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November 23rd, 2009
09:55 pm - Still not dead
Sudhir Venkatesh's mass market sociology book was sufficiently memorable that I can't remember its name and can't be arsed to look it up.
Bright of the Sky by Kay Kenyon was slightly original, but had so many gigantic problems it was basically like reading your way through a superfund site. Girlfriend in a closet? Check. Cultural misappropriation? Check. Cardboard characters? Check. To think she has a trilogy planned.
K Blows Top by Peter Carlson was lightweight but terrific. Krushchev, Ike and Nixon are such characters, all you need for a story is to put them in the same book. A perfect way to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the wall coming down.
The Iron Dragon's Daughter by Michael Swanwick was a re-read, but just as fucked up and compelling as the first time round.
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08:47 pm
Poll #1489556 Hawkers!
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 5At your best guess, roughly what percentage of the population of Boston knows what a hawker / hawker stall is? At your best guess, roughly what proportion of the population of Boston would associate a "hawker / hawker stall"" with the sale of food? With 10 being completely commonplace, how common is the term hawker in modern US English?
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November 22nd, 2009
November 13th, 2009
12:15 am - by the way
That poll in the previous entry?
Please feel free to point your friends to it. We'd be interested in a wide sample.
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November 12th, 2009
04:13 pm - a poll!
Because ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) latvianchick and I have been debating this endlessly over the last few weeks.
Poll #1484557 a poll!
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 21Does "Journeyman" carry broadly positive, broadly negative or broadly neutral connotations? What kinds of associations does the word generate for you?
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October 27th, 2009
09:27 am - Life
is either flirting with me or taunting me. It's hard to tell which.
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October 26th, 2009
09:33 pm
Girlyman marathons make everything better, even cleaning.
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06:29 pm
Still on most days, I hear myself say / Everything's easy
Then reality catches up with me, and I am sad.
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October 12th, 2009
02:58 pm - iso sculptor/musician
I have a friend who has the guts of an upright piano sitting in his closet. This is literally the whole string assembly, no hammers, and the wooden frame supporting it. It does not include any of the external case, or any of the hammer or key assembly.
Anyone know a sculptor/musician who might be interested in cleaning this up for use as a piece of art/decor?
Feel free to repost on your journal.
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October 1st, 2009
10:44 am - OS X
Anyone have a Mac OS 10.5.x install disc which latvianchick can borrow? She needs to install DevonThink pro, which requires 10.5, and she only has 10.4 right now...
Thanks!
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September 29th, 2009
10:54 pm - still not dead
Just feel so after staying up till 2am nearly every night for the last couple of weeks reading Joe Abercrombie's The First Law trilogy (thanks, sandmantv). Brilliant and bloody, fantastic dialogue, and much better character writing than I've read in fantasy for a long time. And, as pointed out, it ends very well, which very few authors seem to be able to pull off. It reminds me quite a bit of Alistair Macleod's stuff, in the sense that the author is a thoroughly sadistic bastard and manages to tailor the sadism to each individual character without having to resort to anything so crude as violence. Abercrombie has better dialogue, though, and not everyone in his books goes around with a stick shoved up their bum. And if they do, they at least find it funny.
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon is pretty much straight up Spanish magical realism. Very well done, but I was expecting something more. It's a little too neat, and the characters are a little too melodramatic, and frankly, Abercrombie's books compelled a longer, harder look at the human condition than this one. I felt a little guilty for enjoying it as much as I did - I find the genre to be composed largely of cheeseburger, tarted up with a lacy veil of literary respectability. Zafon's book is, however, notable for one of the most memorable raconteurs in fiction, whose presence in the book is, on its own, entirely sufficient justification for buying it.
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September 25th, 2009
September 16th, 2009
11:37 pm
Dear eclectician,
Sometimes, people are arseholes.
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September 15th, 2009
09:46 am - Eggses!
