November 30, 2005
Some Buried Caesar
I was walking past Powell's Books on 57th Street some years ago when I saw the irresistible discards box outside. On the top was a torn paperback with a gaudy illustration: Some Buried Caesar was the title. Efffusive endorsements rang out from the front and back covers: "The best ... unbeatable!". The author: Rex Stout (what a great name!), creator of the irritating, contrary, and iconoclastic detective-gourmand Nero Wolfe. I recognised the name from a review (of what?) that I had read, which compared the author to P G Wodehouse and Rex Stout. Already having read, re-read, and much loved the former, I picked up the latter. I could not have done better: Some Buried Caesar is one of Stout's earlier, "post-Depression and pre-war" mysteries, and shows his strengths beautifully. It features a different setting for the action: usually, Wolfe sits in his custom-made chair in his Manhattan townhouse, keeps to his schedule, berates Archie Goodwin, his Man Friday, and drinks beer. In this, the book starts off with Archie crashing the car en route to show orchids at the State Fair. From there, it is but a hop, skip, and jump to the introduction of Lily Rowan, who graces many subsequent mysteries in small but complicating roles; the revelation that Methodists make the best chicken fricassee (and do'n't hold the dumplings); and that anthrax is a disease of cattle. Really, I had not grasped this latter bit, despite the Gang of Four song, until this book's description of the disease as it ravages a cattle herd. Like Wodehouse, Stout has an easy way with words, and gives his characters such distinctive voices that they become caricatures of themselves. Archie would be the perfect tough guy for a Marlowe or Hammett novel, except that he is in the company of Wolfe, who is too cerebral for straight-up noir; Wolfe, confusingly, is also too decadent, in his quiet little "seventh-of-a-ton" way. He has a rooftop greehouse filled with roses, a private chef, and brooks no nonsense. Some Buried Caesar is amongst my favourite mysteries; other Wolfe adventures I really enjoy are Fer-de-Lance, the first to feature the detective; Too Many Cooks; The League of Frightened Men, of which I found a first edition in a dusty shop in Palo Alto that burnt down a few days after I raided their selection; and Please Pass The Guilt, one of the later stories but featuring such odd period vocabulary as "balloon-rimmed cheaters". Even Google has not been able to help with illustrating that term.... Read more
November 14, 2005
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
I am very happily reading select Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, in the edition illustrated by Sidney Paget. (To me, he will always be the illustrator, much as Tenniel is to Alice's Adventures Underground, or John O'Neill to The Wizard of Oz.) Complete text is available online.... Read more
November 09, 2005
Almost French
I am adding a widget that shows my current "reading list", thanks to the cheesily-designed website Chain Reading. And I am reading Sarah Turnbull's "Almost French", the satisfying story of an Aussie who implusively moves to Paris for "love and a new life." Everything works out, but slowly, and the travails of French bureaucracy that she related did not make as much of an impression as did the way she ironed out the massive cultural differences with her boyfriend-fiance-husband (there, I spoiled it for you), his friends and family, and builders, neighbours, et al. She also observed some riots, but that's quotidian around Paris now, in'it?... Read more
November 03, 2005
Lady Chatterly's Lover
In a rush on the way out the door this ack emma, I grabbed a hardbound book from the shelf. I sat down in my seat on the bus to find out that it was the stupefyingly dull "Lady Chatterly's Lover," which I had last attempted to read while spending an afternoon in Rockridge (indeed, a receipt from a nice wine-bar in that area served as the bookmark). And I again got about sixty pages into the book and could not suppress my boredom any longer. I turned out the window and watched traffic flow past.... Read more
October 10, 2005
Galahad at Blandings
After the delightful experience of re-reading Psmith in the City, I picked up a copy of Galahad at Blandings from a going-out-of-business second-hand bookstore (why are the works of Wodehouse available only erratically in the States? I should have bought the lush stack I espied at Dutton's tidy new location in Beverly Hills). The going is a bit slower than the other Blandings books, which I recall with great fondness as being especially light. Wodehouse famously said of his novels: "I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going deep down into life and not caring a damn". I have a faint memory of our sixth-grade English teacher reading Psmith and Mike aloud to us, emphasizing that the initial "P" was silent, and spurious (our hero Rupert could not abide having such a common name on his uncommon character), but I cannot imagine how such a book, filled not only with anachronistic English school-boy humour but also with many mentions of typical British institutions, came across to eleven-year-old Americans. No wonder Anar says that I have more affectations in my language than she does after three-odd years of living in London. Galahad is the epitome of a type in Wodehouse: dashing and socially clairvoyant, he is uniquely able to negotiate the social strata "without a bean to his name". He brings sundered hearts together through the most outlandish schemes, and always emerges himself unscathed.... Read more
October 04, 2005
Psmith in the City
Books with climactic cricket concepts: Dorothy Sayers's Murder Must Advertise: a match between an advertising firm and a teetotalling advertiser; Sarah Caudwell's The Shortest Way to Hades: a match between Artists and Writers in Corfu's Esplanade; and P G Wodehouse's Psmith in the City: a match featuring our hero's amanuensis and helpmeet, Mike.... Read more
September 23, 2005
everything i ate
Nico sent me a copy of TUCKER SHAW's "a year in the life of my mouth", or "everything i ate", a lavishly-photographed chronicle of last year from the menu of a Manhattan hipster. Plenty good-looking snaps of meals (well, take-out) at John's, Sammy's, the 2nd Ave Deli, and pushcart after pushcart.... Read more
September 22, 2005
Save Twilight
A volume of selected poems by Julio Cortázar, with a beautiful sepia-toned photograph as the cover illustration. One imagines the setting to be a Parisian garret. ... somewhere I have an unfortunate, never-completely-read, worn and dog-eared copy of Hopscotch, the daring English translation of Cortázar's Rayuela.... Read more
September 18, 2005
The Mysterious Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
I picked up a 60p paperback at half-price from a stall at Spitalfields Market and read it on the flight back. Spine-tingling, from the inhumane horror of the decaying morals of the title character and from its effect on his lifelong friend, Dr Lanyon.... Read more
September 10, 2005
How Not To Use the Cellular Telephone
Umberto Eco's essay on How not to use the cellular telephone springs to mind whenever I think about how sensitive I am to the buzzing slab of metal in my pocket, to the chirp of the pager on my belt, to the ringing of a bluetooth headset. Thanks to Amazon for providing the searchable text and scanned pages of How to travel with a salmon, his excellent and hilarious collection of essays. I was a little surprised to see that his latest novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, does not appear in English translation by the formidable William Weaver. The subject puts me off, too: an apparently-trendy work in which the protagonist loses his personal memory, but remembers exactly each comic book, novel, and printed word he has read. The work unfolds partly as a graphic novel. Although neither the cultural synthesis nor collage-like accumulation of information is foreign to Eco's novels, the modernity rubs me the wrong way. Eco has written about memory and isolation before, in both The Island of the Day Before and in Foucault's Pendulum.... Read more
September 04, 2005
Thus was Adonis Murdered
Reading the late Dame Sarah Caudwell's delightful epistolary mystery novels featuring a quartet (or quintet, or sextet) of New Square barristers, I recalled picking up The Sibyl in Her Grave from a sidewalk sale in La Jolla five years ago, probably just after it was published. The Edward Gorey cover illustration caught my eye, and the curious title excited my imagination.... Read more
September 03, 2005
The Fever Trail
Mark Hongsbaum's account of the discovery, cultivation, and exploitation of the cinchona meanders too much to be captivating. The story wanders through thrilling and mysterious places: the cordillera, Tucuman, Kew Gardens, and Panama.... Read more
August 31, 2005
Goodbye, Kepler's.
