You can keep my things, they've come to take me home
News and views:
First up, I am not going to be a reluctant New Yorker much longer. Z. got a tenure-track job near DC, so we are going home. We may have to live in Virginia (The horror! The horror! And believe you me, Heart of Darkness references are not much misplaced with respect to certain aspects of Virginia.), but we'll be in the greater DC area. I will greatly miss my colleagues and the wonderful fans of NY, people like cesperanza, astolat, geekturnedvamp, and many, many others. Also, I'll miss my 24-hour gym and the St. Agnes book sale. But I won't miss the crowds or the noise.
Gerald Zaltman, How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market: We think in metaphors, and marketers should understand those metaphors, and understand that concepts are linked so that if you activat e one you'll also activate a bunch of related concepts. Okay? That's a few hundred pages right there. Also, and this is really scary, it's possible to change people's memories of a product experience by careful advertising, so they think they liked something that, immediately after they'd experienced it, they initially said they disliked. Memory isn't fixed; it's not even very stable. Zaltman warns marketers not to use their powers for evil, but then why is he telling them how to do it?
Stan Soocher, They Fought the Law: Rock Music Goes to Court: Neat title, but the neatness ends there. Musicians are in court for a variety of reasons: royalty disputes; attempts to enforce publicity rights; management and break-up fights; copyright infringement cases; obscenity prosecutions; tort suits against hidden messages encouraging suicide; etc. Soocher offers a smattering of each, which leads to some juicy tidbits, especially about a buxom singer's copyright infringement suit against Michael Jackson, but does not constitute a book in any other sense than the physical.
Thomas Mallon, Stolen Words: Forays into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism: Mallon, on the other hand, offers a smattering of plagiarism cases and more general reflections, but the topic is limited enough that the result is a coherent whole. He's a good writer, and the examples are often fascinating. He does have a much broader definition of plagiarism than I do, which is sometimes disconcerting, as when he calls Ted Sorenson a plagiarist for riffing on Oliver Wendell Holmes's "It is now the moment ... to recall what our country has done for each of us, and to ask ourselves what we can do for our country in return" - making JFK a double plagiarist, for claiming Sorenson's words as his own in the popular consciousness. This seems to me a silly way to think about it, because conventions of attribution differ across situations, but Mallon is entertaining as he casts his net too wide. (I personally think Sorenson's tightening of the chiasmus created a new and better phrase, entitling him to our credit; there's a reason we remember JFK's speech and not Holmes's words.)
Paco Underhill, Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping: The trouble with books written by currently active management consultants is that they don't specify enough, so you have to buy their personalized services to really get their expertise, which makes for somewhat boring and aggravatingly undetailed writing. When Underhill does give real tidbits, they're often fun: you have to organize a store to avoid the "butt-brush" factor, because women will stop shopping and leave if people bump into them from behind because the aisles are too narrow. And if you want people to take baskets - and you do, because it increases average sales a bunch from when people have to juggle what they want to buy in two hands - you have to put them in just the right places, or they're worse than useless. If there had been more of that kind of thing, this would have been a fun book.
Philip Gourevitch, A Cold Case: This is a New Yorker article, not a book; I finished it in a little over half an hour. It's not a bad article. It traces the history of a double homicide in 1970, whose chief suspect vanished from New York, only to be found nearly thirty years later in California. The brevity prevents extreme depth of inquiry into either the cops or the robbers, but it's an entertaining true-crime story.
Keith Robbins, Churchill: This short book didn't satisfy my Churchillian needs; it had very little from the man himself, and gave equal attention to every part of his career. The author's theory is that Churchill's life is ultimately a story of failure: he presided over the dissolution of the British Empire and the passing of the mantle of defender of the free world to the United States, exactly the things he never wanted to happen. It's certainly an interesting way of looking at the Last Lion, but not a very inspiring one.
