Spear

Nicola Griffith's Spear is a short, fascinating novella that retells a side quest legend in the Arthurian constellation of stories and characters.

It's lovely. The prose is gorgeous, as always from this author. The main character is a woman who gets to make her own choices and have skills and an identity as an individual, which is the kind of detail I wish I didn't have to highlight but I'm glad to see.

Just as with Hild, this book included certain details of daily life and choices that stayed with me. It's raining and two knights are escorting through the woods? One must offer to go hoodless, for the peripheral awareness. Is magic real or is it just cultural significance and placebo suggestions? I loved this, and it was a brief and delicious read.

(I was left with the impression that I missed significant plot choices and story details because I'm not familiar enough with Arthurian legends and lore. That's okay, the book was great anyway.)

This post's theme word is evanescent (adj), "fading quickly; transitory." The evanescent details of lore dimmed beneath the onslaught of accrued cultural Arthurian baggage.

There is no antimemetics division

There is no antimemetics division is a novel / series of short stories / piece of collaborative fiction authored by qntm. The entire work is readable for free online. It is vaguely unsettling horror --- not my usual preference --- but excellently written and with a compelling premise.

There is no antimemetics division lives inside SCP, a huge online collaborative fiction site loosely based around a single fictional prompt and set in roughly the same universe. If you read widely on the SCP site, you will eventually find some mutually-incompatible storylines; these are explicable under the premise of the universe: the site documents a sort of parallel reality (or is it) where certain ideas have the power to erase themselves from your memory. These are "antimemes", and they can propagate just like memes but are much more difficult to secure, contain, and protect against (SCP).

I don't usually enjoy horror, but this novel and the SCP project more widely are very gentle about the horror angle. If you go looking to be scared, you can find that --- but there are also storylines that are 100% playing the premise for comedic value, entire stories based around one pun punchline, and nudge-nudge-wink-wink stories that play with the tropes of horror joyfully. Spending many hours reading this novel, and various other SCP works, convinced me that I'm actually OK with horror, as long as it is psychological and interspersed with jokes. SCP is more like Jasper Fforde's sense of humor, melted with Peter Watts' attitude and then forced to write exclusively in the format of bureaucratic filing reports.

Rereading the above, my opinion might not be clear. I'm trying to be descriptive. 

I strongly recommend There is no antimemetics division. Try the first few chapters and see if they scratch a particular brain itch for you, as they did for me. If you like the premise, then I hope you've already read Peter Watts' Blindsight (GO READ IT RIGHT NOW, it remains my #1 most-recommended-to-others book).

This post's theme word is descript (adj), "having distinctive features or qualities." This novel made me much more cognizant of the aggressively descript and nondescript elements of my environment.

Sabriel

Garth Nix's Sabriel is a YA fantasy novel; it came to me highly recommended so I will summarize reasons why, reading it in 2020 as certainly an adult, I did not like it and don't recommend it. I don't mean to cast aspersions on youthful readers who enjoyed the book, but it has... issues.

Nominally, it is about a teenage girl who has magical gifts that allow her to enter the realm of Death and, variously, make things more permanently dead or bring them sort-of back to life. That's all you need to know.

The book is going through puberty SO HARD RIGHT NOW

This is my conclusion based on the nails-on-blackboard effect of unwelcome pubescent interjections into the otherwise adventure- and magic-based narrative.

We learn that because "there was minimal sex education" and "None of Sabriel's friends had reached puberty before her, so in fear and desperation she had entered Death" (17%) which seems a pretty dire thing to do in lieu of, I don't know, borrowing a book from the library or walking in to town and asking some responsible-looking adults about it. This is a truly horrible fantasy-world characterization of sex education, general education, learning, curiosity, puberty, and how serious necromantic magic is. Every single time that she enters Death it is given the stakes that she might die ("For Sabriel to enter Death seemed madness, temping fate." 66%), so I HOPE there is literally any other recourse to getting information about puberty.

The descriptions of the glaringly obvious romantic interest start with him being discovered, fully nude. The circumcision status of his penis is described; my personal reading notes say "this had better be significant later". (NARRATOR: It was not.) Later we get to hear about how his thighs are so muscled that he cannot put on pants. Even later we are treated to a gratuitous description of his rippling abs --- under his clothes --- during a fight scene.

Then for the rest of the book we just hear about people getting "flushed" and, occasionally, kissing each other on the forehead or sneakily intertwining pinkies to hold hands. It's as if the narration wants to be erotic, but is constrained by the imagination of a not-particularly-well-read 10-year-old. (They do kiss at least one time in order to COUNTERACT THE MOST POWERFUL DEATH-MAGIC THAT EXISTS IN THE WORLD; one teenage kiss is apparently sufficient, suggesting that the true magic is horniness.)

Everyone is constantly running, and extremely exhausted, but somehow manages to run even harder than before

This did not work to heighten the stakes any of the times it was used. It did heighten my irritation. After discovering previously-unbelievable athletic depth after the last handful of times that they were so-exhausted-they-could-run-no-further, why would I now feel any tension at the mention that they are so-exhausted-they-could-run-no-further? If anything, it just alerted me that they would, in fact, be required to run a bit further, because: drama.

Forced bathing scenes

At least twice, we have to read meticulously-detailed descriptions of scenes where Sabriel is forcibly stripped and bathed. This was uncomfortable and served no purpose except to repeatedly detail that it happened --- we don't even get any internal monologue or self-reflection to justify it. Yikes.

Unpalatable writing style

• Every single character was blindingly Obviously Significant to the Plot.
• The bad guy's name is a good guy's name, reversed --- oh, wow, it turns out they are the same person after hundreds of years of sinister magic!
• Sabriel has read the obviously significant Book of the Dead but can't remember pages from it except under duress in situations where suddenly magically remembering a page of a book would solve the problem; this is true even though she is literally carrying the book with her for most of the adventure.
• Putting earrings into already-pierced ears is an action that is described as causing bloody smears all over the ear-region (personal reading note: "not how earrings work").
• The characters, even those whose inner thoughts we got to hear, were extremely boring and flat, with no actual personality. First impressions and stereotypes were 100% accurate.
• There were two consecutive chapters where characters had to narrative-dump the entire plan of Team Evil Kill Everything And Live In Zombieland AND the entire plan to countermand it by Team Good, Chaste, and Hand-Holding. This despite the fact that the entire plot had been signposted SO HARD in every other clue and revelation for the entire book. Youthful readers are smart and I felt condescended-to on behalf of literate preteens everywhere.

