Getting involved with a site, as part of a team. The overall coding and structure for this site, something I am not responsible for, is tag soup; my skin crawls a bit when I look at it.
Should I let my name be listed on the credits? Harlan Ellison kept “Cordwainer Bird” around for just such occasions.
by Lev Grossman
I really don’t remember when I’ve read a book that irritated me this much. I’m generally a sucker for old manuscript-based thrillers. Possibly it’s because I collect old books myself, but for whatever the reason, a search for old documents will generally find me coming along for the ride.
So it’s no surprise I bit on the premise here: a man is contracted to catalog the book collection of a wealthy family, looking in particular for a specific book. The book is one of those mythical beasts, the only evidence for its existence is what is generally accepted as a forged printing of it. The book doesn’t exist. Or does it?
The plot and the pacing go well enough, though we are expected to swallow several rather large presuppositions to get the story started, such as that the man contracted to catalog the collection knows next to nothing about books, and even less about cataloging them. We’re never given an acceptable reason why he was offered the job in the first place (the closest it gets is the old “I knew I could trust you when I saw you” kind of thing) and worse, we don’t have a good reason for him to accept the job. He seems to have no real interest in books, old or new, he’s due at a top-paying job across the Atlantic in two weeks and he’s spending the time with eleven crates of musty old books and playing what sounds like a prettty boring computer game, rather than preparing for the trip. Yeah, right. That really makes sense.
If you manage to swallow plot setup points like those, the pacing moves along fairly well, and the story develops as the Duke wantshim to drop the search while the Duchess wants him to continue). Then, abruptly, it ends. No climax, no ultimate struggle. Nothing. It just ends. Our hero shows up, breathless, with the codex in his hand, the crypto solved, and nothing whatever comes of it. Nothing changes, nothing is rescued or destroyed. We don’t even know whether our hero gets to start his new job (he was threatened with its loss during the quest for the codex) or what happens to the software company of his friend/acquaintance (which was also threatened with destruction by the Duke’s men).
This non-ending reduces the book to triviality. Why did the author even bother telling the story? What was the point? Basically we have a passably well-written book with nothing to say to us. If all you want to say is that everything is futile, and nothing can be achieved, then be consistent and shut up; if everything’s futile, then your story is as well, so don’t bother anyone else with it.
The structure of a thriller calls not only for a real ending, which Grossman fails to propvide, but for a brief “cooling-down” period after the climax, in which we are given the opportunity to recover our breath while the author fills us in on what finally happens with many/most of the sub-plots that were introduced along the way to keep the suspense building. Here, the author shirks his duty to his readers completely. We get nothing in return for our investment in the characters. No satisfaction at all.
Avoid this book. I can’t think of any circumstances under which I’d support buying it. Counting the speckles in the plaster on the ceiling will pass time more enjoyably. There’s no joy in this read, and if you’re a masochist, there are several other more efficient ways of inflicting pain on yourself, most of which will cost less.
Egad, a consecutive string of turkeys. I need to read something good to get this bad taste out of my mouth.
……I’m in serious trouble.
It was Youth Sunday yesterday, and traditionally the graduating seniors deliver the sermon. There were no graduating seniors in this year’s youth class, however, so they reached back to one from a prior class. The student they picked, Josh, graduated the last year I taught the youth class.
I am so proud of that man I could have just burst. He brought his message, and in it I heard echoes of myself, shaped differently, of course, as if they were bouncing off an irregular surface. He’d actually paid attention and learned something!
Through him I have reached into and affected the future; my own little bit of time travelling. But I’m not proud so much for myself, for my own accomplishment. I’m proud of him, because through it all he’s stood tall (in more ways than one). He’s taken what I taught, and mixed it together with his own experience and ideas he has gained elsewhere, and made it his own. He may echo some of my own conclusions, but he’s doing so not from rote memory, but for reasons consistent with himself.
His life hasn’t been easy; he’s felt serious pain, both physical and psychological. But through it all he’s stood with God, and God has stood with him. He truly believed God had set out to make a man, and he kept himself out of God’s way during the process; truly a great example for us all. Where’s he’s going I can’t tell, but, wherever it is, he’s going to get there, and that place will never be the same again. You can take that to the bank.
