Flood

I've tended to like Stephen Baxter's science fiction. He tends to go for truly epic scales and events. I particularly liked his Xeelee Sequence, which details a multi-millennium year long saga about the fate of the Universe. His most recent book is called simply Flood.

It's a bit odd. It starts off as what appears to be a global warming tale, what with rising seas, but then the seas keep rising. They rise far more than predicted by the global warming models. The characters feel a bit incidental, and are certainly uninteresting. Here Baxter appears to want to show how the world would react to a extraordinary crisis. For a novel about a world threatening crisis, the human element feels a bit lost as well. This is no The Road, to be sure. I think it is really best for disaster fans, but they might think it a bit slow and wordy.

Here, Baxter reviews a wide range of books and movies about the flooding of London. Worth your time.

Mieville on Tolkein

Check out China Mieville on why Tolkein is awesome. Strange, I didn't think he liked Tolkein. Anyway, it's all good, but I particularly like the bit posted below. He hits the nail on the head that the partially described, vaguely nightmarish monsters are often the best.

3) The Watcher in the Water

Dude. That totally was cool. I mean, say what you like about him, Tolk gives good monster. Shelob, Smaug, the Balrog...in their astounding names, the fearful verve of their descriptions, their various undomesticated malevolence, these creatures are utterly embedded in our world-view. No one can write giant spiders except through Shelob: all dragons are sidekicks now. And so on.

But the thing about the Watcher in the Water is WTF? Here the technique of under-describing, withholding, comes startlingly to the fore, that other great technique for communicating balefulness. We know almost nothing about the many-limbed thing in the water outside Moria. Some think it's a giant squid: me, I say not, given that it lives in fresh water, has too many tentacles, and that those tentacles have fingers. Which squids don't have. But we know three things. It is tentacular; it is badass; and it is weird. And that uncertainty is what makes it rock.

Mixed

Well here is a place I need to visit, a hidden beer bar on NE Fremont. I am a tad ashamed that I live about 3 blocks from it and didn't know it existed.

Here is James Ellroy talking about something. Haven't watched yet myself.

Two beverages of note: La Folie from New Belgium Brewing, and Vita Coco. With its Fat Tire, New Belgium is the brewery that really won me over to American craft beer. I had since moved on to other breweries, but with the Lips of Faith program I am an avid fan once more. This one is not cheap at $14 a bottle, but it is a really special beer. Part of the odd sour beer family, this one is oddly refreshing with its cherry tang.

For those wanting non-alchoholic refreshment, the Vita Coco drinks are hard to beat. Made of "coconut water," they sound more like a waste product than something that costs as much as a beer. The taste is like an incredibly clean and pure Gatorade. I find it addictive.

Oh my, covers of each song off of Doolittle.

Slouching towards Dachau

Mixing Logan's Run and Never Let Me Go, Swedish debut novelist Nini Holmqvist' the Unit, describes a future where childless elders are sent to clinical units for medical experimentation and organ donation. The elders (50+ for women and 60+ for men), called dispensibles, are taken away by efficient means and then locked away until death in brightly lit but isolated rooms.

The story centers on Dorrit, an underemployed artist who nevers has children, two strikes in the utilitarian, economic efficiency focused society Holmqvist depicts. The society above all values contribution to the group, and apparently art doesn't count. Sending people to these units is justified because they can no longer give to group economically, so they give their organs and their bodies for experiments. A major theme of the book is that value can't always be quantified and that life shouldn't be guided in that way. While I think the explanation of how the society got there could have been more fully developed, it is an interesting depiction of how the world could return to viewing some people as not deserving humane treatment.

There is a cool detachment about the operations that makes them all the more galling. Dorrit herself though is also so detached, until she meets the love of her life in the Unit, that she is not as compelling a character as she might be. Her seemingly bizarre decision at the end of the book makes some sense in light of the ethos of the society, but doesn't fit her exactly.

The book feels quite European to me. The cool, spare prose reminded me of other Swedish writers. The statist dystopia depicted is peculiar from the American viewpoint. With communities and alleigiances fraying, it is the absence of state power and its replacement by a collection of market and jurisdictional forces competing for loyalty and control that seem the more likely bleak future. Still, a good first effort and it will be interesting to see what comes next.

Best twelve dollars I ever spent

I went to see Shellac last night. I have wanted to see these guys for a decade, but due to highly irregular and little promoted tours, I haven't had the chance. Although Steve Albini is the best known of the members, this is very much an equal partnership. So much so, that the drum set was moved up to be parallel to the bass and guitar. While Albini does most of the singing, bassist Bob Weston does more of the banter, and these guys banter more than most, with a mid-show Q&A session a regular feature. Also no encores, which I quite like.

Here is a good live segment from Ireland. He was wearing the same T-shirt last night. Lucky tour T-shirt?

Awesome cover

While I am fine with a straight ahead cover, I like the experiments that reinvent the song. The shift from up tempo to downbeat acoustic is risky, but can pay off. Evan Dando's cover of Skulls is a good example. Even better is this Old School Freight Train cover of Heart of Glass. In the disco original, the sad lyrics were submerged in the dance beats. Here they are at the fore in this bluegrass version.

BTW, I was too young to be aware of the musical chatter, but I wonder how much flack Blondie took for switching from new-wave to disco.

Horse Soldiers

One of the more startling photos I saw in the early years of the Afghan war was that of a group of bearded American soldiers riding into battle on horses. In Horse Soldiers, Doug Stanton tells the story of those soldiers, and others, serving in Afghanistan in 2001. It looks like a good read for those interested in military history. As in the media, Afghanistan has not seen as many books as the Iraq conflict. This is one place to start. You can read an excerpt of the prologue below:

Trouble came in the night, riding out of the dust and the darkness. Trouble rolled past the refugee camp, past the tattered tents shuddering in the moonlight, the lone cry of a baby driving high into the sky, like a nail. Sunrise was no better; at sunrise, trouble was still there, bristling with AKs and RPGs, engines idling, waiting to roll into the city. Waiting.

These were the baddest of the bad, the real masters of mayhem, the death dealers with God stamped firmly in their minds. The city groaned and shook to life. Soon everyone knew trouble had arrived at the gates of the city.

Major Mark Mitchell heard the news at headquarters nine miles away and thought, You're kidding. We got bad guys at the wire?

He ran downstairs, looking for Master Sergeant Dave Betz. Maybe he would know what was happening.

But Betz­ didn't know anything. He blustered, "One of the Agency guys came down and told us we got six hundred Taliban surrendering. Can you believe that?"

Surrendering? Mitchell ­couldn't figure out why. He thought the Taliban had fled from the approaching forces of the Northern Alliance to Konduz, miles away. American Special Forces and the Northern Alliance had been beating them back for weeks, in battle after battle, rolling up territory by coordinating airstrikes from the sky and thousands of Northern Alliance soldiers on the ground. They now stood on the verge of total victory. Konduz was where the war was supposed to go next. Not here. Not in Mazar. Not at Club Mez.

Besides, these guys didn't surrender. They fought to the death.

Die fighting and you went to paradise.

Mitchell stood at the dirty plate-glass windows and watched. Here they came, a motley crew of the doomed, packed into six big trucks, staring out from the rancid tunnels of their scarves. Mitchell could see their heads over the barricade that ringed his headquarters, a former schoolhouse at the junk-strewn edge of the city. The prisoners -- who surely included some Al Qaeda members -- were still literally in the drivers' seats, with Northern Alliance soldiers sitting next to them, their AKs pointed at the drivers' heads. The prisoners turned and stared and Mitchell thought it was like looking at hundreds of holes punched in a wall.

"Everybody get away from the windows!" said Betz.

Major Kurt Sonntag, Captain Kevin Leahy, Captain Paul Syverson, and a dozen other Special Forces soldiers knelt behind the black and white checked columns in the room, their M-4 rifles aimed at the street. Behind them, in the kitchen, the local cook was puttering -- the air smelled of cooked rice and cucumber -- and a radio was playing more of that god-awful Afghan music that sounded to Mitchell like somebody strangling a goose.

