The Puget News

Last night several folks got together to discuss the first 242 pages of Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, “Against the Day.” It was a lovely meeting of bright minds, yielding numerous insights which will certainly help us as we lumber forward.

A big shout out to the intrepid souls accompanying me in the journey through this novel. Everyone knows I’m a bit of a “Pynchon fan.” I appreciate those who not only put up with this fanaticism, but also humor me to the point of adopting it, even if only for a time. You are rockstars and I should know better…

So what am I finding in this new novel so far? Like most Thomas Pynchon, there are colorful characters, historical events fantastically re-imagined, strange twists of science (old and new), and cadres of secret societies driving the world forward. I am, however, finding this book to have more purpose, certainly more warnings for the present, than some of his other works. Maybe I’ve just read a lot of Pynchon and am starting to tease it out more easily but this books wears a lot more of its heart on its sleeve, on the surface. I’ll expound more on this in the days to come but today I’ll just post an excerpt from one of my favorite parts of the book, sort of an homage to Kafka (indeed the character has been charged with a crime he is fairly certain he committed and yet cannot remember):

Lew went to register at the tall, rickety Esthonia Hotel. The lobby clerks and the bellmen on duty all acted like they’d been expecting him. The form he was given to fill out was unusually long, particularly the section headed “Reasons for Extended Residence,” and the questions quite personal, even intimate, yet he was urged to be as forthcoming as possible — indeed, according to a legal notice at the top of the form, anything less than total confession would make him liable to criminal penalties. He tried to answer honestly, despite a constant struggle with the pen they insisted he use, which was leaving blotches and smears all over the form. [p39]

So let’s unpack this passage just a bit today and look at why it is so indicative of the overall tenor of the book. First of all, even though Lew himself does not know the precise crime he has committed, everyone around seems to have made their judgment on the matter already - some wish to help and some wish to hinder. His wife leaves him and Lew finds himself guided to this hotel by someone he just met in the street. He is on auto-pilot, guided by external forces, strange penance for a crime he has no idea how to more deeply understand, yet has at least temporarily forgotten to question. The world is complicit in blocking this knowledge from him, bureaucracy kicking in and taking him along for a ride - the long, intensely personal form with a pen ill-suited for the purpose, yet externally and explicitly selected. This is man at his most hopeless desperate state, discovering where the world takes him. Will Lew ever find this as absurd as he should? Will he find a way “against the day?”

I love this feeling of inertia and consequence in the novel, that certain acts portend certain consequences which counterbalance the initial act but never quite in the way you would expect . I guess that’s my thought for reading today.

I also wanted to post some great links to explore this work further (hopefully before the NYT decides to expire them for non-subscribers - get ‘ em while they’re hot!). Liesl Schillinger is a reviewer for the New York Times. Unlike the Kakutani review which I thought did a disservice to those who might actually read “Against the Day”, Liesl appears to have really spent some time in deeper thought about it and has written a wonderful critique, acknowledging that while it may not be for everyone, there is indeed a lot to be had for those willing to pry it out.

An afterthought: Apologies to those who may have noticed the peculiar dearth of material available here lately. As one of the recently unemployed, I have been anxiously seeking out a new place to work, ideally someplace I can be excited about. Studying up on companies for phone screens, and trying to accurately assess what it is that I don’t know so that I can at least be honest about that with my interviewers has taken a lot of my time.

To be honest, anxiety in general has chipped away at my drive to spend as much time reading and writing as I would like. Paradoxically, this impediment is occurring just when one would expect I have all the time in the world to actually sit down and be productive. Alas, unlike so many others, apparently my writing comes from a place of comfort and security and not yet from traipsing into the unknown. It’s something I obviously need to work on but I like my house and I have a deep desire to keep it. Sue me.

So, all of that personal stuff aside, there was also a matter of some template issues with the blog breaking display on the website. Thanks much to my friend Ross for helping me get that squared away. We’re back up and running with a new, streamlined look.

The big book approacheth! If you weren’t able to figure out my little graphical hint in last week’s post, the first big book we’re going to read as a group on “The Puget News” is Thomas Pynchon’s new 1,120 page monster, “Against the Day”. It’s being released a week from today and has a great pre-order price of $21.00 (list price of $35.00) at Amazon.com (just click the image above to place your order. Something resemblng a phone book will show up on your doorstep soon thereafter).

A couple of you are signed up to read this with me already, but here is the tentative plan. We will get the books here no later than 23rd and take roughly a month to read it through. The goal is to finish by Christmas and then to go out and celebrate when everyone is back in Seattle from Christmas break. Everyone, feel free to join us! This is not a book to read alone - I promise.

