Thursday, May 23rd, 2002
It’s vast, or I guess “ambitious” if I were a lit scholar. Either way means the same: 600+ pages with frequent detours into microbiology, art history, and music theory. It’s fascinating, if you’re into that sort of thing.
The writing is brilliant, obviously so even to a pedestrian pop-fiction aficionado like me. The text contains dozens of instances of subtle wordplay that will delight the language geeks in the audience. Here are two examples:
A line runs down the office he shares with Lovering, straight as a surveyor’s cut, an osmotic membrane separating the organization of Ressler’s area from the entropic mayhem of his office mate. On Lovering’s side, arboreal colonies of books, lush, vegetative pools of mimeograph, and ruminant herds of manila-enveloped crap creep up to the divide and abruptly drop off. (p. 248)
Our happiness was pathetically outscaled: forty thousand homeless; three quarters of a million addicts. Four hundred radial miles of contiguous squalor, a deep brown demographic smear, a disappointment per square mile that left the three of us several digits to the right of significance. (p. 292)
In construction, this story is similar to Cryptonomicon, which is also long (err, “ambitious”) and peopled by memorable, complex characters. Both stories span 50 years. Both stories contain detailed and intelligent forays beyond the narrative. Both recently appeared in a Jon Carroll’s list of “brainy, pyrotechnical novels” (along with Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, and Ghostwritten by David Mitchell, which I’ve added to my reading list for the summer).
At the heart of Powers’ story is the obsession of one character with DNA (comprised, in unimaginable complexity, from very few base compounds) and with Bach’s piano composition “The Goldberg Variations” (comprised, in unimaginable complexity, from a simple base melody). While the discussions of biology and life science did not appeal, the analyses of Bach’s music did, so much so that I wished I’d had a copy of the music handy, as a soundtrack to the text. (For reference, the recording that captivated Ressler is Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording, catalog #BWV 988.)
This book is challenging, but challenge has its rewards. I recommend it.
Patronize these links, man:
posted to area: Fiction
updated: 2004-04-19 05:53:31
A surfer once told me that surfing isn’t a sport or hobby, but a way of life. He became philosophical about it: the majesty of the ocean, the power and beauty of the wave… (and then, true to form, he lit up a big fat doobie.) The surf-buddy movie Point Break illustrates the same connection between wave riding and introspective analyses of consciousness. “You’re not going to start chanting, are you?” asks Keanu Reeves. Patrick Swayze laughs. “I might!”
Allan Weisbecker doesn’t chant, but he can put into words exactly what it feels like to ride a wave. He also puts into words what it’s like to captain a ship loaded down with a couple million dollars’ worth of pot into someone’s front lawn, for lack of a suitable offload dock, near Long Island Sound.
He has created, in this autobiographical adventure, a fascinating and eminently readable journal of his 2-year odyssey into Central America, a search both for a long-lost surfer friend, and the perfect wave. It’s at once a road story, a travelogue, and a nonfiction fantasy. There is a maturity, or an honesty, to the storytelling that makes Weisbecker a sympathetic character even when he’s violating international law as well as the ocean he loves so dearly. I laughed a lot. I also felt like I began to understand the lifestyle that is surfing.
Weisbecker finds both of the things he sets out to find. In the process, he also creates a wonderfully entertaining story. I recommend this book. I so enjoyed it, I’m planning to read the author’s earlier novel, Cosmic Banditos.
(The Amazon page for this book contains more positive reviews, one of which reads so much like what I’ve written here that I wish I’d seen it first, and saved myself the arduous process of composition.)
Patronize these links, man:
posted to area: Non-Fiction
updated: 2004-03-19 19:41:18
Tuesday, May 21st, 2002
I believe in the value of a full systems purge: no solid food for couple days, for example, or a fresh OS install onto clean disks. Sometimes, starting from scratch gets you to a place that you can’t have gotten to otherwise.
