I’m half-way through Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson, and so far it is global warming, NSF grant reviews, exiled Tibetan monks, a stay at home dad, and rides on the DC Metro. A pretty dull mix, especially the NSF parts, but it is really pretty interesting. Such an odd mix that I keep thinking, “did someone dare him to write an interesting novel with these ingredients?”

That said, the NSF proposal review meeting has far more drama than any of the battle planning meetings or political scheming meetings in David Weber’s “Honor Harrington” books. I finally forced myself to give up on those when I was going back to replot scenes to make them minimally exciting. The space battles are great, but the rest of the books are tedious interior monologue and committee meetings. The characters can’t even walk and advance the plot at the same time. I figured that he’d get better at writing as the books went on, but after six books, it was clear that he was amply rewarded for being mediocre. It is really embarrassing that these are “bestsellers”.

If you don’t have time to read Ellen Gilchrist, well, you do have time, really, she’s that good, but if you don’t think you have time, then you should read Chris Rose’s short article, Can’t stop loving New Orleans. I read the article in the San Jose Mercury News, but they often make things disappear behind a regwall, so I’d recommend the original. On the other hand, the Merc version is edited to be just a bit shorter and still works, so if you really, really don’t have time, try that one.

I’d like to quote a bit of it, but mise en scène doesn’t seem to be very quotable. Still, I’ll give it a shot, with a bit from the tightened up SJ Merc version:

I was in the French Quarter one night last week, trying to get to a movie, but it never happened. I was 40 minutes early, so I crawled around the neighborhood looking for a cup of coffee, and I came upon a guy who was singing while he cleaned the streets.

His name is Melvin Holmes. He was singing a Luther Vandross torch song, the kind that makes women love you for a lifetime. And he was nailing the song, just killing it, just calling out the doves and stars and blooming jasmine of the night.

The version from the Times-Picayune takes three paragraphs to get to roughly the same place. New Orleans is not about being crisp and punchy. As the excised portion says, “classically New Orleans, getting it all wrong in just the right way.”

I grew up in Baton Rouge, not New Orleans, but the two cities aren’t that far apart — fifty miles by road, a hundred by river — and the live oaks give off the same musty smell in both places. Both cities are crossroads, New Orleans is a port and Baton Rouge is the state capitol. Louis Armstrong or Huey Long, take your pick (think twice, which one built roads and schools?).

Like Chris Rose, I can’t stop loving south Louisiana. I won’t be moving back, but I know what he feels.

I’ve been having a fun time sharing books with my 7th grade son.

In 8th grade, I was a library aide. It was at the lunch period, so I’d shelve all the books returned that morning (all of them, because the one I had returned before school was usually on the bottom of the pile), go to lunch between rushes when the line was short, then come back to the library to choose a book and start reading. I’d finish it that night and return it the next morning before school.

As a result, I have a very good grounding in juvenile literature (through 1970, I’m catching up), and I was ready when my son reached 7th grade. Luckily, he’s a team guy and likes having other people recommend books. I’ve been re-reading some and hunting down new ones.

As you can see by the list below, I want to make sure he has a good grounding in the classics.

Ralph 124C 41+, Hugo Gernsback. Michael loved this book, even though it was written nearly a hundred years ago and that shows in the style and vocabulary. Gernsback was totally caught up in the wonders of the year 2660 and that somehow connected. I have a soft spot for visions of the future written in the past, and this one is from 1911, so it is even more fun. It is mostly a travelogue of the future, but there is enough plot to keep it moving.

Be sure to get the edition from the Bison Books Frontiers of Imagination series because it has the cool illustrations. Sigh, that web site is a disaster, but the books are really nice. If they could reissue the catalog of Sam Moskowitz’s Hyperion Press, I wouldn’t care if they wrote their whole site in PDF.