And I feel sorry for any mere mountain that gets in the way.
Goliath, you are mighty, but you cannot win this war
For the one who stands before you is standing in the Lord
The power and the glory are mine in Yahweh’s name
So Goliath, in this hour, you’ll be the next giant slain.
~Scott Wesley Brown
A first novel from Christine Kling.
Les Standiford, you should be ashamed of yourself. Mentioning Seychelle Sullivan in the same breath as John D [MacDonald] is a crime. I’ll admit I’m probably not a good judge of potential, and since it’s her first book maybe I should cut her some slack, but if John D had written this it would lining a bird cage or a cat box somewhere.
The link to Travis McGee is obvious; Sullivan is in salvage. But it stops there. There is the stupid but thorough cop who adds 2+2 and gets the square of the hypoteneuse, the old friend cop (only this one’s recently retired; seems like you can’t have a good guy on the force in this particular world). There’s the home for wayward girls (and you know what it really does to the girls, don’t you?) the ex-lover too nasty to be with but of course too noble to be part of the plot against her. Sullivan herself is too smart for the bad guys to put up with having her around, yet everyone believes nasty things said about her by a drunken racetrack loser. Yep, I can believe that, I can.
I got the feeling for about the middle third of the book the author was stuck for how to stretch it out. So we have a bunch of hand-waving (some hands containing weapons) and water-churning until enough pages have gone back to draw the tale to a close.
Maybe it’s just the linkage with MacDonald that’s triggering this in me; if so, that’s not Kling’s fault. But this tale was tiresome, I frankly almost didn’t finish the book. Life’s too short to waste it reading really bad books. This book seemed to hover gently right on the line between mediocre and bad. It’s quite possible the author has grown past this level now. If you think so and are willing to check it out, try one of her latest books. The only defensible reason for picking this one up is to complete a collection.
Double Sin, published in 1961, is a collection of stories written by Dame Agatha Christie. The publication date puts it toward the end of her “dry period” where her books were more automatic writing than inventiveness, but don’t let the timing put you off. Many of the stories come from the very fertile earlier periods of her career, and there are some real classics in here.
Of the eight stories presented, half are Poirot, and few of them of the automatic variety. Two more are Miss Marple’s, but those are among the more pedestrian of her adventures, and could be missed without regret. And finally, there are two examples of Christie’s gothic touch (non-series). Dame Agatha wrote a number of gothic stries as well, and they are interesting outings as well.
The longest story in the batch, The Theft Of The Royal Ruby, gets reprinted in nearly every Christmas Mystery collection; there are elements of the heart-warming in it as much as mystery. “Wasps’ Nest” plays the least fair with the reader, but that’s OK, in its way, because it’s not really a mystery story. It’s more of a brief step by the Belgian over the line from dectective story to gothic. The question to be solved isn’t so much “who did the crime?” as it is “What’s going on here?” As such, the lack of fairplay is forgivable.
This is one of the better books in this stretch of Christie, probably due in no small part to being comprised of earlier stories. Recommended.
The previous entry was to provide a historical background for some of the following conclusions about the current brew-up over the judicial appointments.
1) The statement “Filibustering judicial nominees is unprecendented” is patently false. The nomination of Abe Fortas to Chief Justice was filibustered, and in fact the nomination failed its cloture vote and was subsequently withdrawn. It was, in fact, quite possible that even had the confirmation vote been taken the nomination would have been rejected, but all we have for that is conjecture, because the vote was, in fact, never taken.
2) The statement “Filibustering judicial nominees is rarely done” is equally patently true. There are many other ways to table nominations, and all them have been used recently. Every Senator is given the courtesy of putting a “hold” on a nominee, stating the nominee is personally offensive to him, and that statement is honored. It’s an extreme case, and is used seldom, but has been used. Most often, the nomination is either never taken up in committee, or if taken up, never reported out from committe. This was the practice used, for example, by Jesse Helms to derail many of Bill Clinton’s judicial nominees.
3) The “Nuclear Option”/”Constitutional Option” is neither nuclear nor constitutional. It has been invoked on at least two occasions in the past by Robert Byrd (a Senator with a reputation for knowing parliamentary procedure rules so well that it was joked he was the “Robert” in “Robert’s Rules of Order”). The right to filibuster is not mentioned in the Constitution, nor is any prohibition to allowing it mentioned.