At one point during some completely unjustified anger at the father she has literally spent 70% of the book questing to rescue, we read "He hardly seemed to notice her, except as a repository for numerous revelations and as an agent to deal with [Bad Guy]." (73%) My personal notes read: "I feel same." It was just not possible to start caring about any of the characters, or the stakes, or even whether it was an interesting set-up.

Maybe YA books are not for me

To be clear, I abandoned this book with maybe 10% left so I cannot tell you if it has an incredible conclusion that makes it all worthwhile. (The Wikipedia plot summary indicates: it does not. She's not allowed to die for narrative reasons!?!? Argh.)

Also, though: the world is teetering in such a fragile way... the destruction of ancient magical contracts is described as releasing so much uncontrollable magic that everyone will die and Zombies Will Rule Forever. So it's not clear how the ancient magical contracts got established in the first place, since the baseline level of magic is constant. This is the most charitable review I could give this book: the worldbuilding made no sense (and everything else about it was terrible, shallow, and bad). The conclusion seems to be: follow the rules that adults give you, do the work they assign, don't ask questions, don't think independently, don't make any choices, and despite getting stellar grades at expensive boarding school, you will still be atrociously bad at everything, but: shrug. You get to take baths and sometimes hold hands with a boy!

This post's theme word is verbigerate (v intr), "to obsessively repeat meaningless words and phrases." The word "charter" is verbigerated so often that it quickly reached semantic satiation.

Piranesi

Susanna Clarke's Piranesi is a novel in the form of a series of journal entries; the character who is writing is, by turns, unreliable, forgetful, and unclear. But because the novel would truly suffer from continuous vague recollections, he also has perfect memory for dialog and for visual descriptions of scenery and surroundings. Does this seem contradictory? Yes, but lucky for us, it doesn't matter because nothing in this book particularly matters.

The novel takes place inside a giant House --- a truly enormous House --- a possibly endless House, consisting of a series of marble-lined, colonnaded halls, vestibules, staircases, and passages. While the narrator uses the word "House", readers and other incidental characters come to understand the series of rooms as a labyrinth: not connected in any predictable way, challenging to navigate, and full of distracting detail. There is no obvious entry or exit point, though the action is centered around a vestibule (also the origin point whence the narrator indexes all other rooms). The narrator is vague on details that seem significant (how does he remember navigation directions perfectly when others get so easily lost?) and incredibly specific on details that no one else cares about (how many daily-use goods will he fashion from "fish leather", where is the best room to go bird-watching from, what is the Platonic Ideal Good Action for him to take in any situation). He confusingly both denies the existence of a world outside the building AND knows lots of words that refer to things that exist in our world, but not in the House.

This sounds mysterious, and it is. Clarke is a good writer and this book has many excellent moments --- e.g. the wink to the reader on p. 60,

I realised that the search for the Knowledge had encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted, and that if we ever discover the Knowledge, then it will be as if the Value has been wrested from the House and all that remains will be mere scenery.

This was unfortunately prescient, as the cleverness of presenting the core labyrinth/mysteri as "a text to be interpreted" was excellent, but indeed once the puzzle's answer was revealed, it was not very satisfying to consider the continuation of any part of the story or setting.

The cover blurbs portray the book as a sparkling gem of prose, an all-absorbing world full of beauty that will irresistibly entice the reader, and a fascinating puzzle. I found the book to be well-written, but describing things as irresistibly beautiful and actually invoking the impression that they are beautiful are two different things. The book does a lot of telling (repeatedly, "The Beauty of the House is immeasurable") and not a lot of showing; mostly we come to understand, gradually, that the narrator's seeming-unreliability all has completely predictable causes, and actually that everything he reports is true. All mysteries are solved, every single clue that I noted was tied up neatly in the most obvious conclusion, there were zero twists and few reveals, no characters had any subterfuge or depth. Everyone was exactly as they seemed on the surface.

And finally, my observation of several books I've read recently: I get the impression that the book's conclusion was written under duress, with the publisher demanding "just finish the book and turn it in!", and not given any time to develop into something interesting or satisfying. The book definitely ends, and that is what can be said about it: in the last page there is a feeble grasp at Greater Meaning which falls completely flat and ends the book on a gaspingly sour note.

My recommendation: if you want an atmospheric book about a mysterious, endless house, read Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast. If you want a book told by an unreliable narrator, then I strongly recommend Tamsyn Muir's recent release Harrow the Ninth (and its preceding book, Gideon the Ninth). If you want a book that explores, in a fun novelistic way, the boundaries of human knowledge and the notion that modern scientific rationality has cut us off from access to certain domains of knowledge and maybe even certain actions and physically real spaces, then I recommend Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland's The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. (which also includes an improvised modern Viking saga!). And if you want an excellent book written by Susanna Clarke, read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.

This post's theme word is heterography (n), "a spelling different from the one currently in use." The vaguely timeless ambience would have been more interesting with heterography.

Happy birthday, Turing!

Today is the 106th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing. (Of course, at birth he was probably very bad at abstract reasoning and proofs, like most babies, but he overcame these difficulties and grew up to be truly excellent at math.)

Just in case you haven't seen this yet (HT: I saw this on Twitter several times, then on slatestarcodex), it is amusing and recursive and cultural and involves computers:

Humans often post on the website reddit, which hosts many, many different message boards and oodles of subcultures and conversations on specific topics. Each specific message board is called a subreddit and has its own adherents, community standards, topic(s) of conversation, style, level of activity, etc.

