Walking on the Moon

Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs are (among other things), the creators of a well regarded but somewhat obscure comic, The Trouble With Girls, that is a spot-on send-up of heroic serial fiction. I mention it because there are elements of that sort of satire here in Splendid Man, but more rough and clumsy.

Splendid Man reads much more like fan fiction than Girls.  In fact Splendid Man is pretty much Mary Sue fan fiction.  The POV character finds himself cast in the role of the best pal of Splendid Man, a direct Superman stand-in.  It’s never clear exactly why Splendid Man would spend time with our Mary Sue, or why we are interested.  Jones and Jacobs eventually get better at this.

A fan of Superman and Jones and Jacobs – like me – can find things to divert themself. It’s interesting to see a snapshot of their writing skill at the time.  One can see little quirks and stylings that remain as they mature.  The structures of the stories are well executed.  Seeing how their later writing animates these skeletons is instructive.

The two authors are also quite knowledgeable about comics in general and the Superman mythos in particular. It’s interesting to see the in-jokes and commentary on the comics that they incorporate. That encyclopedic knowledge is, again, better deployed in their work to come.

Finally, it stands as a snapshot of attitudes and biases of the 1980’s.  The Mary Sue spends a lot of time smoking and drinking in ways that I found cheerfully anachronistic.  In addition, the attitudes toward gays which were probably considered controversially compassionate when the stories were written have become quaint.

As anthropology, the stories are recommended.

Drawing Blood is Molly Crabapple’s memoir. It is keenly and carefully observed. Each simple sentence amplifies the sentence before it.  Each captures a sharp observation about the world.  Molly herself is part of the world.  Some of the sentences describe her, inside and out.  Some describe her world, unique and diverting.  Some describe the how each affects the other.

Molly Crabapple is a peerless visual artist.  Drawing Blood is an illustrated manuscript that features her work. She draws incredibly dense scenes of metaphorical power.  She draws clear, simple sketches of people exploited and manipulative. She captures beautiful places in the throes of revolution. Her art hurls the viewer’s heart from their rib cage and electrifies their brain.

These two forces meet and combine throughout Drawing Blood. Each alone is remarkable, but when combined their power is unrelenting.

A must.

I’m not so much part of the target audience for Charles Stross’s Laundry Files books as I’m a member of its core constituency. His blend of fantasy and horror tropes, spy thriller homages, and computer systems in-jokes is pitch perfect to me.  There is a great joy in following the combination of humor and plot allusions and realizing what’s coming a beat or two before one of the characters explains it.

None of that would be worth anything if Stross put together a less diverting story behind the trappings.  He’s quite an excellent and fun writer, executing a good story populated with believable characters – even when they’re supernatural.

Strongly recommended.

I love to read history and I love to read Sarah Vowell.  I expected to love reading Lafayette. And I enjoyed it a great deal, but I didn’t love it.

Probably the aspect of Vowell’s writing that I love the most is her enthusiasm for her topics – especially when it’s America and history. Her first book that wasn’t a collection of columns, Assassination Vacation was full of excitement and gleeful asides. I had the impression that finding out everything she did was so exciting and so much fun that she couldn’t control the desire to tell everyone.

Better than that, she clearly could control that desire and turn that excitement into a wide-ranging, beautifully written book. It includes delightful historical facts, a sincere paean to the National Parks Service, and a dozen other merits. One of those merits is an ability to connect history and modern times with a brilliant turn of phrase.

All of these are present in Lafayette as well, but not to the same extent. There is a lot of the book that reads like a well-researched, well-written popular treatment of Lafayette’s time in America and its effect on our nation. That’s a great accomplishment, and we need more books like it. And yet, I miss the sparks that fly from every sentence in Vacation.

Recommended.

