Epistemophilia: Emma Goldman, no Ragtime

I listened to a podcast of the Leonard Lopate show today about the history of labor movements in the US and inevitably Emma Goldman's name came up. The author Philip Dray (There is Power in a Union) said that while Goldman was a union supporter, she was too hot for most of them to handle after McKinley's assassination in 1901. Dray says the killer, Leon Czolgosz, claimed to have been encouraged and influenced by Goldman. I knew Goldman lost favor with the anarchist movement by speaking out in favor of Czolgosz but I'm not really clear what the extent of her beforehand relationship was. Evidently, he had met her briefly and was a big fan of her speeches but they don't seem to have been particularly close. The way Dray phrased it, I couldn't tell if he meant that Goldman suggested Czolgosz kill McKinley but if that's the case, no one knows.

Dray also mentioned that Goldman was deported in 1919. Wait, does that mean she wasn't American? Actually, it looks like she was born in Russia and moved here when she was around 16. Granted, most of my knowledge of Emma Goldman comes from the movie Reds in which I don't remember Maureen Stapleton having a Russian accent. And probably the main reason I grew up liking Emma Goldman was first because I loved the movie and second because I loved Maureen Stapleton, partially because I figured she was related to the lady who played Edith on All in the Family (is that even true? Ah, Wikipedia says she is no relation to Jean Stapleton.) Oh well. Still a great movie. I can't believe my parents took me to see that when it came out. I was 12 I think. At the time, Jack Nicholson naked and Warren Beatty peeing red made a bigger impression on me than the politics but I surprisingly still found the movie engrossing even though it was long enough to have an intermission.

Final thoughts on Knots and Crosses

So, I finished the first Ian Rankin Inspector Rebus novel. I was thinking it was adapted at some point by the BBC. Close, it was ITV. I knew Rankin was mad popular in the UK but evidently his books account for 10% of all crime book sales in the UK (is crime book the same as mystery? This statistic seems a bit dodgy.)

I liked several things about the book, including the way multiple protagonist viewpoints are woven together. Rebus is getting hand-delivered anonymous letters with bits of knots and matchstick crosses in them at the same time that there is a serial killer on the loose in Edinburgh who abducts and kills young girls. He finally tells his sort of girlfriend (and policewoman who outranks him-nice touch) Gill who wonders if he is sending them to himself. Meanwhile, his stage hypnotist brother is making money on the side as a drug courier and a local crime beat reporter is onto the story and convinced Detective Sergeant Rebus is involved too. And then there's the matter of Rebus' history with the SAS and some sort of secret elite training disasater that he can't recall which caused him to have a nervous breakdown. I like how the book incorporates the POV of the girlfriend, the brother, Rebus' daughter, the reporter and Rebus' two partners. It muddies the story to keep you from guessing anything and Rankin's writing is good enough that all of it compelling.

What I didn't like is I suppose Rankin is trying to show that Rebus is on the verge of cracking up again. This leads to a few confusing scenes like his first time in the sack with Gill. What happened? He couldn't get it up? I really don't know. Also, in the last third Rebus regains his memory and realizes who is behind the notes-once Gill convinces him they are related to the case-and the abductions turn personal. Rebus runs out into the city to find the killer (connected to the fucked up SAS event Rebus couldn't remember) and....stops into a pub to drink whiskey and bullshit with the clientele. Really? A child killer with a personal grudge against you has kidnapped your daughter and you decide in the middle of your search to do some shots and buy rounds? This scene as a standalone was fine but was so out of place it kind of shit all over my suspension of disbelief. It felt stapled in from earlier in the book, where it belongs.

I did like how Rankin ended the book on a minor character's fate. What happened to Rebus? Well obviously he lived since he's in 16 more books. Kind of a bold choice. I also liked learning about Edinburgh. I hadn't read anything based there so I got to do some reading on it. Edinburgh and Glasgow are only 42 miles apart. I didn't realize they were so close. Edinburgh fancies itself the culture capital of Scotland and the people there seem especially outraged that crime would be taking place. I gather they expect that kind of thing to occur in Glasgow, not the capital. I've read a few books now set in Scotland during the 80's and it seemed like a pretty dismal place economically then. I hope things have improved. It doesn't make the economic collapse news the way Ireland, Spain and Greece does at any rate.

Epistemophilia: useful idiots

I really like the PRI show The Changing World, but it can be a bit up and down. Their recent two parter on  polyezniy-or useful-idiots was however one of their best. The term was coined possibly by Lenin but in practice really refined by Stalin to describe Westerners who were either blinded by the idealistic falderal of Soviet idiology or just susceptible to flattery (or both) and were thus unable to see the misery of Russians under the Soviet rule. Or just didn't care. Stalin was said to have been capable of being quite charming when he wanted, as befits a psychopath.

Some of the people name-checked: Doris Lessing, George Bernard Shaw (who apparently admired Stalin's Pygmalion-esque manhandled transformation of Russia) and American singer Paul Robeson. They played a clip of Lessing herself being interviewed about it and it was rather mortifying. The story of Robeson was particularly sad because he was lured by the Soviet propaganda about the lack of racism in the Soviet Union (interesting to think of this in terms of the rising number of racial incidents against Africans in Moscow now.) He would travel to the Soviet Union to see old friends who were largely in prison by then and were pulled out and cleaned up for his visit so he could see they were fine. They were promptly shipped back to their labor camps afterwards. Robeson even recorded the Soviet anthem in English. I see a clip on YouTube of him singing the Chinese anthem as well.  Mao and Stalin? Could you pick two worse leaders in the 20th century? Dude, I hope you figured this out before you died in 1976.

The most interesting story though was about an NYT reporter named Walter Duranty who won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in Russia in 1931 where he reported that NO ONE died directly as a result of the famine caused by Stalin's first Five Year Plan (they estimate 10 million people died in Ukraine.) The Pulitzer, interestingly, is still on display at the Times-along with a placard saying many people disagreed with his receiving it, including Times' staff.

Here's more interesting trivia about Duranty: in his former life he collaborated with Aleister Crowley on some poetry and in some vague sort of debauchery.

There has been some rumbling lately that Russia is once again becoming a country we should be wary of, thanks in part to Putin. The PRI documentary also mentioned he is trying to whitewash Stalin's image in the history books of Russian students. This might explain why on an NPR story about the Volga River, some people expressed dismay the name was changed back to Volgograd from Stalingrad.

The Battle of Stalingrad in 1942, btw, is possibly the bloodiest battle in history.

Part II of the documentary looks at some more recent useful idiots, like those who supported the Hussein regime in Iraq.