There is a subreddit called r/totallynotrobots where the posts claim to be written by humans, but are written in all-caps and a style suggesting that they are actually written by robots. Redditors writing these posts are humans, so these are humans writing as if they are robots who are unconvincingly trying to pass as human.

There is a recent and extremely impressive system called GPT-2 which unsupervised-ly learns English and performs some really impressive computational linguistic feats, including writing mediocre high-school-style essays and writing very interesting and totally feasible poetry.

There is a subreddit called r/SubSimulatorGPT2 which trains GPT-2 on subreddits and automatically writes "coherent and realistic simulated content" for each subreddit. Of course, this subreddit is just going through other subreddits, training GPT-2, and writing new (automated, simulated) posts for that subreddit.

Now the subreddit-simulating robot has trained on r/totallynotrobots, which means that there are posts on the internet which are written by a robot imitating a human writing in a style pretending to be a robot who is unconvincingly trying to pass as a human. (Or, as slatestarcodex put it, "a robot pretending to be a human pretending to be a robot pretending to be a human.") You can see those posts here.

It's turtles all the way down, and every. single. turtle. is a Turing machine!


This post's theme word is anastrophe, "the inversion of the usual order of words or clauses." Silly grammar mistakes and anastrophe are used to denote unfamiliarity with human language.

Gameshouse

Claire North's trilogy of novellas The Serpent, The Thief, and The Master, all focus on a mythical "Gameshouse", a gambling institution which travels magically from city to city, endures through time, and exerts a strange pull over all humanity. But over our main characters firstly, lastly, and most of all.

The first book, The Serpent, focuses on Thene, an unhappily-married woman in 1610 Venice. Her introduction to the Gameshouse is through her dissolute husband, who gambles and drinks away all his money in the "lower games" part of the club: the usual gambling games, poker and card games, betting on other things, and so on. Checkers. Coin flips. (Battleship, Monopoly, and Diplomacy, once the stories reach the present day.) Thene first follows her idiot husband there, but soon becomes involved in the games herself, and rises to our notice by being smarter at playing games than the rest of the rabble.

One intriguing thing about this novella is its use of person: it is told in the third-person sort-of-omniscient, except for frequent intrusions of first-person into the narrative. This collusive tone of "we now turn to look at..." is as if the narrator is drawing back a curtain on the next scene, and implicating the reader in some of the voyeurism involved in chasing down the parts of this gambling-addicted, high-stakes (literally) tale. The thing I did in the last sentence of the previous paragraph? That's exactly the tone.

Thene is invited to play "higher" games by the mysterious, cloaked figures (inevitably called "umpires") who adjudicate the games. In particular, she is invited to play at a game of "kings", which amounts to meddling in local politics to get her "piece" (a person) elected to the post of Tribune (top of the political heap in Venice). The rest of the story devolves by playing on the tropes of real life as a game: she is dealt cards, each card representing one person who she can use as an asset to influence the election, collect information, spy, steal, kill. The game has rules but those rules are few and not particularly scrupulous. It's a short story about politics, and gender roles, and being cold and calculating with even your own life; the tone is mysterious and compelling. (I find all of Claire North's writing to be hard-to-put-down, intricately crafted, brilliant; see previously.)

The second book, The Thief, maintains the same tone but steps up the silliness of the "magical timeless gambling house that secretly controls all people's lives" by being mostly about a game of hide-and-seek. Yeah, that's right: high stakes hide-and-seek. It's adult-league: guns and spies are involved, as well as police bribery, survival skills, and general action-movie levels of cleverness and desperation under pressure. Just as in The Serpent, there are a few scenes where the main character Remy, a French-English expat in 1938 Thailand, interacts with a mysterious yet powerful fellow games-player known only as "Silver" (actual name gambled and lost many millennia ago). We, the readers, get the clear sense that Silver is playing a long-term game, gradually accreting favors owed from other long-lived game players, in order to play some even larger and more momentous game. By the end of the novella, it is clear that Silver is our first-person narrator, and that he has been building these tales to explain the board, the pieces, and the rules of the game he will play.

The third book, The Master, focuses on this game: Silver challenges the mysterious-in-the-extreme Gamesmaster, "the woman all in white who guards the halls wherein we play" (p. 6), who has appeared at the fringes only as an entirely-white-robed-and-veiled figure adjudicating previous games. All high-level players --- Thene, Remy, Silver, the Gamesmaster --- are effectively immortal, as the Gameshouse allows people to gamble years of their lives, or chronic illnesses, or memories, or "your perception of the richness of the colour purple" (The Thief, p.102). So what stakes are possibly interesting to these immortal, calculatingly clever, unstoppably lucky people? Silver doesn't quite ever make it clear until the final scene, but his objections to the Gameshouse are clear. While players may think that they are powerful, unseating local governments or swaying elections or sinking actual battleships in their games, Silver's suspicion is that they are all being used in a larger game, one in which the Gamesmaster shapes human history towards a particular path. He can't tell what it is, and no one else can either, but the objection to being a piece in someone else's game is strong.

The plot of The Master revolves around a game of chess, but the line between the game-as-metaphor and game-as-literal-life is the most blurred of all three stories: each player is the "king" on their own team, and the game is a series of "moves" which could just as well be cut scenes in a Bourne or Bond action film. The board is the entire planet. The goal, of course, is to capture the other king; people are pawns, militaries are knights, and overall the metaphor is taken right to the edge of overdone and intolerable. Over the course of the story --- which happens in present-day, or maybe just-future-tomorrow --- the entire world descends into chaos, as the competing players draw on contacts in various militaries and governments to attempt to capture each other, bomb each other, create and destroy social movements with the goal of imprisoning the other, etc. The action ratchets up in increments but overall is hyperbolically done; with throwaway lines about how World War I was simply a quick round of some silly game between small-time players, it is clear that this game is insane, and also unstoppable.

All very believably and compellingly told. Claire North continues to be a writer with a direct line into my brain; her words are like the hooks side of velcro, and I am caught.

