Final thoughts on Cat's Cradle

So, I did like this book. I just think I need to sit back and digest what I read. I was going to write a short synopsis of the book just so I could keep straight for myself what happens but I see Wikipedia has one that surpasses anything I could slap together. This is kind of interesting: Vonnegut used to work for GE interviewing scientists who did pure research so he could write interesting PR stories about what they were doing.

I'm unclear: did Felix Hoenikker commit suicide with ice-nine or did he accidentally ingest it. Also, poor doggie. Then again, poor everything. Also, so is Jonah going to climb Mt McCabe and follow the plan in Bokonon's final writing? Also, what was the story behind the stone angel that wasn't for sale? What was Jonah's last name? I guess it was supposed to be indicative of fate, the name didn't matter.

I had one final exchange I wanted to save. It's between Frank Jr. (NOW I know why he's a son of a bitch) and John after the ice-nine event:

"There was a time when I took people's sillly answers seriously. I'm past that now."

"A milestone."

"I've grown up a good deal."

"At a certain amount of expense to the world." I could say things like that to Frank with an absolute assurance that he would not hear them.

"There was a time when people could bluff me without much trouble because I didn't have much self-confidence in myself."

"The mere cutting down of the number of people on earth would go a long way toward alleviating your own particular social problems," I suggested. Again, I made the suggestion to a deaf man. 

"You tell me, you tell me who told those ants how to make water," he challenged me again.

So, there you go. Frank destroys the whole world not intentionally but just because he's a clueless fuck and is no wiser for it.

More great Vonnegut quotes

Where is this book going? What the hell is the point? I don't really know, but I am enjoying it. I expect to finish tonight or tomorrow but in the meantime, here are more lines worth preserving:

' "Where are you going, X-9?' "Frank echoed again.
.....
"They really would have been surprised if I'd stopped and told them where I was going." 

"You mean you had some premonition you'd end up here?"

"I was going to Jack's Hobby Shop," he said, with no sense of anticlimax.

(although he was going there to bang Jack's wife. The poor man was about the only person who really cared about Frank.)

[concerning the Christian priest at Papa's deathbed]

I asked him what particular Christian sect he represented, and I observed frankly that the chicken and the butcher knife were novelties insofar as my understanding of Christianity went. 

.....

He said that he had had to feel his way along with Christianity, since Catholicism and Protestantism had been outlawed along with Bokononism. 

"So, if I am going to be a Christian under those conditions, I have to make up a lot of new stuff."

Should I be at all distressed that it's one of the bad guys who says "Science is magic that works" ?

Epistemophilia: unexpected consequences of meddling

I heard an interesting story about CIA blowback on Matt's Today in History about the Nationalization of Iranian oil in 1951. Iran was a British colony at one time and had a long history of squabbling with the British on the issue of profits (btw, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company eventually became BP.) Then in 1950, the Iranians learned that the US agreed to split their oil profits 50/50 with the neighboring Saudis. The British government refused to do the same. The Iranians voted to nationalize their oil and elected Mohammed Mosaddeq as their Prime Minister. This event should have been a great victory for democracy and it was unique for the time in Southwest Asia.

Alas, the British were having none of it and froze Iranian assets and cut off exports. They even took their case to The Hague but the court found in Iran's favor. Eventually, their financial squeezing took their toll on the population. Meanwhile, the Brits stirred up anti-communist elements in the US government (already you know this story doesn't have a happy ending) and we collaborated with them successfully to overthrow the democratically elected government in favor of the Shah (or Mohammed Reza Pahlavi as his friends called him)-who had technically been on the throne since 1941 and had started out as a secular reformer but became a real dick. He had an infamous secret police, the SAVAK, who also were supposedly trained by the CIA. There is actually a torture museum in downtown Tehran with dioramas showing people being tortured while distinctly American looking mannequins look on.

This event is called the 28 Mordad coup d'etat in Iran.  Mossadeq was arrested in August, 1953, served three years on some kind of jive charges and kept under house arrest until his death in 1967. It's unclear exactly how complicit the Shah was in all of this.

Anyways, this killed democracy in Iran. People hated the Shah and eventually supported the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Some people had dreams of it being a democratic revolution. No religious revolution, alas, is ever democratic. I'm not sure democracy is even a value compatible with religion. It also was just one in a dismal chain of events that fucked up our global image and the people of Iran once again get shafted. It lends a little more insight into why they hate us so much in the Middle East. Who knows how different things might have been if the Brits would have just split the freaking profits with them.

First thoughts on Cat's Cradle

I am almost halfway through this book even though I haven't had much time to read thus far this week. It's fairly short and an easy read. I fear Vonnegut is seeding the story with clues and references I should be picking up but aren't. This is, alas, fairly typical of my experience of literature.


I looked up Fata Morgana just like the narrator of the book did and it is a real thing. It refers to "an unusual and very complex form of mirage" and is caused by the phenomenon of atmospheric ducting where warm air is above a layer of cooler air closer to the ground. Usually, the situation is reversed hence the relative rarity of the phenomenon. It is indeed derived etymologically from Morgan LeFay. There were legends that there were sirens around Sicily who lured sailors to their deaths. Vonnegut made such a point of mentioning and defining this in reference to Frank's first impression of San Lorenzo, there must be some literary purpose at work.

I understand why I made it 41 years without having a clue as to what this book is about other than something something ice-nine. I can't even really describe it. I do like it, I just feel like I'm too literal and missing symbols and repetitions of themes everyone else is getting-I see myself reading the SparkNotes when I'm done just to get as equal amount out of the book.  Definite foreshadowing. All the water references are significant I assume (Bokonon and his love of boats, the narrator saying he should be called Jonah in the first lines, Bokonon as "a fish pitched up by an angry sea", the continuing reminders that the three Hoenikker children have ice-nine in their thermos jugs as they were travelling over water-but only Frank is a "son of a bitch" for having it, all the musing about Bokononism and fate and how the Hoenikker children are in the narrator's karass.)

I like the chapter titles. They are like the little spoiler still-frames on NCIS after commercial breaks. Here is a smattering of lines I liked:

Of these fourteen hundred [conscripted laborers on San Lorenzo], about half are said to have been executed in public for substandard zeal.

 When McCabe and Johnson arrived [on San Lorenzo] in 1922 and announced that they were placing themselves in charge, Castle Sugar withdrew flaccidly, as though from a queasy dream.

 Dr. Breed [are we supposed to dislike him because I really like him thus far] on hearing a secretary refer to a science exhibit as "magic": "I am sorry to hear a member of the Laboratory family use that brackish, medieval word."

 "I guess Americans are hated a lot of places"
[Ambassador Hinton on his wife's letter to the NYT that got him called before the HUAC and fired]: People are hated a lot of places. Claire pointed out in her letter that Americans, in being hated, were simply paying the normal penalty for being people and that they were foolish to think they should somehow be exempted from that penalty. 

"Never index your own book."  [Claire Hinton, former professional indexer. This makes me feel like I did when I read the description of the protagonist's job in Bright Lights, Big City as a fact-checker for a New Yorker-ish magazine: WANT this job.]


"Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn't have the slightest idea what's really going on." [Bokonon's version of the "render to Caesar" quote]

Epistemophilia: BBC pepper pots

I am mourning the fact that BBC Radio 4's History of the World in 100 Objects has come to an end. But I'm still only on object 30-something so at least I'll be catching up for a while.

(also, I have a huge crush on its host and British Museum director Neil McGregor but that's incidental.)

The other night he talked about an object called the Hoxne Pepper Pot (or on the BBC's site, here) This is the most beautiful object so far and it's story is fascinating. Pepper was evidently highly prized and costly in Roman times. The Visigoths were paid off not to sack Rome in 410 with a ton of pepper. It wasn't grown anywhere in the Roman Empire and had to be shipped from India along a lengthy and dangerous trade route over the Indian Ocean and through Egypt. This pot was found by a farmer in Suffolk in 1992 with a metal detector. He was looking for a lost hammer. And instead he found a huge cache of Roman era objects. His hammer, btw, is also now part of the British Museum collection. I don't know why but this makes me laugh.

What I continue to love about this show is how Neil McGregor makes you think about the object as a contemporary from the period would. The family in question appears to have been Christian guessing from the engraving "VIVAS IN DEO" on one of the objects (engraved unicamerally of course as the Latin alphabet was at that time) and Christians in Britain-or at least rich ones-would have been in particular danger. As McGregor said, there were no Swiss banks so what else would you do with your valuables besides bury them? The fact that they obviously never came back for their valuables makes me sad. Did they flee back to Rome? And what did they find there if so? Did they miss their little silver pepper pot with golden lips that would sparkle in candlelight? Not to mention the pepper in it. I guess the return of bland food was another consequence of the fall of the empire.

BTW, the pot is so named because it came from the village of Hoxne (pronouned "Hoksen") in Suffolk. It is part of a group of artifacts called the Hoxne Hoard.

Epistemophilia: Gliese 581 and how to read T. S. Elliot

I have heard two stories on Gliese 581g lately and it's funny-in a disconcerting way-how much the two scientists I heard disagree. This is of course the Goldilocks planet that was recently discovered orbiting the red dwarf Gliese 581. One of the discoverers was on Science Friday and he said he didn't like to speak in absolutes but he was 99% sure the planet harbored life (not, needless to say, meaning intelligent life or even the multi-cellular variety.) The planet is tidally locked to its star so if life exists, it probably does so on the twilight boundary lines. The main reason for his optimism is because the planet exists in the habitable zone where liquid water can exist.

