The Dubious Monk
chinese curses since twenty aught twobook review: mainspring
I read Jay Lake’s blog for months before I finally got to reading one of his books. I finally read Mainspring this week. It was okay but kind of pointless. In a cover blurb John Scalzi calls it a wind-up toy and I think that’s what bugged me about it. It was very very plotty. This bit leads to this bit leads to this one, which makes sense when it’s about a clockwork world, but it felt like it didn’t have anything to say. It wasn’t about anything except this kid’s chosen one quest.
But. The world was very neat. There’re airships and the church of the Brass Christ. The archangel Gabriel shows up as a Clockwork. It’s kind of a really alternate Earth, but still with an Africa and Britain and the geography and sort of history of our world except that it was obviously created as clockwork. You can see the tracks in the sky that the Earth follows around the sun and there’s a giant equatorial wall where the gearteeth of the Earth’s rotation hit those tracks. So yeah, very “created,” which gives religion a bit more oomph.
Anyway, I’m glad I read it, but it was basically just something neat to occupy a couple of days. Like a wind-up toy.
book review: lady of mazes
It took me a long time (relatively speaking) to get through Karl Schroeder’s book Lady of Mazes. It wasn’t because it was bad; I just didn’t like the beginning third very much. There was a lot of stuff going on with people living in worlds that were invisible to each other. It felt poorly described and I couldn’t get into it. Once the vaguely fantasy-style characters escaped from the war and began interacting with the wider universe it was good fun science fiction. There was some random switching of viewpoint characters that annoyed me a bit, just because we’d never been in one guy’s head until it was necessary and then never hung out in there again. I’ve read other stuff by him before and this wasn’t my favourite.
Also, Karl Schroeder is a Mennonite from Canada who’s related to Doc Schroeder. So there’s that.
minimized
I enjoyed my condensed little Folk Fest on Friday. While it was cold at mainstage I managed to shiver through the sets by Iron & Wine and Neko Case which were my reasons for going. I knew that Iron & Wine was just one guy, but that didn’t stop me from being really happy seeing Sam Beam stand there with his guitar a speck in the middle of that big old stage. He laughed at the notion of these thousands of people being outside to listen to “quiet folk music” and played nothing to dance to. I loved it. His voice was less whispery than on the albums and he opened with the Trapeze Swinger, my favourite of all his songs. Neko Case was good too, though her set started a little roughly. I wasn’t disappointed and I’m glad she sang.
I saw the Deep Dark Woods, who I like and saw C.R. Avery at a covers workshop. He did a Neil Young song beatboxing with a harmonica. After that was over I floated to a bunch of stages. Because I was only there for a day I didn’t hang around workshops that didn’t grab me hard. Until the Songs of the Contemporary Cynic show with the Dust Poets and Mark Berube and Vance Gilbert, which was everything you want out of a folk festival workshop. The bands were bantering, had interesting instrumentation and they all joined in on each other’s songs. It was great. I took a bunch of pictures but in a fit of Luddism I only took my old film SLR so I don’t have them digitized (or developed) yet.
What else happened in the last week? I was dogsitting and Rudy didn’t end up dead from the cancer so that’s good. I read a couple of books (reviews will be up shortly) and saw Moon last night with Sean (who graciously accompanied me to a science fiction film). We discussed science fiction and issues afterwards and I was my usual articulate self. I should learn some day not to speak things I haven’t already worked out in writing. Discussions that come through my mouth never work, and I either blather to or patronize my listener. Sorry to everyone who ever tries to listen to me speak.
Today I broke down and got the MLB At Bat program for my iPod so I can listen to baseball games now that my free cable is gone. I can watch a couple each day too, but I’m not a huge fan of watching TV on the palm of my hand. I’m listening to the Mariners game right now. Ichiro was up and was called out on strikes. I tend to do other stuff while baseball is on anyway so listening to the games isn’t too shabby. Plus it gives you video highlights and condensed games and stuff.
movie review: away we go
One of the things about only getting your information from the internet (plus whatever commercials are shown during baseball games before your free cable disappears) is that you can tailor your knowledge very well. So well you eliminate a pile of serendipity. I mean, I get to ignore all the shitty movies I’d never want to see, and don’t get hit by a million commercials for them because of my net habits. (I also learn far more than I’d like about a certain subset of movies I might be tempted to see and now have no desire to, like Terminator Salvation, but this is not the point.) For the most part this is good. But then something shows up on my radar (actually me looking at the listings for the Towne 8) that I had no idea existed, like Away We Go, directed by Sam Mendes who I remember from directing American Beauty.
It’s about a couple in their early thirties deciding where they should live. Verona is six months pregnant. They’re looking for a place. Their jobs can be done anywhere and they want to be close to some sort of friends or family. It’s kind of a “what people do with their lives” road trip movie. That’s it. I loved loved loved it.
