ullman
"Crescent" by Diana Abu-Jaber
"Stories of Your Life and Others" by Ted Chiang
"21 Dog Years" by Mike Daisey
"The Partly Cloudy Patriot" by Sarah Vowell
"America: The Book" by The Daily Show
"Afterglow: A Last Conversation With Pauline Kael" by Francis Davis
"The Innocents Abroad: Or, The New Pilgrims Progress" by Mark Twain
"First Test" (Protector Of The Small Vol. 1) by Tamora Pierce

Filed under: Reading

# 02 Aug 2005, 04:28PM GMT+5:30: "Add it up": I am really glad that Paul Wright pointed me to a bit of non-glurgy inspiration that's akin to Paul Ford's old chestnut about the water boiling. Maybe I should borrow some Violent Femmes. Over the past few days, I've been using classical, Ben Folds, Guster, Dar Williams, and the Mountain Goats to self-medicate.

Limit your wheel spinning to those five minutes in the shower. Let the steam seep into your pores as you sing along to Violent Femmes. Sing, "Just last night I was reminded of just how bad it had gotten and just how sick I had become." Put on your shiny shoes and fight the good fight again. Fight the good fight until it becomes second nature, until it becomes who you are.

Filed under: Reading

# 21 Jun 2005, 09:45AM GMT+5:30: Giving Away Giants Ticket: R.K. Narayan in "My Dateless Diary" does a US book tour. He gets two tickets to some event. "Why two?" he asks. The giver tells him that "two tickets or none" is an unalterable principle in American life.

Update: Gone! Damian will accompany me!

Filed under: Reading

# 11 Jun 2005, 05:14PM GMT+5:30: Setting Records: I can't remember the last time I was this ill for this long. Thank goodness Leonard is taking care of me. If this lasts through tomorrow then I should seek real medical attention.

Read: Pratchett's Men at Arms - a wee bit taxing for my current state, but of course funny and heartwarming. Also - some Jeeves stories that make me understand what Orwell and Leonard say about him. I'd never seen that amoral side of him before, where he ditches the "make someone happier" objective just to make a few pounds.

Filed under: Reading

# 09 Jun 2005, 05:55PM GMT+5:30: Still No Punchline: I still have no punchline for the set-up "Asra Nomani is standing alone in Mecca..." But you can read my review of her book.

It seems unfair to judge Standing Alone in Mecca as a memoir when it's clearly unfinished. It tells us the history and the recent dispatches of battles within Islam, but the story's barely begun.

Filed under: Religion Reading

# 09 Jun 2005, 05:21PM GMT+5:30: Meta-Spoiler Alert:

'But Bertie has no other way of living,' said Charlotte.
'Then, in God's name, let him marry Mrs. Bold,' said Madeline. And so it was settled between them.
But let the gentle-hearted reader be under no apprehension whatsoever. It is not destined that Eleanor [Bold] shall marry Mr. Slope or Bertie Stanhope. And here, perhaps, it may be allowed to the novelist to explain his views on a very important point in the art of telling tales. He ventures to reprobate that system which goes so far to violate all proper confidence between the author and his readers, by maintaining nearly to the end of the third volume a mystery as to the fate of their favourite personage. Nay, more, and worse than this, is too frequently done. Have not often the profoundest efforts of genius been used to baffle the aspirations of the reader, to raise false hopes and false fears, and to give rise to expectations which are never to be realized? Are not promises all but made of delightful horrors, in lieu of which the writer produces nothing but most commonplace realities in his final chapter? And is there not a species of deceit in this to which the honesty of the present age should lend no countenance?
And what can be the worth of that solicitude which a peep into the third volume can utterly dissipate? What the value of those literary charms which are absolutely destroyed by their enjoyment? When we have once learnt what was that picture before which was hung Mrs. Radcliffe's solemn curtain, we feel no further interest about either the frame or the veil. They are to us merely a receptacle for old bones, an inappropriate coffin, which we would wish to have decently buried out of our sight.
And then, how grievous a thing it is to have the pleasure of your novel destroyed by the ill-considered triumph of a previous reader. 'Oh, you needn't be alarmed for Augusta, of course she accepts Gustavus in the end.' 'How very ill-natured you are, Susan,' says Kitty, with tears in her eyes; 'I don't care a bit about it now.' Dear Kitty, if you will read my book, you may defy the ill-nature of your sister. There shall be no secret that she can tell you. Nay, take the last chapter if you please -- learn from its pages all the results of our troubled story, and the story shall have lost none of its interest, if indeed there be any interest in it to lose.
Our doctrine is, that the author and the reader should move along together in full confidence with each other. Let the personages of the drama undergo ever so complete a comedy of errors among themselves, but let the spectator never mistake the Syracusan for the Ephesian; otherwise he is one of the dupes, and the part of a dupe is never dignified.
I would not for the value of this chapter have it believed by a single reader that my Eleanor could bring herself to marry Mr. Slope, or that she should be sacrificed to a Bertie Stanhope. But among the good folk of Barchester many believed both the one and the other.

-Anthony Trollope, ch. XIV, Barchester Towers

Filed under: Reading

# 02 Jun 2005, 04:05AM GMT+5:30: Stephensonia: About once a month I wake up way too early for no good reason. Today it could be because my body is scared of today's dentist appointment. I woke up thinking about the oral surgeon from Cryptonomicon. Real subtle, subconscious.

Filed under: Reading

# 26 May 2005, 07:40PM GMT+5:30: Caustic Commentary & Time-Fillers: Get Your War On makes me laugh bitterly. On a scale of "how bitter is my laughter?" where ten equals "I am laughing black, black tears," The Daily Show is around a five and Get Your War On is a nine.

For the long weekend, a bunch of free essays by Susan Orlean, Michael Lewis, Calvin Trillin, et al.

Filed under: Comedy Reading

# 26 May 2005, 02:36PM GMT+5:30: Recommendations For Non-Light Reading: "Which academic books are fit for human consumption?" This list has added several titles to my wantlist.

Filed under: Reading

# 21 May 2005, 10:07PM GMT+5:30: Machiavelli's The Little Prince: A while ago, I read Peter Singer's Writings on an Ethical Life, the reader he put together to fairly represent his controversial views on animal rights, ecology, poverty, abortion, infanticide, and right living. After reading his book, I think activist Harriet McBryde Johnson has a weaker case than I thought she did before reading Singer's book. However, I do think it would be good for us to have more information on the abilities of people with major physical disabilities to have fulfilling, happy lives; I have much less of a problem with the abortion of fetuses with entirely missing brains than I do with the abortion of fetuses with disabilities on the quality-of-life borderline (e.g., Downs syndrome, Klinefelter syndrome).

The weirdest thing Singer says in the whole book is that we can't derive morals from facts. I'm still trying to figure that one out. Maybe I'm like Cindi Lightballoon in Arrested Development misunderstanding that George Sr.'s statement "Faith is a fact" is on the blooper reel.

Anyway, there's a contradiction between Singer's views, as I see it, on the idea of "potential." When it comes to poverty and the responsibility of humans to help one another, he says that we're responsible for the easily foreseen consequences of our actions. However, on the issue of abortion, he dismisses "potential life"; since the embryo cannot desire anything now, aborting it does not thwart any desires, and hypotheticals as to its future wishes are irrelevant. I understand that introducing "potential" into the argument also invites a slippery slope regarding onanism and birth control, but Singer's method of dismissing it seems solipsistic.

Singer's points on euthanasia seem formidable, but Rivka points out that it is practically impossible to administer euthanasia (or Physician-Assisted Suicide) fairly and ethically in this society; the theory does not work in reality because of logistical and financial constraints in the health care system. As she points out, people with terminal illnesses want to die because of depression (curable) and fear of pain (curable with proper pain management). But she distinguishes cessation of treatment from active killing. I'm still struggling with that argument, as am I with Harriet McBryde Johnson's arguments in general.

Singer, Johnson, and Rivka all want better care for all patients concerned. After all, if we all had excellent preventive care, pain management, counseling, and family planning tools, then the ethics of conception and end-of-life care would cause less agony for all concerned. I think they're on the same side of many issues, but Rivka and Johnson infer policy implications from their beliefs and Singer's on the other side. I need to read up more.

Filed under: Reading

# 16 May 2005, 08:56AM GMT+5:30: What A Dame: I interviewed Diana Abu-Jaber for Saucy Magazine. She said funny and interesting things and you'd probably enjoy it.

Filed under: Reading

# 14 May 2005, 10:12PM GMT+5:30: Homes Update: I finished What You Should Know. The best story in the collection, which mulls Nancy Reagan's day-to-day life caring for Ronald Reagan during his decline, made me weep. Like A.M. Homes's compelling New Yorker article about her adoption and her biological parents, the Reagan story draws on true events. My conclusion: instead of making up premises, stories, or characters, Homes should restrict herself to fictionalizing true stories from the newspaper. Thus, she will be assured of actually having a plot.

Filed under: Reading

# 11 May 2005, 12:59PM GMT+5:30: You Should Know That It Sucks: Things You Should Know by A.M. Homes is very, very depressing. So far, every story I've read has felt like a parody of the "nothing happens" New Yorker style of modern fiction. I now completely understand why Dave Eggers put together a book of adventure/mystery/fantasy genre stories as a backlash.

Filed under: Reading

# 06 May 2005, 07:26AM GMT+5:30: Oryx & Crake: If you have read Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, and you believe you understand the ending, please tell me your interpretation. I finished it last night and felt as though my copy were missing two pages. Since this actually happened to me with Gilgamesh it's not TOO farfetched.

Filed under: Reading

# 04 May 2005, 12:36PM GMT+5:30: Bookishness: At Sam Weller's bookstore in Salt Lake City, as I bought books to read on the train ride back home, I considered getting a copy of Pilgrim's Progress to read for the first time. Then I realized that I'd want a copy of the Bible next to me so I'd get all the references. Like many US public school graduates, I don't know nearly enough about the Bible to get all the Biblical references in great works of literature. Mr. Hatch in American Literature ameliorated that but not enough. I was too dumb to understand what he was trying to do and how hamstrung he was.

I bought and read Twain's hilarious Roughing It, which I enjoyed for the whole ride. Am now reading Margaret Atwood's Orxy and Crake, which takes about three paragraphs to get going. My review of Douglas Coupland's new book is up at Bookslut.

Filed under: Reading Religion

# 27 Mar 2005, 10:42AM GMT+5:30: Litigious Fairy-Tale Queens: From The Fact-Checker's Bible by Sarah Harrison Smith, pgs. 74-75:

Audiotapes of interviews can be a wonderful source [italics in original]. They offer excellent legal protection. In a trial, libel lawyer David Korzenik says, "the factual support for an article needs to be reproducible; tapes are better than notes." He adds, "Everyone thinks they've been misquoted. Most people would sue a mirror for what it shows them in the morning if they could...."

Filed under: Comedy Reading

# 11 Mar 2005, 03:48PM GMT+5:30: Question Marks: Unitarian Universalist jokes and a Satanism joke: "Satanism seems to be an elaborate prank designed to annoy Christians while having some good parties ... rather than a system one could practically live by."

The classics AND contemporary media sometimes show people doing immoral things, and sometimes we see that these actions lead to their downfall. Kristen, you ask why certain books become classics, and whether classics that portray immoral behavior are smut. I've never understood what smut is. I think smut would be pornography that didn't care about a story or characters. The classics care about story.

Literature explores different ways of being human, as my old English teacher said. I realized, after reading George Eliot's classic Middlemarch and finding in Rosamond's character a reflection of myself, that I should be more emotionally independent and not a self-important parasite like her. But that's not because the story punishes her. It's because Eliot describes Rosamond so precisely, wittily, and devastatingly that I wince at recognizing myself.

And TV shows have taught me stuff, too. Sitcoms teach me that lying and hiding stuff never works; if I'm straightforward and honest with people, my life gets a lot easier. The elegant plot structures and wordplay I remember from Seinfeld (probably a classic) and Mad About You taught me about art before I ever read Fitzgerald.

I'd argue that the movie The Matrix is a classic; if anyone wants me to expand on that, shoot me an e-mail.

Compare-and-contrast: the CAPAlert guy who marks a movie down for portraying sin, even if the movie shows the sinner punished for his sin. His justification is that the very portrayal of the sin might influence a child who had not previously considered that sin. I'm not certain there are any edifying stories that don't depict bad behavior; there has to be a Goofus to make Gallant look good.

In our everyday lives, sometimes good things happen to bad people and vice versa. So morality plays for children will have to be somewhat unrealistic, and stories for adults, aiming to recreate the familiar, will depict these dismaying outcomes. (I hesitate to say the word "unrealistic." I've just read C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters, and his scorning comments on the secular world's use of the word "real" to mean "most unpleasant, whether material or notional" make the word "real" stick in my throat. What a funny, disorienting, doubly-directing book, Lewis's Christian edifications feinting behind the Devil's decreasingly convincing instructions.)

Last night I saw Camus's The Just, a hundred-year-old play about terrorists aiming to overthrow the Tsarist Russian state. [Spoilers ahead.] In the end, only one of them dies, but one goes mad. We as adults watching the play know that none of these people comes to a happy end and Russia never gets free, but within the play there's very little explicit punishment for the plotting and murdering. [End of spoilers.] Does that make the play immoral? I really doubt The Just encourages anyone to become a terrorist.

But the main point of your post, Kristen, was about teaching ourselves to act responsibly and accountably. If I could change one thing about the way my parents raised me, I'd work on that very aspect of my rearing. If they'd let me make little choices and suffer the consequences of choosing wrongly, I'd have been more prepared for the stormy ocean of adult life. I think.

Filed under: Comedy Religion Reading

# 29 Jan 2005, 04:27PM GMT+5:30: The Spam King's Gambit: Last night I couldn't sleep and I read Spam Kings by Brian McWilliams, a frequent Salon contributor. For a reader at my level of net savviness, McWilliams spins a great tale of the intimate battles among spammers, antispammers, and side-switchers. They taunt each other via instant message! A failed anti-Semite writes great ad copy for pills and plays under assumed names in chess tournaments! I wish I knew how it ended, but nonfiction doesn't wrap itself up in time for a book deadline.

Filed under: Reading

# 17 Dec 2004, 11:01AM GMT+5:30: Metahumor Discovery: I have probably 150 Amar Chitra Katha ("immortal picture stories") comic books, and have been reading ACK for as long as I can remember. I learned most of my Indian mythology from ACK and press it on friends to teach them Indian culture and history. (Right now a friend has one of my Mahabharata sets.) I saw a recommendation for ACK and set off to the ACK online store -- fantastic! Ships anywhere in the world!

Click on "The Making of a Comic" to find out how much work goes into a single ACK. I started laughing uncontrollably when I saw that the ACK folk had drawn this section as an ACK comic. Metahumor works best when it's subverting something you have always taken for granted, not just taking a new joke one step further.

Filed under: Comedy Reading

# 10 Dec 2004, 01:13PM GMT+5:30: Media Matters: Tim Goodman turned me on to Arrested Development and it is awesome and I love it. Even Leonard likes it. Something aside from The West Wing and Star Trek that I can watch with Leonard! It is so great.

Currently reading Middlemarch by George Eliot, which is also fantastic, detailed and observant.

Filed under: Comedy Reading

# 29 Nov 2004, 03:44PM GMT+5:30: Books I Read When I Was Too Young to Really Understand Them: Back to Eden. A denunciation of modern, unholy, unhealthy eating patterns, and a handbook of herbs and more natural healing methods. Lots of enemas. This fascinated me for the anecdotes; I just flipped through the real reference material. He and his kids and grandkids talked about life on a farm, the virtues of a vegan diet, what God wants, and grotesque cases (ER meets All Creatures Great And Small). The guy had a clinic that used "electric therapy" -- I'm not sure what that means.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I was about eleven when I picked this one up. Why it was in our house I have no idea. I learned from this book the sorts of things that other people my age probably learned from the kinds of movies that my parents wouldn't let me watch, e.g., a passing reference to key parties. The introduction contains one of the best Malcolm X quotes, "My coffee is the only thing I like integrated." Looking back, I am surprised that I never confused Alex Haley (who took X's dictation) with Aldous Huxley, and that despite the LeVar Burton obsession I share with Leonard, we still haven't seen Roots.

I Never Played at the White House, Art Buchwald. A watergate-era column anthology. Dave Barry : Art Buchwald :: humor : satire, right? I was twelve. Like Mort Sahl, Buchwald was cheerfully chauvinist in ways I now find annoying. I learned most of what I know about Watergate from this book and from old Doonesbury cartoons.

A Few Minutes With Andy Rooney, Andy Rooney. I think someone gave my dad this book as a gift. Mom and Dad used to call me downstairs when 60 Minutes had 10 minutes left to make sure I wouldn't miss Rooney's stand-up/journalism/blogging. If you ever read the passage in Richard Wright's memoirs where he reads Mencken for the first time....take away most of the profound and awesome power of the experience and you get a sense of Rooney's influence on me. I mean, come on. I'm not Richard Wright! I think the honesty of his voice and the variety of his subjects got to me. I might not love Malcolm Gladwell now except that Rooney got me when I was young.

Sex And The Office, Helen Gurley Brown. Hoo boy. How that book got into my dad's library I have no clue. I may be the only person who's read this book and not Sex and the Single Girl, which came first. If I recall correctly, this book has absolutely no depictions or descriptions of actual sex, but lots of explanations of office politics. I have never used the techniques that the book recommends to succeed in the workplace (maybe I should) or romance (thank heaven I'm fine there).

Don't get my family started on Lee Iacocca's autobiography. It was the only English-language book around at a house in India that I visited when I was nine. I know a lot more about the Chrysler bailout than most people. Most people who dislike the Ford family do so because Henry Ford was an antisemitic wacko; I did because of Iacocca's description of his firing.

Filed under: Reading

# 11 Nov 2004, 03:57PM GMT+5:30: Deepavali, Dipawali, Whatever: Happy Diwali!

While dressing up for work in a shimmery pyjama juba, a.k.a. salwar kameez, I discovered that I don't have any kumkum, a.k.a. kunkuma, a.k.a. bindi, a.k.a. the red dot you wear in the middle of your forehead or between your eyebrows. I used a marker instead.

Diwali usually celebrates the day Rama comes back to Ayodhya (don't get me started on temples and mosques in Ayodhya) after defeating Ravana, a ten-headed demon. I'm reading the first book of Ashok K. Banker's passable fairy-tale retelling of the Ramayana right now; I should time my reading so that I read that part of the story a year from today.

Filed under: Reading Religion

# 10 Nov 2004, 07:59PM GMT+5:30: Not To Mention The Original Big Book: Two of my favorite Christianity bloggers: Real Live Preacher and Slacktivist. I imagine that the Preacher, a.k.a. Gordon Atkinson, would enjoy Douglas Coupland's book All Families Are Psychotic, and now I find that Fred Clark of Slacktivist enjoyed Infinite Jest. Leonard read that recently and I acted irrationally hostile towards him and it whenever I saw the book. I get irrationally angry at people who are doing things I don't have the guts to do. In this case that's both the reader and the writer of a Big Book. When did I stop reading huge books? When I started commuting on BART?

Filed under: Religion Reading

# 31 Oct 2004, 08:56PM GMT+5:30: An Ad For Canadian Schooling: If you ever visit my putative homepage, and you're viewing the page with graphics turned on, you'll see a bit of Russian at the bottom. "Ya mogu yest steklo; eto menya ne vredit," it says. This is a rare lie on my part. It means, "I can eat glass; it doesn't hurt me." A stray thought by some bored Internetter led to the I Can Eat Glass Project web fad, an attempt to translate this phrase into as many languages as possible and publish the results.

Another phrase of this sort is "my hovercraft is full of eels", deriving from a Monty Python sketch about a really bad Hungarian-English phrasebook. Today, whilst reading the really fun Gordon Korman book Son of the Mob [2]: Hollywood Hustle, a line jumped out at me:

...isn't the most romantic place in the world. But this is Willow. She could raise your heart rate in a hovercraft full of eels. She almost makes me forget that...

And a few pages later:

Maybe in Dad's mind, he can lie and tell the truth at the same time, just the way light can simultaneously be both a wave and a particle.

Gordon, you keep surprising me.

Filed under: Reading

# 15 Oct 2004, 07:39PM GMT+5:30: Want More Profane Rants?: I bought America: The Book by the writers of The Daily Show. It is a jewel. It actually disturbs Leonard to hear my cynical laugh several times per minute while reading that thing. A sample from the audiobook.

Filed under: Comedy Reading

# 05 Oct 2004, 01:58PM GMT+5:30: Erudition: Sometimes I wonder what a Camille Paglia presidential run would look like, but Lyndon LaRouche saves me the imaginatory effort.

I highly recommend Mary Roach's funny and enlightening Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. Not to be confused with Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man by Susan Faludi. My bookmark for Stiff: a World Vegetarian Day postcard.

Filed under: Reading

# 22 Sep 2004, 03:45PM GMT+5:30: Lots Of Puns And Theodicy: Done with Blameless in Abaddon, thus 2/3 of the way through The Godhead Trilogy. Enjoyable enough. Alexei, I think you'd like it.

Filed under: Reading Religion

# 20 Sep 2004, 09:52AM GMT+5:30: Media: Read Y: The Last Man, Volume I: quite entertaining. I need more! Finished Morrow's depressing This Is The Way The World Ends. Yeah, he is obsessed with submarines and silly names and big show trials. Still reading the better Blameless In Abaddon.

Have now (deep breath) actually started Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. (If I were incredibly hardcore, I could finish that and The Confusion by the time The System of the World went on sale tomorrow.) I was afraid to start Quicksilver and vaguely thought that I had to study the history of currency and the Enlightenment to prepare before reading it. Well, I'm fifty pages in and enjoying it, and of course Stephenson is exfoliating, I mean expositioning enough to keep me not-too-confused (i.e., it's not the cursèd Name of the Rose which is nigh-impossible to read without annotation if you didn't grow up Christian (I said nigh-impossible so you don't have to write me with exceptions)). I did say "gah" at the same thing that annoyed Leonard, but he assures me that it gets better.

I must admit that the Stanford college radio station is pretty good and, unlike the UC Berkeley station, has an MP3 stream as well as a RealPlayer stream.

Filed under: Reading Religion

# 18 Aug 2004, 06:22PM GMT+5:30: Recurring: Just finished Douglas Coupland's Miss Wyoming. Yes, he writes the same book over and over, but it is a very good book.

Filed under: Reading

# 07 Jul 2004, 10:42AM GMT+5:30: Did You Mean: C.S. Lewis or Philip Pullman?: I've read James Morrow's Only Begotten Daughter and Bible Stories For Adults and now I'm reading Towing Jehovah. Like, say, Stephenson, he loves naming things, "Father Thomas Ockham" for one. Lots of great analogies: "A choral gurgling filled the air, as if the museum were honeycombed with defective storm drains." As for Towing Jehovah (which Leonard insists on singing to the tune "Waltzing Matilda") specifically, the World War II re-enactment subplot bores me, but I still like the main plot so far. On the whole, I like Morrow, and taught a very interesting short story he wrote in my sci-fi class. His Christian and ethical fantasy amuses me, even if it's uneven. The similarly themed stories in Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others are consistently good. I want to read more by both.

Filed under: Reading Religion

# 17 Jun 2004, 10:08AM GMT+5:30: Also We Were Eating Sun-Dried Tomato Pesto On Arugula: This morning on BART, the person next to me was reading the same issue of Smithsonian as I was.

Filed under: Reading

# 30 May 2004, 11:38AM GMT+5:30: Books: Reading The Greedy Hand by Amity Shlaes, a WSJ writer with whom I vastly disagree, which means John might like it.

Also reading James Morrow's Only Begotten Daughter, in which Jesus Christ's sister is born to a Jewish bachelor in Atlantic City in 1974. James Morrow loves probing ethical systems and religions in the context of fantasy.

I'm sure tonight I'll dream of a booming voice directing me to render unto Him what is Caesar's.

Filed under: Taxes Reading Religion

# 17 May 2004, 02:34PM GMT+5:30: Death, Taxes, And Sumana Writing About Taxes: Reading Conversion and the Poll Tax in Early Islam. Dennett writes clearly and entertainingly, even though it's a university press book with a tiny audience. Good job! Also, he amuses me by saying, "Let us examine the Byzantine tax system of Syria" and actually meaning "Byzantine."

The Arab Empire experienced, of course, some of the same problems that the modern US and modern Israel have. If you use reduced taxes as an incentive for some behavior (such as conversion to Islam or investment in state and municipal bonds), then people will do that and your tax receipts will go down. If you reduce the incentive, then the interest group you have just created will grumble or rebel. If you tax everyone else more heavily to make up the difference, you're fomenting class war. If you try to make up the difference with deficit spending or spending cuts, you might lose credibility, or even the ability to govern effectively. (You can only cut police and military spending so much!)

Finally, from Waltman's Political Origins of the U.S. Income Tax:

If we accord the income tax a high place in the patheon of bequests from the Progressive era, we must sadly note it is a legacy bequeathed only by racism. Were it not for the Democratic leadership in Congress being in the hands of those who wanted to spare the common man much of the taxes he bore in 1913, we would not have had the progressive income tax. But who were these economic humanists Ratner and others have praised? Kitchin, Simmons, Underwood, Hull, Williams, Garner. Every one of them was from the South, and they were all guardians of white supremacy. In fact, even their homilies on taxes are laced with crude racist stories and jokes. When they turned to such issues as black soldiers being armed during World War I or antilynch laws, their venom knew few bounds. To be sure, some were worse racists than others, and to be sure it can be argued that had they deviated from the "party line", their replacements might have been worse. And it is almost certainly true that without their votes and leadership we would have had much more exploitative tax policies. Yet, it is a sad tradeoff. Progressive tax policies were bought with impediments to any progress along racial lines. Before we celebrate the virtues of our income tax therefore, a tear is in order for those to whom taxes were secondary.

Every action has an opportunity cost. If you are sleeping, you can't be writing, and if you are sleeping or writing the Great Customer Service Novel then you cannot be hyping your new one-woman show.

Filed under: Taxes Reading

# 13 May 2004, 09:55AM GMT+5:30: Media Revue: All three of these bits of media experience have something to do with the Middle East! And I didn't even intend it.

Last night's Enterprise provoked even more US/Middle East Allegory babble in me. The sphere-builders are... Ahmad Chalabi! No, the neocons! Ahmad Chalabi is the leader of the Reptilians. No, the reptilian is Prince Bandar! Tucker is Ted Olson! And the Council is... OPEC? a "Mirror, Mirror" UN?

The Council seems really legitimate as a government to everyone in it except the Reptilians, which I guess makes the Reptilians like the US. Are the Insectoids Britain?

Also, Enterprise pulled off a surprisingly assertive mix of heavy exposition, lighthearted banter, trippy sci-fi sets, and suspenseful plot. Good stuff.

West Wing broke my heart in "Gaza." The West Wing thesis on Israel/Palestine resembles Everything Is Ruined's:

"Forget it Jake, it's Jerusalem." Jerusalem is Chinatown. There's nothing you can do. It's a place where there is no right answer. You ask Jake what he did in Chinatown, and he says, "As little as possible." (That's also what he murmurs to himself at the very end of the movie.) "Chinatown" means basically what Heart of Darkness means for Conrad: it's the dark place where every action is a mistake.

The new NSC character, I like. Will Bailey's impatience with nuance discussions, not so much. The huge expository dialogue chunks, a crazed hive-mind talking to itself, I liked. How else to think about the Middle Eastern ourobouros?

Reading Conversion and the Poll Tax in Early Islam by Daniel Dennett, Jr. From the Introduction:

...Nevertheless, all the contributions to the literature of Muslim taxation within the last forty years have been monographic in character and limited in area to particular provinces of the Arab Empire, with the result that there is no single work to which a student who might be interested in the general problem to turn; and if he attempts to master the secondary literature, he will discover so many conflicting data and opinions that his confusion will be increased rather than resolved. This book, therefore, attempts to present a broad view of the system of taxation as it existed in East and West throughout the lands once subject to the Persians and the Greeks, and it is based on all the evidence the writer has been able to discover. It is not, however, a synthesis of the latest opinion, for, as the reader will presently discover, I have views of my own and an axe to grind....

The Introduction's breezy style belies the density of the main text, well, to me. I don't know much about the Ottoman Empire or really a systematic world history at all. Perhaps Charles Adams's For Good And Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization will provide me with a proper framework.

Filed under: Taxes Reading

# 03 May 2004, 05:21PM GMT+5:30: Women: Last night I stayed up too late watching Part I of the original Prime Suspect. Yes, the critics love Helen Mirren for a reason.

Women I have wanted to be (an incomplete list):

Jane Tennison.
Tina Fey.
Once upon a time, Cokie Roberts. (A fantasy of my younger days. On today's Morning Edition she said that the Madrid terror attacks had affected their election results, ignoring the fact that pre-attack polls and post-attack polls both strongly favored the challenger. Yeah, she's off the list.)
Casey Singleton, possibly the only appealing character Michael Crichton ever wrote, in Airframe.

Filed under: Reading

# 30 Apr 2004, 11:00AM GMT+5:30: Compare And Contract: Currently reading Confessions of a Tax Collector: One Man's Tour of Duty Inside the IRS by Richard Yancey. I find it quite enjoyable, as I did Scott Turow's One-L (memoir of his first year at Harvard Law School) and Mike Daisey's 21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com.

Yancey got me with the premise and one of the first lines: "I had just turned twenty-eight, and was wearing a ten-year-old suit with a ten-day-old dark blue tie." Lots of close observations, complex cases nicely narrated, and a sense of suspense in the author's personal transformation. Like Daisey, Yancey uses dark humor and extended metaphors to persuade the reader that the demands of his job pressure him to act amorally and to become an amoral person. Yancey's story, though, is weightier; it tells more and covers a more formidable institution. And he doesn't paint his ethical dilemmas with the broad strokes that Daisey uses; I really won't know till the end of the book what he thinks of what he has done.

Just got to a section on clashes with tax protestors. Oh, the tax protestors. Leonard was kind enough to point me to a report on tax protestors from Reason that softened my heart:

Their attitude toward the Constitution and the statutes and legal decisions regarding the income tax are uniquely Protestant, relying on a layman's ability -- indeed, obligation -- to read and study and parse the original documents himself, to come to his own personal relationship with the law and the cases, and to prefer his understanding to that of the priesthood of lawyers, judges, and accountants.
...
Not merely Protestant, the tax honesty people are strangely reminiscent of fandom -- of the comic book, fantasy, science fiction, role-playing-game variety. They have the same obsession with continuity and coherence within a created fantasy world of words. It's just that, in this case, that world of words isn't a multivolume fantasy epic or a long-running TV series -- it's U.S. law. When these people try to reconcile the definition of income in this subsection of Title 26 of the U.S. Code with the definition in a 1918 Supreme Court case, it's like hearing an argument over the inconsistencies between a supervillain's origin as first presented in a 1965 issue of The Amazing Spider-Man and the explanation given in a 1981 edition of Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man.
The tax honesty movement's vision of the world is fantastical in another way. It is not merely obsessed with continuity; it is magical in a traditional sense. It's devoted to the belief that the secret forces of the universe can be bound by verbal formulas if delivered with the proper ritual. There are numerous formulae in the tax honesty spellbook, with rival mages defending them. Which spell is best: The summoning of the Sovereign Citizen? The incantation of the Constitutional Definition of Income? The banishing spell of No Proper Delegation?
The tax honesty folks similarly believe that their foe the IRS must also be bound by these grimoires of magic: that without the properly sanctified OMB number an IRS form holds no power, that without uttering the mystic word liable no authority to tax can truly exist.
And always, always, the ultimate incantation, The Question: Where does it say that I owe income taxes? Show me the law!

Filed under: Taxes Reading

# 19 Apr 2004, 07:18PM GMT+5:30: On The Night-Table:

Science Fiction/Fantasy: Le Guin's The Word For World Is Forest (heavy-handed and unappealing) and Birthday of the World And Other Stories (nonbad ratio of good to boring stories). Kress, Beaker's Dozen (fun!). Chiang, Story Of Your Life And Others (many good stories, although the recursion theme gets predictable). Currently reading The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead. I like the pacing and characters; Whitehead slightly overdoes the elliptical, lyrical prose, but I don't especially mind.
Tax History: Finished Taxes and People in Israel and am reading The Political Origins of the US Income Tax by Jerold L. Waltman. Did you know the Union imposed a temporary income tax during the Civil War? That's right, the idea didn't just suddenly appear during the Progressive movement.
Children's Books: The sparkling and wonderful Trumpet of the Swan by E.B. White - very much rewards rereading. Popcorn, a nice novel by Gary Provost and Gail Levine-Provost, chiefly memorable because I randomly picked it up when I was younger. The Toothpaste Millionaire by Jean Merrill, the author of The Pushcart War. I'd already read and loved Millionaire and had zoned out during a fourth-grade reading circle of The Pushcart War, which I'll read soon. I wonder whether she wrote the most of all children's authors on business and capitalism.

I could try to combine these trends by reading a sci-fi children's book about taxes, but I don't much care to reread Anthem.

Filed under: Taxes Reading

# 13 Apr 2004, 06:53PM GMT+5:30: Tax Tips: According to Taxes And People In Israel by Harold C. Wilkenfeld, not only does Israel have a Tax Museum, but that selfsame Tax Museum's exhibits go beyond famous people's tax returns. The museum also shows old smuggling devices! Also, it's good to have meetings with taxpayers in private offices, not large open areas where taxpayers can hear each others' cries of outrage.

Filed under: Taxes Reading

# 17 Feb 2004, 12:06PM GMT+5:30: This weekend I reread Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter. Today a loose window in the office is letting in mournful, wailing wind.

Filed under: Reading

# 30 Jan 2004, 04:51PM GMT+5:30: Salon Brilliant Career (Mine): On a midday errand jaunt, I bought some Fitzgerald and Trollope's The Way We Live Now at Stacey's. I asked some coworkers about Trollope and we talked about Victorian novels a bit, both the IT manager and the tech VP enthusiastically recommending Middlemarch. These are the conversations I suppose outsiders think we have all the time.

Yesterday I found out that everyone but me knew that jail differs markedly from prison. One is held in a city or county jail for under a year; a state prison houses longer-term inmates. I've gone my whole life thinking "jail" and "prison" were straight synonyms.

Filed under: Reading

# 26 Jan 2004, 04:42PM GMT+5:30: High school hierarchies and the attendant etiquette dilemmas are the closest I have ever come to the world of Anna Karenina.

Filed under: Reading

# 16 Jan 2004, 03:17PM GMT+5:30: Thanatos: Workers are tearing down a red brick building a block away. Salon's employees are oohing and aahing by the window. Reminds me of the powerful, awesome last pages of 21 Dog Years by Mike Daisey.

Filed under: Reading

# 30 Dec 2003, 11:39AM GMT+5:30: Long-Overdue Update: I had a contented Christmas with the Whitney/Richardson clan down in Bakersfield, CA. We exchanged pleasant gifts and put up with Gretel, a German Shepherd dog who is enthusiastic. I read Philip Pullman's The Broken Bridge and two Terry Pratchett Discworld books. I like The Truth, but Small Gods is my favorite so far.

I've been mildly ill since midway through the trip back, but I feel much better today.

As much as WebTV vexes me when its users have trouble with Salon Premium, I still hugely respect the urge that brought it to life. The founder of WebTV has died, having empowered and connected many, many people.

Filed under: Reading

# 09 Dec 2003, 10:56AM GMT+5:30: Beyond Microserfs, Beyond Nostradamus: Reading Douglas Coupland's All Families Are Psychotic. It so engrossed me this morning that I missed my Muni stop.

Once I watched Tartuffe at San Joaquin Delta College and the program praised Molière's economy of characters. He used only as many characters as were necessary, no more. Coupland feels like that to me, and helps jar the plaque loose from my brain.

Filed under: Reading

# 26 Nov 2003, 12:07PM GMT+5:30: Methodist, Baptist, Catholic, Presbyterian: Wesley Clark talks about his spiritual beliefs. He's regularly attended a few different churches in his life. Right now he considers himself a Catholic, but doesn't attend a Catholic church.

...One night I walked out of the church when the priest said that we should never have fought the Revolutionary War and every war was bad. It was 4th of July. It was an outrageously political statement. I just never felt right when people in the church would take these overtly political positions especially when I felt like I was a good Christian, I was serving my country, and I just didn't feel like I deserved to be lambasted by the priest on the 4th of July...

This passage really underscores the difficulty of reconciling a career in the military with a commitment to the Christian faith. I'd love to have a deep, off-the-record discussion with Clark about that.

Clark and his campaign make the right noises re: religious tolerance ("Wes Clark Sends Warm Greetings to Muslims for Eid Al-Fitr" today) and, earlier in the interview, we see that Clark loves his religion for its comfort and power of leadership and moral guidance. I'm more comfortable with that than with the crusader-like Christianity of George W. Bush.