I’ve been skirting reading Borges for some time.  Several authors I greatly enjoy point to him as an influence.  Those pointers are always delivered in the sort of hushed tones that one reserves for the influential and unique. A close friend recently recommended Borges’s work and that was the kick I needed to actually go get some.  Hushed tones from Warren Ellis are one thing, but no reason for avoiding the experience sounded good when I tried to say them out loud.

The short stories in Ficciones turn out to be witty and playful in an intellectual sense.  Borges takes an idea and runs as far as he can with it, often under the guise of a literary review. Creating a fictional writer who exemplifies whatever odd approach he wants to explore and then critiquing that author seems the long way around, but the structure is generally powerful and engaging.  He manages to convey the idea of taking himself too seriously and not seriously at all in the same constructs.

It helps that his writing is both technically brilliant and fantastically dense. The first paragraph or two of one of his stories often contains the whole of the story.  The remaining pages simply illuminate it from other angles, as a hologram.  Most of these are master classes in composition and structure.  Often this is where I say an author makes that look easy.  Not Borges.  It looks like he worked hard to get these stories perfect.

Overall, these stories are rewarding and entertaining on many levels, but expect to invest time to reap those benefits.

Strongly recommended.

“An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.” – On Running After Ones Hat, All Things Considered, 1908

I spent most of the day yesterday with my instructor doing more transition training.  I’m still metaphorically clawing my way toward the left seat from the tail as I try to internalize all the complex and high performance operating procedures.  I did perform a feat that qualifies as a landing and not an ugly arrival saved by my instructor.  That made me feel undeniably better.

After we stopped for lunch, we started back around the pattern at Camarillo for a few more landings, and noticed that the alternator was no longer charging the battery.  We shed load landed and tried to debug, to no avail.

The fine folks at Camarillo Air Service sent over an electrical tech to try to get us on our way, but there did not seem to be a quick fix in the offing. We had to leave the Viking with them.  Their fellow – Harvey – was one of those fine, competent, eccentric people that one gets to meet in GA.  He went out of his way to help us at every opportunity, but it was not to be.  While I was working with Harvey to arrange for further debugging (and a probable alternator replacement) my instructor went off to look for car rentals.

And here we lucked out.  Nick, my instructor, somehow discovered that Patrick – a pilot who flies out of SMO – was on his way back in his Comanche.  Patrick more than graciously invited us to hop in the Comanche and fly back with him.  Even more graciously, he let Nick fly her most of the way home.  We exchanged numbers and e-mail addresses and hopefully I’ll get a chance to return the favor someday.

So, training was cut short by an inconvenience, but it turned into more of an adventure.  The Viking continues to be a charmed creature that leads me into interesting places.

Nick’s off at his day job for a few days and then we retrieve the Viking and I get back to clawing.

After a few weeks of moving money and airplanes and matching schedules, I started actually flying my new Super Viking today. It’s a big jump from my Archer to a high performance, complex aircraft with a full complement of quirks as well.  I’ve been reading and preparing as much as possible, but shaking hands with 300 horses for the first time is pretty exciting no matter how you slice it.

The first day went as well as I could reasonably have expected.  I wasn’t an instant natural, and my flight instructor kept me from serious trouble more than once.  He and I seem to be developing a reasonable rapport.  We’re both figuring out how the other works best.  I’m getting a lot out of his Viking experience and teaching skills.  We both recognize it’s a big hill to climb and I think we’re up to the challenge.

I’m still feeling the Viking out, but so far it’s been a great plane.  It has plenty of unique characteristics.  The good ones are very good, and the bad ones – so far – are mostly just endearing.  I’m very happy with my choice to join the Bellanca family.

Speaking of the Bellanca family, another member popped up and introduced himself today.  A fellow at SMO saw the unfamiliar Viking on the ramp and came over to talk.  Since I’ve gotten involved with Bellanca owners that’s happened more than in all the years I’ve been flying the Archer.  It’s fun and exciting to join the “cult.”

Tomorrow is another day of trying to claw my way from being far behind the Viking to getting ahead of it.  I’m looking forward to the challenge.

