Tag: books

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

I read Tom Stoppard’s play in college, and had never had a
chance to see it, so I put this
movie on my Netflix Watch Now queue when I noticed it. It’s
directed by Stoppard himself, and has a cast with some notable
stars in it.

It was one of the high points of that course in college — we
read a lot of good literature but most of it was stuff I’d read
already — this was an example of something I wouldn’t have read
on my own but really enjoyed.

The memorable scenes are all really good. There’s some less
memorable stuff that doesn’t get too tedious in between. As you
would expect, the parts that Shakespeare wrote are pretty
conventionally acted, except for bringing out the conceit that
nobody, including the two characters themselves, can remember
which is which. I gave it 3 stars.

If you don’t know the play and want to know whether you want
to, here are the parts I remembered fondly from reading it:

  • R. and G. play a game of “Questions”, where you have to
    always ask a question and it can’t be a non-sequitur or a
    rhetorical question. Then after their first encounter with
    Hamlet they score it by those rules.
  • They try to decide whether Hamlet is mad today based on his
    “when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw,”
    speech, and fail to determine the direction of the wind, where
    North is, or the time of day.
  • The statement that toenails never grow.

You can see some of these quotes out of context at imdb.com,
but it really isn’t one-liner humor.

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Gibralter and Christmas

We like to end the three-hour West Gallery Quire
meetings with something rousing that we know well, so that even if
we’ve been struggling with unfamiliar music where the words are on
a different page with the notes, we can go home feeling like we
sound good when we’ve worked through those difficulties.

Last Sunday we were concentrating on Christmas music, much of
which was new, and even the stuff we’ve been playing for years we
mostly haven’t played since last January. There are a couple of
rousing pieces suitable for ending on, but we’d sung those already
when it got to be time for the last number. So our director
suggested that we end with one of our really common (because it’s
really good) ending numbers: Gibralter.

The text is part of Isaac Watts version of Psalm
72:

Jesus shall reign where’er the sun

Does his successive journeys run;

His kingdom stretch from shore to shore,

Till moons shall wax and wane no more.

People and realms of every tongue

Dwell on his love with sweetest song;

And infant voices shall proclaim

Their early blessings on his name.

Blessings abound where’er he reigns,

The pris’ner leaps to lose his chains;

The weary find eternal rest,

And all the sons of want are blest.

Let every creature rise and bring

Peculiar honors to our King;

Angels descend with songs again,

And earth repeat the long Amen.

Bruce was apologetic about Gibralter not being a
Christmas piece, but I said, “It has ‘infant voices’ and
‘angels’ — it’s a lot like Christmas music.”

He added, “Prisoners?”

I don’t see why you couldn’t make a really good Christmas card
with the prisoners leaping to lose their chains.

Science Fiction Best of… lists

I’ve run into a couple that may be useful when you’re looking
for something to read.

This Best
Science Fiction of the decade list is a little odd, but I
like most of what’s on it that I’ve read. I definitely like
some of Cory Doctorow’s later stuff better than Down and
out in the Magic Kingdom, and I don’t understand
leaving out Honor Harrington and Discworld and putting in Harry
Potter but it’s likely that you’ll find something you’ll
enjoy.

Jo Walton’s list of Foolproof
Holiday Gift Books is less pretentious, and possibly more
useful. She includes some of the series (The
Long Price Quartet, Steerswoman’s
Road) that really got me excited about reading the next
book.

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Why there was no room at the inn

I was typing lyrics for the concert
program, and it occurred to me to wonder why there was a
run on hotel rooms in Bethlehem, before Christmas was a
generally celebrated holiday. The only explanation in the Bible
is that the decree had gone forth from Caesar Augustus that all
the world should be taxed, and everybody had to go the place
their family came from.

This presumably caused a run on hotels lots of places, since
lots of people’s family came from somewhere they didn’t still
live. But Bethlehem was probably worse, because it the classiest place
to claim that your family came from. So even though you
presumably had the usual 4 grandparents and 8
great-grandparents…, you picked the one with the most eminent
lineage to claim. In Joseph’s case, this would have been King
David, who was from Bethlehem. Everyone else with any claim to
David would have picked him, too; hence no room at the inn.

A related note that didn’t occur to me until some time after my
Catholic education had finished is that the lineage at the
beginning of the Gospel of Matthew is Joseph’s, so the story
that comes next
about how Joseph had nothing to do with Jesus’ conception is
even odder than it appears in isolation from the geneology.