Things I am wondering about today

First, what is it about Winter that makes me so listless and unmotivated? Is is the Holidays? Is it that December in Ohio is like living on one of Saturn's moons sans the lakes of Methane? (and the new arsenic-based life. Or...not.) I haven't finished a book in a week or so. I can't seem to concentrate on the one I'm reading and it's a bunch of short stories about the devil. Who doesn't like reading about the devil? I remember I used to work with some fundamentalist people and they were into this book called The Adversary-which is actually the literal Hebrew translation of Satan, I'm always amazed when fundamental types stumble on a legitimate fact-about how Beelzebub was hiding under your bed and making you watch porn and sleep late on Sundays. Satan, he brings readers together. Not even Old Scratch is motivating me currently though. After I work out, I want to sit in front of the television and wish I had a Snuggie.

There seem to be several books called The Adversary so I dunno which one they were getting so excited about.  One of those same people also told me very seriously that Ouija boards are a way that demons can attack you. Ok, making fun of people who believe this stuff is such a cliche but really I'm fascinated. FASCINATED. How can someone be so irrational about one thing but otherwise a functioning, reasonably intelligent member of society? For a cheap thrill, go to Amazon and read the Ouija board reviews. Too many silly parodies but still, intriguing psychologically. Some people are offended they would make a pink one, the better to snag the Hello Kitty crowd.



I did at least find a book on flags of the world at the library that I've been reading. Being able to identify world flags is my new obsession--along with my old obsession of reading reference books cover to cover. I learned that the Confederate flag (obviously not a world flag, thankfully) is an example of a saltire or Southern Cross (or crux decussata if you dig the whole Latin thing.) It's actually the second official flag design the Confederacy came up with and was intended as a battle flag. Some people complained it was "too white" (which is kind of what was wrong with the Confederacy) and looked like a surrender flag. The original flag looked too much like the US flag and apparently troops got confused on the battlefield. Funny the little illuminating details you can pick up in the most random of ways.

I had a history professor in college who said the Civil War was just about States Rights and not slavery which was doomed to end anyways and everyone knew it by then. I repeated this for a few years-the guy was an American history professor so he's know, right? I dunno if that's really accurate though. Wasn't the state's right to allow slavery the question? Lincoln apparently went through several mindsets on the slaves and thought at one point that people would never accept them as citizens and wanted to ship them to Liberia.

Moving on--the damn dog pulled a muscle or something a few weeks ago in the park and I had to take him to the vet. He was prescribed an NSAID called Previcox. What I found curious is the package says it's not for human ingestion. Ok, why not? Not that I need to take my dog's arthritis meds (I have my own-yay?) but I'm curious. I can't find an answer online but I did learn it's a Cox 2 Inhibitor which is what Vioxx was. Hence the "cox" in the name I suppose. Cox 2 is an enzyme that is linked to pain and inflammation and maybe cancer.

I Googled about it and found a story about a guy whose lab died from presumably a bad reaction to Previcox. Disturbing. Luckily, my dog didn't have an adverse reaction. Unluckily, he still seems to be having trouble with his front leg so I might be buying xrays in the new year.

Epistemophilia: quasars and the Catholic Church--both destructive in their own way

So, I was listening to an Astronomy Cast recently about quasars. Here's the thing--I never really understood them. Typically people say something like, "Well, no one does." And this is on the happy occasion that I'm talking to someone who knows what a quasar is, vaguely.

Yes, I know it stands for "quasi-stellar object" or, originally, "quasi-stellar radio srouce" because it was first discovered by radio telescopes in the 1950's and the energy looked like a star but it was red-shifting like a galaxy. The degree of red shift indicated it was moving away from us very fast. Now they are considered high energy galactic nuclei. Wikipedia says that a galaxy hosting an AGN (active galactic nucleus) gets its radiation from the supermassive black hole at its center (I also learned that astronomers originally referred to these as "angry monsters." I like it.)

Wait, does this mean the Milky Way is an active galaxy? We have a supermassive black hole too. NASA says no. An active galaxy is any that emits enormous amounts of energy (xrays, gamma radiation, etc.) caused by an object at its center. I guess we don't emit enough. I expect that's a good thing, to understate.

So, quasars and black holes aren't the same thing, y/y? Correct. The current thinking is a quasar has a spinning black hole at its center. This site explains it well. The intense luminosity comes from gases in the accretion disc. All of the energy in a galaxy added up would equal one of the brighter quasars. They say a large star would have had to collapse to create its black hole.

Ok, on to something completely different. Nicaea. I heard it mentioned recently in a story about the Crusades and I realized I didn't know wtf it actually is. Greece? Turkey? Syria?  It's Turkey, Western Turkey. The town is now called Iznik. It was the capital of the eponymous Empire. One of the Byzantine emperors hid there during the Fourth Crusade-the one where Rome illogically decided to attack Constantinople in 1204. The Catholics then formed the Latin Empire which lasted until 1261. The Byzantines returned to power Michael VIII but Byazntine fell to the Turks under the rule of Constantine XI.

All good preparation for when  I eventually get around to reading Lost to the West.

In A Corpse in the Koryo, Inspector O meets a Finnish/Chinese prostitute named Lena who is also an intelligence operative living in North Korea. The obvious question as to why the hell anyone would live in North Korea on purpose is never addressed. But she mentions growing up on the shores of Lake Keitele in Finland. It's a lake in what Wikipedia says is central Finland (it looks like southern Finland to me.) Alas, I couldn't find anything really interesting about it but it's pretty. Here is a painting of it by a (surprise!) Finnish painter from 1905. The blue of the Scandinavian Cross in the Finnish flag is said to represent the many lakes of Finland.

First and last lines A Corpse in the Koryo

First:

No sound but the wind, and in the stingy half-light before day, nothing to see but crumbling highway cutting straight through empty countryside.

Last:

The girl's book I left where it was, and the flowers too. As I shut the front door behind me and turned toward the station, I thought I spotted a line of geese heading south. They were flying straight as an arrow, high in an autumn sky that was as blue as anything I'd ever seen.

Final thoughts on A Corpse in the Koryo

Whew, maybe not an ideal pick for holiday reading. A novel about North Korea not being a pick me up. Who could have predicted that besides anyone who watches the news ever.

This is the first book in a series about Inspector O, a policeman in North Korea. His parents died in the war (Korean War?) and his Grandfather was a WWII hero who hated the Communist regime. It broke his grandfather's heart when his older grandson went off to "School" (really the Kim Re-education facilities for youth which they still operate) and came back dedicated to the Great Leader. His grandfather was a carpenter which explains O's obsession with wood. He carries different pieces of wood to sit and fidget with. His boss Pak tells him that people wanted to turn him in for having a subversive habit. Let's take a moment and think about how wack North Korea is.