Gerard Pommier, Erotic Anger: A User's Manual: This book made me remember why I stopped reading psychoanalytic criticism. It's possible that my lack of a dream life makes it harder for me to believe that rich insights can come out of a dream, but the real problem I had was that the book was boring and not user-friendly at all. Maybe the translator contributed to the problem; the book was originally in French. Anyhow, the title and the cover (a hand on some soft yielding flesh, like a back or a thigh, not unlike Clark's hand on Alicia in Obsession, though not as attractive) were false advertising. The book is a series of sort-of case studies through which the author explores the idea of castration and the impossibility of desire. The stories were too particular to be interesting, the dream images so idiosyncratic that I didn't engage with them even if they were in fact therapeutically productive. Anger may be tied up with eros, but this book didn't help me understand that any better. Indeed, Obsession was probably more enlightening on the subject.
David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There: Bobos are bourgeois bohemians, people who have resolved the conflict between artistic creativity/freedom and making money in the market, and now live a strange hybrid of both lives. Brooks, as he admits, has turned self-loathing into an art form, and he's darn good at mocking this new upper class - of which I'm clearly a member - with the killer detail. "You will talk about your nanny as if she were your close personal friend, as if it were just a weird triviality that you happen to live in a $900,000 Santa Monica house and she takes the bus two hours each day to the barrio." Early on, there's a wonderful comparison of the NYT wedding pages in the 1950s-60s to those now, a miniature chronicle of every major change in American society. I was a bit tired of the tone by the end; Brooks is too clever by about a third, and occasionally he slips up and falls back into the bobo mentality, as when he says, "Only about 20 percent of the adult population of America possesses a college degree, but in many large cities and suburban office parks, you can walk from office to office, for mile upon mile, and almost everybody in the place will have a sheepskin in the drawer." Was he thinking about the support staff, the people who don't have desks, much less drawers? But that's the kind of thought Brooks' work induces, which makes it a success to me.
Books picked up at Irving House in Cambridge, on the shelf for guests; I traded others I'd finished for these.
Margaret Yorke, Pieces of Justice: After I read these short stories, I was really surprised to see that this collection was published in 1994, though the stories range from 1997 to 1993 for original publication dates. It's full of vicious and outdated stereotypes: women are nasty and hate sex; men are nasty too, but want sex. Women don't work outside the home and divorce is unthinkable because shameful. Women kill for jealousy and spite, while men kill to get rid of the women who are ruining their lives. Murderers are usually punished, often by convenient heart attacks or bee stings from which they could have been saved if only the people they just killed had been there - isn't it ironic? I kept reading on the off chance that things would improve, but nope.
Jane Haddon, Bleeding Hearts: A Gregor Demarkian Mystery: From the mystery section these days, you'd think there were more ex-FBI VCU profilers hanging around than serial killers, though perhaps not by much. Demarkian's an extremely sane version of this character, living in his old Armenian-American neighborhood in Philadelphia, when a neighbor gets caught up in a five-year-old mystery, and then people start to die again. There are some nice turns of phrase - I liked the description of the man who looked like a flexible wire in a good overcoat. However, the person whodunnit was telegraphed so strongly that even I knew who it was for the last fifty pages or so. And I'm not exactly Sherlock Holmes with these things; I'm more the Watson type.
Jeremiah Healy, The Only Good Lawyer: This was the last Irving House book I read, and my favorite of the lot. Protagonist-PI Cuddy investigates a racially charged murder to help out the accused's defense attorney, an old friend, and quickly finds that a lot more is going on in the case than meets the eye. Everything moved briskly and engagingly, until the end when the bad guy got a bad case of expositionitis. Note to self: when I commit a murder, I will not tell all, no matter how certain I am that the plucky detective I've trapped is about to die at my hands. Except for that, it was decent train reading on the way back to NYC.
Gene Wolfe, The Death of Dr. Island/John M. Ford, Fugue State: Tor SF doubles have one novella on one side, and the other upside down on the back, so there are two fronts. I wasn't moved by either story. In the first, our protagonist Nick comes to a floating island orbiting - was it Saturn or Jupiter? I forget, to be treated for his antisocial behavior. Or that's what he thinks; it isn't necessarily what he gets. For manipulation of the damaged for the greater social good, I prefer Sleator's House of Stairs, a creepy novel from my childhood. In the Ford story, Forester, Baker, Margrave, the Commander, Jane Caladon and Irene Kiel move through several configurations - Forester and Baker start out as police officers in an era that's taken Fahrenheit 451 to a whole new level by not only burning books but erasing people's memories of them and of their authors, and Forester is swept up into a conspiracy in which Margrave, Caladon and Kiel figure. Then things change, and we're in an alternate universe in which the Air Patrol keeps the skies free and the United States, what's left of them, in subordination. Then things change, and we're suddenly medieval, with wizards and angels, and Forester is a title rather than a name. Then things change - then change - you get the idea. In a reversal of standard tropes, the men are universals, the women particular, but that didn't seem to mean anything, because Kiel and Caladon recur in the scenarios too; they just have real names. The reveal was sort of science-fictiony and sort of philosophical speculation, and it didn't work for me.
