The illustrious Perdido Street Station was an interesting read with a lot of ideas, but well... enthusiastic with clunky young writer prose. Even the the author himself admitted in an interview that the writing was perhaps not quite up to snuff. But China Mieville has grown up. Or rather grown into his skin. And Kraken is just so. Incorporating street slang and meta hipness with egghead meta philosophizing. Mieville has perfected the expository paragraph - compact and communicative, drawing in with clauses and expelling with statement, inserting 411 packages rhythmically into the windup structure and noir dialogues to make the story hum.

Kraken is a grown man's Harry Potter (a comparison that Mieville slyly references), set in a London underworld teeming with magic but dirtier, grittier and much more violent. Mieville's obsession with the urban world and contingent conspiracy is less cut and dry in Kraken than Perdido Street. Reversal and intrigue reveal the man behind the plan, behind the other man behind the other plan and all the cockroaches taking advantage of any weakness in between. This is no criminal mind forcing his vision lockstep into being, but a messy sort of survival, where bits of meaning catalyze and go extinct on the constantly mutating fodder of human belief. Not surprising then, that the battle between Faith and Darwin is the fulcrum on which the story revolves.

There really is a lot of esoteric to chew on in this novel but the cranky, sarcasm and breakneck pace throws you into the fray front-loaded with information; an experience of truth seeing as malleable and consensual, elided meanings, always being made and broken and never really understood till just too late, a messy process that not only rewrites history but revises it as if the former never was.

Biographies are a kind of mirage, a layer of one person over another, a layer of time over the past, everything constructed, artificial, or perhaps overly factual in an effort not to be artificial, although there's always a feeling that the entire narrative is an act of fiction and that the subject not only disappears but will never have been once the film is inevitably wiped away. Truth in identity, then, is illegible in domestication, and best avoided. However, the biography of Science Fiction author Alice B. Sheldon, also known as James Tiptree, also known as Racoona Sheldon, compels for illuminating exactly that conflict.

"To grow up as a "girl" is to be nearly fatally spoiled, deformed, confused, and terrified; to be responded to by falsities, to be reacted to as nothing or as a thing - and nearly to become that thing. To have no steady routine of growth and training, but only a series of explosions into unwanted adulation - and then into limbo. The world was not my oyster." - Alice Sheldon 

Julie Phillips doesn't create a vivisection for our study, but delicately knots together the contradictory desperation, drives, and desires that eventually allowed Sheldon in the guise of a man, to reveal herself to the world. From Phillips, we empathize with the intensely, internally mercurial Sheldon and her public elusiveness, even to herself. The relief then, when Tiptree allows Sheldon to drop her own baggage for a moment to speak and be heard, is both in the biography and the work. Her fatalism is there too. In a way, Sheldon's entire life is a coming of age story that is cut short, one in constant flux with it's own narrative, self aware and disguised, but much realer for it.

"Tip" started publishing only in her late years, and that work is some of Sci Fi's best. Dr. Ain, the short story on which 12 Monkeys, and before that, La Jetee, is based, come on like a fever, quaking through the theme of suicide dreamlike and neurotically towards the impending apocalypse, and carrying the fatalism heavily and rationally. Often told from the perspective of "innocent" contemptuous male narrators, Sheldon's stories express a deep outrage for the workings of gender politics, letting slip the masks of female acculturation for those in the know, to reveal the deep rage and violence beneath. At once fielding the morally squishy and hard science with instincts of a thriller, Sheldon's work defies gender authorship but is labile with feminism.

Accordingly, the book takes the temperature and meaning of Sci Fi through decades, first personally for the author and culturally, as context. As a fan, this peep into the heady world of Golden Age and New Wave editing rooms is a particular treat, how our tastes are shaped, what humanist principles those editors were trying to sculpt, and in particular, how institutionalized ideas of gender restricts our understanding of the hard/soft paradigm of Sci Fi at large. Pleasant asides: Sheldon's tentative wooing of various authors through erudite letters assigned to Tiptree, and his penetration into the circle of sometimes similarly reclusive people, their collective work creating a safe harbor for the deranged, the damaged, the insightful and oppressed, in other words - the alien.


Note: Reading this biography was a highly personal experience. But I think anyone who has suffered from or is interested in the effects of repression or depression may gain something from both Sheldon and Phillip's insight. While Mad Men's Sally Draper is definitely an unsympathetic character, I imagine that in some sense she, and all the other women on that show, would empathize in a primal way if not fully understand Sheldon's personal despair of "seeming" just a woman yet "being" so much more.


NPR interview with Julie Phillips.


Rare, for me, promotional Amazon link to Sheldon's short story collection,  Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.