Kepler's bookstore in Menlo Park has closed, after fifty years. Bookstore closings bring sadness: "It's like a relative in the family dying," Roy Borrone, owner of Cafe Borrone next door to Kepler's, told the Weekly late Wednesday morning. He said he relocated his restaurant from Redwood City to Menlo Park to be adjacent to Kepler's when it moved across El Camino Real to its present location in the late 1980s. Neil Gaiman remonstrates us: "Remember, if you have a local bookshop you like, buy your books there. Otherwise it could happen to you." I say that this goes for any local shop: flowers, groceries, clothes, whatnot.... Read more
August 29, 2005
In which we read a maghrebi detective story
Jonathan Smolin's translation of Abdelilah Hamdouchi's The White Fly is available at the Words Without Borders web site.... Read more
August 01, 2005
In which we know that malt does more than Milton can
My word! Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love blew me away. The dialogue is crisp, witty, full of verve: the characters leap off the page. I am very sorry that I skipped this play when it had its North American premier at San Francisco's ACT. The play tells the story of the class-bound classicist A E Housman, whose poetry, especially "A Shropshire Lad", shaped much of my understanding of metre and form. Housman travels down the Styx as he shakes off this mortal coil, and meets characters from his past. Sad, wistful, and terrifically funny.... Read more
July 09, 2005
In which I take a mundane journey
Kate Pocrass has been collecting stories and minor adventures in San Francisco for three years, and has published the first volume resulting from her Mundane Journeys project. One can call 415 364 1465 for a selection, updated weekly, or thumb through the pocket-poet-sized book, which is quaint and quirky and smacks of utter uselessness. But she did it, not I, so props to her. Adah Balinsky's marvellous Stairway Walks in San Francisco is another favourite San Francisco book.... Read more
July 05, 2005
In which I am exposed to the elements of murder
After another enthusiastic reading of Dorothy Sayer's romantic piffle, Strong Poison, and watching the filmed dramatisation of the inept adolescence of Graham Young in The Young Poisoner's Handbook, it came as little surprise that I jumped on a recent Oxford title, "The Elements of Murder". Much of the narrative, half popular science and half murder-mystery, unfolds through inane run-on sentences reminiscent of an enthusiastic high-school scholar who has done a vast amount of research and simply cannot wait to express everything on paper. At times, I suspected that the author and his editor were founding members of the Royal Society for the Conservation of Commas, so infrequent was the use a comma when changing subjects in a complex-compound sentence. To his credit, he works in many useful, and sometimes significant, historical nuggets: "Seaweed is also rich in arsenic and on the remote Scottish island of North Ronaldsey there is a breed of sheep which feeds exclusively on seaweed and they appear to thrive on it." He tells the story of the Styrian peasants who reportedly took arsenic regularly, to improve their complexion and to aid their respiratory systems. He credits the defence of Mary Ann Cotton, a noted poisoner, with using the story of the Styrians at her trial. (Anachronistic? I wonder how widely known the Styrian legend was in mid-19th-century England.) Other of his questionable writing: the excitable etymology. "The name merury, by which we known this element, comes from the name of the planet and its first recorded use was by the Greek philosopher Theophrastus around 300 BC." In fact, the association of the planets and metallic elements did not occur until 1500 years later, during the alchemical writings of the Middle Ages. Aside: I have a vivid memory of a National Geographic issue on mercury, which featured a striking photograph of a man floating on his back in a pool of quicksilver.... Read more
July 04, 2005
Nicholas
I picked up a copy of Anthea Bell's new translation of Nicholas, the classic illustrated story of a puckish French school-boy. The elegant, cloth-bound Phaidon edition features the charming illustrations by Jean-Jacques Sempe. Goscinny died in 1977, but both the Nicholas series of books and the phenomenal Asterix comics, produced in collaboration with the devilish Albert Uderzo (whom I met unexpectedly at Hamley's in London), have become classics, in no small part due to Bell's lyrical and humourous translation.... Read more
June 30, 2005
Notes from Undergound / The Double
I began reading Fyodor Dostoevsky's novella "The Double", and, like many of the secondary characters, I find myself bewildered. The edition I have (one of the Penguin Classics series) feels a little heavy in the rendering, but frankly Dostoevsky's prose obscures his tale of a man possessed by madness (if that is, in fact, what transpires). I'm going to go back to Tolstoy's "Master and Man" for my next Russian novella, and then to Mikhail Lermontov's "A Hero For Our Time" or Nikolai Gogol's short stories.... Read more
June 28, 2005
In which I get no forrarder
After a few recent trips by 'plane, I have re-(re-)read much of Dorothy Sayers' oeuvre featuring the monocled 'tec Lord Peter Wimsey. Much to my chagrin, I found myself feeling much like this rabbity protagonist when I found my carefully-arranged bottles of port all upended and cleaned, just as in the scene from her stage-play Busman's Honeymoon in which the provincial charwoman Mrs Rundle does ditto damage to His Lordship's carefully-swaddled bottles. My case was perhaps less severe, but also hilarious. "Never you mind that, Mr. Bunter. I'll soon 'ave them bottles clean." "Bottles?" said Bunter. "What bottles?" A frightful suspicion shot through his brain. "What have you got there?" "Why," said Mrs. Ruddle, "one o' them dirty old bottles you brought along with you." She displayed her booty in triumph. "Sech a state they're in. All over whitewash." Bunter's world reeled about him and he clutched at the corner of the settle. "My God!" "You couldn't put a thing like that on the table, could you now?" "Woman!" cried Bunter, and snatched the bottle from her, "that's the Cockburn '96!" "Ow, is it?" said Mrs. Ruddle, mystified. "There now! I thought it was summink to drink." ... "You have not, I trust, handled any of the other bottles?" "Only to unpack 'em and set 'em right side up," Mrs. Ruddle assured him cheerfully. "Them cases'll come in 'andy for kindling." Dorothy Sayers novels make excellent, and riveting, reading. Interspersed with quotations from the classics, endless piffle, and quaint, feudal Old England ('though they take place Between The Wars), the mysteries rise far beyond the stereotypes of the genre while maintaining the classic whodunit form. Almost all are murder mysteries, excepting perhaps "The Nine Tailors", which is a stupendously beautiful book. And people do die, perhaps outside the scope of the narrative, but the novel is more of a study in character than a murder-mystery.... Read more
June 26, 2005
A Man in Full
I read Tom Wolfe's gripping and lengthy American panorama, A Man in Full, without learning any new vocabulary. (Although, through Kunstler's review of Wolfe's latest, I did learn the appropriately vivid egestive. Now why ca'n't Kunstler afford a proof-reader, or at least some software that has a spell-check function?) A Man in Full's crafty sub-plot with Epictetus itself elevates the novel to approximately the level of John Grisham, which is to say, not very high. And Grisham does courtoom and big-ego drama much more effectively than does Wolfe. In comparison with Wolfe, Grisham wins, hands-down. Whom would you rather take on a plane trip? Oh, Grisham, I reckon. Both writers have a horrible way with plot, but Grisham at least has his characters utter believable conversations. And Grisham writes about place and character in a way that feel real. But surely you are aware of Mr Wolfe's long contributions to American culture, and his witty skewering of everything from architecture to corporate America? Yes, and I figure that Grisham does ditto without actually setting out to write his novels with such a pretentious checklist. Wolfe is very proud of the quality of "reporting" that he brings to his work, subverting the assumption that the novelist should write what he (sic) knows. In this, Truman Capote out-does him. Wolfe just ca'n't win, except, perhaps, on the sartorial front.... Read more
May 17, 2005
Excepting every four hundred years.