Meanwhile, Pamela Gay on Astronomy Cast didn't think it was as likely. If it's in the proximity of a red dwarf, for starters it would have to have a magnetic field to protect it from xrays and flares and sufficient gravity to hold onto an atmosphere. The tidal locking also would cause large convective cells which means strong winds. The extremes of temperature between the day and night sides would further be inhibiting. I guess red dwarfs in their youths go through a period of massive flare activity which could wipe out life on an orbiting planet.

I get confused by the variety and disparity of dwarf stars. A red dwarf is type of main sequence star which means it's in the happy fusion stage of its existence. They are the mostly commonly observed star type. Proxima Centauri and Betelgeuse are red dwarfs. Main sequence stars are plotted on a graph of color versus brighness called the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram with blue at one end and red at the other. I wish they would name white dwarfs something else as they, as supernova remnants, are a different stellar kettle of fish. Our sun, btw, is also considered a dwarf of the yellow variety.

Here is a mnemonic to help remember stellar types: Oh be a fine girl, kiss 'em. A red dwarf would be on the coolest, or "E", end of the scale.

One other thing--I've heard Gliese 581 pronounced at least two ways. Wikipedia says it's "Gleesa" with a shwa on the end. Germanic pronunciation is victorious again.

(All of this typing may be for naught. A team in Switzerland just announced that they can't find that the planet actually exists.)

I listened to an interview between The Guardian and Tom McCarthy, who was on the Booker short list for his novel C. It sounds experimental and was described as conceptual, a term which ruffled him greatly as aren't all novels concepts? I suppose dude but to me this means the concept is paramount, possibly to the detriment of character and plot but maybe you are good enough at sleight of hand that we don't notice. I think the bizarrely overrated and pseudo-clever Don DeLillo might have ruined me for anything experimental or post-modern. I might have to read books about plucky girls who find love in the unlikeliest of places just to purge my fear of stumbling upon another shitty, smug vomitus like White Noise.

I ramble. What I found most interesting is McCarthy said reading Eliot's "The Wasteland" was like flipping the dial and tuning into different radio stations. Which kind of fits in with his own novel's reflection on the early days of the wireless. He also said Joyce's Ulysses should be read for the threads of connectivity in it and not for the plot. He pointed out both of these works were written in 1922 which is the final year of his novel. I thought this might be an important safety tip for whenever I might eventually tackle Joyce.

(holy shit, it's almost 800 pages. Well, this will be an important safety tip for whenever I want to convince someone I've read Ulysses.)

Neon Angel-the only and final say

So, I finished Neon Angel by Cherie Currie. I didn't write about it or bother with first and last lines because, well, it's not really the kind of book with any lines particularly worth preserving. Some of the prose bordered on the artless sort I might have written on a scrap of paper to a friend in my 10th grade Civics class (to whit "I was wondering if someone had slipped her a mickey. She was just a total mess.") But you don't read rock bios for the prose. Nor do I read them to hear how someone came up with a chord progression after a day of jamming obscure jazz riffs. I want fucked up tales of debauchery and celebrities behaving badly. And this book definitely had that.

(The Dirt by Motley Crue is of course still the top of the mountain for such narratives.)

Cherie Currie had several great stories and I can't possibly type but a fraction. For one, she had an affair with a Latin pop star when she was 16 and he was mid 20's. I am guessing this was Julio Iglesias because the dates are about right (Wikipedia says he was born in 1943.) She also mentions he was famous for wearing white suits which seems right. But I can't say I'm an expert on Latin pop of the 70's or any other era. I only know who Menudo are because of their punchline factor.

(I'm more curious who the sleazy quick draw teen idol was that her creepy pimptastic manager basically forced her to sleep with. Really no clue except it's not Shaun Cassidy as she explicitly mentions him.)

The other story is really fucked up but it has a fascinating cameo. One night Cherie was kidnapped by a guy in a limo whom she mistook for a friend of a friend that she thought would have coke. Not only did he not have party drugs, he was a deranged stranger linked to some abductions and murders in Texas who was convinced she had run off and left him to be a rock star. He took her to an abandoned house he was squatting in where he beat and raped her. Repeatedly. She managed to escape finally and they caught the guy--who was easy to find because she had stabbed him in the gut with a knife covered in peanut butter.

This is where the story takes an odd turn. Her brother-in-law was a small time actor named Tony Young. Who got a call from Vic Morrow who in turn was a friend of Cherie's abductor. He asked Tony to try to get Cherie to go easy on the guy because he was basically a good guy who just had a crush on a girl and went a little crazy. Cherie said Tony must have been starstruck by THE Vic Morrow calling him because he actually did try to convince her to drop the charges. She didn't speak to him for a while after that (pretty sure I would have been over speaking to him permanently and I'd have worn a party hat to his funeral.)

I've read stories that Vic Morrow was a real asshole who left his daughter Jennifer Jason Leigh some ridiculously small sum of money in his will just to be a dick. This story? Not helping. Although, when he saw Cherie fall apart in court testifying and eventually have to be carried out by the bailiffs in hysterics, he did come over and apologize. He apparently really thought his friend was a good guy getting a bad rap. Not an excuse but slightly mitigating.

It gets even odder because they later were both in Twilight Zone: The Movie although not in the same segments.Which is pretty fortunate for her, well, considering.

NCIS science

I was in the gym the other day and watched an episode of NCIS when I couldn't find anything else on (why are those "How Stuff is Made" shows so popular on the Science channel? I don't care how Oreos are mass-produced.) It actually was kind of interesting because some guy got poisoned by thallium (atomic number 81, right next to lead on the lower right) by smoking his cigars which were laced with it. According to Theodore Gray's book The Elements (a must-have for amateur chemistry lovers), this is the first really toxic element on the table after arsenic, atomic number 33. And like arsenic, it's a popular poisoning agent and one much harder to diagnose. It was a popular additive in rat poisons and insecticides at one time but not so much anymore.

I think the poisoner on the show used a radioactive isotope of thallium as I remember them talking about alpha particles. This is how they believe the Soviet dissident Litivenko* was killed. As this was a TV show though and the victim was a love interest for one of the characters, he looked much better than poor Litvinenko did at the end and he didn't vomit profusely and lose his hair.

The doctor used a drug called Prussian Blue to treat it. I looked it up and it's a real thing--which was a nice surprise as I only knew the name previously as belonging to a freaky teen sister musical act that sang white power ditties (just when I thought my least favorite genre was Christian rock.)  It works by combining with thallium-and radiocesium-in the intestines. It's chemical name is Ferric hexacyanoferrate. It was originally used as a pigment in oil painting, hence the name.

I wonder if the people behind the Nazi girl group realized they are named for a drug that makes you shit blue radioactive waste.

*Well, another Wiki article says that it was Polonium that killed him. Decided to Google. The Daily Mail asserts that it was indeed Thallium. Good reminder to double-check anything I read on Wikipedia. 

Japanese class starting

Very exciting because I am starting my online Japanese class today.

It's kind of curious the local learning center would offer Japanese at a time when supposedly university Japanese classes are thinning out AND not offer Chinese. I actually would have preferred to take Chinese because I've been reading so much about the country lately-even if I didn't specifically seek out books on it, they are all over the news. But, I don't have any serious intentions of learning hanzi (or kanji) so I don't have much in the way of expectations.

The NYT is writing an interesting series on the ongoing deflation cycle in Japan. Some economists say it is a harbinger of what could happen in the West following our recent economic peccadillo. Even in Tokyo, which is still doing relatively well compared to, say, Osaka, there is a growing trend of young people living in "microhouses" which the NYT describes as concrete houses on SUV-sized plots. The next generation can't even afford the cramped type of housing their parents lived in. It's hard to imagine that in 1991, economists were predicting the Japanese economy would overtake ours by 2010. And now of course China is the #2 economy in the world. The Japanese GDP apparently is essentially the same as it was in 1991 while ours has doubled.

I had some lingering questions over whether Japanese is, like Chinese, a tonal language. I talked to some pony-tailed dude years ago (who seemed to enjoy being an expert on many things more than he did actually researching those things) who insisted he had studied it and it was. I knew I had read something that said that it definitely was not thus I had a distressing data dissonance. After doing some further checking, it seems that Japanese only uses pitch accents and is indeed not tonal. But the distinction is subtle, at least to me. According to Wikipedia, "Pitch accent languages differ from tone languages in that pitch accents are only assigned to one syllable in a word, whereas tones can be assigned to multiple syllables in a word."  Multiple other sources confirm Japanese is not tonal although a lot of people seem to continue to argue about it. I am going to forgive that guy for passing on bad data (but not for wearing a ponytail.)

A few great lines from Hitch and where the author rambles on about why Catholic matriculation sucks it

He's a controversial figure even in some Atheist circles but so help me, I love me some Hitch.

