Gregory Taylor

Perhaps you're of a different temperament than I am, and only start tasks that you fully expect you'll finish, or your initial enthusiasms never flag in the course of some great undertaking.

While I may envy such persons, I think that the fully actualized may be denying themselves one of life's surprising little pleasures: the recovery of pleasure and enthuasiasm (and the accompanying boost to your sense of dedication) in mid-task, with the additional available-to-all thrill of deferred gratification at the end.

If you're imagining that I have a bookshelf full of thick books with discreetly placed bookmarks (I shall someday pick this up from where I dropped it, honest....), then you might be surprised. I'm sitting in my living room typing this, and looking at the bookshelf against the east wall, it appears that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is the thickest work of fiction in this room--I promised the child of a friend that I'd read one of the books, and wound up liking the series (This, presumably, means that I am supposed to be very excited about Susanna Clarke's adult fantasy "Pride and Prestidigitation" outing Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. Yeah, maybe later....).

So it's with some surprise that I find myself reading the third novel in Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle" The System of the World, and feeling that little tickle that tells me that this may all prove to have been worth it.

Now don't get me wrong--I'm not going to tell you to start making your own way through several thousand pages without some serious qualifications. It's one thing to needle-drop (is it bit-dropping on an iPod or CD player?) through a disc on my recommendation, and quite another to kill a couple of humungous tomes.

So here are some interviews that have Stephenson talking about the book and its basic ideas with a couple of people--Laura Miller with my friend Paul Boutin that should give you a little background. Andrew Leonard has soldiered through the books (albeit more quickly than I, and has posted some reviews on Salon for all three volumes: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World. Taken together, they might picque your interest. Or not.

Although I've read every single thing Stephenson has ever written, I wasn't without my doubts on this kind of undertaking. At times, his writerly urgers mean that he spends way too much time describing the technology of rocket-propelled dogs, explicating Gödel's theorem using chain links, spinning out extended pieces on using urine to make gunpowder, and how to manage the perfect bowl of Captain Crunch. As one friend puts it, "It's the David Foster Wallace thing. You love it, hate it, or tune it out and tune in later."

Watching these predilections play out over the course of a sequence of "historical" novels has moved in two ways for me: not only does the past "make more sense," but I find myself seeing things about the conventions of Stephenson's earlier genre works in a different light. I'm reminded that I find speculative fiction interesting for its occasional ability to imagine a world that extrapolates my own in ways I might not imagine; These novels live very much in my world, but they extrapolate forward from a time when quite a lot of what I take as "given" is still being formed. While I might have said whilst slogging through the first two books that the "ripping yarn" portions of the novel--hero bad-boy Jack and his galley slave band carjacking a ship full of gold, heroine Eliza (a great fictional creation she: a woman who instinctly understands and negotiates the rising currents and eddies of the emerging world, "hacking" her way past the obstacles imposed by her gender) negotiating the minefields of court intrigue--were what really entertained me, I'm beginning to see the shape of the story now. Instead of following old Daniel Waterhouse around and watching him try to arrange a little détente between Newton and Liebnitz, we're going to see him as the "real" hero of the cycle: the man of reason that we all believe ourselves to be, attending the birth of a Present Age we take very much for granted.

And I think I can begin to see the writerly appeal of it, too. When it's done well, you begin to see how revolutionary the rise of the scientific method really was. You begin to glimpse the absolutely earth-shattering consequences of the creation of credit and mechanisms of foreign exchange. And those things connect to the fabric of your day-to-day existence in ways that suddenly seem less obvious: the feeling for the observer is reminiscent of that scene in the Matrix where Neo gazes down the dingy corridor at his adversaries and we're suddenly shown the same image revisualized as a kind of glittering data. I suppose that those social history books that my beloved reads achieve some of the same effects, but I'm a sucker for doing that while you tell a story.

On reflection, you can also see some of the ideas about mind and body and social networks that appear in his earlier more "explicitly" SF novels here, too--alchemy emerges as a kind of subplot in book 2 and appears prominently in book 3 as the way that Stephenson deals with the same questions of transcendance and the incorporeal. Rather than the pursuit of cranks, it becomes the way that thinkers of the time tried to imagine how one might escape the confines or discover what might be outside of the realm of What Science Explains. And I'm finding it an extremely interesting part of the book(s), as things develop.

If you're enamored with the tech part of cyberpunk, then this will probably be one of the most prolonged snooze reads of your life in sections (or as a whole) unless you can wrap your head around the technologies of the past. Money is a network. Feuds are viruses that disrupt social networks. Pumping water out of Welsh mines is a form of hacking (An interesting how-to book on 17th century hacking techniques (sort of) is here, btw). If the prejudice towards seeing progress on your own terms only remains in place, well....

it's with some surprise that I find myself reading the third novel in Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle" The System of the World, and feeling that little tickle that tells me that this may all prove to have been worth it.

Now don't get me wrong--I'm not going to tell you to start making your own way through several thousand pages without some serious qualifications...

neal-stephenson-foisting-books-on-a-reading-public-part-1

Neal Stephenson (foisting books on a reading public, part ?+1)

Lilli Wessling Hart

My first introduction to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy wasn't those lovely books by Douglas Adams (who I miss very much)--it was the original BBC radio series (Note: you can get it as an MP3-cd collection). J. and I got hooked on it when our local upstate NY station broadcast it in the early 80s. While the whole series of books was a ball, I've still got a soft spot in my heart for the original radio program nonsense (I can't say I was a terrific fan of The BBC TV version, but this makes me a curmudgeon).