My only qualm is this: often the players use favors they have accumulated from normal, non-immortal people who just have a gambling problem. They seem to have these favors in unlimited supply. How? Those people are turning over at least once every century, so to maintain a world-wide collection of favors owed, high-level Gameshouse players would need to be constantly touring the globe and playing frivolous-to-them games against plebians. We see in the stories that they don't enjoy doing this... yet they must have.

A lot of plot digest and not a lot of reflection on my part, here. I love Claire North's writing. She has really perfected the art of slowly laying out breadcrumbs of plot, of gradually unfurling a bizarre and unexpected premise. Bravo all-around.


This post's theme word is hypercathexis (n), "excessive concentration of mental energy on something." Taking advantage of his opponent's hypercathexis during this round, Silver sneakily gleaned the information that allowed him to win the game.

Gone Girl

I've been recommended Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn severally, and heard praise of it, so I took it off my reading queue and actually read it over winter break. This book is a thriller, and a departure from my usual reading in tone and subject matter. The voice, however, is perfect: unreliable narrators, all the way down, like nesting Russian dolls.

The book is an incredible feat of writing, tightly-plotted, intricately-woven, a virtuosic demonstration of writerly skill in manipulating the readers' attention, curiosity, and mental state. I read it in two sittings, and the one break I took was when one chapter ended in too-dramatic of a cliffhanger; this let me put down the book in disgust at such blatant attention-pandering. (A few hours later I picked it up and finished it.)

That said, I didn't like this book.

It made me feel bad.

First it lured me in, with multiple first-person unreliable narrators and lots of interesting setups for the central mystery (a missing woman). The unreliable narrators are awesomely well-written --- it feels like a true glimpse into another mind, recognizably like my own. The book had several points where characters voiced those little internal thoughts that never rise to enough significance to be mentioned in conversation, but keep cycling back and become normal internal mental refrains. I always wonder how authors manage to figure out such things to add to their writing, and to do it so smoothly that it deeply resonates with me. (Maybe they're trying all the time, and I don't register the notes that fail to resonate?)

Then, it gradually revealed that every. single. character. is a sociopath. Creepily, deviously, ingeniously. (And here I refer to both the characters and to the manner of reveal.) This was haunting, and unsettling, and --- I suppose, to give the genre its due --- thrilling. But horrible. I don't want to have such characters in my imagination, much less in the actual world I inhabit. I was actually upset about choices that these imaginary people were making in order to hurt each other, because I don't want to have such choices happen in the world around me. I don't want people to be evil, I don't want people to be hurt, I don't want people to hate each other. And this book is utterly, cleverly, unerringly twisted; the characters even acknowledge as much to each other:

"You two are the most fucked-up people I have ever met, and I specialize in fucked-up people." (page 415)

The book is a masterpiece of writing, but not the kind of recreational fiction that I ever want to experience. I don't like being frightened or disgusted for fun; I like a challenge, a puzzle, an unreliable narrator, and I don't mind philosophical or ethical quandaries, but I want people to learn and grow and improve. This book doesn't do that; it's purely down, a descent into vicious, bitter, resentful psychosis.

I do not recommend, unless you already know you like the "thriller" genre.


This post's theme word is dysphemism, "a detrimental phrase used deliberately in place of a nicer one." The opposite of euphemism. It's a novel, but I refer to it as "an odious sequence of insidious, brain-infecting, evil words."

Stunningly efficacious

I have no particular, publicly-declarable goals to commemorate the incrementing of our calendar year, except that --- as always --- I want to hone myself into the startlingly effective, time-efficient, prosperous, merry, well-balanced person that other people (hopefully) think I already am.

I like circuitous sentences and superfluous verbiage, and I refuse to change either of those personal attributes in 2018. Come back and try again in 2019, haters.

Day 1 is marked by a high turnaround of holiday letters and emails, paying bills, updating all my yearly-in-January donations, and staring in awe at the truly prodigious list of half-written draft posts for this blog.

(Sorry about that.)

You, my diligent readers, whether my parents or my overcurious students or internet strangers looking to post advertisements as comments (don't, I delete them and it wastes everyone's time), will simply have to put up with me as I am, striving yet again, always, in a continual manner. I want to write more, and more cleverly, and because this platform is free and quick (except when stuck in draft limbo), it will likely be the recipient of this output.

Although frankly, a lot of it goes to /dev/null right now anyway, and that might be for the best.

My year-end phrase-stuck-in-my-head is "flamboyantly intelligent", which is a descriptor of the kind of people I'd like to surround myself with. Maybe there's a subreddit? I'm on a (mild) quest, in any case; if you find any such people, please send them my way. I am a diligent and snarky correspondent, and I have been told I am secretly kind and caring, but that was 2017 and I am looking to turn over a new leaf, so...


This post's theme word is palilalia (n), "a speech disorder characterized by involuntary repetition of words, phrases, or sentences." I am trying to remember the word for "having a phrase stuck in your head", but all I can come up with is palilalia, which is not-quite-it-but-close-enough-to-blot-it-from-recoverable-memory, plus: contains "lila" as a substring!

Video consumption

I know what you're thinking. You're wondering, "what can I watch and listen to to better imitate Lila in thought, action, and deed?" This blog is for you, oh my sycophants, and of course also for my parents, who are approximately 2/3 of my readership. (That's a lower bound.)

Since reading a heap of Hugo 2017 nominees, I've swung far to the other side (while still voraciously reading) and watched... some... movies. (Gasp!) Don't worry, I retain my innate personhood, and independently-verified snarkiness readings have been off the charts this summer, so I'm not losing my precious "edge."

In this blog post:

• Wonderwoman
• Star Trek: III (*reboot timeline)
• Pitch Perfect
• Vikings
• The Rise of Catherine the Great

Wonderwoman was reportedly a male-gaze-free movie (see this and this), but it seemed plenty gaze-y to me, with lots and lots of glamour shots, power posing, and wind-blowing-directly-through-hair. Her appearance was its own subplot! Also, years of weightlifting have left me perpetually dissatisfied with the insufficiently-muscled arms of women playing physically strong characters. If she is actually going to overhead press an entire tank, then could she please have visibly-defined triceps? I suspect that even by examining her physical appearance this closely, I am somehow contributing to a cultural problem.

The coolest part of the movie was that, during a climactic fight, an explosion temporarily deafened Wonderwoman and the audience. This meant that even the dramatic music cut out, which was a fantastic way to show that the fight was still tense, visceral, and compelling, even without the swelling music and loud explosions. Without even being able to tell what characters were shouting at each other! Unfortunately, the movie retconned this cool moment several minutes later by having a flashback in which all audio was restored. Boo.

As for plot: no comment from me; I don't understand how the marketing-fandom-executive trifecta synergy works; superhero movies make no sense. I once saw a kabuki play in Japanese in Tokyo, and I got a last-minute ticket for the second act only. There were no surtitles, so I had no idea what the plot was, I could not understand the speaking, and every single gesture and facet of the performance and set seemed imbued with a mystical relevance that I could only hypothesize. This was basically the same, except much less interesting.

I tried watching Star Trek: a third thing, as endless scifi sequels are probably easier to comprehend, but I found it was replete with the same sort of overhashed writing. As if the script was an amalgam of several scripts, and even that script was lost about halfway through shooting. I think there were several plot points that could have been solved by characters just talking with each other, or occasionally sending a text message. This is in keeping with (apparent) modern movie-writing style. Honestly I tried to forget this as soon as it ended, because it didn't include any cool effects and there was no unreliable narrator. Why bother?

Pitch Perfect was a much better palate-cleanser, for being fairly bland with little bits of cute music and several lines that seemed both realistic and funny. It left unexplained how a singing group that spends most of its time practicing a dance routine can manage to perform musically-complex arrangements flawlessly, but ... it also didn't explain how so many 25-30 year-olds were in college.

Vikings is basically Toxic Masculinity: The Historical Drama. I watched it because I am waiting for the next season of Versailles to be released, and I wanted to see more George Blagden performances. It's weird to see Louis XIV dressed up as a grime-covered heathen. I couldn't stomach very much of this show, as it relied too much on close-up shots of men brooding over their own hurt egos and deciding to murder each other (and ancillary women and children). That's not plot development, IMHO.

The Rise of Catherine the Great was terrific!

... which, I mean, of course I liked this. It was a dramatized history, with very slow plot progress, in German and Russian (and some French), with subtitles. All "place settings" were untranslated onscreen, and also untranslated were the numerous times that the camera looked over someone's shoulder as they wrote a politically-significant letter in Russian. I suppose it might be intellectual snobbery, but I actually enjoyed it a lot more because of the linguistic authenticity, even though that made it less directly accessible to me. Aside from the language, the slow plot, the lovely costumes, ... how to explain my delight? Oh, that's right: a historical digression.

Once, when I had roommates with Netflix, my influence on the group Netflix profile became clear when the mysterious, opaque genre-generating algorithm suggested an entire collection of videos under the heading "British Period Pieces Featuring a Strong Female Lead". This series -- though not British -- fits squarely into that concept-space. I found it by only lightly-algorithmically-influenced browsing, but I'm confident that I would have found it faster Netflixily.

I recommend it.

I also recommend, you know, reading books. Lots of them (I've now added several histories of Russia to my queue). If that's not your style, then the other summer 2017 Lila fashion is singing to yourself in the car: try it today!


This post's theme word is quiff (n), "a tuft of hair brushed up above the forehead," or "a woman considered as promiscuous." The production featured several historically-accurate quiffs!

17776

17776 ("What football will look like in the future") is a piece of fiction by Jon Bois, published on the sports website SB nation. Its exact categorization is evasive: experimental fiction? multimedia experience?

It's very cool, in any case, and the entire project is now published. No uncomfortable waiting now, just a lot of scrolling and loading. (And warning: it doesn't seem to work entirely on mobile.) It posits a future, many thousands of years from now, and what game(s) football may have gradually shifted into... and so much more. Purpose, humanity, climate change, the Fermi paradox... it's all there.

This was very engaging, even if I am left with a lingering worry that I'm not getting it. Certainly there were some references I missed, but there were sentient satellites watching a thousand-year-long game of hide-and-seek.


This post's theme word is gesamtkunstwerk (n), "a work of art that makes use of many different art forms." The internet facilitates a vast new landscape of gesamtkunstwerks!

Watch Your Mouth

Daniel Handler's Watch Your Mouth is a decidedly adult novel. It provides a nice counterpoint in my mind to his children's books, which are sarcastic and occasionally murderous but reasonably PG.[1] Watch Your Mouth consists almost entirely of breathless sex scenes [2], with interstitial innuendo/opera crossover wordplay. The novel's first half is full of stage directions, framing the story as an opera, which devolves into less and less distinct observations until the inevitable operatic finale.

The opera-novel's first-person retrospective narrator is smart and clever [3], but the novel itself casts him into doubt: he is a self-acknowledged unreliable narrator, and perhaps even a narrator suffering weird delusions and a memory disorder. The book starts (several times, in fact) with a usual setup, a comfortable framing of the story to follow, and then gradually --- through judicious and entertaining use of stage directions and references to different leitmotifs, staging, costumes, and orchestration cues --- the story becomes more and more sinister, as well as deranged and unbelievable and nonsensical. The narrator tries to describe things he witnessed, except he can't quite describe exactly what he witnessed, so he ends up describing everything in hedged and allusive terms. This manages to be oblique about plot details while being explicit about sexual details, which is weird but not so gross and repellent that it would stop me from reading more, to see what happens. (I believe the usual mode is to now compliment the author: that was masterfully done, to describe so much while leaving everything utterly uncertain!)

The conclusion, of course, is as in every opera: a dramatic death scene.

