The Other Don Kelly

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.

Bewilderment by Richard Powers: this is the most recent novel by the guy who wrote The Overstory. It concerns an astrobiologist — he studied extremophiles as a biologist, and now scans the spectra of newly-discovered planets for signs of anything that can be called life — and recent widower with a difficult child who may be somewhere on the spectrum. He and the boy struggle with the mom’s death, and the imminent death of the planet (the mom was a heroic environmental activist); he tells his son tales of other planets as bedtime stories; and — this where I am so far — he enrolls the son in an experimental brainwave/biofeedback program rather than let school put the kid on drugs. It’s interesting, but it’s also a bit of an anxiety attack; I don’t read much of it at any one time. Stay tuned…

Excession by Iain M. Banks: Another Culture novel, and a Christmas present from my parents. Pure “bubblegum for the mind” as Anne calls her detective novels, and I happily put Bewilderment aside to scarf this book up in about three days.

PostGIS in Action by Regina O. Obe and Leon S. Hsu: Another Christmas present, this one is nonfiction, bordering on reference, and something I’ve been meaning to pick up for a long time. I read the first few chapters in one sitting, and am now working through it a little more slowly, with my laptop open and QGIS running. Lots of good stuff, a bit dense but the learning curve is pretty forgiving.

The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks: another Christmas present and another fast-paced Culture novel, more bubblegum and I am about halfway through.

I wrote this on Valentine’s Day thirteen years ago. Valentine, Venus, Vesuvius, Venezuela, Vhiessu…

I had several projects I wanted to work on this evening, and a whole bunch of straightening I could be doing, but instead I fell down a rabbit hole — I’d been perusing Anne’s copy of The Dictionary of Imaginary Places last night (after reading some non-Lovecraft Cthulhu stories), looking for the kinds of entries I might like. Plenty of Narnia and Middle Earth, and other things I could do without, but nothing about the Miskatonic River (small blurbs about Arkham and Innsmouth), and then I flipped to the back to read the entry for Vhiessu — nothing.

So today, after a pretty trying day, I sat down at the computer to do those projects (more on them at some other time), and instead I Googled Vhiessu. There really isn’t a lot about it, though it was used as the title for some rock album, and, on obscure fan pages for Pynchon and Jorge Luis Borges, I found some reference to a fictional travelogue by the “accidental founder of Rosicrucianism,” which also mentioned Vhiessu, and which was in the 1740’s the inspiration for some intentional community outside Prague, which collapsed into “cannibalism, orgies, and mass suicide.” WTF?

I tried to find more, and found that some of what was referenced was real, but other parts seemed to lead to weird Internet dead ends: circular references, missing articles in archives of dead journals… In the end, I may have been the victim of an elaborate literary prank.

Now I have to read some Borges, and I’ll have to see if Anne’s book has any references to Ukbar or Tlön.

I finally watched this last night. I’ve been meaning to for years in a not-very-urgent way, since I often come across references to it (references that I sort of get but not quite), and then the other day someone posted a small clip as part of an Internet comment, and I decided to just get it over with. So while Anne was at ukuleles (she’s really not into these kinds of movies) I went online and rented it.

I paid for the movie, pressed play, and got nothing but cryptic error messages from Amazon. D’oh! I upgraded Firefox and re-loaded the necessary plug-ins, turned the machine off and on, all the usual suggested fixes — nothing. (I also tried Netflix and Hulu, they were similarly borked.) Finally I noticed that I had a plug-in installed that I’d forgotten about, one that blocks video auto-play. I was pretty sure it’s obsolete at this point so I just disabled it, and suddenly everything worked.

(By this point a good chunk of my “alone time” had been used up, so Anne came home just at the violent, climactic ending…)

All that troubleshooting was the highlight of the experience; the movie itself was strangely …dull. Everyone in it seemed like a coked-up, hyperprivileged Eighties-era sociopath, which is what they all turned out to be. I found none of them sympathetic — I would not have minded if they were all murdered, and would not have been surprised if they all were murderers. The actual psychology of the main character seemed to come more from a book than anything else — he even used the phrase “mask of sanity” at one point in his internal monologue. In terms of tension or suspense, there didn’t seem to be any, and the ending (no spoilers!) would have seemed less trite if it had been just a little more ambiguous.

Anyway, there it was — I finally saw American Psycho. It was worth seeing, and worth paying $3.99 or whatever, but that’s about it.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

I saw an extremely positive review in Vox of Susanna Clarke’s new novel (Piranesi) which made me want to read it, but I though I’d check out her original novel — for free, from the library — first.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is a honker of a book, weighing in at 782 pages, and tells the tale, set in an alternate-history version of early 1800’s England, of the two men who revived the practice of English magic. It’s written, perhaps somewhat ironically, in the style of the novels from that era — think Jane Austen or the Brontë sisters — which was fun and clever for the first half of the book, but that whole stilted “British landed gentry politeness” thing wears me down after a while (I sometimes joke that the one improvement Pride and Prejudice really needed was a guillotine), and it makes the story, which actually has a very active plot, seem like nothing ever happens.

So the book rolled along just fine until the midpoint and then became a chore, but then it became interesting and readable again in the last hundred pages or so. I suspect that this is a result of my COVID anxiety: several longish books I read recently had the same effect on me — I liked them at first, they became tiresome as my attention span struggled, and then I enjoyed them again by the end. Like those other books, I am actually glad I read this one to the end.

Since Piranesi is only about 200 pages, I’ll be adding it to my list.

It was a total fluke, I just happened to note it among several movie reviews on Vox, but The Vast of Night caught my eye the other day, and since it seemed like something we both would enjoy we watched it over the past two nights.

We were both riveted, leaning in (along with the main characters) as some old woman tells her creepy tale, bedazzled by incredible camera work, and totally sucked in to what might have just been conventional sci-fi if the story were told less skillfully. But it was told skillfully, almost hypnotically, and the real story was more about the characters and atmosphere than any “and then this happened next” plot, even though that part was pretty good too.

I suppose it’ll be in theaters eventually, but we saw it on Amazon Prime. See it there, or on the theater, or maybe at a drive-in for that full Fifties vibe, you’ll be glad you did.