Oh, wait--if you don't know what I'm talking about, read this. 

Or I suppose you could ask your parents.The new series dramatizes the next three novels: Life, The Universe And Everything; So Long And Thanks For All The Fish and Mostly Harmless. The program ran earlier today, it'll be repeated on Thursday, and then put online for your listening pleasure here for a week after that. This is definitely a possible use for Soundflower, innit? If you can't wait until Thursday, there's a nice MP3 sample full of the voices I know and love.

This will more than hold me until the Movie...or, rather, it will give me a bit more time to get used to things and to prepare for another possible disappointment of having a book I love made into a movie I'm not so wild about. So far, we have a bunch of bloggery, and one of those "really early teaser trailers with no actual footage in it" trailers here (big whoop). More to the point is a listing of the cast here. Hammer and Tongs directling? Tim Canterbury from "The Office" as Arthur Dent? Um, maybe. But Mos Def for Ford Prefect??? I really like his music, his acting in The Italian Job was just fine, etc., but I'll have to think about this one.

Don't get me wrong--sometimes a great book can be optioned and modified and turned into a really wonderful film. They just seem more the exception than the rule.

On that note, this interview with the film's screenwriter might be worth a look if you look at the cast list and mutter something unprintable. He appears to be aware of the problems facing him, and quite upfront about the objections that lovers of the original material are likely to have, too.

I wish everyone well, but I am going to be listening to the radio. I see best sitting in a dark room with no screens in it and listening with my imagination turned up, thanks.

My first introduction to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy wasn't those lovely books by Douglas Adams (who I miss very much)--it was the original BBC radio series (Note: you can get it as an MP3-cd collection).

reasons-to-be-radiophonically-happy

Reasons to be radiophonically happy

Brad Garton

Integrated text/music/image application developed using Max/MSP.

project5

My Book of Dreams

I'm reading at the moment, since there's not a lot of listening I can do.

An ear infection I thought I'd whipped earlier returned in a pretty ferocious manner (it even set my ENT to clucking sympathetically and peering sympathetically), with the result being that my right ear is totally non-working (except for being a completely workable source of pain). My sensorium is panned hard left, I'm miserable, so guess what happens? I discover that having your ear vacuumed out sounds exactly like a Merzbow recording? Well, yeah, but the real annoyance is the music that keeps crossing the transom. My friend Jon loans me the recent  Albert Ayler box to listen to,  Kerry and  John send me several tracks from their new recordings in progress, I get a great new disc from Robert Henke that I suspect I'll really like a lot in stereo, and I have to put off critically  listening to the live recordings from my last gig with my friend Tom. With luck, the internal and external antibiotics will do their job. Until then, I'll read.

Since I finished Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle (It was a very satisfying finish, by the way), I thought I'd stick to some music reading for a while. An acquaintance had suggested Audio Culture to me, saying that they were interested in using its collection of essays (or some of them, anyway) as a classroom text. Classroom text? Definitely? But something to have for oneself? You betcha.

If you're at all familiar with Michael Bull's "The Auditory Culture Reader," you'll probably recognize the basic approach-a collection of primary documents, essays, and excerpts from longer works that range widely across the intellectual terrain, connected by short explanatory/expository pieces by the authors.

Reading was a somewhat unexpected kind of pleasure-a chance to read again things that I'd not revisited in a long time, to actually go through pieces I'd only heard about but never actually read myself, and an arrangement that juxtaposed writings by lots of interesting people (Stockhausen, DJ Spooky, Ornette, Eno, Attali, Glenn Gould, and John Zorn, among others) that leaves you with the feeling that you're eavesdropping on a large rambunctious conversation. Heck, even The Onionthinks it's a great book-don't take my word for it.

I'm reading at the moment, since there's not a lot of listening I can do.

An ear infection I thought I'd whipped earlier returned in a pretty ferocious manner (it even set my ENT to clucking sympathetically and peering sympathetically), with the result being that my right ear is totally non-working (except for being a completely workable source of pain)...

stuck-in-my-head-on-a-rainy-day

Stuck (in my head) on a rainy day....

I know you all probably read slashdot religiously. I should, probably. However, I happened to cruise by the mention of an interview with the same Mr. Stephenson, whose Baroque Cycle I was ranting semi-worshipfully about (and with another few hundred pages under my belt, I am still thinking that This Will All Be Worth It).

I know you all probably read slashdot religiously. I should, probably. However, I happened to cruise by the mention of an interview with the same Mr. Stephenson, whose Baroque Cycle I was ranting semi-worshipfully about...

more-pre-novel-foisting-about-neal-stephenson

More pre-novel-foisting about Neal Stephenson....

In the midst of all the shoe collections and other diverting ephemera that is the web, one occasionally finds something amazing. How about hi-rez scans of Shakespeare's plays in their original quarto, and the ability to compare versions without having to schlep to St Pancras to the British Library?

Sorry to be such a geek about this stuff, but hey....


In the midst of all the shoe collections and other diverting ephemera that is the web, one occasionally finds something amazing. How about hi-rez scans of Shakespeare's plays in their original quarto, and the ability to compare versions without having to schlep to St Pancras to the British Library?

Sorry to be such a geek about this stuff, but hey.... 

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