Filed under: Reading

# 25 Nov 2003, 07:01PM GMT+5:30: If You Haven't Seen It, It's Greek To You!: Oresteia and Pratchett's Small Gods are alike in that they both propose a more rational, constitution-based relationship among gods and humans. Sort of.

I want to see both plays in the Continental Divide sequence/cycle/set/wave/particle in mid-December, and am tentatively settled on Sun. Dec 14th to see them both. If you'd like to join me, please make contact.

Filed under: Reading

# 23 Nov 2003, 07:17PM GMT+5:30: It Was Election Day: A year late, I got around to typing up my hands-wrung-over introduction to a Garrison Keillor event.

Good evening to you, ladies, gentlemen.
We welcome you to this evening's event.
Thank you for coming, since some of you want
To check tonight if your vote made a dent.

Instead, you're here, and, thanks to Cody's Books,
Tonight I have the honor to present
Garrison Keillor, master of the pen
And one-man radio establishment.

But first, a few administrative notes.
Please silence cell phones......yes, NOW, go ahead.
The bathrooms are behind you, on the right.
Sure, go, but don't make noise to raise the dead.

After his reading, he'll take Q & A
And then he'll do a signing, row by row.
I'd like to thank the church for our venue
And Cody's Books for putting on the show.

You may know Mr. Keillor from his show,
"A Prairie Home Companion," which is great.
Or maybe you have read some of his books,
like "Lake Wobegon Summer 1958."  Er, six.

He also does "A Writer's Almanac,"
where every day he reads one poem, no more.
And he's compiled them in his brand-new book,
"Good Poems."  (You can buy it at the door.)

I've listened to his show since I was twelve --
But you didn't come here to hear 'bout me.
So I thank Mr. Keillor, and I say,
I give to you the man you came to see:

Garrison Keillor.

Filed under: Reading

# 27 Oct 2003, 03:30PM GMT+5:30: Pretty tired.

When I was in eleventh grade, I asked my wonderful English teacher, Sam Hatch, to name his favorite novel. He considered and answered: Dostoyevsky's The Idiot. A few years ago I tried to read it and gave up in boredom and confusion forty or seventy pages in.

I've just begun it again, and can't imagine why I stopped last time. Leo and Nastasya intrigue me as two eccentrics who are playing by their own rules and forcing everyone else to adapt. You have to know the game to break its rules to your own advantage. Four years ago, I didn't know the game.

Filed under: Reading

# 21 Oct 2003, 03:32PM GMT+5:30: Cred: Andrew Leonard saw me reading Beyond Fear while eating lunch and proclaimed that I am such a geek.

Filed under: Reading

# 10 Oct 2003, 10:27AM GMT+5:30: Cody's Appearances: Terry Pratchett is at Cody's in Berkeley tonight. Other appearances this month (after October use this link, probably) include Berkeley Breathed and Molly Ivins.

I've finished reading the first three of Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency mysteries. Recommended.

Filed under: Reading

# 18 Sep 2003, 03:22PM GMT+5:30: Books: Reading Dostoyevsky's Notes From the Underground, which has so many quotable lines. The fragment that really affected me when I read the first few pages, years ago: "...in that fever of oscillations, of resolutions determined for ever and repented of again a minute later..." Now, I'm fond of this one: "My jests, gentlemen, are of course in bad taste, jerky, involved, lacking self-confidence. But of course that is because I do not respect myself. Can a man of perception respect himself at all?"

I'm considering his discussion of action and justice, which reminds me of the Bhagavad-Gita.

Just read The Eyre Affair by Fforde (a gift from Nathaniel and Shweta), which I enjoyed, and Changing Lanes by Le Guin (a gift from Zack), which I really liked, and Making Book by Teresa Nielsen Hayden, which I liked most when she talked about copyediting.

Filed under: Reading

# 11 Sep 2003, 11:16AM GMT+5:30: Currently reading The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde, an alternate-history time-travel literary detective story. Reminds me of Connie Willis in that you see academics doing time travel in modern England, only it's not as annoying. Verdict in a few days.

About to read: Jake, Reinvented, the new Great Gatsby takeoff by Gordon Korman. I have probably talked more about this book than anyone else who does not work for Hyperion Books. Well, Korman and Fitzgerald are two great tastes, etc. If you don't have anything to be enthusiastic about then you're dead inside. I have Korman, Good Eats, and the possibility of writing another article for Salon. The stand-up bug is nagging rather than encouraging, in case you're wondering.

Filed under: Reading

# 25 Jul 2003, 04:08PM GMT+5:30: Nobody Expects a Palace of Wax!: I'm reading the Mahabharata in prose form, as edited by C. Rajagopalachari, "popularly known as 'Rajaji' or 'C.R.'" Fantastic stuff. I see the connections among little narratives and anecdotes that I read in Amar Chitra Katha comic books. I see how conflicting senses of duty wrought so much inner turmoil in the characters. Very plotty, with characters malicious, struggling, good, and misguided. Wonderful. The best BART ride read I've had in a while.

And this refresher will come in handy when I write my Monty Python-esque treatment of the epic.

Filed under: Reading

# 17 Jul 2003, 09:59AM GMT+5:30: "buy / my / album": First there was The Holy Tango of Poetry, and now we have the much more profane version which includes Jewel.

Filed under: Comedy Reading

# 10 Jul 2003, 10:36AM GMT+5:30: Sadly, No Chance of Customer Bashing: Cody's Books weblog. I bet that the outside-world liaison is the only one with write access to the blog, and I'll have to get on the webmaster's case to make permalinks, but for now, I'm getting excited seeing that my favorite authors have new books coming soon. I'll be reading Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, Garrison Keillor's Love Me, and Terry Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment. And Michael Moore's new book is Dude, Where's My Country?

Update, 14 July: Correction on the blogwriter's descriptive title.

Filed under: Reading

# 26 Jun 2003, 11:20AM GMT+5:30: "In fact, Kia is trans-just about every system of human categorisation, and what she isn't trans- she is post-." -- Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

My mind dwells on my post-ness because only last night did I hear Weird Al's "Your Horoscope For Today." Also, a customer just complimented me as such: "This may be the most postmodern, Gen WXY customer service letter I have ever received."

Filed under: Reading

# 21 Jun 2003, 10:58PM GMT+5:30: Verdict: It's okay. I didn't enjoy it as much as I did Goblet of Fire. Hey Leonard, no need to hurry. Finish Paradise Lost and that Grisham, Painted Christmas or whatever, first.

Update: I feel foolish for having cared so much earlier today, before I started the thing. As though "Even Cody's is hyping it!" were a prophecy of quality, as though this book would stand with The Great Gatsby and The Mahabharata and change my worldview. (Is this one really not as good as #4? Or am I now more demanding?)

On the upside, it was really nice to just escape into a book for hours. I needed the break. Tomorrow, back to packing, moving, and missing Leonard.

Filed under: Reading

# 21 Jun 2003, 08:37PM GMT+5:30: Can't Talk: This weekend: my sister and I are moving and I'm reading the new Rowling. And I miss Leonard.

Filed under: Reading

# 19 Jun 2003, 08:52AM GMT+5:30: I do hope Brendan wasn't too influenced by my disparaging comment on Microserfs (context). Microserfs felt epic and seldom annoying. I liked it a lot, and should reread it.

Filed under: Reading

# 13 Jun 2003, 11:03AM GMT+5:30: When You All Of A Sudden Aren't Working In A Bookstore: You can still read book excerpts, online, at BookBrowse, from Louise Erdrich to Joseph Ellis.

Filed under: Reading

# 12 Jun 2003, 05:14PM GMT+5:30: Find Your Grind: The Salon office environment reminds me, I now realize, of some cross between every media outlet I've ever worked for (e.g., KUOP, "Talking it Through with John Morearty: Dialogues on War and Peace", all my school newspapers from 5th grade on to the Daily Cal) and all the dotcom jobs I've ever had (tech writing, almost exclusively). Elements of the former include frequent deadlines, eccentric writers, loose or nonexistent dress codes, some amount of idealism and fulfillment. Elements of the latter include cubicles, references to "HR", lots of people spending 8 hours a day in front of a screen, more tedium.

But various elements remain the same as they were in my last job, at Cody's Books. Example: publishers send Salon advance copies, hoping we'll review them. So there's lots of free reading material around. But, unlike at Cody's, I find here that the publishers somehow sense the unlikelihood that Salon will review the latest potboiler (M Is For More Murder et al.), so the ratio of interesting stuff to faddle is higher. I just read Hands On!, an interesting collection of 33 essays giving advice to preteen girls. Recommended for all ages and genders for its practical and theoretical advice, the last item of which is "Don't Take Advice."

Filed under: Reading

# 05 Jun 2003, 06:14PM GMT+5:30: Since evidently I'm a 24 Hour Party Person and can't be bothered to actually talk about the books I'm reading, I hereby point you to the Cody's Books summer recommends. I recommended The Apprentice, Crescent, The Bug, Hey Nostradamus!, The Innocents Abroad, and the Salon and Slate anthologies. More seriously, I really do have to talk soon about books. Maybe after I move.

Filed under: Reading

# 06 May 2003, 11:50AM GMT+5:30: Beyond Extreme!: One of our distributors maintains a web page that alerts booksellers to hot new titles about to hit the market. One such title: Lost Souls of the Dead and Dying by J. Berkman.

Publisher Marketing: A nomadic group of vampires has come to Atlanta to find a new wife and daughter for their leader, a tortured creature who traded his soul for immortality and power. Tom Resnick, a successful conservative talk-show host, thinks he understands life, and that he is in complete control of his destiny-until his wife and daughter become the vampires' next target. Hell itself protects these creatures, and Tom refuses to believe they exist. If not for the intervention of a mysterious vampire hunter who's been chasing the monsters for over twenty years, Tom and his family would already by lost. But even with the stranger's help, Tom must quickly expand his view of reality, beyond logic and reason, to have any chance at protecting his family. To save his wife and daughter may cost Tom his own soul, but first he must admit he has one.

Will the pent-up demand for this book fill my store with Anne-Rice-haters champing at the bit?

Filed under: Reading

# 02 May 2003, 11:41PM GMT+5:30: Still No Word From Salon: That pretty much defined my day. Steve's travelogue, a very nice evening with Adam, and some Gordon Korman (The Zucchini Warriors and Losing Joe's Place) distracted me. Man, I really gotta fill up my weekend. I'm probably going to get a fish and go to some BATS Improv.

Filed under: Reading

# 02 May 2003, 07:59AM GMT+5:30: Second Thoughts Aren't Doublethink: On second thought, maybe modern sci-fi already contains an abundance of the sort of thinking exemplified in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and my friends, who read much sci-fi, will not read The Curious Incident and think, "Oh wow! This person thinks like me!" Instead, perhaps, they will read it and think, "Why is this person going on and on about these obvious things? I could have written this, why am I reading it?"

Filed under: Reading

# 01 May 2003, 04:58PM GMT+5:30: Just started reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. Excellent so far. It's a rather-hyped mystery novel whose first-person protagonist is a 15-year-old boy with Asperger's syndrome (I think). Man, he feels familiar.

Filed under: Reading

# 26 Apr 2003, 06:52PM GMT+5:30: Take That, J. Bradford DeLong!: I just reread Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed. Silly idea: a book entitled The Good Soldier Shevek.

[The born-and-raised socialist/anarchist] tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream.

Filed under: Reading

# 19 Apr 2003, 12:47PM GMT+5:30: Intellectual Time Waster: While researching books for a customer, I discovered that the University of Chicago Press posts tons of fascinating excerpts. Behind the scenes at talk shows, why hundreds of Chicagoans died in the 1995 heat wave and the mass media ignored it, apocrypha, Japanese-American draft resisters in World War II, Insiders' French, maps of gerrymandered districts, and more.

Filed under: Reading

# 08 Apr 2003, 09:02AM GMT+5:30: Father Blog Stories: I've been reading G.K. Chesterton; his Father Brown stories tickle my fondness for high-concept mysteries, and his style is great, but the preaching gets on my nerves. Here's a modern mystery tale of weblogs, secret meetings, skulduggery, and betrayal. (via Electrolite)

In other links, Frances might enjoy Teresa Nielsen Hayden's guide to "judging the dubiousness of saints", and Rob Walker goes a little nuts over new Humvee ads. Walker cites Gregg Easterbrook with coining the category "FUV" in "Axle of Evil", a monster article explaining reasons why SUVs are abominable.

"What does it say about the United States that there are now millions of people who want to drive an anti-social automobile? Huge numbers of Americans will pay thousands of dollars extra for vehicles that visually declare, "I have serious psychological problems." (Though maybe we are better off having this declared.)"

Filed under: Religion Reading

# 06 Apr 2003, 11:17AM GMT+5:30: Excerpt From My Lonely Planet Guide To Weblogs: The difference between your high-powered, well-known weblogs (e.g. Instapundit and Body and Soul) and the journals of many of my friends is like the difference between a grand city restaurant and someone's kitchen at home. I go to a Big Blog for consistency and to my friends for personality.

Examples of those latter gems: Rachel, otherwise known as the sister of Leonard who's not getting married this summer, sums up her week; Sarah regularly tosses off links in the way I think Dorothy Parker would, and enchants me endlessly.

Filed under: Reading

# 05 Apr 2003, 06:59PM GMT+5:30: A science fiction short story featuring shipping containers.

Filed under: Reading

# 14 Mar 2003, 05:05PM GMT+5:30: How to Take a Nap: I'm sick. I needed to take a nap and I was a little tired. So I set myself up with tissues and water, and put on a soothing tape of Russian choral music, and tried to read my Routledge Great Philosophers: Berkeley.

Filed under: Reading

# 13 Mar 2003, 09:48PM GMT+5:30: Books You Can't Read Yet: Finished Crescent (April) by Diana Abu-Jaber, which is very good. The blurb calls it an Arab-American Like Water For Chocolate, and though I haven't read Like Water that seems right. I laughed and cried and hoped and gasped and there were almost no hints of magical realism, so I'm happy.

Now reading Ellen Ullman's The Bug (May), which at every page reveals itself as the novel I wish I were good enough to write. Various Indian diaspora writers have already written The Great Indian-American Novel, and now it looks like Ullman has the Great American Girl Geek Novel title locked. Excellent, suspenseful, evocative, emotionally accurate. It's bad for my health, since it tempts me to read rather than sleep. I'll go to sleep now anyway.

Filed under: Reading

# 10 Mar 2003, 05:17PM GMT+5:30: More neat paper things: Biella Coleman has met her and Paul Ford has pondered her. Geek writer Ellen Ullman will publish a new book, The Bug, in May. Today I received an advance copy. Looking forward to reading it and, someday, Close to the Machine.

Filed under: Reading

# 10 Mar 2003, 04:48PM GMT+5:30: I finally got around to visiting Sproul Hall. And now what's in my bag? My diploma! Doesn't look much different than most other computer-printed foil-stamped multi-signed certificates, but tonight I'll tack it on my wall to fend off I-never-graduated nightmares, like an ultraspecific dreamcatcher.

Not only did the registrar clerk give me the diploma, but she also gave me a "free" book (There Was Light) of UCB alumni essays. This book is paperback and seems to have no ISBN.

I walked down Telegraph. The sun shone. I'm more different from the mass here now. I have the thing they're ostensibly striving for. I'm not excited, just a little more confident, a little more fulfilled.

...Diploma in my haaaaaaand,
No, no, they can't take that away from me...

Filed under: Reading

# 02 Mar 2003, 10:22AM GMT+5:30: I have finished several books recently, such as Mostly Harmless (which I understand much better than I did ten years ago, and which touches me) and Jacques Pepin's memoirs and Ved Mehta's essay collection. I hope to tell you about the Mehta and Pepin books soon. Right now I'm reading Crescent, a delicious to-be-published novel by Diana Abu-Jaber. But for now: the Sally Lockhart series by good old Phil Pullman.

Half a year ago, as Leonard celebrated his birthday in Bakersfield with bouts of nausea, I devoured The Ruby in the Smoke, staying up late to eat one fudge-dipped strawberry page after another. The next day I had to drive up to SF, tired and silent (Leonard couldn't talk much), and I waited six months more to move on to The Shadow in the North, The Tiger in the Well, and the guest-starring-Sally-Lockhart The Tin Princess. I read all those in about a week. They entranced me even as each successive book got on my nerves more and more.

Pullman uses his share of Connie Willis-like plot contrivances that only frustrate the protagonists and reader. Adelaide in particular fulfills Ebert's Law of Economy of Character Development. But even that I can forgive when he pulls (ha) it off, which he often does. (Warning: The Tin Princess especially suffers from Willis Disease, being Pullman's non-supernatural novel of international intrigue and warfare. Anticlimactic ending, too.)

The thing that really made me gape was a subplot in The Tiger in the Well, where Pullman enlists turn-of-the-century socialism and his plot in each other's service. It's Bizarro Ayn Rand. In a climactic showdown with the villain, Sally tells him (paraphrase): "You're not evil. I've seen evil. Evil isn't exotic. Evil doesn't have an accent. Evil is five children living in one room, families who don't have enough to eat..." It's didactic and disorienting, but doesn't quite overpower the plot.

Leonard envisions a scenario where someone confronts Dr. Evil (of the Austin Powers movies) with this speech, and Dr. Evil realizes that his pro forma evil was not really evil, and in fact is cancelled out by his philanthropic works.

Filed under: Reading

# 25 Feb 2003, 12:40PM GMT+5:30: It Takes Galt's Gulch to Raise a Child: Libertarian children's books, from The Hobbit to Heinlein.

Update: Man, I hadn't thought about Galt's Gulch in a long time. For those of you who haven't wasted hours of your life on Atlas Shrugged, Galt's Gulch is the hidden libertarian paradise (the one Seth Finkelstein calls Libertopia). If I could stomach reading the thing again, I'd write up the outrageous childrearing practices of Galt's Gulch inhabitants, or you could do it yourself. I feel ill just thinking about it.

Filed under: Reading

# 02 Feb 2003, 09:56PM GMT+5:30: Finally, Some Reviews: Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (IMDB entry): Leonard liked it, and I was glad, since I had been dragged to it and loved it four years ago. Dr. Evil really seems a separate character from Austin. Spoiler: Austin shows himself to be an honorable man when he refuses to take advantage of Vanessa when she's drunk. That's always been the sweetest moment in the film to me.

The Hidden Fortress (IMDB entry) by Kurosawa: I found the film rather boring and long. After The Seven Samurai I expected something more absorbing, with more sympathetic characters. I hated the buffoons, the two main characters (or at least framing-device characters) who just schemed stupidly. And why did everybody yell all the time? Bad microphones? I guess it must be good, as it's Kurosawa, but I didn't see the qualities that recommended it to George Lucas. (The story goes that Lucas thinks of The Hidden Fortress as the ur-Star Wars. Then again, I don't much care for Star Wars either.)

The Producers (IMDB entry): This film is definitely funny. It takes place in the comedy universe, as Leonard puts it, and doesn't try too hard to explain improbabilities. By my just-invented Some Like It Hot-o-meter, where the entire comediness of a film can be measured in the average funniness of a scene, The Producers shines. Most scenes are funny, and there aren't that many of them, thus shooting the film up to about a .75 or .8 Some Like It Hot ranking: about Some Like It H.

I would actually see the Broadway production for twenty or 25 dollars. I assume that Nathan Lane plays Zero Mostel's role and that Matthew Broderick plays Wilder, right? Oh yeah, that reminds me: as I watched Wilder, I thought, "I can't help thinking of him as Willy Wonka from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory." That passed. A week later, when I showed Leonard Willy Wonka &c., he said, "I can't help thinking of him as Harold Bloom from The Producers!" [Update: He said Leo Bloom, not Harold Bloom. Whoops. Yeah, I work in a bookstore.] Oh, and Leonard can't stand Willy Wonka, except for the line where Mike TV jumps into a stupid situation and Wonka lazily calls out, "No, stop, come back."

My notes for The Producers contain the phrase "SF in spring", but I don't know why.

Adaptation (IMDB entry). Saw this with Joe, and it's quite good. For the Gödel, Escher, Bach crowd. Yes, it's gimmicky, but also immensely entertaining, and you probably will like the ending better than I did. I would see it again, with you, even!

Sarah Peters asks:

"so what's the deal with "dr. zhivago"? when is it set? is it actually about a doctor? like ER but with lots and lots of snow?"

Well, Sarah, Boris Pasternak set Doctor Zhivago around the Russian Revolution eighty-odd years back, with an actual doctor or two, but very few explicitly medical scenes. I haven't *cough* er, quite *cough* finished Dr. Zhivago yet. I put it down a few weeks ago and haven't come back to it. It's good. Pasternak writes a fine scene and sets up scenery wonderfully. I save about a paragraph every twenty pages that I simply must quote to Leonard. And, since I haven't seen the film, I really must finish the book to find out how it ends!

I have finished some books in the interim, despite my preoccupation with stand-up. I read a Routledge pocket introduction to Karl Popper, which strengthened my rather Popperian convictions on science and knowability. And I'm almost done with Philip Pullman's Sally Lockhart series, of which more soon.

I also skimmed Zoya's Story, an astonishing memoir by an Afghan woman working with RAWA. It brought tears to my eyes. How brave, strong, and resourceful these women are! The narrator notes briefly that she's my age and has already renounced marriage for the cause of the people of Afghanistan. Wow. What would I sacrifice, and for what? I am a coward.

Filed under: Reading

# 28 Jan 2003, 10:14AM GMT+5:30: McWhorter Update!: Johnnie Mac's newest tome, Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority, has arrived at Cody's Books. I've been skimming it and it looks good. The cover photo is silly, but what are you gonna do.

Filed under: Reading

# 27 Jan 2003, 08:50AM GMT+5:30: I finally got back to the Sally Lockhart trilogy. I finished Shadow in the North in about two days. Now I'm on Tiger in the Well. Who besides Pullman and Card writes such non-trashy pageturners?

Oh, and I saw Christopher Hitchens at the store Friday night. He seems like The Economist: wry and British and presenting an appearance of extreme erudition. And the in-crowd is hip to him, and you'd better be too. I'm not sure whom I disparage more with this comparison.

Filed under: Reading

# 18 Dec 2002, 11:54AM GMT+5:30: Once upon a time I required students to read David Brin's political critique of George Lucas's work. Now Mr. Brin has rolled up his sleeves and made similar arguments regarding Tolkien. I prefer the Salon version to the longer one at his website.

Filed under: Reading

# 14 Dec 2002, 01:33AM GMT+5:30: It is my considered opinion, based on many years of reading Amar Chitra Katha comics, that Indra is not the king of the gods. He convenes councils to try to protect heaven from rakshasa invasions, a task which almost always falls to Vishnu or suchlike in the end. Once in a while he goes head-to-head with Vishnu or Shiva and loses, either directly or in some proxy battle fought on earth. Perhaps a more modern translation would have Indra be Secretary-General of the gods.

Filed under: Reading

# 07 Dec 2002, 12:04AM GMT+5:30: I'm enjoying the drawn-out pleasure of Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. I usually hate tone-setting narration, but here it's great. And Pasternak's swift and cutting depictions of the Revolution clearly say, "Censor me!" and/or portray all the reasons people became starry-eyed Communists.

Work, parties, Leonard, stand-up worries, books. Michael greeted me with a Bach sonata or partita when I got home. Could one go on the Atkins diet and remain a vegetarian? Does UC's president put the university on an Atkins diet? Will I make it to the Apollo Amateur Night performance in Zellerbach? What am I supposed to be doing?

Filed under: Reading

# 25 Nov 2002, 11:17PM GMT+5:30: Slang Serving Suggestions: If you've read Cryptonomicon, use "one-note flute" instead of "one-trick pony" or "one-hit wonder."

I got to share the bound kitsch that is Secrets of Loveliness (Scholastic, 1969) with Sarah and Anirvan this evening. Especially vexing: the quiz on distinguishing fun/harmless, sloppy, and objectionable/taboo fads. Pasting decals on one's legs is fine, but wearing longer skirts than everyone else is taboo? Aieee!

I'm flirting with the idea of doing stand-up at A Cuppa Tea tomorrow night, but I'm not sure. I'd have to write some material; I'll update you when I decide.

Filed under: Reading

# 20 Nov 2002, 07:44PM GMT+5:30: So I've been reading and watching a lot. I recently bought several CDs, and I'll have to talk about those after listening to them each several times. But the books and movies I can review. In progress: Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, which gets going after the first few chapters, so stick with it.

Finished:

The Interpreter by Suki Kim. The worst possible combination: bad, yet not so bad that I could excuse myself for quitting halfway through. Barely engaging plot and wholly unengaging main character. If I want to experience mopiness, indecision, past-stuckness, and first-generation immigrant rootlessness, I'll just think, thank you. But the mystery plot did interest me, and Kim made a few immigrant insights. Here are the best bits:

But a dream remains a dream always. Nothing alters the fact that she never got to see them again. She never held Mom's hands and asked why irises brought a smile to her face. She never let Dad explain what made him leave Korea, why he was so tortured by his old country. She never begged them for time, just a little more time to understand. She never told them that she had to run because she could not see ahead as long as they were there. She could not embrace this place called American while they never forgot to remind her what was not Korea. She could not make sense of her American college, American friends, American lovers, while her parents toiled away twelve hours a day, seven days a week at their Bronx store. She could not become American as long as she remained their daughter. She betrayed them, so she might live.
.....
"...I can heat up some water, or maybe boricha?" he says, putting a kettle on the stove.
..."Boricha," she answers. My favorite, she is about to add, and then realizes that it's been years since she had it last. Mom had used to keep it refrigerated and serve it instead of water....She seems to have forgotten about it one day. Odd how that happens. You swear by certain things -- that particular sundress he first saw you in, or that rose lipstick you wore every day, or that barley tea you once declared you couldn't live without. But then, one day, someone, perhaps a stranger, in a bare, bleak apartment far from home, asks, without a hint of history, "Water or boricha?" and you suddenly remember that it's been years since you've even thought of it. But how is that possible? How is it that you could go on fine without what had once been so essential, that you haven't even been aware of its absence? How is it then you could declare, without hesitation, that it is your favorite? Shouldn't love require more? Isn't love a responsibility?

There. Now you don't have to read The Interpreter, Suki Kim's first novel, tentatively scheduled for publication in January of 2002 from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. But if you like you can have my advance copy.

Son of the Mob, by Gordon Korman. Actually good, and different from much of his past fare. Very different from Son of Interflux, thank goodness! More booze, sex, and death. Also, our emphasis is on one main character, and not his relationship with a best male buddy, and it's told in the first person. Korman, if I guess correctly, tried his hand here in using skills and addressing more mature content that he cut his teeth on with throwaway series stuff; he recently wrote some teen paperbacks with the title "Escape" or "Everest" or "Survivor" or "Island" or something. I look forward to more explorations of these themes by Korman.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy. Ripped through its hundred pages in an hour or so. I wonder how fast I could read it in Russian? If you liked the psychological insights of Anna Karenina but hated spending the whole summer keeping a chart of the characters' names and relationships, this is the book for you. I find the ending patched-on and inauthentic, but maybe Tolstoy always did that to try and convince himself to be upbeat, and besides, I've never died. The whole thing is good. One of several funny bits:

The syllogism he [Ivan Ilyich] had learned from Kiesewsetter's logic -- "Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal" -- had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but by no means to himself.

Hey, if I were quoting modern Russian poets, would I use "Blokquote"? [groan]

Off to see Enterprise and West Wing alone, sob. Next time: Punch-Drunk Love (IMDB entry) and Bowling for Columbine (IMDB entry).

Filed under: Reading

# 17 Nov 2002, 12:54AM GMT+5:30: I got to hang out with Sarah Peters, of old-classmate fame, this evening. We saw Michael Moore's new film, Bowling for Columbine, and I'll talk about that soon. That and The Interpreter by Suki Kim, and Son of the Mob by Gordon Korman.

Today Leonard told me the story of Joseph (he of the coat of many colors) and Sarah elucidated the story of Abraham and Isaac. Bible stories interest me as mythology; in return, I talked about the Mahabharata. Didja ever notice that the Pandavas are like the Spice Girls? Bheema is Scary Spice, Arjuna is Sporty Spice. I don't know that other Spice aspects correspond to Pandavas, but at least it is easy to distinguish the Pandavas with short adjectives, e.g., strong, dutiful, etc. Except the twins. Nakula and Sahadeva? Or Sakula and Nahadeva? As though it matters. They die first anyway.

As you can tell, I've been reading The Book of Ratings (Brunching!). Very good stuff, and I think Lore added some stuff for the book. Value!

Filed under: Reading

# 04 Nov 2002, 03:14PM GMT+5:30: Very odd dreams recently. Sam Seaborn/George Stephanopolous in love with me, chopping kale (Pauline Kael?) on a picnic with Garrison Keillor, that sort of thing. In other news, I am trying rather hard to figure out what I can do to make my Keillor intro special (tomorrow night). I joked with Leonard about playing bits from Dar Williams's "Are You Out There," but he didn't realize it was a joke, and became alarmed. A joke, Leonard! Just kidding.

Reading: UnTechnical Writing: How to Write About Technical Subjects and Products So Anyone Can Understand by Michael Bremer. The publisher is UnTechnical Press, and the book is good so far: useful tips and (as you'd hope) great style.

One of my coworkers has been using, explicitly and implicitly, a logically rude argument (summary of the concept) whenever we disagree. The manifestation I encounter: "I am older and more experienced than you, and therefore wiser, and it is simply not possible for you to legitimately disagree with me because I inherently understand all problems and situations better than you do." I find myself annoyed, and have to learn to not let it get to me.

Filed under: Reading

# 28 Oct 2002, 09:40PM GMT+5:30: I read Midnight's Children. I read Cryptonomicon. And now I've read Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White. And now I say to you that a modern author who dazzles you with his witty, ultra-literate prose in a novel of over 500 pages will, without fail, cop out with a wholly inadequate ending. Argh! Such promising introductions and such jaw-droppingly disappointing conclusions, or absences thereof. It's like they're all Kevin Smith.

Filed under: Reading

# 26 Oct 2002, 09:59AM GMT+5:30: Bill Maher, in his great new book When You Ride Alone You Ride With bin Laden, makes several good points and clever turns of phrase. Example: he refers to "The Axis -- the original, not the lame cover band".

Filed under: Reading

# 15 Oct 2002, 12:28AM GMT+5:30: Pirate homeboys, Leonard.

I love Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White. His intro plays with the metaphors of reader/writer and john/prostitute interaction. The first fifty pages have been wonderful.

Filed under: Reading

# 14 Oct 2002, 11:09AM GMT+5:30: I ripped through Dave Barry's second novel, Tricky Business, in about two hours. It's faster-paced than Big Trouble, taking place entirely in one day, but the general theme stays the same (ordinary people stumble upon organized crime shenanigans in south Florida). I liked Big Trouble better, especially since Big Trouble focused more on likable characters and less on convoluted scheming by mobsters, but I did enjoy Tricky Business. The obstacles that sympathetic characters face in Tricky Business seem real, as opposed to the over-the-top ridiculous obstacles (cough *Connie Willis* cough) in Big Trouble.

People who actually thought about seeing me do some stand-up tomorrow: sorry to cancel on you. I realized that I have to be out of town Tuesday night.

To liven up your day, a bunch of quotes that, for the most part, I've never seen in an email signature.

Filed under: Comedy Reading

# 13 Oct 2002, 11:25PM GMT+5:30: Andy implicitly and Leonard explicitly urge me to upgrade my weblog software, so I will, soon. Format changes and service disruptions may occur.

Today's realization: I no longer feel that moment of disorientation where I arrive at work and have to switch from "customer" perspective to "employee" perspective. I'm already in worker mode when I get there.

Now about to read Dave Barry's new novel, Tricky Business, and Michel Faber's well-reviewed The Crimson Petal and the White (I hear it's akin to Crichton's The Great Train Robbery, which I liked).

Filed under: Reading

# 11 Oct 2002, 12:37AM GMT+5:30: Met Dave Eggers. Seems generous and friendly to his public. He packed the house (the relevant house being Cody's Books) and gave each attendee personal attention.

Did I mention that I finished American Gods? I finished it and don't mind that I spent the time on it, even enjoyed several turns of phrase, but couldn't follow its sweeping pseudo-epicity. I got lots of the mythological references, so it's not an Eco-style problem; rather, the narrative failed to sweep me up in its many epiphanic moments. I liked Pratchett's Small Gods (on the same topic) better.

Note to self: the outfit that I think is "too Gappy" is the one that three coworkers will compliment.

Read UC Press's Hey, Waitress!, which didn't knock my socks off. You'd think that a book compiling experiences in the service industry would automatically interest me, but somehow the lengthy interviews go for Turkelian and don't make it -- too much boring detail, not enough insight and anecdotal nuggets.

Filed under: Reading

# 09 Oct 2002, 03:59PM GMT+5:30: Six or seven years ago, I wanted to impress an interesting fella that I met at alt.fan.dave_barry, so I went to the local public library and I read up on golf. (He also played lacrosse.) I read John Feinstein's A Good Walk Spoiled, partly since I'd liked his appearances on NPR, and loved it. I read a few more of his books and liked them too. I'm no sports fan, yet I enjoyed Feinstein's narratives and his statistics-quoting didn't bother me. After I got to Cody's, I put up a tag in the sports section recommending any and all of his work.

I think I have to take that down tomorrow, because I just finished an advance copy of Feinstein's The Punch. It's about some basketball player who accidentally punched another out in the 1970s. Feinstein also tries to impress us with their backgrounds, and how the punch changed their lives and basketball, but he goes overboard repeating background and trite conclusions, and doesn't give us enough sketches of secondary characters. Don't read it.

Filed under: Reading

# 03 Oct 2002, 11:33PM GMT+5:30: On Wednesday evening, I planned on writing a bit while enjoying the sunset and warm air on the lovely UC Berkeley campus. But I chose to sit by a busy corridor, and ran into two acquaintances, both of whom asked why I was on campus, since I'd already graduated.

Today, after I explained this to Devin, he and I walked on Bowditch and saw a mutual acquaintance. "Hi, Karthik," I said. "Hi," he replied. "Didn't you graduate?"

Devin guffawed.

I introduced the Salon.com authors and editors at tonight's talk about Afterwords, a collection of essays about the aftermath of last year's terrorist attacks. Man. Tiny audience, members who started talking to the authors before I could even say "Welcome to Cody's" -- I just couldn't get out of there fast enough. I hope my next stand-up gig is better.

Currently reading: Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin. I thought it would be like one long Bob Herbert column, but it's more insightful than that. I should read some more work by Griffin; he also wrote some novels, I think.

Embarrassing Moments in Customer Service: "That's $20.82, sir." Name on credit card: Tiffany.

Filed under: Reading

# 01 Oct 2002, 02:22PM GMT+5:30: You might have writer's block if you consider plagiarizing for something to show your writer's group.

I took about three days to devour the first three books of Tamora Pierce's Protector of the Small series. I'll start Lady Knight, the last, sometime after the writing group tonight. Of course, reading hundreds of pages of magic-medieval fantasy influenced all my attempts to concoct a premise for a short story. "People donate blood...and the transfusions change the patients' personalities!" "Someone comes into a bookstore looking for...a book of magic!" Wait, I don't want magical realism, just regular realism, are you out?

Filed under: Reading

# 28 Sep 2002, 11:39PM GMT+5:30: Hooray for socialization. Tuesday was the 'rents party. Last night I got to wish my main man Seth a happy birthday. I met Ben Pfaff, among others, and helped teach some people how to play the game Set. It's Mensa-approved! And then today Leonard and I saw Adam over crepes. That's all fun.

The problem: all Tuesday and Wednesday I ran errands, and then watched the West Wing season premiere, which counts for work in my book. Ergo, I'm tuckered out. I could use a weekend. Well, soon enough.

I just finished Owen Hill's The Chandler Apartments. I've heard that an alternate title floated was A Sea of Kooks (it's set in Berkeley, much in Telegraph). I'll have to read some more mysteries, especially noir, to understand why the hardbitten prose of short declarative sentences attracts me so. I want to understand how writers convey that mix of inner conflict and sureness with narration that borders on sentence fragments.

Next up: possibly Wittgenstein's Poker (the author comes by Cody's on Telegraph this Monday) mixed with Tamora Pierce's Protector of the Small quartet.

Filed under: Reading

# 20 Sep 2002, 12:13AM GMT+5:30: Reviews!

Retief: Emissary to the Stars: I read a set of Retief short stories by Keith Laumer. I borrowed them from Leonard in a hasty "find something to read on the BART" snap. They're rather enjoyable in a P.G. Wodehouse-ish space-farce way or as Spaceman adventures, and the writing is cute, but the uneven collection contains some really annoying pieces. The clever space diplomat Retief always saves the day, but -- in the worst Connie Willis style -- stupid, annoying, hypocritical, selfish, narrowminded characters (practically everyone except Retief, including his superiors and opponents) and their stupid, dragged-on miscommunications take up too much space. Dramatic irony just isn't that funny for that long. If Laumer was trying to satirize US foreign policy, well, that makes me mad on its own, and I don't need sci-fi to propagandize me.

