The Mysteries Within

(6 June 2004, 20:54)

Sherwin Nuland: The Mysteries Within: A Surgeon Explores Myth, Medicine, and the Human Body

I bought this book because it promised to be about organs. In fact, it's organized (haha) on that principle -- a chapter or more centers on each of five organs (stomach, liver, spleen, heart, uterus). And it's by a surgeon -- who better to talk about organs? Organs organs organs! (OK, I'm starting to feel a little too Fafblog here.)

It was pretty cool when it talked about organs -- actual surgical experiences the author has had. Unfortunately, it spent most of its time on the history of medicine. Every so often it would tell the details of some historically important medical experiment, and that was neat too, in the way that well-designed experiments always are. But mostly, history, and history I wasn't particularly interested in reading. It wasn't badly written, and I don't dislike history in general; I just wasn't in the mood for it. And really, there were only four surgeries or so. *pouts* I want more organs.

Mostly, the book was a polemic against fuzzy or magical thinking applied in places where logic is the correct tool. and that's a fine sentiment, but, well, preaching to the choir here. La. I think the author had a particularly sensible take on it, and he appreciated both logic and non-logical approaches to truth in their appropriate spheres, but I'm just so far from being thrilled by polemics, and ones I already agree with have to work doubly hard to be interesting.

( But a few good quotes... )

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movies!

(28 May 2004, 10:41)

Let's depart a moment from small pages for the big screen...

"Touching the Void"

A semi-documentary, semi-reconstruction in which two cheery English blokes climb a never-before-climbed Andean peak and experience disaster on the way down. Shockingly, both survive. You will not believe this even though the guy bearing the brunt of the disaster is onscreen narrating many of his experiences, alive, twenty years later. One of those movies that had to be truth because as fiction it would have been too staggeringly implausible. Funny, in an astonishingly dark way. Scary. Excellent.

( A few more gory details... )

"Triplets of Belleville"

OK, time to put in a less scary movie now :).

I actually have a lot less to say about Belleville because I have no idea what genre it is. "Mad Quebecois genius" is the closest I can get. Beyond that, I don't know what I can say without spoilers. The animation is bizarre and elongated and fairy-tale and not at all Disney and clearly drawn almost entirely by hand by people obsessive about their craft; in some scenes you can see the texture of the paper and it's an important part of the sky. My husband characterized it as "draw an axis through bicycles and rotate reality around it" -- because there were these bicycles in the movie; the Tour de France played an important part, in fact; and the bicycles and the Tour were the only realistically rendered elements in the whole movie -- right down to the taped handlebars, STI shifters, derailleurs, the crazy Basque fans and allez!-esque writing on the roads. (But don't worry; it's a fun movie even if you're not a bike geek; it's just funner if you are. ;) The rest of it was all Sylvain Chomet's reality, which has very little in common with ours, though it's full of surprise and humor and real wonder at every turn. Not that cheesy sentimentalized schmaltz which tends to pass for ooooh childlike wonder in movies these days -- things you see and your intuitive reaction is actually wonder.

There's almost no dialogue. There's a lot of French spoken in the background, and a lot of expressive vocalization, but almost no actual dialogue. And that's fine.

It's unbelievably funny. But I don't want to say how because it's too spoilery.

It will take your brain and go shake! crunch! and leave little brainbits in happy quivering pieces on the floor.

So, yeah. Go see it. Or rent it. It's been in our second-run theatre for a while now so I'm not sure where it can best be found.

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(17 May 2004, 03:34)

May 17, 2004

City Hall, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Sometime after midnight

OMNIA VINCIT AMOR.

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(10 May 2004, 16:33)

Attempting to update our phone list. If I'm supposed to have your phone number, email it to me. (If you don't know my email, am I really supposed to have your phone number?) Thanks.