Have Space Suit, Will Travel, Robert Heinlein. You think that all those SF juveniles are the same, then you find one that is just better. This one has it all — tinkering engineers, good aliens, bad aliens, a prison on Pluto, a galactic tribunal on the worthiness of the human race, and a strong female character who’s good at math. Michael ate it up, but found the 1950’s small town scenes somewhat stranger than being imprisoned on Pluto. Maybe we should go watch a bunch of The Andy Griffith Show or Happy Days episodes to get a proper grounding in 50’s stereotypes. Or maybe not.

Space Cadet, Robert Heinlein. You’d probably pass this one up because of the title, but you’d be wrong. Yes, a lot of the plot is predictable, but it there is something interesting going on besides the regular academy and coming-of-age stuff. The Space Patrol is in charge of a global deterrent, orbiting nuclear weapons. The folk on the ground are so used to peace that even talking about the bombs is impolite. Could we make a lasting peace out of Mutually Assured Destruction? What kind of guardians would we need to make that work? The chill of the cold war spawns a bit of hope.

Heinlein’s Space Patrol has a lot in common with Doc Smith’s Galactic Patrol, but without the all-knowning Arisians to keep them on course. This time, it is all up to the humans.

Of course, Ender’s Game is the best space cadet novel of all time, but I think it is a lot stronger if you know which direction a space cadet story is supposed to go. There are always a couple of cadets who don’t make the grade because they aren’t moral enough, but we don’t expect them to be psychopaths. Space Cadet stands on its own, but if you haven’t read Ender’s Game, you now have another reason to read Heinlein first.

So Yesterday, by Scott Westerfeld. Set the time machine for today! The main character is a Cool Hunter on the watch for emerging fashions. He blows apart a marketing session by inviting an Innovator, a girl who starts fashions instead of following them. Then someone disappears and fashion gets deadly.

I really like how the plot charges ahead while peeling back the facade of marketing and fashion. The language has a now, post-modern shine (is post-modern already passé?) decorated with brand names. Even the cool hunting protagonist is nearly a brand name, Hunter Braque. He makes an aside early on about mentioning brands when he avoids saying “Google” because it is just too common.

It’s good this book is short, because both my son and my wife had to finish it in one sitting. Westerfeld writes longer stuff, too. He has a trilogy on another set of themes that hit home with teens. Uglies, Pretties, and Specials is set in a future where everyone is forced to get surgery and mods to be pretty and happy at age 16. Well, almost everyone. What did they give up to be pretty and happy? Was it worth it? What would you choose?

The King in the Window, by Adam Gopnik. This one isn’t science fiction. Well, there is some weird quantum physics stuff at the end, but that is more fantasy than SF. It is there for narrative effect not intellectual effect (but that is a different blog post). The wonderful part about this book is the feel of Paris and the presence of the past in the present. Racine, Molière, and Richelieu (still adjusting his mayonnaise) are here, and Versailles really is a portal to a different world. Unlike the other books on this list, this book is more about place and character than plot. The plot is fine, but what I remember is Paris, the dinner with Mrs. Pearson, the clochards, and all the windows.

I think the first half of the book was more satisfying and that it loses itself a bit when the American startup guy enters the story. Maybe New York authors just can’t write convincing Silicon Valley stereotypes. But that is a nit on a fun story with a nice bit of depth. My son didn’t see anything wrong with it. For me, catching myself reflected in the café window isn’t quite the same anymore.

When Worlds Collide, by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer. When a book gives away the ending in the title, you know the authors are betting everything on the ride. Imagine a mystery titled “The Butler Did It”. This edition combines When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide. That’s the sequel, but I bet you figured that out. This is another early SF novel, but from 1932 this time. That is a long twenty years from 1911 — world war, depression, and an influenza pandemic. In When Worlds Collide the destruction is not limited to govenrments, economies, or populations, the entire Earth is destroyed and it is done with convincing detail: huge tides, monster storms blotting out the sun, mass panic, and a final desperate dash to another planet. Once there, the meteorological and geological scares are over, but the sociological and political problems are just as serious.

You’re expected to think deep thoughts while reading Hamlet, but Richard III is a crowd-pleaser, Shakespeare’s first big hit on the stage, so herewith a series of thoughtlets.

