Walking on the Moon

Dead Pig Collector is a novella or short story or some form of short fiction from Warren Ellis.  He should call it whatever he gets paid most for writing. Whatever one decides to call it, Collector is an excellent one.

Ellis paints the picture of a man doing a very distateful job very well. As with many undertakings that make the average person queasy, Ellis has thought through the details carefully.  More to his credit, he has created the sort of character would realistically do that job for a living and brought him to life for us.  He’s not likeable, really, but he is believable.

The action follows our realistic character through a – nearly every adjective I considered here was an unfortunate double entendre – complicated day.  It’s a day worth checking out.  If you have never read any of Ellis’s fiction, this is a pretty good starting point.

Stongly recommended.

Andres Neuman’s Traveler of the Century  is a self-consciously literary novel. Its characters all serve clear symbolic roles, the central romance is carried out in an intellectual salon, and the main plot follows the seasons. Such a set-up can easily turn boring and pretentious; for my money, Neuman manages the opposite.

From the beginning Neuman engages the reader by not giving anything away.  Even the setting in mid-1800s Germany slowly peeks out of comments and allusions rather than beng dropped in some exposition bomb. The characters similarly reveal what they reveal about theselves slowly.  The titular traveler is a point-of-view character whose mysterious nature remains in the shadows for quite some time. That’s true even though we spend some time falling in love with him.

Neuman is not shy about using his characters and the salon setting to take the reader down some intellectual side trips. The romance at the center of the narrative is explicity a romance of the mind, and Neuman makes that work by taking us through the arguments and mental jousting that makes up such a romance.

The salon and the romance also provide a backdrop for Neuman to talk about literature and writing in the novel itself. This is all nicely metafictional – commenting on setting inside his setting at the same time he’s explaining how and why setting affects a work, for example. Neuman finds the right tone to make this interesting. He winks enough to show the reader that he knows he’s commenting on himself, while also keeping the analysis and literary argument sensible and engaging.  Even that has two levels: the argument makes sense in the abstract, and also in the setting coming out of the mouths of the characters. It’s not an easy thing to pull off, and he does it while keeping the whole thing engaging.  First rate work.

An important sidelight of that is the amount of time and space his characters spend talking about translation, which is because they’re translators.  Of course I read the work in translation, which adds aother nice loop.  The translation discussions are some of the most diverting in the book, even without realizing that I was reading them in translation.

There are some places where the plot rambles a bit, and some bits that one could read as extraneous. It’s not a maximally tight tale.  I found the diversions more interesting than distracting, but I can clearly see the other position.

In many ways, how much a reader likes this work is going to depend on how well the  reader thinks Neuman has executed this writing.  I think he’s written a very engaging, multi-layered work that lives up to the literary aspirations it wears on its sleeve.  I can easily imagine a reader being less charmed than I was.  But they’re wrong.

Strongly recommended.

I know Scott Meyer from his excellent webcomic, The Basic Instructions. Instructions showcases Meyer’s snappy dialog, so when he published a novel I checked it out.

Off To Be the Wizard shares Twilight‘s strong wish-fulfillment component. Wizard is about nerds who learn to control reality with their cell phones and become medieval wizards and Twilight‘s about a teen girl who falls in love with a magical brooding vampire.  Clearly these are authors giving their audience a world they want to live in more than a literary experience. I enjoyed both Wizard and Twilight, so maybe I’m a target for this stuff.

It was a fun story.  There were twists and turns, and the characters were all likeable and reasonable as well. There’s even some commentary on the social dynamics of the tech world.

Basically, it’s a pretty well done fantasy story for nerds, heavy on the wish fulfillment.  It’ll make an airline flight more pleasant.

We had to put our friend Jackson to sleep this week.  He was our unique 14 year-old cat, as singular a breed as he was in every other way.

He was beautiful. Mostly white with beautiful brown markings and white socks.  When Brenda and I were at the shelter looking for cats to adopt, he was, to my eye, the most gorgeous cat in there.  For that matter, he may have been the most gorgeous in the city. He was never the most graceful cat, but when he sat just so, looking out the window with the sun on him, he was the most majestic snow leopard in a fantasy world.

Jackson looked at the world in a state of relaxed confusion.  He generally walked around with a look of wonderment that undercut his movie star good looks.  It was the kind of look that says, “huh, I wonder what that is.  Maybe I’ll have a look after lunch.” It is an incredibly endearing look, and we wanted to put it on billboards and car wraps so the rest of the world could enjoy it with us.  I’d give a lot to see it again.

His relaxed demeanor was unflappable.  On the rare occasions that he was upset or uncomfortable it was often hard to tell until he peed in your shoes. He was more vocal with me, the junior member of his staff.  He’d recline leisurely with Brenda, overseeing whatever she was doing contentedly with a sleepy eye until I came home.  When I appeared he’d amble over and list out the things I needed to do – generally fill the food bowl.