4) Protests about “changing the rules in the middle of the game” are also moot, because the rules have been changed many times in the past. Filibusters were created in 1806, limited in 1917, again in 1959, again in 1975. And, considering the Senate was established 200+ years ago, when are we not in the “middle of the game?”
Where do I stand? I can’t say I’m in favor of filibustering the appointment of these particular judges, but I will also say I am not in favor of confirming every nomination a president makes. The Senate has a duty to take into account the minority views in all its actions, and the President should, also. Every president has, at one point or another, nominated people that were not high on their list as far as politcal views go. So rather than try and ram everything down the Senate’s throat, a better solution would have been to back off on a couple of the nominees in favor of choices more amenable to the other side of the aisle. But it’s too late for that, now. Both sides have escalated this into a game of “Chicken,” and we know that kids never back down in that game. The result will be a steeper divide between the aisles, more anger and resentment, no matter what the outcome is, and even less civility in Civil Government.
So, we all lose.
Anyone else out there getting tired of the irrational spin (from both sides of the aisle) over the art of the filibuster? Let’s let some air in.
Filibusters have long been a part of Senate history. The House did away with them completely as it grew, but the Senate chose to retain the possibility of them, in no small part because the Senate itself is the house of Congress dedicated to protecting the rights of the minority (in the Senate, Rhode Island and Wyoming have as many votes as California and New York).
For over a century, there was no way to end debate on a topic. A single senator, if the topic was important enough to him, could stall legislation. A minority of one could prevent the Senate from acting.
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Doc Searls does some interesting musing about IQ scores and their meaning.
Doc, I’ll toss something in from the other side of the equation than most of the other correspondents. You see, I know from personal experience that IQ is a meaningless indicator of future performance. My IQ was tested many times, mainly because i was the highest in my school. It was fairly consistent, never below 150 and only once approaching 180. And never once was I at the top of my class in school, nor have I really accomplished anything major in The Real World (I have one patent, but that’s more an indication of a sloppy patent system than my brilliance).
Teachers were a disappointment to me, in the main. Especially my seventh-grade English teacher.
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I know, it’s foolish to think of the Sci-Fi Channel as actually accurate, but I’m really getting depressed over the number of times the term “science fiction” is abused. The latest instance apparently includes horror and fantasy.
This is just silly. I suspect, however, it just is keeping in step with the general erosion of our societal attitude toward truth and facts. “Science Fiction” used to mean “no supernatural effects need apply.” The premises of a science fiction story had to be either demonstrable as fact, or at least possible/probable given what we know.
We have relaxed our collective definition of truth. It used to mean, “that which we can prove.” It now appears to mean “that which we cannot disprove.” There is a large distance between those two points that we have leaped, without good reason. I hope someday we recover our senses, before it’s too late and we’re lost.
The latest book in my return trip through Agatha Christie’s world is Cat Among the Pigeons. Someone is killing the schoolmistresses of one of the most exclusive girl’s schools in Britain.
This one comes from the period where Dame Agatha was truly sick and tired of Hercule Poirot; it’s one of the books where she keeps him offstage for as long as possible, bringing him in 2/3-rds the way through when one of the school girls finds something in a tennis racket, and remembers being told about him by an aunt, so she leaves school to find him.
Plot devices here include the kidnapping of the daughter of a foreign potentate. I find myself asking why I don’t find the plotting here as tiresome as in the Hilda Johansson tale I chatted about earlier, because I’m moved to give this book a higher ranking. Two reasons come to mind: first, the devices weren’t nearly as tired when Dame Agatha was writing, and that Dame Agatha wields them in a more believable story.
As for clues, no she doesn’t play fair this time. She gives Hercule Poirot access to information we don’t get until he announces the solution of the case, and she allows Hercule to guess correctly the interpretation of some clues that admit multiple interpretations without suffiecient evidence.
