Some Words

Well… with the computer out of commission, I found myself unable to get much work done on the big project. That was frustrating, as this week was supposed to be the big push to finish it, I should have been able to do that by the end of the month.

So I wanted to be able to get something done on that front while I waited to get my computer back, and was busy grousing to myself that the other computer was the one with all the software licenses. This gave me a chance to use Google Docs. I’d never done so before, and I have to say that I’m pleasantly surprised. It’s not going to get me to abandon what I normally use, but it’s fine in the short term.

It also reminds me that I’m a little crazy for having a program just to do outlines. And despite that program, I’d let my outline of the text fall off in the past few chapters and I was flying blind. Without the main text though, I’m outlining the last eight chapters finally, which should speed things up if it is anything like when I was last working with an outline. Not my most efficient use of time, these past few weeks, if loosing my primary computer forces me to get cracking.

Also, as a PSA for the few people who read this in Minneapolis: (and some who may be coming into town for the wedding) Dreamhaven is moving. What does this mean? They’re not looking forward to having to haul all their stuff, so for this month there is a big sale. Used paperbacks are 75% off original cover price, with a minimum of 75¢. That means most books are under a dollar in their used section. A lot of the comics are 10¢. The other day I walked out with a pile I could barely carry for just over $15. You should check it out if you are in town.

There are very few times in life that you can look to and say, “Now I know that ‘x’ book changed my life.” Usually, whatever way a book might have changed you is subtle and insidious. You never notice the choice you made or the shift in your reactions.

Today was not like that. My reading of this BBC article was changed by having read Haruki Murakami, I’m not sure for the better. My initial reaction, upon reading that the knifing happened on the same day as another knifing from 2001, was to think that it would be a Murakami story in a few years. A lot of his work is about finding order and shape to the seemingly meaningless events that surround us. Once the matching dates came in, it just felt like one of his stories. Combine that with an increase in mass stabbings… and well, I start to feel a little guilty thinking that way.

Over the past few months, I have read three Poirot novels bby Agatha Christie. It took me a while to get over how racist they are. In Murder on the Orient Express, a man is stabbed. While they are trying to figure out the case, someone advances that it must have been the Italian passenger who did this. His only reason? He feels that Italians are a stabbing people. That would be one thing, but the other characters all take that at face value. No one questions it. In the other two books I’ve read, characters who love money have pointedly been called Semetic.

At times I don’t know why I keep reading. She wasn’t a particularly good writer of sentences. There are plenty of bits that read like bad fiction workshop stuff. That may be a result of her success, or it may simply be a reliance on cliche. I mean, God, she wrote how many of these things?

But I keep reading them, and I’ll probably read a few more, at least the one where Poirot dies, and the rest that are in the binding of five novels I have. I’ve heard a lot of people complain about how formulaic she was, and indeed she is. But, as I started in on the latest one, I realized what kept them entertaining. She knows how formulaic she’s gotten. A few pages into The ABC Murders, Hastings, Poirot’s requisit foil, turns to Poirot and basically announces that this mystery is unlike any of the other they have worked on. Poirot agrees with him. For all I know it’s true, but who are they trying to convince? I like the feeling of watching a writer trying to derail the train to get the spark of life back into things. I like that the stories all feel shopworn before I’ve even read them. I like using them to put off the end of 1984. I don’t want to read about poor Winston getting tortured by rats.

1984 related note. On this, my… I think fifth attempt to read it all the way through, I have now gotten farther than before. Previous attempts left me grumpy and depressed about halfway through. This time I’m over two thirds through. I see why so many high school students fall in love with it, but I wonder if mayby I missed the window to really love this book.

Over the past week, I’ve gotten to read quite a bit more than usual. That means mostly that I’ve put off reading some of the things I’m stalled on, and focused on other books that grabbed me on the spur of the moment. One of those books was Crooked Little Vein, by Warren Ellis of Transmet fame.

It didn’t take long to read, I’m not a terribly fast reader and it lasted all of three hours for me. The book clocks in at 245 pages, very small pages. I’m glad I borrowed it.

It’s not that this book offended me, though the whole point of it seems to be either getting offended at it and shouting, thus boosting sales, or proving to your friends how edgy you are by liking it. At this point in our society (can we call this P.H. for Post Hunter or P.T. for Post Thompson) shock is not a novel thing. Crooked Little Vein is a book built to shock, and make that shock feel novel. All the quotes on the cover are supposed to verify its edgy credentials, and all its testicular saline injection and “you live in a police state” crap is supposed to shock. There is only the barest thinnest wisp of a plot. It’s function is to move the protagonist from one “shocking” person to the next.