The Best of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine: I picked up a copy from a free box a few weeks ago because I wanted something to read at lunch. I read some good stories, notably the uplifting and "Aventura" by Jacqueline Lichtenberg and "Dragon Three Two Niner" by Peter L. Manly.

However, the introductions gave me pause. Of course, I mean no insult to the late Ms. Zimmer Bradley, but her introductions to individual stories made me wonder about her perspective and beliefs.

A few examples. From the introduction to Mary C. Aldridge's Nebula-nominated "The Adinkra Cloth":

In the final balloting, it did not win the Nebula. I have no idea what won it that year, but I'll bet a ripe peach -- or plum, or any other piece of fruit you prefer -- that it wasn't as good as this.

Basically, Ms. Zimmer Bradley is claiming that "The Adinkra Cloth" is better than any other arbitrary story published that year (five years before the publishing date of this volume). How hard would it have been to check what won that year? Did she simply feign ignorance so she wouldn't have to read the winner or make a judgment call on what was better?

And several other rambles, whines, and concealed insults await in other intros! In the spoiler-laden introduction to Dorothy J. Heydt's "Moonrise," a good story that I like partly because I'm a sucker for stories set in Berkeley, Ms. Zimmer Bradley uses extremely flawed anecdotal evidence to claim that "maybe" sci-fi fans are "intellectually superior" to nonfans. What the? And so on.

Two different sci-fi experts (i.e., "People who have been to at least one WorldCon") affirmed that sycophants surrounded Marion Zimmer Bradley in the last years of her life, possibly distorting her judgment. But still. One raises an eyebrow.

The Seven Samurai: Leonard and I really enjoyed Kurosawa's classic tale of fighters who protect a peasant village from bandits. It's about four hours long, yet it gripped us all the way through, even though it featured no musical numbers! Bollywood, take note.

As McWhorter mentioned to his Linguistics 5 lecture several months ago, we should revisit classics not just because they build virtue or intellect, but because they're fun. Indeed, The Seven Samurai has great characterization, dialogue, and choreography and pacing. Even though Leonard and I were watching through cultural and linguistic barriers, the film only mildly confused us. Recommended!

O Brother, Where Art Thou?: I'd like to see The Man Who Wasn't There again to be sure, but this may be my favorite Coen Brothers film. Leonard heartened me by laughing out loud (!) at the dialogue, especially the pretentious vocabulary that the main character (George Clooney) employs. The music made me say "wow" more the first time, in a theater, but I still like it a lot.

Nitpicker's Note: Just remember that this film has even less relation to The Odyssey than does the Demi Moore Scarlet Letter to the original Hawthorne, and enjoy the occasional references. Yes, they conflate Circe and the Lotus-Eaters and the Sirens into one bit. But it's a funny bit, as are all the bits. Recommended!

I wonder what Leonard and I will watch tomorrow! Only our future selves can tell.

Filed under: Reading

# 13 Sep 2002, 12:11AM GMT+5:30: The past few days, I've had great times hanging out with friends and celebrating my birthday. I've seen Zed, Adam, Seth, and Zack, among other people. Zed appreciated Leonard's and my suggestion that the Bible's Apocrypha are history's first fanfic, and suggested Cain/Abel slash. Adam gave me a decorated mix CD. Seth and I went to see Michael Newdow give a terrific speech -- we weren't expecting him to sing! (Very interesting fellow. The ultra-skeptical sort that I wouldn't necessarily want to befriend, but I admire him and am glad he's on our side anyway.) Zack and I wandered and did errands and ate and reassured each other about anxieties business and personal. More on personal anxieties later.

Perhaps crepe restaurants, like gas stations, cluster at intersections, for two different crepe places live at the intersection of east Shattuck and University in Berkeley. Crepe de Vine is now called "The Lying Crepes of Marrakech" or something. Zack says that he suspects it's been bought out by the restaurant Marrakech, since once he saw a waiter there whom he had previously only seen at Crepe de Vine. Coincidence...or merger?

I also saw the film Rivers & Tides, about the artwork of Andy Goldsworthy. He works in nature, in ephemera. And I enjoyed the film, and later was reminded of it by a line in "110 Stories": "It goes, like, something mighty, and despair." I think the author is referring to "Ozymandias," and Goldsworthy avoids the Fundamental Ozymandias Fallacy, as Leonard might put it; Goldsworthy embraces the eventual destruction of his art, he welcomes it. He looks death in the eye each time his work collapses or fades or washes away. A worthwhile lesson.

I visited friends a bit on Wednesday, and visited the peace rally "Our Grief is Not a Cry for War" in San Francisco. I learned how to make paper cranes, and folded a few. I wore a t-shirt with "Peace" in many languages surrounding a globe, and I met a fellow with the least LiveJournally LiveJournal ever, and I signed up to help Food Not Bombs sometime.

Non-profound stuff break: I love having a salary. Like the man said, newfound wealth! Whee!

I've long been meaning to quote this passage from Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth, published in 1976:

"...Despite Colin's efforts, I don't really understand Terran economy.
But I'm learning many things, fast. For example, there are some smart operators around, on the lookout for innocents from space. Yesterday I was going through a display of Persian carpets -- antique, not replicated -- wondering if I could possibly afford to take a small one back to Marissa. (I can't.) This morning there was a message -- addressed to me personally, correct room number -- from a dealer in Tehran, offering his wares at very special rates. He's probably quite legitimate, and may have some bargains -- but how did he know? I thought Comsole circuits were totally private. But perhaps this doesn't apply to some commercial services. Anyway, I didn't answer.
Nor have I acknowledged some even more personal messages from various Sex Clubs. They were very explicit, and I've stored them as mementos for my old age. After the carpet episode, I was wondering if any would be tailored to my psych profle, which must be on record somewhere -- that would have made me mad. But it was very broad-band stuff, and the artwork was beautiful. Perhaps when I'm not so busy..."

Back to intimacy: I'm a woman. I'm in my early twenties. I have never been pregnant. Especially recently, with reminders of death nudging me at the anniversary of the terrorist attacks, and with my birthday, I've wished I were a mother. I'm not going to be a mother for years, if ever, and I worry that working with kids would only exacerbate these desires, not calm them.

I need a hobby.

Filed under: Reading

# 03 Sep 2002, 03:36AM GMT+5:30: Excerpt from No More Dead Dogs -- page five -- that sold me on reading the whole book:

[Our hero hated a book that his English teacher forced the class to read. Our hero said so, plainly, in the assigned book review.]
...Fogelman pounced on the comment. "It was sad. What a heartbreaking surprise ending!"
"I wasn't surprised," I said. "I knew Old Shep was going to die before I started page one."
"Don't be ridiculous," the teacher snapped. "How?"
I shrugged. "Because the dog always dies. Go to the library and pick out a book with an award sticker and a dog on the cover. Trust me, that dog is going down."

Filed under: Reading

# 03 Sep 2002, 03:26AM GMT+5:30: I just heard The Cure for the first time earlier today. Neat! Like Belle and Sebastian meets Ben Folds with a dash of TMBG, I say, trying to analogize to the five musicians that I know.

So! A few book reviews are in order, what with me tearing through volumes like mad.

Midnight's Children by Salman "Slammin'" Rushdie. Confession: I didn't even know till a few months ago that Rushdie is Indian. I thought he was an Arab. But No Doubt He's Indian*, and I enjoyed his thoroughly Indian tale. Midnight's Children follows a boy and his family before, during, and after India's Independence (and simultaneous Partition with the new state of Pakistan) for around 500 pages. Rushdie does magical realism, but well, and his plot twists are more than adequate. I tired of his Connie Willis-like subplot(s) and style, but quite seldom, and overall I recommend Midnight's Children to other Indians. I'm not sure others' patience would be rewarded.

The Chain of Chance by Stanislaw Lem. Enjoyed! Recommended! Confusing, but in a good way, and the mystery was fair. As in some Asimov mystery, more of the Black Widowers and less of the Robots series, Chain of Chance is not that sci-fi, more of a straight mystery with a few slightly futuristic plot devices. I can see how some people might be bewildered and turned off by the first half or so, but if you've enjoyed such Lem as The Futurological Congress, you'll probbaly like this. It's not as bewildering as Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, which I gave up on twenty pages in.

The Futurians by Damon Knight. One of my supervisors laughed over this in the break room, so I borrowed it. It's a relatively quick read chronicling the intersecting lives of some Golden Age sci-fi writers in the 1940s and 1950s. The personalities turned me off, since I already run into too many snarky neurotic clever people. But I found some lovely insights in his descriptions and interviews. Worth it for me, since I just borrowed it from someone. But don't seek it out unless you thrive on sci-fi biography, as my supervisor does.

No More Dead Dogs by Gordon Korman. Fantastic. I started and finished it tonight. A lot in common with The Twinkie Squad (athletics, the school play, a stand-up honest kid whom no one believes, detention with geeks as punishment (loosely), point-of-view shifts, middle-school setting), even above and beyond the usual zany antics, believable gimmick characters, fast plotting, implied celebrity cameo(s), and understated romance (sort of) I've come to expect from Korman. I practically fell in love with the main character. I imagined him speaking in Leonard's voice. Er, Leonard, speaking of which, I recommend that you read this.

$5.99, paperback. As per usual, especially with Korman, the back-cover blurb gives away plot points and misses the whole point and theme of the book, which has a lot more in common with Avi's And Nothing But the Truth** than with the Sweet Valley Babysitters Klub bilge that takes up space we could use to stock more Philip Pullman.

Hey Korman, I really enjoyed Son of Interflux, in which Simon Irving hesitates to let his classmates know that his father heads the biggest corporation in the world. Now I see that you've written Son of the Mob, in which "Vince Luca is just like any other high school guy except for one thing -- his father happens to be head of a powerful crime organization." Er, I hope the rest of the book takes a completely different riff on the similar premise (a hope strengthened by the plot twist giveaways in the blurb), and that you make at least one self-conscious Sopranos reference.

In Cody's Deals, I've seen Susan Love's Breast Book (self-care for women) and Don DeLillo's Underworld in our Bargain Books section for about $5 or $6 each, and a hardcover biography of Tesla for about $4. Neat!

Oh, and isn't Kris's "Leonard Could Play The Banjo (It Was Found Beside His Body)" lovely and clever and saddening? It's the first time I've ever heard myself referenced in a song. About seven in-jokes, and several reminders of mortality, all in 4:30.

Gosh, I should sleep.

* From the headline of an India Currents story on the Indian-American drummer for No Doubt.

** And Nothing But the Truth, which I started writing as To Say Nothing Of the Dog, takes place entirely in the primary-source text of the plot universe. E-mails, memos, diary entries, transcripts of conversations, newspaper stories. Even at twelve I could tell this was neat. Also, the plot concerns free speech and patriotism, and shifting perspectives. Always relevant.

Filed under: Reading

# 25 Aug 2002, 12:34AM GMT+5:30: I haven't even finished 21 Dog Years yet -- even though it's less than 200 pages -- because I only read it during breaks at work. Still, I can wholeheartedly recommend it if only for a perfect and hilarious scene over halfway through the book. All I can tell you is that it involves the narrator, a temp, and toy reviews. I laughed out loud in the employee break room (which is the working world's version of "laughing out loud in the computer lab") for more than a minute.

Now that I don't hang out with friends every single day, and I don't go to school, most of my recreational meatspace conversations take place in that employee breakroom. A few days ago I realized both this and the fact that this situation is the norm for many proletarians. You live alone, maybe with cats, and at work you talk to your fellow employees and people put funny pictures on the bulletin board. And those people become your friends.

Filed under: Reading

# 23 Aug 2002, 12:16AM GMT+5:30: Current reading: 21 Dog Years by Mike Daisey and The Chain of Chance by Stanislaw Lem. I'm not sure what the Lem is about yet. 21 Dog Years is a text version of a one-man show Daisey did about his years at Amazon. It's quite funny. So far, it's certainly less epic than Microserfs, but its lack of pretentiousness also means that it's never as annoying as Microserfs might be in its sententiousness. Also, I never think while reading Daisey, "This might have worked on stage, but not on paper." It actually works on paper, which is a pleasant surprise after reading celeb bios.

Filed under: Reading

# 16 Aug 2002, 01:28AM GMT+5:30: Shill: I got to read an advance copy of a little book, Afterglow, a long interview with Pauline Kael conducted a bit before her death a year back. Good stuff. When it comes out, read it -- it's short and fun. Yummy facts: Kael liked The West Wing and the film criticism at Slate and Salon!

Spoiler: Susanna is wrong and Andy is right, I decree. How can you not like the ending of Book IV? Okay, yes, if you can't go read Book V right away, as none of us can, then it's annoying to end with so much unresolved. But this is the epic plot arc, and it's great! Harry and the danger to the universe are finally maturing! Susanna and I do agree that it's a cliffhanger; I suppose that Susanna and I just don't share a taste for cliffhangers.

I spent the post-work hour eating frozen yogurt, wandering, and picking brambles out of a blanket with Michelle. Today I'll see a Guster concert with Adam and other friends. I work forty hours a week at a bookstore and I ask "paper or plastic?" I guess this is my life, but I don't recognize it. I feel like a database that has changed faster than its index.

Filed under: Reading

# 09 Aug 2002, 10:56PM GMT+5:30: I have to wash my hands every few hours when I work the register. I guess that's what happens when you handle filthy lucre.

Primary reading, about fifty pages per day: Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. As Anirvan helped me understand, Rushdie did these magical-realism and time-switching narrative gimmicks first, and best, and other Indian diaspora writers redo them badly. But I read those hacks before I read Rushdie, so I immediately recoiled when I saw the tricks in force in Midnight's Children, and then had to let myself relax and like the book anyway.

Secondary reading today and yesterday: a rereading of my favorite bits of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Tip: if you know a particular scene is going to tear you up, don't read it as you while away the hours at the register! Also, I wish Rowling would get us the fifth book already, but at least the pause gives me leverage to shill for Philip Pullman.

More secondary reading: Pauline Kael interviews. Neat! More later.

Filed under: Reading

# 05 Aug 2002, 10:47AM GMT+5:30: "I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are." I should read Penny Arcade more often.

I finished Nicole Krauss's Man Walks Into a Room. Good writing in general, if sometimes indulgent, and an interesting plot, if a bit lacking in the ending.

Filed under: Reading

# 29 Jul 2002, 12:38AM GMT+5:30: Anirvan stopped by the Cody's information desk today. I asked him: "Can I help you find a book?" He replied: "I think my bookfinding needs are pretty much taken care of, thanks." Funniest thing I'd heard all day.

Second funniest: I was humming "The Farmer and the Dell" and happened to ask Leonard, "What is a dell, anyway?" He said, "It's what you're getting, dude." Upon his explanation that he was referring to the recent Dell TV ads, I threw something at him, and then laughed.

I've read a few books lately. I like not having homework!

Today I read Neil Gaiman's Coraline. Short and yummy. I blew through it during my lunch hour, and enjoyed it. More stylish but less moving and epic than Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which makes sense, since Gaiman writes a hundred pages about one girl's very personal quest, and not hundreds on a save-the-world battle. I haven't read enough children's fantasy to call it "best" or not.

Yesterday I read Johanna Hurwitz's The Rabbi's Girls in even less than 60 minutes, probably. I picked it up whilst shelving in the children's lit room, and it sucked me in. Sometimes the narrator's voice seems a little too careful for an eleven-year-old in explaining Jewish traditions, but the end moved me to tears, even under the fluorescent lights of the Information Desk.

I'm not quite ready yet to write about G.K. Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which I finished yesterday. I found it illuminating and irritating, and I have to figure out why.

A few days ago, I finished Imperial Earth, by Arthur C. Clarke. I've mentioned before how sparse Clarke's books seem to me. I see now that he builds fascinating universes with very few strokes and I resent how little I get to see of them. But I do enjoy the plotting and quite believable characters and neat ideas in Clarke, and Imperial Earth is no exception.

Right now, I'm reading some R.K. Narayan, Swami and Friends. I enjoyed My Dateless Diary, and Swami's schoolboy adventure stuff reads like ethnic Wodehouse. Which is a good thing.

Today I shelved a little bit of everything: some Asian philosophy, some Islam, some computer science, some US and California history, some political science, and a lot of travel guides. Travel books depressed me today, because I had to reorder and shelve and stare at all these colorful guides to places I've never been and probably never will be. The Lonely Planet guide to Russia (and Ukraine and Belarus) struck such a yearning in me that I had to put it down. I hadn't known I wanted to go back so badly!

Nandini's in Europe, Rachel's in Europe, Alexei's in Europe, why aren't I in Europe? Why shouldn't I be?

I do have to admit: I'm the perfect customer for the Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook people. I love reading warnings and guides to dangerous places (e.g. the Lonely Planet guide to Iran). (They do still flog women for going about with "indecent" clothes on, although if you're a foreigner it's much more likely that you'll just be deported.)

I've been trading California Central Valley experiences with Joelle, a co-worker. As it turns out, she and I went to rival high schools in Lodi. We also have mutual acquaintances. Today I learned that one of my high school classmates -- who should, by all rights, be starting his last year of college this fall, as he's pretty smart -- is married! With a kid! Aiee! Stop the world, I want to get off.

Dreams lately have been rather vivid and imaginative. In a retread of a similar dream I had a few months ago, I was attacked in Kabul for being dressed immodestly. In another dream, or more properly inside a film within another dream, the national security apparatus was sophisticated enough to arbitrarily explode any given residential house in the US for suspected sedition. I then saw that the house across the way was occupied by Michael Douglas's character and his family, planning what they'd say at the show trial, since they'd never liked their neighbors anyway. The Michael Douglas character went out to retrieve the daily paper, and exclaimed, "This isn't the paper, this is my high school yearbook!" And there was full-motion video, a montage of young Indians, blacks, and whites dancing and melodramatically interacting to a Kuch Kuch Hota Hai soundtrack.

Disregarding the other absurdities for a moment, what character would Michael Douglas best play in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai? The headmaster? The protagonist? Miss Briganza?

Filed under: Reading

# 22 Jul 2002, 11:57PM GMT+5:30: Reading Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth, which I like.

Filed under: Reading

# 21 Jul 2002, 09:58PM GMT+5:30: I realize that my current job as a lowly clerk at Cody's makes me some bizarre triangulation between Anirvan, who founded Bookfinder, and Seth, who frequents bookstores and whose dad is in the brick-and-mortar bookstore biz. Seth is the only person I know who has nearly as many bookmarks as I do.

I finished Sons and Lovers, whose ending is not as good as its beginning and middle. I don't care for how the character of Paul changes; I'd rather just read about his childhood for a hundred more pages than see him grow up as Lawrence thinks he does.

Filed under: Reading

# 18 Jul 2002, 01:58PM GMT+5:30: I missed the They Might Be Giants concert. Maybe I'll catch 'em sometime when I'm Older. Oh, and you may wish to check out Seth's perspective.

I now realize that the wacky character from Gordon Korman's terrific A Semester In the Life of a Garbage Bag is proto-indie.

My new job at Cody's is interesting and fulfilling, at least today (the second day). I'm sure you know there's lots to learn. But that's not my fault, that's just an artifact of the short duration of my tenure there.

Back to work.

Filed under: Reading

# 16 Jul 2002, 10:04PM GMT+5:30: I have a free DSL modem and bike helmet, left over from flatmates at my old place, for anyone who wants them.

The velorutionary angel is littering! But yeah, she is beautiful, as per the MemeMachineGo! mention. Then again, is she wearing a bindi?

Kris-style Pet Observations: My new place features two cats, Little Kitty [sic] and Juniper. I keep thinking of Juniper as "Paul," since Juniper seems oversensitive and difficult to manage, much like Paul in Willa Cather's "Paul's Case" and Paul in D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers (my current reading). This follows my months-long habit of accidentally calling Scott, a friend of a former flatmate, by the name "Roger," since I thought "Roger" suited him more. Seriously, Scott didn't seem like a Scott, he seemed like a Roger, and this cat acts like a Paul. As my new flatmate puts it, "Junie is damaged goods."

Today I playfully sprayed Paul with a bit of water and he immediately ran away. Not even bouncing the gold string around got his trust back right away. I don't really like the cats, but I hope neither of them grows to despise me and pee in my bed or anything.

Speaking of Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, like other Lawrence I've read, develops characters unerringly. Every interpersonal relationship is spot-on realistic. Ideas with a capital I don't receive Ayn-Rand-style pages and chapters of blathering except in the context of how characters struggle with their own conflicts, and I like that. There's no better place to read Lady Chatterley's Lover (and de Maupassant's stories and The Great Gatsby) than on a long train ride between St. Petersburg and somewhere else, but wherever you are will do.

Filed under: Reading

# 11 Jul 2002, 07:50AM GMT+5:30: Thanks to Cam for pointing us to Russian Jokes Translated Into English.

I just started Foucault's Pendulum and I hate it, but I'll try to finish it anyway.

Filed under: Reading

# 10 Jul 2002, 11:13PM GMT+5:30: There is a mildly malevolent character in The Peace War called Roberto Richardson. I find this hilarious. Also the fact that in one or two passages the protagonist silently calls him Señor Loudmouth.

Filed under: Reading

# 09 Jul 2002, 10:29PM GMT+5:30: Yesterday night I stayed up too late reading Philip Pullman's The Ruby in the Smoke, the first in the Sally Lockhart trilogy of mysteries. Today I finished Vernor Vinge's The Peace War. Early on in the Vinge I noticed superficial similarities in the protagonists of the two novels. They're very smart young people who have trouble adjusting to new homes where everyone treats everyone equally. I liked them both. I think I liked the Pullman better than the Vinge, but that's just because Pullman writes mythic fairy-tale fantasy and Vinge writes far-out, alien sci-fi with premises building on top of premises. One is comfy and the other is cerebral.

Filed under: Reading

# 08 Jul 2002, 05:33PM GMT+5:30: Leonard is still ill. On the up side, he's almost finished Mark Twain's wonderful The Innocents Abroad, I finished Mikahil Bulgakov's off-the-rails The Master and Margarita, Adam and Kim came over for a short personal visit, Frances made chocolate ganache cake, and I oiled a bunch of doors so that they don't squeak anymore. In bonus good news, I got another call from a potential employer to arrange an interview!

But man, I wish Leonard weren't ill. I'd give up all that to get Leonard feeling well again.

Filed under: Reading

# 06 Jul 2002, 05:52PM GMT+5:30: I'm reading The Master and Margarita, which is quite fun, and which mentions the Solovki Islands, which instantly endeared it to me. However, one incident in the story moves me to both remember an episode in the Mahabharata and to issue you, my faithful reader, a grave warning.

In the Mahabharata, Ghatotkacha and his buddies stage a wedding kidnapping/sabtoage. They set up a diversion in the bazaar: a clothing exchange! "New clothes for old," they shouted in the streets. "New clothes for old!" And the people thought, "What a great deal!" and exchanged their clothes. But, on the wedding day, oh no! Their clothes fly off into the sky, because the magicians have spirited them away.

From Bulgakov: A magician doing a show offers women the chance to exchange their old dresses for stylish new ones. Many women take the offer, after initial skepticism, and turn out looking fabulous. Until, that is, they leave the theater and their fashionable new dresses start disappearing.

Moral of two stories: Don't take a nomad's offer to exchange your old clothes for new ones. Stay with brick-and-mortar shops for that.

Filed under: Reading

# 01 Jul 2002, 09:16AM GMT+5:30: Recently I've actually finished two books. I didn't like Jon Stewart's anthology Naked Pictures of Famous People as much as I'd hoped, although a few of the pieces were worthwhile. I especially liked "The Devil and William Gates".

This morning, I finished Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick. Very good. I like how Dick's plots just charge ahead whether I'm ready or not, and how his characters think and feel, but not so much as to slow down said plot. There's a passage in the beginning-middle of the book, explaining the concept of "kipple" (entropy, roughly), that I might excerpt here because I love how Dick wrote it.

Last week of school. I'm not looking forward to it. Too much reading to catch up on, too hot, too hectic. And at the end of it: a plane trip. I wish I were more excited than hassle-anticipating about that.

From my wall, the faces of Dmitry Sklyarov and Anna Akhmatova and Jon Johansen and Yuri Gagarin regard me with different expressions: tired resignation, almost-smiling understanding, hip young disinterest, and enigmatic sorrow, respectively. I assume that Gagarin's sad because his helmet is the entire world, according to the conceit of the poster.

Filed under: Reading

# 23 Jun 2002, 11:21PM GMT+5:30: I book-traded today at the Ashby BART flea market. Among my gains: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. Now that Nandini and I have read "The Minority Report" and "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale," we might read ...Electric Sheep and arrange some Dick-based movie marathon of Bladerunner and Minority Report and Total Recall.

Two more weeks till I'm done with college!

Filed under: Reading

# 22 Jun 2002, 11:02PM GMT+5:30: After a great (really!) Saturday with Leonard in Colma, I raced to Albany to watch Zed Lopez perform in a bit of improv. Quite fun, and free, and a reminder that I miss performing, be it as a teacher or as a stand-up comedian. Again, maybe after I find a job.

I'm almost done with Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut. Only twenty pages ago did I get to the big metanarrative turning point. I'm wondering where Vonnegut is going, and I assume it'll be worth it.

Old bookmarks, submitted for your edification:

Project Gutenberg
Project Bartleby
"Bernice Bobs Her Hair" by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Political Writings of George Orwell
NOVA Online Transcripts: The Proof
Howl.com
Harlan Ellison Webderland: I Write
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), "Ozymandias"
In Search of Tocqueville's Democracy in America
Housecleaning 101

Filed under: Reading

# 17 Jun 2002, 11:54AM GMT+5:30: Done with Democracy From Scratch, which was the big hurdle because it's a book, not a bunch of easy-to-skim articles that basically give you the gist in the first page.

In Democracy From Scratch, Fish categorizes members of the Russian democratic movement into four categories: Compromisers, Pragmatic Radicals, Saints, and Fanatics. He details characteristics of each one, and the problems they had working together. At the end of the section I felt as though I could write a small role-playing game where players each choose one of these identities and the goal is to overthrow communism. Leonard and I came up with a name: Democratizers and Dupes. "The KGB infiltrates your organization; twelve hit points." Leonard thinks that I should actually attempt to write this game. Maybe after I find a frickin' job.

Filed under: Reading

# 16 Jun 2002, 09:48PM GMT+5:30: In the nongraphical web browser lynx, if you use the left-arrow key to access the previously viewed web page but there is no previous web page, you get this message: "You are already at the first document". Now that I've read Microserfs, this reminds me of the following excerpt:

Q. What animal would you be if you could be an animal?
A. You are already an animal.

Filed under: Reading

# 12 Jun 2002, 12:39AM GMT+5:30: Douglas Coupland's Microserfs is very, very good. I found myself returning to it after I'd finished, locating plot twists and insights. Its style reminds me of weblogs, since it's in diary-to-unspecified-audience form, and it's inspiringly good. I'd rather not write anything here that wouldn't be good enough to go into Microserfs. Maybe that'll be my criterion from now on.

Over dinner I read some of Jon Stewart's Naked Pictures of Famous People. Not as knee-slappingly hilarious as I'd hoped, although the essays got better if I imagined them in Stewart's voice, as a monologue on The Daily Show.

For school, I started reading Sale of the Century: Russia's Wild Ride From Communism to Capitalism by Chrystia Freeland. I love hearing and reading about the end of the Communist regime in Russia. I love the stories of heroic dissidence and new liberties and glasnost and the hope. But it's so depressing to read about how the post-Soviet regimes have monumentally messed up a grand opportunity. It's like reading about Reconstruction and how it ended. (For people not familiar with US history, Reconstruction was the regime over the former Confederacy after our Civil War that aimed on reforming the South and giving blacks equality, both de facto and de jure, with whites.) Since my Russia After Communism class is now past the recap of Soviet history, and we'll now focus on the post-Communist period, I expect I'll get bummed rather often. I hope not.

In case you're wondering what got me on this whole Russia kick, the general list goes something like: Anna Karenina six years ago, and a weird masochistic desire to learn some unpopular (at UC Berkeley) and hard language, and -- I just remembered this recently -- a Wired article I read in 1998. At the time, I didn't even notice that it was by Bruce Sterling. It was the "Second World" sketch, a fascinating portrait of a fascinating situation. I also loved the other articles in that issue, a "First World" look at Silicon Valley and a "Third World" adventure in Africa on its way to wiredness. And that article on Russia is one reason I decided to go to St. Petersburg instead of Moscow, and so I met John and Katie and oh, I'm so glad.

Filed under: Reading

# 11 Jun 2002, 01:28PM GMT+5:30: I finished Douglas Coupland's Microserfs. Anirvan and other friends had raised my expectations of this book, and Coupland matched them. A very good book. It made me tear up and several times it made me look around for someone to hug. Read it!

Now, I really should catch up on my Russia After Communism reading, but I borrowed Jon Stewart's book of essays, Naked Pictures of Famous People, from Seth, so Democracy From Scratch: Opposition and Regime in the New Russian Revolution may have to wait.

Filed under: Reading

# 07 Jun 2002, 01:21PM GMT+5:30: Downloading Mozilla 1.0 over dialup, so I'm visiting Slowtown for the duration. Mozilla has gone through something like 15 "milestone releases," so don't fear the "1.0" moniker, I suppose.

I finished Divorce Your Car! by Katie Alvord, a gift from Leonard, which doesn't hide its anticar biases. Reading it is like reading The Nation; sometimes I get tired of hearing my own prejudices exaggerated and reflected back at me. The most humorous portion, near the end, has the author indulging her utopian vision of a carless society for pages and pages. If the book had been written in the last six months, I'm sure she would have worked terrorism in there somewhere. "And without cars, people can't blow themselves up with car bombs!"

I'm skimming for anecdotes in California Votes: The 1998 Governor's Race: An Inside Look at the Candidates and Their Campaigns by the People Who Managed Them, a volume I snagged from the free bin at Ned's textbook store. I have a sentimental fondness for the 1998 California governor's race, since I correctly predicted the outcomes of both the contentious Democratic primary and the general election way back in January or February for my school paper. At the time, I thought I was a budding Cokie Roberts. Yech.

Later today I'll be participating in a Russian conversational fluency test. I have a feeling I'll hit the wall pretty early.

Mozilla installed. Good stuff.

Filed under: Reading

# 06 Jun 2002, 12:32PM GMT+5:30: I really enjoy the current reading for my Russia After Politics class. I actually got excited at the suspense of the following excerpt:

"An important question is how different the reform process under Khrushchev was from that initiated by Gorbachev, and why the one ended with the entrenchment of the existing system, the other with its collapse. We shall come to this in the final chapter..."
--Mary McAuley, Soviet Politics 1917-1991

Last night Leonard and I tried some product that had been ambivalently labelled "Hot 'n Spicy Cajun Pilaf." Practically the entire three paragraphs of copy on the back of the box tried to reconcile the concepts of "Cajun" and "Pilaf," which, let's face it, are pretty dissonant. I felt sorry for them, but not after I tasted the stuff. Neither Cajun nor pilaf, really. Just sort of soggy yellow rice.

Jeana writes of some film, "though most of the characters bordered on unlikeable because they were just so normal and realistic. *shudder*" All kidding aside, this tells you a lot about Jeana's taste in entertainment! Although you could much more easily derive that same information from other entries in her journal, where she talks about RennFayre and so on.

Speaking of unlikeable characters, I've paused reading David Wong Louie's The Barbarians Are Coming (a gift from Anirvan) for the same reason that I stopped reading The Kitchen God's Wife or The Hundred Secret Senses, one of those Amy Tan novels that isn't The Joy Luck Club, six or seven years ago. I can't stand the protagonist! Louie has expended the attention capital he got from me by having his main character be a misunderstood child of Asian immigrants. Seeing as I'm not the IMF, I'm hesitating on loaning him more.

Filed under: Reading

# 03 Jun 2002, 10:44PM GMT+5:30: I really need to get enough sleep and nutrition and stretch regularly if I aim to use the bike as my primary mode of transportation. Today the ride to school seemed much harder than it had the previous time. I tried futzing with gears but it didn't help. Probably I just didn't have as much energy as I needed.

I started and finished Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven today, as I am wont to do with books when I get my way. Not to pull a "more relevant than ever!", but my ability and inability to change my surroundings has intrigued me for a long time, and I read this book just as I was contemplating the responsibility I take for myself as I break away from my parents. More questions than answers, as per good Le Guin (as opposed to good Nancy Kress).

Professor Fish on the influence of the USSR on the Eastern Bloc: "If you can make Germans lazy and unproductive, Hungarians rude, and Russians inhospitable, you've accomplished a great deal."

Filed under: Reading

# 03 Jun 2002, 12:34AM GMT+5:30: Remind me to read The Lathe of Heaven (Ursula K. Le Guin), Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison), and Maximum Light (Nancy Kress) in the next four weeks. Oh, and also my Russia reading. Ack!

I just read Cannery Row by John Steinbeck, and really liked it. I hated The Red Pony nine years ago, but then again, Steinbeck could definitely be a writer one doesn't appreciate in eighth grade.

My flatmates, mostly, are watching the World Cup and drinking beer. Alex just got a Darwin Awards book. I'm trying to speed-read Soviet history so I can give him back his books by tomorrow, when he'll return them after dropping the class. Even though it's interesting, I have trouble staying awake. I thought I was done with this!

Filed under: Reading

# 31 May 2002, 01:09PM GMT+5:30: The main news is that I made a big mistake and I'm paying for it. I double-counted a class, thinking it could fulfill two requirements, but it didn't, so now I'm taking a summer school class. I'm not quite a B.A. yet. This class, Russia After Communism, really interests me, and Professor Steven Fish is great. But it's Monday through Thursday, 4-6pm, so I can't work full time. Yeah, I feel a bit foolish when I think about the debacle.

On the up side, I finally got an A+ at Cal, in Linguistics 5. Yay!

Job search: (Alexei, upon learning that I'm looking for a job, said, "I hear they hide under bushes and logs.") I've sent out several customized resumes and cover letters in response to job openings, but no one's called me for an interview. I got started working with one temp agency, but business is slow for temps, and another agency told me that they won't handle part-time temps, and I'm one of those right now.

Triumph: I only watched about 45 minutes of random daytime TV on Tuesday. I watched the German equivalent (in English) of "Entertainment Tonight," and I watched the first half of a cooking show. All quite educational. I can now manage a passable German accent while saying "Gerhard Schroeder," and I know a trick for seeding tomatoes (cut them in half and, before slicing them, squeeze them above a garbage bowl or sink).

Biker Sumana: I've been practicing and actually using the bicycle. I can now get going from a standstill pretty well. On Tuesday I rode most of the way up Milvia from a little north of Adeline to Center Street, although at times I had to chant to myself "I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm okay" because I was rather scared of cars and my own ineptitude. By yesterday I basically could ride continuously without too much fear between home and downtown.

As suggested by Kevin, I visited The Missing Link, a bike store and repair shop at Shattuck between University and Berkeley Way. Now I have a fixed-up bike, a lock, and (courtesy of the University and six dollars) a license.

And today: triumph! I used elbow grease and WD-40 and a wrench to remove annoying water-bottle holders from my bike. It's great to exercise control over my environs.

Books: I finished Crime and Punishment and P.G. Wodehouse's Much Obliged, Jeeves. Crime and Punishment had a surprise ending (like Law and Order! You won't believe the twist!), and when I was down this morning, I reminded myself that I really don't want to be like Raskolnikov, letting my romantic-depressed urges make me unproductive and sullen. The Wodehouse, one of his later works, was less masterfully plotted than, say, Very Good, Jeeves. But it still had amusing turns of phrase, and it kept me occupied on the BART, so reading it was worthwhile.

Filed under: Reading

# 27 May 2002, 08:31AM GMT+5:30: Oh, and I finished Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel a week ago or so. I'm glad I did so. It's quite enlightening and actually gives one a newish paradigm for history that makes sense and causes one to say, "Of course!" Again, I need to finish Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace.

Filed under: Reading

# 27 May 2002, 08:20AM GMT+5:30: Leonard loves the crankiness of Losing the Race by John McWhorter. I love the anecdotes. I'd be fine with a book that just contained the anecdotes from all of McWhorter's other books, and lectures, if possible.

Hey, now that India and Pakistan are eyeball-to-nuclear-eyeball -- no, I don't want to think about it -- are we back to calling General Musharraf "leader" or "dictator" or are we still calling him "President" even though he's not? Just checking.

And you've heard of "a recipe for disaster" and "a disaster waiting to happen," but only recently have I heard "a prescription for disaster." Metaphor-wise, who writes the prescription? And where do you cash it in? With a recipe, at least there's the possibility that it's been passed down through the ages, and that you have all the ingredients at hand. A prescription presupposes much more infrastructure than does a recipe. I'll take the simpler one.

Filed under: Reading

# 25 May 2002, 08:55AM GMT+5:30: You know what I love about Leonard? Among other things, he writes sentences that I'm pretty sure have never been written or said before. McWhorter used "Admit it, my friends -- the woman hasn't even seen the talking dog!" in Power of Babel. If he hadn't needed cross-linguistic comprehensibility, I could imagine him using "Axis of Pasta update: consensus is that cheese is the missing third ingredient, though this has yet to be verified in field tests."

