review

Time is a funny thing. It's only really there when you aren't paying any attention to it. Take notice of the passage of time, and it freezes in place, neither future nor past but rather the oppressive weight of a nowness that is paradoxically both never ending and impossibly fragile. There is a sense of this troubling temporality that shoots through all of Amy King's Slaves to Do These Things, which obsesses about temporal passage and what it does to us in a continual iteration of images. This "caughtness" by time is captured in lines like:

Buried by Midnight
I am a warm
fly in amber.

from "Miracle on the Hudson"

or

Usually no one goes
close enough to notice
the noise of biding time,
a vastly off-white habit
from patience.

from "Anarchy's Tiptoe"

What matters in these images, and others, recurring throughout the poems in this book, is that they establish time as a framework within which the entirety of the poet's concerns are found. This temporality is compounded by the sectioning of the book into the usual five acts of stage drama, forcing the rhythm and expectation of a linear dramatic narrative onto the inherently nonlinear scraps of theater contained within each Act. Here then, are the slaves, the characters and persons collected within King's poems bearing under the weight of the master time, and also the master of the poet who is never far from the page. Because these poems are in no way about time, but they are within time and the concerns of lust and love, sex and death, growth and evolution are all made heavy by the burden of time's whip upon them.

Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou

I just read Logicomix. Very interesting. Should have taken the tractatus more seriously, but that's ok, even a lot of professional philosophers don't understand it.

The impact of World War One on modernity is beautifully captured by a two page layout of Wittgenstein standing in the middle of no man's land and a caption by Russell saying "put a man on the edge of the abyss, and in the unlikely event that he doesn't fall in he will become either a mystic or a madman."

The themes betray a computer scientist's fondness for Turing, algorithms, and computation that if not wholly misplaced is not the answer to everything that many computer geeks think it is.

Yet again i find myself wishing that more people would read Hubert Dreyfuss.

But Dreyfuss himself doesn't understand The Philosophical Investigations point on psychology and in his commitment ot Heideggerean phenomenology founded in metaphysics as opposed to a Wittgensteinian one founded in language, he concedes too much to the model makers.

Some years ago a "52-books-in-a-year" meme sprouted up, in which people "challenged" themselves to read a book a week for a year. I thought at the time, as I do now, that this is an absurdly small number of books; reading for merely a half-an-hour to an hour a day one can easily polish off a book a week (depending, admittedly, on the length and difficulty of the book and the reading speed of the individual). Considering that the "average" American supposedly watches four hours of television a day, sacrificing a quarter of that to book reading doesn't seem like much of a challenge, and I'm under the impression that most bibliophiles read quite a bit more and watch quite a bit less. To prove the point at the beginning of 2009 I decided to simply keep track of my reading. My final tally came to 125 books. You can see whole list at Library Thing. (The Doc Savage book "The Man of Bronze/The Land of Terror" counts twice as it's two books collected as one.) Below are short reviews of the best of this list.

The Best of Michael Moorcock

This article is part of a series on the work of Michael Moorcock that will culminate in an interview with the man himself. The story collection The Best of Michael Moorcock is his most recent book.

Considering the work of a writer like Michael Moorcock can be a little intimidating if only because of the sheer volume of material one is dealing with. Over the course of his fifty-year-plus career, Moorcock has written dozens and dozens of books in nearly every genre, and his influence has been broad and immeasurable. His books were formative to the New Wave SF movement that he himself spearheaded in the sixties and seventies, which in turn helped define the SF (and much non-SF) that would come after. His books influenced the creation of Dungeons and Dragons and the plots of children's TV shows. His character Elric was parodied by Dave Sim in the comic Cerebus, his literary fiction novel Mother London was called "one of the most astonishing London novels ever written ... a tour de force" by Alan Moore, and Michael Chabon dedicated his Moorcock-esque historical adventure novel Gentlemen of the Road to him. In the seventies Moorcock even performed with the rock bands Blue Oyster Cult and Hawkwind, who both based songs on his work (in Hawkwind's case, a whole album), as well as with his own band The Deep Fix. The man is an eclectic talent, and a prolific one.

The Kindle app for the iPhone/iPod Touch is easily the worst ebook reader I've ever tried to use. First and most annoying, the text is full justified, and there's nothing you can do to change that, which on the tiny iPod Touch screen makes huge, gaping spaces in between the words. Then, you can't change the font, only a limited number of font sizes, and the only options for coloring are black on white, white on black, or brown on sepia. There's no search feature to speak of. And worst of all, when you look to see how far along into the book you are, it says something like "169-172". Turn to the next page and it says "172-175". Huh? What does that mean. I tried to find some kind of built-in documentation, but the "help" button takes you to a web page (no help if you're not online, which frustrated me in the subway this morning) and on the webpage you have to navigate through a bunch of stuff about the Kindle device before you get to a FAQ page that tells you almost nothing about the app or what the mysterious numbers on the bottom mean.

After some creative Google searching I did find a page on the Amazon site that mentions that the Kindle uses "location numbers", but no explanation of what those numbers are actually supposed to mean.