Julie and Julia (the movie)

The
movie was more fun than the book. Or to be more precise,
the movie is based on two books, and probably the one about
Julia Child was more fun than the one about Julie Powell.

My favorite scene was the one where Julia has just started at
the
Cordon Bleu cooking school and she’s trying to chop
onions and everyone else is going “chop, chop, chop, chop” and
Julia is going “sli——-ce, sli——ce” and is clearly never
going to finish. So the teacher demonstrates how to hold the
knife, and the movie cuts to Julia’s kitchen and she’s going
“chop, chop, chop, chop” and there’s a foot high pile of already
chopped onions next to her.

There is good stuff about cooking in Queens as well as about
cooking in Paris. So if you like the idea of this movie, you’ll
probably enjoy the movie.

Meryl Streep doesn’t actually look much like Julia Child, but
she does do the sound and the attitude quite well.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B002RSDW80&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

What ereader device do I recommend

You would expect a one-a-day blog project like this to run into
trouble in December, and this year is worse than most for that.
In addition to the party (and attendant cleaning and
cooking) and shopping and spending several days in Fall River, I
also lost a day on Tuesday officiating at a special election and
I have the December 17 concert and I’m trying to wrap up Bonnie’s
estate by the end of the year.

One of the tricks I’ve learned for writing a blog post when you
don’t have time to write a blog post is to take something out of
an email you wrote someone. This morning someone asked me to
tell them what ebook reader I recommend, and this is what I
wrote:

I don’t recommend any of the special-purpose e-readers, but the Sony
is probably better than the Kindle if you want to get locked into a
single-purpose, black and white device that doesn’t fit in your
pocket. Everybody who’s actually seen a Barnes and Noble Nook seems
to hate it, and apparently you won’t be able to get one until January
at the earliest.

What I use is a Nokia N810 Internet Tablet. They aren’t making them
any more, but you might still be able to buy one somewhere. They’ve
been replaced by the N900, which is also a phone, but not a phone
anyone in this country would want to actually use.

The iPod Touch is another one to think about. It’s a bit smaller and
lower resolution than what I have, but of course you can use all those
thousands of apps in the app store. John really likes one that has a
candle on the screen and you can blow on it and snuff it out.

Or of course, if they already have iPhones they should try the reading
applications on that. Stanza seems to be the one a lot of people
like.

If you don’t insist on putting it in your pocket, some of the netbooks
are good deals, and give you a lot more functionality for less money
than the Kindle or the Sony.

The best website for reading long discussions about this is
teleread.org.

I later added:

The other thing wrong with the e-ink devices (Sony and Kindle and
Nook) is that you need a reading light to read in bed.

And I should have added that some of them have fairly limited
support for using larger fonts, which is strange since being
able to read at your preferred font size is one of the major
advantages of ebooks over dead tree ones.

Disclosure

Last October, there was a ruling from the FTC that proposed
hefty fines for bloggers who fail to disclose “compensation” for
their reviews. It’s described in indignant detail on the
Teleread blog.

I’ve been ignoring that ruling. It certainly doesn’t apply
directly to me. I’m not organized enough to ask for free copies
of the books and DVD’s I review, and I certainly don’t have any
other direct compensation for what I do on this blog.

I don’t know how to explain my relationship with Google Adsense
in terms that won’t violate my agreement with them, but I found a
place to point
to that does.

When I link to products on Amazon.com, I allegedly get a cut if
you order them. But I really don’t think I’ve been telling you to
order the products unless I really like them, and I certainly
haven’t been telling anyone to get books or movies there unless
that’s really the way they like buying books and movies.

It’s been a long time since I actually got a check from either
of these programs.

I personally get almost all the movies I watch from Netflix. When I buy ebooks,
I get them from Fictionwise, which has a
much more enlightened policy on DRM than does Amazon, and a
discount structure that allows you to at least pretend you’re
getting a lot of free books. I get most of my hard copy books
from the library; if I think I really want to own a dead tree
copy, I either go to a bricks and mortar bookstore or order
online, often used.

Lots of the other things I buy I haven’t gotten from Amazon,
either, even if I pointed to the picture that Amazon keeps
online for us.

Asthma-Free Naturally

I mentioned having been intrigued by this
article a couple
of weeks ago. I decided that buying this
book by Patrick McKeown would make sense if I were really serious about doing
breathing exercises.

Like a lot of these self-help books, the “science” is probably
completely bogus, but the anecdotal evidence that the advice
helps is interesting if it’s advice about a problem you really
need to solve.