Of course it’s pretty much pointed straight at people my age. People who kind of suspect they’re fuckups but don’t want to just live completely by default. Maybe there’s a lot of analysis that would prove why I shouldn’t like the film. Maybe it’s actually horrible. I don’t know. I liked it a lot, even though it made me sad.
book review: the word of god
I can’t remember why I wanted to read The Word of God: or, Holy Writ Rewritten by Thomas M. Disch. I just know that something happened last week when I was working at Reader Services that made me say “I want to read something by Thomas M. Disch,” so I looked him up in our databases, found a book it looked like I might enjoy and then waited for it to be returned to the library. I had never read any of his books before so this one with its promise of the writer declaring himself god and including Philip K. Dick as a major character sounded like it would be up my proverbial alley. And it was. So I’m glad I had this desire whose origin I cannot place.
It’s the kind of novel that is more like a rambling old guy talking about different subjects. While it works well enough here (and when Kurt Vonnegut did it) it’s definitely the kind of thing I wouldn’t want to read from a younger writer. So rest assured that my books won’t be using this device any time soon. (Have I mentioned I’m working on a next book? I am. I’m trying a completely different approach to it: make it good from the beginning, and fuck the word count. We’ll see how it goes.)
Mary from down at the library said she’d started reading this and then when it changed tones she didn’t like it any more so she stopped. Because of this preview of hers I was waiting for the dramatic shift to happen. And waiting and waiting and waiting for about two thirds of the book. It never came. I don’t know what she was talking about in the slightest.
book review: infinite typewriters
Goats is one of the first webcomics I followed way back in the day when it had very little continuity. One of the first bookmarks I made sure any new browser had, one of the sites I’d check on the road in Tibet or wherever I had a few extra minutes after the important emails were out of the way. I’ve bought Goats Tshirts as Xmas presents and have seriously considered buying original art of some of the strips.
So yes, I’m a fan. But it took reading these strips in collected deadtree form (the first volume is entitled Infinite Typewriters to realize how batshit insane a tale it is. It’s more Zing! Pow! than something like Achewood and because of that I don’t think I’d ever really thought of it as being in the same league. I think of myself as someone who appreciates subtlety, fine things usw. Goats was an elder statesman in my comics trawl, something I read because I’d always read it. I had a suspicion it was just a rut I was in. But man, if this is a rut my life needs some serious reexamination.
The book refers to things that happened before Jon Rosenberg kicked it up a notch and decided to turn his joke a day tale into something multiverse spanning and epic, but knowing those little tidbits never make anything on screen fall into place. I mean, maybe the previous appearances of Gregor Mendel would. If you were insane. When it’s a part of your life for years the incremental madness seeps in and you don’t question it. It’s only when you can actually see how we got from Doodletown to Xibalba with a stop at comic conventions along the way that the comic’s glory can be fully realized. And all of this is a very good thing.
When reading it daily I have to confess, I wasn’t a big fan of the Good Hitler vs. Space Hitler storyline. In collected form where it’s not a two month digression from the fish who can kill a man with a taco sauce packet coming to terms with the idiot society surrounding him? Golden.
Did I mention it’s beautiful? The colour work and the character designs are great. The photo faces of Scott Baio and Robert Goulet do take a bit of a hit when they’re on a page instead of the copy-and-pasternet but they aren’t overwhelming.
So yes. Thanks for putting this in book form so I could re-appreciate the awesomeness of insanity.
book review: the writer as migrant
Ha Jin wrote this little book about emigrant/exiled/expatriate writing called The Writer as Migrant. I don’t know exactly why I bought it. Not that I regret it, but it was an odd choice of a Sunday afternoon book-browsing. I suppose it was the Pico Iyer kick I was coming down from and anything about peregrinations was bound to lure me to spend money. I’m probably lucky I didn’t come home with a $300 book on the mighty albatross.
Anyway, Ha Jin wrote a very lovely set of essays here. Most of the subject matter is writers who’ve left their homes to write elsewhere and in elselanguages. It makes me feel bad that English is my first language (though really, when haven’t I felt bad about that?) and I don’t need to leave home to write in it. I hadn’t realized that Ha Jin wrote in English himself. I’d assumed when I’d seen his books on the shelves that they were translations but no. I suppose I should read one of them some day.
reorganizing the library
I am now officially antsy about going to China. Even though I’ve got the whole of school-age summer yet to wait. It looks like I’ll be back from that trip before the 09 library reorganization happens, which may or may not be a good thing.
They’ve been sending out these Questions with Answers about the Reorganization (and by “they” I mean “some people in the business office”) that have been somewhat useless since they refuse to say anything that isn’t in bureaucratese. Yesterday though, Question #10 came out. It was a good question, asking what this reorganization meant in simple terms for those who hadn’t been through one before. As the questioner stated, all the emails to this point assume everyone knows what they’re talking about.