As a puzzle, it’s not one of her best. As a Poirot story, it’s almost non-existent, unless you’re partial to Deus Ex Machina endings. But it’s a passable story. All told, I wouldn’t recommend it unles you’re trying to be a completist. (If you’re looking for good mysteries, in fact, I’d suggest skipping this entire period; until she resigns herself to Poirot’s continued existence, the Poirot books are simply a master going through the motions, “phoning it in,’ as it were.)
Maybe I’ve just overdosed on the period lately, but this particular mystery, by Jeanne Dams, left me completely cold. Try as I might, I just could not get interested in any of the characters presented in it. That’s a bit unusual, as I have generally liked her work (enough to locate signed firsts of her first three books, featuring Dorothy Martin).
The basic plot is is that the uncle of Hilda’s (for lack of a better term) boyfriend has disappeared, and the last reported sighting of him before he disappeared has him murdering his rival for election to the town council. Plot devices include liberal dosages of laudanum, prejudice against both sewedes and irish, con men, and the power of a family to make a murder investigation stop in its tracks.
Also the story steps upon one of my political peeves: democrat=Good, republican=Evil. For the record, I am not now, nor have I ever been a republican. I simply believe that democrats are just as likely to abuse power as republicans (maybe that comes from growing up in the era of Richard Daly, but then again Boss Tweed was also a democrat, wasn’t he?) and I’m getting tired of novels portraying the one but not the other. One of my favorite lines from Rod McKuen (now if that doesn’t date me, I don’t know what does) went: “Black isn’t always beautiful, but any man who thinks it always ugly should be shown the ugly side of white.”
The period touches in the book simply serve to make the idea of a maidservant/detective all the more unbelievable. The plot itself might be good, I don’t know. It was hard for me to pay attention to it because the characters were so uninteresting. In fact I finished the book solely because I kept hoping for it to suddenly get better, I’d enjoyed her Dorothy Martin books enough to make me expect it would. It didn’t. It will be the last Hilda Johansson I read; life’s too short to waste it on unenjoyable books. Not recommended. If you want to read about the period, grab a US History text.
Moving on from Retrospect. The tech support dept is lousy, the product is slow and clunky. The last straw?
My mother’s biege G3 needed a new backup device. She’d been using a Zip drive, then moved on to a Yamaha SCSI-based CD-RW. Then we found a DVD-RW (USB and Firewire) for her. The Dantz support pages said it was supported, and it even came with a new version of Retrospect Express) so we bought it.
No joy. We tried it via the USB first, and had lots of issues. So we went out and bought a firewire card for it. OK, now just for testing purposes we burned a DVD copy of one of her partitions, then another DVD of the other two partitions. Total elapsed time was about 1.5 hours. Long, but not unacceptable. So we fired up Retrospect. First her copy (5.1) then the copy of Express that came with the drive.
After 2 days we gave up. It wasn’t writing anything, even if left to its own devices for 3 hours and more. Of course this was the weekend, so Dantz Tech Support was unavailable. So I made time to return to Mom’s on Monday morning to help get this resolved. After a while on hold I got to have a conversation with a tech non-support person who quite obviously had no clue at all about the product. The first story I got was that the drive was unsupported. He couldn’t find it listed in his “supported devices” list. Don’t know what list he was using, but the website clearly has it listed as supported. He then went on to try and get me to buy the full version of Retrospect, since Express didn’t support this drive. (It’s an OWC Mercury Pro 106, if you’re interested in double-checking my statement.)
Giving up on tech support, I went back to work on the drive (along the way I’d bought a small amount of every writeable DVD medium, just in case — I could use the ones that didn’t work for her on my system, so no loss) and discovered something: It hung forever on DVD-R media, but DVD+RW media was working, after a fashion. So I managed to get Mom’s backups working, but it took 2.5 times as long to do it as it took to simply clone the partitions with the DVD writing software supplied with the drive.
Then, at the end of the process, it coughed up an “assertion failure”. Being a developer myself, and knowing I wanted to hear about anything like that when it happens in my code, I used the Dantz website to report the bug. A long time later (at least 24 hours) we received a rather curt email back from Dantz saying that we should call a phone number and pay a charge. Let’s see, you want me to pay you for the priviledge of reporting a bug that your own developers had the foresight to trap with assert()? Right, I can really see that happening. Yep.