So before I talk about why this line is so great, a brief diversion. I was reading something online yesterday which linked to something else and so on and soon I was watching a video of that twit who became Miss California (I refuse to use her name and add to her Google hit count) who made those remarks on how she thought gay marriage was wrong. But "opposite marriage" was ok, she believed, in her country, in her family. The same stupid twat later lost the Miss California crown for being an uncooperative asshole. So she sued for discrimination (it's like TOtally wrong for people to discriminate against her, in her country, in her family you guys! OMGee!) But then a sex video surfaced and she walked away with nothing. Interestingly, it was a solo sex video. Tsk,tsk. Evidently she never saw this poster.

So the point, which I haven't forgotten, was the video I watched was a clip of her addressing some family group (when did family start to equal fascist, by the by?) where she called herself "brave" and said that God put her there for that moment. Naturally, the chuckleheads in the audience creamed themselves over this. Where to start? Over to you, Hitch:

How much vanity must be concealed-not too effectively at that-in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan?

 But wait, here are some more bon mots just from Chapter 1:

While some religious apology is magnificent in its limited way-one might cite Pascal-and some of it is dreary and absurd-here one cannot avoid naming C.S. Lewis-both styles have something in common, namely the appalling load of strain that they have to bear.

Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or offends reason.

We...find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.

I went to Catholic school as a child with all of the forced Mass and Confession attendance that entails. Bleah. I read Hitchens and a small (largish?) childish part of me still wants to go "I'm reading an Atheist book and YOU can't confiscate it. Suck on that." Really having trouble with that be the bigger man philosophy.

Epistemophilia: the Great Red anti-cyclone

So I was watching something about Jupiter in the gym the other day and they mentioned that the Great Red Spot is an anti-cyclone, not a cyclone. Because it turns in the direction opposite that the planet rotates. That's kind of fascinating, no? It can happen on this planet too but the fluid dynamics get all crazy complicated. For a storm on the Earth to be anti-cyclonic, it would have to rotate clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and counter-clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere.

The Great Red Spot rotates counter-clockwise. Here is what I don't understand: as seen from above, most planets in our solar system, including Jupiter, appear to rotate counter-clockwise. The exceptions are Venus and Uranus (although some sites list only Venus and some others list Pluto as well.) So wouldn't the Great Red Spot be a cyclone if it's moving in the same direction as Jupiter? Must keep looking for the answer on this.

(there is also a smaller storm called the Little Red Spot which was until recently white. They think the storm kicked up materials that had a reaction to ultraviolet light and changed color in a chemical reaction.)

There is a similar storm on Neptune called the Great Dark Spot and on Saturn called Anne's Spot. Apparently there are also anticyclones on Venus' pole.

In which the author desperately tries to convince herself she is not a prude

Look, really I am not a prude. I don't think. But I could not take anymore of Ragtime. Ok, the story wasn't really captivating me although it seemed like historical fiction set in turn of the century NYC would be a no brainer literary lurvefest. I also get worried that I'll confuse the fiction with fact. Not really an issue as it turned out when I read the part where Emma Goldman (love her IRL) gives an astringent rubdown to an infamous chippie (already forgot her name) including her breast and "her mons. 'Yes, even this. You must have the courage to live.'" Uhhhh...what the FUCK? The chippie works herself into a...private happy moment which causes the young man who was stalking her to fall out of the closet he was watching her from while masturbating and, oh, dump his spirit all over her "in a ticker tape parade." How is any of this not seriously creepy? (nevermind the part where the same chippie gives a little girl a bath and dwells a wee too long on the details of her bosom. You know, I don't want to think about little girl's bosoms but thanks E.L. Or the part where the explorer Dad watches two Eskimos have sex on the polar expedition and is way too interested in it. And so on.)

Could not take anymore. My new tactic is you don't like the book? Fuck it. You ain't gots to finish it. White Noise I'm happy to call pseudo-intellectual twaddle but lots of people seem to like Ragtime. Goodreads has it on best books ever lists. Dennis liked it. Shit. I wonder what I'm missing? And does that still mean I'll like The Corrections whenever I finally get my reserve?

Oh well. Too many books to read to sweat shit you aren't digging-or that makes your skin crawl. I picked Neon Angel up from the library yesterday and cannot wait to start it. Hello Daddy, hello Mom I'm your ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch Cherry Bomb!

And, I have felt Christopher Hitchens beckoning to me from the shelf (beat that cancer and fucking quit smoking Hitch!) so I just started God Is Not Great. I tend to run out of steam with screed-style books before the end so I'll see how it goes.

A great line from E. L Doctorow

So I just started reading Ragtime last night and I'm not very far. Dennis assured me that I should read it. I hatched this idea to read some of the books that seemed omnipresent on adult shelves when I was a young'un but for whatever reason never read. I was trying to make a more definitive list the other night but I went blank after Shogun (well, there's also Clan of the Cave Bear and The Thorn Birds but I don't really know if they were true literature or just zeitgeisty literary hiccups.)

Anyways, yes I should make that list. But in the meantime, speaking of precocious young people, here is a great description of Doctorow's young protagonist:

He had reached that age of knowledge and wisdom in a child when it is not expected by the adults around him and consequently goes unrecognized....He felt that the circumstances of his family's life operated against his need to see things and to go places.

I know JUST how you feel kid.

First and last lines for The Monkey House

First:

Rosso was alive and was ashamed of it.

Last:

(on walking through the snow to his Serbian captors)

It was like cutting through the crust of bread so fresh it was still warm from the oven. He told himself there would never be a finer day for such a walk.

Final thoughts on The Monkey House

Just finished Fullerton's The Monkey House and I'm really torn trying to figure out the rating. I loved the descriptions of war and the unforgettable images of the population of Sarajevo, terminally hungry and exhausted and sudden experts on differentiating small arms fire. The last 30-40 pages when Rosso first discovers Tanja is in the hospital, he makes a dash during the night in a flurry of sniper fire and mortar shells, his conversation with poor decent Serbian Dr. Misic who says she will lose her other leg if she remains in Sarajevo and finally his exchanging himself with the journalist Flett to the Serbs so Tanja, Mahmud and Noor could be flown out of the country. He knows the Serbs will almost definitely kill him just for being a Rosso as his father was a Nazi sympathizer and war criminal (the Serbs were targets of Nazi ethnic cleansing.)

What I didn't like was Fullerton takes too much for granted of his reader. I expected and of course didn't mind researching for this book but I wasn't clear on so many things. I still don't think I understood everything at the end. I realize it's a stupid hangup of mine but I think the author should have mentioned what year this takes place as clearly that is significant. The back of the book says 1996 but the Dayton Agreement was signed in December 1995. As I said before I am assuming this is taking place in late 1995 as it seems the war is over in Croatia. Also, as locations are key to the story I think the book could at minimum really have used a map of Sarajevo, if not the Bosnian coast (since that plays a key in the drug smuggling story.)

Maps and dates just tend to be weird peeves of mine. A more general complaint is the story felt a little too insider. I really had trouble understanding some characters' actions, particularly why was Tanja in that cemetary where she got her leg blown off in the first place? It was fairly nonsensical.

Fullerton apparently has done a lot of war reporting and lived in Peshawar (can you imagine after covering the Bosnian War he consented to live in Pakistan?) He has since written 3 other novels. If I were him, I'd be snuggling up to a fire in jolly old England with some biscuits and a cricket match.


Some words he used at the end that I didn't understand:

Roulement is a term used the the British Army for major combat units deployed on short-term duty (usually less than six months)

When Rosso is talking to the Minister after he has arrested Luka (as per their plan as it turns out), he says to him "Hvala" (thank you) to which the Minister replies "Nema na cemu" (you're welcome.) Fullerton prints the English next to the Bosnian but since that's redundant, I thought it must have meant something else.

I like the touch that Anil drives poor, doomed Rosso to the place where Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in June, 1914 for the hostage exchange. Because of the mosques, churches and temples, apparently Sarajevo is referred to as the European Jerusalem. No wonder it has such a sad history.

Finally, I liked Tanja and Rosso's final conversation where she asks him to forgive himself for being his father's son. The end clearly shows that he couldn't.

Epistemophilia: William Pitt(s)

William Pitt were a father and son team that were big in 18th century Britain politics and both served as Prime Minister. And within two days, I listened to a Matt's History podcast on the father and then saw a Modern Marvels at the gym about his son. So I have one cool anecdote about each. And I'm glad I looked it up because until I did I thought there was just one dude.

Following the French and Indian War (or the Seven Years War according to the Brits), the British government enacted the Stamp Act on the Colonies to pay for it where they were taxed for any paper that changed hands. This rightly pissed them off as there were already other taxes like the Molasses Act and stirred the whole Taxation Without Representation pot that would be a big deal later. In 1766, Pitt the Elder, in the House of Commons at the time, gave a speech in defense of the colonies saying, "I rejoice that America has resisted." He went on to say they were members of the Empire and shouldn't have a special financial burden imposed on them for their defense and they had the same rights as other Englishmen.

Tea originated in China waaay back in a ridiculously high BC year. By the 18th century in England, it was the rage but due to exorbitant taxes it was difficult for most people to get legally. The vast majority of tea in England was drunk illegally. Unfortunately, it had toxic chemicals in it and sometimes even sheep dung (for color.) William Pitt the Younger, then Prime Minister, as one of his first acts in office in 1784 reduced the tax from 119% to 25% with the India Act. It also organized the British East India Company. I'm sure this probably had negative repercussions down the line, like for India. But what I want to point out here is that he appeared to have good intentions and also people in England weren't drinking sheep dung tea anymore.