I suppose an education of classics has always been penciled on my bucket list, but navigating the prolific output of the genre and separating wheat from chaff is a daunting task. Spurred by the quality of The Stars My Destination, I'm planning on wending my way down the list of SF Masterworks, a series of out-of-print sci-fi novels republished by Orion/Gollancz. My hope is to discover some writers I may have missed, and visit left of center novels of authors I enjoy. Also of interest, are the Gollancz Future Classics, and Fantasy Masterworks titles. Apparently these objects are highly collectible, but seeing as how I'm mostly interested in content, I'm sure I'll find most books at the library.

Bonus:

Edward Gorey's online comic strip interpretation of Star Trek episode, The Trouble with Tribbles.

The Stars My Destination - Alfred Bester

This book is on countless best of sci-fi lists and for very good reason; hard and soft, prose and pulp, literary and accessible, scientific and mystical, fantastical and satirical, cyberpunk and steampunk, fastpaced and thoughtful... Hitting the sweet-spot between the directives of speculative techno/cultural fiction and new-wave psycho emo/humanism is a rarity - a feat even more astonishing, given the truly well-crafted storytelling and Bester's liberal though accomplished writing style.

There's almost nothing, including my typical gender nitpicks, that I really dislike about this book, from premise to structure to execution. And while countless imitations, spin-offs and sub-genres have centrifuged away from Bester's serialized novel with enough conviction of their own, The Stars My Destination manages to think and read fresh more than 50 years later. An excellent read.

The Blade Itself (The First Law), Joe Abercrombie

Abercrombie's first novel reads like one of the Coen Brothers more violent movies, with blood spattered everywhere and wry dialogue. But where the Coens are calculated and sparse, Abercrombie is halfway to a potentially cheesy version of cheesy 80's fantasy classics on tv. The scope may be a tad ambitious, but on a whole, the book is easy to take in even with all the blood and gore.

I appreciate the author's handling of magic. While all fighting is described viscerally, furiously, and becomes almost baroque, the magic doesn't include a lot of flowing robes, muttering of abracadabra, exposition on mechanics, or zipping lances of light which explode into fireballs. Instead, the magic happens internally, producing dramatic results without mysticism shrouding the proceedings. In fact, it feels more dangerous this way. Ultimately, I appreciate Bayaz, the magi and not-so-simple butcher. I like him a lot in fact and am glad that Abercrombie leaves the mystery intact.

Abercrombie's greatest strength is the unusual humor that his characters are prone to wittingly or unwittingly inspire. However, sometimes the transition for their actions seems rushed and implausible, the reconciliation between the inquisitor and West for example. Overall, the author developes a unique tone of brutal animism and satirical farce that spar from chapter to chapter and at the end, from scene to scene within the chapter. This structural climax is where the slow construction of the book shines. The clash/knitting together feels highly intuitive and natural, mirroring the plot and reinforcing the connections between the characters. And while the stereotypes themselves come from a shallow barrel, their perspectives are broached slightly off center enough for the reader to get something out of it. Logan, the barbarian, is a cipher through most of the book, withdrawn and full of internal conflict, but by the end of the tale, when Abercrombie shoves us into the mindset of his berserker rage and hacks down corrupt minions, we understand where all that comes from. This structurally devised suspense was subtle enough when it needed to be yet satisfyingly dramatic. The weight of the images is all words here and works quite well.

While the slow pace and unusual structure of climaxes in the book didn't bother me, much of the fighting scenes are simply descriptive scenic detours, ones that didn't really move the plot as much as get the characters from one place to another. They felt almost extraneous, a novelized version of a flashy film scene - or what I'm calling action writing. Like an action movie you can fast forward through them and sometimes not miss a thing. I'm not sure that this kind of detailed play by play serves a book that flirts with being an epic. The intensity actually makes the book seem slower than it really is.

This is not only just literary snobbery talking - to show and not tell - because don't get me wrong, Abercrombie is good at telling about picturesque medieval gore, but some aspects of the written word don't translate well or easily to cinema in terms that we are used to, and so the reverse. I wouldn't put that down as a universal rule but perhaps any discussion of action writing should be spoken about in tandem with the bias against cinematic spectacular, particularly, the argument that they are essentially empty of meaning but visually rich. And while this becomes a hairy topic when comparing visual and visual meaning, it is even more strange to find such a comparison between written images and mental ones. I can't quite circle my finger around the entire objection right now, but the distance between reading and imagining is part of it. Perhaps this novel has a workmanship that I can't appreciate, like a really good splatter scene in a slasher movie, or a particularly fine special effect in a sci-fi flick. Maybe The Blade Itself is more like porn and romance novels in function. In that case, this book is genre bending and pretty awesome right?

Definitely uneven, The Blade Itself accomplishes some sound literary feats that I appreciate. The author's prose is serviceable enough, if not completely polished, but falls apart as a story when indulging in description or weak plotting that perhaps work better on screen. Definitely flawed, but I'm invested in the characters and their backstory enough to be curious about the next novel in the series. If there's just going to be a lot more "telling" however, I'm going to take it as an invitation to bash the fast forward button.