What a piece of garbage. It wouldn't be so annoying if Sony wasn't dragging its heals about getting me a replacement Sony Reader after I broke mine (which deserves another post all by itself, WTF Sony?? It's been weeks! But I digress). This book I really want to read digitally is only available to me through the Kindle store or the Sony Store, and as Sony formatted books are basically useless without a Sony Reader, the Kindle won out. (Needless to say I would much much much prefer the book in an open, non-DRM'd format (cough ePub cough cough) that I could read on any device and with any program, so I could bring it into a real ebook reader like Stanza. But instead I'm stuck with this crappy software as the only way to read something I ostensibly own and should be able to to what I like with. Gah.)

Massive spoilers below.

EDIT: added more notes at the bottom.

Imagine if you will that there's a magic red goop, and that a single drop of this goop—one drop!—can create a black hole. Now imagine that a whole man-sized container of the stuff (which one needs, for some reason, because a few drops just won't do the job) smashes in the middle of a starship. Now imagine that for some reason that ship is still around with a giant black hole forming all around it and you can have a nice conversation with the captain of that and then decide for some reason you need to shoot him with your phasers and photon torpedoes because the black hole hasn't completely destroyed them already.

Okay, now imagine that you sky dive from space into the atmosphere of a planet. There is no sense of burning up on reentry or even any sort of heat. Then you land on a giant laser drill in the stratosphere. This drill is hanging off of a ship in space and is drilling a hole in the planet, but there's no sense at all of the ship maintaining geosynchronous orbit; indeed the drill seems to be moving around quite a lot and yet is still drilling this big hole. Oh yeah, and the reason you need a big hole? Because you want to put a drop of red black hole goo in the center of the planet to destroy it because for some reason creating a black hole anywhere in the general vicinity of the planet isn't good enough. (Why do they bother even using the term "black hole" if they have no desire to have anything to do with what a black hole is or does?) But okay, so then you land on your space drill. You whip off your helmets and have no trouble at all breathing up in the stratosphere. Then for some reason the drill is manned, and the bad guys come out and you all have a big kung fu fight up on the top, complete with flips and acrobatics. On a platform in the open air in the stratosphere. And nobody just blows right off.

I don't think I've ever in my life seen an ostensible Science Fiction movie with such complete contempt for science. Space Balls had better science. Godzilla had better science (all of them).

My Little Brother by Cory Docotorow is up over at Literary Kicks. Here's an excerpt:

One thing you have to say for Little Brother, Cory Doctorow's recent book for young adults (now nominated for the Hugo Award for best novel): it's ambitious. It is an adventure story about teenage terrorism that's also a screed on the importance and meaning of the right to privacy and a guide to bad government practices and how to fight them, a novel made manifesto and handbook. The book tells us, for example, why anti-terrorism measures like ramped-up airplane security are bad, or how to safely destroy the RFID tag in a passport. It's useful. It's also pretty blatant propaganda, and it is its nature as a work of propaganda that ultimately undermines its effectiveness as a work of fiction.

Go read the rest.

Out right now: Best American Fantasy 2 (v. 2). This book contains some stunning stories, including "The Drowned Life" by Jeffrey Ford, which reminded me of Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading; a story by Peter S. Beagle that's deceptively Borgesian in its investigation of identity; and Kelly Link proving yet again why she's the best short story writer working today. This is what good short fiction looks like, this is the kind of anthology you want to buy.

Seriously, go buy now. Especially you, Quackenbush.

My review of the short fiction anthology Logorrhea has just been published on the New Haven Review website.

The New Haven Review incidentally is edited by Brian Francis Slattery, the very excellent author of Spaceman Blues: A Love Song and Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America (which books you should read right now), and is worth checking out.

I'm really enjoying telling you all about my new gadgets.

My old, crappy cell phone has been needing replacement for some time now, and given how enamored I am of my iPod Touch, an iPhone seemed like the logical choice. However, I balked at the 2-year service contract with AT&T. I've been without a yearly service contract for most of the time I've had cell phones— that is, since I got hit with an early termination fee in 2003 when I was going to Europe for a few months and decided it didn't make sense to keep my phone. It's a philosophy that's served me well; for example, when I moved to Vermont a couple years ago, I discovered T-Mobile didn't have any service in the state, so I simply canceled and got a month-to-month contract with Verizon. Then, when I moved back, I canceled the less-favorable Verizon plan and got T-mobile again.

So when I discovered that T-Mobile's Google Android powered G1 phone was available with my current, month-to-month plan, and I only had to add $25 a month for unlimited Internet, I was pretty well sold. Incidentally, my plan—called "FlexPay"— is only $40 a month for 1000 daytime minutes and unlimited nights and weekends, so with the $25 a month Internet it comes out to only $75 dollars a month total. This is significantly less than similar plans for the iPhone with its two year contract. (Though they don't seem to be offering my plan anymore, instead offering $40 for 600 daytime minutes and unlimited nights and weekends, which is still pretty good.)