It’s time to move on. I feel like I’m leaving an old friend (I’ve been a retrospect customer on my systems since version 2.x, and Mom’s been using it since 3.x). But when companies start behaving like this, my biggest urge to get a replacement product and move my data quickly, so I don’t get caught in the downpour when the roof falls in.
So I’m off to examine other OSX backup utilities. I got a copy of Silverkeeper with an external drive, but I’m not impressed. Anyone else out there got a favorite?
It had to happen. The strains between Apple and the OS community are showing. I see where the KHTL developers are calling it a failure. I think it may have been, but to me it seems it was a failure expectations more than anything else.
Dave Hyatt blogs a little a bout it. KDE developers answered back.
Reading the posts and comment threads it seems to me the failure is not so much in performance as in expectations. Users expected all the KHTML team would have to do is press a button and the Safari changes could be rolled back into the main tree. As a programmer, I know the merge isn’t that simple. But it also seems to me that this particular failure isn’t all that significant. Yes, it’s tiring to have to keep answering the “are we there yet?” questions, but those questions are going to be asked no matter what’s going on; answering them comes with the territory.
But the more sign ificant failure seems to be what the KHTML developers expected from Apple. Some of the commentary almost reads as if some of them were expecting Apple to simply pay for programmers who worked for the KHTML crew.
There’s always a disconnect when volunteers and paid staff are working. It’s not that either one takes the job lightly, or isn’t willing to work. It’s just that volunteers and paid staff have different goals. Volunteers can afford to be “purists,” they can afford to take the time they feel is necessary. Paid staff are working to deadline for someone who expects a certain amount of production for the money being paid. Sad but true; he who pays the piper calls the tune.
The major complaint seems to be that the bugfixes and other changes Apple’s staff makes to the KHTML code are sufficient to achieve the aims as far as Safari is concerned (evidence: Safari now passes the Acid2 test) but they don’t necessarily “play nice” with portions of the code of other products that use KHTML, and the changes aren’t made according to KHTML standards.
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Yes, I blog about some politics. But when I think about blogging and politics, I have to chuckle. For example:
Mark Glaser writes about something called BlogNashville, apparently a kind of blogger conference started by a conservative who found too many liberals at the previous blogger conference. And there is a bit of a brew-up going on about the lack of civility in the discussions there.
A lack of civility in a discussion between internet bloggers? What a surprise. Next thing you’ll be telling me is that there’s a lot of water in the oceans on this planet.
Seriously, those two statements do rank pretty closely on the credibility scale. I mean, just why would you think that people who have grown accustomed to belittling and abusing folks would stop doing it simply because the targets were physically present in the room? I suppose if you come from the point of view that they were basically hypocrites, and were only talking the way they were because the other person wasn’t in view you might be surprised.
But that’s the problem. They’re not hypocrites, they’re perfectly sincere.
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I have to admit, the cover painting played a part in my purchase of this book. One of the rare times that has occurred, because it’s been my experience that most cover paintings seem to be done by an artist who has read (or at least paid attention to) little more than the title of the book. Most of the time, they’re useless as a tool for making decisions about the book. But Christian McGrath’s depiction of a monk with a keyboard tucked under his arm against a double-exposure backdrop of a circuit board and the wals of a gothic cathedral was nothing short of delightful. Match it with Christopher Stasheff, he of The Warlock In Spite Of Himself, and I figured I was in for an enjoyable ride.
And I was. The premise is that the blessed Father Vidicon is walking down the throat of Hell (having, of course, passed successfully through the Hellmouth) and hears the pleas of those who are struggling against Murphy. A young man, Tony, a computer troubleshooter, stumbles across a message from the blessed father, and becomes pressed into service, falls in love, and tries to maintain a relationship with both a beautifule woman
All the while Tony strives against a delightful bestiary representing the problems we all encounter, Father Vidicon continues his walk, struggling with the more powerful sendings.
Stasheff has put together an allegory for our time, sort of a Pilgrim’s Progress, albeit with both a technological and philosophical twist. While the former would, no doubt, delight Bunyan, the latter I’m equally sure, would not.
Definitely a Good Read, though perhaps we techno-dweebs are most likely to identify with Tony. There is a low probability of this becoming a series, which is a Good Thing (I’d call it impossible, but I know better; still I hope it doesn’t as the story is complete as it stands) because I think the tale would lose something were it to continue.