The protagonist is a detective. A caricature of the corrupt behind the scenes evil politician gives him a job. That job is to find a crazy thing that shouldn’t exist. On his way to find the thing, a path written in large letters with spilled glow stick fluid, he meets a lot of strange people who want him to realize that strange is normal. Is there anyone who reads Warren Ellis who didn’t decide that strange was normal in the mid to late 90s?

But what, dear reader, is the payoff? Well, Mr. Ellis informs, the internet has changed everything.

…

Well Fuck. The World is Flat.

So, the payoff here is a Thomas Friedman op-ed. On the way I get some very pro-porn pseudo edgy writing. Friedman plus porn… aside from the fact that I don’t every want to think about those two things in context again? Meh. The book was meh. It was candy for three hours filled by an after void of meh. Oh my God it’s full of meh.

It’s not that I dislike Mr. Ellis’s shtick. In fact, I normally quite like it. But without illustrations to bring some of the madcap crazy to life… it falls a little flat. Rising to the level of solidly workmanly is a bit disappointing. At least it was only a few hours…

Recently I finished More Equal Than Others, Godfrey Hodgson’s historical survey of America from 1975 to 2000.

It is rare that I feel a book should be read by absolutely everyone. This book might go on that list though. With the election season in full swing now, I cannot help having large swaths of the coverage tinted by my having read this book. As a history of the last quarter of the twentieth century, with some references sneaking in as late as 2003, it does an amazing job of outlining how we got here. My political memory of that quarter century is handicapped by being under the age of 12 for much of it, you might begin to see why I liked it so much.

There are limitations of course, the book came out several years ago, and does not know about the decline of the Republican party that seems to be going on right now. But on the whole, it does a fantastic job of summing up twenty five years in three hundred pages, which is an admirable feat in itself. It also pulls off the deft trick of not being too dry, despite a healthy dose of facts and figures supplied as the basis of Hodgson’s arguments. Of course, that dryness comes with the territory, but Hodgson is a talented enough writer to keep things moving at a very brisk pace.

I’ve already begun lending it out to any co-worker wiling to read it.

When it comes to science fiction, I am a forgiving reader. Philip K. Dick, despite his amazing imagination, wrote amazingly flat prose. It has a way of just sitting on the page, not doing anything much on its own. This is usually compensated for by the fact that almost every idea that came out of his head was interesting. For years the man just churned out novels like some of us take a long shit.

Almost all of those novels have a hero confronting the disintegration of what they think of as their reality. So, I was was saddened when I completed Confessions of a Crap Artist, his realistic novel. Without the science fiction element, I can’t say there was very much to recommend it. The lack of broad ideas highlighted how much he relied on simple character archetypes to populate his books. There are also numerous characters who fail to act in a believable way. That would be fine, if Dick could sell me on why they did it, but he can’t. At one point a character contemplates how he is acting irrationally, and concludes that it is because he wants to. Even he does not sound convinced. The fact that he is trying to get a way from a sociopath and deciding she is worth staying with, even knowing she isn’t right in the head, puts a big neon sign over his head.

I could forgive this, if only there were an interesting technology or some general conflict, but I have just outlined what is probably the biggest moral dilemma of the entire novel. Other than that, the characters just sort of float along, letting things happen to them, or not. The climax happens four fifths of the way though and then it takes forever to finish up.

Usually these things are crazy little gems. Maybe I’ll read Electric Sheep again to cleans the palate.

I don’t look to sports writing for the best that the language has to offer. These people have to churn out text, frequently after a late night game, with the bed calling out to them. Often they got into the industry through the sport, rather than a background in journalism. So I’m pretty forgiving when a place like ESPN has a poorly constructed sentence, or a weird metaphor or simile. Sometimes though, I can’t pass it up without comment. Today, I saw this:

“It was like a post-graduate course in Leadership 101.”

I just sat there for a moment. I mean, sure, you could have a school where they renumbered the graduate courses to start in the hundreds again, maybe some of them even do. But everyone uses 101 for the basics. Why would you try to fight that? Why add 101 to the end of that sentence?

Last night I found myself 48 pages away from the end of the Cairo Trilogy. It was a bitter sweet feeling. As I had first started in on the novels, I had been frustrated at almost every turn. I only liked one character, and he was barely a character by the start of the second novel.

