The Crossing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the stack

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

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

spook country

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

words: (several not english, i think)

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

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

also, great author photo.

Hard Truth

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

For Whom The Bell Tolls

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imperial San Francisco

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

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

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

All in all well worth the read.

On quick quote about our friend Hearst

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

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

All The Pretty Horses

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

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

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

It's beautifully written.

The Poincaré Conjecture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SO, GREAT.

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

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

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

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

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

One Flew East, One Flew West

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

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

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

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

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

Brief Update

am writing from buenos aires.

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

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

okay, going backwards.

about to read:

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


currently reading:

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

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

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


very recently read:

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

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


not so recently read:

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

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

.. many others.