HSU IT Department

I have five -- count 'em, five -- books that I am reading AT THE SAME TIME. Granted, they're five very different books (Victorian bad-boy fiction, librarians are awesome, medieval roman a clef, women's colonial history, and World War II brit-love), that still seems excessive. Some have been lingering a long time, I admit. The WWII book has been in progress since, oh, May of last year, but hey, it's still on my nightstand within the top 5" of the pile, so it counts, right?

This is the only way I can read multiple books. If I were to try to read two or three fantasy novels at the same time, or two or three histories, my brain would go all bobcat-pretzel on me. But as long as I can file each one in a separate location, I seem to be able to deal with it. I'm not sure this is necessarily a good thing. Many recent articles debunk the Myth of Multitasking (apparently we can't do it, we just THINK we can), so perhaps I'm really only half-reading -- or in this case, 20-percent-reading -- each of them. But I disagree. When I'm reading one, I'm totally involved in it. I don't read a page of this one, a page of that one, a page of the other one. That would be multitasking (and actually a pretty accurate description of what I do at work, where I'm constantly discovering a window buried underneath several others, and saying "Oh look, I totally forgot I was in the middle of that email/document/analysis/presentation/YouTube video..."). Reading a chapter or two of a different book each night is more like having something different for dinner, eating what you're hungry for instead of having turkey every night for a week.

So yeah, I'm OK with the multiple book maintenance thing. Anyone else do this? Or is it just me?

Originally posted by gabrielleabelle at Mississippi Personhood Amendment

Because, you know, it just looks like fun :)

[Error: unknown template video]

I knew it!!!!

Yet again, a book I desperately wanted to like but didn't. The premise sounded intriguing: the king of Abascar, a kind of city-state, decrees that all things of color and beauty be "donated" to the castle and everyone will from then on wear only shades of grey and brown ("Abascar's Winter"). At some indeterminate point in the future, he promises that all will be returned to the people and Abascar will be brighter and more beautiful than ever ("Abascar's Spring"). But one young woman, a mysterious foundling raised by the Gatherers (men and women exiled for petty crimes; they live outside Abascar's walls and hope to be readmitted at the annual Testing), knows how to draw colors from nature and create beautiful things for her friends. Auralia's colors eventually spark (literally) changes in the city.

OK, so far so good. But the author leaves massive holes EVERYWHERE. Explanations, if given at all, are so thin as to be transparent. Why would the people agree to this nonsense? What's his motivation in the decree (come to that, what are the motivations of ANY of the characters)? Why isn't there a thriving black market in colorful stuff from the other cities? Who are these Beastmen and why haven't they been stamped out long ago by the other cities? Why was Jaralaine so unhappy and why on earth is she ( here )? What the hell is wrong with the King all these years? Why is the annual event called the Testing when nobody is tested? Why was Scharr ben Fray exiled? Why does Stricia completely lose it when ( this happens )? What are these Northchildren and are they real or imaginary? WTF is this Keeper that everyone dreams about and why does he, or it, even matter? Then there is the very bizarre denouement of the story which a) is way too melodramatic, b) makes no sense whatsoever, and c) has nothing to do with Auralia or her colors! (It's all down to jealousy and the fact that alcohol is flammable.)

Worst of all, the central pivot of the story -- the fact that Auralia's colors have some kind of magical power -- is only ever mentioned in passing!! She has no idea that they do (in fact she says they don't). The first time it's mentioned is third hand, when one of the Gatherers says that so-and-so's breathing was better when he wore a yellow scarf that Auralia made for him. Why didn't so-and-so himself mention it? Or better yet, why didn't we see this happen?

Everything that happens in the story has this same third-hand feel to it, as if the most fascinating bits are happening off screen and we only get glimpses of them or hear about them later. Good characters jump off the page, make you feel like you've met them; these characters come across like mannequins that the author moves around. The author invents weirdly-named animals and plants for no apparent reason (vawns? why not just have them ride horses like normal people??). The characters are paper cut-outs, one-dimensional and cliche: the mad king, the noble prince, the stalwart and loyal soldier, the mysterious foundling, the exiled wise counselor. The fact that the most interesting and complex character in the whole book is the guy who tortures people in the dungeon, who appears for a total of about 5 pages, should tell you how limp and pale the rest of them are.

I ended up just skimming the last hundred pages. Don't waste your time.

For some reason I seem to be on a Russia roll at the moment...

