prohibitive!

Every time Amazon.com adds a new line of goods to the list, my desire to write a "So you want to..." list notches up just slightly.

Posted by eric Thu Oct 31 23:43:55 2002  

Tonight I dined at a restaurant, which is unusual. Usually I'll just grab food somewhere and rush back to a corner of my life where I huddle and gobble, glancing angrily around and growling at any potential interlopers.

Anyway, the table we sat at was right next to a "wall", more of a fence with its seethruness (yes, that's a word, now shut up!). About halfway through the meal, a couple sat down on the other side of the wall; their stools were higher than our table, so my peripheral vision was filled with the man's hand groping at her exposed thighs. Which kinda detracted from the dinner conversation.

Soon they started to have an earnest conversation that I tried really really hard to ignore, but it was pretty difficult. Though I missed the gist of their words, I couldn't help but notice that they were punctuating all their remarks with some variation of, "because I am in love with you." There were no feelings beneath the words, so I imagine them having said things like, "Tonight I will take out the garbage because I love you dearly," or perhaps, "Because of your place in my heart, today I got a speeding ticket from some asshole cop." It was as if they were negotiating a deal that neither really cared about, but felt it necessary to give lip service to the whole love thing.

I'm going to find it really difficult to avoid including this in conversation in the near future, so if I suddenly tell you that I did something today because I am in love with you, just nod sagely and move on.

Posted by eric Thu Oct 31 00:48:25 2002  

I'm pretty sure there are some people out there who perceive me as the stalking type due to my obsessions with security and information retrieval. So it was quite a pleasant surprise yesterday to have the tables turned on me.

A week or so ago I met someone who helped me carry stuff to my apartment from the block over; he gave me his email address so I could contact him about possibly helping him find a job, and I gave him my first name and a promise that I'd send him some useful information as soon as possible.

Yesterday the phone rang, and it was the same guy explaining that he'd found another piece of the blinds that he'd helped me carry to my apartment, and that I could come pick it up whenever. Thing is, I never gave him my telephone number--apparently he found it quite easy to discover the listed phone numbers of everyone in my building, then narrow down to me because I'm the only Eric on the list. I was suitably impressed.

But I didn't really feel like I was being stalked, or that my privacy was invaded. I mean, I leave my number in the public directory because I want to make it easy for people to contact me. So I wonder--if I go ahead and call that woman whose number I found on the internet the other day, would she feel like she's being stalked?

Yeah, probably. Ah well.

Posted by eric Tue Oct 29 19:46:56 2002  

From the New York Post, via Yahoo news:

[Have] you ever noticed that every time they catch a serial or spree killer, he either comes from, just came from, or is on the way to, Washington state?

The place attracts them like the post office attracts disgruntled workers with assault weapons.

Posted by eric Sun Oct 27 07:46:44 2002  

Don't try this one at home, folks.

Remember a while back I bought some candles at a yard sale? The guy who sold 'em to me claimed that when you blow out a candle, the wisp of smoke that rises from it is actually flammable, so you can hold a flame to it and reignite the candle wick.

I scoffed. He said it's true. I told him he would be held responsible if I burned down my apartment building trying it. He said he could use a boarder in his basement. I decided I liked this guy's sense of humor.

So a couple days later, I'm burning things candles, as I am oft wont to do, and I figure it's time to try it.

Well, I'll be darned if it don't work! As if I didn't have enough trouble extinguishing flames in the past, now I have this urge to remotely relight them every time I blow one out.

I definitely inherited this tendency from my dear mother--neither of us can just let a candle burn, we have to play with the wax, tilt the candle all around, etc. I trim the wicks pretty often, though I can't remember if Mom does that, too. My father thinks we're both total pyromaniacs, which shows that this trait is not only genetic, but it's the dominant trait.

Of course, I only know enough about genetics to be able to confuse my doctor with those Mendelian tables. I can't remember now what they're called, and I'm too lazy to look it up. I'm sure some hotheaded geneticist will read this and write to me in a passionate fury over my ignorance about basic biology, thus providing me with the information I need. That's the handy thing about publicly stating one's ignorance, I hear tell.