Prompted by a technical discussion about date formats, I dug out a copy of David Ewing Duncan's superlative "Calendar: Humanity's Epic Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year", and found the author's blog. As for the automated manipulation of the calendar, a colleague pointed out this tit-bit o' unix fun: (salim@xampanyet) ~ % cal -3 9 1752 August 1752 September 1752 October 1752 Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 1 2 14 15 16 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 29 30 31 30 31 Just as we find the railroads behind the standardization of clock time, we might credit the Church for the standardization of the calendar, done so that everyone can hunt Easter eggs at the same time.... Read more
May 13, 2005
Ocean Shore Railroad
I received a copy of the long-awaited Ocean Shore Railroad, part of the "Images of Rail" series published by Arcadia Publishing. The historical notes on the idealism and history of rail along California's Highway 1 bring a tear to my eye: the right-of-way is now occupied by motorways, but the scenery of beaches and mountains remains beautiful. By the bye, construction has begun on a new, $270 million tunnel at Devil's Slide. After the tunnel is opened, the unused 1.2-mile portion of Highway 1 will be converted into a hiking and biking trail with parking on both ends.... Read more
May 07, 2005
In the beginning
Kate sent a copy of In The Beginning, a history of the King James translation of the Bible. The initial chapters of the book chronicle the travails of other translations, and of the political and economic forces that drove translation. The author jumps about a little, and tends to the didactic rather than the scholarly in the structure of paragraphs, but does provide an amusing bit of verse about Martin Luther: Devil: Monk on the latrine? You shouldn't be reading matins here! Monk: I am purging my bowels While worshiping almighty God You can have what goes down While God gets what goes up. In a twist that Ericson would love, Luther apparently had his philosophical breakthrough on the cloaca (in polite Latin).... Read more
April 29, 2005
Fudgeripple Pouchhappy
While looking for a copy of "The Man Who Stole The Atlantic Ocean", I found that the Main Libray now has wireless internet access. Spiffy: perhaps I'll work there today, although the library does not have the book (which is no longer in print, but available for $15 from online secondhand booksellers). A synopsis of the book: fat retired beach-goers find thmselves social outcasts, and take their revenge by secreting the Atlantic Ocean in the basement of their New Jersey club-house. The illustrations -- line drawings, if I remember aright -- of the protagonist, a Mr Fudgeripple Pouchhappy, delight. Eventually, kids save the day. While we're discussing infrastructure in San Francisco, why is the SFPD's online crime map application so lame?... Read more
April 17, 2005
Lusitania
In search of a yarn about seagoing shenanigans, I picked up Diana Preston's Lusitania (with the coy sub-title "An Epic Tragedy"). The third sentence: "... they found that the flashes were not the desperate signals of a last, despairing survivor ... ." And again, a few pages later: "The story of the Lusitania is, above all, about people -- whether British, German, or American, whether afloat on the liner, submerged in the submarine, or enmeshed in the various government machines ashore." This sort of vocabuulary-deprived writing hurts my brain. I intensely dislike launching into a 500-page book when the author cannot write sentence tightly enough to avoid repeating root words. I'm not looking for synonyms, I just want expressive, clear history. Although the author has an extensive section of citations, the writing style seems more like Zagat's than like an academic work. Sentences are peppered with single-word quotations, or built from phrases enclosed in quotation marks. The author capably relates the technical history involved in the sinking of the Lusitania, and the exciting naval developments leading to Germany's challenge for maritime supremacy. Sometimes she presumes historical knowledge I don't have, and this made the first few chapters rough going.... Read more
April 13, 2005
What hath God wrought?