Of course this philosophy doesn’t work so well with my motorcycle. I made it downtown before the engine died completely, as I determined with a sinking (and decelerating) feeling that probably I hadn’t put any gas in the tank in a few weeks. Damn.
So I trudged down the block toward the gas station, to run into a friend who’d seen me walking (uncharacteristically) with my helmet in hand. He offered to accompany me to the filling station, which is the same as a gas station but 50 years older.
I’m not a graduate of Dale Carnegie’s fine courses in how to win friends and manipulate people, so I asked a question whose answer, I could have predicted, would be “no.” I asked, “Do you have a gas can I could borrow?” This is a pointless question, because these folks sell gas cans. Sure, they could “loan” me one, for $15, and I’d get to keep the can at the end.
Anyway, true to form, the guy says “no.” I was momentarily flummoxed, searching for my next tack. But my friend leapt into the breach and handily rescued me — he pointed at the clerk’s nearly-empty Nantucket Nectar bottle and said, “Can we have that bottle?” The guy was so shocked at my friend’s brash request that he agreed. He hadn’t even finished drinking it.
We rinsed the bottle, dried it as best we could, and filled it with $.16 worth of gas. I’m pretty sure it’s illegal for a filling station to sell gas in non-approved containers, but once the bottle had been filled, the safest course for the clerk was clearly to let us take it, get it off the premises as quickly as possible and hope we didn’t get hit by a car before we crossed the property line.
This story feels like it needs an ending, but nothing much else happened.
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posted to channel: Personal
updated: 2004-02-22 22:49:16
Sunday, May 19th, 2002
Killing time before a flight, I stepped into the restroom to brush my teeth and wash my hands — my ritual of pre-travel disinfection, an attempt to arrive with no more bacteria than the ones I’d brought from home. It became immediately apparent that if my mission was to avoid bacteria, entering a public restroom was perhaps an unwise course of action, for the stench of the place was overwhelming. I was unpleasantly reminded of an under-ventilated outhouse at a park in Canada, in which the constant exposure of the sun on the building’s corrugated roof raised the inside temperature to a point where the festering slop below the seat had fermented up a magnificent stink, enough that even the flies couldn’t stay long, and I attempted to relieve myself while holding my breath, which is again an unwise course of action if the capacity of one’s bladder is larger than that of one’s lungs, as I realized must be the case when I lost out to the burning in my chest and gasped several deep, heaving breaths, ensuring that the airborne fecal matter had ample opportunity to lodge itself in the deepest reaches of my bronchial tubes, far beyond where normal shallow breathing might have carried it.
So anyway, I walked into a more-than-typically crowded men’s room at the airport, and was immediately assaulted by the raw stench of the place. I hastily cleaned up, curiously eyeing the line of guys behind me. As I was drying my hands, I noticed that all the urinals were available, but all the stalls occupied, and five guys in line, waiting, listening, and no doubt holding their breath… when from one of the stalls came a second assault on our senses, the sound of, ahh, a successful if violent elimination, an auditory display of digestive prowess that washed over the line of would-be stall patrons in a palpable wave. I saw in the mirror that two of these guys were actually rocked back on their heels briefly. One of them blinked, seemed to consider his situation for a moment, turned on his heel and left the room. And then another! Really, nobody had to use the toilet that badly.
As I left the room I led a parade out the door, as everyone who’d been in line had decided to seek a less-densely-soiled bathroom further down the concourse.
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posted to channel: Travel
updated: 2005-07-20 21:06:06
Saturday, May 18th, 2002
I really didn’t want to be a fussy pain-in-the-ass granola-toting California vegan food weenie, but somehow word got out among the 20 college friends I’d flown to Cincinnati to spend the weekend with, and at every meal occasion somebody would say, “Let’s make sure we pick a restaurant where Matt can eat.” I downplayed this demand, for I assumed I’d be able to find a salad or even a plate of salmon just about anywhere (not that salmon is a traditional vegan pantry item; I’m not that strict. For the moment, at least, the foods I skip are all the ones that have legs.). But just as “no” didn’t used to mean “no”, “salad” still doesn’t mean “salad”, if you’re within 500 miles of our meat-addled heartland.