Stone Mattress collects several of Margaret Atwood’s recent short stories.  The collection seems a lot like a series of etudes. In the notes she mentions that several are from stunt collections – authors produce works within loose but binding constraints.  Etudes are often interesting, but rarely satisfying.  So it goes here.

The collection certainly has its enjoyable passages.  This is Margaret Atwood, after all.  every story has at least one passage that is worth reading the whole story for, even if the passage is taken in isolation.  Most of the works do considerably better than that, having some structural or thematic points of interest that are unexpected at the outset.

Still, these stories feel fluffier than Atwood’s long fiction.  Worth it if you like to see a great writer noodling around on the keyboard.

Recommended.

Dale Gronic’s Tales is misnamed.  There are some stories in here, but by and large they aren’t fascinating anecdotes.  Largely Tales is a fairly ad hoc study of the Steelers’ draft classes.  I will say that the Steelers’ draft history turns out to be pretty checkered – much more so than I realized – but this treatment doesn’t capture things very well.

From Gronic’s research, it does seem clear that a book about the Steelers’ drafts would be interesting.  The various coaches have had widely varying philosophies on the role of the draft in team building.  When coaches are changing every few years, this can lead to extremely unusual personnel. Furthermore, each coaching staff brought different skills to the draft. It was common to have a principled plan and a poor eye for talent, that added further noise to the signal.

The 1970’s dynasty was as much a product of the staff’s continuity as its philosophy, but both contributed to some incredible years.

Now, as interesting as that analysis is, it doesn’t fit well with the title.  That title promises me great stories from exciting characters or interesting games.  This is pretty much lacking.  Gronic primarily follows a few draftees who would grant him interviews and tells their history in Pittsburgh.  This is diverting (at best) but never compelling.

On the last Sunday of August I was standing next to the grave of Chief Sealth on Bainbridge Island in Washington.  I hadn’t intended to visit the place, but serendipity is like that. A storm had blown through the day before, and a the pines were still whispering about it. Brenda and I were getting ready to head to a pair of friends’ wedding. We were alone at this nexus of history and possibility, commemoration and commencement.  I stood for a while, looking out at the Sound, listening to the wind.  I finally pulled out my phone, dialed a number, and left a message.  “This is Ted Faber. I accept the offer…”

With those words I severed my longstanding employment at ISI.  USC/ISI has employed me for longer than I lived in the town I was born in, and longer than any other job I’ve held.  The decision was a difficult one, but a combination of my earlier decisions and changes to ISI and the research climate in general combined to convince me that is time to do something new.

I’m happy to discuss the details of that decision with people, but the issues were primarily of autonomy and funding.  ISI has always given the most support and autonomy to people who can fund their own research – you eat what you kill.  I have always been more comfortable turning research ideas into prototypes than in evangelizing new areas of work.  That led to me putting myself in a bad position to evangelize when necessary, and support for the roles I chose was on the wane. The specific set of forces that caused that are a bit arcane.

I continue to have great respect for ISI as an institution and especially for the people I was privileged to work with there.  They do top-notch work there from the researchers and students who are blazing new research trails to the project assistants who support that work. I still have many friends there and hope to for years to come.  It saddens me that I cannot continue there, even as I’m excited about my next adventure.

My last day will be 2 October 2015 almost exactly the last day of my 20th year at USC/ISI. The synchronicity of that also appeals to me.

I’ve  chosen to make a fresh start at The Aerospace Corporation. It sits at an interesting space in the national research infrastructure and employs many people I respect and enjoy working with.  The goals and projects of the place are familiar, but the focus different enough that it all looks new.  The place is familiar yet fresh and the work both new and comfortable.  I’m looking forward to setting out on a new journey with my old bones.

If you only have my ISI contact information I’m easy to find on social media, should you want to stay in touch.  Don’t hesitate to friend or follow me.  Come take a journey with me.