I had independently figured out that breathing through the nose
actually helped during an asthma attack. So I believe some of
the rest of the stuff about practicing breathing through the
nose and I have been doing some of the recommendations. I’m not
going as far as figuring out how to laugh with my mouth closed,
but I did order some surgical tape to try taping my mouth shut
while I’m sleeping. Instead of his nose unblocking exercise for
nasal congestion, which sounds uncomfortable, I’m continuing to
do the alternate nostril breathing I learned in Yoga class.

The advice about diet and exercise is fairly standard, and not
particularly well-written. For example, here’s the paragraph
about meat:

Fruit and vegetables are of primary importance. A
little meat is essential for good health, but for some people in
the Western world it has become an obsession.

I don’t know how many vegetarians the author would have known
in Ireland in 2008, but you certainly can’t talk to the population
of Cambridge, Massachusetts that way.

I have completely stopped taking my steroid inhaler, and am
controlling attacks by a combination of breathing exercises and
the albuterol (rescue) inhaler. I’m not saying it’s a complete
solution, and when I get over the undesirable side effects of
taking the maximum dose of steroid inhaler for so long after
that cold in October, I may well go back to using it a bit. But
it’s possible that these exercises will help reduce the need for
it.

So I’m making a qualified recommendation of this book. I don’t
really believe the thesis that asthma is a result of a shortage of
CO2, or that asthmatics take in 4-6 times as much air
as normal breathers. But some of the recommendations probably
help some people, and if you’re having trouble with your asthma,
it’s worth thinking about.

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Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood

I said when I reviewed
The
Year of the Flood that reading it made me want to
reread Oryx
and Crake. I have now done that. I enjoyed it more
this time. I suspect it might make sense to read The
Year of the Flood first if you haven’t read either of them
yet. They take place in the same time frame — two or three of the major
characters in Flood are minor characters in
Crake. But you really are more interested in Jimmy,
the narrator and main character in Crake, after
you’ve seen him (and Crake) throught the eyes of Ren, one of the
point of view characters in Flood.

The argument for reading Crake first is that
Flood takes the narrative one scene later, so if you
read Flood first, you know one piece more about how
Jimmy’s story resolves itself. I can really imagine a third (at least) book
in this world — I hope it happens.

Here’s an example of the same story told from two different
points of view in the two books. The characters are college roommates.

As Jimmy sees it in Oryx and Crake:

Bernice let him know how much she disapproved of his carnivorous ways by kidnapping his leather sandals and incinerating them on the lawn. When he protested that they hadn’t been real leather, she said they’d been posing as it, and as such deserved their fate. After he’d had a few girls up to his room — none of Bernice’s business, and they’d been quiet enough, apart from some pharmaceutically induced giggling and a lot of understandable moans — she’d manifested her views on consensual sex by making a bonfire of all Jimmy’s jockey shorts.

As Bernice tells the story in The Year of the Flood:

She’d had a roommate like that at first, plus he’d been an
animal-murderer because he’d worn leather sandals. Though
they’d been fleather. But they’d looked like leather. So she’d
burnt them. And thank God she didn’t have to share a bathroom
with him any more, because she could hear him doing sexual
things with girls practically every night, like some
degenerate bonobo/rabbit splice.

‘Jimmy,’ she said. ‘What a meat-breath!’

This is real science fiction written by a real novelist, who is
also a fine poet. I didn’t think Oryx and Crake
was among her best work when I read it 6 years ago, but I think
the two novels together are at least equal to The
Handmaid’s Tale, and certainly better in terms of
richness of the imagined future.

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Agent to the Stars, by John Scalzi

I was reminded that I hadn’t told you about Agent to the
Stars, which I read a few weeks ago, when I read John
Scalzi’s blog entry this morning.

The blog says that if you’re going to self-publish, please
don’t pay anyone to do it. You can get it online for free, and if
you need hardcopy, he recommends lulu.com, as do I.

As someone to get advice about self-publishing from, he’s one
of the obvious successes. He wrote Agent to the
Stars when he was a struggling young writer, and published
it online, suggesting that people send him a dollar if they liked
it. He wasn’t expecting to make much money that way, but he
stopped counting when he had $4,000, and the interest in the free
online book made it easier for him to sell his subsequent books to
“real” publishers.

Anyway, if you’re looking for a funny, lightweight science
fiction novel to read, I recommend this one. I can’t tell you
much about the plot, since there would be spoilers, but it’s very
well done. And you can download it for free if you have a way to
read books in html form that you enjoy.