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Wicked

(28 April 2004, 11:58)

Wicked, by Gregory Maguire

Wicked is Maguire's prequel to The Wizard of Oz, focusing, as its subtitle would indicate, on "the life and times of the Wicked Witch of the West". I have to hand it to the man -- he's better versed in his Oz than I am, and brought up characters and events I hadn't thought of in decades. His own characters (or takes on the familiar ones) are good and his writing is amazing. Again like childhood -- this is the first book since then where I've really felt like I was there. Someone more literary than I can examine the writing and see if it really is unusually thick with visual metaphor; I just know I saw everything that happened and lost track of the world around me. Additional points -- Maguire's vocabulary is bigger than mine, and I learned several new words! (Not in that showy, "look, my vocabulary's so big" way; his prose is really delightful and fluent.)

Unfortunately, the disappointing part of the book concerns the nature of wickedness itself. He ruminates greatly on what it is -- gives us very different personalities for the Wicked Witches of the East and West, and for other major characters as well -- philosophizes and storytells -- but in the end I'm not sure he has a thesis, and he may (alas) cross the line into that old cliche -- "she wasn't evil, just misunderstood."

( wickedness )

This word "disappointment" bandied about so much, though, it's really an excellent book, crashingly well-written, and you ought to read it, if only so we can talk about what you think it says about evil.

( 14 ideas | Ideate )

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

(14 April 2004, 14:55)

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

An absurdly brilliant book. Her writing is passionate, honest, opinionated, engaging. Her method, obvious yet revolutionary. Her logic blindingly compelling. Her ideas fundamental. I don't know how anyone could read this book without becoming a fan (and, moreover, dramatically more aware of the surrounding world). Who should read this book? Everyone, but especially people familiar with New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Baltimore, San Francisco -- major American cities from which she draws many examples.

Oh, what's the book about you may ask? Well, it's as the title says: cities. What makes them vibrant, exciting, thriving, popular, loved? What makes them grey and dull? Is there anything we can do about it?

But it doesn't really matter whether or not you're interested in this now. I wasn't particularly. Read the book. You will be.

( Let's say some more, shall we? )

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trolling for linguistics books

(8 April 2004, 14:59)

I've been reading a linguistics textbook (sufficiently introductory it doesn't merit comment, if only because I'd probably embarrass myself). I've discovered, to probably no one's great surprise, the following:

Subfields which interest me hugely: syntax, historical linguistics, language acquisition
Subfields which are OK: phonetics, computer language foo
Subfields which make me want to fling myself out a window: semantics, sociolinguistics

So, I know a lot of you out there in ukeleleland are big language geeks. Any books I really ought to read? Or really oughtn't? (Assume I have almost no formal linguistics background but have studied a lot of languages, mostly Indo-European, am willing to tackle reasonably tough texts as long as the lack of background won't be too frustrating a hurdle, and have a mathematical/scientific bent. You can assume it 'cause it's true. :)

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meme!

(31 March 2004, 20:20)

I have yoinked this meme from bromius, for it amuses me.

---

Pick an interest from my interest list that you either:

A) Don't know anything about
Or
B) Know something about but can't understand why I would dig it.

And I will explain to the best of my ability.

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some thumbnail reviews

(31 March 2004, 10:36)

John Hersey, My Petition for More Space

A lightweight and somewhat dated dystopia (the one where population growth has left us with, well, no space). No reason to read it unless you, like me, have a weakness for dystopias, or a long bus ride to fill. But do read Hersey's Hiroshima, which is not lightweight at all, and, alas, real.

Lance Armstrong (with Sally Jenkins), It's Not About the Bike

OK, I am a cheesy fangirl, I admit it! (Though I reserve the real depths of my fangirlism for Tyler Hamilton...) But this man is not human. If you like biking, or cancer survival, or unreal physiological capacity, or general inspiration or awe, read this book. It's actually well-written in addition to having compelling subject matter. And a very fast read. And -- and -- Lance!

Cherie Priest, Four and Twenty Blackbirds

We ordered a bunch of stuff from Amazon, and they included this for free. It's a slim horror/suspense novel by this totally gothy-looking author. Despite this, it doesn't suck ;). The writing kept me moving along, the main character was generally sympathetic (though she occasionally slipped too far into Gen-X ironic flippancy), the gothiness of the book is thoroughly tongue-in-cheek (including a hysterical sendup of a coffeehouse poetry slam). The author is also from Tennessee and Southernness pervades her work, which gives the goth aspects an unusual yet plausible twist and makes the whole book seem a little more original. Also a fast read.