But the story, and its light fourth-wall-breaking, does not end there. Even as the death scene denouement trickles to a feeble closure, the narrator refers to how incomplete the tale feels and how much of the novel is still in your right hand! This obviously is only true for physical copies of the book, but as luck would have it, I was reading a physical copy, so this trick landed and seemed cool and witty. Then the remainder of the book was even more disjointed and off-the-rails, with the added twist that maybe every 2 or 3 pages, Handler masterfully convinced me that either (1) it was all real, and this was a sort of fantasy-nightmare world, or (2) the narrator was having a mental breakdown, which we were seeing from the inside. The first such switch is neat. The switch back requires overcoming some reasonable skepticism. The next switch, and the next, and the next? I don't know. I oscillated between believing the book literally and disbelieving every single event, and that is a precarious balance to strike, and an astounding effect to sustain for so long.

In conclusion, I liked it, even though the subject matter was squicky.


This post's theme word is sercroupierize, "to have sex with several people in succession." (Not in many online dictionaries, apparently.) The book's sercrouiperizing narrator was very off-putting, but somehow always turned-on.

[1] Many iconic children's movies start with the double murder of the protagonist's parents, so... I'm just saying, any cognitive dissonance you may have with my downplaying of murder as on par with sarcasm, and completely suitable for children --- take it up with the culture-makers. I'm just an observer.

[2] The sex scenes may be breathless, but they are also not terribly erotic. They're just kind of... the shotgun approach to horniness, where everything gets utterly slimy and the characters have to take breaks every few hours for coitus, for no apparent reason.

[3] Well, he's either "smart and clever" or "incompetent, idiotic, and deranged". It's hard to tell. You'll see.

Reunion summary, part II

Months of persistent nagging, often several times a day, was insufficient this time. Most of the class defaulted and failed to submit any self-summary for our next reunion (and accompanying book). This forced the alumni office to give us an extension and step up the guilt-tripping to previously-unexplored reaches of extremity.

Lo! and behold: it worked. Well, a bit. I'll admit that I didn't put as much pizzazz and creative obfuscation into this one as the last one. (In my defense, I now have a job which offers me a lot less free time for creative writing projects on the side.)

My quest for evil mastermindhood continues apace. I have maximally levelled up on the education ladder, and collected one degree of each type (arts, science, philosophy); I now demand to be addressed by my full title ("Professor Doctor Master..."), which is becoming an onerous time-delay during dramatic entries.

Since last we met, I moved to Canada, and then, when that proved insufficiently French, I moved to Paris itself. O! that epitome of French stereotypes: the glorious boulevards, the wine/bread/cheese, the magnificently sneery accents. Many truly marvelous adventures were had, which this margin is too narrow to contain. After nearly a decade abroad, I reluctantly returned to domestic shores in pursuit of that most elusive of quest objectives: tenure.

I return to the US a well-travelled, multilingual, and even-more-highly educated person, all things which serve me well for making small talk and getting pigeonholed. As a professor of computer science, I know a lot about both pigeons and holes. Ask me sometime.

I promise to give you homework. (Due date: the next reunion.)

If unnamed editors change anything, that'll pretty much determine my non-participation in future editions. (Last time they threatened that editors might take action, but the final version was what I had submitted, ridiculosity unchanged.)

These periodic check-ins seem decreasingly relevant in the networked social media sphere in which I dwell: everyone I want to hear about, I already do hear about; we are already in touch. And everyone else? Reading about them in the paper-printed book (!) will be useful, but mostly for tracking how many future CEOs and congresspeople I knew in their early 20s.


This post's theme word is aesculapian, "relating to medicine," or "a doctor." I usually introduce myself as "a doctor, but not the type that helps people", but I am considering condensing this to "a non-aesculapian doctor", to alienate all but the most erudite.

What is the largest number you have counted to out loud?

I take attendance by having the students answer a question. (This question was student-generated, too!)

What is the largest number you have counted to out loud?

Usual answers: 100, 101, 125, 200, 400, 999. "I don't remember."

Unusual answers: 7, 20, 42, 54, 117, 267, 723. Why stop at (1) such a small number, and (2) a non-round number?

Impressive answers: ∞, 5000, "1000 (My parents wanted to keep me distracted and I was 8.)" (note: it worked, and this student is now a math major!).

Answers I, personally, found confusing: i, -1, √115, 0, "2 grillion", 17 1/2. I'm not sure what increments you are counting in to get to -1, or i, or square roots, or fractions. Actual theoretical issues of countability (in the technical sense) come into play here.


This post's theme word is plangent, "loud and resounding," or "sad or mournful." The plangent dirge counted onwards, never ceasing, its rolling tones reverberating down the valley, but I had come to suspect that the Plinker Monks would never reach "square root of 115 bottles of beer on the wall"... (-excerpt from My Life Amongst Mathematical Entities from Thought Experiments)

Nitpicking metaphors with modern engineering

"Jesus had said it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter Heaven, but rocketry had thirty years of practice working with astonishingly small tolerances and rose to meet the challenge." - Scott Alexander's Unsong, chapter 39

The swoop from cultural highbrow to literal engineering terminology tickles my sense of humor. Is there a name for this genre? "Nerdbait"?

This post's theme word is ultracrepidarian (n/adj), "(one) giving opinions beyond one's area of expertise." Which is truly the ultracrepidarian, the literary scholar with opinions about engineering  details or the engineer who obliterates a metaphor with a cleverly-designed tool?

James Joyce

"In attempting to be completely faithful to real life, in all its true confusion and complexity, Joyce ended up writing a book that is fascinatingly, instructively unreadable." - Professor Eric Bulson, for The School of Life on Joyce's Finnegans Wake

This is serious. I have tried several times and I just keep putting Joyce's books back into the queue. Listening to this framing of Joyce's work makes me think I should bump up its priority and try to read it again.

This post's theme word is frustraneous (adj), "useless, unprofitable." The exercise of reading was frustrating but not frustraneous.

Invisible catnip-cloak

Certain sentences can grind my brain to a halt, demanding attention and completely derailing the reading process, whether by tone, word choice, lyricism, or utter rhetorical madness. Witness:

This amalgamated aesthetic is catnip to a significant portion of American listeners but functions like an invisibility cloak against music writers.

