The Puget News

First of all, congratulations to Doris Lessing.

I’ve never read her work before but I’ve been thinking about starting a series of blog posts where I read all of the Nobel Prize winners for Literature and write about the experience. Have any of you read Doris Lessing? Any thoughts on what book I should start with? I read in her wikipedia entry that she considers the Canopus in Argos series to be her most important work to date.

If you have ideas on which Doris Lessing book I should start with, please suggest it in the comments.

Update: You can check out the New York Times article here. I love the photo of Doris Lessing sitting there in disbelief on her front porch.

Stout, sharp and a bit hard of hearing, after a few moments Ms. Lessing excused herself to go inside. “Now I’m going to go in to answer my telephone,” she said. “I swear I’m going upstairs to find some suitable sentences which I will be using from now on.”

Update 2: With everyone getting in on the action, it was only a matter of time before Kakutani weighed in.

This one goes out to the folks who read “Against the Day” with me. It’s the best review of the novel I have read to date, exposing the great faults and the dizzying underlying talent at the same time. It comes as little surprise that a review this well-written wasn’t written anytime near the books release. This sort of understanding can only come from serious time invested.

VQR: Back to the Future: On Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day

[Tip of the hat for finding this one goes to the Marginal Revolution blog. Thank you!]

The article is here:

In October, the online retailer Amazon.com will unveil the Kindle, an electronic book reader that has been the subject of industry speculation for a year, according to several people who have tried the device and are familiar with Amazon’s plans. The Kindle will be priced at $400 to $500 and will wirelessly connect to an e-book store on Amazon’s site.

Update: Apparently, this is a hot Amazon story today. Another blogger is reviewing the product before it even comes out.

David Weinberger’s “Everything is Miscellaneous” is a well-written exploration of the various “geographies of knowledge” and how our maps of this knowledge are changing as our tools and computational processing improve. If you are a data wonk, organization freak, or just somebody intrigued by how the classification of massive amounts of data, this is a book for you. It’s a lively mix of historical classification schemes and modern use cases of companies finding ways of making their data more useful.

The inside flap of the book lists three “profound consequences” which it believes are important (the following bullets are quotes from the inner flap):

• Information is most valuable when it is thrown into a big digital “pile” to be filtered and organized by users themselves.
• Instead of relying on experts, groups of passionate users are inventing their own ways of discovering what they know and want.
• Smart companies do not treat information as an asset to be guarded, but let it loose to be “mashed up,” gaining market awareness and customer loyalty.

While I believe the three claims above are well-documented throughout the book, I think that there is a core component of the dialog that should have been expounded in more detail; precisely how this miscellaneous pile becomes relevant and navigable to each individual user. While there are pockets of companies and researchers adding meta-data to digital archives in a way that enriches it for targeted audiences, it’s still a very small group and a very small percentage of the overall material on the web. Indeed, while I know of no metrics on this, I would wager that the index of enriched content is falling further behind the actual pace of content creation. I believe that some rich forms of intent publication need to be added to the equation in an automatic manner in order for this problem to be solved.

In our current world, the internet is an extension of faulty (albeit useful) rules. “Thou must be cited (or linked to) to be useful,” seems to be an underlying rule of the internet. I cannot prove it, but I’m willing to bet there is an amazing amount of useful data, specific to given user search queries, not returned as prominent search results by the current algorithms. Specifying intent in a search query is a difficult matter, often involving programming-like search queries. This is not something the average internet user knows how to do.

While there is infinitely more data available to the layperson than ever before, and our search engines are enormously useful generic indexes, they still only brush the surface of user intent, something that is promised by what everyone is calling the “semantic web.” Theoretically, this is the framework that will allow computers to infer “user intent” on behalf of a user and make a request to other computers for precisely what the user probably wants. In order for this pile of randomness to become useful, we need a generic way of publishing meta-data about the sites being visited in a manner which does not get in the way of the average user. Ideally, this universal schema of intent would be enough to apply to individual user repositories of data. In fact, this might be where the movement for this sort of disclosure would need to occur. Anybody interested in defining a universal classification scheme for intent? Yikes!

I’d highly recommend this book by Weinberger as a thought-provoking and fun read. It had me questioning the organization schema of my own home library (and patting myself on the back for a couple ways that I’d apparently internalized hundreds of years of various classification methods already). It’s a fun read that doesn’t take too long.

I’d love to chat with folks about it so feel free to contact me via the comments if you are interested!

Sputnik Sweetheart is an excellent introduction to Haruki Murakami for those wishing to test the water before jumping into something like “Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” (still undoubtedly the best). Here we have all the themes that we’ve come to know in Murakami: unrequited love, parallel universes, a disappearing heroine, fractured selves, dream states, water wells, and an ambiguous ending that leaves you pondering the meaning for days.

In the very first sentence of the book, Sumire, the female heroine of the story, falls in love:

In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life. An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping across the plains — flattening everything in its path, tossing things up in the air, ripping them to shreds, crushing them to bits. […] The person she fell in love with happened to be 17 years older than Sumire. And was married. And, I should add, was a woman. This is where it all began, and where it all wound up. Almost.

This is a pretty decent encapsulation of everything else we will encounter throughout the book. Sure there are other wrinkles, such as the fact that Sumire’s best friend, the nameless narrator of the tale, is hopelessly in love with her. We end up exploring a fairly bizarre and broken love triangle; the object of Sumire’s affection, an older woman named Miu, is unable to return Sumire’s affection, Sumire is not romantically inclined towards the narrator, and the narrator loves in vain.