Keith R. A. DeCandido, Farscape: House of Cards: O tie-in novels, how I have missed you! Or no, not really, but this one got decent reviews on Amazon and my Farscape interest is far from satisfied, so I gave it a whirl. DeCandido has the characters' voices down competently, and he tells a very episode-like story, with bad guys who clearly have other lives that just happen to intersect with Moya's crew, rather than seeming to have been constructed just to encounter the heroes as is too often the case. The setting, a Las Vegas-type planet going through a rough patch - literally - is nicely done, as is Crichton's reaction to it, which is not what you might expect: DeCandido takes something we know about Crichton's inferior physiology and makes it useful to the story.
Space Opera, eds. Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough. Despite the title, this collection includes both sf and fantasy featuring music in some important role. I noticed that the non-space-based stories tended to be in primitive/rural spaces; there were very few stories in urban settings, as if music couldn't really exist in the city. Authors include both editors, Gene Wolfe, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Peter S. Beagle, Steven Brust (whose story is urban), Alan Dean Foster, Suzette Hadden Elgin, Josepha Sherman, Charles de Lint, and Jody Lynn Nye. I didn't find the stories memorable, but if you really like reading about music, Scarborough's "Scarborough Fair" is a nice story of love, loss and forgiveness, while Brust's "Drift" is a clever reworking of the John Henry story, man v. machine.
Orson Scott Card, Wyrms: Say what you like about him, Card's range is undeniable. This book is about a young girl on a distant planet in the far future, a girl who realizes that she's heir to the throne though her father has been enslaved by the usurper who now rules. She must struggle to survive court politics, though when she learns that she's the subject of a thousand-year-old prophecy, she's no longer safe and has to begin a journey to a strange city of half-humans where humanity's fragile accommodation with the planet will either be solidified or destroyed. Whew! Even saying it was a mouthful ("typing it was a keyboardful" lacks the same effect, don't you think?). The protagonist is a bit of a cold fish, though she's supposed to be; the aliens were interesting though scientifically they seemed a bit shaky; and a lot of information came out in big indigestible chunks along the way as we learned we were in a sf novel and not a fantasy novel. Still not sure how the prophecy fits in, either. Not Card's best, but not embarrassing.
Diane Duane, So You Want To Be a Wizard: This is a fairly cute variant on the "two kids discover they have magical mystical powers that make them the only ones who can save the world, so they go do it" story. Thank goodness there weren't many cats, because I find Duane unbearable on the subject of cats. The dark alterna-Manhattan where the kids were forced to venture had some genuinely creepy aspects, including terrible dragonfly-helicopter things that attacked them as soon as they arrived, and an antagonist who believed he was a good guy and showed more moral complexity than Duane has sometimes given her characters. I think I would have enjoyed this a lot more if I'd read it when I was really a kid. rachelmanija discusses the entire Wizard series, with spoilers, here.
Helen Dunmore, Your Blue-Eyed Boy: I ordered this on melymbrosia's recommendation, I think. It's a novel about a judge in rural England whose past comes back to haunt her, in the form of an old lover who just might be trying to blackmail her. The novel asks: who are we? Are we the same people we were twenty years ago? And how far will an ordinary, upstanding citizen go to protect her ordinary, upstanding life? The judge's domestic situation felt depressingly realistic, as did her desperation. The title comes from ee cummings: "how do you like your blue-eyed boy now, mr. death?" I'm not sure who the blue-eyed boy is supposed to be in the novel, but I do know there's someone on LJ with a wonderful Lex icon using that quote.
