Not to be confused with this post, in which various alternatives to abstinence are explored in far too much detail.
I’ve had a bit more time to read, lately, now that the computer is whole again, and the receiver is sent off to the shop for rescusitation, and that there’s enough room in the garage for the wife’s car. Going back as far as vacation, I’ve read:
Atlas Shrugged: Although I still resonate with some of the values in this book, I haven’t ever really found it to be representative of anything resembling real life, in my experience. I’ve always found Ms. Rand’s notion of sex, for instance, to be quite different from anything that seems natural to me. Plus, I’ve never really had that killer urge to bring my competition to its knees, or to take the wife by force. Still, her ideas as regards excellence are worthy of attention. For those of you who pinged me because I said I don’t know what Objectivism is, there’s a couple of sides to that: I do know what Rand says Objectivism is, and up to a point I think it’s got value. The extrapolation from first principles to implementation (as postulated in Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead), though, isn’t anything resembling a straight line. So to me, there’s a gap between first principles and principles Rand derives from first principles, and I don’t understand how that derivation works. Another thing: I’ve read this book several times over the last three decades or so, and it seems I’m just now noticing the plague of punctuation errors in it. I’m wondering, for the Gary Farbers out there, if this is simply poor editing or if usage has changed that much since its publication.
Zodiac, by Neal Stephenson. Damn, for a book that he wrote seventeen years ago, this kicks ass. It lacks the arid wit of his later offerings, and it also lacks a great deal of the humorous parenthetical commentary, but if you’ve already read Cryptonomicon and The Diamond Age and The Baroque Cycle and Snow Crash, then this is well worth your time. And at just over three hundred pages, it’s low risk, timewise. The plot is basically related to toxic-waste dumping in Boston Harbor, with emphasis on dioxins and related compounds. Good technical background on the aforementioned toxic waste; could be completely wrong but it at least it’s plausible.
In the Beginning…was the Command Line, by Neal Stephenson. This is nonfiction, and is an essay of sorts on computers, with emphasis on Mac vs PC. Stephenson doesn’t favor one over the other so much as note that both Apple and Microsoft successfully market to people’s desire to have made the Right Choice; they’re both selling image, not substance. He spends some time on UNIX and Linux in comparison, but I’m not sure he’s really wrapped the whole issue up as well as he could. Linux still has some software gaps that it needs to fill in order to dominate the world (as it should), and Stephenson failed (IMO) to consider this as a serious shortcoming. Still, for a book that’s now six years old, very insightful.
Vitals, by Greg Bear. Bear writes what I consider to be "hard" science fiction; Darwin’s Radio and Darwin’s Children are primarily books about how evolutional jumps may occur; this book begins being about turning off the ageing "feature", and takes an abrupt turn into influencing the population by introducing carefully engineered (in a low-tech sense) bacteria into their bodies. It’s fiction, but it scared the hell out of me in much the same way as The Hot Zone did. In this book, Bear’s main character is a rather unlikeable fellow who you wind up siding with because of the problems he’s beset with. The ending is deliberately (I think) ambiguous, which could be thought-provoking or a setup for a sequel. Either way, a good read.
Memoir from Antproof Case, by Mark Helprin. So far, the best book I’ve read this decade. I hated this book, starting out. The protagonist is not someone you’d have any emotional connection to at all: eighty years old, living in Brazil and a fugitive from…something. And in more than one respect, a raving lunatic: he cannot abide the smell of coffee, and at times takes rather excessive measures to keep even the smell of it away from him. He is, by all appearances, someone that few readers could care about. By about a third of the way through, I was thoroughly hooked, and by the end I was enchanted. Helprin has, in this book, demonstrated a talent for connecting the reader to beauty and emotion, rather than simply doing a workmanlike job of describing it. And of course by the end, the protagonist winds up looking like someone you’d want to have known. I recommend this book to everyone. I recall being similarly enchanted by A Winter’s Tale when it came out a couple of decades ago; now I’m going to have to go back and read it again. And I’m going to have to clear out a section for Helprin on my bookshelf, permanently.
in the night room by Peter Straub. Straub has written a number of books whose protagonist is Timothy Underhill; this is the latest. This is another variation on the theme of laying ghosts to rest, and Straub’s made a fairly lengthy and successful career from that theme. Good read. Not his best effort, but not everything can be. My favorite book by Straub is Mystery, which is very good indeed.
The War of the Flowers by Tad Williams. Interesting, but not nearly his best effort. For that, look to the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy beginning with The Dragonbone Chair.
I’ve also seen a few movies: Primer, The Machinist, and The Jacket.
Primer lost me, and I’m going to have to see it again. There’s a great deal of conversation that got lost at normal volume levels that were absolutely key to understanding what the hell was going on. This is a very interesting movie even disregarding plot, though: the budget was reportedly $7000. If you can imagine a group of guys building a time machine in a home garage, the result is plausibly much more like this than the multi-million-dollar special effects Hollywood seems to gravitate toward. There’s some unresolved paradoxes/overlaps here that I probably didn’t get because they were explained in a conversation I missed. This film relies more on character interactions for story background than on imagery; the cinematography is absolutely spartan (not to be confused with low quality, though).
The Machinist was hands-down the most captivating of this trio. I’ve got to ‘fess up, though, that Christian Bale was at least as gripping as the plot and characters: Bale lost what’s got to be 60 or 80 lbs for this role, and the question of what’s eating this guy, literally, that he’s lost this much weight is distracting to the point that you almost cannot pay attention to the clues provided along the way. Bale is anguish embodied, without actually expressing it overtly. Hackneyed phrases like "gut-wrenching" spring to mind, not because of graphic visual imagery, but because of the stark emotional impact. If you haven’t already seen this, go see it. Very good supporting performances by Jennifer Jason Leigh and Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, but Bale’s the show here.
The Jacket was a wonderful movie for exactly as long as you can accept that time travel is possible via drugs. It goes without saying, then, that there’s a major problem with the storyline. Performances from Adrien Brody and the always wonderful Jennifer Jason Leigh take this from thumbs-down to a recommend, if you don’t have more pressing things to do. I enjoyed it during; it’s the thinking-about-it-afterward part that downgraded it.
Music-wise, I’ve been listening to 12 Girls Band, which is a group of Chinese women that do a mix of Asian and Western classical and popular music, arranged for Chinese instruments. Very interesting and also quite pleasant. Their arrangement of Coldplay’s Clocks led me to decide to buy that disk, only to discover that it’d been sitting on my shelf, long ago purchased but still wrapped. So I’ve been listening to A Rush of Blood to the Head quite a bit, and liking it a lot.
Of course, this is an open thread. I’d appreciate the opinions of others on the above selections, as well as recommendations for further reading, viewing and listening.
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