He also rhapsodizes about sandpaper and how hard it is to get. His grandfather hated sandpaper. Who does carpentry without sandpaper? Apparently it was invented by an American in the 19th century according to the book (Yahoo answers tells me the sanding technique may have been invented by the Chinese but an American first patented the production process. Interesting.)

He is used to having his home and office random searched by the DPRK's shadow security forces.

The story, as I mentioned, is confusing in the beginning. O is asked to take a picture of a car on the highway outside of Pyongyang (come to think of it, since Kim turns out to be connected to it, I'm not sure why he was asked. Or was this Kang's idea? I still don't totally understand this story.)  The camera has no batteries. Also, their office teakettle was stolen (O's inability to ever get a cup of tea is one of the few pieces of humor in the story.) This camera thing turns into an incident which the reader understands less than O even. His boss sends him to Kanggye, then Manpo where he meets Kang who wants him to break into what turns out to be a Military Security base. Why? Also don't totally understand. But then a murdered foreigner (a Finn as it turns out) is found in a room at the Koryo and Kang tells O that Pak wants him to return to Pyongyang.

It's at this point in the book where I really started warming up to O. The interviews with MI6 (I am guessing) were kind of confusing (I really don't understand how or why O would be allowed out of the country if he is a lowly Pyongyang detective but maybe that's explained in a future book) but by the end, they helped illuminate O's personality and dry humor. I really like how O keeps "forgetting" to wear his Dear Leader pin. I still don't understand why he wouldn't defect even more than Renko. North Korea give new meaning to shithole.

The dead guy in the Koryo, at any rate, turns out to have been a Finn who is working with Kang on his smuggling information. Kim, the psychotic Military Security leader, also has a car smuggling information. But he hates Kang and his whole department. Kang is trying to sneak his people out. He stays behind so he can get Lena, the Chinese/Finnish operative (or prostitute?), to leave with him. Military Security killed the Finn to send a message to Kang by putting him in the room he had just stayed in with Lena. There's also something about Japan but I didn't totally understand that either. My Asian history is pretty poor like most Westerners. The author mentions most Asians hate Japanese. That's kind of interesting.

By the end, lots of people are dead: Kang, Pak, poor Lena (bludgeoned in the Temple at Hyangsan by...Military Security?), the security officer who was a friend of O's and knew about the smuggling, the desk clerk in Manpo (choked by having his despooled Western porn video shoved down his throat), and maybe Grandma Pak and Kang's daughter, who if not dead is in a labor camp and wishes she were. Who isn't dead is Kim, the man who directly or indirectly killed them all. But, O has set him up to appear he is collaborating with the West by giving them a copy of his passport. Again, what the hell was O doing in Prague?

And the part at the very end after the shootout about O finding a corpse that isn't Kang--does that mean he got away? I think that is what it means. 

The end of the book is dated January, 2003 so this all takes place in 2002 I assume.

I complain about not getting the story but I did like it. Very well put together. Besides what I mentioned above, I don't understand why some people chose to help O. Were they all operatives of Kang? That's hinted at but the desk clerk giving him the bus schedule meant for Kang, I don't really get why he did that. It could also seem like a strange coincidence that everyone O ran into in the mountains seemed to know and have something built by his grandfather but that is where his family lived when O was young I think. The more you know about Korea and its history, the more you'll get out of this.

Final thoughts on The Devil You Know

Well, it wasn't too intellectual but it was kinda fun plus it did have to Google stuff so I give it props for contributing to my data stream.

I really wanted more demonic shenanigans but it was mostly about Felix being hired to exorcise a ghost from the National Archive of Britain. Kind of a fascinating place to set something, enjoyed that bit. Some parts of the story I really liked were his relationships with Cheryl (the Archive computer expert he hooks up with. Alas, their liaison is brief as he ruins her Mom's wedding reception by conjuring the ghost at the Archive in an attempt to find her killer), his roommate and college friend Pen and his other college buddy Rafi who is possessed by the demon Asmodeus. The succubus Ajulutsikael is interesting too although, alas, doesn't seem to have the Google-worthy pedigree Asmodeus does (hey, it was worth a try.) Also, enjoying the way she gruesomely smote the bad guys after Felix cut the silver binding chain.

Urg the damn dog just chewed up the back cover of my brand new Dean Ornish book. What possessed me to think I wanted an animal in the house?


Reminiscent of Butcher's Harry Dresden novels but maybe slightly better. The use of a tin whistle as an exorcism modus vivendi was...I dunno. Unique.  A little hard to get into. Better than holy water and the Latin Mass at any rate. I'd read another one. Another book that doesn't really need first and last lines recorded.

First thoughts on A Corpse in the Koryo

So, I finished The Devil You Know but with the holiday, I haven't been able to post yet. If I'm not too lazy after I work out, I'll do so tonight.

I'm now reading A Corpse in the Koryo which is James Church's first book about a policeman named Inspector O in Pygongyang, North Korea. After I started reading, it belatedly occurred to me that I might not enjoy reading something from a North Korean policeman's perspective (because working for that regime, the ratio of things done for the good of your fellow man has to be low to zilch.) It also was hard to fall into the rhythm of the book but I think it will make much more sense by the end. North Korea is such a wack country that I've had to approach it like I was reading a sci-fi space opera.

There is no corpse yet. The book starts out with Inspector O being asked to take a picture of a car on a road outside of Pyongyang in the early morning. He sees the car speeding thru the countryside sans license plates but can't take a picture because the camera battery is dead (a recurring theme of North Korea living in a strange limbo of a society with 20th century technology but lacking the resources to consistently power it.) This leads to some kind of vague trouble for Inspector O with Military Security and someone named Kang from the Investigations Department (this seems to have something to do with the Party.) The book is disorienting as you are joining a conspiracy already in progress. I suppose that is the intention.

I like the little touches like Inspector O complaining that the Police don't have their own thermos anymore so he can take tea with him on stakeout. They don't have a thermos? I wonder what Kang is up to and if he and Pak are both really dead (the story is alternated with an after the fact interview O has with MI6 somewhere in Eastern Europe. How the hell does he end up there? I guess I'll find out. And more to the point, since he doesn't seem to have a family, why does he even go back to Pyongyang?)