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November is NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), the month where thousands of aspiring novelists take advantage of the seasonally poor weather (especially here in the Puget Sound), trade in their self-censoring generally overly-judgmental attitudes, and focus purely on the production of writing a novel - no matter how bad it is. Hellbent on the production of 2,000 words a day, these folks labor towards the completion of a 175-page (50,000 word) novel while their progress is shared, encouraged, and tracked at the NaNoWriMo website.

It’s a worthy endeavor, a task to which I aspire - perhaps next year - and the folks I know who have participated have lauded the benefits of it freeing their creative processes.

The reason I bring this up is that I’ve been following Matthew Baldwin’s attempt over at the ever-hilarious Defective Yeti to read “Moby Dick” this month. I don’t know if the clever creation of the “NoNoReMo” moniker is his, but since he’s the first person I’ve seen use it, and I could find no central “NoNoReMo” website using a cursory Google search, I’m giving him credit. His “Moby Dick” reading excursions are frequently blogged and always contain hilarious observations about the experience. So far, I’m harboring doubts as to whether Matthew will be successful - he hasn’t updated the attempt since November 6th but I love what he’s produced so far - even it means that “Moby Dick” moves further down my priority list of “Books to Read”.

The reason I bring all of this up is that several people, including myself (you know who you are), have decided to collectively read a big novel coming out near the end of this month. While we have no need to tie ourselves to a 1-month goal on this, it would be best not to drag this out. We’ll probably aim to finish by Christmas or New Year. I don’t want to write about it longer than that and even indulgent readers would have their patience tested.

I’ll announce what the book is in the coming days so that anybody who wants to partake can do so (although the above image should be a pretty major hint - nudge, nudge, wink, wink). Getting people to read gigantic books is always a goal of mine though, so if I were you, I’d expect to see this exercise repeated with various works in the future. Feel free to suggest things you’d like to read and discuss online.

James Tiptree, Jr. was the pen name of famed American science fiction writer, Alice Sheldon, a writer most famous for exploring the perceived differences between male and female authorship and who committed suicide in 1987.

I recently picked up The James Tiptree Award Anthology 2,” a collection of work intended “explore and expand our notion of gender” since I was intrigued by what I had read about the life of James Tiptree, Jr. I wanted to spend some time thinking through the notions that he spent his life confronting; after all, it’s not every man that looks back at their childhood as a little girl (and alternatively remembering it as a little boy for the purposes of epistolary exchange).

The opening essay in the book is by a woman named Julie Phillips, a writer who has spent the last 9 years working on “James Tiptree Jr.: A Life of Alice Sheldon.” The essay sets a good baseline for understanding the work in the anthology and so it’s easy to understand why the editors would choose to lead with it. It’s essentially a rediscovery of the author via correspondence and personal mementos.

James Tiptree, Jr. corresponded with famous authors, notably Joanna Russ, acclaimed feminist and science fiction writer. In reaction to a piece of fan-mail from Tiptree, Russ told him off for making a chauvinist remark. Tiptree responded so apologetically that Russ asked him if he were gay. He assured her that he was not but claimed it would be much easier if he were. A correspondence between them began. What’s interesting is that it appears Russ intended to learn a bit about male culture from Tiptree (initial questions were about whether men found vampires sexy and why) while Tiptree responded to these questions as if reliving her childhood, this time as a boy. I’m sure this led to some interesting exchanges.

Tiptree spent his life exploring gender issues in fiction, a field in which he felt being male lent a voice that being female had somehow denied him:

I find, in all the writings of women, a strange muffled quality, as if the living word, as it left the lips, had been hastily suppressed and another substituted, one which would conform to some pattern imposed from without. […] I am trying, from the living urge of my own life, to force open channels of communication so far mostly closed. […] To press out naked into the dark spaces of life is perhaps to build a small part of the path along which others like myself wish to travel. [9]

And so, to kick off this anthology, we learn about a person who chose a separate destiny for herself in the hope of helping others who might come after her. What a fitting tribute it is then to have an annual literary award for those that keep pushing. I’m eager to see what the rest of the book brings.