Posted by eric Fri Oct 25 22:10:58 2002  

According to the internet, "Edgeworth was the favorite tobacco of Joseph Stalin."

I rest my case.

Posted by eric Thu Oct 24 23:26:40 2002  

I left work a wee bit early today so I could make it home in time to watch the Gilmore Girls. But I got to the bus stop too early (I just can't type "busstop" any more, sorry). I didn't feel like waiting several dozen minutes for the next bus, so I went into Elliott Bay Books instead. Boy, what a mistake.

See, I'm not supposed to be spending much money on Stuff lately since I'm saving up for ... well, I'm not sure yet, but I hear that hoarding cash is a great way to contribute to a Recession, so I'm doing my part!

Anyway, I didn't do my part very well tonight. I was just going to check and see if Kage Baker's new book had come in yet, but it wasn't there. Then I wondered if they had anything by John Sladek (I'm presently reading The Reproductive System, and thoroughly enjoyed Tik-Tok several months ago, though I really should have read Tik-Tok of Oz instead, since that was my plan ever since I got to the Emerald City, to find out out about its clockwork mayor), but I didn't see anything on the shelf under Sladek's name. A quick check in the far-too-highly-shelved used section turned up nothing as well, but then I noticed a secondhand copy of Red Mars. Heck, since it's used, it's cheap, and it's the first novel of the series I haven't read by Robinson yet, what the heck, right?

Then I wonder, what if I'm looking in the wrong areas for Sladek, maybe his stuff is in some alternative fiction section (I still don't get why Lethem is grouped in with "regular" fiction), so I ask.

Whooo boy, big mistake. The guy ends up running up and down several flights of stairs looking for a single book that they might have floating around, and I'm standing there trying not to make stupid smalltalk with the attractive woman sitting behind the counter. So I decide to ask when they'll be getting Kage Baker's new book in, and she finds out that they have it, but it's up where the guy is looking for the Sladek book, so how about we just have him look for that as well while he's up there...now I'm feeling like a total jerk.

He finds it, and then someone else finds the Sladek book, and now I've got three books to buy. I head over to the checkout and then remember that I was also thinking of getting the new Book of Ratings, so I head back to the information desk. Guess where the book was! So after another trip up the stairs, I've of course found yet another book to buy sitting on the impulse purchase table in front of the information desk, and then I can leave.

The moral of the story: Those people at Elliott Bay are great. I don't feel bad at all when I give them my money, though I feel bad about kinda-sorta scoffing when the sales clerk implied that Years of Rice and Salt was a continuation of the Mars trilogy. You'd think, considering how often I do it, that I'd feel pretty okay about being a jerk. Ah well.

Speaking of which, when I got outside the guy convinced me to buy two copies of Real Change, and the paper pissed me off with their resounding "No" recommendation for the Monorail initiative, so they can forget about me ever buying another one of their papers. Maybe I can start giving out $20 to people willing to openly denounce the paper or something.

Oh, and my current theory about why Mr. Sjöberg has not recently updated his site is because he's building up a scarcity of his new work, thus impelling us to buy his new book.

Damn him for being able to jerk me around so well. Damn him even more for his good book--sure, some repeats, but they stand the test of time.

Posted by eric Tue Oct 22 22:43:42 2002  

Unfortunately, I have nothing to write about today. I was hoping to do another book review in conjunction with a movie review, but the cinema decided not to schedule the movies properly, so I saw another movie instead. A movie that twisted me up inside until something snapped. Boy, that Adam Sandler. Phew.

So, anyway, until I can see the movie I intended to see, you'll just have to live with this article regarding the discovery of a dinosaur mummy (thanks, G!).

Oh, and a question: Is a "busstop" the person who initiates the kiss?

Posted by eric Mon Oct 21 21:41:32 2002  

Last week I finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt -- the last 600-plus page novel I read took me about six months, but I only spent about a month in this one, and I think I can ascribe that to a general readability of the book.

Before I started the book, I read some reviews that complained about the book's pacing, and some also took issue with Robinson's forays into theory and philosophy. I was a little concerned that the book would be boring at points, but I found myself completely unable to put the book down. I didn't have any marathon sessions where I had to get through several dozen pages before I fell asleep, but I think Robinson should be commended for that--the book is very well sub-divided, and the philosophizing that occurs is split up intelligently and paced quite well, I think.