"If I needed to build a 3,000-hole golf course on Mars, this is the man I'd call." Has to be the best endorsement ever. This article chronicles the adventure of laying fiber across three continents, under the ocean, and the amazing convolutions political and mechanical therein.... Read more
April 10, 2005
Reading round-up
Over the past few days, I've been sick abed and working the page-turners: P.G. Wodehouse (the Jeeves Omnibus, including "Carry On, Jeeves" and "The Inimitable Jeeves"; I wish I had some Blandings books handy); John Grisham ("The Chamber"); Stephen King ("Pet Sematary"); Dorothy Sayers ("Clouds of Witness"); and a very, very unwieldy paperback ed. of Cervantes' "Don Quixote". Anna and I walked down to the main library and I read through a stack of shorter Jean Merrill books, but, alas, "The Pushcart War" was unavailable. For a public library, the SFPL has a dearth of available popular titles, and its small collection is oddly scattered to the branch libraries. I find this library system creepy for its inability to hang on to copies of books: of 10 copies of "The Pushcart War", not a single copy was available for circulation, and only one was actually checked out. To its credit, the SFPL has a netflix-like reservation system, and I can even choose the branch to which desired titles will go for my convenience.... Read more
April 04, 2005
The Client
On a rainy Saturday in Pittsburgh*, I raided a friend's bookshelf and came up with a comfortably worn paperback of John Grisham's The Client. I read it the rest of the day as I shuttled back and forth on the bus and subway, and came close to completion overnight while watching the time change. This morning, as I waited for a car to take me to the airport, I raced to finish the book: "Okay, 30 pages, about half an hour." I could so do that. And then I realised, as I turned the last leaf, that a sheaf of pages had dropped from the cheap glue at the end of the binding, and I wouldn't finish the page-turner. Undaunted, I figured that the newsstands at the airport would have the book, and I could stand quietly in a corner and discover how Grisham, never the master of the powerful ending, wound up this book (which is quite good: Grisham writes great legal thrillers, much better than Scott Turow). Frustratingly, the three shops at the terminal had almost every other of his books (really: the one on the ground floor had almost a dozen thick paperback titles by him). I was totally foiled, stymied, thwarted. And by the time I get to the library, I'll have forgotten all of the exciting action of the preceding 75 pages. * Not really in Pittsburgh; I just really like the phrase, from one of P.G. Wodehouse's wickedly humourous novels. I wish I'd been reading Wodehouse instead.... Read more
March 28, 2005
Mole People
I finally read Jennifer Toth's emotional account of underground homelessness in New York City, Mole People. Toth was cutting her teeth as a journalist during the daring research and writing for this book, and sometimes the writing reflects lofty literary goals. At other times, the phrases become repetitive and the stories too brief to impart meaning or much empathy. She pursued a remarkable and difficult story, and the book is a stirring testament to that. "Mole People" reminded me of Dark Days, the film so acclaimed at Sundance a few years ago. I hadn't the chance to see the film during its short run (at the late Castro?), but I really wanted to. Turns out that one can now obtain Dark Days on DVD... Read more
March 11, 2005
The constant expansion of a single moment:
This article in the New York Times discusses Gregory Rabassa and Clarice Lispector, providing my first biographical glimpse into Lispector's writing. An incontrovertible liar who wrote in Portuguese! I first read her "Água viva" during a world-literature course at Pennsylvania State Univ., taught by one of her other translators and champions, Earl Fitz.... Read more
March 05, 2005
Suitable for Arabs and old gentlemen
I started on Andrew Lang's edition of The Arabian Nights Entertainments, which provides a child-safe retelling of the classic shenanigans: "In this book the stories are shortened here and there, and omissions are made of pieces only suitable for Arabs and old gentlemen." The ribald pieces omitted, the anthology still makes riveting reading, and Ford's pen-and-ink elegantly illustrates the adventues of Sinbad. However, I'd like a more thorough, and unexpurgated edition. Some of the breathless reporting seems drawn straight from Herodotus, Homer, or Marco Polo: "In one place I saw a tortoise which was twenty cubits long and as many broad, also a fish that was like a cow and had skin so thick that it was used to make shields."... Read more
February 24, 2005
Last Chance to Taste
I began reading Gina Mallet's wistful Last Chance to Taste, about the declining importance of food in our culture. I'm ambivalent: are we so leisurely that we can inspect and fetishize our food (well, obviously, yes); but so coddled that we have already forgotten than many of our parents' generation, immigrant or no, faced food shortages even relative to their parent's generation? The embargoes and rationing of the Wars; the lack of air shipping; At the same time, I strongly believe that we must pay close attention to our food sources. We must eat locally-grown and -obtained food, in season and organically grown. I'm all for sushi, but don't like the chemicals added to it so that it retains its colour.... Read more
February 01, 2005
Not endorsed by Tallulah Bankhead.
Simon Singh's new book, "The Big Bang" sounds like another laugh riot. What I mean is, he has written two eminently enjoyable books about math ("maths", he would say), and this little number on cosmology promises to be a good read.... Read more
January 21, 2005
January 17, 2005
wish that I could push a button
I'm re-reading Michael Frayn's Headlong, a mischevious and enjoyable story about a man who becomes obsessed with his land-rich neighbour's art collection. Is is a Brue(h)el?, he wonders. And the book is richly in the present tense, even as the action shifts from the present to the recent past to the more-distant past: Frayn artfully uses simple language to build his story. By contrast, Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent is another problem altogether, a confusingly-written legal thriller which takes place in an uncomfortable present tense. The verbs switch sometimes into the perfect, but overall the narrative has little sense of its place in the time of the book. And the story, too, is disappointing: the vocabulary feels stilted, overly-researched, pretentious. Not the legal jargon, but the characters' language. The author's attempts at vernacular amount to little more than stereotypical jive-talkin' (without the ultimate apostrophe, even: jive talkin he would have written).... Read more
January 03, 2005
Neither fish nor fowl
Picked up a marked-up and well-beaten copy of the Norton Critical Edition of Shakespeare's Henry the IVth, Part I. Perhaps now I can get to the bottom of Act II, Scene I. The much-beloved Seminary Co-op Bookstore, Chicago's labyrinthine repository of all that is printed for the social sciences and humanities, has a special section for the Norton Critical Editions, and their distinctive spines leap out from bookshelves wherever I look. After leaving Chicago, I was distressed to discover that other bookshops don't keep their Nortons all together in a special section, and spent two frustrating weeks looking for a NCE of Moby-Dick before uncovering one at Dutton's Brentwood Books.... Read more
January 02, 2005
I read it with some fava beans and a nice Chianti
After sorting through some of my more recently-shelved books, I was happy to see a copy (first printing, uncut, no less) of Thomas Harris' third instalment concerning Hannibal Lecter. I devoured the book, with its sporadic and unnerving lapses into the present tense, much as its protagonist might devour a seasonal white truffle. Hilarious horror, mocking macabre, and silly suspense. I wonder if the movie is any good: apparently the author went through several revisions, pre-publication, with the director and stars of the previous film incarnation, Silence of the Lambs (which had a pivotal scene filmed down the road from where I grew up in Pittsburgh!). A tender side-story involves a curious character who wants to see all the extant paintings by Jan Vermeer. I half-assedly tried ditto several years ago, only to find myself staring at nothing at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. I did see some beautiful works in DC, NYC, and London, but have yet to see any of the Dutch or German holdings.... Read more
December 31, 2004
Adventures underground
I picked up a copy of Randy Kennedy's Subwayland; this book collects his excellent column from the New York Times, which came to an end last year.... Read more
December 25, 2004
McDonald's Book Shops Reopens
Although I thought that McDonald's Book Shop had shuttered its doors for good, a report from the Chronicle informs me that the owner was looking for a buyer and renovating the building. And what atmosphere: "McDonald's, on Turk Street between Market and Taylor, is surrounded by residential hotels, liquor stores and porn shops. Junkies and alcoholics cluster on the sidewalk out front, shouting obscenities at one another and at passers-by." The shop boasts more than a million shabby items for sale in San Franciso's Skid Row.... Read more