He had been looking forward this morning to overseeing the construction of the medical facility in town, and the further blowing up of mines and bombs that littered the area like confetti. Each day, a little bit more of the war seemed to be ending. Mitchell had even started to wonder when he would get to go home. He and a team of about a dozen Special Forces soldiers had moved into the schoolhouse only forty-eight hours earlier. Their former headquarters inside the Qala-i-Janghi Fortress, nine miles off, in Mazar's western quarter, had given them the shits, the croup, and the flu, and Mitchell was glad to have moved out. It seemed a haunted place. Known as the House of War, the fortress rose like a mud golem from the desert, surrounded by struggling plots of wind-whipped corn and sparse cucumber. Its walls towered sixty feet high and measured thirty feet thick under the hard, indifferent sun.

The Taliban had occupied the fortress for seven years and filled it with weapons -- grenades, rockets, and firearms, anything made for killing. Even Enfield rifles with dates stamped on the bayonets -- 1913 -- from the time that the Brits had occupied the area. Before their hurried flight from the city two weeks earlier, the Taliban had left the weapons and smeared feces on the walls and windows. Every photograph, every painting, every rosebush had been torn up, smashed, stomped, ruined. Nothing beautiful had been left behind.

After three years of Taliban rule, there were old men in Mazar with stumps for hands. There were women who'd been routinely stoned and kicked on street corners. Young men who'd been imprisoned for not wearing beards. Fathers who'd been beaten in front of their sons for the apparent pleasure of those swinging their weapons.

The arrival of Mitchell and his soldiers on horseback had put an end to that. The people of Mazar-i-Sharif, the rugmakers and butchers, the car mechanics and schoolteachers, the bank clerks and masons and farmers, had thrown flowers and kisses and reached up to the Americans on their horses and pulled affectionately at the filthy cuffs of their camo pants. The locals had welcomed the balding, blue-eyed Mitchell and two dozen other Special Forces soldiers in a mile-long parade lining the highway that dropped into town out of the snowy mountains. Mitchell had felt like he was back in World War II, his grandfather's war, riding into Paris after the Nazis fled.

Now thirty-six, Mitchell was the ground commander of the Fifth Special Forces Group/Third Battalion's Forward Operating Base (FOB). It had been a distinguished nearly fifteen-year career headed for the top of the military food chain. His best friend, Major Kurt Sonntag, a thirty-seven-year-old former weekend surfer from Los Angeles, was the FOB's executive officer, which technically meant he was Mitchell's boss. In the tradition of Special Forces, they treated each other as equals. Nobody saluted, including less senior officers like Captain Kevin Leahy and Captain Paul Syverson, members of the support company whose job it was to get the postwar operations up and running, such as providing drinking water, electricity, and medical care to the locals.

Looking at the street now, Mitchell tried to figure out why the Taliban convoy was stopping. If anything went bad, Mitchell knew he was woefully outnumbered. He had maybe a dozen guys he could call on. And those like Leahy and Syverson weren't exactly hardened killers. Like him, these were staff guys, in their mid-thirties, soldiers who had until now been largely warless. He did have a handful of CIA operators living upstairs in the schoolhouse and eight Brits, part of a Special Boat Service unit who'd landed the night before by Chinook helicopter, but they were so new that they didn't have orders for rules of engagement -- that is, it wasn't clear to them when they could and could not return fire. Doing the math, Mitchell roughly figured that he had about a dozen guys available to fight. The trained-up fighters, the two Special Forces teams that Mitchell had ridden into town with, had left earlier in the day for Konduz, for the expected fight there. Mitchell had watched them drive away and felt that he was missing out on a chance to make history. He'd been left behind to run the headquarters office and keep the peace. Now, after learning that 600 Taliban soldiers had massed outside his door, he wondered if he'd been dead wrong.

The street bustled with beeping taxis; with donkeys hauling loads of handmade bricks to the city-center bazaar; with aged men gliding by on wobbling bicycles and women ghosting through the rising dust in blue burkhas. Afghanistan. Never failed to amaze him.

Still the convoy hadn't moved. Ten minutes had passed.

Without warning, a group of locals piled toward the trucks, angrily grabbing at the prisoners. They got hold of one man and pulled him down -- for a moment he was there, gripping the battered wooden side of the truck, and then he was gone, snatched out of sight. Behind the truck, out of sight, they were beating the man to death.

Every ounce of rage, every rape, every public execution, every amputation, humiliation -- every ounce of revenge was poured back into this man, slathered on by fist, by foot, by gnarled stick. The trucks lurched ahead and when they moved on, nothing remained of the man. It was as if he'd been eaten.

The radio popped to life. Mitchell listened as a Northern Alliance commander, who was stationed on the highway, announced in broken English: The prisoners all going to Qala-i-Janghi.

Remembering the enormous pile of weapons cached at the fortress, Mitchell didn't want to hear this. But his hands were tied. The Afghan commanders of the Northern Alliance were, as a matter of U.S. strategy, calling the shots. No matter the Americans' might, this was the Afghans' show. Mitchell was in Mazar to "assist" the locals in taking down the Taliban. He figured he could get on a radio and suggest to the Afghan commander presiding over the surrender that the huge fortress would not be an ideal place to house six hundred angry Taliban and Al Qaeda soldiers. But maybe there was a good reason to send them there. As long as the prisoners were searched and guarded closely, maybe they could be held securely within the fort's towering mud walls.

And then Mitchell thought again of the weapons stockpiled at Qala-i-Janghi, the piles and piles of rockets, rifles, crates of ammo -- tons of violence ready to be put to use.

Not the fort, he thought. Not the damn fort!

Belching smoke, grinding gears, the convoy of prisoners rumbled past the fortress's dry moat and through the tall, arched entrance. The prisoners in the trucks craned around like blackbirds on a wire, scanning the walls, looking for guards, looking for an easy way out.

In deference to the Muslim prohibition against men touching other men intimately, few of the prisoners had been thoroughly searched. No hand had reached deep inside the folds of their thin gray gowns, the mismatched suit coats, the dirty khaki vests, searching for a knife, a grenade, a garrote. Killer had smiled at captor and captor had waved him on, Tashakur. Thank you. Tashakur.

The line of six trucks halted inside the fort, and the prisoners stepped down under the watchful eye of a dozen or so Northern Alliance guards. Suddenly one prisoner pulled a grenade from the belly-band of his blouse and blew himself up, taking a Northern Alliance officer with him. The guards fired their rifles in the air and regained control. Then they immediately herded the prisoners to a rose-colored, plaster-sided building aptly nicknamed "the Pink House," which squatted nearby in the rocks and thorns. The structure had been built by the Soviets in the 1980s as a hospital within the bomb-hardened walls of the fortress.

The fort was immense, a walled city divided equally into southern and northern courtyards. Inside was a gold-domed mosque, some horse stables, irrigation ditches encircling plots of corn and wheat, and shady groves of tall, fragrant pine trees whipping in the stiff winds. The thick walls held secret hallways and compartments, and led to numerous storage rooms for grain and other valuables. The Taliban had cached an enormous pile of weapons in the southern compound in a dozen mud-walled horse stables, each as big as a one-car garage and topped with a dome-shaped roof. The stables were crammed to the rafters with rockets, RPGs, machine guns, and mortars. But there were more weapons. Six metal Conex trailers, like the kind semitrucks haul down interstates in the United States, also sat nearby, stuffed with even more guns and explosives.

The fortress had been built in 1889 by Afghans, taking some eighteen thousand workers twelve years to complete, during an era of British incursions. It was a place built to be easily defended, a place to weather a siege.

At each of the corners rose a mud parapet, a towerlike structure, some 80 feet high and 150 feet across, and built strong enough to support the weight of 10-ton tanks, which could be driven onto the parapet up long, gradual mud ramps rising from the fortress floor. Along the parapet walls, rectangular gunports, about twelve inches tall, were cut into the three-foot-thick mud -- large enough to accommodate the swing of a rifle barrel at any advancing hordes below.