It’s a long slog, 1,313 pages in the Everyman edition, and while I pride myself on not giving up on novels, at around page 350, I have to admit I was thinking about it. Then, something happened around page 800. I had made in through 450 pages that I didn’t hate, but didn’t really love. Suddenly, I found myself rethinking the entire book. I came to love it. I started worrying about the characters. I hadn’t felt this involved in a character’s hopes and dreams for years.

I have harped on the values of keeping narratives short. Even at 350 pages, a novel is long enough that a movie must condense it. That is is good. A novel exists to give form to narratives so long that they cannot be contained in any other form. More than any other form, the novel is allowed to sprawl.

Yet, the Cairo Trilogy does not sprawl, not really, and for once, I think that was what frustrated me from the outset. As the novels grew and more characters were introduced, the scope of the action opened up. Large portions of the first novel take place in a single house. As the work continues, greater and greater portions of Cairo are opened up. Likely the feeling of place is greater in Arabic, but eventually I did get a feel of the world that the characters were in.

And over the course of those thirteen hundred pages, I came to care about the characters who annoyed me. I couldn’t avoid them, so we made peace. By the end, I was thinking of starting over from the beginning again, which I don’t think I’ll do. But I’ve surprised myself by thinking I may come back to this book.

And so I was left with a feeling I had not felt in a long time. I had read a novel over 800 pages, and didn’t feel like I had wasted my time. It was almost enough to make me rush right into the Brother’s Karamazov. I think I’m going to pace myself though, so I settled for David Copperfield divided into 411 discrete chunks… I’ll probably be grumbling about it by around 21.

After adding the books I’m reading via email to my list on the sidebar, I realized that I’m reading 10 books at once. Now, obviously I’m not picking up each of these books every day. But I am part way through all of them, and feel like I don’t need to start any of them over.

I’m a fairly slow, careful reader, but I’ve started to wonder at what point I have to admit that this is stupid. I don’t usually let it get this bad. I used to consider six to be crazy.

Every time I tell myself it’s time to cut back on the booze, I got to work. Getting home from work is a distinctly booze inducing experience. I’m not drinking too much, but more often than not these days, I get home and think, sure I could relax, but a drink will make it faster. Then on days off I find myself thinking, hell, it’s happy hour and there are 2.75 pints at the BLB. Two pints, and a good book, later I find myself wondering about my alcohol intake. This is a distinctly American pastime. While we make fun of the French, they would never be so unmanly as to think a drink or two every day was a problem.

I just finished Special Topics in Calamity Physics two days ago. I think I am going to write a review and put it on Iceland Spar, but for the moment I will just say that it was not bad, not as good as I first though, but not bad.

Immediately after finishing it, I started on Mrs. Dalloway. It has proven to be a much slower read. Despite being only 194 pages in the edition I own, so thoughtfully emblazoned with “The book that inspired ‘The Hours,’” it has proven a small challenge. Having really only read Orlando before this, it was intresting and oddly pleasurable, to find out what all those people had been talking about when they said she had intimidating sentence structure. The opening fifteen or so pages are nothing in construction like the rest (or what I’ve read, I must admit I’m not done yet). Part of this is the way that she uses words, and part of it is the fact that she uses semi colons like she’s getting over wartime rationing. After that, it calms down into a much more easily read book.

It has started me thinking about novel length again. Dalloway is short and compact. I was surpsied be the number of characters who get stuffed in, but so far each of them has feel fully fleshed and real, if uncomfortable. It makes Calamity Physics seem almost lazy in its wordiness. I don’t really know what to make of that. It will come up over at Iceland Spar, no doubt, but I will leave that to my post there.

A while ago I found a link to Dailyliy on some blog, likely Lifehacker. It’s a site that emails you up to three books at a time in short daily doses. Needless to say, they don’t have the current best sellers, but if you’re looking for… a drip feed of Sherlock Holmes, it has what you’re after. You can also get a bunch of the old Russian classics, spread over 500+ emails or rss entries. I don’t know what translation they use, so I’m not sure I’d go for that. But currently I’m getting Philoctetes, The Picture of Dorian Grey (which originally came out as a serial, thought probably not in 95 parts), and a collection of ghost stories.

Not a bad way to get a little reading done on the sly at work.

Edit: It appears that there is no longer a three book cap.

Against my better judgment, I just motored through the last Harry Potter book. Spoilers and stuff below.

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