Filed under: Reading

# 24 May 2002, 07:24AM GMT+5:30: Skimmed Neal Stephenson's The Big U last night. Stephenson didn't rerelease it for a long time, arguing that he didn't want people to read his inferior early work instead of reading worthwhile fiction by other people. Then The Big U got rereleased anyway.

He was right the first time.

The Big U's political satire reminds me of the heavy-handed, depressing parts of Wobegon Boy and other works by Garrison Keillor. And I just skipped the subplots about role-playing gamers and the cults and political groups. I just wanted some conversation among the main characters and the exciting fight scenes that were like the almost-last fight/chase scene in Snow Crash. And there's not enough of that.

So, yeah. Stephenson is right. Read something else. Two Tales of Crow and Sparrow, perhaps, which I still don't hate, even though I'm more than halfway through. In fact, it strikes a chord with me, because my mom always got on my case about using my right hand instead of my left (I was born left-handed, but they switched me!*) and various rituals and superstitions regarding cleanliness. Dundes reminds me of Lawrence Lessig, showing me things I've always known in a new light.

That reminds me, I really need to finish Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Maybe during my upcoming unemployment.

*My father recently told me that he and my mother should not have retrained me to be right-handed, "because all left-handed people are geniuses." Thanks, Dad.

Filed under: Reading

# 23 May 2002, 06:11PM GMT+5:30: Got two graduation gifts today, which were, as all of them will be, unexpected. I can't believe I'm graduating, and therefore can't quite believe that I should get gifts for anything.

Jeana gave me Two Tales of Crow And Sparrow: A Freudian Folkloristic Essay on Caste and Untouchability, by Alan Dundes. I'm about two-fifths through it. Jeana said that all the Indians she's given it to have hated it, but I find nothing to hate as of yet.

Shweta-beta gave me a graphic novel: Fallout: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and the Political Science of the Atomic Bomb. Once upon a time I evinced interest in this book, and now I have it!

By the way, the Acknowledgements list in Chutney Popcorn included a thank-you to Urvashi Vaid. I'm pretty sure they're referring to the gay rights activist. I remember seeing her once on a morning talk show and thinking, "A female Indian-American activist for gay rights! Wow!" Rock on, Urvashi.

Filed under: Reading

# 21 May 2002, 10:16PM GMT+5:30: I'm now halfway through Crime and Punishment and almost halfway through Microserfs.

I heard part of an Eminem song on the radio today -- "Without Me," I think -- and quite liked it. Am I turning into Simon Stow? Am I going to end up writing papers on Slim Shady in The Republic?

Filed under: Reading

# 11 May 2002, 01:55AM GMT+5:30: I like listening to choral music, especially faster-moving and non-religious stuff. I've known for a long time that I like a cappella of the doo-wop and arrangement-of-pop-tunes varieties, but I also like a bit of the Josquin and the folk songs and "El Grillo" (The Cricket), as I've discovered and come to appreciate in this Basic Musicianship class.

We of our Music 20A class will put on a concert of choral singing as part of our final. You can come! It'll be Wednesday, 15 May, at 2:45 in Room 125 of Morrison Hall. We'll all sing Tallis's If Ye Love Me and Josquin's Mille Regretz together, and we'll break into small groups for other pieces. My group will sing a sea chantey called We Be Three Poor Mariners or something like that. Come on by!

Today a few cool things happened. I finished In Code, which is less annoying than I'd thought. It's more interesting than Dan Rather's autobiography, that's for sure. And it clearly explained public/private-key cryptography better than any other treatment I'd ever read.

Sarah Flannery is a special sort of person, the type of which the world needs more. She's the type who can confidently approach a hard task and try at it and try at it and count her failures as learning experiences and live with the humility and keep going until she succeeds, self-esteem intact. I'm the other type. I've met quite a lot of that Sarah Flannery type over the years, and I always envy them, and now, maybe if I can just accept that I'm not like that, my envy won't have to get in the way of being friends with these people.

I saw a campus showing of the recent French cinema hit, Am�lie. The showing I attended was sold out but, through just hanging around and vaguely hoping for an opportunity and then snagging it when it came by, I found some reluctant scalpers and got a ticket. Yay scavenging!

I enjoyed the film, and of course I wept and shouted at the protagonist to act differently, but I think my expectations of the movie were too high -- the ad said it/she (the protagonist) would change my life! -- and so I didn't walk out of it with the same bliss that came to me at the end of High Fidelity.

The three French films I've seen during my Berkeley career, the ones I remember, are Am�lie, Romance (ugh!), and some quite good and moving picture I saw at the Fine Arts a few years back with my sister. It was about a youngish woman living in Paris (aren't they all?) learning about what's really important in life and breaking away from her unfulfilling routine to form relationships with others and hear their stories. Hmm, a pattern! The gimmick was that she was looking for her lost cat, and I can't remember the title. "Black Cat"? "White Cat"? "Black Cat, Big City"? "La Chat Diabolique" (Leonard's translation of "That Darn Cat")? "My Lost Cat"? These vague, non-Boolean "it was a French movie about a girl who lost her cat" stirrings don't play well at the IMDB. I'll remember the title eventually so's I can recommend it to you.

Later, I played designated driver, dropping off some acquaintances at a party and then driving home (alone! in Berkeley! on a Friday night!) with nary an accident. I will not say that there were not hairy moments, but hey, life without hair would be pretty Golden Age of Sci-Fi extraterrestrial, and in those stories women just faint and overreact and get referred to by their first names, and that's annoying.

I'm continuing the ravagement of The Philip K. Dick Reader (which is what I am too, I guess), as you can probably tell. Yummy stuff. I like that I've now read "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" and "The Minority Report" so now I don't at all want to watch the corresponding blockbuster films. Oh, and I finished that short-story collection I bought at the anarchist bookfair, Down and Out in the Ivy League by J.G. Eccarius. Enough good stories and hours of enjoyment are in there to justify the $2 or $3 and hours I spent on it. I'll lend it to you if you like.

Filed under: Reading

# 10 May 2002, 09:34AM GMT+5:30: Reading In Code by Sarah Flannery. Amateurish and annoying with too many puzzles. But I'll finish it. Even though she, at 16, made a much more efficient algorithm than the RSA's or whatever, at least I know I can write better than she can.

Filed under: Reading

# 06 May 2002, 02:44AM GMT+5:30: I finished Twain's The Innocents Abroad last week. Now I've finished Terry Pratchett's Small Gods (I started it Sunday evening) and begun a Philip K. Dick anthology. The Pratchett and Dick I received as gifts from Leonard. Thanks!

I actually found The Truth (My First Pratchett) more moving than I found Small Gods. Leonard had recommended Small Gods as the best of the Discworld lot. Maybe this disparity can be accounted for in the fact that religion (the theme of Small Gods) is to Leonard's youth as rebellion against parents (as in The Truth) is to mine. Or maybe not.

Filed under: Reading

# 30 Apr 2002, 11:38AM GMT+5:30: Alarm clocks: During my first year at UC Berkeley, I lived in a dorm. And, I suspect, in every dorm lives a person who sleeps through his alarm, every morning, no matter how loud it is. Chris was that guy on our floor. He lived right next to the communal bathroom, so we heard his alarm going off for half an hour or more as we performed our morning ablutions. The rest of us had no idea how his roommate stood it.

One day, on the whiteboard on Chris's door, we saw a note: "Hey guys, could you bang on my door to wake me up on Wednesday at 7:30?" Evidently he really had to get up on time that day. Oh, how gleefully Dan and I took that responsibility upon ourselves!

Recreational singing: Yesterday I sang Guster, "Center of Attention," and Leonard's "Standing in a Line," and "Doob-Doob," and one other by him. "Center of Attention" got me a smile from a passer-by.

Books: Zack, on rereading Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed:

I like it just as much as I did as a twelve-year-old, but for completely different reasons. The twelve-year-old me liked it mostly because Shevek (protagonist) gets to invent new physics theories.

[I read The Dispossessed after my last finals of the fall semester of 2001, curled up on a beanbag chair at Leonard's workplace, with a great view of the bay. Susanna can testify as to how comfy that is.]

People forget how good Twain is. The Innocents Abroad is by turns hilarious and wistful and biting and wince-inducing and heartbreaking. The heartbreaks aren't Twain's fault, but history's. When Twain talks about the lovely city of Beirut, or travels through "Palestine" with no greater fears than inept guides and thirst, then I wish that I could have seen the Middle East that way, as it was then, and not as it is today.

I wince when I see Twain crankily dismissing whole races and religions and labeling them as, say, lazy and greedy. Yes, it was 1867, but jeez! I suppose that even I would fall under some category that he considered stupid or dirty or subhuman. An unpleasantness.

More TV: Last night Nandini and I watched Seventh Heaven together, and agreed that the only attractive member of the Seventh Heaven cast is Stephen Collins, who plays the father/minister Eric Camden. Curiously enough, Catherine Hicks (who plays his wife) was a star in Star Trek IV -- and Stephen Collins was in Star Trek I! (Thanks, IMDB.)

Aiee! According to the IMDB page for Seventh Heaven, if I like this show, I'll probably like Beverly Hills, 90210. Oh, no!

Filed under: Reading

# 17 Apr 2002, 03:28PM GMT+5:30: I scored at the Friends of the Public Library book sale today. I got a free Stanislaw Lem anthology and I bought Ray Lynch's Deep Breakfast and They Might Be Giants's Miscellaneous T on audiocassette for the princely sum of $1.00.

Filed under: Reading

# 16 Apr 2002, 04:36PM GMT+5:30: More Khayyam madness:

Waste not your Hour, nor in the vain pursuit
Of This and That endeavour and dispute;
Better be jocund with the fruitful Grape
Than sadden after none, or bitter, Fruit.
You know, my Friends, with what a brave Carouse
I made a Second Marriage in my house;
Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed
And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse.
For "Is" and "Is-not" though with Rule and Line
And "Up" and "Down" by Logic I define,
Of all that one should care to fathom,
Was never deep in anything but--Wine.

Brought to you by the Booze Council.

Filed under: Reading

# 30 Mar 2002, 06:49PM GMT+5:30: I visited the Anarchist Bookfair and hung out a great deal with Steve and met up with Anirvan and Seth. I also saw people whom I knew (sort of) had not expected to see: namely, Reina Palacios (now Reina Hutchinson), a person I'd known in high school; Peter, a fella I vaguely know from Cal; and Keith Knight, a cartoonist whose "The K Chronicles" appears on Wednesdays at Salon.com.

I bought merchandise from Knight and got his autograph. I also got:

a bookmark or two
a necklace of beads, gratis
a CD of music by Pete Seeger (If I Had a Hammer: Songs of Hope and Struggle, on the Smithsonian Folkways label)
J.G. Eccarius's book of short stories, Down and Out in the Ivy League
a booklet by John Johnson, Why I Am Not a Mormon: Fallacies of the Mormon Faith. I think Leonard and Adam might be interested in borrowing that one.

I would have bought Divorce Your Car! by Katie Alvord (New Society Publishers), but I spent far too much as it is.

Now I'm hanging out at home, the room to myself, listening to A Prairie Home Companion and hoping to read and do homework. A good weekend so far.

Filed under: Reading

# 25 Mar 2002, 01:48PM GMT+5:30: From the latest issue of that esteemed journal of diaspora, India Post, two items.

First: in the "Woman Post" (two-page spread devoted to women), an article (if you can call it that) repeating some press release about the latest and greatest "a little alcohol consumption lowers some women's risks of heart disease" study. The graphic: some image lifted from a liquor ad, featuring a scantily clad white female with a come-hither look, as well as two bottles of booze. Huh?

Second: a news-brief, two paragraphs, in "Youth Post," telling us -- thanks to a new Scientific Study! -- that young people listening to techno music drive more dangerously than people listening to ballads or silence. Leonard is vindicated!

An unrelated "huh?": I'm using Netscape on Windows 98. Somehow a Microsoft Internet Explorer pop-up just appeared on my screen. WTH? Oh yeah, browser/OS integration. What was it Malcolm X said? Alex Haley wrote that, while stirring cream into his coffee, Malcolm X used to say, "My coffee is the only thing I like integrated."

Filed under: Reading

# 22 Mar 2002, 10:00AM GMT+5:30: Many, many media experiences over the past few days have I had.

On Tuesday I saw Noam Chomsky speak. I couldn't follow his speech, which was about about theories of linguistics or something.

On Wednesday I went to BAM!, er, BAM's exhibit of photographs depicting human migration. Certainly many images haunted me, especially pictures of dead bodies and of children. But the most striking photo showed me a woman working the land in the foreground and a river and a skyscraper in the background. The caption informed me that, in Indonesia, one often finds farmland and highrise buildings within sight of each other. This bit of data uniquely made globalization come alive for me.

Yesterday, Thursday, I saw Gosford Park again. A very good movie that stood up to repeated viewing and that Leonard enjoyed. (He's as picky as I am, so that's something.) Gosford Park -- what Wodehouse left out but could have written had he been more malicious.

Speaking of Wodehouse, I finished A Few Quick Ones and (as always) loved his short stories, especially the ones where plots turn on coincidences and scheming, rather than just scheming. Now I'm working on Stanislaw Lem's A Perfect Vacuum.

Also: Hey Seth: there's a database on agriculture [subsidies?] called Agricola. And the lobby of Sather Tower on the UC Berkeley campus holds an exhibit on the loyalty oath controversy.

And: To me, laugh-out loud funny.

Filed under: Reading

# 16 Mar 2002, 09:44AM GMT+5:30: This morning I read the first two short stories in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies. I like them, much as I liked the stories in Anjana Appachana's Incantations and Other Stories. Both sets have that indie-film vibe and Indian-diaspora genre vibe going, although Anirvan (consummate connoiseur of all things indie and diasporic) could probably talk my ear off about nuances that distinguish the two, and I'm pretty sure Lahiri's prose is more subtle (maybe this is why Lahiri has a Pulitzer and Appachana doesn't).

I only hope Lahiri's novels don't stink as much as Appachana's Listening Now, which my mother and I both hated and both couldn't finish.

Filed under: Reading

# 10 Mar 2002, 11:54PM GMT+5:30: So I enjoyed but fell asleep while listening to Bach's Mass in B minor with Leonard and Seth, after showing Leonard a few episodes of Yes, Minister. In other media experiences, Leonard and I watched some MST3K, I'm almost done with Professor McWhorter's new book The Power of Babel and reading every article by him that I can find online, and I'm listening to and really enjoying Guster's album Lost and Gone Forever (borrowed from Alexei).

McWhorter is really influencing me this semester. First Leonard interrogated me wrt where a dialect turns into a new language, then this evening I discussed with Crystal the proper status of "Black English." I find linguistics pretty interesting this semester, but maybe that's just because I'm getting to know cool linguists such as Adam and McWhorter.

Filed under: Reading

# 04 Mar 2002, 12:52AM GMT+5:30: From Adam: "Snapple says it's 'made from the best stuff on earth.' Evidently the best stuff on earth is ... water and high-fructose corn syrup."

I hung out with Matt and Adam last night, er, Saturday night, and Leonard today. The socializing! The fun! Now I've seen two episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus and one of Muppets Tonight. The crotchety critics in the Muppet cast are basically Beavis and Butthead.

Yesterday and today I reread Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter, which has a few lines as disorienting as "Somebody's got to do it....I'm free, white, and twenty-one...this is a free country and I'm free and independent. I do as I please."

For my weekly chore, I cleaned the kitchen floor. I really scrubbed some spots that hadn't gotten enough attention from previous floor-cleaners. Camilla told me to stop and said that I reminded her of Cinderella.

Filed under: Reading

# 01 Mar 2002, 07:20AM GMT+5:30: It's not often that I wonder, "How should I address this professor? Would he rather I use his title, his title and last name, or his first name?" and then read a book by him (in this case, John McWhorter's Losing the Race) that answers the question (in this case, "John").

Filed under: Reading

# 28 Feb 2002, 03:16PM GMT+5:30: Even though Bad Subjects is usually full of grad-student wankery, I still read it. Case in point: it's fun to skim such a perfect embodiment of the genre, especially when it's queer theory being applied to "why the life of a teaching assistant stinks".

On the other hand, sometimes Bad Subjects gives you a useful introduction to some fun contrarian.

As long as I'm pointing you to cute culture analysis, I'll quote from an instance of Michael Kinsley's brand of astonished common sense:

America is not, as it sometimes seems, a society lurching from one acute social crisis to the next. It is a basically healthy society with lots of chronic problems that exist simultaneously, can and should be ameliorated, but will never go away.

And Leonard is right. Read the NYT article on the revolutionary entrepreneur Farsi satellite TV station. The last page is hilarious -- P.G. Wodehouse for the twenty-first century.

Filed under: Reading

# 19 Feb 2002, 08:11AM GMT+5:30: I'm reading Teaching as a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner. Enjoyable and thought-provoking.

So now I have over a year of my life here in my journal at this website. I started back in December 2000 and I'm glad. Thanks to Seth and Leonard for inspiring me.

Adam and Leonard visited me yesterday. I attempted to make lunch. Tip: beans need soaking overnight before they can transform into food. Take note!

We played Scrabble and I had a great stroke of luck the very first turn, using up all my letters with UNIFORM, but Leonard later achieved SULFITES. Hey, is TA really a word?

Great quotes via Postman and Weingartner:

Ernest Hemingway: "In order to be a great writer a person must have a built-in, shockproof crap detector."
Father John Culkin: "A lot of things have happened in [the twentieth] century, and most of them plug into walls."
Jerome Frank: Up until about 1920, almost the whole history of medicine is the history of the placebo effect.

Filed under: Reading

# 12 Feb 2002, 09:07AM GMT+5:30: Every year I try not to pay attention to Valentine's Day or the Academy Awards, and every year I kinda do. Hey, Lagaan is up for Best Foreign Film! Adam, it'll be a deathmatch between your Am�lie and my Lagaan, eh?

I finished Wobegon Boy by Garrison Keillor last night, er, early this morning. And then I basically cried myself to sleep because Keillor is particularly gifted at arousing yearning and sorrow and the impulse to find someone to love to stave off death. I'm really glad I've found all these friends and a few readers, people in whose memories I'll live on, but they'll die too, all of them, everyone on every bus I've ever taken, everyone in every class I've ever taken, everyone I've liked and everyone I've hated (a short list), and every thought experiment of teleportation and prosthetics and the nature of the self just counterpoints my inevitable winking-out.

As I see it, there are a few main schools of thought with regard to the afterlife. One is the reincarnation or heaven/hell/purgatory-style belief system. I don't believe this; I see no good reason to believe it.

Another is the Rent paradigm:

How about love?
How about love?
How about love?
Measure in love.
Seasons of love,
seasons of love.
-"Seasons of Love"

Certainly I wish to experience much love before I die, but that's only a way to maximize the years I have on Earth (or Mars, or whatever), and to influence the memories people have of me after I die. They'll die, too.

And then there's the legacy system. This strikes more of a chord with me. I want to create works that will continue after everyone I know and have ever known dies. I've always had a heightened sense of the ephemeral -- comes from my family moving around so much when I was a kid, perhaps -- maybe this is why I'm such a packrat, to keep a simalcrum of continuity about me -- so this is less rampant arrogance than rampant fear of death, although I suppose they're two sides of the same coin.

Filed under: Reading

# 30 Jan 2002, 07:16PM GMT+5:30: I don't know why this is so damn cool, but it is. I saw this in a sig.

I play it cool and
Dig all jive.
That's the reason
Why I stay alive.
My motto as I live
And learn is:
Dig and be dug in return.
-Langston Hughes

Filed under: Reading

# 17 Jan 2002, 07:50AM GMT+5:30: Yesterday I went to a store (The Dollar Tree) to try to buy blank videocassettes, and what happened? Nothing. Not even ice cream. Or, rather, I couldn't find any.

(Have I complained here before about the metaphor of the Dollar Tree? I mean, do the dollars grow on the tree? Is the tree made of dollars? Does it cost a dollar? Would one maybe hang one's dollars on the dollar tree, as on a coat tree? I'll stop before this gets as bad as the "unlock your future" rant.)

I often find myself intrigued at what books pop up in the not-quite-ultimate remainder bin of 98-cent-stores and the like. And I often feel guilty for wanting to buy some of them. But the selection at the Dollar Tree contained several quality items! Examples:

We Know What to Do by presidential candidate Lamar Alexander (probably wearing his plaid flannel lumberjack shirt in the jacket photo).
A rather good book that I have read, Erik Tarloff's Face Time. Like The West Wing, but darker and more sexual. A dollar?!
If you loved Gavin de Becker's The Gift of Fear, you'll like his sequel concentrating on the safety of our children, Protecting the Gift. I actually considered buying this.
My freshman year I was so interested in Howard Kurtz's Spin Cycle that I ordered it via Collected Thoughts, a bookstore on Euclid Avenue. (I passed Collected Thoughts with Mike Carns every Friday night that we visited the Berkeley Rose Garden.) I didn't buy that many books that year, except for coursework, but I thought that media-politics expos� was worth the money. I must have lent it to someone or left it in the Stockton house, much like The Orwell Reader, because I can't find it now. And now it's at the Dollar Tree.

If I were an author who found her books showing up at the Dollar Tree, maybe I'd comfort myself with the hope that my works would reach a larger, less well-to-do audience. But I'd probably still feel awful.

Oh, you know that some authors are so famous that their names show up in much larger type on their book jackets than the actual titles. However, yesterday I saw the converse: a self-help book on whose jacket a price sticker covered up the author's name.

Filed under: Reading

# 09 Jan 2002, 09:42AM GMT+5:30: Leonard and Zack and I had fun last night conversing on many topics and eating at King Dong (a.k.a. the surprisingly good Chinese restaurant next to the massage parlor at Haste and Shattuck).

Me: It's like that Asimov story.
Zack: I'm sorry, I haven't read Asimov's complete works.
Me: Don't worry, Asimov didn't either.
Leonard: Asimov didn't even write Asimov's complete works! It was--
Me: Bacon.
Leonard: Yes, Francis Bacon, yes.

Filed under: Reading

# 07 Jan 2002, 10:51AM GMT+5:30: In the preface or epilogue to paperback editions of best-selling books (e.g., Ender's Game, Iacocca, The Gift of Fear), authors oft say something like, "I never expected that I would get thousands of letters from people who said, 'Your book changed my life.'" You know, it's happened enough times that authors really should expect it by now.

Filed under: Reading

# 07 Jan 2002, 10:50AM GMT+5:30: Gavin de Becker can't stand local TV news. In The Gift of Fear, he rails against its sensationalism and fearmongering and faddiness and generally low standard of reporting on about three separate instances in the book. But just as I thought, "wow, he's really peeved at TV news," he started out a new paragraph with "I discuss all this here as much more than a pet peeve."

Likewise, Hofstadter started losing me in his discussion of symbols and thought and the brain and finally said, "Perhaps this seems too abstract..." or some such.

As Leonard has noted, these disclaimers probably came in the editing-by-others stage of the book-writing.

Filed under: Reading

# 06 Jan 2002, 10:20AM GMT+5:30: This morning I was reading Hofstadter and I realized that one thing in this book that annoys me is his wordplay. I mean, as you all know, I am heavily in favor of wordplay in almost every situation, but Hofstadter's endless wordplay leads me to suspect that he makes arguments just so he can play with spelling in punny ways.

This connects to my other peeve I just discovered. de Becker does this and lots of rather unprofessional writers do this. They'll mention a word root or a dictionary definition as though that, in and of itself, is an invincible argument for their position. It's often a conclusion/capstone or an introduction rhetorical trick. Definitions should be used to clarify the premises of arguments, not to make arguments. And word roots are seldom relevant to the discourse.

Filed under: Reading

# 05 Jan 2002, 05:42PM GMT+5:30: Now I have to update my weblogging software (NewsBruiser). I should be glad that Leonard added functionality. And I am. But upgrades. Grrr.

I have to reply to a lot of email. I will be glad to do it. And tonight I got to catch most of Garrison Keillor's monologue on A Prairie Home Companion. He used the "we're Lutherans" setup three or four times!

I finished Childhood's End and, as after The Songs of Distant Earth, I found myself slightly disoriented that Clarke skips such huge chunks of time. He writes two-hundred-page epics; his grand plots fit in the palm of your hand. I like the fast pace. But his sketches leave out some sheer fiber that I need to feel sated with a story.

I practiced driving today. Not too difficult, considering I hadn't driven in months. I need to set up an appointment to take my license exam, which (I think) has no written portion but (I know) has an eyesight test and a ridealong inspection.

I really dislike malls.

Filed under: Reading

# 04 Jan 2002, 11:06AM GMT+5:30: Finished The Gift of Fear and will have to talk more about it later, especially regarding de Becker's pet peeve: local TV news.

de Becker warns us that one indicator that signals danger is a person's resistance to the word "no." He laments that mass culture trains women to not reject or to let someone down lightly and trains men to disregard rejection.

I wish I could tell my mother "no means no!" when she tried to serve me more food.

Filed under: Reading

# 03 Jan 2002, 09:39PM GMT+5:30: Today I entered a used books store in El Portal and ended up buying The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker, whom my sister and I used to mock back in the late nineties when he showed up on Oprah Winfrey's talk show and the like. Now that I live in a city sans parents, and personal security concerns me every damn day, I'm much less inclined to mock the "security expert" and much more inclined to listen to his advice. Don't try to explain away your intuition that "something is wrong"; trust that you are an expert at predicting other humans' behaviour, as you've been doing it all your life; remember that everybody is pretty much alike and context explains a lot. This is basically The Social Animal, chapter eight (the "tips and tricks" section), only about personal safety rather than love and relationships in general.

de Becker gives a list of almost-universal human characteristics: disliking ridicule and embarrassment, seeking connection with others, seeking a degree of control over one's life, etc. I read it out loud as a checklist (e.g., "Do you suffer from these symptoms?") to Leonard. He asked whether the checklist was intended to test how long someone could go without getting sarcastic. "I crave ridicule and embarrassment!"

Filed under: Reading

# 02 Jan 2002, 05:35PM GMT+5:30: Today I had much fun. I met Steve and his friend Michelle at brunch at Crepe de Vine on Shattuck and we had a fun conversation. Steve gave me Christmas presents: three "tacky" bookmarks, and four books that had been on my wishlist:

Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End
William Gibson's Count Zero
Gibson's Neuromancer
Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive

Thanks, Steve!

As we were eating, Shweta, Nathaniel, and two of their friends walked in. After Steve and Michelle left, I continued talking and hanging out with the new crowd. Nathaniel even helped me out with my Hofstadter problem of yesterday. One new friend, Dan, is on a Peace Corps term in the Ukraine, and we conversed a bit in Russian; with the other, Zachary, I conversed at length about software, religion, and other mutual interests. (He once submitted NetHack nonkitten items to the robotfindskitten project.)

I wrote all this while on hold with Pac Bell. I am still on hold with Pac Bell. I called PG&E twenty minutes ago and, in five minutes, arranged for my electricity and natural gas service to end on 31 January. Pac Bell, on the other hand, twice has tried to get me to opt-in to talk about other products and services from the SBC "family."

Okay, I'm not on hold anymore. I'm talking to a person. This is good.

Done. My phone service here will no longer exist as of sometime in the morning of 31 January 2002. "Sharon" thanked me for being "such a wonderful customer." I wonder if they say that to everyone, not just the ones who pay their bills on time.

Filed under: Reading

# 01 Jan 2002, 03:54PM GMT+5:30: I'm still reading Douglas Hofstadter's G�del, Escher, Bach, and I'm in the chapter entitled Typographical Number Theory. (By the way, even though I've seen Hofstadter in person and in pictures, whenever I try to picture him I get this vision of Nathaniel Smith. Bright, cocky, and enviable, that sort of thing.)

Around the middle of the chapter, Hofstadter throws out a few exercises-for-the-reader in translation from English to Typographical Number Theory (in which only the natural numbers exist). He doesn't provide the answers anywhere that I can see, but Leonard agreed with my answers for the first four puzzles, so I thought I was ready for the fifth:

b is a power of 2.

Leonard didn't know how to translate it (that darn inability to represent recursion!), and thought it might have to do with something called the Chinese Remainder Theorem, but sort of gave up and went back to rereading The Lord of the Rings. I kept plugging away, trying to solve it, since I knew that a solution existed.

I tried an approach that reasoned, "b is either equal to 1, or it's a product of 2 and a, where a is some power of 2." But that leads to recursion and I don't know how to represent recursion in TNT.

Then I tried to think about the properties of powers of 2. And powers of 2 are never odd (except for 1), and powers of 2 are not divisible by any odd numbers (except for 1). The first rule there is realy a sub-rule of the second, so:

b is not the product of any odd number (except one) and any other number.

I don't know how to represent the various typographical notations in HTML, but here's a translation of my TNT representation of the above logic:

For all a,
For all c,
 a equals zero,
 or b does not equal (c times (one plus (two times a)))

Am I right? Or am I missing something? I think I am missing something. Probably there's some insidious loophole involving the possibility that c is odd or something. What is the "right" translation?

(By the way, Hofstadter merely describes this problem with: "may be a little tricky.")

(I get the sense that Seth's diary will feel this entry call out to it, deep calling to deep, and put up an answer to my question without Seth even having to write it.)

Filed under: Reading

# 29 Dec 2001, 02:04PM GMT+5:30: Reread Anurag Mathur's book The Inscrutable Americans. Much like R.K. Narayan's My Dateless Diary, which is better and which mentions Berkeley.

The funniest portion of the Mathur novel concerns our Indian visitor's discovery of American girls in the springtime sunning themselves and so on.

Randy walked in and found that Gopal was not in the mood for subtleties.
"Naked women," ranted Gopal. "Bloody damn fool naked women are lying everywhere. Wherever I am going there are damn fool naked women lying everywhere. Why?"
"Yes," said Randy. "I agree completely. Ain't life grand?"
Gopal glared at him. "For you maybe. What about me?"
Randy began to understand. "No luck still?"
Gopal snarled.
"Wow," admired Randy. "Years and years of celibacy. Like Gandhi, huh?"
"Gandhi is not having bloody damn fool naked women lying for miles and miles all around," Gopal groused bitterly.

Filed under: Reading

# 20 Dec 2001, 08:17PM GMT+5:30: Certain bits of television I'd like to watch all the way through. Examples: Baseball and The Civil War by Ken Burns. The seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine that I never saw, and all of Babylon 5. And some Nova and Frontline episodes. Fortunately enough, the transcripts for those last two shows are online at pbs.org, and every so often I go reread the transcript for "The Proof."

STACY KEACH (NARRATOR): The task was to prove that no numbers, other than 2, fit the equation. But when computers came along, couldn't they check each number one by one and show that none of them worked?
JOHN CONWAY: Well, how many numbers are there to be dealt with? You've got to do it for infinitely many numbers. So, after you've done it for one, how much closer have you got? Well, there's still infinitely many left. After you've done it for a thousand numbers, how many, how much closer have you got? Well, there's still infinitely many left. After you've done it for a million, well, there's still infinitely many left. In fact, you haven't done very many, have you?

Filed under: Reading

# 20 Dec 2001, 06:58PM GMT+5:30: Today felt terrific. I finished The Dispossessed, started Hofstadter's book, and watched The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, and spent time with agreeable people, and liked it all. This is what vacation should be.

I'm probably going to try to sell a bunch of books tomorrow to Ned's and Moe's and whomever will take them.

Filed under: Reading

# 18 Dec 2001, 11:02AM GMT+5:30: Last night I conversed with my sister on many topics. She came over to discuss Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress, which I had lent her, and which had set her head abuzz. (Kress and Le Guin do political fiction so much better than Rand! Unless The Fountainhead, which I have not read, is somehow several orders of magnitude better than Anthem and Atlas Shrugged, both of which I have read.) I recommend Kress's work and haven't read nearly enough of it, as my wishlist attests.

Nandini and I also mentioned our growing distaste for advice columnists. She told me that the new Salon columnist isn't bad, and that she now only reads letters at Slate's "Dear Prudence," not Prudie's responses. What an innovation! This could change my entire advice-column-reading experience paradigm!

Slate recently revealed that Prudie is the daughter of Ann Landers. Nandini voiced doubt that simple heredity gives one advice-giving prowess. I noted that perhaps Prudie is the George W. Bush of advice columnists.

Filed under: Reading

# 14 Dec 2001, 01:46PM GMT+5:30: I've been reading The Dispossessed by Le Guin. Enjoyable and thought-provoking. Better get to the housecleaning, though.

Filed under: Reading

# 06 Dec 2001, 10:43PM GMT+5:30: I finished The One Best Way yesterday evening. I enjoyed it, although Kanigel rather maddeningly draws no concrete conclusions about the benefits and disadvantages of Taylorism today. At least he presents much evidence and argument for several sides.

One reason I chose to read a biography of Taylor: for years and years I have tried to figure out why I worry about wasting little tiny bits of time. These days, I try to indulge myself in the decadence of leisure, taking scenic routes and enjoying the hot massage of the shower, but even so, efficiency hovers over me, the false god of my world.

Steve and I agree that there's a difference between "really inefficient" and "waste." An important distinction.

Filed under: Reading

# 03 Dec 2001, 09:02PM GMT+5:30: When I took Political Science 2 (Comparative Politics) my freshman year of college, Simon Stow pointed out a passage near the end of some article in our reader. "Some people say that [dangerously-close-to-straw-man argument]. They are wrong." Stow told us to remember that sentence, since we'd never again see "They are wrong" in any other article by a political scientist.

Slate just published a New Republic editor's hard-nosed exposé of Republicans' culpability for the current recession. The sentence that reminded me of "They are wrong":

"It wasn't just some giant miscalculation. It was a lie."

From the same article, another great comment that touches on a Leonard gripe:

"So the previous tax cut was supposedly needed to make the surplus disappear. The next one is needed to bring it back. Whatever."

Filed under: Reading

# 03 Dec 2001, 12:47PM GMT+5:30: This Fredrick W. Taylor biography rocks. It confirms the dictum I read in stained glass at the Library of Congress half a year ago: "The history of the world is the biographies of great men." Sometime in the next few years I want to read biographies of other recent historical figures: Freud, Darwin, Marx, Truman, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, the usual suspects.

The next few pleasure books I read will include Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke. My sister and the fellow next to me on the BART recommended it highly. In addition, I must finish Guns, Germs, and Steel. The last time I read any of it, I was riding on a bus from Novgorod to St. Petersburg.

Filed under: Reading

# 02 Dec 2001, 06:22PM GMT+5:30: I waited so long to pick up The One Best Way again that the time period it covers is the same as the time period we're covering now in my Imperial Russian History class. Three more lectures to the revolution!

Filed under: Reading

# 30 Nov 2001, 10:16AM GMT+5:30: Argh, argh, argh. Scott Adams got me! I mocked the imperfect questioner and questioned the Socrates character, and now I find out that this Daily Cal reviewer got the point, and I didn't. Adams was, it seems, deliberately playing with the form of the Socratic dialogue, challenging the reader to herself question the traditionally infallible Socrates character and "think for herself." Cyrus Farivar writes,

Adams twists an ancient tradition of passive Socratic questioning by inviting the reader to directly question the paradox that Avatar is omniscient though he speaks in false syllogisms.

No wonder he had so many fallacious arguments -- that was Adams's intention. Great. I feel had. I shouldn't, but I do.

Filed under: Reading

# 29 Nov 2001, 07:56AM GMT+5:30: There's this great photo in Bob Woodward's The Choice (his book on the 1996 US presidential election). Colin Powell is speaking at some press conference with downcast eyes and, on the right, a woman, presumably his wife, is crying. The caption goes something like, "Colin Powell announced in a press conference on February 31, 1996, that he would not run for President. He also revealed that he is a Republican."

The way the photo and caption go together, the woman seems to be weeping, and Powell ashamed, because he has just outed himself as a Republican. Quite funny.

Filed under: Reading

# 28 Nov 2001, 11:57PM GMT+5:30: I took a break from writing my paper -- at this rate it'll be done in May or so -- to try to finish off my thoughts on something that happened today.

I gave in a bit to temptation this evening. On my way home, I stopped at Barnes & Noble's. I could rationalize it as "waiting for the rain to stop," but that's not why. I saw in the B&N window an ad: Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, will speak about his new book (God's Debris: A Thought Experiment) on 6 December at the Berkeley Barnes & Noble's at Shattuck and Durant. So I stopped in and found the book and skimmed it all the way through. It took me about thirty minutes to read about a hundred pages. I found it useful, but not terrific.

Adams uses the hoary old Socratic-dialogue framing device, which creates some problems. First, our protagonist-questioner doesn't ask some questions or make some counterarguments that I'd like, and the maddening "all-knowing wisdom" of the Old Man goes unquestioned. But -- second -- Adams can deflect criticism of the flawed arguments that his characters make, saying that the book is only a work of fiction, not a philosophical tract and not necessarily representative of his own thoughts.