In all, the fort measured some 600 yards long -- about one third of a mile -- and 300 yards wide.

At the north end, a red-carpeted balcony stretched high above the courtyard. Wide and sunlit, it resembled a promenade, overlooking a swift stream bordered by a black wrought-iron fence and rose gardens that had been destroyed by the Taliban. Behind the balcony, double doors opened onto long hallways, offices, and living quarters.

At each end of the fort's central wall, which divided the interior into the two large courtyards, sat two more tall parapets, equally fitted for observation and defense with firing ports. A narrow, packed foot trail, about three feet wide, ran around the entire rim along the protective, outer wall. In places, a thick mud wall, waist-high, partially shielded the walker from the interior of the courtyard, making it possible to move along the top of the wall and pop up and shoot either down into the fort, or up over the outer wall at attackers coming from the outside.

In the middle of the southern courtyard, which was identical to the northern one (except for the balcony and offices overlooking it), sat the square-shaped Pink House. It was small, measuring about 75 feet on each side, too small a space for the six hundred prisoners who were ordered by Northern Alliance soldiers down the stairs and into its dark basement, where they were packed tight like matchsticks, one against another.

There, down in a dank corner, on a dirt floor that smelled of worms and sweat, brooded a young American. His friends knew him by the name of Abdul Hamid. He had walked for several days to get to this moment of surrender, which he hoped would finally lead him home to California. He was tired, hungry, his chest pounding, skipping a beat, like a washing machine out of balance. He worried that he was going to have a heart attack, a scary thought at age twenty-one.

Around him, he could hear men praying as they unfolded hidden weapons from the long, damp wings of their clothing.

Shutter island

The trailer for Shutter Island is out. It is based on one of Dennis Lehane's non-series novels and I quite liked it. It has similar emotional heft to Gone Baby Gone and Mystic River, the two other books of his that have been made into films. I am hopeful for Darkness Take My Hand, but I may be waiting a while.

While Gone Baby Gone was a top rate crime procedural and Mystic River is a classic, Irish Gothic tragedy, this one is a straight up thriller, with secrets piled on secrets until the big whammies. I have high hopes.

Big bads

Borders now has a scifi blog. The posts are VERY short, but still worth checking out. Right now Brian Sanderson, best known as the one chosen to complete the Wheel of Time, is writing. Here he asks people to name their favorite dragon. That's a good question. I am little more interested in the notion of favorite big scary monster. I think for me it is either the Shrike (he's made of razors!) or the horrifying slake-moth from Perdido Street Station. Thoughts?

Who invented cartoons, I'd like to shake his hand

I've spent the past few weeks working my way through Neal Gabler's massive Walt Disney biography. It took this long not because it was boring or too dense, but because it deserved close reading. The book tells the story of Walt from his ancestors up to his death from lung cancer.

Although I considered myself familiar with the story of the studio, I really wasn't. I thought it was an upward trend of success from day one. In reality the studio teetered on the edge of disaster for much of its earlier years. The creative drive of Walt and the business acumen and diplomacy of Roy Disney kept the studio alive.

Gabler portrays Walt as the sort of person that most technology executives that I have met think they are. They bear the burden of his negative attributes without the countervailing positive attributes. Disney was monomanical, tough on employees, paranoid and given to ignoring any viewpoint other than his own. On the other hand, he was truly a creative genius completely dedicated to creating new popular art. I've tended to see him only as an overseer and while he was a visionary he also developed new technologies, stories and key scenes for the movies. Some companies would have turned out the same with different leaders. Not Disney.

The book has me digging up all sorts of Disney movies I haven't seen. There is for example, Make Mine Music, a sequel of sorts to Fantasia. This one came out just after World War 2, when the company was trying to rebuild itself after years as a government film factory. Rather than the cohesive work that is Fantasia, this one was cobbled together from bits and pieces. It would take a number of years before the company found its footing again.

As much as I liked the book, I can only recommend it to those with a strong interest in movies, pop culture or Disney himself. It is a long read for those with a tepid interest.

One for the Pavement fans

If you troll the music or Matador sites you might have seen the Date With Ikea contest. Essentially you proposed why needed it and then you got a trip to Ikea. This is to promote the re-release of Brighten the Corners in the Brighten the Corners: Nicene Creedence Ed. Like previous re-releases it has a disc plus of B-sides, live tracks and desiderata. If you have a lot of money to burn, consider the gatefold LP version which has yet more songs.

Anyway, Stereogum linked to this video of Bob Nastanovich taking the nice young winner to Ikea. Seems a friendly sort, no?


Brighten the Corners is not always on the list of latter day fans. Here is Shady Lane which has my absolute favorite Pavement lyric:

State by state

I picked up State by State this weekend. This is not the sort of book you read all at once, but might make for a great going off to bed book. It consists of 50 essays (and one interview with Edward P Jones about DC) about each state. In each case, the writer is given a small amount of space to write something about an entire state. Not easy!

I've been looking at the states with which I have a personal connection first, which means I have read VA, NC, and OR so far. I liked that tack that the VA and NC authors did, which was to explore an important element of the state's culture. In the case of VA (drawing no doubt on his Confederates in the Attic research experience) Tony Horwitz talks about Virginia's fascination with it's, often bloody, past. In the North Carolina section, Randall Kenan talks about hogs, which allows him to get to farming, the environment and BBQ. Well done. I was less taken with Joe Sacco's Oregon piece. For one he uses a comic format. Given the space available, you can't do much with a comic. Then he focuses on Portland. Portland is great and all (I live here, so I better like it) but Portland is to Oregon, as New York is to New York State. Not terribly representative.

I've just started on William T. Vollman's California section. It has a humdinger of an intro.

It says something about our changing America that once upon a time, an art-friendly governmental organization commissioned one volume about each of our fifty states; whereas this book, inspired by the WPA's example, has been commercially published and allows each state only a few thousand words. Fortunately, mass culture, with its big box warehouses of the landscape, language and mind itself, has already destroyed so many differences, there is less to say anyhow. Of course, the ambiance of Florida still varies from that of Montana, Hawaii's from Alaska, but aren't their television programs the same? Accordingly, I dare to hope that a generation or two from now, if a sequel to this sequel comes out, its writers will have life even easier.

Ouch, that's the way to start an essay! Keep in mind he has just written a thousand page plus book on the Imperial Valley alone, but it is distressing for fans of regional diversity.

The Powells version comes with a new Out of the Book Documentary of the book.

Fun timewaster

Strange Maps has a fun map this week. It shows the US with each state shaded in with a flag of a foreign nation. The foreign nation has a similar population to the state its flag covers. See how many you can get(note this link is to the full picture which is covered on the blog). Avoid the comments.

Old school Trek with the kids

As part of my never ending quest to help my kids appreciate their nerd heritage, I showed them Star Trek The Motion Picture this weekend. Yes, the movie is as ponderous as the title suggests. Still, the story engaged them and I do appreciate that is an actual science fiction story rather than a straight up space opera. This clip illustrates my two least favorite things about the movie. The many minutes too long fly-by of the Enterprise provides a great time for a bathroom break, but little else. I am all for starship porn, two of my fave scenes of all time being the Enterprise vs. Reliant in Star Trek 2 and the climactic battle in ROTJ, but this is just a static trip to show off the model. Boring.

Worse though are the hideous uniforms. They are all off whites and browns, as if to say that the movie is as lifeless and pallid as the clothing. The worst of all though is the strange little short sleeve shirt that Kirk sports at one point. It's like he had a tee time, but got called to the bridge at the last minute. I much prefer the bright red, militaristic wear of the follow on films.



It could be worse though. In the mid-70s, there was a plan for a new show called Star Trek Phase II. The uniforms for that one were all Logan's Run swinger wear. (check about 2:41 in this documentary)



Because the Internet can bring everything back, Star Trek Phase 2 is back in a new form. This show is released online and has appearances by some of the original cast.

GBV cover

I love an unexpected cover. I am listening to So Divided, by .....And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Dead. They have a non-low fi cover of Gold Heart Mountain Top Queen Directory. Here is the original for comparison purposes. A nice odd song, just right for a cover.

Another fantasy giant gone

Via Citizen Reader, I see that David Eddings has passed. While I would not rank him with my favorite fantasy novelists today, he is the author that hooked me on fantasy novels*. I gobbled up the Belgariad in middle school and high school and then followed it up the Mallorean into my college years. Looking back, I am surprised that the last one of those came out in 1991. By that point, I thought I had transistioned my loyalties to the initially thrilling, but ultimately disappointing Wheel of Time saga. Looking back, the Belgariad, while more understated, is probably the more successful series as it manages to tell its story without collapsing under its weight.

Thinking of Eddings and 1980s fantasy novelists, I thought of Terry Brooks known for the Sword of Shanara and many follow on novels. While nearly all fantasy novelists (excepting of course Tolkein hater China Mieville) borrow from Tolkein, Brooks seemed to cut and paste directly from the Lord of the Rings. The book concluded with a battle that may as well been called the Battle of Minas Tirith. It sold fine, so I guess fantasy fans don't mind, but I am curious if people still read Brooks.









*Lord Foul's Bane was my first fantasy novel but that one didn't work for my pre-teen self.

WSJ Summer reading list

The Wall Street Journal has put out a summer reading list. Unfortunately you have to click through their interactive piece to see them all. Not a huge deal, but I like to skip around and the navigation gives titles but no authors! All is forgiven though, because they bring news of a new Carlos Ruiz Zafon novel! His Shadow of the Wind was a fantastic literary thriller and I had despaired of seeing another by him. Holy smokes and one by Rafael Yglesias (he of the wonderful Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil. -- Note, this book is bizarrely expensive new, but Powells has a few used copies for under $10.)

Richard Russo has a new one too. It's called That Old Cape Magic, but I can't find out much about it. I would be jumping up and down, but my wife, who is probably a bigger fan than I, thought his last one was a yawner. So I am wary.

The WSJ is kind enough to throw the genre fans a bone with Fragment, a sort of Jurassic Park story where researchers stumble on an island, the ecology of which has followed a different evolutionary path.

What to do with books you've finished reading

I saw in the Oregonian today that the level of donations for the Fall Friends of the Multnomah County Book fair is lower than expected. Who knows why, but I suspect that more people are selling their books rather than donating them. The line at Powell's is always long for people selling or trading. I realize I do not donate much because donation is the last choice on my book funnel.

The books I like best I keep and put on my shelves. In nearly all cases, it is nonfiction that I keep. I tell myself that I want to keep books in certain subject, in case I need to look something up. I don't think this has ever actually happened, but in case I need to at some point, I am ready. With fiction, I quite often send it off. I only keep them in case my wife might want to read it. If not, it is usually gone.

The ones I think are good, or that I am not ashamed that I read, I tend to loan out or give-away to someone to read. I used to want them back, thinking I would loan them out to others I know, but I am just as happy to have people pass them on to someone else. The same people will usually share their books with me, so everybody wins. If I don't think my friends will want it, I go ahead and trade it in, usually at Powells but sometimes at the local paperback exchange. I like to help out the little guy, but man, having some credit at Powells is like a ticket to Willy Wonka's factory.

By the time I have loaned out or sold my excess books, I don't have a lot left to donate. I've come to recognize the books that Powells and the paperback exchange don't take. Out of convenience some of these go to Goodwill and others go to schools for fundraising. I am slightly ashamed of the books that I hand over to the school. I want to attach a note that these aren't my regular sort of books, no, no, no, but then I would have to admit they are third in line for books.

They went through me like a pavement saw

I listened to the noise rock of Big Black quite a bit back in college. I didn't branch out into the rest of the noise world (no Einsturzende Neubauten for me, thanks) mostly I suspect due to my interest in the bizarre subject matter of Albini's lyrics. They combine elements of some of my favorite literary genres including noir, true crime and Southern gothic. The songs are little horror stories about sex murders, people who like to watch at abattoirs, assasins, and the rantings of bitter redneck drunks. Back in the record store days, my local store, Peaches (or maybe it had changed to Mothers at that point) had a section called "Difficult Listening." I'm pretty sure these guys would have been shelved in that section.

Anyway, I liked these guys enough that I thought I had tracked down nearly all of their output. I picked up Crack Up by buying God's Favorite Dog, on CASSETTE no less. I found a copy of Sound of Impact at some point as well. I thought I had pretty much tapped this band out.

Not so! Someone has posted Newmangenerator from the unreleased Big Black Peel Session. It sounds like a creepy Atomizer outtake. So far, I would call it OK, but maybe it will improve with listens. On the immediately appealing side, we have Big Black's cover of Rema Rema. Good luck finding a physical copy, apparently just 500 were made. Not much on the lyrics side. It is mostly "Rema, rema, ha, ha, ha," but the hooks are nice.

The sad truth is that when I finally discover a lost gem, my peak enjoyment of the band is since passed. For me, music is tied to periods of time and there is often something missing when I come back to it. It doesn't mean I don't enjoy it, just that it has lost much of its power. Hence the unbridled excitement I would have experienced in 1994 upon finding these is now just a moment to smile.

Domino Men

I've just finished an odd sort of book. Domino Men is Jonathan Barnes follow up to Somnambulist. I say follow-up rather than sequel as it is set in the same universe as the prior book but doesn't continue the story or use many of the same characters. Overall the book is weaker, with less interesting characters, increased pointless violence (if you recall the jarringly brutal execution of the first book, expect a lot more in this one) and a tighter, if less interesting story line.

In this one we find that the shadowy government organization the Directorate is fighting a surprising enemy for the life of London. Those familiar with English political history will have some inkling as to who that enemy might be, but I'd rather not spoil it all the same. The main character is a milquetoast loser whose claim to fame was his youthful stint on a sitcom where he always uttered an inane line. His filing clerk days fall behind him when the Directorate swoops into his life.

Barnes is Oxford educated and writes for the Times Literary Supplement. Nothing out of the ordinary about that, but little literary jokes in the book make me wonder if this book isn't meant to be a joke, or at the very least a turning of the tables, on genre fans. He sharply contrasts the humor of his deft use of language with terrible images and little hope for his characters. I get the sense that he is asking if readers of escapist, apocalyptic fiction really enjoy it. It reminds me of Joe Hill's excellent "Best New Horror" short story which indirectly asks fans of horror why it is they like this stuff.

Clever bit of literary theater or not, the book is fun to read for most of it and then becomes less so. The last few sentences of the book imply another in the sequence, but one that would be futuristic in nature. I am quite curious to see where he takes it next.

Whither the B-side compilation?

I threw on Dead Letter Office on the iPod today. Wow, that one still holds up well (and is only EIGHT dollars on Amazon.) When I first bought it (back in 87 or so) I thought it was a new album, but no, it was a B-side compilation, the first I ever bought. Collecting true B-sides (the song that got tacked onto a single, back when there were singles), alternate takes, live tracks, international releases, and studio throwaways, the B-side compilation brings all sorts of musical goodies together in one place. Dead Letter Office is one of the best ever made, or I suppose, compiled.

I don't know if it was the fact that it covers REM's incredibly fertile early period, but the quality on this one is high. The covers are great, exceeding both Aerosmith and Velvet Underground (not the biggest challenge...) but also serving up Crazy, a classic by the still little known Pylon. Then there is the amazing Voice of Harold, where Stipe reads the text from the back of a gospel album over the musical track of Seven Chinese Brothers. Then there is the loopy Bandwagon, at times my favorite REM song. I always like it when the southern accent creeps into his vocals as it does here. Who can forget Walter's BBQ, a little ditty written for GA BBQ joint.

This one is so good that it is worth more than many a REM studio album. Why don't we see more of these sorts of things? The Killers put one out a few years back. Pearl Jam has Lost Dogs, which suffers from the Sandinista! and Use Your Illusions problem of insufficient editing. Too long to recommend unreservedly, it does have No Lip, a rocker only surpassed by Courdoroy. It also has the oddly creepy Strangest Tribe, which is well worth a listen. Does Louder than Bombs count?

So that is some, but where the hell are the rest? Yes, I am aware that there are no more actual B-sides as there are no more 45 singles, but there are plenty of soundtrack cuts, one-offs, piss-takes, Japan-only tracks, Peel Sessions, ITunes exclusives, and Australian tour EPs out there for bands to fill up a nice compilation. Sure, we can probably dig these things up ourselves, but more likely than not, you won't find them on your own.

I suspect Pavement could have put out a humdinger of a compilation, but they took an alternate route. They are re-releasing each of their albums with another disc containing B-sides, concerts, radio shows and EPs. Of course, now the fan has to get all of them. Clever! One odd note on that. The version of Painted Soliders on one of the re-releases sounds a bit different than the one in this classic video.

Could it be that bands are not keeping the music? Or is the strategy to hold on for a post-breakup release?

You tell me you wanna be different

So I've only recently listened to the Modern Lovers, which I suspect makes me a bad indie listener. I found I prefer the Burning Sensations cover of Pablo Picasso (was never called an asshole) than the original Modern Lovers version. This may be due to the rule that whatever you hear first you prefer. Or maybe it is because the Repo Man soundtrack rules (who can forget Let's Have A War, Repo Man, TV Party, or the unbearable amazingness of Reel Ten (this was my 12 year old equivalent of drugs)).

All that said, the story of hippie Johnny and the ladies in I'm Straight is so fantastic that it makes listening to the Modern Lovers more than awesome. Now I understand from whence In My Eyes comes.

Good or bad?

Hmmm, the trailer for Pandorum looks like the kind of thing I would like. Ship lost in space, terrible things afoot. It also looks like Event Horizon, the worst film of all time. Watch and decide.

The new Peter Hamilton

A friend lent me his copy of the new Peter Hamilton book, The Temporal Void. So kind was he! It is too expensive to buy and too long to check out from the library. So far, I am quite liking it. It isn't as good as Night's Dawn, but it is better than any of his other books that I have read.

A note of warning though. If you have not read the book DO NOT DO NOT DO NOT read the Publisher's Weekly Review. A massive spoiler lies therein.

Stand up, you don't have to be afraid

Growing up, I thought all the stories about Kiss were true. I thought that Gene Simmons did really chop off the hands of fans at shows with his giant teeth shoes. I also bought into the notion that he had a cow's tongue grafted onto his own. I also believed that it stood for Knights in Satans Service. I know, ridiculous, but come on man, I was eight, cut me some slack.

Anyway, I would have probably freaked out if these custom Kiss Legos showed up in my Lego box.

That said, while I no longer fear Kiss, I do fear the fans of Slipknot. The kids in this video look like the rampaging hordes that will drown the world in apocalypse.

Slipknot |MTV Music

The ends of the earth

For a generally sad book, Simon Winchester's The Sun Never Sets (recently republished as Outposts) is certainly a fun read. In the 80s, Winchester got the idea to travel to the remaining pieces of the British Empire. Most of them are nearly unknown (Trista da Cunha anyone?) and tiny. At the time, Hong Kong was a colony, but the remainder are small indeed, which makes for interesting stories of forlorn little places like St. Helena and, in some regards, Gibraltar.

What makes the book so enjoyable is Winchester's prose which swerves from nostalgic to wistful to acid. Here he mocks the Gibraltar Rock Apes, famous due to the legend that as long as they stay on the Rock, so shall Britain:

But here they still sit, begging for food on the Monkey's Alameda, swinging from wall to tree to tourist shoulder, spitting, lunging, hawking, puking, and displaying their unpleasant and oddly tailess backsides to the daily busloads of the curious. They are truly loathsome creatures, in a state of permanent distemper, ogrous packages of green and grey fur, all teeth, stale fruit and urine. How little these true barbarians know of the solicitous tendresse to which they are subject, or the colonial telegrams that have passed to and from the Gibraltar cable station, attesting to their contentment, or their decline.

Great stuff for travel fans, but Imperial fans in particular.

Shouldn't have to be so hard

I've listened to the Wilco album (helpfully titled Wilco (the album) and kicked off by Wilco (the song)) twice now. At the moment I am indifferent. This means one of two things. The hoped for outcome is that this is one that takes a number of listens to fully engage it. This happens all the time. Most recent was Wolf Parade. Less desirable outcome is that I just don't like it.

My stiff upper lip is stiffened by listening to the fabulous Shouldn't Be Ashamed, my most favorite of their songs.

Jay Bennett, RIP.

An Englishman in Dixie

I love the books of William Boyd. His Any Human Heart is one of my top favorite novels, up there with Kavalier and Clay, Atonement and Cloud Atlas. His Ice Cream War, set in the little known African theater of World War One, is among the finest of the war/imperial novels, right up there with anything by JG Farrell. A Good Man in Africa is right up there with Graham Greene's great ones. Armadillo is a well constructed examination of identity and the idea of Englishness.

Stars and Bars, which I just read, is not as good as those books. It has Boyd's trademark wit, but it lacks the deeper understanding of people that enrich his other books. The book is the closest thing to pure slapstick that I have yet encountered among his works. Henderson Dores is an Englishmen who longs to be American. The novel opens with him at work at an art house in NYC. He is sent into wildest Georgia to evaluate the collection of an elderly man.

Upon his arrival, he finds that most of the family is none too happy to see him. One son threatens to beat his ass with his head and one daughter is given to candid Anglophobia. He makes matters worse by trying to juggle two women, one of whose daughters travels with him to Georgia.

There are many funny moments, but the book just feels insubtantial when compared to the others. If this were one of his others, he might try to explore more of how Americans and the English interact. Here, it is mostly, if not entirely played for laughs. It isn't a bad book by any means, but don't expect something like his others.

A particulary geeky side of scifi

For me science fiction is a completely unguilty pleasure. In fact, if the cruel book gods one day forced me to read from only one genre, it would be science fiction. That said, there are some sub-genres about which I feel a twinge of regret about reading. Mostly because they usually aren't that great. Alternative history is one. It's sub-category of modern folks going back in time, accidentally or otherwise, always tempts but usually delivers so-so results. Although it was over-long, I liked John Birmingham's Weapons of Choice which features a fleet of early 21st century warships being flung into World War 2, the time line of which they immediately disrupt.

This sets it above the lame Final Countdown in which the USS Nimitz goes back to Dec 6, 1941 and decides to not intervene in Pearl Harbor. That movies reminds me of trashy bit of military scifi from the 80s called the Seventh Carrier. This one imagines that a seventh carrier was meant to participate in the Pearl Harbor raid but it got frozen in an iceberg (or some such). Freed in the 80s, it goes on to successfully attack Pearl Harbor sinking a helicopter carrier and damaging a battleship. Astounding to say, but the author was able to turn this into a franchise.

There is also a great short story out there, maybe by Clarke or perhaps Asimov, which has a US soldier stationed in Iceland transported back to the Viking days. He sees himself as superior to the locals, but finds he has no skills for the time and is promptly killed when he runs out of ammo. Nice twist on the superiority of current civilizations.

Anyway, I have been intrigued by the Destroyermen series. In these, a World War 2 US Navy destroyer enters some sort of worm hole and goes to a Harry Harrison like world where the dinos never died. It has all the preposterousness that can make for good adventure scifi. I nearly grabbed it at the library but a friend has lent me the latest Peter Hamilton doorstopper and I should really read that first.

Islamists

With the end of the Bush administration and the coming economic crisis a number of formerly hot topics have gone rather quiet. Iraq, terrorism, Islamic-American relations and Islam itself have largely subsided as topics for conversation. Part of it is the rise of the latest and greatest crisis story and increased (but not enough of an increase) of attention paid to global warming, but there is also a sense that now that Obama is in office, everything overseas will just be dandy.

Just because we are not paying attention doesn't mean things still aren't happening though. We should all listen to the debate surrounding Ed Hussain's the Islamist, Why I Became an Islamic Fundamentalist, What I Saw and Why I Left. Originally published in Great Britain, the book caused quite a storm of controversy. A number of the center and right papers wrote positive notices, while the major left paper, the Guardian, and a number of others had less positive things to say about it. Wikipedia has a nice summary of the arguments.

One of the major arguments is over whether his depiction of the state of militant Islam in modern Britain is accurate or not. That will take someone more learned in the subject to say. What I can say is that the book provides a personal view of how militants (of all stripes) recruit, manipulate and use young people to build dangerous movements. It isn't as if Hussain lacked positive role models. His had a loving family, a solid education and a mentor in a socially and philosophicaly oriented rather than politicaly oriented Islam.

Americans will of course be interested in whether the aggressively anti-Western Islamic movements of Britain could arise here in the United States. Hussain addresses this in an afterword for the US edition. His answer is that the short term looks good, because American society is more inclined to assimilate newcomers than Europe but long term risky, as the Wahabists are beginning to make inroads.

A cover you need

Ooooo, someone has posted one of my favorite covers, Lucinda Williams singing Positively Fourth Street. This site has a passel of covers by Lucinda, including the Dylan cover. She doesn't really do anything new with the song, except to bring her incredible voice to the story. Her voice is so rich with emotion, so it works with this Dylan classic.

Here is a favorite or two

Essence - a take on the classic sense of sex as a drug. Probably the best use of "fuck" in a country song as well. (OK, fine, David Allan Coe fans may disagree. If you do not mind utterly tasteless tunes, then compare against this song. NSFW!!!)



Car Wheels on the Gravel Road
Including Lucinda pitching the reissue.

Summer book

I'm generally a huge fan of the New York Review of Books Classics line, but I have failed to grok Tove Jansson's the Summer Book. Consisting of a series of vignettes, it tells the story of a young girl and her aged grandmother on a island in Finland. The praise for the book is effusive, see for example this blog post, but I am just not seeing it. Of late I have been a bit agitated so I haven't been able to sink into prose and I suspect that this book requires lots of quiet and lying somewhere like a hammock. I actually bought this copy so maybe I will go back to it later.

Suspicion torments my heart

One of my favorite crime thriller writers is Thomas H Cook. He isn't flashy, but he keeps churning out these meditations on the long term, emotional effects of the impacts of crime. I may have read his best, the Chatham School Affair, first. The ones I have read since are good, but not quite at the same level. The latest though, is the best I have read since.

Red Leaves is short and begins with someone looking over family portraits, rarely a good sign in crime novels. The main character Eric Moore is trying to get a sense of what happened to his family. The bad news all started the day after his teenage son returned late from babysitting a young girl named Amy. The next day, Amy's parents call looking for her, as she has disappeared. As the days grow, suspicions grow and relationships fracture. The conclusion is tragic in a typical Cook way, which is to say a sense of waste and regret hangs over it.

This one is shorter and tighter than some of his other books, so you can blow right through it. The characters are all so flawed and the overall feeling so sad, that this is probably for the best.

Rock for the day

Here is Portland's own Thermals bringing the rock on "Now We Can See," which seems to be about thoughtful barbarians. The lead singer Hutch Harris looks like a younger Stephen Malkmus and sounds a bit like John Linnell (of TMBG) making him a yin/yang of indie rock.

Burn After Reading

I ignored Burn After Reading when it came out, as the reviews were weak. My love of the subject matter (spies in DC) finally pushed me to rent it. It's certainly not in the top tier of the Coen Brothers movies, but it is better than the average comedy for certain.

This one is all about the goof-ball characters, nearly all of whom are numbskulls. Brad Pitt's gym instructor is the most obviously dull, but even the supposedly whip-smart CIA analyst played by John Malkovish is a buffoon. In the extra features, the Coens say they came up with the characters and then the story and that shows. The plot is mostly an excuse to have the characters collide in crazy ways. The best character, to my mind, is George Clooney's sex (and jogging) obsessed US Marshall. He moves into a parody of the main characters of political paranoia films that is great fun to watch.

I suppose my biggest complaint is that it can't decide if it wants to be a black comedy or not. It starts out mostly as farce and then slides into a farcish black comedy that doesn't get really dark until the final moments. At that point it felt out of synch with the rest of the movie.

If you don't mind spoilers, not that they are that important, here is every line by John Malkovich in the movie. The number of eff bombs is impressive, most impressive.

Another great one from HBO

If you wanted more of Band of Brothers, you got it. HBO now has a show set in the Pacific coming out.

Annie's Ghosts

It's amazing how many mystery stories revolve around family secrets. One of my favorites, Thomas H Cook, has built a career writing books that deal with the emotional toll of family secrets and family history. Writers as diverse as Harlen Coben and Edgar Allen Poe have used the hidden history of families to tell their sorrowful tales.

Of course, real families have secrets too and Steve Luxenberg, of the Washington Post, found a doozy. Late in life, his mother, who had always made a great deal about being an only child, revealed that she actually had a sister. Digging further after his mother's death, Luxenberg learned that his unknown aunt had been committed to a mental institution in her late teens and that she had lived the rest of her life there. In Annie's Ghosts, Luxenberg has documented his quest to learn who his aunt was and why his mother hid her from her children.

Luxenberg has structured the book as a mystery story, with false leads, missing documents, bureaucratic blocking, and the uncovering of additional mysteries, such as the true story of his father's service in World War 2 and the dire tale of his mother's cousin who escaped death at the hands of the Nazis by posing as a German and working for the Wehrmacht. Although the stories in and of themselves, which include the shifts in the mental health industry, the Holocaust in the Ukraine and immigrant life in 20th century Detroit are interesting, the suspense driven narrative greatly enhances the read.

Although his story is personal, Luxenberg does note that thousands of people disappeared into homes because they were considered different or even shameful. In not all cases were they erased from family history, but in many they were. This opens up all of the other reasons people were hidden, some of which he explores on his blog.

Visiting a bookstore

I was down in the Sellwood neighborhood of Portland on Friday. I like the area quite a bit, but I don't find myself going very often. My most frequent reason to visit is to get my hands on some Salvadoran food. El Palenque's fried plantains are certainly worth the trip.

This time I drove past Wallace Books and, since I had the time, I stopped in for a good browse. Wallace is a new and used bookstore of the kind that is disappearing. The building is a converted residence, so the store has a warren like feel that the modern stores have eschewed. Thanks to a dedication to organizing, the store gives the feel of a place where you might find a lost treasure, but you can also search alphabetically if you choose.

The science fiction section was particularly nice with all manner of out of print treasures. Few things date as quickly as science fiction, but the selection was attractive. I picked up Resume with Monsters, a strange sci-fi book by William Browning Spencer.

Over in history I found a copy of Only Yesterday. This one, about the 1920s, was written in 1931, giving it, I hope, the feel of a book about this decade written this year. It had an inscription, which usually gives me pause. I worry that it was some spurned peace offering. In this case, the original owners seems to have written when they bought it (2001, in case you are interested).

Lastly was Lost at Sea. I had a spell where I read piles of adventure/disaster books, but I then had my fill. I suppose I am getting back on the horse.

What I like about visiting stores like Wallace is that I buy books that I otherwise wouldn't (whether I read them is another story). While I appreciate all the Internet can offer for the directed search, the browse is something that the Web still can't do very well.

Two videos one happy, one sad

I ran into these tonight. The first one is Weezer covering MGMT's Kids. Pretty fun, aside from the unfortunate "T-Mobile in the house!" shout out by Rivers Cuomo. It was a T-Mobile Party, but still.



Then we have the Road Trailer. Looks about as dark as the book. It looks like we get more of an idea of what happened to end the world. The action to lonely survival ratio looks different than the book, but that is probably part of a desire to excite the viewers.

A Girl's Guide to Modern Philosophy

Charlotte Greig is a folk singer and music writer in the UK, but back in the 70s she studied philosophy at the University of Sussex in Great Britain. In her first novel, A Girl's Guide to Modern Philosophy, she uses that experience as a basis for the story of a girl with a dilemma. Her main character Susanna is involved with a neglectful older man. Thanks to her dissatisfaction with that relationship, she begins a relationship with another student, but her concerns about the new relationship prevent her from officially ending her earlier one. Then she finds out she is pregnant and her problems get worse.

This could be the start of an excruciating Lifetime movie. Instead, this is a lively novel that places the emphasis on characterization and story telling, rather than message hammering. Greig does a good job in creating her setting in particular the student lifestyle. Coming at the end of the 60s era and, in the more leftist UK, the student world here is one in opposition to society at large and Susanna's uncertainty of where she fits is a key part of the drama. The characters felt real and Susanna in particular felt like a young woman struggling to overcome her youth with intellectual tools she had developed.

While the philosophy studies initially provide mostly for establishing the character, they come to be at the center of the drama. As her situation becomes increasingly dire, she finds that her philosophy studies have become quite pertinent. She uses what she has learned to have a dialogue with herself about what she wants and what is best for her. While she nods to the political, Susanna is more interested in the individual and the personal. The treatment of sensitive issues is well handled.

I enjoyed the book and look forward to what Greig does next. I hope it takes advantage of her years in the music scene.

Yay, a new band to follow

Man, I like the songs from the Heartless Bastards. Sadly, Portland is not on the schedule. Click here and listen to Out to Sea and, in particular, the Mountain. Is is automatically alt-country if it has a slide guitar?

Complaining about GRRM

Neil Gaiman has words for those who are mad at George R R Martin for not yet finishing the next Song of Fire and Ice Book and those are words are GRRM is not your bitch.

Viddy well, little brother, viddy well

There are some songs of which movies have permanently altered my perceptions. I cannot help but think of AirCav assaults whenever I hear "Ride of the Valkyries." I am even given to muttering "This is a Romeo Foxtrot, shall we dance." Sometimes I have a false association, I tend to think of the Omen when I hear O Fortuna, although it was never in the film.

Another such song is Singing in the Rain, forever, tied to the rape scene in Clockwork Orange. I was a little concerned when I saw that one of children's classes would be singing it at the school music show. Fortunately, any associations were swept away by the audience participatory dance segment. It's hard for the mind to wander when you have to pay attention to the next dance step.

An odd read

Among my Christmas gift books was House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest by Craig Childs. The civilization, as you might guess, is the Anasazi. Having visited Mesa Verde some years back, I wanted to learn more about what may have happened to them. So far, I am learning a fair bit about it, but I am learning lots more about Craig Childs. The key word in the title is TRACKING. Some writers barely make an impact in the story they tell. Not our Craig. For every page about the Anasazi, there are five about Craig looking for them or exploring. He spends a lot of time alone out in the desert Southwest and he is given to odd behavior like hopping into a flash flood and riding it and hiking through neighborhoods hiding from dogs. This doesn't make it bad, but you should be aware.

My faith in the Man Booker restored

Well, it looks like I need to start paying attention to the Man Booker Prize again. Aravind Adiga's White Tiger won the 2008 award and it is flat out awesome. It manages to be both a hilarious and troubling meditation on the brutal inequities in today's India.

The White Tiger of the title is Balram Halwai, a murderer, former servant and now an entrepreneur, as he puts it. His dark story is told in a series of letters written to the premier of China, coming to visit India. In these letters, he slowly reveals his experiences, including his crimes and then his surprising fate. It is the story of one who escapes the Chicken Coop, where Halwai says, the vast majority of Indians live. Like chickens waiting for slaughter, Indians accept their unfortunate lot in life while the rich and powerful torment, abuse and steam roller them. As white tigers are rare, so is the entrepreneur like Balram who breaks free.

The criticisms of India are myriad. The value and reality of India's democracy is called into constant question. Adiga certainly seems to argue that the downtrodden have no rights in both India and China, but at least in China their living standards are improving. There is also the notion that one must be an extreme rule-breaker, as in Balram's case, to actually change your lot in life.

All that makes it sound a bit, or even quite a bit, heavy. Not the case! Despite the subject matter, it has an almost breezy feel, as Adiga pulls in slapstick and observational humor. Despite being wicked, his narrator is quite amusing and his takes on the ruling class of his village are acidly funny. Also, this book is short. I really appreciate someone who can tell the tale in under 300 pages. All in all, a great book.

Captain America

I grew up as DC kid. I read mostly Batman and Justice League comics (looking back at the Justice League covers, man are they goofy). I suspect this was due to the influence of the Superfriends TV show, but it may also have been to my neighbors who had the comics I was reading for free. I did have a friend who had a lot of Marvel collected in books, and I read those, but I never really read the comics. One of the characters I considered completely uninteresting was Captain America. He seemed like he was just a really strong guy with a Dudely Do-Right sort of persona. Oh what a mistake.

I've just finished reading the very large Captain America Omnibus (pricey! You might try the library) and the follow on Death of Captain America trilogy. Although it covers over 30 issues, it maintains just a few story arcs over that entire period. There is little or no episodic story telling, instead we get a long, grim fight against terrible odds and with innumerable setbacks. The story includes Captain America's exploits in World War 2, the Cold War and a long simmering revenge tale. Yes, it is a comic book story, but it is a very good one.

Really, the characters are important here, but I think the most important part of its success is the writer. Ed Brubaker wrote this one and everything I have read by him is excellent. If you go visiting the comic shop, his name should be enough reason to try something out.

Four Corners of the Sky

You may not have read any of Michael Malone's novels, but you have probably seen one. The covers of his novels are particularly eye catching with great use of color. The cover of his latest novel, the Four Corners of the Sky, features a girl running and carrying an airplane on the cover. That little girl is Annie. At age seven, her father abandoned her at her aunt and uncle's farm, leaving her only a beat up airplane as a remembrance. As a child, the girl was a metaphorical flyer, fleeing from place to place with her con artist father. As she grew, she started flying for real, attending Annapolis and becoming a Navy pilot. At age 26, her father contacts her again, promising to finally give Annie the name of her mother if she will come to his deathbed...with one or two items he left behind.

Against her better judgment she goes to find her father, starting a loopy quest that brings in all manner of odd characters, including Cubans, the Feds, local Miami police and Brad, the husband Annie is trying to divorce, but can't quite seem to shake. Malone is a native North Carolinian and he is clearing working in the tradition of the Southern tall tale. The characters are often over the top, including the foul-mouth disabled pilot who teaches Annie to fly and assists in her quest and the Shakespeare loving con who helps her Dad on one last giant con. The story gets increasingly wild with multiple people chasing Annie and her Dad for differing reasons.

You don't need to have read any Baum, or even to have seen the movie, to note that the story is heavily influenced by the Wizard of Oz. Annie lives in Emerald, flies her rattle-trap plane into a tornado, nearly loses her dog, and does her fair share to help the cowardly and the broken- hearted.

Not that you need to be a fan of Oz to enjoy this book. Malone's background includes writing for soap operas as well as crime novels. The Four Corners of the Sky has elements of soap opera, with heavy doses of romance, and crime, with crime at the center of the plot, but really this is a big book about families and the odd people in your family. This is one for those who want a giant, crazy story in which to sink themselves.

Portland in the NYT

Another day, another article about Portland in the NYT. This one is pretty good though as it is about cheap eats. I am so glad that Tabor got a mention. The schnitzelwich is the best sandwich in all the land. I might have to go get one tomorrow. Very nice to see that the strip club Acropolis got a mention, not for the ladies, but for the cheap steaks. Locally sourced, don't you know. Beers got mentioned, which makes sense. Only bummer is that the local chocolate and dessert folks got no mention. Next time, I suppose.

I've seen those vampire dramas too, they're cruel

So it has been vampire movie season at my house. Among my most recent movies have been three vampire movies (and an awesome low-key French film -- more on that later.) The first one was 30 Days of Night, which is happy to remain true to its comic book origins. It is somewhat Carpenter-esque in having a small group of people dealing with an enveloping tide of evil. In this case it is vampires, and an unpleasant, almost animalistic bunch they are.