The Library of Congress has a new online exhibit of a whole collection of beautiful color images from Russia -- which date from 30+ years before color photos were actually possible! The first color film (Kodachrome) came out in 1936, but a Russian photographer named Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii came up with a way to create color images (though not print them) way back in the late 1800s/early 1900s. He had the idea of taking three black and white photos of a subject -- one through a red filter, one through a green and one through a blue -- and then back at home he would project the three negatives together, each one through the appropriate filter, onto a white sheet or wall. (His projector looks a bit like a stoplight, with three lenses.) The blended RGB light created color images, just like it does on TVs or computers today. Pretty amazing!

The Library of Congress has his negatives and they've created color prints from the RGB negatives. The photos are GORGEOUS -- this page of the exhibit has some of the best ones with the lushest colors (the Emir of Bukhara has a particularly lively robe). The main page for the exhibit has a bunch of information about the photographer and a detailed explanation of his process as well as the process the LOC used to create the color images for the exhibit.

Go. Look. Marvel.

Hating Irene. Hating the Weather Channel. Hating most comprehensively all those hyper-alarmist people who caused Amtrak to go spastic and cancel trains. Not only was I forced to be a no-show for a conference panel I was supposed to be chairing, but (WAY more importantly) I had to cut short my vacation with my mom, meaning that I didn't get to eat here or see this. To add insult to injury, we were tied in Scrabble four games to four, and now we'll never know who's Queen of the Universe.

Curse you, weather gods!!!!

I've always liked this movie (Joan Crawford and Eve Arden) and only found out recently that it was based on a book, so of course had to read it. It wasn't really what I expected -- in some ways it was better than the movie, in others worse. Better in that we get a fuller explanation of why Veda is the way she is, and why her mother puts up with it, but worse in that Mildred comes off as much stupider. The ending is completely different from the movie, much less dramatic; it ends -- literally -- not with a bang but a whimper. Cain apparently also wrote Double Indemnity (another favorite movie of mine) and The Postman Always Rings Twice. His writing isn't anything terrific -- the characters are two-dimensional and cliche, for the most part; maybe that's why they did better as movies where that doesn't matter so much. Bottom line: meh. May have to see the Winslet version, just so I can compare.

Well, obviously this was AWESOME, since I finished Name of the Wind on the 7th and this on the 9th. OK, it was actually 2am on the 10th. A. Ma. Zing. But Patrick, Patrick, how can you keep us waiting until May 2012???? Especially when you said they were all done????

The Pacific Northwest secedes and forms a new country, Ecotopia, based on a steady-state (i.e., sustainable) model rather than the perpetual-growth model that is capitalism. A journalist from the U.S. on an official visit writes columns on various aspects of Ecotopian society: education, health care, working habits, sex, etc. The book's 1970s roots show through in places, particularly in race and gender attitudes, but taken all in all it's an interesting piece of work.

The book alternates between the narrator's personal journal kept during the trip and the columns he files with his newspaper back in the U.S., so you get both facts and personal experiences/interpretation. The Ecotopian solutions to problems like pollution, unemployment, welfare etc. are presented somewhat simplistically, but the author's intent was simply to suggest plausible alternative modes of thinking about success, progress, happiness, love, work, and so on, not to lay out a detailed blueprint of how to execute it. By and large I think he succeeds, if not with the elegance of his predecessor Sir Thomas More. (Speaking of which, did you know that the full title of More's Utopia is "A Truly Golden Little Book, No Less Beneficial Than Entertaining, of the Best State of a Republic, and of the New Island Utopia" ? Quite a mouthful.)

I'm not sure how workable some of the ideas are (people quit work at the drop of a hat to have a beer-and-pot party, for example, yet somehow they're productive enough they only need to work 20 hours a a week) but they're all thought-provoking. Whether the hippy-dippy laid-back attitudes that he describes would be capable of producing the new technology that Ecotopia relies on is debatable, but it's refreshing to be shown another worldview to contrast with our mass-produced, mass-marketed, over-commercialized worship of more/bigger/faster, particularly after the last decade of Double Plus Ungood events (9/11, two wars, economic collapse, etc.). Bottom line: definitely a book with an agenda, not great literature, but an interesting read that should stimulate your little gray cells.

In other news, I've started on Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind, and holy #@&*^ is it good. So well-written that you almost immediately forget you're reading and feel rather that you're living it, seeing events with your own eyes. It's rare writing that goes straight into you like that without, apparently, passing through the eyes or requiring translation by the brain. I'm in awe of his skill.