First thoughts on The Monkey House

So I'm a little over halfway through John Fullerton's The Monkey House. The book was a little slow in the beginning although I can't say why. It certainly should have been exciting with Detective Rosso flying from Zagreb into Sarajevo and the plane having to bank sharply to avoid Serb artillery. Maybe I just have so much I want to read I'm distracted.

What I don't like is the book is not precise about the time period. It's just Sarajevo during the war. It appears to be wintertime. It's a pet-peeve that I think was fanned into a fire by Dennis that I have to know when exactly a book is taking place (assuming it's not just a novel that is presumed to be contemporary.)

Fullerton says that Rosso flew in from Zagreb which is the capital of Croatia. He also says Zagreb is safe. So I am guessing this is in 1995 as the Croatian War was from 1991-August 1995. As late as May of 1995, the Serbs were firing rockets into Zagreb. I dunno, this conflict, or really a series of them,  is so frakking complicated its reminiscent of the Middle East. All anyone can agree on is that no one particularly likes the Bosnians as they are a Muslim majority and, hence, apostates.

The war spilled over into Bosnia (as Rosso's wife and others predicted it would) soon enough in April 1992 and lasted until December 1995. It and the war in Croatia ended officially with the Dayton Agreement. Hard to imagine this crazy multi-national conflict being resolved in little Dayton, Oh. Poor Bosnia was unprepared for war. In 1991, Croatia and Serbia were attempting to partition it between each other.

Anyways, enough about the history. Clearly I need to read some books about this. I'm ashamed to say I was aware of all of this going on in the early 90's but I didn't pay much attention.

My interest in the book has grown as I've kept reading and slowly fallen into the rhythm of life in Sarajevo. Everyone is slowly starving. Rosso's wife is an alcoholic who sold most of their belongings for booze. The mental hospitals can no longer tackle problems like alkies as they have to keep the schizos and manics from walking into firefights. His goddaughter Tanja is having an affair with the local crime lord, Luka. She is a paramedic and saves a woman who was shot in the street by a sniper when no one else would help. She also resents to woman for getting shot.

What is most interesting is the moral/pragmatic counterweights of Rosso and Luka. Rosso hates that he is involved with Tanja but his interest in Luka for now is his involvement in a particularly nasty murder of a Serbian dentist who was also a police informant (Fullerton is playing that novelistic game of not handing out all the facts that the protagonist knows to sustain the mystery. That normally annoys me as it seems like cheating but he throws in so much other detail that you almost don't notice.) She was beaten and possibly stabbed and then choked to death in her own bathtub where she was left face down in a puddle of bloody shit. Yes, nasty. A nearly blind little girl was in the apartment scavenging, hid and tells Rosso she recognized Luka's voice.

So, he's a bad man. But why is Rosso even still trying to do his job at this point which has that deck chair on the Titanic feel? The government is practically non-existent. There isn't enough food. Rape and murder by the Serbs are commonplace. Plus, as Luka points out, his smuggling of booze and cigarettes which he trades for weapons are what is keeping the Serbs out of the city. The people love Luka. And it makes sense. Who would you side with in such a situation?

Fullerton (he's a British journalist, btw) has some lovely descriptive passages. I always appreciate effortless yet lovely prose. Here he describes the amorphous front:

Trenches and foxholes ran along a line of apple trees, zigzagging across the far side of the orchard. The trees themselves were mostly bare, the branches grey, the trunks slick and black, their roots emerging from the ground that was soft, wet and uneven...Rosso heard sporadic firing; the double crack of a single Kalashnikov, the vicious thump of an RPG, the fast ripple of a light machine-gun in quick short bursts like the sound of tearing cloth, only louder, more abrupt. Brrp. Brrp. .. Torn trees, churned soil, boots sucking in the mud. The drip, drip of snowmelt. Splashes of weak, watery sunshine. So this is the battlefield, Rosso thought. This is what it is like, for us and them. 

...The ground  was uninviting. It was too wet to hug with any enthusiasm and too flat do to much good if he did; the worst of both worlds. I don't mind getting wet if I'm still alive afterwards. It was bocage country; short murderous rushes, infantry charging in terror against other infantry lying in wait, waiting in terror. ..You could hear a man breathing behind the one just ahead, lying in his scrape, friend or foe, wondering too, index curling around the trigger, waiting for you to cough or sneeze...No front, no rear. Just murder. 

How can you not read that and picture everything now? The mundane winter landscape. Barren trees, snowy muddy ground that can suck your boots right off, the drip of melting ice. Interspersed with vivid and varied gunfire and musing about the flat ground that provides no cover from it. I won't be able to decide how much I like the book overall until I finish but this passage? Amazing.

Ok, what the hell is bocage you are asking? Unless you are British because then you probably already know. It is Norman in origin and referred originally to a landscape of mixed woodland and pasture. During WWII, British soldiers referred to the countryside of Normandy this way and the gently rolling hills and hedgerows that made visibility difficult and gaining territory on the Germans notoriously difficult.

Great lines

Still slowly reading The Monkey House. Having a week where I come home exhausted every night and fall asleep with a book in my hands like my grandma used to do. At least thus far I do not have removable teeth.

Fullerton starts each chapter with a quote. This one from my favorite playwright Tennessee Williams' "Cat On a Hot Tin Roof" was particularly resonant:

'We have to distrust each other. It's our only defense against betrayal."

Some literature just doesn't fully make sense until you reach a certain age.

Epistemophilia: the Ferhadja Mosque and speaking of Serbs

I listened to a How We Got Here the other day (which is timely as I just started reading a mystery set in Bosnia during the war called The Monkey House) and Jeb told the story of the Ferhadija Mosque in Banja (pronounced "bahn-ya") Luka, currently the capital of Serb-run Bosnia. I still can't keep all this Balkan shit straight. I don't think anyone can. I don't think the Bosnians and the Serbs and the ....whatever you get the idea.

The mosque was blown up during the Bosnian War in 1993. It was built in the 1570s so it's really a shame, nevermind the other implications. Apparently, it was one of 16 destroyed in the city in this time period. It was a great example of Ottoman architecture. They Photoshopped the mosque out of pictures of Banja Luka. They took the pieces of the mosque and hid them. They threw pieces of the minaret in the local reservoir and other pieces in the dump. Amazingly, they are retrieving these pieces and rebuilding the mosque. Also amazing is that the climate to do so even exists. Just 7 years ago they tried to have a corner-laying ceremony and locals burned their buses, mounted a pig's head on the building (goddamnit, I hate people's shittiness but when they are cruel to animals just to be shitty to each other it's a whole 'nother level of fucked up) and stoned the people who turned up. One old man died from his injuries. The pictures at The World's website are just amazing. Random slabs of rock. I can't imagine how that professor of architecture will turn them back into a semblance of what was.

Meanwhile, on The World in Words they also have a story about the Balkans. Montenegro insists on calling its language Montenegrin, even though its essentially Serbian to many peoples way of thinking (like calling it "American" here in America.) It became an official language in 2007 but they are still working out the curriculum. I wonder why Montenegro is so interested in dissociating itself with Serbia? Obviously I need to do more reading about it but Montenegro did side with Serbia during the various Balkan conflicts (or at least the Bosnian and Croatian wars.) 


So, I haven't gotten too far in The Monkey House yet but I did notice a policemen referring to a murder victim as a lousy "cetnik." He thought it was funny she died in her bathtub. The book takes place in Sarajevo during the War. Not sure of the exact time. Anyways, I looked up cetnik and it's slang for Serb. It appears to be derogatory but Serbs (at Urban Dictionary anyways) call themselves that too. In fact, the Serb entry for the term is kind of loopy and scary.

Unrelated but I listened to an interview with Jonah Lehrer, the author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist, which is a book about the interconnectedness between science and the humanities. He said Proust's character in Swann's Way describes the memories that are triggered in detail by eating Madeleines. He said actually this is scientifically correct because taste and memory have a direct line to the hippocampus where long-term memory is stored. He also talked about how Virginia Woolf strove to get the psychology of her characters right and how the reactions to Stravinsky's "The Rites of Spring" changed over time (it caused riots when it first was performed) illustrate the plasticity of the human brain. Most amazing though is Lehrer actually made me want to read Proust.

Shit I can't keep straight, vol II: Literary prizes

So, Howard Jacobson just won the Man Booker for The Finkler Question. I could have sworn I just heard the Guardian talking about the Man Booker winner. Is time flying that fast? Probably. But there are also a crazy number of literary prizes out there. I mean, that's good. Books don't receive enough attention, not near as much as they should. But what is the difference between the Man Booker and the Whitbread? Between the Pulitzer and the National Book Award? Time to find out.

The Man Booker is awarded each year for the best original full-length novel, written in English, by a citizen of the Commonwealth of Nations, Ireland or Zimbabwe. The winner receives 50,000 pounds. The judges will compose a longlist of 12-13 books that they then whittle down to 6 for the shortlist. The judges are chosen by the Booker Prize Foundation Committee. Translations are not eligible. Why Zimbabwe? I'm glad you asked. I dunno. I tried to research the answer and I found a website that said the country of "Africa" was eligible. Ohrilly? It's a former British colony but shit, so are we.