In addition, Adams can hide behind his subtitle, excusing himself with "it's only a thought-experiment." A thought experiment should contain provocative, well-thought-out questions. God's Debris certainly contains some of those, but there's very little there that strikes me as new. Free will, God, yawn. Adams entertains with his writing style, and makes the questions more palatable for a mainstream audience, but I've asked myself these questions already, so they don't shock me.

In the first third or so, Adams -- excuse me, the Old Man -- tears down the naive reader's worldview. In the second part, he builds an elaborate and (to me) questionable cosmology involving God and probability. In the third, he gives the questioner advice on how to live happily.

The third part is the best.

I found the advice generally useful (except for the "inherent gender differences" parts), so certainly one wonders whether that implies that its basis is valid. Well, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, which is just another way of saying "be careful of reckless correlation." One does not need to believe the advice-giver's philosophy to recognize good advice. Recognize the probable and act accordingly, the Old Man says, and I agree. As a final note, I must remark upon the Scott Adams media empire and how its existence colors my view of any artifact emerging from it. Mr. Adams has Big Ideas and spreads them quite effectively via his books, e-mail list, comic strips, and other media. I urge caution of Scott Adams's unabashed memery. I sense some large, frightening plan in the offing, and I would rather not be one of his minions.

Filed under: Reading

# 28 Nov 2001, 09:30PM GMT+5:30: "There are many different philosophical positions on what it means to be ethical and what morality means (Frankena, 1973)."

Thank you, Richard M. Perloff and Mr. or Ms. Frankena.

Filed under: Reading

# 28 Nov 2001, 12:26PM GMT+5:30: The In Defense of Advertising book had nothing I could use, I discovered rather quickly. (No index entries for "children," "minors," "protection," "sex," or "violence.") But our Objectivist friend Mr. Kirkpatrick married a woman named Linda Reardan. Ayn Rand named one protagonist of Atlas Shrugged Hank Rearden. I don't mean to imply anything so much as call it an amusing coincidence. I certainly would never imply that Objectivists are such slavish devotees to Miss Rand that they'll make major life choices based on the details of her fiction.

Filed under: Reading

# 28 Nov 2001, 12:13PM GMT+5:30: I should have known that some book entitled In Defense of Advertising: arguments from reason, ethical egoism, and laissez-faire capitalism would revolt me. But the copyright acknowledgments page contains eight items, three of them by Ayn Rand! Aieee!

It gets better. The preface starts out talking about ads that the author, one Jerry Kirkpatrick, once disliked, until he learned more about advertising and now he believes that the ads "all meet the standards of both good advertising and good taste." Well, Mr. Kirkpatrick, if you reacted negatively to the ads -- and, by association, to the products they advertised -- then they were bad advertisements, weren't they? Jeez.

Filed under: Reading

# 28 Nov 2001, 12:07PM GMT+5:30: Lane, W. Ronald, and Thomas Russell. Advertising: A Framework. p. 265. The word "slogan" comes from the Gaelic, slugh gairm, for "battle cry."

Filed under: Reading

# 26 Nov 2001, 09:01PM GMT+5:30: I just conversed with my sister and lent her: One-L by Scott Turow, Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress, Waiting by Ha Jin, and a book of graphic --that is, comic-book style-- retellings of various fairy tales. The first two I bought at garage sales or used book stores. The third I bought new, or Dan bought for me, at Moe's or Cody's on Telegraph. The fourth I received as a gift for my birthday in 2000 from a couple that has since broken up.

I'm listening to You Will Go to the Moon by Moxy Früvous on a disc what Steve gave me. Thanks, Steve.

Speaking of books [disingenuous segue]: Leonard and I browsed at Pegasus yesterday. We saw a book entitled The Maths Gene. (As many of you, my fair readers, already know, "maths" is a British abbreviation for "mathematics," as strange to US-dwellers as "math" is to UK residents.) Leonard remarked that we must be seeing the British version of the book, since the version for export to the US would have an altered title. I said, "Yeah, The Maths Gene and the Sorcerer's Stone."

Filed under: Reading

# 22 Nov 2001, 11:24PM GMT+5:30: I used to read a Calvin and Hobbes every day, off calvinandhobbes.com. But that habit lapsed, and today I read some Watterston for the first time in months (not counting the strips that I see next to Bizarro and Dilbert and the like pasted to office doors at the U). At first, Calvin sounded a lot like Leonard, but then I got to visualizing him more as me. I didn't particularly see any resemblance between Hobbes and anyone in my life. My better self, maybe.

Filed under: Reading

# 22 Nov 2001, 11:20PM GMT+5:30: Mixed-up bookshelves: at one Thanksgiving shindig I attended today, I saw Moby Dick next to The Illustrated Adventures of Sherlock Holmes next to The Days Are Just Packed!

I got through half of the Watterston before a family member came and bugged me to socialize.

Filed under: Reading

# 20 Nov 2001, 06:56PM GMT+5:30: I'm reading a heck of a lot on persuasion for my paper in political psychology. Peter Wright, summarizing an experiment in "Cognitive Responses to Mass Media Advocacy":

Adult women were presented either anaudio or print version of the text of an ad for a soybean-based food innovation....All the women were asked to treat the entire transmission segment as they naturally would in responding to mass media transmissions in their home. Half were also told that the upcoming ad would discuss a topic about which they must soon make a personal decision. This heightened the amount of attention given the ad versus the other message, as shown by reliable differences on a postmessage question.

To paraphrase Phoebe on the television show Friends, you must decide, you must decide, even though it's just an experiment, you must decide!

Filed under: Reading

# 17 Nov 2001, 07:50AM GMT+5:30: I did, in fact, go to bed around 3:40. I stayed up for a tiny bit reading The One Best Way. I really like Kanigel's method, though he gets repetitive in talking about young Taylor's taste for numbers and measures, and in stressing that "this was a different time, the late nineteenth century, really, remember this, you'd better remember that this was a different time when goods weren't nearly so ubiquitous and easy to make and most every manufacturing process involved craftsmanship." I sort of mind the repetition, but then again, since I'm a modern consumer and I often forget how new and unusual it is to have such abundance of disposable goods, perhaps I need the repetition.

Filed under: Reading

# 16 Nov 2001, 09:39AM GMT+5:30: I used to have all sorts of theories about the Harry Potter books. I'd talk about how the weakness of the French and the evil of the Germans had to do with World War II, and how the post-Voldemort wizard vengeance was a rather literal witch hunt reminiscent of McCarthy, and so on.

But I haven't read any Rowling recently, and a Culturebox and another, more involved analysis that I read today rather sated me for Rowling theories for a while.

Filed under: Reading

# 16 Nov 2001, 12:11AM GMT+5:30: I actually own and have sort of started Shirer's classic, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which I bought for a buck at a thrift store next to the S-Mart Foods in Stockton. A Political Psychology discussion weeks ago reminded me of this, and of the question: Does Godwin's Law apply if one is actually discussing Nazi Germany?

The answer is, of course it does, since Godwin's Law is not actually some normative tool about winning or losing but simply an observation that, "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." Usenet tradition might say, "Someone made a Nazi comparison, game over," but (unfortunately?) I can't use that excuse to walk out of my Political Psych lecture.

Filed under: Reading

# 16 Nov 2001, 12:05AM GMT+5:30: "Oh, now we see the violence inherent in the system!"

What a great movie, Holy Grail.

Before the film, Robin and I should have done reading for our classes, but instead we talked about books we'd read and books we wanted to read and recommended to each other. I haven't yet read Brothers Karamazov or Crime and Punishment, but Robin had never read Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams or Jared Silver's Guns, Germs, and Steel. How can a history major never have heard of Guns, Germs, and Steel? Don't ask me.

Robin also recommended to me Harold and Maude, a film I first saw mentioned in a list of recommended movies that Mike Parsons wrote for the Tokay Press.

Filed under: Reading

# 15 Nov 2001, 11:40PM GMT+5:30: My current fun-book is Robert Kanigel's The One Best Way, a biography of Frederick W. Taylor. An offhanded remark about transcendentalists seized me -- what's the name of the transcendentalist journal that Emerson started? Ah, yes, The Dial.

Taylor's dad gave him rather touching parental advice when Fred was off at college. It made me tear up to see a dad's letter with that heartfelt compassionate sentiment. If I ever have children, I want to honor them so much. I'm not sure I could stand it. Maybe no one is, until going through with it.

Filed under: Reading

# 15 Nov 2001, 09:48AM GMT+5:30: George Orwell wrote in "Politics and the English Language" that

incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning without those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written as tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase.

I had already been considering this when I came across David Thomson's ode to Frances McDormand. His very first sentence not only ends with a needless preposition, but misuses "vale of tears" (also "vale of sorrows").

As men go through this veil of sorrows, there's a lot of things we have to adjust to.

"Veil of sorrows"? What the hell is that? Are you wearing a really sad piece of crepe over your face? Are you a Nathaniel Hawthorne character? So egregious.

Filed under: Reading

# 14 Nov 2001, 08:42AM GMT+5:30: Even if I move outside of Northern California after I graduate, I'll still keep reading Jon Carroll's column in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Filed under: Reading

# 14 Nov 2001, 08:34AM GMT+5:30: Adam linked to Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think." I've never read it, but since I posit that Google helps us achieve memex-hood, I should.

Once upon a time, Leonard impressed me by instantly recalling Bush's name when I said, apropos of nothing, the title of his famous article. Or it might have been the other way around. Either way, very hip.

Filed under: Reading

# 12 Nov 2001, 05:49PM GMT+5:30: I'm really glad I hung out with Alexei. He gave me some great food for thought regarding faith and religion. In addition, he sprang for lunch and I got back Bargainville and Garrison Keillor's The Book of Guys.

I was really glad to find The Book of Guys because I had been looking for it on and off for a year or more. I stopped teaching "Politics of the Midlife Crisis" about a year and a half ago, and I assumed that I must have lent it to someone in that class, and then it turned up in Alexei's bookshelf. Maybe now my luck will turn around and I'll start finding all the (material) stuff I've lost lately. Very frustrating.

Filed under: Reading

# 12 Nov 2001, 11:26AM GMT+5:30: Frustration. I tried to buy some stamps at a vending machine in the post office annex on Allston Way. It ate my $4.00 and gave me back 60 cents in change but did not give me my book of ten first class stamps. (What went wrong? I assume the book didn't drop from its holder, but since the machine -- like too much government -- was nontransparent, I couldn't tell.) Since it's the Monday after Veterans' Day, the main post office was empty of all but the homeless seeking shelter from the rain. I might go there to complain tomorrow.

In happier news, I'm going out to lunch with Alexei. Sometimes I like holidays. I'll try to cram in a few more chapters of Fathers and Sons before I leave. I enjoy Turgenev's spot-on characterizations and the philosophical arguments, and I half-enjoy and half-dislike that I can spot where a translator found some awkward phrasing for some Russian expression.

Filed under: Reading

# 09 Nov 2001, 04:51PM GMT+5:30: I have to read Fathers and Sons by Turgenev over the weekend. Good thing it'll actually interest me.

Filed under: Reading

# 09 Nov 2001, 01:32PM GMT+5:30: Crying: Last night I read Harlan Ellison's Paladin of the Lost Hour and cried. I've been thinking that nothing lasts. Sherwood Anderson has this great line in Winesburg, Ohio, in the short story "Sophistication."

There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood. ... He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun....

The sun is like time. It nurtures us, it lets us grow, and then it kills us. This particular melancholy thought I first had about three years ago.

(Whilst looking up "Paladin," I found another story by Ellison, "Susan", which speaks to the same sorrow.)

I woke up this morning to National Public Radio. Various listeners spoke of how their lives have changed in the past two months, because of the immediate shock of the terrorist attacks on New York and D.C., and because of the war, antiterrorism actions, and other terrorism-related recent events. One woman joined the Peace Corps. One American Literature class can relate better to Bradstreet, Sandburg, Whitman, and Ginsberg.

I've been paranoid and melancholy for years. The recent terrorist attacks just confirmed it.

Filed under: Reading

# 04 Nov 2001, 09:23PM GMT+5:30: Today was the first time in ages that I've started and finished a book in the same day. Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog amused me and certainly pulled me along. She surprised me in the intricacy of her plot, and in the relative lack of frustration for her protagonist/narrator. Usually she takes great glee in throwing every conceivable obstacle in your path. (I've already complained about this.) This time, certainly I encountered pages that made me say, "Argh!" and put the book down for thirty minutes. But it didn't nag me as much as it has in her short stories.

Overall, I see this book as a cross between two of her other books, Bellwether and Doomsday Book, both of which I own and have read. I didn't find this book as emotionally moving as Doomsday Book, nor as annoying as Bellwether.

Next: study for Russian test tomorrow.

Filed under: Reading

# 03 Nov 2001, 08:33AM GMT+5:30: What have I been reading? The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman, and Peter Maass's articles.

Filed under: Reading

# 31 Oct 2001, 01:33PM GMT+5:30: I applied to join Slate's Book Club using a modified version of my anti-Name of the Rose screed. Wish me luck, less on that than on the midterm I'll take in half an hour. Tsar Nicholas, Tsar Gicholas.

Filed under: Reading

# 31 Oct 2001, 12:57PM GMT+5:30: Yesterday, as I walked home in the dark at 5:45pm or so in the pitch-black night interrupted by soft haloes of streetlights and harsh beams of auto headlights-- the time change still disorients me -- I stopped for a few minutes by Pegasus Bookstore at Durant and Shattuck. Some employee posts poems in the window, and the selection changed a few weeks ago. Last night I read Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" for the first time, I think. I also read a poem entitled "Try to Praise the Mutilated World" by Adam Zagajewski, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh.

When I searched for the text and author of the poem just now, I found that many people have cited it as an appropriate poem to read and think about in the wake of recent terrorist attacks, and that the New Yorker published it in its Sept. 24th issue. I liked it too.

One reason that I really enjoyed "Try to Praise the Mutilated World" is that I thought the imagery struck the right balance between vivid, evocative language and personal interpretability. I like poems that I can closely read to see more. Example: "leaves eddied over the earth's scars."

It's been a while since I read poetry that didn't disgust me. It was uplifting.

Filed under: Reading

# 30 Oct 2001, 08:30AM GMT+5:30: I've actually caught up a tiny bit on my Russian Imperial History reading, which is quite fortunate, since I have a midterm tomorrow.

Two passages particularly caught my eye. The first, I excerpt from "Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia" (1811) by Nicholas Karamzin. Karamzin was a conservative historian who didn't like Tsar Alexander I's reforms.

Russia, after all, has been in existence for a thousand years, and not as a savage horde, but as a great state. Yet we are constantly told of new institutions and of new laws, as if we had just emerged from the dark American forests!

Second: One cannot discuss the history of Russian revolutions without mentioning the Decembrists. In 1825 tight cadres of (mostly) educated nobles, officers in the army, tried to overthrow the government. One reason for their dissatisfaction: during the Napoleonic Wars and subsequent occupations, Russian officers spent time in Western Europe. How embarrassing they found it to say, "We are fighting for the freedom of humanity, against Napoleon's tyranny," and have to answer for Russian serfdom!

A. Bestuzhev wrote, in a letter to Tsar Nicholas I analyzing the uprising:

The army, from generals to privates, upon its return, did nothing but discuss how good it is in foreign lands. A comparison with their own country naturally brought up the question, Why should it not be so in our own land?
At first, as long as they talked without being hindered, it was lost in the air, for thinking is like gunpowder, only dangerous when pressed....

Filed under: Reading

# 30 Oct 2001, 08:11AM GMT+5:30: By the way, I finished Newton's Cannon and liked it. Now I need to read the rest of The Age of Unreason. I'm just glad that this sequel addiction doesn't go for, say, history. "Well, I just read a history of the Civil War, and now ... I don't know what happens next! I need to read about Reconstruction!"

Actually, I can imagine saying that.

Filed under: Reading

# 29 Oct 2001, 04:01PM GMT+5:30: Why must Bad Subjects texts be such wankery? Why is "I was ready for punk rock." the first simple declarative sentence in this analysis-cum-memoir of The Prisoner?

Filed under: Reading

# 28 Oct 2001, 07:39PM GMT+5:30: Oh, the last thing that Kavalier man said to me before we parted ways was, "Have you read Siddhartha?" Yes, I have! Siddhartha and Steppenwolf, I think, are the two Hesse works I've read. Right after I acquired them, I recall sitting in a restaurant with Dan when some stranger asked me whether I knew the names of four works by Hesse. I almost got it. Steppenwolf, Damien, Siddhartha, and another. I forgot it then and I forget it now.

Filed under: Reading

# 28 Oct 2001, 07:31PM GMT+5:30: It would be completely unscientific to conclude, on the basis of one evening's anecdotal evidence, that people who ride the BART on Sunday night tend to read more highbrow material than the average BART rider. But an hour ago, the folks transferring at MacArthur were carrying such works as:

a Steinbeck collection
Plague Wars
Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums
Les Mis�rables
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

Just after I noticed this, Kavalier Man and I struck up a conversation. He asked what good books I'd read lately. I suggested The Orwell Reader, Lady Chatterley's Lover, and Newton's Cannon, and gave my considered disapproval of The Name of the Rose. He said that he read a lot in high school and then tired of reading all the time. I didn't get a chance to tell him that I now spend a lot of time with friends that I used to spend reading, and that I now actually consider declining social activities to make time for books.

Filed under: Reading

# 26 Oct 2001, 03:18PM GMT+5:30: It's easier to trace the mental map to my next reference. Russia in this period had serfdom, autocracy, all sorts of arbitrariness in its political system.

"I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes." Soon it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics." When it comes to this, I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty--to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic]." -- Abraham Lincoln, Letter to Joshua F. Speed, Aug. 24, 1855

I didn't know those first few sentences there until just now. Also, I predict that someday someone will search for "Degeneracy," looking for the game, and will find this entry, which has nothing to do with the game.

Filed under: Reading

# 22 Oct 2001, 10:37AM GMT+5:30: Usability, Wobegon, Segfault, Potter:

Today in my life. An hour and a half of handball (making up absences) rather than just half an hour, a Russian test on which I probably got some type of B, a good history lecture about the Decembrists, a spurt of UNIX learning, more fruitless attempts to get NewsBruiser running on my OCF webspace (durn CGI wrapper), and a bit of studying and reading Good Omens sandwiched among constructive conversations with Leonard, Alexei, and my sister.

Tomorrow: a test and a comedy show! I referred to both of these in diary entries in the past week, in case you want to know more.

"Gay hero emerges from hijackings." A fella who graduated from my college and who happens -- happened, I should say -- to be gay helped avert the hijacking on Flight 93 on September eleventh. ("He didn't emerge. He died. His heroism survived," a friend nitpicks.) This reminds me of statues to Crispus Attucks.

Segfault sez: "If Shakespeare Wrote Error Messages" has jumped to #14 in the Top Stories of All Time! I'm glad. Up from #15. Yee-ha. Public approbation: terrific.

No false patriotism here. Fraudulency is still up, despite any alleged obligation of patriotism and support for our kind-of-elected leaders during "all of this."

Heavens, they're tasty! What is so "tasty and expeditious" about Prairie Home Companion's Powder Milk Biscuits? My private explanation: they're high in fiber and help "shy persons"; connect the dots. Incidentally, I scored 8 out of ten (would have been 9 if I had better motor skills) on the Lake Wobegon trivia quiz at the Prairie Home site.

Usability issue. Okay, I'm not sure whose fault this is. I think it's mine. Because there's sooooo much documentation out there for new *nix users, right? So it must be my fault that I have never, until today, read some useful, clear documentation on how to install software on a Unix system. I came across this, half-despairing, after about a year of trying and failing to find the answers in man pages, my O'Reilly Running Linux, and HOWTOs. This lecture finally told me, in plain and simple language, what the several steps are for making something useful out of some foo.tar.gz file. And, since that's the format for almost everything I've ever run into, argh that I lost a year of useful computing because .... well, because not only do I get no signals from my environment as to what to do, but even when I sought out directions, I couldn't understand them.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Taliban. Er, Azkaban. But seriously, folks, Goblet of Fire, the most recent Harry Potter novel, certainly alludes to terrorism, albeit magical.

I think I gave that book back to Dan, but maybe I could skim some passages again at a bookstore or something. The Harry Potter books really do get more thought-provoking and morally complex as the series progresses. I'm looking forward to seeing J.K. Rowling's next work.

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/10/23/13712/233

Filed under: Reading

# 21 Oct 2001, 01:34AM GMT+5:30: Is a puzzlemint.:

Puzzles. This is the first time in ages and ages that I'm hearing Weekend Edition Sunday for any length of time, and therefore the first time in ages and ages that I'm hearing the Sunday Puzzle with Will Shortz. I guess I did really like puzzles once upon a time; I remember sitting in my room in Stockton trying to solve the puzzles along with the hosts and the guest. I was pretty good at it, as I recall, almost always as good as the guest. Perhaps practice would help me get back up to that level so that I would not find humiliation in the kiddie section of Leonard's copy of Games Magazine.

I only have the radio on this morning to wait for "A Prairie Home Companion" to come on at 11. But that means I have to listen to "Car Talk." Ew. I'll turn it off and trust myself to remember to turn it back on at 11.

But here's the NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle. Take the letters N Y X M. What comes next? It may or may not be a letter of the alhpabet, and, as it's an "international" puzzle, doesn't rely on the English language. Send an email to puzzle@npr.org -- 1 entry per person -- by Thursday, 3pm Eastern time (USA), with your name and daytime phone number.

Weekend with Seth. Friday night I went to a party or two. I'd have had more fun if I hadn't been so severely sleep-deprived from staying up late that night with Katie. Goodbye, Lia, and best wishes to Laura, and I have to go now to sleep.

Seth and I went to San Francisco the next day and I read the second half of Existence and Uniqueness and was very impressed. As I told Seth later, if I had a copy of his poem at my house, I would probably read little bits of it as often as I read little bits of Cryptonomicon. Certainly it affected me and triggered many thoughts regarding love and my personal history.

Duncan was kind enough to drive us to Sixth and Mission or so, where Seth and I ate dinner at a recommended Vietnamese restaurant, "Tu-Lan."

We went to a Dar Williams concert at the Warfield, nearby. The security searched my bag briefly -- the first time since Russia that an authority figure has searched me or my stuff. And I saw Darin there! Darin, who wheedled me into joining the OCF, and whom I met one day on Dwinelle Plaza by complimenting him because he was wearing a PGP shirt (I think).

The opener, one Matt Nathanson, was really a stand-up comedian disguised as a rock star, or, as I put it, a rock asteroid.

"This song, like many of my others, has lyrics that don't really make sense. I do that a lot. I mean, lyrics not making sense -- that's rock. That and signing breasts. And since I don't do any of the latter..."

Both Nathanson and Williams play the guitar, which reminds me of Leonard, and reminds me faintly of some musical criticism that Dan and I once did of "The Kids Ain't All Right" by The Offspring. Also, a few people in my high school journalism class -- of which I was reminded recently by looking through my sister's high school yearbook and seeing pictures of me and stories I wrote -- sometimes hung around and played the guitar instead of working. I've always been a sucker for an acoustic guitar.

"You can guess this one, since all my songs start in G."

There were a lot of other fun moments at the concert and I might refer to them in a later diary. I like Dar Williams's low-key sense of humor, and her songs made me want to write more poetry. I'll be posting my first sonnet in years here in a few days.

Plumbing. My toilet has developed a clogged drain thanks to (I assume) an overdose of toilet paper. Plunging and drain unclogging chemicals don't seem to work yet. Next step: calling the manager of the apartment complex.

Reading. I'm not yet done with Newton's Cannon, and I'm almost halfway done with Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. This is the third time that I've picked up Good Omens, and I hope this time I'll finish it. Other stuff always gets in the way, somehow. I really like Good Omens and I'm starting to see why people rave about both Gaiman and Pratchett.

Link. John pointed me to Seanbaby's dumb-lawsuit expose. I'm assuming he especially liked the preposition-buzzword form on the first page.

More both-and thinking. "Make love AND war."

"A Melody Out of Darkness" is the one-man show by my new friend David Poznanter, whom I met at Katie's friend's party on Thursday night. Neat fella. It's "about a young man struggling to come to terms with his family's Holocaust experiences as well as his own experiences with anti-Semitism." Traditional Yiddish folksongs and music performed by Estradasphere accompany the drama. It's Friday, October 26, at 8pm, at Porter College Dining Hall at UC Santa Cruz. Cost: less than $8 for most of y'all. More info at 831-459-2857.

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/10/21/163442/41

Filed under: Reading

# 19 Oct 2001, 10:16AM GMT+5:30: Carrot Stick:

Latin translations, probably bad. "Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur (Anything said in Latin sounds profound.)"
"Cogito Ergo Doleo." (I think therefore I am depressed.)

Thursday night.

So Katie came over, Katie of Reed College fame, and she whirled me off to a folk concert and then to a shindig at her friend's place. And I got lots and lots of stories to tell about this evening.

Utah Philips and Rosalee Sorrels. Fun folk singers and folk storytellers. I probably shouldn't tell the most memorable lines and stories. I'm lazy, but in addition, the delivery helps a lot, and I wouldn't want to spoil anyone in case s/he goes to see either Philips or Sorrels sometime.

Hymnals. The event happened in the First Congregational Church at Dana between Durant and Channing in Berkeley. I glanced through the New Century Hymnal. I wish I knew that many songs. I wish I'd been in an organization, when I was younger, that had disciplined my singing voice.

Aphorisms and stories. "A bird in the hand does you no good if you're trying to blow your nose." Okay, I spoiled you on one. There are many more, including some extended and hilarious anecdotes, where that one-liner came from.

Xenocide. The fella sitting near us in the pew was reading Orson Scott Card's Xenocide, third book in the first Ender series. Katie remarked, "I thought everyone who would want to read Xenocide already did."

In addition, almost everyone she knows, she maintains, has read part of The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, but not all.

Juggling. After the performance (I fell asleep a bit during the last bit, but only because I was tired and the music was slow), Katie and her friends had scheduled a shindig. But they had just made friends with a girl who was attending a circus school and carrying a "Bag o'Fun," i.e., a bag of juggling balls and pins." So, inside and outside the church, Katie's friends juggled for about 45 minutes. Very amusing. I'd like to learn to juggle. I've tried, but not very hard.

"A few degrees short of cheddar." What does that mean? Even the coiner didn't know.

The Anecdotes From the Party. "The Evil Circus" and "Please don't tell me his name is Mateo Car" and "Lying in a Language I Don't Know to the Chief of Security of Beijing to Get an Exit Visa." These are great stories and I will tell them in person to anyone who asks.

World travels. Peter and David are jugglers -- street performers! they do this for money! -- and recently traveled the world for a year together, performing in various locales around the globe, such as Rotterdam and Hong Kong. I hope to someday do something half as neat.

Penn and Teller. While at Peter's place, I skimmed a volume entitled Acrobats of the Soul that profiled clowns, magicians, and the like. I had never before considered how Penn and Teller consciously involved the audience in their deceptions as a political act. I'd like to see some more of them, or read some of their texts.

Tea. I have never before taken part in such an elaborate tea ritual as the one I did early this morning. It's a Chinese ritual, with a smelling cup and a drinking cup, and probably the caffeine I consumed was one reason why I stayed awake till something like 5am before falling asleep. Another reason, of course, was how Newton's Cannon engrossed me. Thanks, Jeana and Adam!

Friday.

Good diction. The Infidels Newswire pointed me towards an editorial by another Leonard, this time a Miami Herald columnist. "This is a man who purports to speak for God? God ought to sue for slander.....God help us if this guy represents anything beyond his morally illiterate self." Morally illiterate! At least I didn't call that credit card vendor that. Just "such a sophist."

Both/and thinking. Food AND Bombs. Bringing justice to them AND bringing them to justice. A carrot stick.

Oychen prosto! In Russian class, we listened to and reenacted a dialogue between a candidate for president and a journalist. The candidate said oychen prosto ("very simple") three times in describing his proposals, and every time he proposed a policy -- four times! -- the journalist responded with Da, eto konyeshna khorosho ("Yes, of course that's good"). I'm really glad that McGraw-Hill ginned up this dialogue, because that means they faked it. Right? Right?

Friday night.

I read more of Newton's Cannon, prepared and consumed ravioli, and visited two parties. Nothing very, very exciting. One amusing discovery: a few months ago, Seth called Michelle's cousin, Lia, and asked whether she had just gone to a movie with Leonard. The answer is no. Different Lia. Extra hilarity.

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/10/20/11636/395

Filed under: Reading

# 18 Oct 2001, 03:37AM GMT+5:30: Eco, handball, worrying, and the teevee.:

Wednesday.

Finished The Name of the Rose. I stayed up until something like 1 am on Wednesday morning finishing The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. This is a book that Seth and Leonard and the like had liked and recommended to such as me.

And after I read it, I read the author's postscript, and then I went to sleep, and the next day I spent something like half an hour telling Leonard how little it had done for me, and that I loathed the book viscerally. I feel less intensely about the volume now, thank goodness.

Point-by-point breakdown follows:

My parents didn't raise me Jewish or Christian or Muslim. And so the scriptures that my parents hold sacred, and the mythologies that they gave me to study, had nothing to do with stories of Moses and Jesus and Abraham and Cain and Sarah and Ruth and Isaac and Job and Peter and Judas and Adam. I have about as much knowledge of the Judeo-Christian backstory as might be expected from going to school in the USA all my life. And so The Name of the Rose is not a book for me. Eco assumes that his reader knows quite a bit of mythology and theology that I just don't know. Perhaps, if I happen to learn a lot more about Christianity in the next twenty years, I might get more out of Name of the Rose.
Now that he knows this complaint of mine, Leonard recommends Foucault's Pendulum to me, since it's more self-contained, but then again, he had thought that Name of the Rose is self-contained, and it was to him, since he was raised Christian, but it's not to me.
This complaint raises my suspicions that people I know only like The Name of the Rose because it pats them on the back for being erudite. It's like why I like watching "Jeopardy!"
Maybe the spoiler that Seth accidentally told me influenced me a great deal, and I would have thought the book much more compelling if the ending had surprised me.
Sometimes I like it when an author digresses into philosophy or description. But Name of the Rose made me impatient for plot (and, to a lesser extent, character development) during the long lists (and, to a lesser extent, during theological speeches). The first half or so of the book was particularly grueling, serving as exposition regarding the politics of the time (I wouldn't have minded some exposition regarding that general Christian backstory, but no). And Eco knew this: in the postscript, Eco characterizes the first two hundred pages as an initiation! Even though his editors clearly informed him that the first two hundred pages were too demanding, Eco maintained that he wanted the reader, after the first third of the book, to be ready for particular things that Eco wanted to do in the rest of the book. Well, Umberto, this is a book, not a frat, and I don't particularly like being hazed.
A greater emphasis on plot is another reason that Leonard recommends Foucault's Pendulum to me now. Perhaps. But, having burned myself once, should I really return to the same stove?
Eco explicitly aims at providing a "metaphysical mystery." In the postscript, he references G.K. Chesterton. I've read some Chesterton, and Father Brown Stories amused me much more than Name of the Rose. There's Christianity, there's twisted mystery, there are musings on the meaning and nature of knowledge and being. And it's far more interesting. I'm thinking that I'll read The Man Who Was Tuesday (or is it "Thursday"?) before I read any more Foucault.
Seven hours? I spent seven hours reading this thing? I mean, at least now I've read this thing, and so I can say more informed things about it. But I'd prefer to, having read it, be able to say more informed things about lots of things, not just about Eco's work and this novel in particular.

Handball. Terrorists. Exactly. So I got this newsletter in my handball class Wednesday morning. It was a standard little association thing, desktop-published by some soul at the Northern California Handball Association onto fourteen orange sheets five times a year. In this Issue were hall of fame inductees, a treasurer's report, a silly column, tournament results, a calendar, some other items of the same type, and an article entitled "Cupertino Courts at Risk," by Jack Murphy.

The Cupertino Parks & Recreation Department is planning public forum [sic] for the purpose of hearing from users of the Sports Center about the type of programming they would like to see at the new Cupertino Sports Center. This meeting is scheduled for October 11, 2001...
...have consistently pointed out that Racquetball-Handball is a sport that does not support itself with enough members to warrant a continuation of its facilities....There is even talk of having any new courts (if any) shared with other activites, such as kids taking tennis lessons, which has devastated the quality of the courts in the past and tended to stymie our sport...
I urge you to coordinate all your efforts on behalf of Racquetball-Handball with...

All well and good. All fine. This is exactly the civil society of which de Tocqueville and Madison spoke, what? And then there was a note at the end, in italics:

Editors [sic] Note: Jack lost two relatives at the World Trade Center attack. We offer our condolences to Jack and his family. Please support Jack and handball players everywhere by helping to save these courts.

If I may, What the hell? We'll return to No-Connection Theatre right after these messages...

Telly.

"The West Wing." I saw the second part of the season opener two-parter last night. Not bad. I'm glad that "drink the Kool-Aid" has become standard enough in the American lexicon that Sorkin had a character say it in last night's episode. Oh, and the various characters' behaviors and changes over time allow for ample application of political cognition theory, e.g., consistency bias. I love it.
"Enterprise." This was, in my opinion, the best episode so far of this new Star Trek series. The Klingons weren't bad, the characters reacted realistically, the Texan and the Vulcan didn't annoy me out of my skin, and I actually found the discovery and the wonder touching. I still opine that the Enterprise shouldn't be running into any aliens of which TNG and DS9 fans (such as Sumana) don't recognize. Oh, and some wonder why this ship seems better-designed than the Original Series ship does. My theory: some very odd tragedy around 2200 killed all the industrial designers and the craft had to begin again from scratch.
Note that these two hours of television each week comprise pretty much the only TV I see at all, barring glimpses when I'm at someone else's home or passing by the Recreational Sports Facility concession stand. And the ads are driving me nuts. Some cleverly arrest me. And then some make me wish I were reading a book. Even Name of the Rose again.

Mom, I'm not going to contract anthrax. I wish my mom didn't worry so much. I really doubt I'm going to come down with anthrax, or eat so little that my body doesn't get all the nutrition it needs, or get trapped on the BART when terrorists strike. Yes, I'm taking extra precautions these days because I'm brown and really stupid racists could think I'm a Muslim or from the Middle East. But I don't think she needs to worry as much as she does. I imagine I'll be just as much of a worrywart if I have kids. I'm well on my way already, especially when it comes to my personal life.

Seth's diary.

TFA: Well, some people have been telling me unfelicitous things about Teach for America, so I'm certainly aware of some problems of the program. I'll be thinking about those for a while.
"Free": I think that this fella was actually getting people to sign up for a credit card, not just fill out personal information questionnaires. That's even more diabolical! And that's why I called him a sophist.
"To be": I try to avoid "to be" in my writing just because it bore and so many nuanced verbs exist. Russian has no present-tense conjugations for the verb "to be," and that (although I knew about E Prime a while back) has raised my consciousness of the different ways that English speakers use "is." We ascribe characteristics and describe locations and declare existence and all manner of bad-things-to-conflate. E Prime attracts me.
Spoiler: I wished, for a very short time yesterday morning, that "ecpyrosis" had meant "the burning of [Umberto] Eco."

Thursday.

PHC is third-wave! Lookee here, you can submit greetings for Garrison Keillor to read on the air. Some people don't quite get the point.

John's great email. My old friend from the University of Maryland, John Stange, wrote me a terrific email complimenting my recent Segfault stories, "Top Ten Signs You're Using Windows" and "Heinlein Maneuver" (the latter inspired by a Leonard comment). I love praise.

Katie visits. More on that in tomorrow's entry.

Islamic terrorists and Kress. A while back, I wrote that I didn't like how Nancy Kress made Muslims into terrorists in her Beggars series. It seemed too stereotypical. Jennifer Sharifi wasn't what I wanted her to be. But right now I feel less prone to object.

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/10/19/63758/104

Filed under: Reading

# 16 Oct 2001, 08:47AM GMT+5:30: Some of the best things in life might be things.:

"Man is born free..." Can you find the Rousseau reference in this picture?

Immaterial! I was looking through my stuff this morning for various reasons. I have quite a few books and some good CDs. I can get pretty attached to my stuff -- I'm still distraught that I can't find a little red notebook in which I wrote a lot of stuff in Russia -- but overall, I try to remember that the most important things in life are not material objects.

Still, material objects help a lot. They can trigger memories, and keep us comfortable so we can concentrate on more interesting things (cf. Maslow's hierarchy of needs). And yesterday, my friend Alexei had a crisis in which he lost his bags in which he carried his journal and other notebooks. They contained all the writing he had done this semester. He was pretty upset. I think that his notebooks and journal have been returned to him, but certainly it reminded those of us who were with him that little McGuffins can become important, even to people who try not to get attached to mere physical objects.

So I was poking around my books, and realized that I have two copies of Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville. As well, I own a number of perfectly good CDs which carry music that I just don't care for anymore, if I ever did. I'm going to try to get rid of this stuff. I think I'll give away/sell a bunch of stuff that I'm just holding on to so that I have artifacts around me that remind me how cultured I am.