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The Left Hand of Darkness

(27 March 2004, 18:49)

TITLE: The Left Hand of Darkness
AUTHOR: Ursula K. LeGuin
SHORT VERSION: A pointless book.

( and now I shall babble about inconsistencies and maybe even irrelevance )

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trolling for ideas

(25 March 2004, 08:48)

Well, the husband and I just had a lengthy debate about this (in which, by the way, I'm right and he's wrong), but maybe some of you can stick up for his position.

The question being: why does linear algebra not suck?

Let me elaborate a little. He claims that linear algebra has some sort of intrinsic beauty, but, whenever I pressed him for examples, he talked about its application to physical or engineering systems. I say that's not intrinsic beauty, that's application, and, of course, being a pure mathematician who doesn't like engineering and rabidly dislikes certain areas of physics, I actually count this against linear algebra. Of course, my linear algebra course was taught by a wretched mumbly Ewok, so I am open to the possibility that there was some kind of intrinsic worth to the subject, and I just didn't see it.

So. If linear algebra is worth studying for its own sake, where? Why? How?

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some thumbnail reviews

(17 March 2004, 13:02)

TITLE: Sophie's World
AUTHOR: Jostein Gaardner (trans. Pauline Møller)

A history of philosophy in the form of a novel. An odd idea and, as you might expect, fairly slow (albeit thought-provoking) at the beginning. The pace picks up considerably toward the end, and the plot ends up both surprisingly interesting and surprisingly philosophy-relevant. The main character, Sophie, is largely sympathetic (though the author has no idea how to handle dialogue during the philosophy-intense parts and makes her sound somewhat petulant); the other main character, Alberto, is certainly interesting, though to a surprisingly large extent he remains as mysterious to us, the readers, as he does to Sophie. The Norwegian setting, and concomitant cultural assumptions, are a nicely interesting layer for those of us not from Norway. But, overall, the philosophy is too shallow to be of great interest to an adult intellect; though I'm not actually interested in philosophy, if I were, I'd want to get enough depth to really wrestle with. I think the book would have been much more compelling had I read it when it came out and I was about Sophie's age (15).

TITLE: The Road to Mars
AUTHOR: Eric Idle (yes, that Eric Idle)

In which an android develops a theory of comedy. It's unclear how much the android's theory is supposed to reflect the author's, but I'm going to say it does; moreover, that there aren't a lot of people with better qualifications to be theorizing so. The book is, of course, funny. Assorted hijinks occur, involving daring (or at least totally hapless) navigation of an asteroid belt, explosions, divas, image consultants, and all the other things requisite to a comic journey through a widely settled solar system of the future. The author, being English, now and again shows he's much better educated than the rest of us, but he doesn't mean to; he just can't really help it (this was, after all, one of the people with enough schoolboy classical background to bring us the Judaean People's Front!). And, unsurprisingly when you think about it, the book is very dark and lonely at its core. It's a good book. If you're a Monty Python fan you're pretty well morally bound to read it for your own personal edification but, even if you're not, it's a good book. And a pretty quick read.

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the time has come, the walrus said...

(13 March 2004, 16:41)

I really ought to get another bike. The rest of this post is probably of interest only if you're a bike geek. But if you are, I'd appreciate your input.

( What sort of bike should I get? )

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(6 March 2004, 13:57)

Have you ever wanted to get some people together in your community to hang out in Latin?

Now you can: colloquamur.

You know you want to.

*bounce*! *bouncebouncebounce*!

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The Substance of Style

(29 February 2004, 09:50)

AUTHOR: Virginia Postrel
TITLE: The Substance of Style
SHORT VERSION: I think Postrel is arguing that, as disposable incomes increase and manufacturing costs lessen, the aesthetic properties of consumer objects are becoming one of their most important traits, and that this is a good thing, because it ties in to self-expression. Honestly I only read a few chapters, because it seemed more like a catalog than an argument. And her examples are interesting -- she adores her subject and there's a wide world of oddments out there -- but after a while examples are just not interesting reading. They need to be tied together with reasoning, and it's just not there. So, actually, I don't think I'll write a long version. What would I say?