Several things I've had to look up:

• The Koryo is a hotel in Pyongyang. It is a luxury hotel, particularly by North Korean standards, but from what I've read you won't be confusing a stay there with the Ritz. Several reviewers on a travel site made a point of noting how weirdly thin and small the towels there are. Also, guests are not of course allowed to wander the grounds. It is a 45 story twin tower and probably is a striking landmark on the Soviet era-style crumbling Pyongyang skyline. Here are some more pictures of it, showing its best sides. BTW, I was curious about what they charge so I tried to investigate rates on Trip Advisor. For any style room and a variety of dates, they told me nothing is available. Perhaps due to recent Korean Peninsula hostilities there are no rooms at the inn for Americans. 
• Totally beside the point, but one reviewer made a point of saying they didn't recommend getting a massage in the hotel facility but they didn't elaborate. I'm really curious now. Why??
• There is also a Koryo Museum in Kaesong. Koryo refers to a dynasty that ruled Korea during the Middle Ages.
• Kaesong is right on the 38th parallel almost. You can't help feeling extra sorry for the people who live there. They just barely missed escaping the shit-tastic Kim regime.
• Inspector O meets Kang at the Juche Tower. Here are some more Google images of it. It's kind of pretty when it's lit up at night except for the tacky top. It is kind of ass ugly during the daytime. Kim Jong-Il is credited officially as its designer so perhaps that makes sense. 
• Juche refers to the ideology of Korea-centric isolationism that the DPRK ascribes to. It was originally put forth by Kim-Il Sung. 
• Inspector O mentions asking for a transfer to Kanggye and then fleeing there to escape whatever the hell is happening in Pyongyang. He also goes to Manpo later. They are both located in the mountainous Chagang Province on the border with China.  There is little information about it online however you can find a Wiki map of the military base there. 
• As an aside, this area was considered part of the legendary MIG alley
• The border with China is partially demarcated here by the Yalu River. Yalu is a Chinese word meaning "the boundary between two countries." Here is a great picture of the broken bridge across the river, taken on the Chinese side.
• Oh, this is interesting. The Chinese offered to rebuild the bridge if Pyongyang would open their economy instead of being freaks. Not much luck on that, yet. Interesting the Chinese are leading the way in diplomacy with North Korea though, favoring economic aid over sanctions.

North Korea is of course famous among other things for a famine in the 90's where possibly millions died. The tacky monuments everywhere.....I wonder if anyone there is bothered by it. Every show I've seen on North Korea reflects back a brainwashed, robotic populace who was taught that the Great Leader made the sun rise every morning. Curiously, it still rises without fail although he died in 1994. Of course not everyone can be that content because people clearly try and do defect. There would probably be more except for the fact that the defector's families are thrown into concentration work camps. 

I also remember when I was in Syria and we visited the Quneitra Memorial in Damascus. Quneitra being a town in the Golan that was destroyed in the two wars with Israel (1967 and 1973.) It is now in a DMZ occupied by the UN. When we got to the Memorial, one of my classmates pointed out that a North Korean flag was flying there (double props to him for being able to identify that. I need to work on learning my world flags one day.) We asked our guide about it who was a friend of ours. I wish I could remember his name. He was carrying out his mandatory military service by working as a guard at the Memorial (pretty lucky draw for him.) He said that the North Korean people were so moved by the plight of Syria and the Golan they helped pay for the Memorial. It's a pretty elaborate setup with a diorama and a building that looked like it could have been a Smithsonian annex. Now, the North Korean government obviously doesn't give a shit about the Golan Heights and surely doesn't have money to spare. I wonder what the story is about that.  I have a certain affection for Syria having studied there and I really wish they wouldn't join hands with possibly the most vile regime on the planet (it's a tie between that and Iran-oh wait, they cozy up to Iran too.) Sigh, get it together Assad.

More research for The Devil You Know

About midway through the book, Felix goes to Bunhill Fields to clear his mind as he says it's a cemetery for dissenters that hasn't been used in a long time so it's free of ghosts. This is a real place. It was a burial place for anyone outside of the Church of England and includes some famous graves like William Blake, John Bunyan and George Fox-a  founder of the Quakers.

Speaking of Fox, here is a nice quote from him:

"The Papists they cry, Conform.
And the Turk, he cries, Conform.
And did not the heathen Emperors cry, Conform?
And the Presbyterian, he cried, Conform.
And the Independents...
So everyone that gets the uppermost, and gets the staff of authority, commands...
But no law of Jesus requires it, who said, 'Freely you have received, freely give.'"

The word "Bunhill" incidentally derives from "Bone Hill." And it hasn't been used as a cemetery since 1855. There is also a large Quaker cemetery nearby. 

He also mentions John Owen and Isaac Watts are buried there, like the reader should know who they are.   Anyways, looked them up. John Owen was a 17th century theologian. He wrote a lot. He doesn't seem very exciting from a historical perspective. His contemporaries probably had the same reaction.

Isaac Watts was just a kid when John Owen died. He was a prolific hymn writer and wrote some books on logic. 

Carey refers to them as "the reservoir dogs of 18th century theology" (although Owen was 17th century.) I love the Tarantino flick. I don't get the joke.  Damn British humor.

A few more great lines

The Guardian Science podcast had a story about the Ig Nobel prizes (yes, it was a few weeks ago. I'm always behind.) The biology winners were a team that studied fellatio in fruit bats. Which is kind of brilliant. The Guardian science writer said the story made for a "marmalade dropping moment" when reading. That has to set a new bar for Britishisms.

I also read on the FreeThinker blog this great quote from Mencken: “theologian is defined by H. L. Mencken as a blind man in a dark room searching for a black cat that is not there–and finding it."

Epistemophilia: take a ride on heavy metal

Nope not the movie (although I learned recently that squabbling over the music rights kept it out of the DVD market for 14 years.) I was listening to a Brain Stuff podcast on how smoking affects the fetus and they mentioned that smoke contained the heavy metals cadmium and arsenic and I thought--wait, arsenic isn't even a metal. It's a metalloid. And cadmium is kind of in the middle of the transition metals at #48. It's below tin at #50. How are these heavy? And it occurred to me that although I had heard the term many times, I didn't really know what the definition was. I had assumed it was anything of a certain atomic weight-like at the bottom right of the table. Wrong.

(and obviously bismuth is fairly heavy and isn't toxic...)

It turns out there isn't a very good or standard definition. In medical terms, a "heavy metal" is any poisonous metal regardless of its atomic weight. This means that beryllium at #4 is a heavy metal. And, yes, it means arsenic is included even though it's only kinda sorta a metal.