The Costa Prize (formerly known as the Whitbread) is given to authors based in the UK or Ireland. They are considered a more populist prize than the Man Booker as they are given not only for literary merit, but also for books that convey the joy of reading. There are 5 categories (Best Novel, Best First Novel, Poetry, Biography, Children's Book.) The winners of each get 5000 pounds. There is then an overall winner that receives 25,000 pounds. It is sponsored by Costa Coffee (a subsidiary of Whitbread.) Also, I looked through a list of the last few years' winners and scarcely recognized any.

The Orange Prize is annually awarded to a female author of any nationality for the best original full-length novel written in English, and published in the United Kingdom in the preceding year. It was created in response to the all-male Booker shortlist in 1991. The winner receives 30,000 pounds. The judging committee is composed of five women. It is not without controversy due to its being all female. Even people like Germaine Greer and A.S. Byatt attacked it. A bunch of dudes also have said its sexist. I hate this rubbish sniping about writers genders. It reminds me of all the Franzenfreude nonsense going on right now in this country. Also, Jodi Picoult writes dross.

The Pulitzer is awarded to an American author, preferably to one dealing with American life. The winner gets $10,000. It is administrated by Columbia University. BTW, that's Benjamin Franklin on the medal and it's pronounced "pull", not "pyull." There are, of course, also many other Pulitzer prizes given besides literature. There are a number of categories within journalism and "letter" as well as one for music. Not sure I knew about the last one (well, no wonder. I took a look at the winner and I recognized maybe two names.)

The National Bookw Award is given to an American author and its mission is "to celebrate the best of American literature, to expand its audience, and to enhance the cultural value of good writing in America." It is administrated by the National Book Foundation. There are 4 categories: fiction, poetry, nonfiction and young people's (it explicitly says this instead of "children's.) So, like the Costa except no prize for first fiction. There are 20 finalists-five from each category-who each receive $1000. The winners receive $10,000. Apparently, at one time there were many more categories that recognized different genres.

The PEN/Faulkner is awarded by the foundation of the same name to the year's "best work of fiction" by a living American author. The winner gets $15,000 while the four runners-up each receive $1000. They claim they are the largest peer-juried award in the country. This part is kind of cool: the winner and runners-up are invited to come and read from their work in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington.

The Prix Goncourt is a prize given is a prize for French literature for "the best and most imaginative prose work of the year." They also give out prizes for first fiction, poetry, biography and (hey! here's an idea) short story.

Well, there are probably bazillion others but that is enough. I do want to quickly mention the prize established by Barbara Kingsolver, the Bellwether Prize. It  is intended to support writers whose unpublished works support positive social change. She won the Orange Prize (you know, the sexist one) and used the award money to fund this award, according to an interview with BBC World Book Club.



And to prove how jive these awards can be, I looked up Don DeLillo and saw how many he has won. Just the list for White Noise is depressing.

First and last lines The Moon is Down

First:

By ten-forty-five, it was all over.

Last:

And Winter nodded slowly. 'Yes, you remembered. The debt shall be paid." (to Asclepius, that is.)

Final thoughts on The Moon is Down

Loved. It. So powerful and knowing the history of it just makes it more so. People were living the things Steinbeck wrote about. I can't believe people in this country (like you Clifton Fadiman and James Thurber) could be so clueless about its beauty and power.

Some of my favorite lines:

(on the introduction of Dr. Winter): "He watched in amazement while his thumbs rolled over and over in his lap. Doctor Winter was a man so simple only a profound man would know him as profound."

(the Mayor on being told by Colonel Lanser that the people were orderly and would cooperate with the new regime): "They are orderly under their own government. I do not know how they would be under yours."

(Lanser to the traitor Correll on how conquered people are not peaceful. God I wish Steinbeck would have chosen to kill Correll off in some gruesome fashion): "I am tired of people who have not been at war who know all about it. I remember an old woman in Brussels-sweet face, white hair; she was only four feet eleven; delicate old hands...We didn't know her son had been executed. When we finally shot her, she had killed twelve men with a long, black hatpin." 

(Winter on why they are bothering having a show trial for poor Alex Morden): "I would guess it is for the show. There's an idea about it: if you go through the form of a thing, you have it, and sometimes people are satisfied with the form of a thing...The invaders will have a trial and hope to convince the people that there is justice involved."

(the Mayor to Lanser on why he would not condemn Alex Morden to death):

"I'll tell you what I'll do. How many men were on the machine guns which killed our soldiers?"
"Oh, not more than twenty, I guess," said Lanser.
"Very well. If you will shoot them, I will condemn Morden."

(the Mayor's final words to Alex Morden): "Alex these men are invaders. They have taken our country by surprise and treachery and force....When they came, the people were confused and I was confused. We did not know what to do or think. Yours was the first clear act. Your private anger was the beginning of a public anger. I know it is said in town that I am acting with these men. I can show the town, but you-you are going to die. I want you to know....Alex, go, knowing that these men will have no rest, no rest at all until they are gone, or dead. You will make the people one. It's a sad knowledge and little enough gift to you, but it is so. No rest at all. Good-by, Alex."

(on the people's sabotage efforts): The jolly lights did not shine out on the snow, for by law every window must be black against the bombers. And yet when the English bombers came over, some light always appeared near the coal mine. Sometimes the sentries shot a man with a lantern and once a girl with a flashlight. And it did no good. Nothing was cured by the shooting.



(on the way the town treated their occupiers): Now it was that the conqueror was surrounded, the men of the battalion alone among silent enemies, and no man might relax his guard for even a moment. If he did, he disappeared, and some snowdrift received his body. If he went alone to a woman, he disappeared and some snowdrift received his body. If he drank, he disappeared.....And the soldiers, smelling warm food from the little restaurant, went in and ordered the warm food and found that it was oversalted and overpeppered.

(I must include Molly's scene where she kills lovesick Lieutenant Tonder, the man who carried out the execution orders against her husband): She looked at the table, and she saw the big scissors lying beside her knitting. She picked them up wonderingly by the blades...until she was holding them like a knife, and her eyes were horrified....Slowly she raised the shears and placed them inside her dress. The tapping continued on the door. She heard the voice calling to her. She leaned over the lamp for a moment and then suddenly she blew out the light. The room was dark except for a spot of red that came from the coal stove. She opened the door. Her voice was strained and sweet. She called, "I'm coming, Lieutenant. I'm coming!"

(Doctor Winter's reaction to Lanser saying he would lie to the people and tell them Orden had begged for his life): "They would know. You do not keep secrets. One of your men got out of hand one night and he said the flies had conquered the flypaper {emphasis mine}, and now the whole nation knows his words. They have made a song of it....You do not keep secrets, Colonel."

(the Mayor to his wife when she says they can't arrest the Mayor): Orden smiled at her. "No," he said, "they can't arrest the Mayor. The Mayor is an idea conceived by free men. It will escape arrest."

Those scenes and the Mayor's final scene where he quotes from the Trial of Socrates are the sort of writing that sticks in your throat and won't let you go. I can see why it inspired the resistance. I want to say that it's a shame we were occupying a country ourselves 20 years later but that situation is a bit more complicated. The North Vietnamese regime followed the particularly brutal model of the Chinese Communist Party and certainly their people were the worse off for it. And look at what happened in Cambodia. WWII had easy answers and clear villains but most wars do not.

Epistemophilia: of Burr conspiracies and other cells

Listened to a History Stuff podcast about Aaron Burr. Aaron Burr is of course famous for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel but he also was involved in a conspiracy after that to become the King of Louisiana. Dude, Americans don't like kings. How could you not have learned that from the Revolution?

Basically, his political career was finito after killing Hamilton whom he challenged to a duel after his feelings were hurt by stuff Hamilton said at a dinner party. He was acquitted of murder charges. He then moved to the Ohio River Valley and tried to gather land and an army for the aforementioned king plan. One of his conspirators unfortunately for him was James Wilkinson, a shady guy who was discovered to be an agent of the Spanish crown after his death. Some people believe he was involved in a plot to kill Meriwether Lewis (there is some controversy over whether his death was a suicide.) Wilkinson eventually turned him in to Jefferson who had him charged with high treason in 1807. The Supreme Court took a strict reading of the law and acquitted him. He had to flee the country after that though and spent time in Europe until he was basically kicked out of England and refused entry to France. He still tried to become King of Louisiana. Obviously, he was not successful.

So this was a touching story: David Cameron, the new British PM, apologized for Bloody Sunday (January, 1972 in Derry, Northern Ireland) after the release of the Saville Report. It was really politically courageous and heartfelt. I'm very impressed. The Saville Report took 12 years to compile and was 1200 pages. The introduction alone was 60 pages. The previous report, which exonerated the military and claimed the victims had weapons, was around 60 pages in toto and came out of an investigation called the Widgery Tribunal.  Bloody Sunday is sometimes known as The Bogside Massacre in Ireland.