Books in particular. I'm more than halfway through The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. I can't recommend it wholesale, the way Seth and his ilk do. I put it down more than a month ago because the plot wasn't advancing quickly enough for my taste. I picked it up again about a week ago. Now both my reading and the plot have picked up momentum. Unfortunately, because I've read some of Existence and Uniqueness, I know how the book will end. But I knew how Anna Karenina would end when I read it about five or six years ago (wow), and I still enjoyed it. In fact, it was reading Anna Karenina that allowed me to realize why some people like soap operas.

Speaking of Tolstoy, War and Peace was supposed to be in my hands by now. It and about five other books comprised the contents of the box that my host mother mailed off to me about two months ago. I imagine it's lost forever. Argh. More "it's just things/but they're things I wanted to keep and have around" Alexei-ish mixed emotions.

Oh, and the other day I was poking around my domicile for a copy of the Constitution. I found it in a textbook on American politics and government that Sam Hatch, an English teacher who taught me my junior year of high school, gave me. He infiltrated my senior year English class and left it on my desk before I got there. It contained a note:

    Sumana,
	Congratulation on your AcaDec
triumph.  I hope this volume is
helpful to you in Mr. Berkowitz's
class.
	Excelsior!
		-SamH.

Note that I was in Academic Decathlon in high school, that I was the "team captain" and highest scorer my junior and senior years, and that Mr. Berkowitz was the teacher of the honors economics/government class. This book didn't help me much in that class, since the standard textbook and Mr. Berkowitz's time-honed lectures contained the entire and relatively meager quantity of information that I needed and didn't already know. Mr. Hatch's gift did help me study for the Advanced Placement exam in U.S. Politics in Government. I studied for this exam almost entirely on my own (in contrast to the help I got from peers and/or teachers in taking the AP exams in European History, U.S. History, Calculus, and Literature and Composition), and I did very well. It was the only AP exam on which I earned a 5 (the highest score possible). My grade pleased me because I didn't have to worry that I hadn't studied hard enough.

There are four more stories behind my AP agonies and triumphs. I should tell them, so as not to lose them.

Art Spiegelman. Mike Spiegelman, the Fresh Robot who made the anthrax joke that Leonard referenced, has a father named Art. However, Mike Spiegelman's father did not draw Maus. However, Mike Spiegelman's father has conversed with the Art Spiegelman who drew Maus, and evidently they both like, as Mike puts it, "bad jazz."

I found this out because Leonard and I arrived an hour or so early to the Marsh's Mock Cafe and I got to converse with this particular Robot, who was also in the cashier's booth. I was the first person in the history of the Mock Cafe e-mail newsletter to mention it and get the two-for-one admission offer, Mike noted.

You're listening to Pterodactyl Edition. Leonard and I have been having fun with the hypothetical screech of the pterodactyl. But we haven't been having nearly as much fun as Alex Chadwick of National Public Radio. Last week sometime, he was hosting Morning Edition and expressed surprise/dismay at some news item with a very pterodactylic cry. "The baby weighed fourteen pounds -- rrraah! You're listening to Morning Edition."

No wonder that's not in Russian! I played some of Tarakani Live! this morning whilst doing Russian homework. It's one of the CDs of Russian music that I got back in Russia. The first track of Tarakani Live! reminded me of tracks on Rock by Naif. If you ignore the lyrics in Russian, you'd think the sound came straight out of mid-nineties Seattle.

More amusingly, it reminded me of an evening back in St. Petersburg. I had just bought Rock and some other CD, possibly Tarakani Live!, in a music store on Nyevskii Prospekt. The grandson of my host mother had a CD player. When I listened to one of the CDs, I thought and remarked that it sounded an awful lot like, I think, Limp Bikzit or some such. The similarity progressed. Finally, I actually recognized that it was a Limp Bizkit/Blink 182/whatever song, and investigated, worrying that I had just bought a CD of bootlegged Western songs, and found out that the CD player, which contained a three-disc changer, was actually playing a Limp Bizkit CD belonging to the grandson.

Fully Committed. Alexei and Steve want to do food-socialization things soon. Wednesday night, tomorrow, I concede to two hours of the telly. Thursday night Katie (of Russia-trip fame) visits. Friday night I think I have some other commitment. Saturday I'm spending with Seth and possibly going to a Dar Williams concert with him. And in the midst of all this I really should study for the Political Psych midterm on Tuesday, and prepare for some open-mic comedy that night at Blake's.

Nandini, Vinay, Nathaniel, Dan, Anirvan, and I saw "Fully Committed" something like a year ago in San Francisco. It was a quite funny one-man show concerning an elite restaurant and its overworked reservation agent.

More Guy Noir. I finished and sent in one outline for a Guy Noir script for A Prairie Home Companion. I'm working on a new one now.

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/10/16/234754/20

Filed under: Reading

# 12 Oct 2001, 12:00PM GMT+5:30: Blood, social psych, glass, Enterprise, &tc.:

So this entry is really an agglomeration of a bunch of stuff that's been floating in my head the past few days. Pick and choose from the smorgasbord of Sumana!

Air hockey. When I played against Steve on Tuesday after lunch, I beat him 7-4. But it was close at a few moments! He considered it a very respectable showing. It reminded me that for a great deal of last semester, my weblog entries often seemed to consist of only "lesson plans and hockey scores."

Racial profiling. So now it's happened to one of my friends. Anirvan reported rather clear evidence that officials at four out of five security checkpoints stopped him -- a brown bearded man -- much longer than they did a practically identical Taiwanese man when they flew to and from some spot in Canada recently. I have mixed feelings. It's demeaning. It's also slightly rational. As Michael Kinsley noted, if all we know about the terrorists is their physical appearance, should we really bar ourselves from using that in preventing future hijackings? Then again, given the heightened secutiry measures, will they try to hijack again, or will it be some other method that we aren't expecting? (The elsewhere-in-Slate "we must make the unthinkable evil thinkable to get inside the minds of terrorists" argument by William Saletan.)

A bunch of Russian-related stuff. How should a family decide what to watch on TV? The answers revealed us as very different people. In my Russian class, Cinzia said that people should take turns, easy-going Sean agreed, I facetiously argued that *I* should pick the program (my putative spouse preferring to read), Makiko said that the husband should decide, and Jeff recommended having two television sets, backing it up with an anecdote from a wacky friend. That's our class in a nutshell. Well, there was the time when we talked about people we admire, and I mentioned my old English teacher Sam Hatch, and Sean talked about a musician friend of his, and Makiko talked about Mother Teresa, and Jeff talked about God. Perhaps that's a better nutshell, but it doesn't include Cinzia, since she was absent that day.

Russian children's cartoons. That's what we've been watching. I love them. They have this absurdist sensibility that I've been missing in children's programming for ages.

Almost all of us in the class have some prior experience in French. The most common words for which we accidentally use the French are "with" and "and" and "but." However, on Monday, I think, Jeff said "Apres" for "after" and didn't know how it had happened.

Zhenia, my Russian instructor, is still sick. The FBI just put out a warning that said, in effect, "we're expecting another big terrorist attack, but we don't know when or where. Just soon." Some NBC employee in New York just tested positive for anthrax. It would be paranoid to connect the dots and conclude that Zhenia has come down with B. anthracis, right?

Wednesday.

TV. I watched The West Wing and Enterprise. Both could have been better and could have been worse. That afternoon, I had expounded to a few of my Russian Imperial History classmates on the merits and failings of each show, touching heavily on Enterprise. I theorized that:

In this show, the writers have separated out the Counselor Troi characteristics and given sexiness to the Vulcan woman and emotional uselessness to the translator.
If Earth is like the USA, and it's just starting out in interplanetary politics and Vulcan's always trying to tone down Terran exploratory/interventionist reflexes, then perhaps Earth : USA :: Vulcan : Europe. This one needs a little work, but I think that it's potentially a model with explanatory power.

West Wing was certainly better in the season opener per se, the opener qua opener, than it was last week in its Very Special Terrorist Attack episode that writer/producer Aaron Sorkin wrote in something like a day. As one commentator put it a week ago, "Can we get Sorkin back on crack? This is horrible."

Poor CJ. This show trumps the book Spin Cycle (which was one of my great splurges my freshman year) (I wonder where that book is. Did I loan it to someone? Is it in Stockton, along with the Lost Jacket that Garrison Keillor autographed to me three years ago?) for making a citizen sympathetic to a White House press secretary's job.

We can work it out. I took a shower after handball. It almost made me late for Russian, but goodness that feels nice. It reminds me of a year ago, when on Tuesdays and Thursdays I would shower after judo and tromp off to Steve Weber's excellent International Relations lecture. I think I liked that semester. Funny, I can't recall what I was taking, aside from IR, judo, and Russian. Oh, yes, American Political Theory with Michael Rogin, and I liked his lectures in that class so much that I took the 1939 Through Films class with him and Professor Moran the next semester, and that wasn't nearly as good. I am glad that I got to see all those movies, though. I feel more cultured now.

My closer friends who work out regularly number about three. The two white ones do yoga. The Indian one does not. This amuses me.

Russian history. Professor Reginald Zelnik, the Imperial Russian History professor, is great. He lectures at exactly the right pace, he has this low-key sense of humor, and he makes this material interesting when a lot of lecturers could mess it up. He's a craftsman -- not showy, not bombastic, just producing reliably good work. I admire his lectures for the same reason that Leonard admires the work of Stephen King: reliable craftsmanship.

Thursday.

First blood donation, ever. Exactly a month after the terrorist attacks in New York and D.C., my blood donation appointment arrived. Via the radio in the donation room, we heard Bush's press conference. Not very relaxing, to me -- I talked on the phone to distract myself from the process. (I wonder if they'll find my blood useful -- is there still a shortage? -- or tasty.)

Because I was donating blood, I missed a free showing of a Russian-language film, Mirror. Oh, well. I fell asleep during the one last week, anyway.

Social psychology. Elliot Aronson wrote an outstanding sociology textbook, The Social Animal, which you could almost certainly find on Bookfinder and which clarifies my thoughts on psychology and sociology every time I pick it up. Reading this book may be the best thing to come out of my Political Psychology class this semester. Not only does Aronson convincingly explain causes of and possible solutions to such phenomena as self-justification, aggression, and prejudice, he also gives out how-tos on liking, being liked, making relationships more authentic, and persuasion! This is a terrific book, folks, and I'm not even selling it. (I am, however, composing a note of gratitude to send to Dr. Aronson, a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz.)

Dr. Aronson mentions the "chillingly manipulative" title How to Make Friends and Influence People (the classic self-help text by Dale Carnegie). I read that book my sophomore year of high school, because my journalism teacher, Mr. Woo, advised me to. I hadn't gotten a page editor position on the newspaper, he and the editor-in-chief said, because I lacked "people skills." And so I got a position that they made up to use my proofreading skills -- "Copy Editor" -- and I trotted off to the school library and borrowed the book and read this book that he had recommended. I don't know whether it helped at all, although I suspect it did, if only in articulating lots of those little rules of social engagement that I'd never learned. I'd never learned them because my family had moved around a lot when I was young, and I'd eventually shut myself off and withdrawn and read books and watched TV while other kids were out there learning social skills.

Once upon a time, I justified my maverick attitude by arguing that friends only hold one back. My analogy was: it always takes longer to make a decision and to get going and to get somewhere with more people rather than fewer. This implied that I was actually avoiding making friendships. In retrospect, that was probably a lot of sour grapes. I probably couldn't have made enough friends to slow me down even if I'd wanted to.

My own tendency to make sour-grapes rationalizations is something about which Aronson, and this Political Psychology class in general, are helping me learn.

And that convoluted sentence structure is the sort of thing that's absolutely fine in Russian but which I find suboptimal in English. Gotta stop that.

Candleholder glass. More than a year ago -- almost two years ago! -- I assisted my father and mother in performing a wedding in Tilden Park here in Berkeley. The happy couple was Lori and Himanshu. Everybody got some knickknack to take home: a red candle in a small glass cup, a sticker on the side reminding one of the blessed occasion.

I only started using the candleholder a few months ago. A few times I've had a wick burning rather close to the glass. I replaced the candle when it burned down all the way. When areas of the glass discolored, I thought it was just soot.

A few nights ago, as a candle burned in this holder, the glass cracked loudly and a piece of it fell off. Fractures remain. I blew out the candle and marveled at the beautiful crack in the dark glass. It looks like obsidian. I think it's the most beautiful thing I've seen this week.

Nobel, info asymmetry, parking space. So one of the three Economics Nobel laureates this year is a UC Berkeley economics prof. This trio worked on the problem of information asymmetry in markets. Hurrah! That's the term I've been using for years to describe what happens to people with weblogs. Seth is forever running into people who know far more about him than he does about them. Me, for instance, before I started keeping a weblog. It hasn't jarred me yet that someone knows far more about me from a weblog than I do about her. Usually I just get jarred because I have a bad memory for meeting people and I think it's the first time we've met when actually we've had three classes together or something.

Oh, and the Daily Californian reassures me that the new laureate will receive the free lifetime parking space, as per campus custom. No kidding. If you look around LeConte and other such buildings, you will see permanent signs marked "Reserved parking for NL." It took me more than a year to get it.

Comedy Night! The Heuristic Squelch is holding a Comedy Night on Tuesday, 23 October, at Blake's on Telegraph. I intend on going and doing open-mic stand-up. It'll be a great relief from my Political Psychology midterm earlier that day.

The two TAs. Two graduate students teach discussion sections for my Political Psychology course. I only have to go to one, but I attend one by each teaching assistant (TA -- but the preferred term is GSI, Graduate Student Instructor). One is by-the-book and very peppy, thoroughly dissects the readings, makes comprehensive handouts, and encourages discussion. The other drawls out a stand-up routine that clearly, systematically, and hilariously covers all the material that the professor covers less well in lecture. Thursday might become my favorite day of the week.

Guy Noir analogies. I'm trying to come up with Dashiell Hammett/Raymond Chandler-style analogies for weather and for beautiful, troubled dames. It reminds me of the "Funniest Similes Written By Students" page that I found at the now-defunct laughpage.com and showed to Angel Ayon and Karl Neuharth and the like back in high school. Angel and I still laugh about it.

Wow, all I had to Google was "hummingbirds analogies" and I got it. Google keeps impressing me.

Doonesbury. The recent strips have made me laugh.

The Onion as unreliable narrator. I recently realized that unreliable narration is the trick, the gimmick, behind most of the fake editorials in The Onion. [Fast voiceover: Other works employing the device of the unreliable narrator include The Raven by Poe and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.]

Fresh Robots. Tonight I intend on showing Leonard the magic and beauty that is the Fresh Robots, a San Francisco-based comedy troupe. I found out about them because I met Sunil through Dan, and then Sunil met my sister, and then he invited a bunch of his friends to see them perform at a San Francisco comedy club, and that's where I met holeburning and Aaron and remet Laura (now Nandini's housemate) and met Lia, whom I introduced to Leonard and with whom Leonard watched the remastered Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And it was a terrific show, even besides the six-degrees business.

Which reminds me, one last link or two: A good "Why don't I know anyone who died in the Sept. 11 attacks?" Slate piece linked to a neat six-degrees meditation. I wonder if I'm like Lois Weisberg. Alexei and my sister and my parents are the Lois-y people I know. On Tuesday, I asked Alexei whether he had ever clocked the length of time he can walk on campus without recognizing someone. Yes, he said -- about two minutes. Oi!

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/10/12/15031/428

Filed under: Reading

# 09 Sep 2001, 08:31AM GMT+5:30: The Great Conversation ... About Savings!:

So let me contribute to the discourse about yesterday's events. You've heard from Leonard. You've heard from Seth. Now, the third side of the story. brainwane's take.

So Leonard and I wished to join Mr. Schoen in celebrating the billionth second of Unix. We assumed that the proper thing was to meet up with Seth after the EFF Share-In in Golden Gate Park. The Muni bus was late (what did I expect?!), and the driver seemed loathe to, you know, make up for lost time, give out information to passengers and the like, do that whole "friendly service," that sort of thing. At one point a woman who had been dissed by him started rummaging in her handbag, and I was thinking that she might pull out a gun. Good thing it was just a little change purse that emerged.

There was a sign behind the driver's seat: "Information Gladly Given but Safety Prohibits Unnecessary Conversation." Leonard and I discussed it. It's rather not as one-size-fits all as they'd like to think, Leonard noted. (This sort of incident turns me towards Leonard's anti-large-city view, away from my previous city-as-freedom-and-excitement position.)

Result of all this plot: instead of getting there about half an hour before the blessed event (and about an hour after the EFF Share-In ended at 5, I presume), we got there about twenty minutes before 6:46:40, and Seth was nowhere to be found. At first we weren't sure that this assemblage was the right one, since we saw no EFF paraphernalia. Even though we did eventually see people with EFF hats and tie-dyed shirts cleaning up, there were really very few EFF people cleaning up from the share-in, compared to the number of hippie/gutter punk/bum stereotypes who really didn't seem in a hurry to get anywhere else (and were not wearing tie-dye).

So people from the EFF vaguely consensus'ed that Seth and his groupies had left for dinner somewhere. Leonard and I checked out exactly one restaurant on Haight on the vague idea that the party might be there -- also, I'd been there before. They weren't.

I immediately sought a bookstore and we wandered for twenty minutes or so around Booksmith, a not-bad bookshop on Haight. But they have no Gordon Korman. Grr. He's my favorite children's author/young adults' author, and it seems as though I can never find his work anywhere. I recommend almost everything he's done. Start with something like Losing Joe's Place or This Can't Be Happening at MacDonald Hall! or A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag or Don't Care High or Son of Interflux.

Anyway.

L-dawg bought some Terry Pratchett. We waited something like twenty more minutes for a Muni to take us back to civilisation. We realized that we hadn't really noticed when the billionth second had passed. Oh, well. Happy billionth second, Unix! Here's to ... well, however many more seconds of Unix are best for consumers and innovation and stability for computing infrastructure in the universe.

Other news. I updated/rearranged my homepage and wishlist. And today I have a brunch that I thought was yesterday, and then parent time, and then a partyish thing.

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/9/9/113140/3157

Filed under: Reading

# 07 Sep 2001, 12:24PM GMT+5:30: Job Fair, Day 3:

This is really almost all I want to talk about (except for the fact that Seth dropping by unexpectedly yesterday was one of the ten best surprises I've ever had in my life). Freebies from the last day of the job fair included: two flying discs, several pens and highlighters and keychains and brochures, a laundry bag, a tote bag, Post-Its, cool Post-It sticky bookmarks, a water bottle, a visor, fidgeting toys, a CD wallet, candy, and a first-aid kit.

If you can believe it, the freebies were better last year.

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/9/7/15240/80820

And we created standards!

Fri Sep 7th, 2001 at 10:38:28 PM PST

Went to a meeting of the Science Fiction Working Group tonight. No, we didn't create standards for sci-fi. We talked about sci-fi in academic terms, more specifically about The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. Alert readers will remember that I taught this book in my class last semester. A great book. I enjoyed the discussion, although sometimes I felt in over my head. I was the only undergraduate, you see. The graduate-student host taught me Rhetoric 1A during my freshman year here at UC Berkeley. I'm always glad to (re)meet neat people.

A fun-packed weekend approaches: brunch with friends tomorrow, a Unix billion-seconds dinner in the evening, and then a party I'll hold on Sunday night. Whew!

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/9/8/13828/34759

Filed under: Reading

# 14 Aug 2001, 09:30AM GMT+5:30: Zhili Buili:

Hindi film, steering, reading, writhing, and arithmetic. Title from the intro to most Russian fairy tales, "Once there was..." (mutatis mutandis for gender and number, of course).

Lagaan. Today I finished watching Lagaan, also known as "Once Upon a Time In India." Almost four hours long, and yet only containing about five song-and-dance numbers! And -- my goodness, can this really be a Hindi film? -- the subtitles are excellent, and the songs seem to emerge naturally from plot and character!

Some neat British/Indian compare-and-contrast and fusion -- in fact, the only time you see some painfully stereotypical song scene, with a scantily-yet-traditionally-clad woman dancing about in some historical locale and wind machines running full tilt offscreen, just watch -- it turns out that she's white! That scene just jarred me, because it reminded me that certain film devices really feel more laughable to me when white people do them than when Indian people do them. Perhaps it's just habit.

Oh, a few quibbles. First of all, people don't learn Hindi in a day. My sister didn't, I wouldn't, and some random English woman wouldn't, even in India. Also, I would have enjoyed Lagaan better if I had more tolerance for film cliches and more knowledge of cricket. That is to say, I should be more like an average member of an average Indian audience. But, overall, I would actually pay to see this movie again, whereas I'm pretty sure I could take or leave, say, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, except for camp value.

Driving. Today I had another driving lesson. My U-turns are much less death-defying than they once were. Ditto for left turns, three-point turns, lane changes, and general maneuvering. I like learning this skill, although I also like that my intended lifestyle won't require me to use it much. I think public transit just suits me better.

Writing. I'm actually making some progress on finishing up Russia travelogues. For example, yesterday I posted a big chunk of my Solovki travelogue. As much as I dislike the boredom of Stockton life, and miss my friends, I must admit that I like the way material is flowing out of my notebook and into my diary, as opposed to just accumulating untranscribed in shorthand in my notebook.

Reading. I'm progressing in The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. I must admit that the opening seemed pretentious and plotless. Pages and pages of mystical-leaning description isn't my bag. But stuff is sort of happening now. I'd finish the book even if it wasn't improving, just so I could be sure that every single person who raved to me about Eco was a loon. In any case, To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis will be my reward for finishing Name of the Rose. At the moment, though virtue may be its own reward, finishing Name of the Rose might not be.

Of course, when I can't read my book, I chew Trident, er, flip through magazines such as Smithsonian and India Post.

Friends. Steve, thanks for the candy -- I'm still chomping away. Angel and I will have one of our far-too-infrequent summits soon, later this week. I'm seeing Alexei and Camille for the first time in months after I come back to the Bay Area this weekend, and I'm quite glad of that as well -- infrequent emails and weblog postings aren't enough. My sister is having various parties soon and I'll get to know more of her BILLION KAJILLION friends at said shindigs. Dan and I conversed a bit on the phone yesterday, and gave each other food for thought.

And here's a shout out to one other friend, who is having a rough time of it lately. I'll be the streetsweeper for your rained-on parade, old chum.

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/8/15/03057/3136

Filed under: Reading

# 05 Aug 2001, 04:35AM GMT+5:30: I can't believe I'm not staying:

And yet, I Can't Stop Leaving St. Petersburg!

I hit Frankfurt tonight, then leave there the next day and arrive in Washington, D.C. on Monday afternoon local time. Then I leave D.C. on Tuesday morning for a trip to SFO via Minneapolis. I'll be in SF late Tuesday night. I shouldn't have left War and Peace out of my bags and given it to my host mom to ship to me, should I?

See you all on the other side of the old Iron Curtain.

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/8/5/73531/23933

Filed under: Reading

# 23 Jul 2001, 05:50AM GMT+5:30: Hi, I'm fine, and back in Piter:

This is the "I'm alive, though my forehead is one large mass of bug bites" entry. I'm back in St. Petersburg, working on the Solovki Islands travelogue. John's diary of the trip will probably be updated much faster than mine, since he does macro/summary and I do micro/details.

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/7/23/85021/1510

Some Solovki with your bits today?

Mon Jul 23rd, 2001 at 09:04:55 AM PST

I took a group excursion to the Solovki Isles in the White Sea, escaping St. Petersburg for the past few days. Here's the first part of my travelogue.

Wednesday: The Departure.
So, on Wednesday, we had no class, and -- unexpectedly -- I had not gone to a club the previous night with my tutor (she was too tired), so I got to wake up somewhat early and very bright to pack and do errands before getting on the train for the boat to the Solovki Islands in the White Sea.

Here's my list from that morning, slightly edited to take out really personal stuff.

Food
Water
Juice
900 Days
Cheeselcoth
Mosquito OFF!
Fumigator
Vitamins/medicines
5 days' clothes
Towel
soap, shampoo, toothbrush
moisturizer, sunblock
Toilet paper
First-aid kit
Pens, notebook (?)
Film, camera
plastic bags
Purple plastic cup, utensils
pyjamas
Sweater
To buy: Gulag Archipelago by Solzenhitsyn
To buy: Hat
D.H. Lawrence book
[various expurgated things]

And I had to change money via a traveler's check and do Internet stuff. (That was when I finished my Moscow travelogue, by the way.) I was able to leave my stuff at the university while doing most of the errands. I did not get to buy a hat or anything else I'd wanted in the way of traveling supplies, or find Gulag Archipelago at any bookstores. I only tried Dom Knigi ("house of books") on Nyevskii Prospekt, the big, well-located bookstore across from the Kazan Cathedral by the university. They're surprisingly low on English translations of Russian authors. All they had was August 1914 and a few Tolstoys, that I could see. I bought really cheap editions of The Great Gatsby (to reread) and a collection of Guy de Maupassant short stories to read for the first time.

While on the Internet and whilst packing, I found out that I'll be arriving in San Francisco, CA around 10:45 pm on August 7, via San Francisco International Airport, on SunCountry Flight #27 from Minneapolis/St. Paul. As a bit of a side note, if you'll be in the area, it would be great if I could arrange some sort of welcoming party at the gate.

When I came back to the university to pick up my stuff and head to the train station, I heard a discussion in progress among three of the four men in our twenty-person group of ACTR participants. It would seem that all of the men had to be in coupes with three unknown Russians each. The consensus (in male-banter manner) was that Gregg would be stuck with three large, hairy, male homosexual Russians, and Gregg declared, in typical profane Gregg manner, "As long as they don't have AIDS, I don't give a shit." (Gregg is John's roommate; they're the only two of twenty not in homestays with Russian families.)

People grabbed their stuff and left for the metro. Poor John had a really hard time with the crowds, cranky turnstiles, the heat, and a HUGE suitcase. We got to the train. Katie and I were in a coupe with a cute little boy of around maybe two years, his mother, and her mother. (The consensus, among those who would know -- namely John and me -- was that this kid was cute, but not nearly as cute as the girl playing with the bronze ducks in Moscow.)

The eighteen hours of train loomed in front of us as a void of pain. It was very, very, very hot and humid, and many of the windows opened little or not at all. As well, no one had a coupe composed of only Americans. Ergo, when we discovered that two of our happy band had only one coupe-mate, and he was away for most of the evening, that coupe became "the party coupe."

The "party coupe" was not just a nice place to socialize, in English, free of guilt at excluding Russians, although it was that. You see, during the Moscow trip, when other passengers in our group had discovered a lamentable lack of vodka with which to socialize, a number of them had vowed to correct the fault during the trip to Solovki. And so there was a great deal of sloshability, of booze, of drink, of alcohol, available to anyone who wished to partake, in the "party coupe." And in Russia the law says that the drinking age is 18 years old, and even that is not so much a limit, as drinking is so a part of the national culture that families teach their young'uns to drink, all together.

I wish that I'd written that long, rather impassioned entry before I left for Solovki, the one in which I described the various pressures I was feeling to change my beliefs, ideas, and behaviors regarding alcohol. But I didn't, so I'll just try to discuss it now.

I was in D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) back in elementary school, and fell for it hook, line, and sinker. (Hey, I won the class essay contest on "Why I Will Never Use Drugs" and I loved it, okay?) I even signed the little pledge to never use illegal drugs -- including alcohol, if I recall corerctly! And my parents don't drink and never have, and since I didn't have many friends of my own before college, in my younger days I didn't see many non-negative portrayals of alcohol use in real life. Only in the last few years have I come to see alcohol drinking, possibly, as a not-necessarily-evil thing. And even that wavers sometimes!

I mean, I don't come up against many huge ethical dilemmas in my life, I think. But the question of substance use makes me wax philosophical, at least privately. If Alice is tipsy, or even flat-out drunk, and she says or does something that she would not do if she were sober, then did Alice really do it? Generally, I believe that if people choose to ingest psychoactive substances, then they should be responsible for what they do under the influences of those substances. But what about opinions? And behaviors? If I ask Alice whether she loves Bob, or feels guilty about using Windows, and when sober whe says yes and when drunk she says no, or vice versa, then what does that really tell me?

I want to be in charge of myself. And I already second-guess myself all the time. I really didn't want to ever do anything that I would not choose to do if sober. So what, then, could be the appeal of alcohol? Differences in perception? But I wouldn't be able to explore those differences without taking some risks and behaving somewhat differently than I would if sober. What a mess.

I generally don't like to mess with my body. It's doing a fine job, on its own, taking care of my business. I generally stay away from caffeine, and don't smoke, and don't do any of the illegal drugs (e.g., cocaine, marijuana, MDMA), and try to eat and drink in a way that will keep my body slenderish and working well. And most of these precautions and preferences don't set me apart from my peers. Except drinking. Almost everyone my age drinks in the United States, I think, even if it's just one or two drinks a month. And, in Russia, not drinking alcohol sets one apart even more. I, the only vegetarian, the only nonwhite, the only one from UC Berkeley, the only one with less than two years of Russian classes under my belt, in these twenty ACTR St. Petersburg students, was also -- I'm pretty sure -- the only teetotaler when I arrived in Washington, D.C., six weeks ago for orientation.

But I was curious, and it's legal here, and I am with a bunch of people whom I trust not to take advantage of me when I'm vulnerable, and it was a safe environment, and Mom, Dad, I know you won't like this, but I tried drinking alcohol. And I didn't do it to rebel against you, to make you mad or to dash your hopes or anything. I did it to ... well, I'm trying to figure out why I did it, just as I was trying to figure out whether to do it.

Note that all of my previous tiny excursions into trying alcohol were Russian-related and had absolutely no effect on my state of mind.

A year ago, back in the States, on a field trip into the Little Moscow in San Francisco, I drank some kvas at a Russian restaurant. Kvas is a fermented black bread beverage that is -- so I'm told -- an acquired taste. Well, the food was kind of unpleasant, but not nearly so much as the kvas. After a longish car ride home, I threw up. I'm not sure to what I should ascribe the vomiting.
I went to Cafe Idiot almost exactly a month ago. I wrote about it in my K5 diary. Basically, I was with four friends, and everyone gets a free shot of vodka with dinner, and I tried about three drops of it, and it tasted vile and reminded me of a dentist's office and affected my consciousness almost none.
At my homestay, about three weeks ago, I had a sociable dinner with Vera (my homestay mother) and two of her friends. They accepted that I don't drink, but they were drinking, and I decided to try some. I had, on a full stomach, a shot of vodka. I felt nothing in my head, only a burning warmth spreading down my gullet.
Also at my homestay, about three or so days before I left St. Petersburg, there was a little party going on when I arrived home around midnight. I was already tired and my Russian skills were already slightly worse for wear that night. I didn't know the people, they all spoke at the same time, they had already been drinking, and one of them kept trying to speak to me in bad English -- to translate, helpfully, I suppose. So it was already hard for me to understand what they were saying and what was going on (besides the obvious obligation to eat, drink, be merry, and eventualy sleep). I was offered a small glass of "champagne cognac" with which to make toasts and join in the general festivities. I drank most of this very small glass during the course of eating a big dinner -- that took about an hour, I think. I remained confused.

John, who is not opposed to drinking, has had many conversations with me on the subject. He and I have noted a problem somewhat related to my last experience there. I'm already honest (read: uninhibited), extroverted (read: loud), and not completely graceful (read: clumsy). He imagined that I would not change that much, under a mild tipsiness.

Well, I decided to try to find out. I grabbed a plastic cup, and over a few hours, I drank about four servings of vodka, some with pineapple juice and some without, in the convivial atmosphere of a crowded train compartment.

Quotes from the evening include:
"It has been requested that you walk like an Egyptian."
"This is an epistemological problem." "If you can still say 'epistemological'..."

Here are my notes from the epedition into haziness. Actually, it wasn't that hazy. It just felt -- in retrospect, it just felt like a slight exaggeration of my normal clumsiness when tired and trying to maneuver in close quarters whilst on board a rocking (not rockin') Russian train. But, in any case, here are my notes:

So I'm drinking for the first time. Vodka, usually with pineapple juice. After a few drinks, my quick-vision-switching seems somewhat affected, and moving around (getting up, walking) seems different. But inhibitions seem intact, as does fine motor control (I reached into my $ [shorthand for "money"] belt to get this pen & notebook), and hand-eye coordination. Kyem [circled]. Our stop. [Jon Stone, our Resident Director, told us that the town of Kyem -- the name of which which I wrote in Russian -- was the stop where we would have to exit the train the next morning, to catch the boat to Solovki.]

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/7/23/12455/1352

Filed under: Reading

# 17 Jul 2001, 07:09AM GMT+5:30: St. Petersburger and Cheese:

"That's not blasphemy, that's just plain common sense!"
-- Katie yesterday

Okay, first priority is a long-delayed link to John's Journal of St. Petersburg happenings. Just another perspective. Link to it, read it, comment on it once he writes his own backend for that.

Note also that tomorrow I leave for Solovki (the actual Gulag Archipelago of Solzenhitsyn fame), and there may be no net access there, and tonight I go to Money Honey, and that yesterday my notebook got soaked in a rainstorm, so before stuff crumbles and smudges and generally disappears, I'm going to try to immortalize the last nine days or so in some diarizing here.

Back when I was in D.C., I saw some color photos of the Caucaus region of Russia, taken a hundred years ago. Very disorienting. I'm pretty sure Slashdot had some mention of this thing. It was an exhibit at the Library of Congress, if I recall correctly.

Stuff to read: A while back I was thinking that I should really read The Telling by Ursula K. Le Guin. Now I'm starting Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence, which was a bargain at 62 rubles at Dom Knigi. (It'll take up some time on the train, and I'm glad.)

I'm bonding with some of the people, especially the females, in my group. Erin and I, for example, share a common kitsch experience with Siri. We all watched "Jem" -- the cartoon based on the Barbie knockoff doll -- in our youths. Jem, Truly Outrageous! As well, Kate and John were with me when we got caught in a huge rainstorm yesterday whilst taking in the extraordinary view from the colonnade of St. Isaac's Cathedral.

Incentives. What market incentive makes a currency exchange feasible and profitable? I just wonder why there are so many Obmen baliuti about. Is there some statistically significant relationship among rates, commissions, location, friendliness, service capacity, and so on? What heuristics could help me get the best deal?

Russian roulette is not here called, as I had hoped, American roulette. It's just Russian roulette.

Intimidation. Yesterday at St. Isaac's, the cashier was really gruff and very mad that I didn't have exactly 5 rubles (the student fee). She said something about "these foreigners" in Russian. Excuse me? As John said, "Sorry your infrastructure is crumbling, but that's not my fault." Hey, I gave her a ten. Maybe St. Isaac should switch places with the Patron Saint of Pocket Change or something.

But the other day I saw a guy in a military uniform eating ice cream on the down escalator at Cherneshevsky metro station, and that cheered me up.

Literature. We're reading Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva on love. Which, of course, makes me think of unorthodox love metaphors. Anyone care to take a gander at Love As...

a pair of glasses
a purse
an old shirt
mineral water
a haircut
a movie review
a university
Communism
the DMCA

I actually was very bored today during Russian press and tried my hand at a love poem.

My love is like a long, long lawsuit
That's newly appealed in June.
It cannot die, it cannot fade,
Tho' it recesses each day at noon.

For some reason, recently I remembered a moment in middle- or high-school literature. We were quite intensely discussing some metaphor-laden bit of lit. And then someone raised her hand to ask, "Could we open the door?" And it took everyone else a moment to realize that we had to take her literally. It was amusing.

Baby Sitters' Club. A series of books for pre-teen girls, basically. There was -- early on -- a book, entitled New Girl or some such, in which Claudia had a new friend and that took her away from her established group of friends. Claudia was an artist, and so was Ashley! A common interest! But it turned out that Ashley wasn't such a good friend after all. She was untrustworthy. Perhaps I, too, should beware of new friends, and remember that common interests are not all, and do not always supersede personality. Or maybe I should remember that the author of that book had a vested interest in keeping Claudia with the Club and not letting her wander off with Ashley at the end!

Dreams. I've had several strong dreams recently. Making cameo appearances have been Weird Al, Tom Green, Isaac Davis-King, and Alice Hoffman (the last two are people from my high school), for no good reason, really.

Rynok. An authentic Russian market. I've seen one now.

Twisted phrases. One of the first phrases a student of Russian learns is "vui ne znayete, gde... [x]?" because that's the polite way to ask where x is. (The example is usually "metro," aka "nearest metro station.") There's a certain exaggerated intonation, too, coming up heavily (?) on "znay" and down on "ete." So, inevitably, I've combined that oft-parodied phrase with "Dude, Where's My X?" (sort of) to get, "Dude, Where's My Metro?" and (funnier): "Vui ne znayete, gde maya mashina?" (You wouldn't happen to know where my car is?)

Museums. I went to the Russian Political History Museum and the Anna Akhmatova Museum this weekend. I recommend the former highly and the latter tepidly. More later.