Have 3 dozen excellent eggs from a farmer friend. Better than anything you can buy in Whole Foods or Formaggio, and, frankly, better than most farmers markets eggs. $5/dozen. Any takers? D can deliver by sitting in Diesel this afternoon.
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September 6th, 2009
September 2nd, 2009
06:10 pm - Jar of Fools
I think someone reading this journal may have our copy of it. If so, please let us know so we know where it is.
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03:14 pm - Still not dead
Having a truly, amazingly, phenomenally shitty day or two.
But, in the best traditions of scrawny little immigrants everywhere, I'm still not dead, and thus able to bore you with reports of my continued media consumption.
Graphic novels which have particularly disappointed me lately included DMZ v. 3: Public Works and 100 Bullets v. 13: Wilt. The first is plotty and much less atmospheric than the previous volumes in the series. Brian Wood does not do plotty very well, and the results are hackneyed and predictable. Also, the main character very obviously starts thinking with his balls. This is sad. The latter is just a huge clusterfuck, which is sort of the only way the series could have ended, once they got to issue 80 and failed to start tying anything up. I'm going to sit down and read all 100 issues from start to finish at some point in deep winter when I'm hibernatory, and I still have some hope that they'll make sense read that way. But.
I was also disappointed by Jonathan Hickman's Nightly News, a graphic novel which is more designed than illustrated. It's mildly funny and mildly pointed and very pretty and very baroque. Also, however many volumes of Blade of the Immortal have gone by since my last post, I'm now up to v. 20, and the plot is still going nowhere and Samura-san is still slacking on his pencilling. Disappointing.
Also, Freakangels v.2 was kind of lovely and continues to be one of my favourite Ellis series ever - but it's so disappointingly bloody slow, and frankly, the art is not of a sort that deserves to stretch across moments and pages the way this series is paced.
Barely disappointing me at all were The Rabbi's Cat, Berlin v.2: City of Smoke and Flight v.6. The first two are certified works of genius and I am disappointed that not all of you have read them. This volume of Flight was probably my favourite since the first - I got the sense that this was more tightly edited, and the stories were, as a whole, just that little bit sharper and prettier and more magical than those in v. 4 and 5. Gagne's ongoing piece is beginning to bore me a little, though.
I am also disappointed that there isn't more Girl Genius than there is already. How did I manage not to read this series for the last 10 years? I'm disappointed in myself.
I picked up Keith Brooke's The Accord (2009) and Emma Bull's Bone Dance (1991) expecting to do a cyberpunk now/cyberpunk then comparison, and I was disappointed, because neither of these is really cyberpunk, though both wear the trappings, a bit. Bull's book (yes, that Emma Bull) advertises itself as a fantasy for technophiles, and I guess it is, a bit, insofar as there's magic involved - but there's also very, very little tech involved, so anyone looking for a fantasy for technophiles would probably be quite disappointed. Structurally it's very classic Hollywood western, and it has some of the trappings of Liberation and some of the ingenuity of The Diamond Age and some of the desperation of a Kurosawa movie, and it's pretty free of the irritating writing that clouded War for the Oaks and all in all it was one of the more interesting things I've read in a while. The Accord was also pretty good, although, in spite of starting with virtual worlds and a near future setting, Mr. Brooke manages to miss the memo about how these mean you have to write a cyberpunk novel, and instead writes something that Charlie Stross might have come up with when told to write cyberpunk - big, world-changing, interdimensional, indeterminate future alternate reality with some quantum this and interstitial that. Everyone in the book is a bastard, and Brooke manages to interweave the novel of ideas and the novel itself in some quite affecting, effective ways.
I was also barely disappointed by In Ashes Lie, which was relentlessly, breathlessly, full of plot. So much plot, so tightly wound, that there was barely time for anything else, and there shouldn't have been time for anything else - but in the middle of it, a spot or two of genuinely stirring rhetoric, some bright, fresh, blood, and a surprisingly beautiful portrait of Michael Deven.
Up should never have gotten its Pixar license for being too sad. Disappointing that they'd let it out of the studio, really.