This slim volume on the history of operating system development, written in 1999, is way more entertaining than the subject would seem to indicate. Using vivid metaphor, Neal compares each of the major OSes to car dealerships selling and marketing the following vehicles:

Microsoft Windows 95 = station wagon
Microsoft NT = hulking off-road vehicle for industrial users
Apple = European sedan
BeOS = Batmobile
Linux = free tanks

One of the central questions of the book is whether there is a future in the OS business for the major non-free providers. Since the book’s publication, we’ve learned the answer for at least one of them - apparently selling and marketing Batmobiles ended up being too much of a niche market for BeOS…

The far more interesting question is about the industry Goliath, Microsoft. Can it be that Microsoft has over-defended their desktop dominance when they should be concentrating on complex application development (which they are also really good at)? Is Microsoft doomed to suffer a new flavor of Apple’s classic blunder? Recall that Apple used to be the largest OS maker in the world. In hindsight, they handed the market to Microsoft by refusing to sacrifice their hardware division. Microsoft worked solely on the higher-margin software that could operate across many more hardware platforms and ended up commoditizing what had been a niche industry.

Fast-forward to today, Microsoft currently enjoys a market-dominating share of the OS marketplace. Will they lose out to a new breed of competitor while protecting their dominant position at all costs? Will they forget to jump when the time comes? While they protect their competitive moat from competitors, their competitors are developing some pretty big catapults. A whole army of next generation dev-shops are creating efficient (and free) OSes and new waves of applications that are OS-agnostic, accomplish much of the same work as Microsoft’s applications and cost much less money (or come for free).

Who wants to be in the OS industry anyways?

Applications create possibilities for millions of credulous users, whereas OSes impose limitations on thousands of grumpy coders, and so OS-makers will forever be on the shit-list of anyone who counts for anything in the high tech world.

Another interesting analogy of the ever-competitive OS landscape is the following:

In your high school geology class you probably were taught that all life on earth exists in a paper-thin shell called the biosphere, which is trapped beneath thousands of miles of dead rock underfoot, and cold dead radioactive empty space above. Companies that sell OSes exist in a sort of technosphere. Underneath is technology that has already become free. Above is technology that has yet to be developed, or that os too crazy and speculative to be productized just yet. Like the earth’s biosphere, the technosphere is very thin compared to what is above and what is below.”

While certain of the facts of this book are dated (Apple’s new OS X can access the underlying command line, directly in contradiction to certain points about abstraction which Neal was making) it is the recurring cyclical themes that drive the essay and yield real food for thought. We learn about Americans’ ingrained love of mediated experiences, the need for UI, and that the current complexities of life demand levels of abstraction never before necessary. The questions become what interfaces do we allow ourselves and what do we give up in the process of this abstraction?

This is a wonderfully entertaining book for any non-coder trying to get a basic understanding of general OS concepts and history or any coder trying to understand the generalities of the marketplace in which these OSes exist. It’s an entertaining middle ground ripe for debate.

Murakami’s characters are nearly always animated by intensely personal searches for their own versions of truth. This is what makes them so striking and so odd to follow as a reader. They move in straight-lines, fatalistically drawn towards strange climaxes which delight and occasionally, to be honest, befuddle even sophisticated readers. “Kafka on the Shore” is vintage Murakami. While I would not place it on the same high pedestal I have for the ambitious “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” or the taut “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World,” this is a book well worth reading if you are fan of his other speculative works.

In a very broad sense, “Kafka on the Shore” is structured similarly to “Hard-Boiled Wonderland” in that there are two main characters and plots converging throughout. The main character is a teenage runaway who has re-named himself Kafka Tamura. The reader is never told what Kafka’s original name might have been, but we initially meet him as he has an internal dialogue with a split personality named “Crow.” Crow says the following about Kafka’s plans to run away on his fifteenth birthday:

And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You’ll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain, when you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm is all about.

The other character driving the plot is an older man named Nakata, whose job is to find lost cats for people. We find that Nakata suffered a strange accident during World War II. After collapsing on a school field trip and reawakening weeks later, Nakata had lost much of his mental faculties but gained the ability to speak with cats. Nakata is on a bit of a quest to rediscover that part of him which was lost on that odd day. He becomes thrust into the main plot by an action he is forced to take when the life of a cat he has been searching for is threatened. This action becomes a driving force for self re-discovery.

As in other Murakami works, these two plots require the outside assistance of a panoply of strange and bizarre characters and forces. The interactions are grossly entertaining, absorbing and heaped in quirky symbolism and metaphor. I’d strongly recommend this book to people who are already fans of Murakami - you’ll get what you’re looking for. If you’re just getting your first taste, however, I’d instead recommend “Hard-Boiled Wonderland” as an appetizer. It’s a bit more accessible and has a less strained resolution.