A small group of us were in a rush to eat. We dropped in to Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, a restaurant chain from the Friday’s/Hard Rock Cafe mold, with pop-culture paraphernalia hanging on the walls and lots of blood and oil being excreted from the kitchen. As expected, the menu had a section dedicated to salads. As I should have expected, all but one of the salads contained some kind of flesh: grilled chicken Ceasar, taco salad, and — I kid you not — something called Barbecue Salad, which I couldn’t bear to even read about, because one of the least kind things you could do to a generally healthy lettuce leaf is dunk it into sauce made from white sugar, cheap vinegar, and canned tomato paste. I ended up bypassing all these chopped-muscle entree “salads” and opted for the spinach salad from the side-order menu. When it was served, I was reminded of the pervasiveness of dairy-farm thinking in these Midwestern states… Again, I should have expected this, for reasons I’ll go into in a bit: my spinach salad had about eight leaves of green, covered with hard-boiled egg and a mound of bacon bits (gah!). I didn’t ask if the meat nodules were real, because I’m not sure which answer I would have preferred: fatty pig meat pan-fried in oil, or textured soy proteins flavored to taste like fatty pig meat pan-fried in oil, but chemically fortified to be shelf-stable for approximately 400 years. I picked them off as best I could and tried to surreptitiously wrap the remaining baco-crumbs in spinach, in hopes that they’d pass unnoticed through my virginal digestive tract.
The thing is, the salad’s description on the menu did not mention any of these animal products. To be fair, it also didn’t mention that the salad would be served on a plate, or that a fork and a cup of water would be provided; some things are just taken for granted. In the Midwest, the meat is assumed.
Why, as I indicated, should I have expected all this? Because just 30 days ago I was in Cincinnati, reuniting with a different group of old friends, eating dinner at a pub that had an afterthought of meaty salad items on the menu. I’d ordered the one that sounded least likely to require after-dinner defibrillation, but it turned out to be so covered with shredded cheese that I could literally not see anything underneath. I had to ask for a separate bowl to dump the cheese into as I shoveled it away, excavating my vegetables, although in retrospect the wiser course would have been to flip the whole thing over into the second bowl and eat from the bottom up. There was at least a quarter-pound of cheese on there.
Obviously I survived both episodes. I’m really not that fussy about my diet, and I’m sure I wasn’t a pain in the ass about the issue, even though I am a Californian vegan food weenie, and I do travel with my own granola. It was really sweet of everyone to be so concerned about me though. My wife and I were even offered vegetarian dinners at the wedding reception.
Of course, I followed it up with a piece of cold pizza we found abandoned in the hospitality suite, a socializing room in the hotel that was set up for out-of-town guests, provided by the newlyweds to save us from standing the beds up against the wall to make space for the crowds of people we’d otherwise pack into someone’s room like we used to do in college. We’d left the suite at 3pm for lunch, and returned 11 hours later, post-ceremony, post-reception, to find that the bride’s father had absconded with the half-case of beer we’d stashed there for our late-night return. The cold pizza was a small but much appreciated consolation. I don’t often eat found food (hey, look! there’s a piece of gum on the bottom of this desk!) but our forensic clock analysis indicated that the pizza was, at most, 8 hours old, far less than the half-life of delivery pizza, which I’ve never actually seen spoil — someone invariably eats it before it turns, presumably three to four days later.
There were only three slices left: two sausage and one pepperoni. I snaked the latter on the theory that at least the meat was hidden. I figured was going to feel ill the next morning anyway (it was a heck of a party!).
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posted to channel: Travel
updated: 2004-02-22 22:49:16