I think that's it. I'm disappointed that I haven't done more reading.
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July 15th, 2009
12:13 am - A manifesto
Worth adopting. Not necessarily wholesale.
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July 14th, 2009
09:58 pm - Still not dead
But feeling somewhat cooked out - 3 night weekend, plus 10 courses for 8 people on Sunday, plus wine tasting (which we made dinner for) on Monday, equals a higher than usual mental friction coefficient, especially when it comes to food. A friend is coming over on Thursday night - we're getting pizza from the (admittedly quite, quite good) local.
This installment is overdue, but what finally prompted me to get off my arse was seeing this graphic on boingboing yesterday. It shows a breakdown of US household spending, and the single smallest measured item is reading. An average American household spends 0.2% of their income on reading, or $118/year. This is behind tobacco, at 0.7%, housekeeping supplies at 1.3%, and personal care at 1.2%. This outraged me so much that nothing would do but to drag latvianchick to Porter Square Books at lunchtime and buy $130 worth of reading material.
Anyway - over the last however many months, this is what I've consumed.
Queen & Country Definitive Edition v. 4 collects the various Unclassified storylines. Good reading, while waiting for Rucka to get round to writing more Q&C. I'm curious to see what he does now that he's run out of Sandbaggers plots to borrow.
Mr. Pip was a fantastic read - kleenestar introduced it to me as a story about the power of imagination - and what struck me about it was its willingness to face up to the unintended consequences of imagination. Charming and shocking by turns.
Palimpsest was brilliant in a completely different way. A couple of people told me they started it and put it down because it was too dense, but it was precisely the sort of dense I love in fiction - wild and wordy and shamelessly, romantically, poetic. Combined with several tight plots, one of which was a very convincing and unforced world-changer, this hit all my buttons. To nitpick, characters came across as plot-bots to some degree.
The Red Wolf Conspiracy is the rollickingest, sea-shanty-est, swashbuckling-est book I've read in a while, and remember that I started the year with an overdose of Aubrey/Maturin. It's big fantasy, with big ships, and all in all a winning combination. Original setting, pretty good pacing, and plenty of "dundunduuuuuuun!" Somewhat cardboard characters and not that snappy dialogue, though.
I've been trying to read The Dark is Rising and just failing (sorry, prosicated - I'm too old to get past the "look! Let's give the protagonist awesome stuff!"
Austerity Britain is about 700 pages long, but sheer bloody brilliance. In spite of growing up in a very anglophone ex-colony, and having visited England numerous times, I don't think I ever understood why the country is the way it is until I read this book. This lack of understanding was partly down to a simple lack of factual knowledge about modern British history (which this solved), but it was greatly complicated by the way the popular consciousness in Britain is - like the popular consciousness in Singapore but unlike that in the US - shaped to a great degree by the actions of the government. Austerity Britain tells both stories and illuminates the interplay, while making good (if not terribly original or exceptionally deft) use of some terrific sources.
The Works has been bathroom reading for the last 2 months - it was terrific. Anyone who claims any affection for New York City - or any modern city at all, really - needs to read this.
A couple of Warren Ellis shorts - Switchblade Honey is Ellis doing SF action, and mediocre. Anna Mercury is Ellis doing SF action, and fantastic - shares some elements with Planetary and Ministry of Space. Ellis is hard to critique, in a way - his pacing and dialogue are so expert it's really a question of how much you like the particular conceit he's chosen to play with this week.
In cover to cover cookbooking, Happy in the Kitchen is well worth picking up for anyone who is interested in cooking and likes to play in the kitchen. I'm looking at you, coraline and prosicated. Unlike Keller's stuff, it's not so much "recipes from my restaurants" as "techniques I like," illustrated with recipes for a home kitchen. And unlike Keller, his techniques are genuinely playful and original, and quite inspirational. Keller inspires you to do things better, Richard inspires you to do things cleverly. In the middle of Keller's Under Pressure which is useless to anyone without a sous vide setup.
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