December 22, 2004
Ashes to ashes
Brewster Kahle wants to complete the circle of Google's Print service: once physical media are available online, make the books, movies, concerts, et al. available at cost to people everywhere. The social and policy aspects of the internet archive are phenomenal. Their first colo is in Alexandria, where once Ptolemy took all of your books for his library (and returned to you a faithful copy, but a copy).... Read more
December 16, 2004
Thick enough to cut with a knife
The same day that the New York Times published a front-page scoop on Google's project to digitize library books, the nearby city of Salinas announced that it will close its three public libraries, including the John Steinbeck Library. For lack of $775,000 annually. Anna has student-taught in three schools in the San Francisco Unified School District; not a one has a library or librarian.... Read more
December 06, 2004
Apropa't
I have long felt a kinship to Barcelona, and was happy to find in today's mail a copy of Robert Hughes' recent study of the city, sub-titled "The Great Enchantress".... Read more
Follow, follow, follow
Read a handful of L. Frank Baum's Oz books over the weekend, in the Del Rey reissues from the '80s. The trade paperbacks unfortunately don't do justice to Jno R. Neill's beautiful line illustrations: reduced in size and on inferior paper, one can't make out a lot of the detail. Was Baum describing a Socialist paradise in his books? Another question: where does the abbreviation "Jno" for John originate? It's how Neill signs his ornate illustrations; it's also painted on the station-cab in Market Blandings, where many an interloper alights for hijinks at Lord Emsworth's estate.... Read more
November 29, 2004
(Past) Progressive writing
I picked up a copy of J P Dunleavy's Fairy Tale of New York, a rollicking book written mostly with participles. I really liked his Wrong Information Is Being Given Out At Princeton, with its antihero Stephen O'Kelly'O, and the succinct, vindictive Lady Who Liked Clean Restrooms. The narrative portions of the book remind me of William S. Burroughs in their lucidity, and in the way both authors eschew complete sentences.... Read more
November 28, 2004
Dr Dolittle
Despite the high praise accorded to Hugh Lofting's Dr Dolittle, I found it an excrescence, especially compared to its contemporaries. The level of sophistication does not approach Lews Carroll or Kenneth Grahame, as Hugh Walpole suggests in his Harper Trophy edition.... Read more
November 27, 2004
Bug book
Susan lent me an anthology of writing about insects: Insect Lives, "Stories of Mystery and Romance From A Hidden World". It contains passages from Exodus, the selfsame that JZ swore pointed to manna as being "insect shit!" in his trademark first-year lecture.... Read more
November 26, 2004
Amar Chitra Katha online
I read a lot of these classic Indian stories in comic-book form from Amar Chitra Katha when I was younger; it's how I learned many of the stories from the Mahabharata, and about Ashoka and Tansen.... Read more
November 23, 2004
Warning labels for books
Like Mad Magazine, but funny, these warning stickers for textbooks should come in handy in a Fight Club sort of way... Read more
November 20, 2004
Words Without Borders
Words Without Borders is the online magazine for international literature; supported by the US National Endowment for the Arts, its editorial board includes Chinua Achebe, Edith Grossman, and William Weaver.... Read more
November 14, 2004
rub-a-dobe
I suppose that Adobe Books in the Mission needs a shtick to attract some attention. We will be celebrating the opening of this enormous art installation. For one amazing week in November, Adobe Book Shop in San Francisco has agreed to allow it's estimated 20,000 books to be be reclassified by color. Shifting from red to orange to yellow to green, the books will follow the color spectrum continuously, changing Adobe from a neighborhood bookshop into a magical library—but only for one week. Adobe Bookshop in San Francisco’s Mission District, and all of its contents, will be transformed. It will take a crew of 20 people pulling an all - nighter fueled by caffeine and pizza all following a master organizational plan - but come Saturday morning it will be like a place that would only exist in a dream. Adobe galls me. The staff's general lackadaisickal attitude towards their books -- piled on the floor, with bugs all over them -- is one thing, but the overall shabbiiness of the shop speaks to a general disrespect of books, of people, and of the admittedly-dirty neighbourhood. Brian, who ran the late, lamented Chelsea Books, stepped away from the disintegrating Adobe more than a decade ago.... Read more
November 10, 2004
Oblique Strategies
At Moe's in Berkeley, I found a Loeb of Longus' Daphnis and Chloë. This story was the reason I wanted to study Greek in college. I have another Greek edition around here somewhere, but so far my favourite edition is Christopher Gill's translation, in B.P. Reardon's Collected Ancient Greek Novels. The Loeb editions have a well-deserved reputation as a compromise: the handy pocket-sized cloth-bound book with the miserable translations. And while they prayed, they laboured too and cast about to find a way by which they might come to see one another. Poor Chloe was void of all counsel and had not device nor plot. For the old woman her reputed mother was by her continually, and taught her to card the fine wool and twirl the spindle, or else was still a clocking for her, and ever and anon casting in words and twattling to her about marriage. -- III, §4... Read more
October 25, 2004
Who has the best housecoat?
Read This Paragraph At my local Barnes and Noble, there is a huge wall of Java books just waiting to tip over and crush me one day. And one day it will. At the rate things are going, one day that bookcase will be tall enough to crush us all. It might even loop the world several times, crushing previous editions of the same Java books over and over again. And This Paragraph Too This is just a small Ruby book. It won’t crush you. It’s light as a feather (because I haven’t finished it yet—hehe). And there’s a reason this book will stay light: because Ruby is simple to learn. But Don't Read This One! Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby is released under the Attribution-ShareAlike License. So, yes, please distribute it and print it and read it leisurely in your housecoat. In fact, there will be a contest at the end of the book for Best Housecoat. It’s a coveted award and you should feel honored to even read about it! (Especially if you are reading about it in your soon-to-be-prize-winning housecoat.) I really like the straight-forward nature of ruby, and contributions like Why'sadd to this enjoyment.... Read more
October 24, 2004
in all ways remarkable
Began reading a comprehensive edition of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. This particular edition, a nice hardcover example of which I found while tidying my room, contains facsimile pages from recently-discovered textual addenda. Although the manuscript reproductions are perhaps most satisfying to a more scholarly attitude than mine own, the included period illustrations accompany the text beautifully.... Read more
October 22, 2004
An indictment of the people and the President
Bumped into Adam yesterday, who loaned me a copy of Sleepwalking Through History. I read with some alarm the first two chapters, on Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, and titled "The Loser" and "The Winner" respectively. As Carter spent a sleepless final week in office, negotiating the terms of release for the Iranian hostages, Reagan showed little inclination to do other than sleep and party his way to Inauguration. I blame the subway: Appearing on ABC's "This Week With David Brinkley" after the [arms procurement] scandal began, Arkansas Senator David Pryor described it this way: "A few yards from here is Connecticut Avenue, and we all see the beautiful hotels and office buildings and grand shops, but underneath there's a subway system that is running day and night where people are getting on and they're getting off.... Some of the poeple that are getting off that subway ... have either been with the Department of Defense or with a private consulting firm. They go to a contractor. They're in the Pentagon private consulting firms or their own contractors, and they're all sloshing around in the subway system with all of this money and we're in trouble because of it."... Read more
October 18, 2004
The LA literary conspirarcy
As I was being bodily removed from Dutton's Brentwood Bookstore, I picked up a copy of David Fine's Imagining Los Angeles, a literary tour of L.A.. I'm only a couple of chapters into it, but the writing suffers from being overly derivative, especially of Mike Davis' excellent surveys of post-modern representation of the city, and suffers from poor editing. I also received a sizeable volume of literary L.A., Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which holds a lot of promise. It's in the same series as the volume on Baseball edited by Nicholas Dawidoff.... Read more
October 09, 2004
I'm a Marxist and I read.