So what makes this book so special? In and of themselves, these are interesting facts, but nothing that fiction writers hasn’t covered many times over. The genius, as you might expect, is in the details. There’s a reason that Miu cannot return Sumire’s affection, even though she’d really like to (and no, it’s not because she’s married - she can’t be loving to her husband either). Something in Miu’s past continues to haunt her so strongly that it has formed a rift in her personality, something so powerful that she blatantly acknowledges her loss of self when Sumire comes on to her while they’re on a vacation on a remote Greek island.

Before we know it, Sumire herself has goes missing and Miu dials up the narrator to come and help her figure out where to look for her. Setting all of these personal intrigues and relationships up constitutes the first half of the book. The second half is dedicated to the narrator’s search for his missing friend and love, looking for clues in her journals and trying to uncover deeper meaning in Miu’s strange past. The writing here is really virtuosic - controlled and stylish, bouncing between epistolary and narrative smoothly, weaving an atmosphere of mystery, dark carnivality, and harsh sunlight. The books builds to a strangely erotic climax just over half way through, it simmers for a while, and then the deeper mystery begins to unfold. It’s quite an interesting experience and I’d recommend it highly.

If you know and love Murakami already, this book will just further your fervor. If you’re new to him, I’d recommend picking up “Sputnik Sweetheart” or “Hard-Boiled Wonderland” as a great entry point to his larger works. You’ll get the mood, mystery, symbolism and archetypes he’s so known for out of either of these books.

While reading the April 2007 issue of Harper’s I came across an excerpt of an interview [subscription required] between Tom LeClair, professor of English at University of Cincinnati, and William Gaddis, the famous author.

LECLAIR: How do the novels get to be so long, if they don’t start out with mass in mind?
GADDIS: If one is involved with a complicated idea, and spends every day with it, takes notes, and reads selectively with it in mind, ramifications proliferate. If one has what could be called an obsessional wish to exhaust an idea, understand it on six, seven, or eight levels, the book gets longer and longer.

While this extract might seem obvious, I just love the idea of focused time around the exploration of complex ideas and the expressed dedication to following them through to their natural conclusions. It always helps to remember that great authors wrestle with these ideas day in and day out while the rest of us are out grabbing our coffees. This gives me hope.

Note: The excerpt in the magazine is called “They call me Mr. Difficult” by Tom LeClair. This is part of a newly released collection of essays called Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System.

Other Interesting Links:

• Harper’s makes all past content available for free to subscribers

Actually the title is “Strange English Language” a poem by Dr. Gerald Nolst Trenite (1870-1946).

Great poem on the screwed up-ness of how english words are pronounced. heh, it made me chuckle so I thought I would share it with a wider audience.

Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.

Go read it and enjoy.

I have always thought that Lucius Shepard writes like a G. G. Marquez. You have a very distinct and clear idea of the characters and the setting. You can almost smell the sweltering heat of the dying Louisiana town where the story takes place. And just like many of Marquez’ works, there is a lot of mysticism intermixed with reality where, in the end, you come to the belief that magic and the real world are intermixed, that if we were just in the right place (wrong place) at the right time we too might get wrapped up in a fairytale or tragedy.

The story revolves around a bargain the town of Grail made with the “Good Gray Man”. Every generation they must promise a Midsummer Queen to him. The bargain they made is for all the town’s bad luck to be drawn onto the Midsummer Queen. But I don’t know if they got what they’ve bargained for, because it appears that, perhaps, they get no luck at all good or bad.

The story centers on Jack Mustaine, an outsider and how he is entwined in the story, cast as the hero or is that the jester…Will he rescue Vida Dumars, the current Queen? And what is his larger part in the story?

The people know that Jack might be the one who breaks the spell: they warn him, they help, they hinder. It’s a true suspense story that could end in many ways. I’ll let you read it and enjoy the ending yourself.

Great book, and one I will certainly read again.

p.s. I’ve read most of his works. I can recommend this as a great introduction to his writing and would follow it up with The Jaguar Hunter.

I posted an essay by George Orwell that talked about the craft of writing and how simplicity should be strived for. Here is a related essay also about the craft of writing, in this case written by Kurt Vonnegut. He echoes many of the same thoughts raised by Orwell.

http://www.harmonize.com/probe/aids/manual/style.htm

Keep it simple. Keep it clear.

As an example he brings up one of the simplest yet most famous sentences ever written : “To be or not to be?” No word longer than three letters but so much depth in those 5 words.

Where Orwell emphasized keeping the use of words as straightforward and simple as the subject permits, Vonnegut talks a bit more about your voice. He urges the writer to write from within their own persona and don’t try to be someone you are not.

I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am.

This is a much shorter article and a good companion to the Orwell essay.

Related Links:

• Eric Franklin’s TPN Post: Kurt Vonnegut RIP (1922 - 2007)
• Technorati Search: Kurt Vonnegut

A small but mighty group of tough-minded individuals finally worked our way through Thomas Pynchon’s new monster over the last few months. I think we’ve now settled on a pace that works for us, and even more importantly, we’ve selected our book for the next few meetings. I’d like to extend the reading group invitation to anybody out there interested in joining us.

Here’s how it works:

• The group meets every other Thursday at 7:30PM. Most of our meetings have been in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle at local pubs. If anyone wants to try reading remotely, let me know and we can try to make that work using the blog comments as a discussion forum.
• We spend at least half our time drinking, making small talk, and eating. If you’re a high-powered lit-nerd, you may want to find a more appropriate outlet for your snobby prowess.
• The idea of the group is to read challenging works which benefit from multiple points of view. We’ll vote on books as we approach the time for the next one to begin.
• We’ve found that 75-80 pages per week is our pace. Any more and people start to crumble under the obligation. The number of meetings we have will generally be based on page count.

The next book we’ve decided to read is “Poor People,” by William T. Vollmann (see the New York Times review ). We’ll be meeting March 29th to discuss the first 150-160 pages. You can purchase your copy (and support this blog) by clicking the image below: