Category Archives: books

The Reserve

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A bad review that make me want to read the book.

Compare Kakutani:

Vanessa Cole is a parody of the crazy femme fatale, a woman, Mr. Banks would have us believe, so beautiful that men are willing to overlook her obvious mental illness.

with Bad New Hughes:

Sure, she’s good-lookin’. She’s also crazy. Crazy as a shithouse rat. Run for your life.

I’m with Uncle Patrick on this one. Parody? Hah.

While looking to see if the NYRB had weighed in on Mr. Banks’ latest, I came across:

In Japan neglected or abandoned blogs are called ishikoro, pebbles. *

Completely unrelated to Banks, but too nice a word to pass unmentioned.

Follow up and new stuff

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I am adding new tags to my posts – starting immediately and as I feel like it, I’ll use Chas’ post typology. I’m going to enhance and extend** a bit:

Type1 – !warning – minimal original content!, other than perhaps an “Ooh, shiny!” from yrs truly.

Type2 – what I did on my summer vacation feat. Deep Thoughts. In other words, things I’m thinking about.

Type3 – eats.

So, the first official type1:

Quite some time ago I posted on the work of Walton Ford. I clicked to the Taschen Books web site yesterday and on the home page? Info about Pancha Tantra, a beautiful bestiary. “Bruegel by way of Borges” indeed – I wish I could afford a copy (n.b. if I could afford a copy, I likely would not be working a “normal” job).

*

Read this (and the comments). It’s caused me to read some new-to-me Orwell, re-read a bunch of T. S. Eliot and think a little more…

** “enhance and extend” is oftentimes IT-corporatespeak for pervert and make proprietary.

Bookstack

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The on-deck circle:

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A very bloggy stack. From the top: nos. 2 and 3 recommended by Steve, nos. 4 and 5 by COOP, and number 8 (indirectly somehow – GoodReads?) by RKO’C. The Haraway Reader is cheating – I’ve read a couple essays already – just wanted to amp up the gravitas a bit.

Loose end, tidied up

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After reading Pluvialis’ post on drowned cities (and other things) last summer, I spent a week or so racking my brain trying to remember where I’d read a description of a drowned Thames estuary, complete with underwater buildings being reinhabited. Courtesy of BLDGBLOG’s excellent interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, I’ve been whacked over the head with it – Blue Mars.

The concrete cylinder ended some three meters down, but the ladder continued, down into a big chamber, warm, humid, fishy, and humming withe the noise of several generators in another room or building. The building’s wall, the floor, the ceilings and windows were all covered by what appeared to be a sheet of clear plastic. They were inside a bubble of some kind of clear material; outside the windows was water, murky and brown, bubbling like dishwater in a sink.

Nirgal’s face no doubt revealed his surprise; Bly, smiling briefly at the sight, said, “It was a good strong building. The what-you-might-call sheetrock is something like the tent fabrics you use on Mars, only it hardens. People have been reoccupying quite a few buildings like this, if they’re the right size and depth. Set a tube and poof, it’s like blowing glass. So a lot of Sheerness folks are moving back out here, and sailing off the dock or their roof. Tide people we call them. They figure it’s better than begging for charity in England, eh?”

Follow-up on some posts

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I channel-surfed my way to a teevee program on the history of Soviet helicopters the other evening. There was footage of the Mi-12; it’s tough to envision just how big it is until you see it swallowing trucks whole. I did a YouTube search and came up with the following clip – it’s in French and interestingly enough what parts of the narration I understand match perfectly with the English version I saw. Mi-12 fun fact – there’s a shaft connecting both powertrains together. Both engines on one side could fail, but both rotors will continue to turn.

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Minor spoiler alert! I’ve posted on Alan Moore and Gerry Anderson recently and wasn’t surprised at all to find that Moore knows his Anderson. In The Black Dossier Mina and Allan arrive at a spaceport where they steal a rocket – a Pancake Extra-Large 4. They had been told that the Extra-Large models are named after how the previous models met their end (thus Shrapnel XL2). One guess as to how the Pancake meets it’s end (with a not-too-bright Perspex robot pilot at the controls).

Kornbluth

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I sometimes wonder if Cyril Kornbluth will be the next Philip K. Dick movie/screenplay-wise. Actually, he may already be – my ties to to the motion picture industry consist of being able to look up titles on IMDB. Two Kornbluth/Pohl collaborations I read ages ago have stuck with me to this day: Gladiator-At-Law and The Space Merchants. Gladiator-At-Law seems especially apposite nowadays, what with the housing finance mess (aka Big Shitpile) – revolving as it does around housing and arcane financial arrangements to obscure who controls what. I wonder whether Pohl or Kornbluth read Gangs of New York; one of the gangs in Belly Rave (a slum housing development originally named Belle Reve) is the Wabbits – surprisingly close to NYC’s Dead Rabbits. Wa-wa-wabbit twacks! Also – struldbrugs! The Space Merchant’s Chicken Little (a huge blob of chicken tissue that’s fed chorella algae -IIRC- and has hunks sliced off that become people food) resonates today as well – here’s a class on animal tissue culture and tissue engineering. I can’t wait for Ron Popeil to get involved – “Makes beef jerky for around $3 a pound, and you know what went in it, because you made it yourself!”

Kornbluth hit the silver screen at least once – The Marching Morons fathered Mike Judge’s Idiocracy. I loved the Marching Morons when I first read it – in my defense, I was fourteen – since then, well… It’s great fun, but when you’ve finished there’s a strange odor in the air. I smell eugenics. We’ll ignore the statistical cold water as well – tons of dopes, tiny elite – what are your chances of rolling lucky seven in the can’t-choose-your-parents crapshoot. That’s right – in all likelihood, you’d be one of the pinheads. The Marching Morons does give me an excuse to introduce a great new word: tlonian – adjective applying to a product that has metastisized off the screen and into the real world (see: Holiday Inn) and post a video of an AWESOME new tlonian product from Idiocracy, Brawndo: The Thirst Mutilator. I love Borges.

