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.