Moving on to Science Diction which told the story of how the cell got its name. Cells were first seen in a microscope to Robert Hooke who was looking at cork. They reminded him of the tiny rooms occupied by monks called cellula, hence the name. The word made its scientific debut in Hooke's book, published in 1665. This was also the book that inspired Anton van Leeuwenhoek to buy a microscope, improve its lensing and found the field of microbiology in Holland in 1674. Another fun fact I learned from Wikipedia: van Leeuwenhoek was the executor of Jan Vermeer's will when he died in 1675.

First thoughts on The Moon is Down

The introduction by Donald Coers (who has written some Steinbeck books I may need to check out IF they aren't too academic) says that Steinbeck approached the OSS about writing this book after he got the idea while filming "The Forgotten Village" in Mexico (this was also the film that produced one of the few if only real arguments between him and Ricketts due to their conflicting views about indigenous populations.) Steinbeck felt the fascists were outpacing us in the propaganda race. When this book came out, a lot of critics didn't understand it and felt Steinbeck was too sympathetic in the treatment of the Nazis (interestingly, never called that explicitly in the book although it's pretty clear when one character's fantasy is to die on the battlefield to the strains of Wagner.) The book was majorly misunderstood and underappreciated in its time in this country. Clifton Fadiman and James Thurber no less criticized it.

However, in Europe it was a huge success. The book was published in March, 1942, a very bleak time during the war. In occupied Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands and Norway people risked their lives to print and clandestinely distribute it as a pamphlet. It came to France in 1944  6 months before the liberation and was a hit there as well. Sartre in his essay "What is Literature?" defended a similar work called The Silence of the Sea by Jean Bruller, saying to understand literature one must first understand the audience it was written for. An occupied people would have found a story about goose-stepping, monacle-clad villains laughable. What was disturbing about the occupation and the crimes of the Nazis was how normal they could appear.

My favorite story from the intro tells the story of the man who translated and published it in Holland, an actor and underground publisher named Ferdinand Sterneberg. He ran a press called De Bezige Bij ("The Busy Bee.") He used to also perform scenes from it clandestinely for select audiences, warning them beforehand they could at any time be raided by the Gestapo. He eventually stopped because he was hiding two Jewish friends in his home. His neighbors were "untrustworthy" so his friends could not walk about, run water or use the bathroom when he wasn't home for fear of alerting snooping ears. Sterneberg felt it was too cruel to leave them in such a state for hours. He and his friends survived the war.

The publishing royalties from this pamphlet funded the resistance in all of the above countries. How amazing is that? It's really tragic this story isn't more widely known here. Steinbeck continues to not receive what is due to him.


After the war when Steinbeck was travelling in Italy, he was approached by an Italian who told him mere possession of the book was grounds for execution. Proof Steinbeck did something write no matter what those ass kettles Fadiman and (I'm sorry) Thurber say.

BTW, I see the further reading section that Harold Bloom edited a book about Steinbeck. I wonder if he changed his mind about him. I just found it in Google Books and nope, Bloom writes a petty intro saying Steinbeck is overly sentimental in Of Mice and Men, East of Eden is not worth re-reading, In Dubious Battle is a period piece only useful to historians and The Grapes of Wrath is "a problematic work that....lacks invention." He says Steinbeck suffers in comparison to Hemingway. I don't know what is up Harold Bloom's ass but since he said fucking Cormac McCarthy wrote the greatest novel of the century, he clearly has issues.

I'd like to give the last word to my beloved Steinbeck. When discussing the criticism of this book in his essay  "My Short Novels" written 10 years later, Steinbeck said:

"It was said I didn't know anything about war and this was perfectly true, though how Park Avenue commandos found me out I can't conceive." 

Oh, I love this man.

I was going to write about specifics of the book thus far but I'll save that for later now.

Shit I can't keep straight, vol I: hadrons are not a dark matter

Puns are not my friend. Anyways.

Hadrons (Greek for "stout" or "thick") are simply composite particles made of quarks held together by an electromagnetic force. They in turn are made up of baryons and mesons.

Baryons are made up of 3 quarks (so, protons and neutrons are the obvious examples but I gather there are others.) Protons are the only stable baryons.

Mesons are made up of a quark and an anti-quark. Examples created in particle physics experiments include pions and kaons. I'm not going to bother looking this up further. I tried and found a tangle of nuclear forces and gluons and colors and spinning bosons. I think all mesons are bosons. But not all bosons are mesons maybe? Aha, that logic class I took in college years ago to avoid math pays off.

Ok, it made me nuts so I did just look up a little more. Bosons are indeed mesons which means the Pauli Exclusion Principle does not apply to them because they are integer spin particles. As opposed to baryons which are Fermions and are half interger spin. If you are a Fermion, you can not simultaneously occupy the same quantum state with another...uh, particle?

Moving on...for the last time, here is the difference between dark matter and dark energy. They used to think the expansion of the Universe was slowing down and might reverse one day in the Big Crunch. Stephen Hawking talked about this in his book which apparently everyone claimed to have read but were really busy reading Jackie Collins. Then came the Hubble and they saw the Universe's acceleration is actually not only slowing down but is actually increasing over time. Over time, the expansion of the Universe has been confirmed from various sources such as study of the CMB and better measurements of supernovae. According to NASA, 70% of the Universe is dark energy. We can tell from the maths. Some people say though that Einstein's theories have some kind of as-yet-unknown gaffe in them. So dark energy is either a property of space, a new dynamic fluid, or a new theory of gravity.

Here is an easy way to explain dark energy: it's also referred to as repulsive gravity.  It is much weaker than plain old gravity but more observable over large distances where it seems to take over.

Dark matter on the other hand is inferred to exist by its gravitational effects on visible matter. Some pioneering astronomers-Fritz Zwicky and later Vera Rubin-observed that some galaxies were spinning so fast they should fly apart. But they don't. The explanation for they don't would seem to be mass but we can't detect it. In fact, we are about 5 times short.  It is not antimatter or we would see the unique gamma rays antimatter produces when it is annihilated. It is not composed of baryons as they are observable by their absorption of radiation. And because of the observed gravitational lensing, it's not massive black holes.

All told, regular matter only makes up about 5% of the universe so we are way off on something. 



Here is some more info from Universe Today:

The case for dark matter can be appreciated by first looking at the solar system where, to stay in orbit around the Sun, Mercury has to move at 48 kilometers a second, while distant Neptune can move at a leisurely 5 kilometers a second. This principle doesn’t seem to apply in the Milky Way or in other galaxies we have observed.  Broadly speaking, you can find stuff in the outer parts of a spiral galaxy that is moving at about the same orbital velocity as stuff that is quite close in to the galactic hub. This is puzzling, particularly since there doesn’t seem to be enough gravity in the system to hold onto the rapidly orbiting stuff in the outer parts – which should just fly off into space. 

So, we need more gravity to explain how galaxies rotate and stay together – which means we need more mass than we can observe – and so we invoke dark matter. Dark matter also helps to explain why galaxy clusters stay together and explains large scale gravitational lensing effects, such as can be seen in the Bullet Cluster .

Hmmm, now I see why I have trouble keeping this shit straight.  Hopefully this will help.

First and last lines for A Loyal Character Dancer

First:

Chief Inspector Chen Cao, of the Shanghai Police Bureau, found himself once again walking through the morning mist toward Bund Park.

Last:

(on having to send Wen through the gate without Liu to America and more importantly, on saying goodbye to Catherine):

Along with a part of himself, he thought, though he might have lost it long ago, perhaps as early as those mornings on the dew-decked green bench in Bund Park.

Final thoughts on A Loyal Character Dancer

Just finished this book. I has a sad that Inspector Chen and Catherine Rohn couldn't be together but it really would be impossible politically. It would ruin his party career to marry an American and as Yu said, given his background he could never go far in a law enforcement career in the US. As if he could leave anyways.

Even worse, they find poor Wen and she has to leave Liu (the guy who has loved her for 20 odd years in secret and united at last) to go to the States to be with her shitstain abusive older husband. It really sucks to be a woman in most of the world. If she stayed in China, the gangs were after her. The big mystery was the gangs had coerced her into poisoning her husband.

I really like the poem Liu wrote about her which is too long to copy here. He was a reporter with the Wenhui Daily (a real paper, btw, founded in Shanghai in 1938) and went to Fujian to write a story about the factories there. There in Changle (or ChangLe, also a real place in east Fujian) he unexpectedly sees Wen and writes a poem where the factory manager describes her as "as a grinder, but a revolutionary one, polishing up the spirit of our society." Which sounds beautiful for a split second. Then you think about how tragic and wasteful the Cultural Revolution was and you want to vomit.

I love Detective Yu. For one example, where in the scene where he interrogates a prostitute and she mentions two triad members forced her into a threesome he tells her she had better cooperate now as group sex is illegal. Uhm, what? WTF was going on with China. Defiantly Atheist and yet as prudish as an old Church organist. I wonder if any of this has changed (I mean, not that I'm like give me group sex or give me death but how or why would you make that illegal?) He and Pequin finally get their own place at the end of this book instead of sharing a converted Shikuman house dining room with their son.

If I ever get the urge to learn more about Chinese poetry, look up Su Dongpu.