Today I learned the word "rivalrous", which means "emulous", or "eager to surpass others". Resources that cannot be shared are rivalrous. I also picked up three long-time favourite classics of economics: The Marx-Engels Reader; de Tocqueville's Democracy in America; and Mr Adam Smith's "truck, barter, and trade" (the po-mo title of "On The Wealth of Nations"). Outside of a dog, a man's best friend is a book. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.... Read more
October 04, 2004
(all the barbers were anarchists)
Began reading George Orwell's stirring Homage to Catalonia, while listening to Modest Mouse. I first heard this band while sitting at the Albion (now the Delirium) with Mark Athitakis on a mid-day bender some years ago. I can't remember why Mark was excited to find them on the juke-box, but I do remember (and have repeatedly proven) that they make great drinking music.... Read more
October 01, 2004
Tell me, where all past years are
Anna was sweet to pick up a book for me from the Children's section of the San Francisco Public Library. The book: "Archer's Goon", a masterful work by British novelist Diana Wynne Jones, whose books I've loved since reading "Howl's Moving Castle," with its conceit from a Donne poem, and its milliner's-daughter heroine. "Archer's Goon" is a subtle masterpiece, with sewage, finance, education, and words as public resources, each "farmed" by a shadowy sibling of the family in charge of the town.... Read more
September 26, 2004
Serpents in Paradise
Began reading Dea Birkett's Serpents in Paradise, but the writing really isn't very good -- although the material, a woman's journey to and stay on remote, legendary Pitcairn Island, deserves much better.... Read more
September 22, 2004
We will meet in the place where there is no darkness
Re-read Nineteen eighty-four in a beautiful paperback facsimile first edition. These things happen," he began vaguely. "I have been able to recall one instance -- a possible instance. It was an indiscretion, undoubtedly. We were producing a definitive edition of the poems of Kipling. I allowed the word 'God' to remain at the end of a line. I could not help it!" he added almost indignanty, raising his face to look at Winston. "It was impossible to change the line. The rhyme was 'rod.' Do you realise that there are only twelve rhymes to 'rod' in the entire language? For days I had racked my brains. There was no other rhyme." The precepts of doublethink, once a symbol of Totalitarian regimes such as Stalin's (and the mustachioed Big Brother of the book bears an eerie metaphorical likeness to him), makes me wonder: are we actually at war with any country?... Read more
September 19, 2004
Waller and Steiner: "The more you buy, the more you save!"
For the past month, I have not seen the Santa-hat-wearing fellow who sells books each Sunday mid-day at the corner of Waller and Steiner. He stopped me one morning out on the stoop, while he was negotiating three shopping carts laden with his stock-in-trade, and asked if I wanted to sell him the stuff I was putting out onto the sidewalk. I told him he could take it all in exchange for three books. I wonder if he's moved to another intersection? Have we fallen from favour? (He brought levity to the oddly grimy corner, and also kept it neatly swept. He gave picture-books to kids.)... Read more
September 18, 2004
Path Between the Seas
Reading the grueling story of the Panama Canal, as told through David McCollough's Path Between the Seas.... Read more
September 02, 2004
The Music of Chance
A quiet morning, re-re-re-reading Paul Auster's Book of Illusions. Is this to modern fiction what math-rock is to rock & roll? Word of the day: span.... Read more
August 30, 2004
... a girl's best friend?
After Shawn, forever singing the virtues of audio books, praised Diamonds, I picked up a reading copy and sat down with it yesterday afternoon. Alexander the Great, on his march into India, is said to have heard about a pit filled with diamonds. The pit was guarded by serpents whose gaze would kill a man. Alexander, eager for the diamonds, ordered that his men be given mirrors. When they approached the pit they held up the mirrors and turned the reptiles' gaze back on the snakes themselves, killing them. Alexander then ordered sheep to be slaughtered and their carcasses flung into the pit. The diamonds stuck in the fat. Vultures swooped down and devoured the diamond-studded flesh, and afterward, as they flew away, expelled a rain of diamonds into the hands of Alexander's men.... Read more
August 29, 2004
Sleeping Beauty
Re-read Danny the Champion of the World, in an edition illustrated by Quentin Blake. Although I'm particular about illustrations, Blake's idiosyncratic pen-and-wash style illuminates Dahl's wise story of a boy being raised by his clever father. The father enjoys poaching, and what's bred in the blood means that the boy invents a new approach, so fiendish that it means that they will eat their pheasants and wreck the reputation of the local land-lord / capitalist. Not quite a party-line parable, but the villagers do defeat the local tyrant and celebrate in the quiet, studious way of village-folk. Also made into what sounds like an excrescence of a television movie.... Read more
August 11, 2004
You don't sound like much of a prince
Tracked down a library-bound copy of Jay Williams' Petronella, illustrated by Friso Henstra; although the book is still in print, the new illustrations can't possibly have the captivating curves of Henstra's buoyant princess and enchanter. Now I have to find a copy of their other collaboration, "Forgetful Fred."... Read more
August 01, 2004
Fever in
Sick abed today, I read through some Golden Age mystery novels: two (of the few tolerable) by Agatha Christie: Death in the Air and Cards on the Table (others I like include The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and The A.B.C. Murders); and a perennial favourite, Dame Dorothy Sayers' Murder Must Advertise, a novel which transcends genre fiction.... Read more
July 29, 2004
Brideshead Revisited
I picked up a copy of Peepshow: The Cartoon Diary of Joe Matt, a slightly self-righteous, R.-Crumb derivative yet still original confessional comic. I opened it up to a random page, and found a diary entry entitled "How to be cheap." Perfect, as I had bought the book from a vagrant who's a regular at the corner of Waller and Steiner on Sunday mornings: he collects leftover books from all around San Francisco and resells 'em, $1 a pop ("Each book a dollar! 7 for $5! 15 for $10! The more you buy, the more you save," as well as keeping that particular corner clean.... Read more
July 16, 2004
Complete & Uncut
After a harrowing trip home on the J-Church, I debarked at the corner of Church and Duboce and walked in to the Out of the Closet shop to look for a copy of a book: Stephen King's Complete & Uncut "The Stand". I read the cut-for-weight version about 20 years ago, but thinking about germ warfare lately has caused this novel to reënter my mind. To my surprise and delight, I found a crisp hardcover, dust jacket in Brodart even, with the promotional bookmark tucked neatly inside it. Perfect! Just as I picked it off the shelf, the lights dimmed and a clerk announced that the store was closing; "Please bring purchases to the counter."... Read more
July 06, 2004
The power of independent booking
After many years, I finally picked up (and read!) a copy of Mr Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, Lawrence Weschler's essay on the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City. I have enjoyed a membership at the musuem for several years -- one look at their unequalled collection of title="Offsite: My Secret LA">Hagop Sandaljian's microminiature sculptures convinced me! --... Read more
July 03, 2004
You let me get a pregnant elephant ...