I should note, for the people who find the name "Virginia Postrel" familiar or the people who are determined now to avoid her, that it may be familiar and you probably shouldn't avoid her --

She's the former editor of Reason magazine and writes a wide variety of guest columns, so you may have encountered her in that capacity;

Her earlier book is The Future and its Enemies, which the husband informs me is totally brilliant, though I haven't read it.

Her web site also has some interesting writing and, as befits someone who's just written a book on style, it's pretty cool-looking. (Though what *is* it with this rash of conservative blonde punditobabes? OK, she's not exactly conservative, she's libertarian, but the two tend to get elided these days.)

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Tigana

(29 February 2004, 09:37)

AUTHOR: Guy Gavriel Kay
TITLE: Tigana
SHORT VERSION: If you like fantasy, you'll like it. Even if, like me, you don't read a great deal of fantasy, you might like it, because it's a very well-done example of the genre, and it has a fascinating premise. Get the ten-year anniversary edition with the author's afterword, because it turns out there were all kinds of awesome themes kicking around in there that I didn't notice until I read the author's take on them.

( Like Lake Wobegon, but with sorcery )

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lotd: grab bag

(27 February 2004, 08:38)

There's apparently a move underfoot of people who use classic '80s game consoles to make music. This is every bit as weird as it sounds. They have live shows. They reprogram dot matrix printers (for when game consoles aren't enough). They cover Depeche Mode (mp3 file; big). (This is every bit as weird as it sounds; don't listen unless you want your brain to explode *cough* marphod *cough*.) They have a Christmas album.

---

You know that guy who cost the Cubs the playoffs and had to be taken into custody for his own protection? The ball in question has received its fitting reward. "It's like the ring from The Lord of the Rings and we're kind of like Frodo, trying to get it over with," fan says. Plus: extra bonus quote from a befuddled Gerhard Schroeder!

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As She Climbed Across the Table

(24 December 2003, 11:14)

Once again I find myself rather behind on recording books...

TITLE: As She Climbed Across the Table
AUTHOR: Jonathan Lethem
SHORT VERSION: One of the coolest ideas ever for a main character. Alas, the book never comes together. Worth reading the first thirty pages, and then putting it aside to spare yourself the disappointment.

( It offends my morals somewhat, too. )

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what are my favorite poems?

(13 December 2003, 11:21)

The 7th graders in my school are interviewing various non-English-teachers as to their favorite poems. I'll be talking to one of them on Monday. I have an index card on my desk which has been accumulating poems so I won't forget during the interview, but I'm wondering if it's missing anything. How would you know my favorite poems? Uh, I dunno. But you might know yours. Or you might know me well enough to know what you think I'd like. Whichever way, we can exchange some good words.

Here's what I have so far:

George Herbert: "Denial", "Prayer"
Shakespeare: Sonnet 116
Milton: that sonnet that starts with "Cyriack"
Auden: Sonnets from China
Byron: "The Destruction of Sennacherib" (maybe?)
Donne: "A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning"
Gerard Manley Hopkins, e.e. cummings, W.B. Yeats: I like them in general but I can't think of any specific poems. I feel certain I should be able to think of specific poems for Yeats, and I think it's likely I should know some for cummings too.

I'd probably be too predictable for a Latin teacher to go quoting classical poetry, but I'm partial to the bit in the Odyssey with Nausicaa, too.

I'm wondering if I'm missing anything by those wonderful overeducated young men who died in terrible droves in World War I. Wilfred Owen. He had some good stuff.

Some poets I'm not including are St. Vincent Millay, Keats, Pound, Wilde, Frost, either Browning, Hardy. They have good stuff, but it doesn't rise to the level of favorite. Though I guess some of it once did. Oh, and Dickinson. I loathe Dickinson.

And yeah, I've spent way too long reading sonnets. It happens.

So am I missing anything?

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essay question time...

(30 November 2003, 16:29)

What are your favorite charities? Why?

(P.S. Out of town these last few days for everyone's favorite family-and-gluttony holiday; have caught up on all posts but if anything in comments requires my attention, said attention is more likely if you point the comment out to me. ;)

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