The answer to Question #10 was “Look at Libnet” (our library intranet). That’s it. I went to the page they listed and there wasn’t anything. I poked around (since I am a library employee and am capable of finding things on websites) and found a page they probably meant, since it had a section at the bottom labelled Reorganization. In that section was the email Rick Walker sent to the library staff letting us all know this was happening. That’s it. The bullshit nature of that “answer” to Question #10 pissed me off so I wrote a Question of my own. It was snarky (but not rude) and included specific questions about specific issues that those of us who don’t know what the hell all the corporate jargon means might find enlightening. I have no idea if it’ll be answered but it made me happy to point out what a useless piece of crap they’d answered Question #10 with.
As it is right now there’s just rumour and half remembered bits of what the last reorganization was like. One big thing is that they’re eliminating 3.7 full time equivalents because of 311. Which the library has withdrawn from since it was ridiculously bad for anyone who wanted to use the library. Ever. So it’s been a long term cost-cutting thing that was going to happen pre-”these economic times.” I’m not worried about it right now (I may be when October rolls around if all I can get is 8 hours/week), but if you’re at the Winnipeg Public Library and your staff seem a little more frayed than usual, this could be why.
book review: sun after dark
Sun After Dark, the Pico Iyer book I’d read before thanks to James and Michelle Stabler-Havener, didn’t cause quite the same angst in me that Global Soul did. Primarily because this book was less about some idealized form of human and more about the places he’d been. There are also book reviews in this one wherein he talks about a writer’s disorientating effects and the relentless proof he tries to hold onto. And there are stories of Rapa Nui and Angkor Wat and Pol Pot, and these address some of the worries of the traveller being a colonial force (even if brown-skinned). The essay about Tibet makes sense, especially when coupled with the essay about hanging with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala.
All in all I liked Sun After Dark much more than Global Soul. It felt less polemic and more story oriented. And it made me want to go to Bolivia without making me want to kill myself for not being there right the fuck now. So that’s a good thing. I guess.
book review: global soul + imagining canada
Last week I read two Pico Iyer books: Global Soul and Imagining Canada: An Outsider’s Hope for a Global Future (couldn’t find it on Amazon, since it was a CBC produced lecture I guess? Sorry if you wanted to buy it). They were similar, in fact the chapter on Toronto in Global Soul hit most of the same points as Imagining Canada did, but was directed more at non-Canadians. In any case I’m putting them together here.
The important thing I had to keep reminding myself of in these books were that they were almost 10 years old. I still think of time being around the turn of the millennium but things are different now and man is that ever more evident in non-fiction than in a novel. (Yes it’s obvious but I read way more novels than non-fiction so it’s almost a new thought to me.) The book and to a lesser extent the lecture were talking about a world before global terrorism became this huge concern, before regular people gave a shit (or pretended to give a shit or were annoyed at people telling them to give a shit) about climate change. Because of the last ten years it’s hard to take his paeans to the world traveller, at home nowhere but airports as anything more than a romantic daydream. And believe me this kind of romantic daydream hits me where I live. I don’t want to be here owning a condo and paying taxes to store my books; I want to be jet-setting, crashing here and there in anonymous strange places seeing new things with fresh eyes. But, it ain’t happening these days, not if you’ve got a conscience.
In one chapter of the book Iyer “lives” at LAX for a week. It’s hard to say exactly what that means since he doesn’t go into the details of his process, but he waxes poetic about these anonymous spaces being the site for partings and reunitings and all these huge moments in people’s lives. He doesn’t talk about the TSA at all. Or about how planes and the jetsetting lifestyle dumps carbon into the atmosphere. It’s presented as a romantic ideal with no consequences beyond not feeling at home anywhere, but isn’t that better? Isn’t that the way of the future?
I don’t know. I wish it was. I wish that could be my future. But as this millennium moves forward I feel like all of that isn’t going to happen, at least not for the non-superrich. I know he’s talking about people who need to travel for their livelihoods, not people like me who’re doing it on their own dime and should by all accounts be focusing on the local because that’s how the world is really going to change and be sustainable. I feel like I’m supposed to be finding everything I need within a bicycle ride of home, which is the opposite of what this book is saying.
There’s a lot of other good stuff in there too about immigrant communities and how moving beyond nationalism is how the future will look. And in some ways I can see it and I feel bad for being here saving money and having a place for my things. If I want to be a human of the future don’t I need to move past all of this?
And then I think about a tiny house and some land with a view and that’s all I want. That’s the kind of simple life that doesn’t exploit anybody else, right? I could do that with a proper supply of books. Sigh. I just feel like I’ve chosen everything wrongly; like if I’d stayed in China I’d be closer to the life I wanted, the life in this book. It feels really hard to be a Global Soul when you live in Winnipeg.