Germs

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Some semi-random thoughts/impressions after finishing 1491:

  • Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel might be better titled Germs, Germs, Germs and Some Other Ancillary Stuff – at least as far as the New World is concerned. If 1491 is accurate in it’s depiction of the depopulation of the Americas as a result of smallpox and friends, the technological advantage enjoyed by Europeans is almost beside the point. One also wonders how a full-strength local population would have held up against a tiny force (the conquistadors) with superior firepower, but incredibly long and tenuous supply lines. Logistics, logistics, logistics.
  • Still with the Diamond comparo – 1491 gives a much different impression when it comes to food crops. If grains are the only thing compared, then the Old World wins big time – wheat, barley, rice, oats, rye vs. corn (maize) and quinoa. It would be interesting (I’m sure someone has already done it) to compare the caloric and protein output of milpas, medieval European farms, Andean potato plots, etc. and see if Diamond’s suggested European advantage exists.
  • Passenger pigeons. I’m leaving this as a teaser – fascinating… (Or you can click here – a post from before a personal 1492: my discovery of Querencia. In fact, searching Q for ‘1491’ – not a bad idea.)

My two biggest takeaways from the book are, first, how deeply rooted and deeply wrong the popular image of the Indian – and pre-Columbian America – is and, second, how much permaculture went on in the Americas, especially in the Amazon basin. If you haven’t read it – highly recommended.

More Moore

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Win! Hooray for serendipity. I started at Bruce Sterling’s and followed his link to a post on Amazon’s new Kindle (wisdom of crowds says, “Fail!” – also, read this). Speedbird – the blog with the Kindling post – looked interesting; I read a bit. Down a ways mention is made of a new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen title – The Black Dossier. Great news – and news it is. Though I love me some graphic novels, I’m out of the loop – there is much in the comic book world that I’m not particularly interested in, and I haven’t figured out where to find my kind of stuff (I read FLOG, but that’s just one – great – publisher). The only decent comic book store in the area having gone out of business and Million Year Picnic being too far to drive for one book (although I do want to get down to Cambridge soon – visit friends and the HMNH), off I go – virtually – to Amazon.

For those of you who know the League only via the movie – as is often the case – the books are far superior. I need to rent V for Vendetta and make that comparo sometime soon…

Alan Moore

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and Art Spiegelman and Daniell Cllowes appeared on last nights episode of the Simpsons. As fun as that was – and as groovy as the Tintin embedded short was – what nearly made me fall out of my chair was the poster behind the animated Moore in the book-signing scene. It was for the Lost Girls – I guess that’s what critics call transgressive (or not – I’ve never been able to figure that out word litcrit-wise). I’m sure the poster reference is all over the interwebs by now – though a quick google didn’t turn anything up – just wanted to put down a marker. I noticed!

Update – It’ll probably be mere minutes before Youtube pulls the clip down, but in this brief window of opportunity, the scene in question:

Mixed Media

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  • Book – peacay at Bibliodyssey recently announced The BibliOdyssey Book. I think I’m going to request one through my local bookstore – they’ll often order an extra for the shelves.
  • Radio – I heard a song for the first time the other day – The Smith’s Girlfriend in a Coma. Bwaaa-haa-haa-haa! I was never much of a Smith’s fan – it always seemed to me a bit unseemly to be that whiny self-pitying introspective without at least a half gallon of brown liquor in your belly. Girlfriend in a coma?!? Case closed.
  • DVD – 29 years worth of National Lampoon? I’m in. I’ll spare everyone the fogeyniscences – suffice it to say, I remember very clearly the moment I first clapped eyes on a NatLamp.
  • Paper – papercraft Japanese trout. Remember, “If the trout are lost, smash the state!” (Tom McGuane?) Aside – coming up on smash the state time anyhoo, methinks. Your tax dollars at work (the Higazy case).
  • Later – Newspaper illo – Dan Zettwock – amazingly good:

Karma Repair Kit: Items 1-4

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1. Get enough food to eat,
and eat it.

2. Find a place to sleep where it is quiet,
and sleep there.

3. Reduce intellectual activity and emotional noise
until you arrive at the silence of yourself,
and listen to it.

4.

– Richard Brautigan *


Two Argentine links

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First, a follow-up to an earlier post on Borges’ Library – via BoingBoing, a paper titled Information Policy for the Library of Babel. To quote the BB entry, “James proposes that the Internet bears striking similarities to the Library of Babel — and applies the lessons from its infinite depths to the question of information policy for the net.”

And – a bit of hyperlinked serendipity. One of the widgets on my Netvibes page shows me my Fickr contacts’ most recently posted pictures. This morning I saw this picture of a Ford Falcon Ranchero posted by Telstar Logistics (as COOP and A Certain Design Student know, the Ranchero is a huge favorite of mine). I zipped over to Flickr to mark it as a fave and while I was there, I read the comments. GiselaGiardino23 wrote, “(The sedan version, apart from being the most used Ford car, was used by the military dictatorship and the police, painted green, so they are widely linked in the collective memory to the violence and atrocities of the 70’s here).” “Wow”, said I, “I wonder where she lives?” I clicked through to her Flickr home page – the answer was immediately apparent: Argentina. And to close the loop, she has a “Borges, the infinite and me” photoset!

I am reassured by the delight I feel when these kinds of odd connections occur – age and cynicism (aside from the military dictatorship considerations) haven’t swamped me yet!