I was only vaguely aware of cadmium being poisonous. It's a common impurity in zinc ores. And excess cadmium can cause something called itai-itai disease (which means "ouch ouch" in Japanese) which causes your bones to soften and kidney failure. It was first discovered, appropriately, in Japan on the island of Honshu. The outbreak was caused by miners polluting local water supplies. This went on from around 1912 until 1946 when measures were started to eliminate the pollution (it also killed all the fish.) Cadmium was not seriously suspected as the cause of the disease until the mid 1950's. The victims eventually sued and won but it wasn't until the early 70's.

I also listened to a Do Nothing But Read about Gothic horror. Usually I like this podcast but I got agitated when one of the podcasters mentioned that Bram Stoker wasn't able to copyright Dracula so everyone stole the character without impunity. The story of the original Nosferatu movie is fairly well known though and contradicts that. Stoker's widow sued for copyright infringement. And eventually won. The prints were all to have been destroyed but some weren't luckily as it's very influential. It also introduced the idea of vampires being killed by sunlight (not Stoker) which writers have been using ever since. Up until Stephenie Meyer that is.

(Florence Stoker wasn't a bad lady. Dracula was just her only source of income.) 

Ok, did some more googling. The podcast got it sort of right. Stoker failed to follow proper copyright law and it was never copyrighted in the States. However, in the UK and other countries per the Berne Convention, it was considered to be copyrighted. Most countries, including the US, are signatories on the Berne Convention. The US did not join, however, until 1989.

The good news is that Universal negotiated with and paid Florence Stoker for the rights to Dracula when they made the 1931 film with Bela Lugosi, even though they didn't have to.

So, I heard two podcasts that I feared contained bad data but they didn't. Sweet.

New words from The Devil You Know

So it's interesting how fast a thing can pass through the cultural grinder turning it into pollen that sticks and shows up everywhere until you are sick of it. So fast. Vampires-urg, no more (except for True Blood.) Zombies? Sick of em and I never thought I'd see that day. I'm even starting to run out of steam on The Walking Dead and it just started. I still want to read the graphic novels though.

Anyways, what supernatural junk food is left? Yup,  demons and the devil. Louis Cyphre. Captain Howdy. I started reading Mike Carey's The Devil You Know which is equally about ghosts and loup-garou. I'm not actually sure if Shaytan makes an appearance in this but that's ok.

I'm surprised by how many things I had to look up in the first two chapters. To whit:

• fly tipping: this is what they call illegal dumping in Britain. 
• paletot: obviously a man's overcoat from the context but I thought it was something special. Nope, just an overcoat. And the final "t" is silent just like you'd think
• tricoteuse: technically this is French for a female knitter but it generally refers to women like Madame Dufarge who knitted during guillotine time during the Revolution. I thought this was just something Dickens whipped up. Who knew? It was a whole social movement of women who started out marching because they were pissed over bread prices. The people loved them. Then, like everything else in the French Revolution, they got scary. Rejected by their own revolution. Like the Red Guards. 
• Asmodeus, who possesses one character, isn't just made up by Carey. He is mentioned in the Talmud and in the Catholics-only Book of Tobit and the Kabbalah. In the Pseudoapocrypha, there is a story that Solomon tricks a demon into building his Temple. That demon was Asmodeus. Jewish mysticism-you gotta love it. Christianity is so freaking boring.

I also like how he refers to himself being compelled to complete an errand like "Ulysses tied to the mast." I think I'd like to go back and read his Hellblazer comics.

First and last The Left Hand of Darkness

First:

I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.

Last:

"I  should like to hear that tale, my Lord Envoy," said old Esvans, very calm. But the boy, Therem's son, said stammering, "Will you tell us how he died?-Will you tell us about the other worlds out among the stars-the other kinds of men, the other lives?"

Final thoughts on The Left Hand of Darkness

I've been on a bad streak with book club choices. Winesburg, Ohio was just ok, even though I had read it and really liked it as a teen. It felt like that, as a book a teen would find profound. I again feel I must be missing something as it influenced everyone including Faulkner and my beloved Steinbeck. Then came White Noise and the less said the better.

But, streak broken because by the end I really liked The Left Hand of Darkness, to the point that when the Envoy travels to Estre Hearth to meet Estravan's kinsmen, I was a blubbering mess. Also funny as a book that up until about halfway through I would have said was interesting intellectually but lacked an emotional connection, I was in fact very emotional invested by the end. The travel over the ice did it. Frozen landscape contrasts with strong emotions. If I could only string a sentence together in an artful way, this would come across so much better.

I really liked the little touches LeGuin threw in: the detail she knew about travelling on ice which I know a little of from reading so many books about Everest, her observation that the electric cars travelling over the mountains were silent (this book was written in 1969-I didn't know electric cars didn't make noise until post-Prius), her contrast of Karhide and Orgoreyn (are there some Soviet parallels in this novel? There must be), the state-sanctioned religion in Orgoreyn which is a watered down greatly manipulated version of the much older Handdara religion of Karhide (this reminds me of the Chinese government's official Christian church.) And so much thought LeGuin put into what a sexless society would look like. The Sarf agent attempts to get the upper hand on Estraven by taking drugs that bring on kemmer and trying to-what?-seduce him? (this is how you know a world-building novel has worked when you take up the language naturally.)

And all the details about Gethen having very few animals, no communal insects and no species suitable for domesticating as a pet. And the Investigators speculation about why the Hainish founders would have tinkered to create a unisex human species and what the evolutionary advantage was (no rape is pretty cool. ) Le Guin is able to take something like never having seen a woman and make you really think what WOULD that be like? And how would you explain it to a Gethenian? And to live among people who think you are a pervert because you are a man (or a woman) all the time? Genly Ai-or Genry to the Karhidians-spent so many years on Gethen that he found male and female voices either too deep or too shrill when he finally encounters them again and thought of them as "great apes with intelligent eyes, all of them in rut, in kemmer." I accidentally discovered that was the ending before I had read it when I was looking at the Wiki article for the book and expected to find it off-putting but it was just right.

I ended up really liking how Estraven became a co-narrator of the story. I didn't immediately see that coming. And I liked that about midway through I had to flip back and re-read some passages to see them with new eyes. And like the narrator, I loved Estraven.

I liked the contrast between the hot-tempered, lively people of Karhide that live in a disorganized monarchy versus the orderly, incurious people of Orgoreyn (the Orgorata) who live in a highly structured and regimented bureaucracy.  Everyone needs papers to travel anywhere or get a job. They have no reaction when raiders from Karhide burn their homes or when they are arrested and shipped off to voluntary farms for re-education. And you can tell they are passionless because their cuisine sucks. 

