So that John Denver song about Jacques Cousteau in my last post, it got me thinking about the latest Richard Powers novel, which I’d read a few weeks ago but now I couldn’t remember its name. So, I Googled it (it was Playground) and happened to read a few random reviews, and I won’t post any spoilers but I found I completely misunderstood the entire book! Like, the entire point of the story went right over my head… I guess I’ll just have to give it a re-read.
- Category Archives cultural ramblings
Books, movies, music…
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I Am The Mercury
I got interested in a recent presidential ruling, a two-year exemption for some coal-fired power plants from the new, stricter EPA regulations on mercury emissions. I took a look at the list of plants in the proclamation and mapped the ones in Pennsylvania; you can check out my new page with (one version of) the map here. Enjoy! If that’s the right word.
But that map is not what I came here to talk about, I came here to talk about yodeling.
There is a song I really like called “I Am The Mercury,” by Jimmy Spheeris. The title caught my attention at first because it reminded me of an image from a science fiction novel involving alchemy, where a student sees a plate in one of the secret texts: it was described as a wild man’s face, maybe caught halfway into a scream. The picture (inside the book, in the novel) was titled “Lead Man,” but I remembered it as something-something Mercury — possibly because of the connection between mercury and insanity?
Anyway, there is no connection between the book and that song, but the song is incredible:
What I really like is that chorus, “let it rain on the mountain,” and then that wild yodeling shout — I don’t know if that even is yodeling, it seems very Americana, a folksong-ey barbaric mountain yawp. I know I’ve heard it somewhere before…
I knew it had to be in some John Denver song, so I Googled “John Denver yodeling” and found the one I was looking for pretty quickly: “Calypso,” a song about Jacques Cousteau and his research ship. And so, just because I can:
And that brings us back to thinking about the environment. And, now that I think of it, that definitely is yodeling.
PS This is what I wrote twenty years ago.
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Something To Look Forward To
Well, well, it looks like Thomas Pynchon has a new novel coming out this fall!
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I Was A Server Bot On Rigel 8…
This post’s title is part of a song in my dream last night, sung in a syncopated, Latin style, maybe a bit like Tom Waits’s “Bye Bye Baby,” by a chubby waitress, who was understood to be at least partly machine, in a diner that was understood to be in space, about a date she went on (with some guy who looked a bit like a cyborg Sam The Butcher). It’s mostly faded now of course, but I woke up with the song in my head, and I just thought I’d document what’s left of it here…
Meanwhile, Reading: I’ve been burning through the “Slow Horses” novels and novellas; I’ve probably read seven or eight by now. Great page-turners, Anne is also reading them and recommended them to me. We were out last night with John and Donna, who are watching the series on TV, and a good part of our evening conversation was about “Slow Horses.”
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Some Quick Book Reviews
December 7th, a day that lives in infamy. It’s also the second day in a row for snow in the morning. Nothing is sticking, it’s still too warm, but it sure does look nice. Anyway…
I spent a good portion of November fighting with recurring colds, sinus infections and the like. Just before the wedding trip I went to the doctor and got some antibiotics; the doctor said that there was probably some underlying virus causing the recurrent secondary infections, so she advised rest and fluids. I was pretty aggressive about the “rest” before our trip, and that (plus the antibiotics) pulled me through the weekend, but I still had a lot of rest/recovery to get done…
I filled my downtime, at home and in Boston, with a few e-books:
Angelmaker, by Nick Harkaway: This is the same author who wrote Titanium Noir, and our library has most, maybe all, of his books so I thought I’d check him out a bit more. (Fun fact: “Nick Harkaway” is a pseudonym for Nicholas Cornwell; his father David Cornwell was also a novelist — and his pseudonym was “John le Carré.”)
Angelmaker is not science fiction; it’s more like a gangster story, with fantasy elements but set in our world, modern London in particular — the story world was well built, and a very pleasant place to visit. The story itself (no spoilers) moves pretty quickly to a very satisfying ending.
I liked this enough that I took out another of his novels from the library.
Tigerman, by Nick Harkaway: Tigerman is complicated, and a bit darker/sadder than either of the other Nick Harkaway books I read, but like them it was also a fast moving semi-thriller, a sort of murder mystery that spins wildly out of control. It’s set in the present time on a fictional island, without too much science fiction — though there is an industrial pollution apocalypse looming over the island — but it uses comic book themes as framing, something I don’t know much about so I may have missed a few nuances along the way.
Like I said, this novel was darker, but it was also more complicated and emotionally deeper than either of the other two, with a somber but still satisfying ending — it was the best of the three.
Echopraxia, by Peter Watts: This is sometimes called a “sidequel” to Blindsight, not quite sequel or prequel but set at about the same time as the events in the first book. So it’s a hard sci-fi story with a lot of biology overtones, set in a post-human, near future dystopia. The cast features an escaped vampire, a hive mind, the father of the previous book’s protagonist, and a somewhat hapless “baseline” human biologist along for the ride to near-solar orbit, where they are again up against that enigmatic alien civilization.
