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?"