I think I want to read more Le Guin. There's a lot to think about here. It'll take me a few days to parse it all out.

Epistemophilia: Hans van Meegeren, the fake Christ and art thieves suck

So, while I was in the library the other day, I picked up a book on display about art travel (called Art + Travel) through Europe that actually is really entertaining-and since it's a travel book it has plenty of maps. It provides a lot of information for a travel book and has reproductions on a great number of paintings by Caravaggio, Munch, Van Gogh, Vermeer and Goya. And where to see them.

I wanted to highlight the story of an art forger named Hans Van Meegeren (1889-1947.) He started out as a student of architecture then later tried to become a painter but the Dutch critics weren't very complimentary. He set out to prove the experts wrong and began a career as a forger of Dutch masterpieces, including Vermeer who was from his own home town of Delft. He fooled many art critics and even the Nazis. Goering has one of his fake Vermeers, "Christ and the Adultress" in his collection. And this is how Van Meegeren got in trouble. After the occupation, he was arrested for selling Dutch cultural treasures to the Nazis. To prove his innocence, he painted one of his fakes in court, demonstrating the techniques he used to imitate the Dutch masters and how he made the paint appear aged.

He was given a token sentence of one year for the forgery and became a folk hero among the Dutch for fooling art experts and, even better, the Nazis. Alas, he died of a heart attack before he could serve his sentence.

BTW, the article about Vermeer (my favorite since I love all things Dutch Realism) mentions not much is known about him or his life but he was an admirer of the Dutch painter Carel Fabritius and owned some of his paintings. I don't know him--apparently he was in turn a student of Rembrandt. There is some information about him here.

I'm not the only one who loves Dutch Realism. The most stolen artwork in history is Van Eyck's The Ghent Altarpiece. I remember my art history teacher in college telling us he painted everything to exacting detail using single-haired brushed to get some of the details. You can zoom in and see amazing detail on the crown and the jewels and garments. Seven times it's been stolen and I didn't know this-it weighs 2 TONS. A panel of it is still missing.

A Vermeer was also one of the paintings stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The total value of that theft was around $500 million. None of the items have been recovered and also include works by Rembrandt, Degas and Manet.  The going theory now is a faction of the IRA has them. Apparently,  a lot of art is stolen as bargaining items for international crime. WTF, is the IRA still around? People are pigs, as my Mother often says.

(here's something cool about that Museum: if your name is Isabella, you get in free.)

First and last for Exile

First line:

"Kick it and see," he said.
She felt the foot going into her side, a dull thud ripple through the crippling pain.

Last line:

Vik waited all night. He sat on a bar stool, watching the door for four hours, pretending to chat to Shan about Gram Parsons and Motherwell's lineup. Every time the doors opened he felt sick and nervous. He waited and waited until the bar staff were shouting time, but Maureen never came.

Final thoughts on Exile

So I finished Exile and can really get going on Left Hand of Darkness for book club now.

This definitely had the feel of  a transition book but I really loved it by the end. I even was a bit surprised by the ending. Ann Harris turns out to be alive and in hiding from Frank Toner. A nameless junkie is dead in her place. Kilty Goldfarb is Maureen's pal and I hope she turns up in the last book. Maureen is contemplating killing her Dad to spare her baby niece from being molested too, Mark Doyle is trying to talk her out of it. Leslie is beginning to realize her boyfriend is a douchebag. And Maureen's brush with the drug dealing network makes her look at her ex-dealing brother Liam a little differently now (that and him cheating on his girlfriend when they were in London.)  And a dealer named Neil Hutton got shot up the arse for stealing drugs from Frank Toner. I wonder how literal that is. And you just know, that's probably happened to someone somewhere.

And the Glasgow police have their hands on crazy Angus's threatening letters to Maureen which implicate her in his beating and imprisonment in the last book. I wonder how their seizure of them can be legal but I guess it is under Scottish law since Denise Mina used to lecture on criminology at University.

And oh, the end with poor Vikram. Kind of heart-breaking. I want to read the last book but I'm going to wait a bit and stretch it out.

Epistemophilia: useful idiots and a buggering Amis

I listened to Part II of a BBC documentary on useful idiots, which is what Lenin supposedly called people in the West who unquestioningly supported his regime and parroted his propaganda. Part II dealt with more recent examples of the phenomenon. People in the British and US governments upheld the Pinochet regime in Chile and apartheid in South Africa because they were supposed bastions of anti-communism. They also interviewed a journalist who had written about China under Mao. He said anyone who lived in Hong Kong during the early 1960's would have known how severe the famine caused by Mao was because bodies would regularly float downstream to Hong Kong. He said that he and select other journalists were invited to tour China during the Cultural Revolution and were taken to schools and shown smiling children in classrooms. The only problem was there WERE no children going to school during this period in China. He reminded himself then of the bodies in Hong Kong. He said Mao probably killed or directly caused the deaths of 40 million people. That defies imagination. Who could top that number? Stalin, maybe?

They also interviewed some journalists from Focus, an Iranian English language news agency. They had until recently been given free reign but during the elections last year, the government cracked down on what and how they could report. One reporter quit and then during the protests he called his old office and asked if they were covering the protests. For that, he was sentenced to 117 days in prison. Over 100 of those were spent in solitary. He was subjected to torture and was forced to apologize to the Supreme Leader. While he was there, he was interviewed by a reporter from Focus. The BBC reporter was clearly offended by the notion of a journalist interviewing another journalist in a prison where they were being tortured and not reporting it.

I wonder was there any real value we gained by supporting Chile and South Africa. The Soviets were a general threat to us (and the rest of the world) certainly-we're only now learning how close we came to war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It's easy to look back and blame but I wonder if there was any genuine good that came out of turning a blind eye to a bad thing or was this just more venal stupidity bereft of benefit like the McCarthy hearings? Then again, look at that story about Iran again. Democratic values are useless if they are only sustained by supporting bullshit like that. You end up like the deluded Richard Nixon, criticizing Carter's treatment of the Shah who had been a "real friend" to the US. A real friend to us he may have been but to his own people, not so much. And look how much both the US and Iran has suffered because of our support for him.

It's so hard to get to the real truth of world issues. Science is much easier. Sometimes. I guess the question of whether a Goldilocks planet was really found orbiting Gliese 581g continues and will for some time as more data is analyzed.

Speaking of Stalin, here's a happier story from the BBC about Russia's women fighter pilots during WWII. The Germans called them night witches and spread rumors that they had been injected with some drug that allowed them to see better at night. One German pilot who was shot down by one supposedly refused to fly again when he found out a woman had shot him down. 