This is very much a “careful what you wish for” tale about the Singularity, and was a harder, meatier, slower read than the Nick Harkaway books, which sometimes means “better,” but while it was a great read I think the Harkaway books were better.
Journey To The Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel, by Stephen Budiansky: My usual MO with library e-books is to really get into it with one or a streak of fiction choices, search for more and find myself overwhelmed by unfamiliar authors and titles, and go select instead some non-fiction that looks interesting. Then I either get bored or annoyed, and I drop the book. I took out this book half expecting the same thing to happen, but I forgot that biographies, though non-fiction, are stories and can hold my attention as well as any novel…
Kurt Gödel was a member of the Vienna Circle, or some Vienna Circle, and was the brilliant mathematician who proved that mathematics could not be reduced to rote logic — there would always be true mathematical statements that could not be proved. (This raised a bit of a stir, needless to say, just as the attempt to finally get mathematics on a rigorous, purely logical basis seemed to be reaching its culmination.) That much I knew about him, but this fleshed him out quite a bit more: his colleagues, friends and rivals in Vienna and the academic world, his marriage, his escape from Nazi-occupied Austria, his years at the Institute for Advanced Study and his friendship with Albert Einstein, his struggles with mental illness, and his eventual death from self-starvation.
The book was based on a lot of recent research (by the author) in Gödel’s papers and archives, and did a great job describing the man, his work and his world. I was pretty happy with this one.
I’m currently feeling better and I’m more active, and I am now on the hunt for my next book. I just downloaded John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. I’ll let you know.
PS: WXPN is doing the “885 Best Songs by Women (As Chosen By You)” this week. Right now they are somewhere in the low 600’s and the ladies are killing it. Groove is in the heart, baby!
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Blindsight
Blindsight, by Peter Watts I saw a mention of this book somewhere on the Internet recently, and was intrigued enough — I think that there was a picture of an octopus involved — so I got it on Kindle. A good read: it’s a dystopian, “hard sci-fi” story about first contact, with a lot of speculating and philosophizing about consciousness and awareness in intelligent beings — the story’s premise is built on the possibility that awareness is an evolutionary drag on intelligence.
The crew is post-human, with various enhancements meant to interface with each other and with the equipment they use; their leader is a resurrected “vampire” (that is, a member of an extinct superhuman subspecies that once preyed on humans), and “the Captain” is the ship AI, which really does not talk with anyone but the vampire. They are sent out to study and make contact with an obviously extraterrestrial artifact orbiting a nearby rogue planet, and things go from there…
This book did not read as fast as, say, Titanium Noir — it took a long weekend rather than a day — but it was engrossing, and kind of creepy, and well worth reading.
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Some Musical Interludes
We just got back from Godfrey Daniels on the other side of the river, where Anne participated in an old-time music jam — a bunch of crusty old characters playing fiddle and banjo, mandolin and dulcimer, and Anne on her violin, and me as the only audience. (Jeff F showed up later in the evening with his violin.) I knew pretty much none of the songs, but it was a real pleasure to listen to everyone play.
I myself did not get to play today. I was supposed to be playing duets with Donna, but as I was getting ready I found my cello horribly out of tune, and when I tried to tune it one of the strings broke. (It turns out, Donna couldn’t make it anyway, so it wasn’t that much of a disaster.) I took my cello to Montero Violins, where the woman talked me into a full set of new strings — they were rather old and starting to sound dead — which put me back a good chunk of change, but it had to happen sooner or later. (I also got a lot of good advice on the care and feeding of my cello, so that helped make it worthwhile.)
Saturday night we went out to a concert in Easton with Jeff and Kristen. Two full string quartets — the amazing Emerson Quartet, who are actually disbanding after this year so we were lucky to see them, and the younger but also incredible Escher String Quartet. Tey played a whole bunch of combinations, quintet and sextets, and ended with this amazing Mendelssohn Octet. It was an amazing night, capped off with a quick trip to Porters.
So that was my musical week!
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Meanwhile, Back At The Ranch…
We went with Shari & Rick to see “NOPE” today. Holy cow, what a movie! No spoilers, but it was a UFO horror film, packed with all sorts of other creepy stuff that may or may not have anything to do with the main story (spoiler: they do, I just spent the last hour reading reviews of the movie).
Anyway, here is a trailer, and a recommendation: go see “NOPE.”
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Piranesi
I surprised myself and just ripped through this book, and have to say I really enjoyed it. I think it hit the sweet spot in terms of length, and balance between world-building and action/drama; even the narrator’s voice and the writing style were not too much of one thing or another, but just where they needed to be.
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Time To Face The Music
I’m slowly getting back in the swing of cello things: I played duets with Donna on Tuesday, and yesterday was my first lesson in probably a month. I thought I played well, for both the lesson and the duets — I’d been practicing since we got home, so I didn’t expect to stay rusty — but I was pretty tired after each one.
Meanwhile: We haven’t done quartets in a while, and my ensemble is on hiatus for the summer, and the music studio I go to is about to close (the owners are retiring).
That is all.