James Patterson’s recent outing for profiler Alex Cross was, to be blunt, a disappointment. The premise is that Alex Cross has left the DC police and joined the FBI in order to have more time with his family. We’ll leave the obvious point that this is unrealistic and scarcely credible alone, chalking it up to the required “suspension of disbelief” that reading every novel involves.
But after passing over that point, there are just too many stale plot cliches. The mother of his (Alex Cross’s) child reappears with a nasty lawyer and you can deduce every detail of the progression of that subplot just from that statement. Another subplot revolves around how the supervisor of Cross’s mandatory FBI orientation and training classes feels towards this new guy the the bigwigs recruited and brought in by promises. Yep, you guessed it. Most of the other devices in this novel have beards fully as long or even longer.
Still, I’ve always said that I don’t mind a trip down a familiar road so long as the tour guide makes it enjoyable. The major plot involves a white slavery ring operated by a Russian mafia, ex-secret police, gangster. It involves the kidnapping and delivery into slavery of white suburban soccer moms to order (with the token gay request thrown in for diversity) from a catalog assembled by the organization. Fortunately, Patterson manages to avoid descending into the obvious titillation offered by this premise, and the pacing of developments and plot twists in it occasionally show flashes of his mastery of the genre. But generally speaking, instead of a tight plot and good characterization we get a lot of running around with accompanying shouting and waving of hands, with no real satisfying conclusion at the end of it all.
It’s a rather pedestrian effort from a writer I’ve come to expect more of. Diehard fans of Alex Cross will want to pick it up, if for no other reason than it marks a sea change in his life. If you’re new to Alex Cross, pass on it; you’ll find material at least as good in almost any book selected at random from this genre.
“I bid good-by to a friend last night,” she said through her tears in the morning. “I loved him well, and he loved me, but he is gone today and will not return.”
Why? We sought for an answer to the question, “Why?”
“The question is vexed,” said the first. “There is no ‘why.’ There is only what is. Like life, death does not need a reason. You cannot expect meaning from an impersonal universe.”
“It is the way of things,” said the second. “Death is natural, as is life. It is the doorway through which we leave life. Less than that, it is but the name we give to that doorway. It is not the end, it is but a passageway.”
“You did not deserve him,” said the third. “He was taken from you because of that.”
“This is but another test,” said the fourth. “You will be judged by how you respond to it.”
Less than satisfied by the answers proffered (though the third had a point; we certainly didn’t deserve him) I turned, as always, to the Throne.
“Why?” I shouted through my tears. “Why have you done this to us?”
The echoes of my whisper were still reverberating, when the question returned. “Why?”
I looked up, “Yes, that is my question.”
“And that is my answer. Why do you ask me only now? When I first sent him to you, you didn’t ask me why. When, for over a decade, I let you keep him, you did not ask me why. Every day he was there he was doing my bidding, listening to you, caring for you. Every day he soothed your mind.
“And only now, after he’s faithfully toiled ten years and more at the task I gave him. Only now, after I have finally chosen to release him from that task. Only now, my child, you think to bring me the question you should have been asking every day. Only now, ‘Why?’”
He’s right, of course. Just over a decade ago, by a circuitous route that could only be ascribed to divine intervention, Patches entered our household. He was a delight, and an anchor. His graceful acrobatics entertained us. Whenever we spent too long with our heads bent over a book or a keyboard, he would swoop down upon us, enforcing a break time. He taught us that nothing was so important that it should interrupt play time. When our problems became overwhelming, he would be there to take us out of ourselves, to remind us we were not alone. Friend, confidant, taskmaster; a stern critic with a bent for sarcasm. He kept us laughing, smiling, and loving. He kept us sane. He was indeed just what we needed, Father. Thank you.
Patches, a 17-pound British Shorthair cat, dead at the age of 15, after a month-long illness that left him weighing only 6 pounds at the end. Gone, but not forgotten. No, never forgotten.
Sorry I haven’t felt like writing much. Apart from the occasional thought that the only ones reading this blog are poker spammers, we’ve had something a little more pressing to deal with around here.
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