Shakespeare is famous for insults, but this play specializes in curses. There are a few good insults, of course. Richard calls Queen Margaret a “foul, wrinkled witch.” That sets the tone for that relationship. But the curses are almost as evil as the deeds, “Die neither mother, wife, nor England’s queen!,” Queen Margaret says, wishing the deaths of Queen Elizabeth’s father, sons, and husband.

Some of Shakespeare’s plays are more accessible than others. This one is pretty good, though keeping track of four kings, two queens, two near-queens (dead and promised, respectively), and innumerable lords gets a bit old. It would be easier to understand if Richard 3.0 directly followed Richard 2.0. But then we’d have betas. Dang.

Is it time for a new book of management ideology? The main challenge in writing Management Secrets of Richard III would be getting 300 pages out of “demand total loyalty, lie to everyone, kill anyone in your way.”

In Act 3, Scene 7 Richard makes a tremendously risky and confident move. Almost every obstacle between him and the throne is dead or locked away, so he refuses it and makes them beg. His false objections are a hint of truth, “Alas, why would you heap this care on me? / I am unfit for state and majesty.” When he finally agrees, he claims that the blame lies on them if it all goes wrong. Suckers.

The history of actors playing Richard seems to be a continuing struggle to rise above chewing the scenery. The part invites several kinds of overacting, but also allows very different interpretations. It must be a real thrill to nail that part.

Richard Plantagenet was born October 2, 1452, Niccolò Machiavelli on May 3, 1469. It is a shame that they never met. Niccolò had the theory, Richard the practice.

The play isn’t history, Richard couldn’t have been that evil. It is based on seriously biased Tudor histories. That makes it more fun, like listening to the home-town radio announcers for baseball instead of the carefully even-handed TV commentators. Before every Rice football game they’d tell us “No cheering in the pressbox,” but that didn’t stop us from writing how the dominant Owls crushed the hapless Horned Frogs.

I’m not especially happy with the notes in this edition (Signet), about a third of them are things I don’t need to be told, and there are quite a few mysteries without notes. I guess it is back to the Arden Shakespeare. More expensive, but worth it.

Many Shakespeare plays are just full of lines that are widely quoted. Beyond “this is the winter of our discontent” and “my kingdom for a horse,” there aren’t many in Richard III. Those two are the first line of the play and the last of the second to last act, Richard’s first and last lines — clearly Shakespeare knew when to play his best cards.

The pacing is interesting in Act 5. The last two scenes are extremely short, 13 and 40 lines to cover the final clash between Richard and Richmond, Richard’s death, and Richmond’s closing speech. If those were preceded by normal action, the play would feel cut short, unfinished. But the scene before delays the clash is a parade of ghosts who recapitulate Richard’s murders, something that would usually be done in a final speech. We are held at the high point of tension, and the shock of the final scenes can hit with full force.

These are not subtle or especially deep characters. Richard is broadly drawn, with some shreds of humanity, but the other characters are pretty shallow. Mostly, we get to watch them get sucked into the evil vortex that is Richard and see how much they struggle against it. They each get their turn, but it is all about Richard.

Update: A few hours after I posted this, I read about a Shakespeare-themed virtual world. The first play they’ll tackle is Richard III.

I’ve finished the first volume of Christopher Alexander’s The Nature of Order, and the photographs just jumped out at me. Several of the photos showing “wholeness” in everyday life were very, very good. The photos aren’t credited in the text, so I dug through the acknowledgments in the back. Surprise! The photos are by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alfred Eisenstadt, Andreas Feninger, André Kertész, and Eliot Porter, some of the finest photographers of the 20th century.

The central concept of The Nature of Order is wholeness, an aesthetic and mathematical order which creates good fit between things and people. There are photographs of wholeness in buildings, ceramics, and rugs, all by masters of those arts. There are also photographs of street scenes and everyday life. These photographs are are by masters of photography, but they are not examined as art in themselves, only as documentation of wholeness in something else. Oops.