He did love to eat. Because his hunting skills were hilariously sub-par, that meant he loved the Ted & Brenda restaurant experience.

He knew all the sounds of food preparation, and would stroll into the kitchen to let you know the current state of the meal timer.  That timer ran from following closely and maybe rubbing a leg (“I know you just fed me, but I’m sure there are treats”), to standing underfoot and purring (“it’s time to eat, and here I am in case you missed me”), to a kindly reprimand (“Hey, it’s dark and the bowl’s empty.  I’m hungry and can’t make it myself”). He did this all with his same cheerful demeanor – all those quotes are missing a “my good man” as an address. If mealtime had come and no one showed signs of noticing, he would walk loudly into the kitchen. Not many cats can stomp, but he had it down.  When he was fed, he could sneak up on you pretty well; when he was hungry you heard him coming.

I can’t really do his quirks, beauty, and nature justice with a few paragraphs.  He was a bright spot of joy in my life for 14 years and I’ll miss him for 14 more. Just seeing that handsome face with its confused but cheerful look brightened many a long day.

When you lose a cat who loved to eat, every mealtime is a reminder.  When I sit down to eat, I still hear that purr that says “My good man: in case you forgot, I’m here, and I wouldn’t mind a spot of food at all.”  I hope I hear it for a while.

A few months ago, on a uncontrolled field tour, I landed at Mefford Field (TLR) in Tulare, CA for the first time.  On a tour I like to take a quick picture of something on the field and then pop right back up into the air and on to the next field.  At Mefford I saw an older looking Piper dealership/service center that seemed worth a second look.  I did take a snapshot form the cockpit, but it really didn’t turn out at all.  So yesterday I hopped in the plane to check it out.

I say “hopped,” but it actually took a little doing.  I left my EFB at home and had to go back for it, then I needed to get some air in the tires, and finally get an IFR climb out of Santa Monica to get through the marine layer that’s been hanging around all July.  But, more or less, I hopped in the plane.

Once I hopped successfully, it was an hour and a half of flying to get out to Tulare.  There’s always something to see.  Yesterday I flew over a fellow doing aerobatics near Fillmore, a little bit of cloud cover and convection in the Gorman area, and through the haze and smoke from a wildfire to the north.  It was nowhere nearby, but the Central Valley traps the smoke.  Then into the pattern and onto the ground.

There was a helicopter in pattern the whole time I was there – about a half an hour – but that was it.  The field was basically deserted, but the Golden State Highway (the 99) was packed with people passing the field by.  It made for a wistful atmosphere.

I tied the plane down and poked around.  In addition to the dealership, I found an old hangar, a pair of aircraft on static display as war memorials, and several aviation businesses.  I got the impression that TLR is a working airport, and I was here after hours.

Here are the pictures I took as I walked around:

After spending a half an hour or so walking around and taking pictures, I popped over to Porterville Airport (PTV)  for lunch at the Airway Cafe.  The Airway Cafe is a great airport cafe, and I’m always happy to get a chance to stop by.

After lunch, I popped back up to Santa Monica – enjoying another hour and a half of flying.

In some sense, it’s strange to spend all that time for a few pictures of airport buildings.  I think it’s a great way to spend a Saturday.

You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me is kind of hard to get a handle on.  It’s not quite the sort of travelogue that it seems like it might me from the title/blurb. Nathan Rabin does take us on a tour of both Phish sub-culture and Insane Clown Posse sub-culture with interviews and first person accounts, but somehow neither the bands nor the fans take center stage for long.  It’s not completely a memoir, because the whole narrative is viewed from the viewpoints that these sub-cultures come to represent.  It’s a strange book to put a label on.

It’s also a difficult book to put down.  Rabin underwent a reluctant transformation during the time he put this thing together, and those personal experiences are the core of the book. This is the kind of transformation that ends with “and what the hell’s coming next?” not “and we all had a good laugh looking back.”  Rabin does an excellent job telling his story honestly, neither trivializing the small personal moments nor generalizing for false universality.  While I think many people will be able to relate to his journey, it is very much his journey.

Rabin’s writing supports this unusual narrative.  When he is introspective and analytical about what he has experienced, his thoughts are clear on the page.  When he’s spinning a yarn that happened to him on a Greyhound somewhere his descriptions are vivid and memorable.  Both of these make the story work.

Overall, an unlikely melange of memoir and reporting that is intelligent, diverting, and honest.

Recommended.

Gilbert King won the Pulitzer Prize for Devil In The Grove, and it’s easy to see why.  This is a well written, meticulously researched history of a horrifying miscarriage of justice in a 1949 rape case.  King collects a dizzying array of facts and testimony that make clear just how badly America treated its black citizens.  It’s the kind of sobering history that makes you worry how much has changed.