At Dutton's in Brentwood, arriving five minutes just before they shut for the weekend, I came across Raphael Patai's The Children of Noah, an account of ancient Semitic seafaring adventures.... Read more
July 02, 2004
In massalia there were no networks
Surprised to find an outpost of a local independent bookstore at the airport, and happily picked up Cunliffe's The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek. Need to find a copy of Mark Buchanan's Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks.... Read more
June 27, 2004
On the origin of cities
Having heard that this year's National Spelling Bee winner took the prize with autochthonous, I wondered where I might stumble upon that word. The answer: on the first page of the Introduction to Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 -- the year that Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island, and The Bronx united as boroughs of New York City. This 1100-page volume, the first in the self-billed definitive history of the city, has a table of contents that runs to ten pages. Once you have a city, you have to decorate it: Image a city where graffiti wasn't illegal, a city where everybody could draw wherever they liked. Where very street was awash with a million colours and little phrases. Where standing at a bus stop was never boring. A city that felt like a living breathing thing which belonged to everybody, not just the estate agents and barons of big business. Imagine a city like that a stop leaning against the wall - its wet.... Read more
June 20, 2004
The place of salt
The place-name wich indicates a place where salt was made. The citation states that it is merely a variation of wick. Mark Kurlansky suggests this definition in his unsatisfying book Cod.... Read more
June 19, 2004
A world in which MUNI is on schedule.
Riding MUNI and staring distractedly out the window, I imagined the multiverse, that in some orthogonal world the driver had sped up and whizzed past these buildings (are they there in the other world?) a little faster, we'd hit a different sequence of lights. ... or that the buildings were slightly taller, the light hadn't distracted the driver, causing him to slow down. Or that the buildings were painted a different colour; that the cars hadn't changed lanes, forcing the trolley to slow down; that I had caught a MUNI driven by an auto-pilot; that MUNI had precedence over autos; usw. Walking home, I found a copy of Michael Crichton's "Timeline", a novel with quantum mechanics as its trope.... Read more
June 12, 2004
A short-term effect?
Reading the Vintage Book of Amnesia, edited by Jonathan Lethem (whose Motherless Brooklyn I loved; unhappily, I haven't enjoyed any of this other books, excepting the fantastical, short, and tortuous The Shape We're In). Aside from the beautiful "Nightmare" by Shirley Jackson and the whopping six-page story by Donald Bartheleme, many of the stories disappoint me, including Lethem's own contribution. An essay by neurologist Oliver Sacks discusses the physioloigical underpinnings of amnesia while describing the sad case of "The Last Hippie."... Read more
June 11, 2004
The ships are getting restless
Perusing The Outlaw Sea and thinking of .... Read more
May 31, 2004
Reading day
Engineers of Dreams Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation Vintage Book of Amnesia The Secret Life of Lobsters Locust... Read more
May 27, 2004
Pirates of the Malaccas
Reading Giles Milton's account of the bloody Spice Wars, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. His loose collection of anecdotes prevents the book from being a strong history, but some of the anecdotes relate very exciting incidents from the struggle amongst the feckless Dutch, cunning Portuguese, and desperate British. During this time of intrepid, daring, and stupid exploration, the Dutch innvoated map-making technology. Today, this online mapping tool produces interactive maps (with nearby transit stops marked!) for almost any address in the European Union. James Lancaster, who inadevertently created the trading triangle between England, Gujarat, and the Spice Islands when he pillaged Portuguese carracks in the Indian Ocean, ran into weather on his return to England: Even Lancaster felt the end was near. Descending into his cabin, he penned a letter to the Company in London, a letter whose unfailing spirit would become legendary among the sailors of the East India Company. 'I cannot tell where you should looke for me,' he wrote, 'because I live at the devotion of the winds and seas.' And then, sending the letter over to the Hector, he hade her head for England leaving his own ship to her fate. The Hector's captain refused and shadowed the Red Dragon until the storm finally abated. And so, side by side, the ships sailed first to St Helena and then into the English Channel. When the adventurer Wm. Hawkins arrived in Gujarat to arrange English trading rights, he found strong pro-Portuguese sentiment, backed by Shah Jehangir's official pact with Portugal. Hawkins was annoyed but placed his trust in tact and diplomacy. He sent a polite but firm letter to the Portuguese command reminding him that their two countries were at peace and asking that 'he release my men and goods, for that we were Englishmen.' The commander was in no mood to be lenient and sent Hawkins a return letter 'vilely abusing His Majesty [King James I] terming him King of Fishermen, and of an island of no import'. Worse still, he described Hawkins as 'a fart for his commision'.... Read more
May 26, 2004
Library of babel
I'm working on a bibliography of books about bridges.... Read more
May 24, 2004
Decaying machinery
Photographs of urban decaying mechinery in the sublime Forgotten Substations and Eliza.... Read more
May 13, 2004
A subway named möbius
Many years ago, I read a collection of science-fiction short stories that included A J Deutsch's "A Subway Named Möbius:" in this story, a new addition to the Boston T resulted in a topological anomaly, and the train carriages went missing on the track. An Argentinian crew moved the story to the labyrinthine subway of Buenos Aires; I can't find this on disc, though. ... this seems to be the most popular story associated with the author; it turns up all over the web, but very little else does!... Read more
May 12, 2004
A matched control subject
The subject of a landmark case in scientific ethics as well as the physiological basis of sexual identity died last week.... Read more
April 27, 2004
H is for hapax legomenon.