If you want your vampire movies steeped in tradition, even if not vampire tradition, then Near Dark is a good choice. The movie was apparently originally written as a Western, but was repurposed as a vampire movie when it seemed no one wanted to go to Westerns anymore. It's set in the southern plains and has the dark, depopulated feel of the early Coen Brothers movies. Like Blood Simple, the characters, including the vampires are a bit "country" (as we say in the South). It puts a nice spin on the Southern gothic tale and a hint at what drives the violence in the backwoods. I also loved the casting of Aliens alums Bill Paxton, Lance Henrikson (imagine his character in Pumpkinhead turning wicked) and Jenette Goldstein as vampires. Their visit on an unfortunate roadhouse is worth the price of admission alone. Unlike the cruel animals of 30 Days, these vampires have distinct and distincly unpleasant personalities.

Most recently I watched Let the Right One In, which seems the most closely tied to the original psychological nature of the vampire story. In this subdued Swedish movie, the two main characters are lonely children. One is the sad child of neglectful divorced parents. The other is a vampire. They find each other at night on a empty playground as the boy, Oscar, fantasizes about hurting the bullies who torment him. Eli, the vampire, is the only one to support him and he slowly turns the tables on the vampires. The ending is quite ambiguous, as it points to the possible creation of a key archetype in the vampire mythos, but also appears to be quite happy about it. This movie takes an ambiguous view of the vampire, sympathy sing with the situation but not ignoring how they feed. There is are so many great details in this movie, including some banal killings, the terrible sounds and shifts in face when Eli attacks, and the sadness of poor Oscar.

So while the first movie is for fans of the genre, and the second is ideal for those who like the only the best of schlock, the last is a great movie on its own.

Star Trek

As everyone who has been near a TV or a movie theater knows, Star Trek is opening this weekend. I am hoping to take my eldest soon. He has seen all the Star Wars movies, so the violence shouldn't put him off. We can also then begin the debate as whether Star Trek or Star Wars is the better franchise (this form of debate has already started. 2 out of 3 offspring agree that Indiana Jones > Star Wars.)

Although I don't watch a lot of Star Trek today, I preferred it to Star Wars when growing up. This is a bit like the Beatles vs. the Rolling Stones, you don't dislike either band, but you like one better. My preference is not based on David Brin's argument that Star Wars is aristocratic while Star Trek is democratic. No, I think Star Trek just hit a different set of geek buttons, specifically the technology buttons.

Star Wars is justly lauded for creating the look of a worn down universe, but the technologies aren't terribly memorable. Characters yes, but the technologies no. Trek is much truer to the speculative nature of science fiction playing with transporters, genesis devices, cloaking devices, weapon systems, and the like. The ships were also much more varied on Star Trek, although this was less the case initially. As in navies today, there are ships with different roles assigned to them, instead of the very big ship vs. fighter that plays out in Star Wars.

The two major space battles in Star Wars are essentially the battle of Midway played out where an overwhelming naval force (the Japanese) is destroyed by a small group of fighters (US). Star Trek has no fighters, which is a little strange, but then the overall feel of its navy is that of the Napoleonic period. Roughly equal navies patrol vast distances and chance upon one another. The actions are quick and fierce, but rarely decisive. In such a universe, fighters might make less sense. Or maybe the designers just didn't want to make any.

Anyway, I suspect the movie will be a lot of fun, if this Onion News Video is to be believed.


Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'

And I'm all out of bubble gum

Steve send this Flickr image list of Republicans in clown makeup. He compared it to the clown monster from It, which is sure to generate nightmares. I am going to start seeing Cheney in my storm sewers. Looking at it again I'm reminded of the classic John Carpenter film They Live, which argues that our society has been made materialistic and anti-intellectual by a bunch of aliens. Watch Rowdy Roddy Piper as he learns what is really going on in the world.

Fun with grammar

As ways to fill your free time online, Bloggingheads.tv is one of the better choices. If you are unfamiliar, each show brings together two people, often on opposite or conflicting sides of an issue, to talk for about an hour using computer video cameras and telephones. Unlike TV, the format is given to long form, loose conversations, which means it isn't great for soundbites or quick watching, but it can be an engaging thought-provoking listen.

One of the great benefits of the series is watching authors and thinkers explain and unpack their ideas, without the watering down and excess caution you see with tv pundits. One of the people I was happiest to discover via Bloggingheads is John McWhorter. He combines subject expertise, a strong point of view and a personality that makes him seem like an ideal dinner companion. You can see him here talking to Glenn Loury about torture, Obama, and other issues of the day.

So I put his latest book, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, on my wish list and my wife bought me a copy for my birthday. It is a small, somewhat odd, but completely enjoyable book. McWhorter is a linguist and in the book, he takes aim at a number of theories about English, none of which were known to me beforehand. One of the biggest is whether Celtic languages impacted the development of English. The CW is no, and McWhorter argues strongly for their impact.

Another interesting section is based on his skeptical take on the Sapir Whorf hypothesis. His doesn't buy the idea that a language's grammar sets the parameters for how one understands the world. He points out that counter-examples are often left out of these supposed grammatical drivers of culture. For example, he notes "As towering a mind as literary critic Edmund Wilson, for example, thought the reason Russians seemed unable to keep a schedule was that Russian isa language where future tense is indicated largely via context- but then Japanese is like that, too, and the Japanese never seemed to have any problem with schedules."

McWhorters prose style is both erudite and conversational. His sentences are geared toward the interested layman, being neither jargon laden, nor condescending. It is these qualities that make a book that could so easily have been a challenge, a fun read that, while not easy, provides great stimulation. I will be reading more of these.

An exciting milestone in my NPR life

This weekend, for the first time ever to my knowledge, I ate at a restaurant discussed (gushed?) by the Sterns on The Splendid Table. The place was Norma's Ocean Diner in Seaside, OR, a town not known for its food, but then again those are the places the Sterns like best. The restaurant prides itself on its clam chowder (which I didn't have) and its fish and chips, which I did. In addition to the traditional cod, they offer albacore, halibut and salmon fish and chips. I had the salmon and it was quite tasty. The strong flavor of the salmon stands up well to the beer batter, which is pleasingly dry.

You can listen to the Sterns talk Norma's here. Whenever I hear the show, I want to go to the restaurants, so I am so happy that it finally happened. I almost went with the petrale sole. Listening to the radio spot, I wish I had. Next time I suppose.

It was a lovely food weekend as the BBQ place I thought had closed was in fact open and my favorite baked good provider was open as well.

Sci-fi books that I want to be movies

I hope the new Star Trek movie does well. For one, I love the franchise and hope it can be revived. I am going to start showing the movies to the kids and see what they think. For another, I want more science fiction movies made. There are so many great stories from which to choose and sci-if provides all the spectacle you could want. Here are the books I would most like to see on the big screen:

Blindsight by Peter Watts. This one has a great scale for the movies, with a strange crew going to the edge of the solar system to investigate a UFO. This one has bizarre characters, truly alien aliens, and a dark backstory that could be handled in 2 hours. This one would be a moody, character drama in the Solaris vein.

Liege-killer by Christopher Hinz. This unjustly forgotten action classic may have suffered from the Matrix effect. The follow on volumes are not as good, but technology has finally caught up with this one. The book is set in a post-apocalyptic Earth where the remnants of humanity rebuild in orbital habitats. Into this fragile world, a forgotten weapon is released to terrible effect.

Sparrow - Maria Doria Russell. Here is one for the haters. Russell writes both science fiction and literary fiction, so this one is reflective piece about the relationship between religion and science, from a perspective sympathetic to both. This is a first contact story that focuses on the philosophical challenges and our inability to understand other cultures.

The Night's Dawn Trilogy - Peter Hamilton. OK, OK, this series is about a million pages long and has as many plots and sub-plots all the books published in the last month. That said, long books have condensed before and this story is awesome at the Star Wars level, except for the end, but then again the Star Wars end is pretty weak itself.