On The Guardian Books, they discussed authors who make appearances in their own works. Examples were Milan Kundera, Will Self and Martin Amis. The last one was funny because Kingsley Amis said this was a way of "buggering the audience." I knew vaguely that Kingsley was critical of Martin's work but some didn't realize the extent of it till I googled. The quote is funny but really, poor Martin.

More great lines from Exile

So, this book is a bit drawn-out and meandering. I understand now why Joanne didn't like it as well as Garnethill. Happily, I have Resolution still to look forward to, but I'll put that off since after that I have no more Maureen O'Donnell novels to read.

I still enjoy Mira's writing greatly even if the story lags a bit:

Sarah had left a bundle of Jesus pamphlets on the table. Each had a catchy title on the cover and mesmerizingly bad drawings of Aryan Jesus telling some black people what to do, Jesus having a laugh with some sheep, baby Jesus chortling in a manger....They were halfway through breakfast when Sarah put her figertips on the bundle of Jesus pamphlets and pushed them across the table to Maureen. "Why not have a read while you're eating?" she said. 
Maureen smiled. "You're fucking joking, aren't you?" she said, and the atmosphere deteriorated from there.

Maureen inhaled and felt the nicotine trickle into her system, tickling her fingers, opening her hair follicles, placating the angry rims of her eyes, kicking her into the day. (This description almost makes me want to start smoking. Compulsive Nicorette chewers should probably find something else to read.) 

She could waste years at home trying to make sense of a random series of events. There was no meaning, no lessons to be learned no moral-none of it meant anything. She could spend her entire life trying to weave meaning into it, like compulsive gamblers and their secret schema. Nothing mattered, really, because an anonymous city is the moral equivalent of a darkened room. She understood why Ann had come here and stayed here and died here. It wouldn't be hard. All she had to do was let go of home. She would phone Leslie and Liam sometimes, say she was fine, fine, let the calls get farther apart, make a up a life for herself and they'd finally forget.

Britisms from Exile

There have been several words and miscellany I didn't recognize from Exile so I've looked them up.

Maureen mentions an Aga warming her London friend Sarah's kitchen. Aga is a Scandinavian made stove that is sold throughout Britain-but curiously not in Ireland outside of Northern Ireland. They have a cute, distinctive multi-paneled front to them.

Sarah brings Maureen a plate of kedgeree to eat. It's a dish of boiled rice, fish, parsley, eggs and curry. I do love curry but, frankly, this sounds kinda like ass.

The London Met police tell Leslie they have to take Jimmy to Carlisle to be interviewed since they aren't Scottish. So it makes sense that Carlisle would be close to the Scottish border and it is: about 10 miles. It's in the county of Cumbria. According to WikiAnswers, Carlisle is about 110 miles from Glasgow though. Quite a drive.

(Incidentally, Cumbria just came up on a PRI Geo Quiz. It's where Stan Laurel was born, in the town of Ulverston. He was born Stan Patterson but changed his name, supposedly because he was superstitious and didn't like the 13 letters. There was a recent row in England when a tourism agency in Durham mistakenly printed 50,000 brochures saying Stan was born there.  Ulverston is much farther South than Carlisle though so even if Jimmy weren't being escorted by police who think he's killed his wife, he wouldn't be inclined to swing by there and visit the Laurel and Hardy Museum. Anyways..)

Sarah makes a face when Maureen tells her she has business in Brixton. Brixton is a neighborhood in the South of London. Apparently it's somewhat hip and gentrified now but there are still dangerous areas (Wikipedia helpfully informs me that you should never buy marijuana or cocaine from the dealers at the tube station. You'll either be buying overpriced oregano or get arrested. Helpful safety tip!) It seems like it's a mix of upscale housing, renovated Victorian buildings, music clubs and high crime areas which you should studiously avoid after dark. It's sometimes called the drug (and oregano?) capital of London. It's also a multi-ethnic neighborhood where you can get cuisines ranging from Jamaican to Eritrean. Some asshat set off a nail bomb near the market there in 1999 to ignite a race war. Luckily, it looks like no one was killed and he's now serving a bundle of consecutive life sentences.

Brixton is also the home of The Electric Avenue (the one Eddy Grant sang about.)

Maureen's mother Winnie mentions her estranged perv father Michael is living in a council flat. I gather from the context this is government housing and it appears to be. Evidently, there is a housing shortage in Glasgow. A Glasgow website says if you are low on money, you can apply for Council or Housing Association accomodations but there is a wait and if you are lucky enough to attain this low cost and assured tenancy housing (meaning your landlord has to get a court order to remove you if you don't want to leave), you may not find yourself in the most "salubrious" of areas. I love the Brits and their positive, tasteful spin on the mother tongue. It's not a crime-ridden shithole, it's just not salubrious.

The quotable Salman Rushdie

I heard an interview with Salman Rushdie on the BBC. He's just written a sequel to Haroun and the Sea of Stories. I didn't realize it because I've never followed his fiction career much but it was written during the height of the fatwa crisis. He said he was against thinking that was defined by anger. I always was hesitant about Rushdie because for starters, I usually hate magical realism (unless it's served up with sarcastic yet thoughtful wit a la The Monsters of Templeton) and also because his books always struck me as the sort that academics raved about and yet were totally unreadable. Deciding what to read is going to require some judicious investigation.

First thoughts on Exile

I absolutely love the Scottish writer Denise Mina and her lugubrious heroines (her less lugubrious heroine is Paddy Meehan and, unsurprisingly perhaps, I liked that book less. Some people though consider Meehan favorite of Mina's heroines.) I wish she would write more about Maureen O'Donnell but I guess she favors the trilogy approach so she is, alas, done. She is considered a writer of Tartan Noir. I decided to do some quick research on the term. It was coined by James Ellroy to describe Ian Rankin, whom he considered an exemplar of the genre. The roots of Tartan Noir go as far back as Robert Louis Stevenson but it was heavily influenced by the likes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.  Here are some other Tartan Noir writers, some of whom I'm not familiar with.

I thought Maureen would be happy since at the end of the first book, Garnethill, she vanquished the man who killed her boyfriend, raped mentally ill women and framed her brother Liam for the murder. But she's still depressed and on the outs with Leslie who has a new boyfriend who usurps all her time and likes it when she dresses like a tart (how could you Leslie?) She is tormented by the idea that her estranged father, who raped her as a child, is back in town and living somewhere not far from her. Her mother is still a sloppy drunk who refuses to believe any of it happened. And the police are still hassling her about the circumstances of Angus' capture (him being the rapist/murderer/therapist who Maureen beat the shit out of and framed.) I'll pick a tormented protagonist any day over a plucky heroine who finds love in the most unexpected places.