When I was seven or eight, I read an odd book: I cannot recall the title, but remember that the cover illustration had a gaudy painting of a dark room with a brain in a jar, and a boy standing in studied amazement. The story told of the young boy and his relationship with the brain, which could answer anything; one of the curious bits of trivia it knew as that Jane Austen's posthumously-published Northanger Abbey makes the first printed reference to rounders as "base ball". What is the technical term for the first occurrence of a word or phrase? Karen Joy Fowler has written a book in the first-person plural, titled The Jane Austen Book Club.... Read more
April 25, 2004
Lauding laudanum
Several years ago I read Althea Hayter's excellent Opium and the Romantic Imagination; today I picked up The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics.... Read more
April 13, 2004
There and back again
It's been a while since I had any seafaring adventures. I picked up a copy (signed first-edition) of Caroline Alexander's latest, The Bounty. The story of Capt Bligh and the Bounty has long fascinated me, and now I'm learning new details: May 1 brought an extraordinary diversion: two sharks were caught and in the belly of one was found a prayer book, "[q]uite fresh," according to Lieutenant Clark, "not a leaf of it defaced." The book was inscribed "Francis Carthy, cast for death in the Year 1786 and Repreaved the Same day at four oClock in the afternoon." The book was subsequently confirmed as having belonged to a convict who had sailed to Botany Bay in 1788 with the first fleet of prisoners consigned to transportation.... Read more
April 07, 2004
L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.
World War II flying ace Antoine de Saint-Exupéry disappeared somewhere over the Mediterranean, on a spy mission in '44. Succinctly, he wrote a beautiful story that profoundly affected many, and has led to much thought in many languages. It took me a long time to learn where he came from. The little prince, who asked me so many questions, never seemed to hear the ones I asked him. It was from words dropped by chance that, little by little, everything was revealed to me. The first time he saw my airplane, for instance...he asked me: "What is that object?" "That is not an object. It flies. It is an airplane. It is my airplane." And I was proud to have him learn that I could fly. He cried out then: "What! You dropped down from the sky?" "Yes," I answered modestly. "Oh! That is funny!" And the little prince broke into a lovely peal of laughter, which irritated me very much. I like my misfortunes to be taken seriously.... Read more
April 03, 2004
Achilles, heal thyself.
Roy and Leslie Adkins' stirring account of Jean-François Champollion's life, spent in pursuit of hieroglyphics, revealed that this young linguist, hailed as a genius from a very early age, struggled with German. Of all the modern languages (French, English, Italian, the latter two necessary for reading scholarship) and the oriental and african languages (Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, Chaldean, Persian, Greek, Latin, Demotic, and especially Coptic), he encountered problems with the most structured of modern European languages? I didn't realise that the decipherement of the Rosetta Stone didn't take place for many years after Champollion's discovery. Although the Adkins' book tosses in odd bits of sensationalism (describing the work of an English antiquariam, "... he was a homosexual ...") and often irrelevant and unedifying asides, it is a decent account of the struggle to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. At times they attempt to cast Champollion and Young as fighting mano a mano, but they would do better to focus on Champollion and his stalwart brother, Jean-Jacques. They present the historical context of the Royalist upheaval in France very well.... Read more
March 31, 2004
Think globally?
File under "another one bites the dust": The strong-willed Chinook bookshop in Colorado Springs, CO will close forever on its 45th anniversary. When I was a wee lad, I often wandered down to the underground Pinocchio Books a few blocks from my parents' house in Pittsburgh. A few months after the first mega bookstore (a Barnes & Noble, which we had previously known only as a catalogue-based seller of remainders) moved in, Pinocchio closed. A store that sold Winne Ille Pu and a large assortment of Tintin comics, as well as a spectacular selection of children's books, I loved walking down there to browse and sometimes buy. The shop moved to Boston, where it fared little better.... Read more
March 28, 2004
I wish that I could push a button.
I'm often irritated by narrative written in the present tense. The tense doesn't immediately turn me off a novel, though: I really enjoyed Michael Frayn's Headlong : A Novel, with the immediacy of the protagonist's plunge into obsession captured by the tense. And now that I'm again re-reading Tunnel Vision, I realise that it, too, uses the present tense for most of the frantic narrative (the thing that irritates me about this book -- you know there has to be something -- is that it's set in a sans serif type). Tunnel Vision tells the story of a tubespotter (think trainspotter, but with an obsessions focussed on the glorious London Underground) who bets his wedding and honeymoon that he can journey all 260-odd stops on the Tube in one day. With a drunken tramp as his Virgil and the dodgy signals of the Tube as his nemesis, our hero desperately tries to beat the clock in order to meet his fiancée at the Eurostar.... Read more
March 12, 2004
Manuscripts never burn.
Unlike Jorge at the spetacular conclusion of Eco's "The Name of the Rose," the crazed idealist at the end of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita declares that "Manuscripts don't burn." Saw the A.C.T. production of ditto; the staging was magnificent, and the themes of the novel resonated clearly. A little on the long side (3+ hours, with intermission -- coffee! mints!), the play was quite liberal in its interpretation of Bulgakov's witch- and satanic imagery. I didn't notice the sign reading: "Caution: This play contains adult content. Nudity." until leaving the theatre.... Read more
March 07, 2004
Here's Johnny.
After many, many years, I finally watched the Stanley Kubrick adapation of Stephen King's novel The Shining. The book that Jack was writing contained the one sentence ("All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy") repeated over and over. Kubrick had each page individually typed. For the Italian version of the film, Kubrick used the phrase "Il mattino ha l' oro in bocca" ("He who wakes up early meets a golden day"). For the German version, it was "Was Du heute kannst besorgen, das verschiebe nicht auf Morgen" ("Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today") For the Spanish version, it was "No por mucho madrugar amanece más temprano" ("Although one will rise early, it won't dawn sooner.")... Read more
March 01, 2004
Ramblings from an un-named state in the West.
Began reading Truman Capote's Music for Chameleons. Now I wonder: the deliberately-titled "Nonfiction Account of an American Crime" novella which marks his entreé into the nonfiction novel genre (did he create that? as he more-or-less claims in the Introduction) bears the mark of verisimilitude as does, say, Fargo, which starts off with the title "Based on a true story." And of course it wasn't. Never mind that the incident which sparks all the crime is a land-grab for water rights. I would like to find a nice, short biography of Capote. I never finished either Rexroth's Autobiographical Novel or the biography which I have started several times in the past six years -- and Rexroth has long fascinated me, in his writing and in his life. He lived just down the street, on the same block as I live now.... Read more
February 26, 2004
Is our librarians learning?
The Palo Alto Daily News ran a story reporting that the Redwood City Public Library has learned a lesson from San Francisco. Librarians preparing for the upcoming $45,000 renovation of the Schaberg Community Library simply discarded unwanted titles, and did not coöperate with a local resident who tried to take them to other community organisations.... Read more
February 21, 2004
A rubaiyat you could be proud of
Began reading Amin Maalouf's Samarkand, which chronicles the adventures of a young Omar Khayyam. The novel, originally in French, mixes a fantastic modern-day tale of the manuscript's redisovery with an account of its creation, just as the Seljuks were advancing across Persia.... Read more