The MacGuffin of reincarnation as a way to tie together what would otherwise be disparate lives had me enthralled every step of the way--I still find myself looking at people differently, wondering if they're behaving the way they do because of some spiritual core that shapes the development of their personalities. Yet at the same time, the characters were quite distinct in their different incarnations, and believably so--it would seem that both nature and nurture are to blame in the world of this novel, and I find it hard to disallow that perspective bleeding over into my real-world ontology.

Some of my favorite bits in the novel were the times Robinson showed his hand, such as one occasion late in the book:

The moments of change, or the clinamen as the Greeks called it [...] had become the organizing principle and perhaps the obsession of the Samarqandi anthologist Old Red Ink, who had collected the lives in his reincarnation compendium using something like the clinamen moment to choose his exemplars, as each entry in his collection cotained a moment when the subjects, always reincarnated with names that began with the same letters, came to crossroads in their lives and made a swerve away from what they might have been expected to do.

"I like the naming device," Bao remarked [...]

"Well, Old Red Ink explains in one marginalia that it is merely a mnemonic for the ease of the reader, and that of course in reality every soul comes back with every physical particular changed [...] -- he would not have you think his method was anything like the old folk tales, oh no."

"It's such a useless exercise. [...] What if this had happened, what if that had happened, [...] what if Alexander the Great had not died young, on and on, and they all would have made enormous differences and yet it's always entirely useless. These historians who talk about employing counterfactuals to bolster their theories, they're ridiculous. Because no one knows why things happen, you see? Anything could follow from anything. Even real history tells us nothing at all. Because we don't know if history is sensitive, and for want of a nail a civilization was lost, or if our mightiest acts are as petals on a flood, or something in between, or both at once. We just don't know, and the what-ifs don't help us figure it out."

"Why do people like them so much, then?"

Kirana shrugged, took a drag on her cigarette. "More stories. [...] Perhaps it would be better just to focus on the future."

"You, a historian say this? But the future can't be known at all!"

"Well, but it exists for us now as a project to be enacted. [...] We're midway through the loom, that's the present, and what we do casts the thread in a particular direction, and the picture in the tapestry changes accordingly. When we begin to try to make a picture pleasing to us and to those who come after, then perhaps you can say that we have seized history."

I've also noticed that Robinson has a penchant for flooding. I'm not sure why, if it's a metaphor that strikes him deep, or if he's just had a lot of experience with flooding, but I've seen flooding scenes in a lot of his writing, enough to the point that it's really quite odd. There's something more there, I just know it.

Another idea that seems dear to Robinson is that of musical theory--his novel The Memory of Whiteness deals with such ideas at length (and in a fascinating manner, I thought, though music theory really isn't my strong point). In The Years of Rice and Salt, I fortunately knew enough about 20th century musical history to enjoy the character who attempts to recapture the lost musical traditions of Christian Europe:

Writing down every note and demanding that the musicians in the ensemble play only and exactly the written notes was an act that everyone regarded as megalomaniacal to the point of impossibility; ensemble music, though very highly structured in a way that went back ultimately to Indian classical ragas, nevertheless allowed for individual improvisation of the details of the variations, spontaneous creations that indeed provided much of the interest of the music [...] No one would have stood for [his] insane strictures if it were not that the results were, one could not deny it, superb and beautiful.

Posted by eric Sun Oct 20 21:14:16 2002  

You Seattleites might be interested in hearing that "Clarion West is having a special 'Clarion West: Past and Present' talk" next Thursday, October 24th (more info at the website).

Featured are:

• Greg Bear
  
• Octavia E. Butler
  
• Ursula K. Le Guin
  
• Vonda N. McIntyre
  
• Syne Mitchell
  

So if you're even remotely interested in good science fiction, then you should probably attend. And if you attend and really must see me, just stand up at some random point and shout, "HEY ERIC, WHERE ARE YOU SITTING," and I'll be sure to wave to you.

Or maybe I'll be so mortified that I'll just cower in shame. I'm not sure which; it really depends on my mood.

Posted by eric Thu Oct 17 21:49:04 2002