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/7/17/10914/1919

Musing over Museums

Tue Jul 17th, 2001 at 07:45:15 AM PST

I'm trying to transcibe my thoughts from the Anna Akhmatova Museum, the Russian Political History Museum, and the Piskarov cemetery here in St. Petersburg. The rain yesterday smudged up the ink in my notebook in some highly symbolic way or another. So here's what I've got.

"Who is not with us, is against us," is inscribed on a dinner plate (!) in Russian at the Russian Political History Museum. 1918, Petrograd.

I have only seen one sculpture, in my life, that I felt might come to life quite suddenly and naturally. That is "Mother," 1945, V. Eishev, in the middle of a room dedicated to WWII and the Blockade. Also disturbing were an actual Nazi flag and a picture of Molotov with Stalin in the background.

Sometimes I see an "i" -- not Cyrillic -- in a Cyrillic word. Yes, it's ancient, but it still bugs me.

Posters, posters, posters. Yeltsin (!) in "Strong President, Strong Russia." "Have you forgotten that you are Russian?" (Have I forgotten that I'm Indian? Or American?) And the very funny one linking your first time voting in free and open elections with your first sexual experience.

A great calendar with wordless and hilarious cartoons for every month.

I got really lost on the way to the Akhmatova museum. I saw a dead cat near 8 Fontanka . "FACK" was near 28.

In the museum, the question (posed by some non-Akhmatova artist) "Is there God on Mars?" interested me.

For some reason, I wrote "Snow Crash and Toilet Paper" in my notebook, next to a note about having to order ketchup separately when eating fries in a cafe here, but I can't recall why the Snow Crash/TP reference is relevant.

I've taken a lot of classes. High school, college, enrichment. And yet I've never received systematic training to enable/aid me in creating a sense of taste regarding art and music and literature, I think.

I visited the British Bookstore "Anglia" (near the Anichovsky Bridge, on the Fontanka) after the cafe, after the museums. It was a weird experience, English shock. There was no Russian! Anywhere! Withdrawal! And then someone spoke in Russian, and I was fine.

Sunday morning, I saw Russian boys running in the park near my house, evidently in a heat for some track-and-field meet.

I was on my way to Piskarov. There are mass graves there, because that's where most of the victims of the Blockade are buried. The ground was so hard, and the dead so many, and the living so hungry and weak, that eventually people dynamited the ground there to make trenches into which to shovel the bodies.

A kid next to me on the metro was also takig flowers and also seemed to take the way to Piskarov, at least, he got off at the right stop...does he come every Sunday? Or is today an anniversary?

I thought of Moxy Fruvous's "The Gulf War Song."

The Eternal Flame at Piskarov was very warm. The mounds covered with grass flickered, distorted in its convection, and so did the statue of Mother Russia, laying a garland on the dead. There is a wall behind here with sentiments such as Let no one forget and nothing be forgotten.

The Germans suffered, too.

I'm glad that there are no tourist vendors outside Piskarov. No Blockade Bread souvenirs. Not even flowers. Only the piped-in music is distasteful at times.

Should the living suffer, as they did during the Blockade, to pay respects to the dead?

But my visit was bookended by two enjoyable food experiences. Kafe Marko on Nevsky ("What country are we in?!") and a place near Vladimirskaya Metro. They played the Beatles in the background. The last time I heard a lot of Beatles was with Leonard.

I have to go to a club with my tutor now.

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/7/17/104515/343

Filed under: Reading

# 14 Jul 2001, 08:19AM GMT+5:30: The Intersection of Doom...and Death:

A lot of very eclectic material in today's entry. The title refers to the intersection near my university (university may not actually be mine), Herzen Pedagogical something-or-other in St. Petersburg, Russia. This intersection has no lanes, no apparent traffic signs or lights, and lots of cars and vans and tour buses whizzing by. I'm thinking that Kazanskaya Ulitsa would be Doom, and the little minor street right behind Kazanskaya Sobor (Kazan Cathedral) would be Death.

Leonard:
You mentioned that the only times you've ever read something in second person was in text adventure games and in A Canticle for Liebowitz. I was rather impressed by the second-person chapters in Dave Barry in Cyberspace.
Also, it turns out that you and I are starting trips on the same day. You leave for Utah on the 18th, which is the same day that I leave for the island of Solovki. Uh, Mom, Dad, other readers, you should know that I'll be gone till Monday, and I am pretty sure that there are no Internet connections on this island that was once a monastery and then was a Stalinist gulag. I'll try to call. Just Mom and Dad. Not you, if you're anyone else. Well, maybe my sister.

I do not think that they will sing to me.
In one of my Russian classes, possibly grammar or literature or current events, we translated in a casual, offhanded manner, davaite syezdim as "Let's go," which now reminds me of that other entry about Nachalo and On y va, but which back then reminded me of the line from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot. "Let us go, then, you and I..."

That, then, reminded me of an incident with my "uncle" N.S.L. Bhatta, an Indian poet. He had picked up my mother and me in his car when we visited him in India.

"So, what are you doing these days, Uncle?
"I just finished translating Iliad."
"Wow, that sounds like a big project! Was it from the original Greek?"
"He wrote in English."
"Huh?"

And it turned out that he had said "Eliot," not "Iliad," and we had a good laugh.

Reading material.
So I finished We a while back, and enjoyed it, and recommend it. I do recommend that you read it a bit more chunkily than I did, though -- I read a few pages each night for about a week, and I think I should have just read it in a few hourlong sessions instead. (Yes, I am avoiding the perhaps inevitable compare-and-contrast with other dystopias. I may be just staving it off.)

I finished The Nine Hundred Days by Harrison Salisbury a few days ago. That's on the subject of the siege of Leningrad during the Second World War, a.k.a. The Great Patriotic War for the Fatherland. It's quite good, if very concentrated on the first few years of the blockade. There are maybe twenty chapters on the first year, and then the next two years are, say, two chapters total. And Salisbury is generally quite good about remaining unschlocky, which is why I was so surprised to read the occasional lines such as, "the Germans had on their sides Generals Cold, Fatigue, and Hunger." It sort of reminded me of my earlier complaint about Caleb Carr's The Angel of Death and the ending of each chapter with some melodramatic sting.

As well, I felt a tinge of disturbance at Salisbury's "Only Leningraders would do [x]" sentences. For example, there were Leningraders who kept feeding their pets a few morsels, and did not abandon or kill them. Perhaps it's not just Leningraders who would do that, or not.

But at least the schlock and stereotyping prepared me for my latest book. Last night, I finished my very first book by [my Aunt] Agatha Christie, Dumb Witness. It has Hercule Poirot.

"Yes, the curry may be of some significance, perhaps."

I mean, come on! And I realized that I prefer "mysteries" in which I have all the facts at my disposal early on. I shouldn't have to know obscure poisons, or Victorian etiquette. I further mention that one Sherlock Holmes story in which it's a lot easier to guess the twist if you live in the modern USA and only think of one thing when you see the letters KKK.

Speaking of Sherlock Holmes, Christie gives Doyle a nod in the first few chapters of Dumb Witness. The assistant-type, Hastings, who speaks in the first person, speaks with Poirot, and Poirot calls Hastings "Watson"! I was confused for a moment. Was "Watson" just the nom de rigeur or something for these superfluous narrator-assistants in mysteries? But no, it was a little joke.

Why do Poirot and Holmes keep Hastings and Watson around, anyway? The twenty-first century answer: to provide a premise for slash fan fiction. Because there aren't enough premises for slash fan fiction writers already, you see.

Acrobatics of the Mind.
I see "WC" (water closet) and think "W3C."

The graffiti "2KIT" on the steps of Kazan Cathedral remind me of 2 Legit 2 Quit (M.C. Hammer as an AOL chatroom fiend?), which reminds me that in the former USSR, it's Hammer [and Sickle] time, which leads me to conclude that I Can't Stop Referencing!

Notes from Swan Lake:
"What is this juice? It's not cranberry..." "They have a lot of weird berries here. We just got some at my house. There are these really weird green fuzzy ones, and you wouldn't think it to look at them, but they're the best." [sip] "It's ... Russianberry."

The swans in the background -- not the ballerinas who were swans according to the plot, but the setpiece props that actually anatomically resembled swans -- moved on a little rail or something along the back of the stage. I wondered if I would get a prize if I shot one.

When the guy in black, the Evil Enchanter, came onstage, I whispered, "Oh no! It's Alexander Lebed!" See, lebed is the Russian word for swan, and Alexander Lebed is a kinda scary Russian politician, and never mind.

There was sort of a flamenco touch to these dancers in Spanish-looking costumes and their theme during some big scene. I thought that was pretty interesting. I imagine that composers have expressed political sentiments by associating evil characters with the musical motifs of certain cultures and nations.

The cafe in this theater, which was rather run-down and definitely not the Mariinskii, played American music and had a cardboard cutout of the Spice Girls. All five, all together.

Food.
My Russian mommy feeds me really well. [I Can't Stop Using Iambic Pentameter.] This morning she gave me some sort of ice-cream dessert. I was halfway through the thing before I realized it was cheesecake. Cheesecake! Covered in chocolate! At 9:30 in the morning! She's fattening me up to make sure I can get through the cold, harsh, Northern California winter.

I've had French fries at some point each day yesterday and today. Here, you have to order the ketchup separately.

Things I see.
I see solitary men carrying objects that can only be called purses. Here, the law says you have to carry some sort of ID with you at all times. But passports fit in pockets in most men's clothing. What's going on here?

I saw graffiti that said "FACK" today. This is a "Collect All Five Wrong Vowels" contest, I guess -- a peer of mine said she took a picture of some scrawled "FECK."

In the past week, I have seen (presumably) Russian men who looked almost exactly (in most cases) like Ben Affleck (see previous entry), Rudy Giuliani, Charles Manson, and Alan Alda.

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/7/14/11196/2357

Mix-'n'-Match Matroshcki

Sat Jul 14th, 2001 at 09:16:43 AM PST

We had a presentation the other day regarding matroschki dolls. Yes, the ones with nested dolls inside. As opposed to Intel Inside. Anyway, the tourist traps here in St. Petersburg are infested with vendors selling cheap knockoffs. Sometimes they feature babushki, sometimes politicians, sometimes sports team members. Wouldn't it be great to have a mix-and-match matroschki? Say, inside the babushki is a ninja, then a Brezhnev, then Kobe Bryant, then Ricky Martin, then a Teletubby, then Nixon, then Cal Ripken, Jr....

I just want the ninja inside the matroshki.

By the way, I bought -- for a ruble -- a piece of gum labeled, "Fruit Flavoured Ricky Martin." Not a word about gum. And a picture of Ricky.

I can buy Ricky Martin on the open market!
Is Ricky Martin ever not fruit-flavoured?

Oh, and it turns out that you can't just add "skii" to the end of a word to try to make it an adjective. My Russian mom laughed at me for trying "gidskaya kniga" (guidebook?) and "marionetskii teatr" (puppet theater?) this morning.

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/7/14/121643/285

Moscow: Part II

Sat Jul 14th, 2001 at 09:28:41 AM PST

Part II of my Moscow odyssey. Part I was here.

Day Three: Sunday.
Some stuff, first, that I had forgotten to mention previously.

First: on Friday night, in Moscovsky Vokzal, belying all the very progressive and enlightened thoughts I've been having about race in this 80% white country, I approached a group of Indians -- familiar faces, what? -- and found out that they identified themselves as Russians, which made me feel like a boor for asking where they were from.

Also: it's a bit of a Russian tradition -- in Moscow, at least -- to see the sights, especially Red Square, on your wedding day. So there were lots of brides about. I liked it. I love feeling festive. I even wished one of them good luck.

Moreover: I was near one of the many metro entrances/underground passageways on Saturday afternoon when I said, "What's that violin music?" I peeked in, and ten people on violins and other string instruments were playing. Not badly, either. Lots of people were watching, and I took a picture, and I was happy. The San Francisco subways can just roll over and die; they can't even compete now. There are no chamber orchestras on BART.

At some point this weekend, I realized that I am a lot darker than I used to be. I am pretty sure that before-and-after pictures will show me a milk chocolate in early June and dark chocolate, kind of like Shweta, in mid-August. I should probably use more sunblock.

So. Sunday. I copied down a bunch of stuff from Kate's Lonely Planet guidebook. (Lonely Planet is the Google of guidebooks to the ACTR kids. There's just no contest.) Netcafes, restaurants, places to go. It may have been that morning, or the next one, that I saw, dubbed in Russian, the prom scene episode from Beverly Hills, 90210. And it was dubbed quite well, too. I could have sworn Brenda was saying, "Konyeshna" (of course), to the question of "shall we get our pictures now?" Also, the previous day, on some channel that never again appeared on our TV, I saw a test pattern and listened to "Walk Like an Egyptian" as I surveyed the Moscow skyline from my hotel window. Very apropo.

We breakfasted to no one's delight, really, on some porridge-and-milk that only vaguely resembled my idea of kasha. I actually like kasha, the way my host mom prepares it, where it's kind of like plain brown rice with butter. Anyway, we headed out for a tour of the Moscow metro system -- ony five interesting stations out of about eighty. I made conversation with our guide on the way to the first stop, and she complimented me on my Russian! Goodness.

I thought of a Kodak ad that features some comically non-native-language-speaking tourists in, I think, Italy. They ask for directions and eventually get where they need to go so that they can get a picture of themselves at some emotionally significant spot (I'm simplifying the ad). Maybe part of what I dislike about tourism is the way it objectifies the place and the people you are viewing. Ray Bradbury talks about this in some short story of his. I can't recall the name.

There are lots and lots of statues in Moscow. My goodness. It's generally noted that Prince Vladimir rejected Islam for his country because of its alcohol restriction. Maybe it was also because Russians can't stand not making representations of the human form. Also, they need lots of public meeting places. "I'll meet you by the bust of [minor bureaucrat who played politics well]." "Wait, maybe it would be easier to see each other at the statue of [obligingly patriotic agitprop hack]."

I wasn't feeling particularly awed during some of the excursion. Maybe I just ran out of awe too early on in Russia, I thought.

Then I saw Mendeleevskaya. I took quite a few pictures of Mendeleevskaya. I am very happy that there is a major metro station in Moscow named after Mendeleev, and also that the chandeliers are shaped like models of molecules. Crystal-formation-looking things. John groused that they didn't look enough like authentic, scientifically valid molecular formations. Don't look the Bronze Horseman in the mouth, John.

A few of us failed completely to find the cemetery attached to the Novodevichye Convent (the entrance was far away from the convent entrance, and the rest of the people went back the next day to look at famous people's graves). But the convent was very pretty and peaceful. I actually saw a nun, dressed in all black, scurrying along to do...whatever it is that Russian Orthodox nuns do. How different our worlds are!

On the way to a restaurant from the convent, as we gradually gave up on seeking the cemetery, we came upon THE CUTEST THING I HAVE EVER SEEN. EVER. There is a park next to the convent, with trees and a stream. I saw some little bronze ducks that immediately reminded me of Make Way for Ducklings. And I was right! Ten years ago, Barbara Bush (First Lady B.B.) presented this thingie to the children of the USSR from the kids of the USA, in honor of the classic work by Robert McCloskey. And I sat on the big mommy duck and had my pic taken. And then, as I rested on a bench, I saw a little kid of five or so come over with her gramma, and she played with those ducks for half an hour, and set the bar for any future cuteness display I may ever witness. She "fed" things to the duck, she created interactions between some stuffed animal and the ducks, she just embodied cuteness. Oh, and she used (of course) really simple Russian, so I could understand her. E.g., "There!" Yeah, that was the highlight of my day, and possibly of my entire trip to Russia, in terms of cuteness.

From a good lunch at Guriya, a Georgian restaurant on Komsomolskaya Prospekt:
TO DO: Figure out how I feel about alcohol.

On the way back to the metro, I finally realized that Sprite ads that say, "Don't believe ads," are an example of the Liar's Paradox.

To what extent do advertisements and signs in general assume that the viewer already knows the city? That question kept coming up -- as Caleb Carr wrote, "like the only hummable melody in a difficult, nightmarish opera," or something like that. Well, it wasn't nightmarish. Neither was it "like a splinter in your brain, driving you mad," as in The Matrix. It just kept coming up.

Later that day, I remembered Michael Crichton's Travels, a very good book. I especially remembered the chapter involving the Dyaks and the Something-Kundalkiki Gorge. It's a chapter about missing what's right under your nose.

After the restaurant was Gorky Park, which I just viewed from the outside. Today it hardly seems a place of skulking, of Cold War intrigue. Today it just looks like a circus.

The perehod, or underground passageway, to the other side of the street, was chock-full of people selling paintings. Somehow I liked that better, seeing the walls full of art and viewing them as a consumer, trying to figure out what I liked and what would be worth my coin, rather than gawking touristically from one "masterpiece" to the next and feeling some sort of obligation to like everything.

There was a sculpture garden, and then there was rain, and then back at the hotel, there was dubbed X-Files ("Malder"), and I made some joke about the tsar of wishful thinking.

I'll write more about Sunday night in a bit.

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/7/14/122841/118

Filed under: Reading

# 01 Jul 2001, 09:59AM GMT+5:30: NO PHOTO NO VIDEO YES TOURISTS:

Or perhaps, given the foci of my Russian classes lately: Verbs of Motion II: They're Back, and They're Going to Tell You How They Got Here!

I went to the Hermitage for the first time (having been in St. Petersburg for two weeks), I had various multilingual experiences, I saw Tomb Raider dubbed in Russian, and I thought a heck of a lot while doing it all.

Sakura. I think that's the name of a character in Puzzlefighter, which I used to love back freshman year in the Freeborn dorm. But it's also a rather good if touristy Japanese restaurant near the Nyevskii Prospekt metro station.

We were American tourists, speaking English and a bit of Russian, in Russia, in a Japanese restaurant with (I'm guessing) Chinese-Russian wait staff, and the menus were in Russian and English with, in addition, English transliterations of Japanese names. And the instructions on the chopsticks were French, and don't even ask how many countries supplied this place with alcohol.

What is the proper procedure for importing a word into Russian? "Kafe" should be, by all rights, neuter, since it ends in "e," but grammarians (I think) say that it should be treated as masculine, since it's not a native term. "Tempura?" Should one say, "Ya hochu tempura," or "Ya hochu tempuru"? Should I have declined it in the accusative there?

The Hermitage. Students get in free, which is quite a relief, since it's a few hundred rubles for foreigners. I had second thoughts about leaving my camera in the cloakroom, not because I wanted to take photos (although I eventually did), but because the attendant looked shady. I changed sections so as to find some babushki attendants instead.

My Rough Guide (Official Mediator of the Sumana-in-St.-Pete Experience 2001) said not to wander, but to concentrate on my interests, since the Hermitage is so huge. Well, I don't know my interests (and I thought a lot about Leonard's opinions on arts v. crafts), so I half-wandered and half-looked at the famous, tourist-attractor stuff. Renoir, Degas, Monet, Titian, Breughel, Gaugin, Rembrandt, Manet, Rubens. (The room with French impressionists had the NO PHOTO NO VIDEO signs everywhere. And a babushka in every room. A lot of the paintings -- well, to quote Ross, "No temperature controls, no glass, no alarms, just a system of babushki, defending the priceless art." I wanted to take pictures of the babushki, or of the NO PHOTO NO VIDEO signs, or of the captions that had Russian, French, and English on them. But it was forbidden.)

Some of the stuff I saw was really, really old -- 600 years or more -- which just heightened my sense of absurdity regarding being there for only a few hours. I mean, it's an embarrassment of riches, art-wise, there at the Hermitage. (Don't forget the WWII spoils-of-war treasure.) It reminded me, after a while, of Arlington. There, one couldn't help but turn her back on some of the graves. Here, it's impossible to pay respectful attention to every work of art.

I saw a Breughel that reminded my of a W.H. Auden poem -- Musee des Beaux Arts. It was called something like "Robbers Stealing from Peasants," and one of the robbers had this beatific look on his face. It was kinda cool that I got to see the brushstrokes on the painting, since there was no glass between it and me. I was Close to The Machine, er, Art. But that also worried me, since I had heard about, and later actually saw, Rembrandt's Danae, which a visitor slashed and splashed with acid years back. Glass has its virtues.

There was more Russian spoken around me, and less English, than you might think, seeing as this is pretty much The Tourist Spot here in Leningrad. Lots of Russian, some English, some German, a bit of Japanese, some French, was what I heard.

Imagine a Microsoft-run gallery. NO PHOTO NO VIDEO NO NOTE-TAKING NO REMEMBERING-AND-TELLING-OTHERS-ABOUT-IT-LATER...and so on.

I sometimes forget that, for a really huge part of human existence, works of art were mainly about the Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman mythologies and histories. All these religious themes, and all these white people being portrayed. But I'll get to the White Male gaze later, in the Tomb Raider section.

I wandered, while looking for the exit, into a display on trumpets. Dan plays/ed the trumpet. In fact, the last time I was out of the country, in India, I bought a little toy trumpet (not to be confused with the piece "Toy Trumpet," as played by the Canadian Brass, which Dan also enjoys/ed), which I gave to him. I also played the trumpet once, for approximately three months, in fourth grade. But I never settled down to an instrument -- the piano I gave up at an even younger age. I kinda wish I had. Certainly thought-provoking.

I have to write more sometime to articulate my feelings on What It Is to Be a Tourist, and whether I'm getting better at spotting the national origins of tour groups -- distinguishing USA from Germany and so on.

Maybe the Hermitage isn't for me. Or maybe I should, next time I come by, try to sit a while with some stuff that interests me. And I'm sure that there's gotta be something. And, if all else fails, I can look at the interactions among babushki, tourists, Russians, foreigners, and the priceless art.

On my way out, I saw crates and crates and crates marked "FRAGILE" and "THIS WAY UP" and so on. I can only conclude that it's all art, but -- on its way out, or in? (One main way the Russian Museum makes cash is by loaning out its collection to museums in the west. Hence, my group's expedition to its 20th century collection in a few weeks may or may not be worth it at all. Sad.)

I bought some calendars.

Tomb Raider. Saw it last night with Katya, who is terrific, in some theater on Nyevskii. It was rather passable in Russian, seeing as we could rather tell what was about to happen sans audio comprehension. "She just said 'fifteen years.' What happens in fifteen years?...Oh. There's a picture of an old-ish man, and there's a gravesite. Oh, he turned up missing fifteen years ago. Think she'll see him later on in the film? Yeah."

Aha! I knew that I hadn't heard that bit of banter from the trailer!

The Male Gaze was rather prominent in this film, what with all the unnecessary and rather counterproductive PG nudity and nudity suggestions focusing on Ms. Jolie. And every main character was white, and there was lots of exotic-nonwhite-natives-of-foreign-lands cultural imperialism. Rather annoying. My previous exposure to lots of White Male Gaze stuff in the Hermitage probably primed me for this to annoy me.

The theater's concession stand was very comprehensive. Alcohol, popcorn, slices of cake, probably pirozhki. This is something could stand more of in the States -- real food, and not horribly priced, at movie theaters.

On our way there, Katya and I saw -- in the underground passageway/street crossing -- a Russian band covering lots and lots of Tom Waits songs. Katya says they were terrific. We gave them some rubles. Around $3.50 total. They were pretty neat.

We. I finished it. More later.

Note to Alex, Susanne's friend. Cryptonomicon is a book by Neal Stephenson, who also wrote Snow Crash, Zodiac, The Diamond Age, and other sort of cyberpunky sci-fi books, as well as the long essay In the Beginning Was the Command Line. Cryptonomicon is very long and incredibly geeky at times, and covers a wide swath of ... lots of topics. I tend to find opportunities to quote Stephenson often. Once my sister forbade me from quoting or referring to Stephenson, Seth Schoen, or Leonard Richardson for a day's worth of conversation with her. It was pretty tough.

Things that kind of remind me of home. Hare Krishnas, Scientologists, rollerbladers. Oh, and Young Communists. And weird variants of franchises and corporate foods that we have in the US. Example: Pringles, flavored Paprika or Cheese & Onion.

Salon. I think sometimes that Salon is just trying to be the exact opposite of Reader's Digest.

Bluesville, Tennessee. Is there one? There should be.

First published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/7/1/95917/48550

Filed under: Reading

# 29 Jun 2001, 10:15AM GMT+5:30: Compare and Contrast...The World!:

George Orwell wrote 1984 after reading We and Brave New World. (I'm reading We right now -- or I guess I should call it Mui, since I'm reading it in Russia and it was written in Russian.) Why did he do that? Probably to give high school seniors stuff to compare and contrast for centuries.

Ever get that feeling that the Divine Author is doing the same goldarn thing?

I didn't get to go to the LUG meeting, BTW. I showed at 7:30 at the Anichovsky Bridge, and so did....no one else. I'll have to contact the group to make sure it still exists.

Anyway. I noticed some oddness a while back, when I saw two similarly themed films coming out at similar times. A Bug's Life and AntZ. The Truman Show and EdTV. And now that I am completing the troika of Orwell, Zanyatin, and Huxley, I get this compare-and-contrast urge.

Actually, I also have all these very interesting people in my life, and a number of them are very similar, as geeks and in other ways (I think; this is one of those situations where one questions the definition of geekitude and its inclusiveness and exclusiveness and explanatory power for characteristics and personality). So I'm forever comparing-and-contrasting, say, Steve and Leonard and Seth and John and Anirvan and Dan and I don't know how many people.

More in a little bit, mostly on the very unexpected concert at the Smolnyi Cathedral and on my stream of consciousness from History Lecture.

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/6/29/13150/3586

Filed under: Reading

# 25 Jun 2001, 08:40AM GMT+5:30: Short -- books and religion, basically: Yesterday I finished reading Angela's Ashes and started reading We.

Catholicism appeals to me, in the same way as I imagine it appeals to a lot of people, what with the unconditional redemption and state of grace and all. I think Maxine Hong Kingston and/or Maya Angelou commented on this.

First published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/6/25/84014/2922

Filed under: Reading Religion

# 06 Jun 2001, 02:08AM GMT+5:30: Girlfriend in a SoMa: Kurt Vonnegut, Bertrand Russell, Star Trek, Martin Gardner, The Smiths, Big Tobacco, Angel, Robert Browning.

So today I finished Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Sure, I also packed a great deal for the St. Petersburg trip, and I did housework for my mother, and I ate and talked on the phone and the suchlike, but the primary intellectual activity of my day has been reading -- that and some of Bertrand Russell's Marriage and Morals. (My dad recommended it as an insomnia remedy.)

First, Slaughterhouse-Five. I'd read some Vonnegut before, namely, "Harrison Bergeron" and Player Piano and Timequake. Vonnegut's brand of in-your-face, extremely purposeful absurdism strikes a chord with me -- and, apparently, with millions of other readers. His mainstream popularity makes me suspicious. (This contrarian (read: perverse) attitude is nothing new to those who know me.) But those stories are, indeed, enjoyable, and perhaps even good.

As you probably know (if you know anything at all about Vonnegut), Slaughterhouse-Five is one of his most famous works, if not the most famous. There exists a film version. ("Own" "it" "on" "DVD.") There may be merchandise -- little Tralfamadorians, little teapots, little Montana Wildhack dolls.

I found it extremely similar to Timequake. Lots of rumination on the foolish mortal preoccupation with free will, much Kilgore Trout and reflexive referencing. And I found it quite enjoyable. Yes, Vonnegut sticks much of his craft right in your face, telling you this is what I am doing here on a writerly level, isn't it silly? The insistent denial of subtlety, at times, is the point, no? (At least he doesn't clash symbols in your face as Nathaniel Hawthorne does.) But some of the craft -- such as his fractal detail ad absurdum in the stead of melodrama -- is more structural, more rewarding to ponder.

"There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces."

I'm going to read more Vonnegut when I get back from Russia, if I have time. I'm thinking to start on Welcome to the Monkey House or to restart Cat's Cradle, which I began once upon a time. Any suggestions?

Ah, yes, the Bertrand Russell. Certainly any attempt to rationally review mores and laws regarding sex and love deserves its meed. My quick skim over Russell's waters suggests that he deserves the "reasonable" moniker. I am not sure that I agree with one of his premises: the purpose of marriage is to bear and raise children. If I were to accept that, then I would feel much differently than I would if I were to think, for example, that the purpose of marriage is not only to raise children, but to provide a stable and secure relationship within which two people can support each other as they develop and grow old. Wasn't it Blake? no, Browning:

Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in his hand
Who saith, "A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!"

The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Royale" ran on the nightly TNG reruns today. In it, Captain Picard implies rather strongly that Fermat's Last Theorem, "800 years" after Fermat, has not been solved. The show was written and performed around 1988. Andrew Wiles solved the problem in the mid-1990s. Somehow this uplifts me, that the human race moved a bit faster than Gene Roddenberry and Mike Berman et al. planned.

Beginning Martin Gardner's Fads and Fallacies: In the Name of Science: The Curious Theories of Modern Pseudoscientists and the Strange, Amusing and Alarming Cults That Surround Them. A Study in Human Gullibility. I've read most of the intro, "In the Name of Science," but then I started skipping around a bit. I read a bit on Lawsonomy, and the whole chapter on Lysenko, because Leonard (note the temporary address) hath mentioned those fad-llacies to me. This is my first crack at Gardner's nonfiction; I've earlier read a short story by him about a maths professor who discovers a way to transport himself rather unusually by tying himself in a complicated knot. I think it was called "The N-Dimensional Professor" or something. I found it sort of dry, but then again, Mr. Medeiros in tenth-grade trigonomentry/analytical geometry killed a great deal of my love for math.

Anyway, I like Gardner so far. The dry wit reminds me of a line -- about the efficacy and predictive/explanatory power of witchcraft as compared to modern economics -- from John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society that made me laugh out loud for minutes on the ACE commuter train a few years back.

I'll take more of a crack at Gardner tomorrow.

Listened a few times through, though not thoroughly attentively, to Strangeways, Here We Come by The Smiths. Enjoyable, in a Belle-and-Sebastian-meets-The-Police sort of way. I'm not quite certain whether they are Good. Hey -- did Douglas Coupland pay homage to their song "Girlfriend in a Coma" with his book of the same title, or is it a coincidence? I'm pretty sure the book came after the song.

Some have remarked upon the crocodile? alligator? swamp-dwelling carnivore depicting Big Tobacco in recent television and billboard adverts by the state of California. Certain ads have compelled me to contribute to the discourse on this topic. The ads take thirty seconds and attempt to dissect the triple-feint PR strategy of the tobacco companies' ads.

"We never say the "c" word -- cigarettes. Oh, lots of beer, and cheese, and community spirit."
"And getting that big smokey brand name out there."

The California State Department of Public Health would have us believe that this is a colossal mind game; The Crocogator and the offscreen voice seem to be playing chess, with the public's hearts and minds at stake. I'm just thinking that most people are not that into the strategy here, and that these ads are effective only on a tiny niche of the audience, much like ads for Archer Daniels Midland (Leonard, as Jim Lehrer: "Mmm, that's some tasty grain!") or 3M (Steve: "OK, I'll buy a *lot* of tape").

Angel visited. Thank God! My third visit in four days. A pre-departure avalanche of affection. And we talked of important things, and I was glad. Coincidences: The first half hour of her visit coincided with the appearance of some Indian guy our family vaguely knows on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" He lost ridiculously early. A discredit to the race.

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/6/6/2815/19904

Filed under: Reading

# 04 Jun 2001, 10:01AM GMT+5:30: Dude, Where's My Activity?: Today -- not much. Shopped and otherwise prepared for the Russia trip, took a long nap, reread Go Jump in the Pool! by Gordon Korman, e-mailed a bit, read some of The Age of Kali by William Dalrymple, watched a bit of TV, ate, and talked on the phone with people. No mini-golf whatsoever. That's all.

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/6/5/1153/34531

Filed under: Reading

# 04 Jun 2001, 02:26AM GMT+5:30: Milk, cheese, bread, diary: A tiny little litany of what I've done today.

I played mini-golf with Steve/holeburning, the second person in two days to drive down from the SanFran Bay Area to come see me in scenic Stockton. I beat him mostly because I had played the very same course the previous day. I also beat him at air hockey. I thought I had beat Leonard handily the previous day, but no. Steve didn't even make more than two points in each game (the game automatically ends when one player, namely brainwane, makes seven goals). I wonder whether I would whip him even better if the table worked the way it's supposed to. Tip: the puck should not ever stop hovering! Jeez.

We also walked around the University of the Pacific, which may be the only fun and free thing to do with someone in Stockton, aside from sitting at home talking.

Finished The Cyberiad, by Stanislaw Lem. Very good stuff. The puns are terrific, the two main characters are different when I was afraid that they'd just be the same, and the surprising sophistication of the philosophical dialogue unnerved and provoked me.

One of the things that amazes me most is how much work the translator must have done to create English puns that, presumably, carry the same flavor that Lem must have created in the original Polish.

To fluffy grue: I know that sometimes Segfault stinks -- hey, even now it's down -- but the geek humor site recently published one of my articles, so it can't be all bad.

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/6/4/22647/37416

Filed under: Reading

# 01 Jun 2001, 09:32AM GMT+5:30: It's brainwane-o Bandito, the Bandit brainwane: What else is there to do in Stockton, California, but write diary entries and emails, delay learning more Russian, get scared at travel advisories, read the work of dead white guys, and complain about the heat?

Orwell, Lem, Wodehouse, Chekhov; Bless you. I've finished The Orwell Reader, I'm rereading some P.G. Wodehouse (Very Good, Jeeves! and the like), I'm about halfway through Stanislaw Lem's The Cyberiad, and I'm sampling Chekhov stories from
The Image of Chekhov
Forty Stories by Anton Chekhov
In the Order in Which They Were Written
Translated, With an Introduction by Robert Payne
"The Lady With the Pet Dog" is so relevant, and as clear and cold as a block of ice.

Chekhov can be really depressing. At least when George Orwell depresses me he also provides some tiny but explicit glimmer of hope. The Orwell excerpt about his schooldays from Such, Such Were the Joys reminds us, quite rightly, that modern-day teens have no monopoly on horrid school experiences and angst arising from them. Take that, Jon Katz!

I'm not sure whether Stanislaw Lem can be the Thomas Pynchon of fantasy in the same way that Neal Stephenson is the Thomas Pynchon of sci-fi, because maybe Thomas Pynchon is already the Thomas Pynchon of fantasy.

Star Trek: The Next (de)Generation. I'm watching old episodes from the beginning of second season, I think. Riker has a beard, but they still have the old uniforms, which I would call "stupid" only because they signify a lack of quality. How uneven in quality! Even within the same episode! "The Measure of a Man" was pretty good except that the JAG was a character written before TNG writers could reliably handle strong females (compare K'Eylahr, or however you spell the name of Worf's mate). "The Dauphin" was horrible except for some inspired banter between Riker and Guinan. "A Matter of Honor" seemed like an ad for exchange programs; I feel as though there should have been a ten-second ad for Interplanetary Study Abroad at the end, with Riker, the Benzite, the Klingon, and Wesley all giving a Mentos thumbs-up to the camera. Come to think of it, the quality of an episode from this period may have an inversely proportional relationship to the amount of screen time Wesley gets. Hmmm. This calls for the building of a wildly inaccurate metric!

Funny-names-department. I have an uncle Ramanujan who is a math professor. Or, as he would possibly say, a maths professor. That's great. Imagine if I had more relatives with appropriate trade names! Uncle Sophocles, the playwright. Aunt Marie, the physicist. Cousin Thomas, who doesn't believe anything you tell him.

Immunizations. I'm going to Russia in a bit, and the CDC and suchlike are very concerned to see that I don't die of, say, diphtheria, polio, or typhoid. These travel warnings (regarding diseases that the USA, for all intents and purposes, eradicated a generation back) really drive home the fact that Russia is a developing country. Nothing like "causes paralysis and death" to brighten up the packing of the suitcase and the bon-voyage party. Good thing I'm not intending to visit Vladivostok or any of the other far eastern cities, or else I'd really be worried about the currency of my Japanese encephalitis immunization.

Somehow I feel that "I am immunized and super-sized" should have the same tone as "Disco Stu does not advertise."

Heat. Expletive, it's hot. I'm in the agricultural breadbasket of California, and heat exhaustion may soon crop up on this brainwane's frame.

How hot is it? It's so hot, you'd think it's summer!

Hydration, importance of. Wherever you are, make sure you're drinking enough water. Whether it's summer or winter, you need a certain amount of the old H2 (O, that is!) to lubricate all those little biochemical ball bearings. When I remember to drink more water, my mood improves, I sleep better, and my food even kinda tastes better! Drink cool, refreshing water. Now with pretty much the same ppm level of arsenic!

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/6/1/213246/1768

Filed under: Reading

# 30 May 2001, 12:36PM GMT+5:30: The Heartbreak Of St. Petersburg: All of a sudden, I have a sense of style. No, it's not sudden. It's just surfacing. I hesitate to either say that it has sprouted, or that I was pushing its head down with my foot till I decided not to drown it after all.

"Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise." -- George Orwell, "Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool," 1946

Mutually non-exclusive choices:

I'm very young
I'm very foolish
Orwell was wrong
Orwell exaggerated when using the word 'imagine'

(I'm heading off to Russia in a few weeks. I'll be visiting St. Petersburg for almost two months. If there's anyone reading this who lives there, I'd love to meet you for a cup of coffee or something while I'm there. The first image that comes to mind is myself, wrapped in all sorts of parka and muff, shivering in the snowdrift. But of course I know that's wrong. The average temperature during the summer in St. Petersburg oscillates between 60 and 90 degrees Fahrenheit. It snows as much in St. Petersburg in June as it does in Stockton in June.)

I've been reading Orwell. I just drink it in. The fiction, the nonfiction, everything. And it's like what I hear dancing with an incredible partner is like: he anticipates my counterarguments and almost always addresses them satisfactorily. Such clarity, such rigor. This is one of the authors who makes me want to create something as worthwhile, something as substantively good as the work I read. Something that people will experience after I die and express some gratitude that I ever lived.

And maybe I'll never do that.

I get so many habits from my parents. I react out loud to movies and television and the radio, sometimes to others' annoyance, expressed or unexpressed. I shirk work, delay it as long as possible when it's something boring or unpleasant. Sometimes it never gets done. And sometimes I talk too much, and don't let others expletive-gerund concentrate.

The thought is slipping away. I had so much to write, and now it's dead, because I couldn't get to the computer soon enough. Goddammit!

I wanted to get here and write something great, something expressive, and something -- goddamit, will people ever stop saying stupid things so loud that I have to hear them so that it ruins my concentration?!

I just want to go back into my room, and listen for the sixth time to Moxy Fruvous's Live Noise, and make that connection again between the live version of Video Bargainville and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. More specifically, the weird love-of-decay-and-death I sense in the exuberance of the crowd in the live recording of Video Bargainville, and the jaundiced hatred of life that Orwell sees in Swift.

I saw some television today. My reaction startled me. Every time I get some TV after not having any for a while -- I mean the bad stuff, the daytime muck, the prolefeed on the networks -- my reaction startles me. I'm getting pickier and pickier, and/or the stuff I see is getting worse and worse.

I'm troubled by the Supreme Court decision on Casey Martin, the PGA, and the Americans with Disabilities Act, and with the TV coverage I saw of the ruling. I feel uneasy that a private organization can't keep its rules as it likes. The television coverage focused on the debate over whether walking, sans cart, is "an essential part" of the game, when it seems to me that perhaps the relevance of a private organization's rules is not the most crucial point. And then the home-schooled-kids-in-spelling-bees piece was horribly biased and puffy, too. Am I seeing more? Or is ABC World News Tonight actually telling less than it told when I was in high school?

I cried the other day while reading Orwell's account of his experience in the Spanish Civil War. (An excerpt from Homage to Catalonia appears in The Orwell Reader.) He wrote that his few months in the militia, in the force against fascism, were immediately trying and frustrating and irritating, allowed him to see a vision of humanity and of the hope for a classless society, "the idea of equality." And I cried at the possibility of clear-eyed idealism, at the combination of passion with analytic rigor.

Perhaps I would rather make art than have children.

No, maybe not. Over the course of my life, perhaps I will do both. But right now, I think I'd rather write one great book, or short story, or poem, or just an epigram, than ever risk tormenting a child through inconsistent, moody, selfish parenting. Perhaps I'm just fighing the last war -- oh, is that description too general? (Ha ha.) I'm sure you can read between the lines.

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/5/30/03633/2584

Filed under: Reading

# 24 May 2001, 04:10AM GMT+5:30: The Most Recent Picture Show: I saw part of a movie, I read some stuff, I looked at some art, I gotta clean.

I went on Tuesday night to see Satyajit Ray's movie Charulata at the Fine Arts Theater at Haste and Shattuck in Berkeley. Ray is probably the most famous filmmaker ever to emerge from India. (He is Bengali; Anirvan gloats about that, playfully.) But I was so tired that I fell asleep in the middle of the film, so I only saw the beginning and the end. Good stuff, that which I saw. I should probably see it for real sometime.

So now I haven't seen any of the Important Indian films. I really want to see the more recent films by Deepa Mehta -- you know, the ones that were so controversial in India that theaters that were showing it got bombed by fundamentalists. Fire and such. Fire tackled lesbianism, empty marriages, etc. Funny: just as some Christians say that "God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve," some Hindus say that "God created Rama and Sita, not Radha and Sita."

I've read more of The Orwell Reader, begun P.G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster Sees it Through, and read through the most recent San Francisco Bay Guardian. In the SFBG, Annalee Newitz writes a thoughtful article on the problems in deliberately trying to connect or separate sex and love. Annalee certainly seems reasonable, in her own way.

I really like potato salad.

I went and saw some art yesterday. Whenever I set out to Look At Art, I feel uncomfortable because I always feel uncomfortable pronouncing judgment, or commenting in any way, really. I feel underqualified. And then I wonder whether it's okay to feel that way. I'm not even sure what I like, and why. As you can tell from a few of my recent diaries, I've been trying to figure out how I feel about art. I mean, thousands of smart people, more, even, have devoted their lives to this idea. It must have some sort of merit. And I get some sort of pleasure from various aspects of experiences and objects, aspects which I might call "elegance" or "beauty."

I'll just stick to creating comedy and nonfiction text, perhaps, in which I have some grasp of the criteria that I share with peers. I'm not sure about music, or visual media, or movies or TV -- maybe I can just try to take one piece at a time.

I helped out some French-speaking tourists on BART today. I believe I was marginally worse at understanding them than I was at understanding Dimitrii, the Russian guy I met on BART five days back. Four high-school years of French, followed by three college semesters of Russian, plus a lifelong exposure to Kannada -- you can understand how I got pretty mixed up in trying to listen to the French speakers.

I need to clean. Perhaps what I need is to invite people over to my place, so that I will then feel ashamed of the mess and clean it up.

Poll:
Art is...

Other People
A Process, Not a Product
A Lady in the Drawing Room, a Whore in the Bedroom
Free as in Speech, Not Free as in Beer

Originally posted by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/5/24/161037/165

Filed under: Reading

# 22 May 2001, 12:40PM GMT+5:30: Fun, fun, fun, till daddy takes my independence away.: "So puns have a slight aphrodisiac effect on me."
"You mean they turn you on. Come on, use street language."
"No! We are not on the street. The street is over there, beyond that plaque that says, 'You are now on UC property.' And so we are still on campus, and so I will use academic language, not street language, and so I will say that it has a slight aphrodisiac effect."

All the fun and sadness I've had for the past 72 hours or whatever. Marketing that makes me shake my head in shame. P.G. Wodehouse. Oh, and candy.

Some people don't like Red Hots! The sweet and spicy little cinnamon candy. How can this be? Red or black licorice, I get. But Red Hots? Goodness. Well, at least I haven't run into too many people who dislike chocolate. Yet.

Hogwarts, the academy of witchcraft and wizardry in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter universe, apparently (according to merchandise I saw over the weekend) has some sort of pseudo-Latin school motto. Hey, Latin scholars! What does Draco Dormiens Nunquam Titillandus mean? Which, of course, reminds me of a Monster.com ad I saw in a BART station (the SF Bay Area Underground/subway/metro) on Sunday. "Carpe better jobium." Aaargh!

If you pass by a Barnes & Noble's, such as the one on Durant and Shattuck in Berkeley, and you resist your natural urge to resist this manifestation of the homogenization of middlebrow culture, then you might go in and see a Scholastic (kids' publisher) book display. And you might see the abomination that is T*WITCHES. Combining the teen-girl wish for a twin and the trendiness of superficial Wicca rebellion! The slogans are:

Radically Different. Identically Powerful.
and
Twins. Witches. Exactly.

Exactly what? As Leonard said, "Twins. Witches. (That's a stupid idea!) Exactly."

Note that I am not calling Wicca superficial. I'm just saying what you probably already know, that for a lot of kids the idea of Wicca is a trendy little tool for rebellion, and not a really sacred way of life. They wouldn't know what the Rede was if you beat them over the head with it. It's not superficial, but some people treat it superficially, and I'm pretty sure that this wannabe kids' series is trying to ride that wave.

Again, Aaargh!

Anyway.

So I've been reading Wodehouse off and on for a few years now. As with my new favorite band, I wish I'd discovered Wodehouse seven years ago. Wait, maybe I did. Anyway. I finished Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves over the weekend, and found it good, but not as virtuosic and enjoyable as Right Ho, Jeeves, the other Jeeves and Wooster novel I've read. I have recently realized that, in everyday life, I talk more like Jeeves and Wooster than like any other characters in literature. I'm not sure where the causality is there. In any case, I'll be starting Bertie Wooster Sees it Through as soon as I finish or get bored with The George Orwell Reader, which I got over the weekend and which, coincidentally, contains Orwell's essay, "In Defense of P.G. Wodehouse."

OK, "Fresh Air with Terry Gross" is going bye-bye, Moxy Früvous is sliding onto the acoustic deck.

I got back that research paper of which I wrote here about three weeks ago, the one about naturalization rates among Indians in Silicon Valley. It's always great to have your grader tell you that you understated the strengths of your methodology.

A day or more after the final:

"So? How was the test?" -professor
"The test was fair. You, sir, are not." -me

I suppose I've been delaying talking about my emotional state. Well, it's changed. I kept really busy this weekend -- lots and lots of socialization. And, to quote Calvin of Bill Watterston's Calvin and Hobbes, The Days Are Just Packed! And I didn't really feel sad at all, except for brief flashes and memories. But then yesterday I talked on the phone with the person with whom a relationship recently ended, and who told me that I am still a good person, and that triggered something, and I cried for the first time since that dissolution.

I guess I was blocking the pain, and now it's arrived, and George Orwell wrote about the experience of poverty from his life in Paris. From Down and Out in Paris and London:

And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs -- and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.

And, from Moxy Früvous's quill, in a song about heartbreak and getting over a breakup:

He thought about his life, his heart began to rush
He buried the crown, found a bucket and a brush
BJ paints town!

Perhaps I did things backwards. What else is new? Sun Rises, Analysts Stunned, as Segfault will say someday.

Poll: I want x in my life, where x equals

Jeeves (P.G. Wodehouse)
Data (Star Trek)
Marvin (Douglas Adams)
Jane (Orson Scott Card)
Daneel (Isaac Asimov)

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/5/22/124043/134

Filed under: Reading

# 18 May 2001, 04:21AM GMT+5:30: Funny lines from my final: I took my last finals of the semester today. I turned in an extra-crappy paper for my "1939" class, and took my "California Politics" final, and now it's over, the whole semester, the whole year. And I'm listening to Moxy Früvous, and I have all the time in the world to read all this stuff I've been wanting to read, the P.G. Wodehouse and the Martin Gardner and the Gibson/Sterling, and instead I feel kind of alone and possibly just starting down a path of pain and emptiness, so I'll post these funny lines from my final.

Note that I was not setting out to be the class clown of California Politics. I was just emotioned out.

"After apportionment comes redistricting, as after rain the sun."

"Not an election year goes by that the citizenry doesn't vote yea-or-nay on some whack-ass initiative."

On attempts to stem the tide of harebrained initiatives: "But ... there will always be rich people with zany schemes (cf. horsemeat initiative)."

On a proposed scheme to tell voters systematically, via a note in the ballot pamphlet, the probability that a proposition will be found unconstitutional and overturned by the courts: "Voters get more information, writers of inits. get more cautious about writing whack-ass propositions with messy legal implications, and its costs seem negligible. It's a win-win-win situation!"

"... an across-the-board split down the middle ..."

On wedge issues: "Our two-party system requires that each party, like Walt Whitman, be large and contain multitudes -- of opposing views, that is!"

And: "Pete Wilson is the poster child for the use of immigration as a wedge issue."

I'm all right, right now, which is all I can ask for, right? And my friends have been more help than I had realized they would be. Thanks, guys. Being busy tomorrow will help a lot.

Poll: Best Moxy Früvous song on "Bargainville"

Video Bargainville
Gulf War Song
King of Spain
River Valley
Stuck in the 90s Again
Other

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/5/18/42116/2620

Filed under: Reading

# 11 May 2001, 03:57AM GMT+5:30: Weird Al brainwaneovich: Wow. I've gotten used to cleaning, or maybe it's just that I've cleaned up my apartment so many times in the last few weeks that I haven't had time to get it *really* dirty again, so it isn't taking that long.

I love Weird Al. "Even Worse" is my dishwashing album.

See, I'm coming home from work but I forgot my address
I'm half an hour late for my algebra test
Then, some slimy alien jumps out of my chest
Then I'm falling and falling and I guess you know the rest

Mike Parsons gave me "Even Worse" in lieu of paying back a fifty-cent loan that I kept harping on. This must have been in seventh or eighth grade.

I'm socializing tonight with new friends and old. Mostly new.

Finals approach, and I'm sort of halfheartedly working on a paper on Destry Rides Again, a 1939ish film starring Jimmy Stewart as a Wild West lawkeeper who uses less-than-orthodox methods to get his way. I think it would be interesting to watch that in some sort of movie night with Stagecoach and Moulin Rouge, the new Nicole Kidman flick. All these pivotal prostitute characters, all sympathetic, all sort of soft-on-the-inside-hard-on-the-outside. Of course, I'll probably be talking much more about the weird half-pacifism, half-vengeful anarchy that Destry Rides Again seems to espouse. I'd welcome comments from anyone who has actually seen this rather obscure flick.

It seems that every time I clean, I find that I have more books. This shouldn't surprise me, since I'm the one who buys them, but it does. Hard Times by Studs Terkel, the Hermann Hesse-like The Witness by S.L. Bhyrappa (which I recommend), some random hard-bound Plato, two little paperbacks by Stanislaw Lem that I haven't barely started yet. Purple Dots by Jim Lehrer -- yes, that Jim Lehrer.

From The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, by T.S. Eliot:

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

Poll: Best media experience

Weird Al
T.S. Eliot
Jimmy Stewart
Stanislaw Lem

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/5/11/155744/384

Filed under: Reading

# 25 Apr 2001, 09:33AM GMT+5:30: Do I look fat in this font?: Media experiences I've had today:

Bellwether, an un-put-downable book by Connie Willis. I really couldn't stop once I'd started. Sure, the contrived frustrations (as usual with Willis) get annoying, but it was worth it anyway.
Sullivan's Travels, a hilarious 1939 film written & directed by Preston Sturges. I watched it for my 1939 Through Films class, and loved it. Much better than The Philadelphia Story. Still looking for the Gulliver's Travels references, though.

In today's journal, brainwane teaches, sees a whore, buys a bookmark, and cannot cure herself of a meme.

Ever since I started hanging out with Leonard, a certain meme has infested me as slowly and surely as syphilis. It's ""Tonight's Episode," the only slightly nonsensical title at the top of Leonard's main webpage. Go ahead, look at it. I dare you.

It's as Neal Stephenson's herpes virus of irony (which infects anyone who lives in California for too long, as posited in Cryptonomicon). I keep coming up with new ones, writing down the good and discarding the bad. It's more distracting than a half-read Orson Scott Card novel. I see parking signs and transmute them into sleazy slogans of corrupted corpses. What a life.

Today in my DE-Cal class, I tried to talk a bit about religion, jumping off with The Matrix. While referring to Neal Stephenson's In The Beginning Was The Command Line, I made a rather inelegant analogy of HIV destroying defenses sneakily to the relativism of the American monoculture, and its disabling of righteousness defenses in other cultures. It's still rather muddled in my head.

I saw a prostitute! I have been told (passive voice intended) that the "massage parlor" next to King Dong (a Chinese restaurant) on Shattuck, between Haste and Channing, is a brothel. And today I was walking home from school when I saw a woman near the place.

[Channelling Raymond Chandler] She was white, thirty and trying not to look so. She had "blond" hair that had seen more chemicals than Erin Brockovich. Come to think of it, she looked kind of like Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich -- not the face, not the pretty lighting, just the clothes. Heels that made her almost seem dainty -- her feet, anyway. And her short pink dress seemed like something Whore Barbie would wear.

She was running, I think -- if you can call anything a woman can do in those heels "running" -- out of the "Massage Parlor" (with the neon sign from ancient times, neverlit), a keyring dangling from her upraised hands. She passed them through the window to a fella sitting in the driver's seat of an SUV. Then she went back in. I caught a glimpse of a dingy, dungy office-looking room just inside the door. I didn't have to wait for the door to close to know that the sign on it simply reads, "Ring bell for service."

It was the first time I'd ever seen a woman and had quite a bit of certainty that she was a sex worker.

My class informed me, later, of the nuanced layers, the levels of degradation, implied by the words "whore," "slut," "skank," "ho," and "slattern." I should have asked about "scarlet woman." Or rather, "pink lady."

I bought a bookmark. It was hidden in the folds of a book at the church thrift sale. It's white paper, with sort of lacily perforated edges and a colored emblem of sort of a Santa Claus in the middle, decorated with red characters, Japanese or Chinese, I don't know which. I didn't buy the book, which may have been Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee. I really should read some Pinter and Albee some time. Get in that black-turtleneck-cappucino vibe.

Later, y'all. It's The West Wing and Gogol for me! Tonight, tonight...

Poll: Better alliteration

sleazy slogans
corrupted corpses

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/4/25/213323/223

Filed under: Reading

# 15 Apr 2001, 02:55AM GMT+5:30: So heaven is a slasher flick?: Weekend fun, I had. A Gateway to Heaven, I saw. Various jokes, sight gags, and puns, I discovered. Cheeriest, to me, was the nicknaming of "CollabNet" as "ClamNet."

So Dan, a friend of mine, told me that the two wildly dissimilar birds I saw conversing on Wednesday were, most probably, just the male and female of one species. Hmph. There go my hopes of doing a good-faith "bird linguist" bit at the comedy night on Monday.

I had a great deal of fun this weekend, and it's not even half over. Thank-yous go out to Leonard and to Kevin Maples and Kevin's friends.

I'm really enjoying Leonard's music. He was kind enough to oblige me and play a good deal of it for me (and Kevin and Scott and Shane) last night. In fact, right now I can't really stop listening to "I Screw Up Everything I Touch," "Relativity," and "Royal Jelly."

Okay, I stopped. Copperpot, now, and the Weatherheads, TMBG, TentilEight, and The Carpet Patrol. All of those (except for They Might Be Giants), I discovered through IUMA. Yes, IUMA of the baby-naming scheme. Still a great resource. I wish they had more funding.

San Francisco Examiner headline yesterday: "Drivers killed fewer walkers last year," or something to that effect. Although I'm glad, I seem to sense some left-handed complimentry in the headline.

If I could quantify the voyeurism and low-down wrongness of "reality" TV shows, and somehow evaluate all the TV shows in the history of reality, all the way from "Candid Camera" to "The Real World" to "Survivor/Big Brother/Temptation Island/Boot Camp/Chains of Love," and then I graphed it, what sort of result would I find? And what sort of trend would it really project? What really is the next step in voyeuristic entertainment? Some sort of AllAdvantage-type arrangement where thousands of people can sign up for cash-for-surveillance freelance work? AmIFascinatinglyMundaneOrNot, then, would be the mediator. Hmmm. Perhaps I've said too much already. *calls VC*

Currently reading: Caleb Carr, The Angel of Darkness, sequel to The Alienist. I'm about a third of the way through it, even though I perhaps shouldn't be, since I have work to do for every one of my courses and extracurricular activities. I think it was my sister who said that Caleb Carr actually does in The Alienist what Michael Crichton tried to do in The Great Train Robbery. I have to say that Carr's first-person narration helps avoid the exposition-heavy style that Crichton critics, well, criticize. But the heavy-handed attempts at suspense cliffhangers at the end of every chapter get rather old.

Random sample, from Angel:

The Doctor took the knife again. "The Philippine Islands, Stevie, are one of the most important colonies in the Spanish Empire. A most valued jewel in the queen regent's crown. Well..." He walked towards the center of the room, still examining the knife "It would seem that we have gained an advantage tonight -- and lost one." He gave us all a very serious look. "We must move."

I once heard a Crichton critic, back in high school, state his objections thus: "Okay, let's say he's writing about a guy going to Africa. First sentence: 'The guy was packing for Africa. The first trip to Africa by Europeans was made in...' And that goes on for six pages. Then, 'The guy packed a can of bug spray. Bug spray was invented in....'" Years later, I realize that: the beginning of Congo is, in fact, not quite like this; and that the edutainment of Crichtoneqsue style has its hilarious comeuppance in Modern Humorist's Encyclopedia Brown parodies.

So I was sick this past week. Monday afternoon I ministered to Alexei, who had (he thought) been poisoned by bad fish over the weekend. That night I stayed up late writing an essay on James Rorty, pseudoculture v. mass culture, and Dark Victory, or, as I put it to most of my friends, "Applying a theorist you've never heard of to a movie you've never seen." Didn't eat much or sleep much those next few days, except for some bake-sale goods on Wednesday, early afternoon. What I'm wondering is, exactly what was the tipping point of the illness? What made me sick on Wednesday afternoon, night, and Thursday morning? Did I catch something from Alexei? The brownie? Was it to food, or the lack of food, or sleep, or what combo?

Illness wreaks havoc with the scientific method. I want the independent variable, dammit!

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/4/15/25525/7264

Filed under: Reading

# 04 Apr 2001, 02:21AM GMT+5:30: Take that, economists!: Me, yesterday, during Political Science 171 lecture:
"If I never hear the term 'Pareto equilibrium' again it'll be too soon."
Prof. Bruce Cain, during the same lecture:
"Don't make fun of economists, now, they make more than we do."

Pareto optimism: I don't want Pareto equilibrium, because that state is, literally, hopeless. I've reconciled myself to enjoying the journey and hating the goal In that way I'm very much unlike Odysseus, or a hypothetical Odysseia. He really wanted to get home, and yet at the point when he's happiest, fadeout and credits.

I actually picked up and read a bit of the Fagles translation of The Odyssey while I was in The Other Change of Hobbit the other day. I love the bit about the bed. That Penelope was so clever! However, I had to pick up and get involved in The Big U before Shagrat came and sat on my lap.

I remember a number of years ago hearing Fagles on Diane Rehm's talk show on KUOP. It was early on some weekday morning, I remember, because I got up early my senior year to do physics homework. I loved those early mornings....

Fagles read the opening of the poem, in the Greek, and it sounded so beautiful and so magical. That's the sort of thing that turns people to becoming classics scholars. Me, I express my orality through the oral epic of our time: jokes and stand-up comedy. The ultimate epithet: "rosy-fingered dawn" or "how many [x] does it take to change a light bulb?"

All Your Base: The definitive satire (not to put down Segfault's much-earlier two cents).

Reading: I went to Black Oak Books last night, and bought The Giver (which I finished last night) & The Big Sleep (which I went there to buy, originally). It seems to me that you can find out a lot about a person by having them read The Giver, if they haven't already, and finding out their opinion on how optimal the portrayed society is. I got this nagging feeling, during and after reading it, that Lowry is unfair to a system that actually keeps a lot of people happy. She is a longtime resident of the USA, which (in my experience) turns people towards individual rights and away from honestly believing in the value of community.

"The Giver" isn't as ham-handed and sinister as Anthem, which allows more subtlety and encourages substantive consideration. Important note: this book has one prestigious award(s) in the realm of children's books. I heard about it on The Looseleaf Book Company, a radio prgram re: kids' books on KALW Sunday mornings.

As more diatribe-style writers would yell: Is this the sort of filth we allow into the hearts and minds of our children?!

I had a very interesting conversation with Alexei yesterday re: school shootings. He also beat me at air hockey. Grrr.

Now I go and see free stand-up on Sproul. Next time: the artist is not the art, the believer is not the belief.

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/4/4/142153/3116

Filed under: Reading

# 02 Apr 2001, 12:09PM GMT+5:30: Space, time, and "take my wife ... please!": Today: Seth's diary, Einstein's Dreams, and free professional comedy!

Seth's diary yesterday contained a hilarious commentary on our historical shortsightedness, titled "California history." I recommend it highly.

Last night I read Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams in a voracious fit of putting-off-Russian. Very thought-provoking. I especially liked Lightman's imagination WRT the people who tried to defy the laws of their respective worlds. The book also reminded me of how difficult it can be to question my assumptions, and that the ones I least question might be the ones I most need to undermine (e.g., the nature of time, the merits and disadvantages of ambition, etc.).

All right! I was afraid that there would be no more Heuristic Squelch comedy nights this semester, but it looks as though that's not a problem. This Wednesday, April 4, there's a free comedy show on the steps of Sproul Hall at UC Berkeley. The featured comics are hilarious, especially Brian Malow. Again, 11:30 am till 1 pm on Upper Sproul Plaza on April 4th. Great stuff! I imagine there's no open-mic portion, otherwise I'd be doing four minutes of schtick.

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/4/2/12938/28202

Filed under: Comedy Reading

# 27 Mar 2001, 11:55AM GMT+5:30: Kress & speciation: Argh. Here I am, trying to soak up enough DMV information to please them, and sneaking away to read Nancy Kress's Beggars Trilogy ten or twenty pages at a time, and now I've been trying to make a Wintel box perform like something better than the dadblamed spit-and-baling-wire contraption that it is. So, for those I haven't emailed in a few days, apologies; I'll get to you soon. *kicks CPU*

I'm on the third book, Beggars Ride. I read too fast; I always have. I used to think it was a good thing, a secret pride, that I read faster than others. Now I see that it keeps me from really nailing the things about a text that make me uncomfortable, until I've given in to the author's assumptions and uncritically accepted her logic.

Examples: Jennifer Sharifi is a fanatic, and she's a Muslim. Kress engages in discourse with the work of Ayn Rand, especially in the first and second books, and yet she's dropped only one tantalizing reference to any of Rand's work, and even that obscure. And a few weak spots -- in the second book, especially -- remind me of the worst aspects of Atlas Shrugged: the deterministic plotting based on characteristics, not characters; implausible philosophical soliloquies and dialogues; complete moral condemnation of a class.

That said, Kress plausibly explores the speciation, through genetic modification, of humans.

Long ago, I was at Black Oak Books with Anirvan and...Greg? Mike? What was the name of that guy from the other side of my cubicle, back when I was at Innomedia? Anyway, we ate at Cha-Am afterwards, I remember, and Anirvan and I talked ancient Hindu mythology, courtesy of Amar Chitra Katha, as Mike (?) ate on, silently bewildered and bemused.

But more importantly, we all went to Black Oak to hear Paulina Borsook, author of the then-recently-published Cyberselfish. The question-and-answer period included discussion of the Bionomics (think Biology+Economics) Institute, which predicted (I think I heard) speciation of humans within 200 years.

I thought I sensed the room go quiet for a moment.

Now, I imagine the Bionomics people were speaking of the scientific definition of speciation. As I remember from ninth-grade biology

(Mr. Porter's class, his windbreaker with his collar up, last I heard he was coaching the water polo team at UOP, the squish and strange hard shiny flexibility of frog parts, winning the Bone Challenge for my team, a t-shirt color-coding my anatomy,

his surprising gentle knowing that I needed to cry after I didn't win any points for my classmates in the biweekly classwide Challenge of the chapter tests, his dropping the femur that comprised a hall pass onto my desk so that I could run across Senior Circle to the Business building restroom to sob, his telling me that I didn't have to be Clarence Darrow)

, speciation is the divergence of two species so far apart that a member from each cannot mate to produce an offspring who can also have viable offspring. (So K'Eylar, Worf's mate, should have been sterile!)

But Kress is more concerned, I think, with cultural speciation. As is Asimov in the Foundation and Robots serieses. Earthers and Spacers, donkeys and Livers and Sleepless and SuperSleepless. The gated communities and the COPS trailer parks, core and periphery. Is the speciation already here?

As long as there is social mobility, up and down and sideways and east and west and full-circle, then we are one people, we humans. To the extent that someone is not part of my "we," my tribe, to that extent she may as well be a different species.

And --thank you Borsook, Kress, Card, Asimov, teachers -- genetic speciation will only heighten cultural speciation, not start it.

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/3/27/235555/369

Filed under: Reading

# 25 Mar 2001, 02:34AM GMT+5:30: Books for Spring Break: I have now finished Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. I finished The Amber Spyglass less than 24 hours after I received it.

More: Nancy Kress and irritating MS errors.

Last night I went to Black Oak Books in north Berkeley, and bought all three books comprising Nancy Kress's Beggars series. I read the novella Beggars in Spain about two months ago, and was gladdened & surprised to learn that she had expanded it into a book, and that the book was the first of a trilogy. Three Kresses and The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West (for my "Political Theory: American Movies and American Society, 1939" class with intellectual badass Prof. Rogin), all for $11.34.

I really ought to go to the northern outskirts of Berkeley more often. Black Oak is there, as is the Cheese Board Collective (which sells good pizza, I've heard), and other neat eateries.

Gosh, this sounds like an entry Seth would write.

Servers that use IIS (I think) give, it seems, more aggravating error messages to visitors than other servers. For example, if I try to get to a main page by chopping off the end of a URL (example), then I get "The Virtual Directory does not allow contents to be listed," which oddly reminds me of the quote from "The Simpsons": "Disco Stu does not advertise."

On the way to Black Oak, on the 43 AC Transit bus, I saw the flowers. There's a little shrine now, marking the spot where a pedestrian got killed at Hearst and Shattuck.

Be careful, everyone.

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/3/25/143448/131

Filed under: Reading

# 18 Mar 2001, 12:06PM GMT+5:30: Questions (unanswerable?), and answers to non-questions: The Phantom Tollbooth
My mom (not *your mom!*)
Correction/update
Books I got for free
What to do with an old monitor and keyboard I can't use?

The Phantom Tollbooth anecdote: When I was in my junior year of high school, I walked in to my first-period honors U.S. History class [with Steve von Berg, the bomb (a good thing) of a history teacher] carrying Tollbooth, which I was rereading.

Amber Hoover asked if that wasn't a kids' book.

I replied that it was.

She asked if I hadn't read it, then, when I was a kid.

I replied that I had, and that I was rereading it.

She asked, "Why would you read a book twice?"

I don't think she was joking.

My mom: She's visiting me this weekend. She's cleaning as I speak. Yes, in my home. (sigh) She's a force of nature. You don't reason with the tides. Or a hurricane. You just name them. Hurricane Mom.

I showed her around Berkeley, which was fun. A very nice day! And we only got scared by one loony.

Correction/update: In a previous entry, I referred to "Brian's" funny bit about Arab/Jew buddy cop movies as the solution to Middle East tensions. His name is Brian Sinclair, and he's a Squelch writer/contributor at U.C. Berkeley. I figured you all should know his last name.

Soon I'll update y'all with info I received from Seth Schoen about corporations-as-persons, Judge Marilyn Patel, and political systems under alien domination. Stay tuned!

Books I got for free: There was a big ol' sale on Thursday and Friday by the Slavic, Celtic, Italian, and Scandinavian departments (I may have missed one) at Cal. But I arrived after the sale, and thus I got stuff for free! Lesson: Ask for exceptions to the rules, and you'll be rewarded. (If you'd like to read the "fractally weird" (thanks, Neal Stephenson) conditions of my free-book-gettin', comment below.)

Sakharov Speaks by Andrei Sakharov (Soviet physicist and dissident). Neat combo. "Between LeConte and Barrows..."
The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Why did they have this? I don't know. I swore I saw bodice-rippers, too.
Yevgeny Yevtuschenko: A Precocious Autobiography. One of my favorite poets. His poem "When Your Face Came Rising" changed my life in tenth grade.
The Image of Chekhov:
Forty Stories by Anton Chekhov
In The Order In Which They Were Written
Translated, With an Introduction by Robert Payne
Was all this so important that it all had to be in large type on the front cover?
Some book by Boris Pil'nyak. The whole book is in Russian, and the title is something like "Conversations." My Russian teacher told me he's great. Maybe in ten years I'll be able to appreciate that.
Six Soviet One-Act Plays. Edited/selected by Ludmila A. Patrick. Actually an intermediate Russian textbook, with a glossary and everything. Think this would freak out an audition audience? "Come in with a three-minute monologue." "Does it have to be in English?" What's a good answer to that?

What to do with an old monitor and keyboard I can't use? The Used Computer Store at Shattuck and Haste doesn't want either. "Too obsolete" and "glut" were the reasons, respectively. Donation bins anywhere? I hate to throw stuff away. Blame my Puritan ancestors.

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/3/18/0634/40271

Filed under: Reading

# 10 Feb 2001, 03:22AM GMT+5:30: The right question: I experienced a truly transcendent moment the other day while teaching, and I'd like to share it with you.

(In the CD slot right now: Frisbie, "The Subversive Sounds of Love." Playing the first track, "Let's Get Started.")

Yesterday was class meeting number four -- the second session of the second week. I love having two hours a week to discuss stuff -- the last class I taught had only one. (All right, so they're Berkeley hours, 50 minutes, but still, it's twice as much. I wish my political science classes had two hours a week of discussion, not one.) There's so much interesting stuff to talk about, and I can choose the subjects, shape the discourse.

Yesterday while writing the lesson plan, I experienced a problem I don't think I'd ever had so bad: teacher's block. What should be the milestones in our first discussion of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness? I knew where I wanted to start, but what destination would be most useful, and what route would cover the most interesting scenery? Le Guin (through the Foretellers), Simon Stow, and Steve Weber have all powerfully raised my consciousness of the importance of asking the right question.

I already knew that I wanted to mention a thing that Le Guin says in her introduction:

Yes, indeed the people in it [the book] are androgynous, but that doesn't mean that I'm predicting that in a millennium or so we will all be androgynous, or announcing that I think we damned well ought to be androgynous. I'm merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and though-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are.

So: where is she right? When are we "already" androgynous? Where does, and where doesn't, gender affect us? I also wanted to ask them whether the world of Gethen repelled or attracted them, and discuss ways that gender and biology affects our institutions.

So I finally came up with some concrete details and examples, both in the book and in real life, that we could productively discuss. For example, since each individual Gethenian is sexually inactive most of the time, Earth's sex-drive-based advertising campaigns wouldn't exist there. Also, even though Gethenians don't generally do things based on sex drive, the first country we see on Gethen has a monarchy, a hierarchy, and Gethenians use the institution of shifgrethor in devious power plays. (Don't ask me what shifgrethor is -- read the book or look it up; I can't explain it adequately.)

So the lesson plan got written, and a few hours later I entered 235 Dwinelle, grungy and very student-looking. I'd meant to go home before class and change into teachery-y clothes and exchange my student-signifying backpack for the teacher-signifying portfolio bag. I saw the students -- my students -- with The Left Hand of Darkness on their desks.

[Lengthy Aside: By the way, I get a kick out of the fact that these students were carrying and reading a book simply because I had assigned it. I know, that's kind of a power trip. So sue me, I'm an insecure little dictator. A "desperate little despot," as a teacher at my old high school once wrote:

So good night and good living and good life and get along
And farewell, and be happy and be sure you sing the song
That allows you to be something ... you've been nothing for so long
You desperate little despot ... des spot light's yours.

But that, though it's from "The Pope Pong Song," page 80 of Tiger Pause 1996 from Tokay High School, is beside the point.

Wait a sec -- I guess I've always felt this way. A poem from the same literary magazine, two pages back, by me:

To Buddha
God sits at the desk now
Marking papers red
Subbing for our teacher
Struck this morning dead
God is wearing earrings
White streaks in her hair
If I want to get in AP
Saffron I must wear

It's sophomoric, what you would expect of a high school sophomore, which is what I was. But teaching-as-power has been a theme with me for longer than a year. Perhaps that's because school was, it seemed to the younger me, the one place where I excelled. And if academics are your sports, then teachers are the coaches and referees. They make you and break you.]

I did the administrative things. I took attendance and I dealt with a new student who wanted to enroll. We started talking about the book -- what shifgrethor was, and who thought the world of Gethen was possibly "neat," and who was wary.

And then I asked -- "How are we 'already' androgynous? Where does gender not affect us?" I may have said different words.

And the moment was electric. I looked around the room. Every student -- I think, I hope -- was staring, gazing, not blankly, but thinking, for a second, two, three --

I had asked something they hadn't asked themselves before, and they were sifting their experiences, seeking, seeing with new eyes, forming new synapses, making connections --

And two or three voices called out at once, bursting with the enthusiasm of discovery. On the rowing team. In Wu Shu. Over the internet. And we made connections, categories...

The rest of the lesson went well. Animated discussion ensued about the traditional powers that women have, and what Gethen is like, and why the cold climate is important. I set up my next lesson, about the Self and the Other in Darkness. As with all good lesson plans, mine proved to be the skeleton, not the flesh; the map, not the territory (apoogies to John Chapman).

Le Guin writes in that same introduction:

Finally, when we're done with it, we may find -- if it's a good novel -- that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it's very hand to say just what we learned, how we were changed.

I can't say, either, how I was changed, or what my students learned from Friday's class. But I saw something happen in that moment yesterday, when my question lingered unanswered in the air, and it gave me a high so strong, so clear, that I never wanted to come down.

Poll: Do you want to read more of brainwane's teaching experiences?

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/2/10/15221/3922

Filed under: Reading

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