A woman from Leslie's shelter, Ann Harris, has disappeared and she asks Maureen to investigate. It's also clear Leslie isn't telling everything she knows. The woman has in fact been murdered, as you find out in the opening chapter. In London. And there is of course much more to the story and she's not the ordinary victim of domestic violence she makes herself out to be.

As usual, lots of great lines but here are a few, emphasis on the downbeat:

"Yeah, I'm a shit," she murmured, taking a deep draw on her cigarette, savoring the knowledge of an early death. "I'm a shit. I'm a shit." It was nine forty-five in the morning and she wanted to get drunk and stay drunk.

"Jimmy Harris couldn't hit a tambourine." Maureen took a deep drink of her whiskey and lime and felt the thin skin inside her top lip shrivel in the concentrated solution.

She looked at the address on the scrap of paper. Leslie has scribbled "thanks" as the bottom, as if Maureen were a vestigial friend doing her a favor, an unhappy reminder of the gray time before Cammy and the bracing breeze in her cleavage. 

(Inness being the slightly dense bullying police officer who keeps being sent to question Maureen about Angus and the letters he's been sending her from the mental hospital.)

Maureen didn't know what to say so she told the truth. "You're frightening me," she shouted. 

Inness stopped still. 'I didn't mean to," he said stupidly.

In a TV movie they would have hugged each other, he'd have come back in and they'd have had an honest discussion about their feelings, a sun-dappled moment of tenderness with a stranger, and they'd leave, elevated and touched at their common humanity. But this was Glasgow. "Fuck you," shouted Maureen, and slammed the door in his face.

Pauline was a June suicide...Two weeks after she was released [from psychiatric hospital], a walker had found her dead under a tree. Maureen couldn't stop thinking about her. Her thoughts kept short-circuiting straight from worry to the happy image of Pauline at peace on the grass in springtime, oblivious to the insects crawling over her legs.


She'd [Maureen] known a lot of people and didn't remember liking any of them. She looked down. It was just a short drop. But Jimmy had nothing, and she had 8000 pounds of Douglas' money left....The banks were still open: she could take it all out and drop it through his door. But she might not come back to this point, this part of the windowsill.....It was nice out here with the wind and the rain and Maureen closed her eyes.

BTW, Maureen mentions Liam throwing a Hogmanay party. It's easy to gather that this is New Year's but I wasn't familiar with the expression. Hogmanay is indeed the Scottish name for New Year's. The tradition may go all the way back to the Norse. There are parties and parades and certain traditions of certain foods and drink as gifts that are starting to fade away. The tradition of singing "Auld Lang Syne" originated with Hogmanay.

Epistemophilia: homoagnosia and Dorothea Hoffman

An post with an unintentional word theme.

Dennis pointed out I made a homophone error in a review. Or homonym? I never could keep those things straight. So, I googled it of course and, it wasn't totally easy to reach a conclusion. Some sites don't seem to know themselves. Particularly one home schooling site which makes me fear for the next generation. I went to WorldBook online to get the answer.

Homonyms are words that are spelled and pronounced the same but have different meanings. Like grizzly bear versus The Violent Bear it Away.

All homonyms are a form of homographs. To be a homograph, words are spelled the same but may not be pronounced the same. An example is bass the fish versus bass in your stereo system. Like the asshole neighbor who comes home after the bars close on Tuesday mornings blasting his stereo full throttle loves his bass while I in turn would like to hit him in the face with a rotting bass.

Homophones are words with the same pronunciation but different spellings and meanings. As in what I inadvertently wrote: right versus write. Or their/there.

Finally, I listened to a Poetry Magazine podcast about the poet Dorothea Grossman. She is a lady in her 70's who records her poetry with an improv trombonist.  The poems made me smile plus they were able to convey a complete visual and tell a story in such a brevity of lines. I think I'm going to have to seek out her CD. Here are a few of her poems. The first two were on the podcast, read by Dorothea herself. I sometimes have difficulty listening to poems being read because I need to read the lines but these were short enough and her style of reading was so witty and engaging that it's worth seeking out audio of her readings. Not all poets liked to read their own work publicly (including one of my favorites, Elizabeth Bishop.)

I have to tell you

I have to tell you,

there are times when

the sun strikes me

like a gong,

and I remember everything,

even your ears

Noon Concert

These frail, white widows

who get their hair done weekly

in tight curls,

like little flowers,

bend their heads

until the applause

says it’s time

to be brave again.

Spring

The murderer,
on his way to work,
stops to admire the wisteria
framing his doorway,
and waves
to the bug-eyed azaleas.

(I don't know what this last one is called but it was the funniest of the lot. I found it here:)

Ernest Heminway and Soren Kierkegaard 
liked to write standing up at a podium.
I hear you ask, "Why?"
I do not know for sure
but it must have been uncomfortable
after, say, 15 minutes,
which might explain
the darkness of their work,
or even why
nobody cares about them
anymore.

 There is an interview and a sample of her poems here.

Final thoughts on God is Not Great

 I really got stuck in the mud with Hitchens. I think it would work better to read it in parts when the mood hits rather than straight on from cover to cover. I will say it really crystallized my feelings about religion. The damage to human society clearly outweighs its ephemeral benefits. We can create secular structures to feed the poor, etc. In fact, we have. What's much harder is mitigating the effects of their war on science, on free thought, on minorities, on homosexuals, the terror and murder committed in your wholly imagined deity's name. I already felt the Vatican was morally culpable for their stance on condoms in Africa but I didn't realize they also spoke out about Salman Rushdie when the fatwa was issued on his life. But wait-not in his favor. Against him for defaming a world religion.

It also seems clear to me that banning gay marriage on religious grounds is CLEARLY a violation of separation of church and state. 

I remember once asking a Deacon about how the Church's stance on contraceptives/AIDS was valid (it's a long story how this came about) and he said, well isn't it true those people are doing something they shouldn't do anyways? So, they shouldn't be fucking? Sorry to break it to you dude but this is a biological imperative for most humans and no amount of beads or magic water is going to change that. What if they are married? After all, the Church does tell married people in Africa that they can't use condoms even if a partner is infected with AIDS and spreads rumors they don't work. Which make them both immoral and stupid. God, fucktard. I wish I had said all of that to him (except maybe the fucktard part.)

I think that's another reason I had to quit reading. It made me too angry. I did highlight some passages I liked. Way too many to preserve here. I'm glad I bought the book at any rate.

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.