Coming soon: review essay on becoming a pornographer.
First up, I am not going to be a reluctant New Yorker much longer. Z. got a tenure-track job near DC, so we are going home. We may have to live in Virginia (The horror! The horror! And believe you me, Heart of Darkness references are not much misplaced with respect to certain aspects of Virginia.), but we'll be in the greater DC area. I will greatly miss my colleagues and the wonderful fans of NY, people like cesperanza, astolat, geekturnedvamp, and many, many others. Also, I'll miss my 24-hour gym and the St. Agnes book sale. But I won't miss the crowds or the noise.
Gerald Zaltman, How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market: We think in metaphors, and marketers should understand those metaphors, and understand that concepts are linked so that if you activat e one you'll also activate a bunch of related concepts. Okay? That's a few hundred pages right there. Also, and this is really scary, it's possible to change people's memories of a product experience by careful advertising, so they think they liked something that, immediately after they'd experienced it, they initially said they disliked. Memory isn't fixed; it's not even very stable. Zaltman warns marketers not to use their powers for evil, but then why is he telling them how to do it?
Stan Soocher, They Fought the Law: Rock Music Goes to Court: Neat title, but the neatness ends there. Musicians are in court for a variety of reasons: royalty disputes; attempts to enforce publicity rights; management and break-up fights; copyright infringement cases; obscenity prosecutions; tort suits against hidden messages encouraging suicide; etc. Soocher offers a smattering of each, which leads to some juicy tidbits, especially about a buxom singer's copyright infringement suit against Michael Jackson, but does not constitute a book in any other sense than the physical.
Thomas Mallon, Stolen Words: Forays into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism: Mallon, on the other hand, offers a smattering of plagiarism cases and more general reflections, but the topic is limited enough that the result is a coherent whole. He's a good writer, and the examples are often fascinating. He does have a much broader definition of plagiarism than I do, which is sometimes disconcerting, as when he calls Ted Sorenson a plagiarist for riffing on Oliver Wendell Holmes's "It is now the moment ... to recall what our country has done for each of us, and to ask ourselves what we can do for our country in return" - making JFK a double plagiarist, for claiming Sorenson's words as his own in the popular consciousness. This seems to me a silly way to think about it, because conventions of attribution differ across situations, but Mallon is entertaining as he casts his net too wide. (I personally think Sorenson's tightening of the chiasmus created a new and better phrase, entitling him to our credit; there's a reason we remember JFK's speech and not Holmes's words.)
Paco Underhill, Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping: The trouble with books written by currently active management consultants is that they don't specify enough, so you have to buy their personalized services to really get their expertise, which makes for somewhat boring and aggravatingly undetailed writing. When Underhill does give real tidbits, they're often fun: you have to organize a store to avoid the "butt-brush" factor, because women will stop shopping and leave if people bump into them from behind because the aisles are too narrow. And if you want people to take baskets - and you do, because it increases average sales a bunch from when people have to juggle what they want to buy in two hands - you have to put them in just the right places, or they're worse than useless. If there had been more of that kind of thing, this would have been a fun book.
Philip Gourevitch, A Cold Case: This is a New Yorker article, not a book; I finished it in a little over half an hour. It's not a bad article. It traces the history of a double homicide in 1970, whose chief suspect vanished from New York, only to be found nearly thirty years later in California. The brevity prevents extreme depth of inquiry into either the cops or the robbers, but it's an entertaining true-crime story.
Keith Robbins, Churchill: This short book didn't satisfy my Churchillian needs; it had very little from the man himself, and gave equal attention to every part of his career. The author's theory is that Churchill's life is ultimately a story of failure: he presided over the dissolution of the British Empire and the passing of the mantle of defender of the free world to the United States, exactly the things he never wanted to happen. It's certainly an interesting way of looking at the Last Lion, but not a very inspiring one.