Thoughts on A Loyal Character Dancer and some alphabet trivia

The title of the book refers to a woman named Wen who is married to a guy that is generally a shit. He is 15 years older than her. She probably married him because he knocked her up when she was an Educated Youth working at his factory in Fujian during the Cultural Revolution. The only type of dancing allowed during the cultural revolution was character dancing. There were pictures of her dancing with the Chinese character for loyalty (which also I presume is the character on the book's cover and at the top of each page.)

BTW, according to the Senor Google, the character is loyalty. Behold:

The Chinese "alphabet" is really made up of logograms, where a character indicates a word or a morpheme rather than a phoneme (the Latin alphabet, in contrast, is made up of phonograms.) To refer to the Chinese alphabet, you say Hanzi (the name of the alphabet changes with the language, e.g. Kanji for Japanese.) Wikipedia says Chinese characters are the longest continually used writing system in the world. Really? And not Hebrew? I followed one of the links cited in the article which said the same thing but didn't give dates. It did say there is now a museum of Chinese writing in Henan Province. On a website called Kwintessential (some British translation company), I found this:

According to the Kangxi dictionary the total number of Chinese characters is a staggering 47,035. The bulk of these writing symbols are not used today but nonetheless they make up the historical collection of Chinese writing symbols that exist as an extensive library.

Still no dates.

Also, the book mentions the concept of guanxi which also was mentioned extensively in Spider Eaters in reference to the author trying to get a passport to get out of China. Guanxi is a personalized network of influence and mutual favors. It literally means "relationships."

Epistemophilia: the surprisingly fascinating story of lead

Watched Modern Marvels at the gym.

Learned that lead was called plumbium in Roman times and hence the "pb." The lead/crazy Romans theory is false, at least as far as the water system goes. I had heard this before but never specifically why it was false. The pipes were almost definitely coated with limestone due to the nature of the soil in the area which would have acted as a barrier. Even back then, Romans knew (or some did) about lead's neurological effects. However, they did sometimes add lead to wine to form the compound lead acetate. It made the wine sweeter. I've read about children in poorer neighborhoods eating lead paint chips because they taste sweet.

Most lead is mined from the earth in the form of galena ore. It's about 87% lead and the rest of sulfur. The majority of mined lead is used in car batteries.

Lead stops x-rays because they bounce off of its bigass nuclei. The high energy particles ricochet until their energy is dissipated. I believe anything sufficiently high density would do but lead is cheap. Lead cannot stop neutron radiation.

Lead is dangerous because sometimes your body mistakes it for calcium and it gets absorbed into your bones and then travels throughout your body on red blood cells who think they are lugging calcium around. This is rather curious since calcium is an alkali earth metal with an atomic # of 20 and lead is a heavy metal with an atomic # of 82. I just Googled this though and found confirmation from multiple sources. Intriguing.

We have lots of lead (#82) on our planet because uranium (#238) eventually decays into it. From the radioactive decay article on Wikipedia, it looks like U-238 decay chains eventually into Lead-206, an isotope of lead.

Muriatic acid is another name for hydrochloric acid.

Acid rain is nitric and sulfuric acids.

Epistemophilia: wave particle duality, poor Kodak and wtf is prosopagnosia

Listened to an Astronomy Cast on wave particle duality. The way stars keep expanding is due to photons crashing into each other. This is an example of the particle nature of light. So is the way we see, reflection and refraction. It explains why glasses work (so yay for duality as I am almost legally blind now.) Newton thought light was a particle, case closed.

For his near contemporary Huygens though, light was clearly a wave based on his observations of interference and diffraction patterns.

On Matt's Today in History, learned about poor George Eastman (as in Eastman Kodak.) He wanted to bring photography to the masses by making it portable and developing the film for his customers in the beginning. He developed some kind of degenerative bone disease and killed himself in the 30's rather than spend his life in a wheelchair. His suicide note said something like "I've already done everything so why not?"

New Yorker Out Loud interviewed Oliver Sacks. No wonder he's into rare neurological problems. He has face blindness (prosopagnosia.) He said he has learned to recognize people by the way they walk. Other famous sufferers include Penn Jillette and Jane Goodall. Sacks said she even had trouble identifying her chimps but I dunno if he was kidding. Agnosia is from the Ancient Greek for ignorance and prosop from the Ancient Greek for face.

Some things I learned from Gene Gilliom's China talk

Gene Gilliom has is a Professor Emeritus of social studies at OSU and led a tour group to China last year. He gave a talk on old versus new culture in China. He also is in Torch Club with Seelbach. He has been traveling there since the mid-1970's so he witnessed the tail end of the Cultural Revolution. It officially ended with Mao's death in 1976.

His group visited Beijing, Datong (where a lot of the coal mining is), Hohhot (the capital of the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region-not the same as Mongolia. The name means "blue city" in Mongolian), Dalian, Shenyang, Changchun, Harbin, QingDao (where the beer comes from-German influence), Suzhou and Shanghai. One lady in his group broke her arm and a few ribs when her horse bolted in the Gegentala ("the place of grazing in summer") Grasslands of Inner Mongolia and had to stay in the hospital for 10 days. In China, you pay for your hospital stay and services up front. The tour company lent her money and sent an interpreter to help her. Your family provides linens and similar services, the hospital does not. Interesting but what a shitty way for her to learn that.

I also learned:

• 500 million people live in the Yangtze River Valley
• 1000 new cars a day enter the Beijing roads
• Since 1980, there are have been ~5000 buildings over 15 stories tall erected in Shanghai alone
• The name China comes from the Emperor Chin
• The migration of people seeking work from China's interior to the coast represents the largest migration in human history

First thoughts on A Loyal Character Dancer

So far I'm enjoying this book, the 2nd in the Inspector Chen series, as much as the first one. Like the first one, lots of detail on the Chinese mindset. I like the way that Chen tries to get out of escorting the female US Marshall as he doesn't want to get sucked into a political task and then keeps thinking about the party and how things will look with an eye to potential accusations of Western corruption and impropriety. For that reason, he refuses a room at the Peace Hotel to avoid any trouble even though he'd love to stay there and invite Inspector Yu's family so they could use the hot water. Funny that atheist Communism Chinese style is so Southern Baptist about sex.

I also like the little educational asides. Detective Yu (I love him!) is sent to Fujian to investigate the disappearance of the wife of a refugee who has agreed to testify in a human smuggling case in exchange for Witness Protection (and also, he might be kind of shady.) Yu tells a local cop who is unhappy about Shanghai's interference that he'll need a translator. It turns out that Fujian province is one of the most linguistically diverse provinces per Wikipedia. The Han Chinese are a minority.

White Noises Off

I sat at my desk at lunch today desperately trying to read White Noise. You know that scene in American Werewolf in London where David is calmly reading a book one minute and the next he is screaming and ripping his clothes off and sprouting fangs and a tail? Yeah, that is what this felt like. I decided fuck it, I was done. And a sense of peace just that suddenly came upon me. This is the feeling of a good, nay excellent, decision.

A tedious academic in a made-up discipline (Hitler Studies? That's your joke DeLillo?) An affectless wife-oh sure, eventually you find out she is shagging some guy to obtain an experimental drug that supposedly ameliorates the fear of death but even then she just becomes another annoying character in a crowded sea of same who also is still affectless. A seriously creepy oldest son who plays chess over mail with a mass murderer and that's not even the creepiest thing about him. A colleague that likes to natter about the intellectual significance of generic peanut packaging and tourist photo ops and is in desperate need of a good generic nut punching. An unbearable class co-taught by Hitler guy and ridonkulous colleague (who I always imagined could be played in the movie by David Cross) who is trying to start his own discipline of Elvis Studies. Wasn't Elvis a cliche by the mid 80's? Fucking pretentious pseudo-clever twaddle. I gave it two stars but really I think I hated it. Warning sign #1 and the reason I've avoided DeLillo so studiously lo these many years was a rave review Rolling Stone gave Libra. Warning sign #2 is people who like to use the fucking tragic contraction "PoMo" like this book.

Not even posting first and last lines. This book does not deserve the typing time.

Moving on to A Loyal Character Dancer, second in the Inspector Chen series.

Short list for the year: Michael Chabon, Ragtime, Jonathan Safran Foer, Why Evolution is True, maybe David Mitchell, maybe Japanese history.

Epistemophilia: Of netsukes, fumies and staircase comebacks

British potter Edmund de Waal has written a compelling memoir about his family during the holocaust, The Hare With Amber Eyes per the Guardian. In it, he talks about his family's collection of netsuke which survived the war by being hidden in a mattress. Netsuke are Japanese mini-sculptures which originated in the 17th century.

Speaking of Japan, the icons that Japanese Catholics were forced to trample on to apostasize were called fumies. This happened under the Tokugawa Shogunate.

A genizah is a storeroom for sacred Jewish texts. One of the most important was found in Cairo in the 1890's.

Oscar Wilde died a pauper from meningitis in 1900. He had served 2 years in jail for libel. On his deathbed, he converted to Catholicism. He was a big mystery religion fan.

French has the fabulous expression "l'esprit de l'escalier" which means "staircase wit." It means thinking of a rejoinder too late e.g. after you are already taking your leave on the staircase.

Epistemophilia: Hurricane Lolita

Listening to the Guardian podcast today, the British writer Jonathan Raban was asked about writing and he told an anecdote about Vladimir Nabokov. Asked where he got his inspiration for Lolita, he gave this typical (for him) cryptic response: he had read about an ape held in captivity by scientists that was given crayons and paper. His drawings were never anything recognizable until one day he drew something they could identify. He had drawn the bars of his cage. That is what Nabokov was describing in his writing.