This sentence, appearing in Jia Tolentino's "The Slippery Appeal of the Biggest New Band in America" in The New Yorker, compels further contemplation.

Partly I perform a readerly revel at the idea of an aesthetic which can simultaneously be catnip and and invisibility cloak. (Or at least, catnip which "functions like" an invisibility cloak. Is it worn? Eaten? Brandished?) Partly I cringe at this strangely not-quite-metaphor. Partly I am ready to accept any sentence beginning with the awesome and alliterative "amalgamated aesthetic".

But the biggest part, and the final one for me, is the sheer audacity of writing a sentence about "music writers" in an article about music; this is an incredible feat of non-self-recognition on the part of the author, who surely must be labelled as a music writer. And to whom this band is --- as the feature and focus of this article-let --- definitely visible.


This post's theme word is  eclose, "(of an insect) to emerge as an adult from the pupa or as a larva from the egg." Twenty One Pilots' hit song "Stressed Out" focuses on the difficulties and angst of eclosure.

The Book of Phoenix

Nnedi Okorafor's The Book of Phoenix fits the mold of her previous writing (Binti, Lagoon) for me: it is vaguely science-fiction/fantasy, with characters whose choices are opaque to me even when the writing reveals their inner monologues. It touches on racism and slavery and human testing and the limits of scientific ethics, for very strong values of "touches on" (in the same way that District 9 "touches on" apartheid).

The protagonist, a woman named Phoenix, is the result of a scientific experiment, and has lived all her life in a large lab complex, surrounded by prodding scientists and the bizarre and puissant other human/animal/robot experimental subjects. She begins as fairly naive and innocent, although very well-read.

Then, of course, she escapes.

The book is her own firsthand (maybe) account of her escape and the ensuing series of revelations (about the extent and horror of human-subject testing by this powerful corporation) and rescues/destructions wrought (of the other human subjects and of the company's physical holdings and employees, respectively). Her reflections on human testing are pretty much as expected: "Human beings make terrible gods." (p. 152)

As always, the conclusion is that Racism Is Bad. All other types of discrimination, too: we should all aspire to just get along, respect each other, be kind, and improve the lives of those around us. ("He accepted what I was as if it were normal. He gazed at me but didn't stare. His world was big and there was room for me." p. 155)

The story was a bit jumbled, or at least, it was not designed for someone with my mindset to comprehend. For example, some event happens several times. Time A it takes 3 days. Time B it takes 1 month. Time C it takes a few minutes. After time C, one onlooking character says that it is getting faster... a conclusion which I think unwarranted, given the available data. But he says it with a certain conviction, and without any second-guessing in the narration, that indicates (to me at least) that the readers should accept this pronouncement as accurate. It is narrative fact. This causes some dissonance in my brain, as the available data might just as well suggest that it is alternatingly fast-and-slow, or just noisy and unpredictable, or really anything.

The entire book is like this: it's not what I expect, I never feel comfortable with what is going on, and it explicitly calls out privileges that benefit me. It's discomforting, but as with Okorafor's other writing, this discomfort is clearly meant to be a feature of the writing for readers like me. And I think that it's good, or right, or at least social-justice-minded, for me to "sit with [my] discomfort" (in the words of Another Round host Heben Nigatu, episode 15).

The final notes of the book are weird --- there is a framestory to wrap up, but then we pop the stack one more time. Somehow. Somehow we pop the empty stack, we jump up another level to a frame story that no one even knew was going on. The fourth wall is broken, which is of course pure Lila-bait, but it's brief and weird and I am still thinking about it and not sure what to make of it: "Once the author wrote the story, the author became irrelevant." (p. 210) and "'I know what you think,' she said. 'You can rewrite a story, ... Think before you do; your story is written too... Who is writing you?' she asked."(p. 211)


This post's theme word is rhizophagous, "feeding on roots". The three-mile-high tree had tremendous rhizophagous needs.

The Girl Who Soared over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

Catherynne M. Valente hits another one out of the park --- and all the way up to the moon --- with The Girl Who Soared over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two (previously: 0, 1, 2). Our protagonist continues to be September, no longer a little girl but a teenager, ageing at a fairly steady one year interval between books. This was another excellent jaunt to Fairyland, with  involved the question of free will and Turing tests and fundamental rights and lots and lots of silly and ridiculous fairy-magic. Yetis are involved, and time speeds up and loops back on itself variably. The observer effect is used, and of course the omnipresent narrator sneaks in some sly marginalia.

September meets her fate, written in a book (of course), and observes that  "You can't argue with something that's written down... there's nothing for it. Once it's written, it's done. All those ancient books always say 'so it is written' and that means it's finished and tidied and you can't say a thing against it." (p.162) The narrator continues by directly, fourth-wall-breakingly, replying:

Oh, but September, it isn't so. I ought to know, better than anyone. I have been objective and even-tempered until now, but I cannot let that stand, I simply cannot. Listen, my girl. Just this once I will whisper from far off, like a sigh, like a wind, like a little breeze. So it is written --- but so, too, it is crossed out. You can write over it again. You can make notes in the margins. You can cut out the whole page. You can, and you must, edit and rewrite and respahe and pull out the wrong parts... Living is a paragraph, constantly rewritten. It is Grown-Up Magic.

The entire book is full of these little touches and flourishes, head nods towards growing up and towards preserving magic and towards clevernesses in all their forms. As before, Fairyland is full of comic takes on adult life, as rephrased in terms of magical nonsense systems. But here Valente does the converse, too: she describes normal reality in magical terms. She blends from both directions. September is learning to drive, and gets a car in some parts of the adventure --- leading to the description by a fairy of gasoline as "saved-up sunlight. Giant ferns and apples of immortality and dimetrodons" (p. 151), a rather delightful stance to take on a fundamentally boring description of everyday fuel.

Nothing in Valente's writing is boring or everyday. All descriptions are amped-up, as if the Fairyland writing style were a baroque chest of drawers.  When describing the scene laid before the adventurers, it gets to be "vermilion and viridian and cerulean and citron and bold, glossy black, fairly glowing in the twilight." (p. 40) That's right: where other books might say it was red, green, blue, and yellow, with black outlines, Valente instead provides readers with an imaginative raid on the thesaurus. This is applied enough to be fun without verging into the exhaustion of rococo-saturation.