Gerard Pommier, Erotic Anger: A User's Manual: This book made me remember why I stopped reading psychoanalytic criticism. It's possible that my lack of a dream life makes it harder for me to believe that rich insights can come out of a dream, but the real problem I had was that the book was boring and not user-friendly at all. Maybe the translator contributed to the problem; the book was originally in French. Anyhow, the title and the cover (a hand on some soft yielding flesh, like a back or a thigh, not unlike Clark's hand on Alicia in Obsession, though not as attractive) were false advertising. The book is a series of sort-of case studies through which the author explores the idea of castration and the impossibility of desire. The stories were too particular to be interesting, the dream images so idiosyncratic that I didn't engage with them even if they were in fact therapeutically productive. Anger may be tied up with eros, but this book didn't help me understand that any better. Indeed, Obsession was probably more enlightening on the subject.
David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There: Bobos are bourgeois bohemians, people who have resolved the conflict between artistic creativity/freedom and making money in the market, and now live a strange hybrid of both lives. Brooks, as he admits, has turned self-loathing into an art form, and he's darn good at mocking this new upper class - of which I'm clearly a member - with the killer detail. "You will talk about your nanny as if she were your close personal friend, as if it were just a weird triviality that you happen to live in a $900,000 Santa Monica house and she takes the bus two hours each day to the barrio." Early on, there's a wonderful comparison of the NYT wedding pages in the 1950s-60s to those now, a miniature chronicle of every major change in American society. I was a bit tired of the tone by the end; Brooks is too clever by about a third, and occasionally he slips up and falls back into the bobo mentality, as when he says, "Only about 20 percent of the adult population of America possesses a college degree, but in many large cities and suburban office parks, you can walk from office to office, for mile upon mile, and almost everybody in the place will have a sheepskin in the drawer." Was he thinking about the support staff, the people who don't have desks, much less drawers? But that's the kind of thought Brooks' work induces, which makes it a success to me.
Books picked up at Irving House in Cambridge, on the shelf for guests; I traded others I'd finished for these.
Margaret Yorke, Pieces of Justice: After I read these short stories, I was really surprised to see that this collection was published in 1994, though the stories range from 1997 to 1993 for original publication dates. It's full of vicious and outdated stereotypes: women are nasty and hate sex; men are nasty too, but want sex. Women don't work outside the home and divorce is unthinkable because shameful. Women kill for jealousy and spite, while men kill to get rid of the women who are ruining their lives. Murderers are usually punished, often by convenient heart attacks or bee stings from which they could have been saved if only the people they just killed had been there - isn't it ironic? I kept reading on the off chance that things would improve, but nope.
Jane Haddon, Bleeding Hearts: A Gregor Demarkian Mystery: From the mystery section these days, you'd think there were more ex-FBI VCU profilers hanging around than serial killers, though perhaps not by much. Demarkian's an extremely sane version of this character, living in his old Armenian-American neighborhood in Philadelphia, when a neighbor gets caught up in a five-year-old mystery, and then people start to die again. There are some nice turns of phrase - I liked the description of the man who looked like a flexible wire in a good overcoat. However, the person whodunnit was telegraphed so strongly that even I knew who it was for the last fifty pages or so. And I'm not exactly Sherlock Holmes with these things; I'm more the Watson type.
Jeremiah Healy, The Only Good Lawyer: This was the last Irving House book I read, and my favorite of the lot. Protagonist-PI Cuddy investigates a racially charged murder to help out the accused's defense attorney, an old friend, and quickly finds that a lot more is going on in the case than meets the eye. Everything moved briskly and engagingly, until the end when the bad guy got a bad case of expositionitis. Note to self: when I commit a murder, I will not tell all, no matter how certain I am that the plucky detective I've trapped is about to die at my hands. Except for that, it was decent train reading on the way back to NYC.
Gene Wolfe, The Death of Dr. Island/John M. Ford, Fugue State: Tor SF doubles have one novella on one side, and the other upside down on the back, so there are two fronts. I wasn't moved by either story. In the first, our protagonist Nick comes to a floating island orbiting - was it Saturn or Jupiter? I forget, to be treated for his antisocial behavior. Or that's what he thinks; it isn't necessarily what he gets. For manipulation of the damaged for the greater social good, I prefer Sleator's House of Stairs, a creepy novel from my childhood. In the Ford story, Forester, Baker, Margrave, the Commander, Jane Caladon and Irene Kiel move through several configurations - Forester and Baker start out as police officers in an era that's taken Fahrenheit 451 to a whole new level by not only burning books but erasing people's memories of them and of their authors, and Forester is swept up into a conspiracy in which Margrave, Caladon and Kiel figure. Then things change, and we're in an alternate universe in which the Air Patrol keeps the skies free and the United States, what's left of them, in subordination. Then things change, and we're suddenly medieval, with wizards and angels, and Forester is a title rather than a name. Then things change - then change - you get the idea. In a reversal of standard tropes, the men are universals, the women particular, but that didn't seem to mean anything, because Kiel and Caladon recur in the scenarios too; they just have real names. The reveal was sort of science-fictiony and sort of philosophical speculation, and it didn't work for me.