Leonard Lopate had hurricane experts on to discuss how the field has changed since Katrina. Hurricane science has improved since Katrina. They say they are doing better at predicting the path but less so with the intensity. They may never be able to fully capture the chaos. Once you pass a certain point in the ocean (not sure where but by NYC certainly), hurricanes cannot exceed Category III in strength.

First and last lines for Beyond the Outer Shores

I'm going to try to continue being disciplined with this blog and include the first and last lines of the books I read.

Beyond the Outer Shores

First line:  

He was, as many would later remember, a mysterious fellow-handsome, boyish looking even, twenty-six years old, slight, not much more than five-foot-seven.

Last line:

Ed Ricketts, it seems, is bouncing back with the sardines.

Final thoughts on Beyond the Outer Shores

I just finished this book which I feared at one time I was stuck in a low reading gear with. Wow. Just loved it in the end. Although parts of it were tedious to read at the time, I now understand what Tamm's intention was when he wrote it-namely, to take the charming Doc from Steinbeck's novels and turn him into the rounded and much more complex Ed Ricketts. He did like to drink and he did like women (although some speculate the Steinbeck exaggerated-he said when going through Ricketts journals after his death he tore out many "blackmail material" pages on Ricketts' daliances with local women and yet only two pages were missing.) He was also a devoted stepfather to his second wife's daughter who died of brain cancer. The illness put him deeply in debt. He was an ecologist ahead of his time who predicted the collapse of the sardine trade in Monterey-killed by greed and overfishing for the war effort. He wrote essays decrying the treatment of Japanese Americans during WWII. The greatest ecologist of the time, Dr. TA Stephenson, was a fan of his work and visited Ricketts, telling him he quoted Between Pacific Tides to his wife until she was sick of hearing about it.

I learned many random brilliant things from this book; hence, I will list them in a random fashion:

• Darwin did not apply his theory of evolution to mankind in The Origin of the Species. He thought church types would freak out. He posited it 20 years later in The Descent of Man. He even suggested religion was proof of man's evolution.
• Steinbeck called his first novel  an "abortion" and he was embarrassed by it.
• Joseph Campbell was very impressed by Steinbeck's ideas in To a God Unknown and said he hoped people would discover his work
• Campbell and Steinbeck, alas, never really became friends because of a brief unconsumated romance between Campbell and Steinbeck's first wife, Carol.
• Ricketts was a HUGE influence on Steinbeck's writing. He died in 1948. Steinbeck only wrote one book considered great after that (East of Eden) and he had started work on it before Ricketts died although not sure if he actually was writing it in earnest. He planned it as his magnum opus.
• Sweet Thursday may have been the Cannery Row sequel but people plainly saw more Steinbeck than Ricketts in the Doc character. Ricketts died in May, 1948 and was full of optimism about his planned trip to BC where he would meet up with Steinbeck and complete his Pacific ecological trilogy with The Outer Shores (ahh, that's the meaning of this books title.) The Doc in Thursday had writer's block, couldn't find pleasure in anything, and was annoyed that people were trying to find him a wife. This all-especially the last-applied to Steinbeck. He even describes Doc as staring at a yellow legal pad and being unable to write. It was Steinbeck, not Ricketts, who wrote on yellow legal pads.
• Steinbeck burned most of his correspondence with Ricketts after his death. Some friends of Ricketts (not all of whom liked Steinbeck) said it was because he didn't want people to know how responsible Ricketts really was for Steinbeck's output. I don't know why Steinbeck did it. Grief makes you do funny things. Ricketts was obviously a huge influence but he repeatedly referred to Steinbeck's gift for words and asked Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell to polish his work sometimes so I don't think it's fair to say Ricketts is the reason Steinbeck could write. 
• A lot of critics didn't like Cannery Row and found it not deep. Steinbeck said he wrote it in 4 layers. I of course am stuck in first gear with my literal Asperger's mind and loved the book. Ricketts' wife at the time wrote about it in the local paper and called the book a "poison cream puff" in response to some critic's review. Really? I thought it was sweet. WTF am I missing? I need a skeleton key.
• Steinbeck's first post-Ricketts work was the experimental novella/play Burning Bright. It was described as moribund by audiences.
• There was a real Mack, a real Lee chong, a real Dora Flood. Her story is interesting and rather tragic. She was indeed a madam and a large woman. She was also big hearted and a pillar of the community who contributed to local charities and quietly gave food to local families. The agents of decency descended on Monterey, alas, like a plague of locusts with hard hearts and small minds towing their offended messiah on a bier behind them and put her out of business. She died penniless a few months after Ricketts accident.
• Steinbeck thought Le Morte d'Arthur was one of the best books ever. His clique loved Robinson Jeffers' poem, The Roan Stallion.
• Steinbeck writing about the mourners following Ricketts funeral as they walked out of the Chapel and walked separately and alone on the shore "We were lost and could not find ourselves."
• Speaking of the funeral, Ricketts new wife (who was in her mid 20's) fell apart at his death and asked a friend to make the arrangements. He opted for a small invite only affair which angered Ricketts sister who said Ricketts was the kind of guy who was friends with everyone and wouldn't have excluded people.
• While going thru his things at the lab after his death, Steinbeck and a friend had Ricketts safe pried open. It was the only thing that survived the lab fire in 1936 (where he lost his books and records.) In the safe was a bottle of scotch and a note "What the hell do you expect to find in here? Here's a drink for your trouble." 
• One more happy story to end on: Ricketts was terminally perturbed with the treatment he got from Stanford University Press. They were supposed to be coming out with a second edition of his book but again, kept delaying it. He and Steinbeck got drunk one night and wrote a note to the publisher saying they looked forward to the Press' forthcoming opus "The Internal Combustion Engine-Will it Work?" Ricketts contacted them a few days later to apologize but he publisher actually said the note shamed him and he would work to get the second edition finally released. Alas, it was published posthumously. But, it did contain a touching prologue saying the author "Dr. Ricketts" died tragically before he could review the final copy. After all the delays and snubs from peers for his lack of a degree, recognition at last.

Ok that's enough. The book is just too fresh in my head. I really could sit and cry for Ricketts, Steinbeck and the sardines if I let myself.

More Ricketts and other random tidbits

Gack, just when Beyond the Outer Shores starts to pick up steam with a tidbit about Steinbeck or Joseph Campbell, Tamm goes back to giving discourses on what Ricketts did day by day while he was in the Queen Charlotte Islands (the Galapagos of the North they say.) Starfish collecting on this day, eating crabs with the natives on this day. I do want to finish the book and not skim so as not to miss the entertaining morsels. And it has a The Monster at the End of This Book feel since I know Rickett's death in a freak accident is awaiting me.

Interesting rejoinder to thoughts about religion and how it's bad and how science is making it obsolete: Joseph Campbell in The Hero With a Thousand Faces observed the destruction of native cultures and how the death of their religion broke their spirit essentially. He said Western man was undergoing the same with the ascendancy of science. Specifically how the "rapidly rising incidences of neuroticism, mental disorders, suicides, dope addictions, shattered homes, impudent children, violence, murder and despair in modern society" could be consequences of the death of literal belief in the Bible. Interesting. I don't totally buy it as certainly all of those things exist in a religious society, but interesting.

Listened to AstronomyCast this morning on the subject of antimatter. When you convert energy into matter, you necessarily create matter and antimatter. Likewise, combining matter and antimatter begets energy. About 50% of the output will be lost as neutrinos but it is still a comparatively efficient reaction.

And, so why didn't all matter and antimatter react and destroy each other in the early days of the universe? This question used to confound astronomers as it seemed to violate the laws of physics. The answer is CP Invariance which basically in certain decay processes, the universe prefers to go one way or the other. Where C is charge symmetry and P is parity symmetry. The guys who discovered it eventually won the Nobel Prize (it sure is tough for theoretical physicists. They can't win until their conjecture is proven in a lab. When/if the Higgs-Boson is eventually discovered, Peter Higgs will have a Nobel waiting.)

There is no anti-energy as energy is zero point. There is no anti-time as time cannot run backwards. There is no anti-gravity. If there were an antimatter star, it's mass would cause objects to rotate around it in the same way as regular stars.

We have managed to create (briefly) anti-hydrogen and anti-helium.

This is one of the reasons why nuclear decay is bad. Beta decay emits positrons which if they hit a strand of your DNA, say, they damage it. But they use positrons in PET scans so I don't really understand too well why that is ok.

Speaking of history (or not), I also listened to a show about Tecumseh. The treaty he objected to was the Treaty of Greenville in 1795. He felt Indian lands were owned communally and couldn't be handed over by certain parties in a treaty. The Battle of Tippecanoe was in 1811. Tecumseh died two years later. William Henry Harrison was rather a shit and "Tippecanoe and Tyler too" was nothing to brag about.  The Battle of Tippecanoe was one of the catalysts for the War of 1812 since the Brits collaborated with the natives (although they also stabbed them in the back.) I'd like to visit this site in Indiana. It's near Lafayette. I dunno though if there is much there besides the memorial obelisk.