I continue to love this author. Read this book, too; if you've properly followed my recommendations to read its predecessors, you'll be drawn to read this book by your own reading gusto.


This post's theme word is logomania, "obsessive interest in words," or "excessive and often incoherent talking." Pardon my logomania, it is brought on by my logomaniacal reading habits.

The Girl Who fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

Catherynne M. Valente continues to delight with The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There, the second book in her Fairyland series (previously: 0, 1). We stick with our familiar protagonist September, who has grown up a little in the intervening year but still longs to return to Fairyland, where she left behind several close friends, the fantasy-world of magic and silliness, and, of course, her own shadow. This girl-shadow --- with her own name, and her own narrative arc, and her own personality --- is the title's referent, continuing the series' title pattern.

Valente again tickles the readers' fancy, with a story and characters wonderfully sweeping from the foolish and silly to the clever and subtle. The prose is luscious and playful, childlike with hints of adulthood peeking through. Again we are treated to some light breaking of the fourth wall ("I am a sly narrator," p. 59) and again the details of Fairyland are a mirror-image of the daft systems of reality (economic speculation of firstborns and spinning straw into gold); I was particularly gratified to hear from more magic-researchers about the intricacies of academia in Fairyland. (In a book titled Sleeping Royalty and Other Politickal Conundrums, we read that "Other than revolution and assassination, falling asleep for a hundred years or more poses the biggest danger to royalty these days." p. 121)

At a toll to pass into the underworld, instead of surrendering a puissant magical item, September is asked to take one from the Sybil's cluttered house, with her encouragements:

But the trouble is, when they leave their sacred objects, I'm left with a whole mess of stuff I have no use at all for. Good for them --- they learn not to rely on their blades or their jewels or their instruments of power, but for me it's just a lot of clutter to clean up. After a thousand years, you can see it heaps up something monstrous and there's just no safe way to dispose of magical items like these. (p. 46)

In the time since the previous book, September has read a wide variety of mythology, as background research and preparation for her anticipated next visit to Fairyland. So this book makes even more references to familiar fairytale tropes, and September sometimes heads off a dull explanation with a shortcut that she figured out from other stories.

Once again the conclusion was unexpected, which is a criterion I appreciate a lot recently.

Recommended. (Although, start at the beginning of the series!)


This post's theme word is pervicacious, "very stubborn." Pervicacious girls have very strong magical powers, if handled and frustrated correctly.

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

Catherynne M. Valente's The Girl Who Circumnavigate Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making continues the story retroactively begun in the prequel The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland --- For a Little While, which I quite enjoyed. That is, the story of Fairyland continues. The titular girl has changed.

Our new heroine is September, who falls for the traditional abducted-by-fairy tropes, but only to a point. She is a modern heroine, quite practical, definitely in the vein of Alice (of Alice in Wonderland), blending an ability to go-along with the silly nonsense around her --- which often subtly or not-so-subtly mocks the nonsense of adults in the real world --- with a stubborn determination and fierce loyalty to her friends. For example: September happens across some indentured-postdoctoral research Fairyland residents, and when she calls one out on evading her questions, the response includes:

We were only told to feed you up and send you into the woods. No one tells us anything unless it's 'Mix up Life-in-a-Flask for me, Citrinitas!' 'Bake me a Cake of Youth, Trinny!' 'Grade these papers!' 'Watch that beaker!' 'A monograph on the nature of goblins' riddles, Ci-ci!' I swear to you, I am finished with postdoctoral work! (p. 136)

September knows that fairies are tricky, and listens carefully to subtle rules and sneakily-worded conditions. ("Hello, I believe we have an utterly unique specimen on our hands: a child who listens" observes a quest-giver on p. 31.) But fairies know about these fairy-tropes, too:

If it will make you feel better, I can lead you to a pit in the forest or steal your breath or whatever it is I might --- and I'm not admitting to anything --- have done in my profligate youth. (p. 106)

The book is infused with this self-awareness, it is a fairytale which knows about fairies and fairytales and breaking the fourth wall, and gently does it all over again, in a triumph of marvel, whimsy, and intelligence.

Valente's writing-magic has worked on me again. The story is unpredictable in a way that Alice in Wonderland is not (either because I have been repeatedly inoculated to its style by indoctrination from an early age, or because Valente is a modern writer with a better sense of what my readerly expectations may be, and this a better handle on how to shrug them off and go somewhere new, unexpected, and fantastic). I proselytize these books, and D. reported that they not only describe but also recreate the sensation of childhood, the curiosity and bewilderment and astonishment and uncertainty and pure, untrammelled joy.

Some marvelous bits that I highlighted:

• "One can never see what happens after an exeunt on a Leopard. It is against the rules of theatre. But cheating has always been the purview of fairies, and as we are about to enter their domain, we ought to act in accordance with local customs." p. 15
• "But even the wisest men may die, and that is especially true when the wisest of men has a fondness for industrial chemicals. So went my mother's patron, in a spectacular display of Science." p. 39
• On p. 161, the following exchange:
  "... I cannot begin to imagine what you are!"
  "WHO!" bellowed the shoes, hopping upright, straps flapping in indignation. "What is an indirect dative reserved for things. I am alive! I am a WHO. Or a whom, if you must."

And on breaking the fourth wall:

• "no one may know the shape of the tale in which they move." p. 35
• "September could not see it. ... That is the disadvantage of being a heroine, rather than a narrator." p. 171

The climax and ultimate problem (and resolution) of this book were excellent, just full-on capital-Q Writing of Quality. Not at all what I expected, based on the hints dropped and clues collected. As with all of Valente's writing, this gripped me in unexpected ways, and was tremendous fun. I highly recommend.

This post's theme word is allochthonous, "originating in a region other than where it is found." The allochthonous girl circumnavigated Fairyland.