Keith R. A. DeCandido, Farscape: House of Cards: O tie-in novels, how I have missed you! Or no, not really, but this one got decent reviews on Amazon and my Farscape interest is far from satisfied, so I gave it a whirl. DeCandido has the characters' voices down competently, and he tells a very episode-like story, with bad guys who clearly have other lives that just happen to intersect with Moya's crew, rather than seeming to have been constructed just to encounter the heroes as is too often the case. The setting, a Las Vegas-type planet going through a rough patch - literally - is nicely done, as is Crichton's reaction to it, which is not what you might expect: DeCandido takes something we know about Crichton's inferior physiology and makes it useful to the story.
Space Opera, eds. Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough. Despite the title, this collection includes both sf and fantasy featuring music in some important role. I noticed that the non-space-based stories tended to be in primitive/rural spaces; there were very few stories in urban settings, as if music couldn't really exist in the city. Authors include both editors, Gene Wolfe, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Peter S. Beagle, Steven Brust (whose story is urban), Alan Dean Foster, Suzette Hadden Elgin, Josepha Sherman, Charles de Lint, and Jody Lynn Nye. I didn't find the stories memorable, but if you really like reading about music, Scarborough's "Scarborough Fair" is a nice story of love, loss and forgiveness, while Brust's "Drift" is a clever reworking of the John Henry story, man v. machine.
Orson Scott Card, Wyrms: Say what you like about him, Card's range is undeniable. This book is about a young girl on a distant planet in the far future, a girl who realizes that she's heir to the throne though her father has been enslaved by the usurper who now rules. She must struggle to survive court politics, though when she learns that she's the subject of a thousand-year-old prophecy, she's no longer safe and has to begin a journey to a strange city of half-humans where humanity's fragile accommodation with the planet will either be solidified or destroyed. Whew! Even saying it was a mouthful ("typing it was a keyboardful" lacks the same effect, don't you think?). The protagonist is a bit of a cold fish, though she's supposed to be; the aliens were interesting though scientifically they seemed a bit shaky; and a lot of information came out in big indigestible chunks along the way as we learned we were in a sf novel and not a fantasy novel. Still not sure how the prophecy fits in, either. Not Card's best, but not embarrassing.
Diane Duane, So You Want To Be a Wizard: This is a fairly cute variant on the "two kids discover they have magical mystical powers that make them the only ones who can save the world, so they go do it" story. Thank goodness there weren't many cats, because I find Duane unbearable on the subject of cats. The dark alterna-Manhattan where the kids were forced to venture had some genuinely creepy aspects, including terrible dragonfly-helicopter things that attacked them as soon as they arrived, and an antagonist who believed he was a good guy and showed more moral complexity than Duane has sometimes given her characters. I think I would have enjoyed this a lot more if I'd read it when I was really a kid. rachelmanija discusses the entire Wizard series, with spoilers, here.
Helen Dunmore, Your Blue-Eyed Boy: I ordered this on melymbrosia's recommendation, I think. It's a novel about a judge in rural England whose past comes back to haunt her, in the form of an old lover who just might be trying to blackmail her. The novel asks: who are we? Are we the same people we were twenty years ago? And how far will an ordinary, upstanding citizen go to protect her ordinary, upstanding life? The judge's domestic situation felt depressingly realistic, as did her desperation. The title comes from ee cummings: "how do you like your blue-eyed boy now, mr. death?" I'm not sure who the blue-eyed boy is supposed to be in the novel, but I do know there's someone on LJ with a wonderful Lex icon using that quote.
Coming soon: review essay on becoming a pornographer.