• Category Archives cultural ramblings
  • Books, movies, music…

  • 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.”


  • 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!


  • 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.


  • 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!


  • Meanwhile, Back At The Ranch…

    Posted on by Don

    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.”


  • Piranesi

    Posted on by Don

    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.


  • Time To Face The Music

    Posted on by Don

    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.


  • Vacation Reading

    Posted on by Don

    Congratulations to my niece Olivia, who graduates high school today!

    Some books…

    I brought both The Dazzle of Day and Deacon King Kong along on this trip, and finished them both. Both had long ago become chores to get through (especially Dazzle), and both turned out OK by the time they ended (especially DeaconDazzle of Day was just unrelentingly depressing almost to the very end).

    Being on vacation meant that we had to visit a few bookstores, and that meant more new books:

    Thin Air, by Richard K. Morgan: I burned through this one in a few days, and finished it on the flight home. This was another in my long series of “bubblegum for the mind” sci-fi books, and it was classic Richard K. Morgan: a genetically modified super-warrior, washed up and gone vaguely rogue on Mars, gets himself involved in some serious interplanetary spy-soldier drama. Lots of hyper-violence, high tech, and cheesy sex… I already can’t remember the hero’s name, but it was a fun read while it lasted.

    Piranesi, by Susannah Clarke: I’d been planning to read this for a while, but put it off to read her first book (Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which took me forever to finish) then other things intervened… But I picked it up in Colorado Springs, and am now about a quarter of the way through. I’m not sure what it’s really about yet, but so far it’s the journal of an earnest, somewhat naive (amnesiac?) young man named Piranesi, who lives in the ruins of a giant house, which seems to be the only thing in his universe. It feels like something sinister is coming down the pike, but so far the vibe is a lot like The Slow Regard of Silent Things, and the world-building — the part I like best anyway — is really good.


  • Downtown Colorado Springs

    Posted on by Don

    It was a bit warm yesterday so we decided to do some indoor exploration: we went downtown to the arts/historic district (Old Colorado City), got some lunch, and then visited the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College. They had several exhibits going on, including one reexamining John James Audobon and his prints, and one room filled with Chihuly works.

    We finished our day with a visit to a coffee-shop/bookstore, where we all ended up getting several books.


  • Seven Thousand Gypsies Gathered Together

    Reading: The Dazzle of Day by Molly Glass. Emmi’s husband Kyle sent us this book, which he read recently and liked, and thought we’d like too. (He’s always spot-on in his recommendations.) I started reading it the other day.

    So far we’ve been jokingly referring to the book as “Quakers in Space,” since that’s the basic premise: the Earth is dying, and a worldwide consortium of Friends manage to establish a working ecosystem on a generation ship (think the Nauvoo/Behemoth from “The Expanse”), then leave to search for a new home planet among the stars. I’m now up to Chapter 2, where the ship is approaching its target planet, after more than a century of travel, and preliminary scans show it to be disappointingly inhospitable. I suspect that the rest of the book will center on the decision they will have to make — make a go of it on this planet, or keep looking for a better one.

    So far I’m finding the book to be an engrossing read, but it’s really personal, and intense, and weirdly sad… I can only read a few pages at a time.