Alexander looks at the teacup, but through the photograph. The discussions of wholeness are always about the photograph’s time and place, never about the creativity of the photographer who chose that time and place to make the photograph. Alexander makes an important mistake when he treats artistic photography as pure documentation.

The mistake is easier to understand when you look at the photographers he uses. Most of them are working in a narrow style, the “high mimetic” mode (using Northrup Frye’s literary term) typical of Life magazine. The photographs intentionally show a world that is clearly like us, but better in some way. Most people do take these photos as documents, without realizing the skill and art involved in making a beautiful photograph from the living, moving world.

For Alexander, these are photographs of subjects or situations which strongly show wholeness. For me, these are photographers who can create art with strong wholeness from everyday subjects and sitations. Unfortunately for him, this is a serious mistake. Is the wholeness in the world or in the photograph? Is it innate or created by observers? Is wholeness flat and black and white or three-dimensional with colors and smells? If you are espousing a theory of fundamental order and wholeness in the world using photographic evidence, this isn’t a question you can dodge. It is central. These photographs are not neutral evidence of order and wholeness, they are themselves creations.

Alexander does use a few photographs by Eliot Porter and Edward Weston, clearly not high mimetic photographers. Again adapting Northrup Frye, these are recognizably real scenes, obviously superior in degree but not in kind (Frye calls this the “romantic” mode). These photos are used to illustrate form in nature, so it is appropriate to use photos that emphasize formal composition over documentation. Still, Alexander never even mentions that Eliot Porter might have created a photograph with order and wholeness out of available bits of nature instead of merely documenting the existing order. He seems to be misreading these more formal photographs in the same way as the others.

Two glaring examples of this misreading are with a single Henri Cartier-Bresson photo and with a series of André Kertész’s photos of Paris. Both cases have extensive discussions of the wholeness of the scenes as if the photographs were pure documentation.

The first example, pages 92-95, comes with a convenient contrasting example. First, we get a discussion of what is visible in the Cartier-Bresson photo. The next photo is of Alexander’s childhood home, and most of the discussion is about things not shown in the photo. In fact, this discussion is the first one where wholeness is clearly a three-dimensional concept and even an experiential path through three dimensions (like ZEN VIEW or INTIMACY GRADIENT in A Pattern Language). Until this point, it wasn’t clear whether wholeness was purely visual or was a characteristic of human activity.

Toward the end of the volume is a short section dedicated to André Kertész’s Paris. Kertész is an especially poor choice to treat as a documentary photographer. He was deeply visual and emotional, sometimes more more surrealist than realist. His own comments on his photography make exactly this point: “The things I photograph are not at all outstanding. I make them stand out.” [from PBS video interview]. Alexander reads these photographs naively: “Can we aspire to this? To Kertész’s pictures?” [page 394].

How can it make sense for architecture to aspire to a photograph? A later Kertész photograph, Broken Bench, makes this point especially clearly. The photograph is of a park, but it certainly isn’t something we aspire to. The bench is broken! It does make sense as a symbolic portrait an emotional state, perhaps of Kertesz’s problems fitting into New York after leaving Paris. It isn’t any kind of evidence for or against the wholeness of that particular park, and there is no way for an architect to “aspire to this”. The art of that photograph has nothing to do with the design of parks and benches.

I do think there is a lot of value in Alexander’s thesis of wholeness, but it is deeply disappointing that a brilliant person working in an applied art (architecture) can’t tell the difference between a document an a work of art. Photography has been around for over 150 years. Get a clue, people.

Arnold Zwicky’s Goram Motherfrakker! post about fake cuss words reminded me of the last time I read E. E. Smith’s Lensman series. The fake swearing there is of legendary silliness, to the point that it distracts me from the silliness which is essential to the plot. My trick is to substitute my own realistic cursing while reading. You can do it too. Use your imagination. I know you can do better than “she’s a seven sector call-out” even if it is just “check out the ass on that one!” You’ll need to get into a rhythm though, because you will encounter “by Klono’s gadolinium guts!”