The case is cut and dried by any reasonable standard: several of the men convicted had never laid eyes on the woman they were alleged to have raped, all were beaten until they confessed (or it was clear they wouldn’t), the trials were all overshadowed by mob violence, and defense attorneys nearly lynched.  When a new trial was ordered by the Supreme Court, the sheriff simply shot the two defendants on the way to the court house (one miraculously survived).  No charges.

King makes it clear that it was also cut and dried by the unreasonable standard of the day: a white person claimed rape by blacks, so they were guilty.  A lot of the impact of Grove is how well King brings that standard home.  The case was the kind of media circus that happens with alarming frequency today – as I write this the Trayvon Martin case is the analog – but the lynchings and shootings were considered expected.

Understanding central Florida’s history here makes people’s reaction to the modern case much clearer.

Grove is harrowing and essential reading.

Strongly recommended.

Unnatural Creatures is a collection of fun stories loosely organized around interactions with mythical or imaginary creatures. It is organized by Neil Gaiman, who in addition to his skills as an author, shows off his taste in the fantastic.

The stories in Creatures cover a remarkable period of time.  The oldest, Frank Stockton’s “The Griffin and the Minor Canon” was first published in 1885, and others were produced for the collection in 2013.  While there is probably a slight statistical bias toward recent stories, the publication dates spread out rather well.

The broad range of times and tellers never feels like a stunt.  If one skipped the tale introductions, it would be difficult to tell which stories came from which decades.  This is partially the nature of fantasy stories about unnatural beasts, of course.  More often than not such things take place in Jane Austen-y English heaths, making it as easy to write one looking around in 1885 as looking back in 2013.

As if anticipating that criticism, Gaiman not only picks stories from the past, his setting varies.  Larry Niven’s “Flight of the Horse” was published the same year as the moon landing, but blends science fiction and fairy tale creatures in thoroughly modern ways.  The versatility and inventiveness of many other writers is similarly on display.

Creatures is the kind of collection a kid would do well to stumble across in a school library or other unexpected place and have their ideas about the power of storytelling expanded.

Recommended, even if you already have an open mind on the power of stories.

I feel confident that Roger Ebert titled his memoir Life Itself partially so there would be a bunch of reviews titled like this one.

There are a lot of ways to look at Life Itself, but I think I’ll take Ebert’s own tack in assessing it: how did it affect me when I read it? I came away feeling that I’d spent time talking with someone who was colorful and interesting.  The book convinced me that I would like the opportunity to meet Roger and get to know him better.  He seems honest, interesting, and intelligent.

Honesty is necessary for a great memoir.  A writer who spends a couple hundred  pages making press releases or excuses may as well just write fiction.  Ebert doesn’t do this, nor does he write whatever he thinks at the moment.  The book is full of genuine sentiments, arrived at after a lifetime of consideration, and expressed with verve and polish.  That can rob them of some immediacy – his discussion of his personal theology is intentionally measured rather than ecstatic – but overall seems consistent with the man’s character.  I also think an examined, joyful, life clearly and honestly expressed is the best we can hope for.

It also helps to have an interesting life to talk about.  Intellectually, I agree with Scott McCloud that everyone has a story to tell, but in my heart I believe that some people’s lives are just more interesting than others.  Ebert’s clearly done a lot; pulitzer prize winning journalist, television star, leader in the film community, and cancer survivor.  In addition to living a full life himself, he’s interviewed a lot of other standouts.  Life Itself tours all this interesting space.

Finally, he thinks about things well.  Some intellectuals come off as cold because their drive to analyze the world drains their intensity.  Ebert tells you what he thinks without ignoring how he feels.  Few people can think well and maintain both intensity and civility while they explain it.  Ebert is one of them.

If one wanted to be critical of Life Itself, one could point out that it is episodic and lacks overarching structure.  And this is so; it has clearly coalesced from blog posts, rather than being a literary undertaking.  But, so what?  It’s a well-written distillation of a man’s beliefs and the path that lead him to those beliefs.  That’s a pretty good definition of a memoir.

Strongly Recommended.

Mary Roach is a really brilliant science writer.  She picks a topic that 12-year-olds would be excited about, like what happens to the food we eat.  Then she goes off and finds out a ton about it and writes it up  in a way that speaks to the reader’s inner 12-year-old and more mature side.  The result is great books like Stiff, Packing For Mars, and today’s topic, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal.

Gulp is a good choice for Roach. Her inner 12-year-old gets to talk about all kinds of icky things like spit and poop and make actual fart jokes while her inner science nerd gets to learn about one of the most interesting things people do: turn food into energy.  And poop. It’s glorious for her and the reader.  Her footnotes on the ironic names of researchers are worth the price alone.

This is great, clear science writing with a sense of fun.

Strongly recommended.