Edit: The second two novels made no impression except more of the same unfortunately. Perhaps this a flaw in my ability to pick up the pleasures of such a text.

Not the film based on Do Angels Dream of Electric Sheep, but The Bladerunner, a 1974 novel by Alan Nourse. In some near future, good health care is provided to anyone who agrees to pay the fee - sterilization. Those who don't want to comply with these terms are forced to turn to black market practitioners. The idea is to weed out those who have genetic diseases or those with less immune resistance, allowing the rest to breed healthier, stronger children. Truly deadly epidemics, however, choose victims indiscriminately regardless of healthcare choices. The book is really a cautionary tale about the dangers of "socialized" or two tier medical systems.

I suppose in the the early 70's, this doomsday prediciton may have sounded like a pile of invisible cymbals making an unnecessary din, or communist evil. But substitute "lots of money" in place of sterilization and "HMO/single payer/insurance" for government medical center and Nourse's book is amazingly prescient. Some of these fears have become founded - a two class system of those who have and don't have healthcare, "free" clinics = black market, mutated man-made super virus, children with poor immune defense systems, etc. We have yet to see if nationalized healthcare will produce such a staggering social program like the one in The Bladerunner, but we know that China ran such an experiment for a long time. To think of this story loosely and in global terms is important because disease is transmitted in exactly that way.

The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen -  Grace Young

Mine are not the sharpest in the drawer.
Here is how to get yours to slice through a hair long-ways.

Several classics appear in this cookbook, such as a detailed recipe for trice cooked lechon kawali and bibingka, as well as some harder to find staples such as pancit malabon. Be aware that some liberties exist. The adobo recipe includes coconut milk. By the authors admission, the puto recipe is omitted entirely for being too difficult. While there are a lot of "stories" and glossy pictures, there are some familiar dishes missing such as the more ubiquitous pancit palabok. With such heft, this book falls short of being a bible and is organized somewhat erratically in terms of recipes. Perhaps there's a more authentic or comprehensive, in the lax terms of Philippine cuisine, book out there, but I have yet to come across it. Until such a tome appears, this one will do more than fine.

Update: The New York Times published this article in which one of the authors admits that given a choice she wouldn't add coconut milk or soy sauce to her adobo. Why they include both ingredients in a published recipe is beyond me. Perhaps they are catering to a Western clientele? My marinated adobo, with coconut milk, is on the stove later today, so I will have to see how I feel about it.

Realist writer Moravia, lays down the truth bomb on a tortured relationship in, Contempt, and fascism in, The Conformist, both translated into film by Godard and Bertolucci respectively. The writer is intensely interested in misrepresentation, the point at which projection becomes invisible or decadence begets a need for order, and thus, the cinematic interpretations accurately depict tenuous idylls ruptured with a kind of paradox.

As incisive as McTeague, by Frank Norris, Moravia performs a dissection of human fallibility within the framework of external pressures. In the novels, though the object is always meaningfully and maddeningly obscured, the drive for clarity is precise. When the omniscient narrator is removed, complicated internal dialectics become flattened and baffling on screen. Instead, the audience needs to succumb to the aftereffects, pure visual interpretation, become mere humans wallowing and wading through the muck as best we can. Remarkable how much gets lost in and without language.

A baffling trip to Trader Joe's for Burgundy a la Beef Bourguignon, prompted me to check out Drink This at the library - by Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl, with informative review here. In an unpretentious and practical voice, the author guides the novice through basic knowledge of history and wine making, provides a rubric to identify characteristics of specific species of wine, how to compare them and what to eat them with.

The Goal: Hopefully to lead budding oenophiles towards an assured recognition of their own taste preferences rather than inculcate what is "good."

I think this approach would also serve as solid practice when navigating all sorts of pedantic obsessions that might cross ones path in life such as opera, pizza, late 90's trance, contemporary fiction, French New Wave films, and politicians - in other words, all topics subject to subjectivity and dominated by intimidating eggheads.

While it's great to be informed, it's better to Be open. Be methodical. Like what you like. Even if what you like is Twinkies. Those Comp Lit skills ought to come in handy somehow.

Insight, uncovered through solid research and exposed by accessible prose, is what this collection has to offer. Familiar institutions suddenly shed their formidable monumentalness, instead they are revealed as a series of individual tics and half rationalized compromises. Gladwell tends to construct these narratives laterally, first stepping in one room and then a different one and yet another, before finally linking them together as incontrovertible evidence. Commonly held views on human behavior and social systems are questioned. Often debunked. Questions you never thought of are posed and answered.

In a way, he is teaching us how to process information and facts and intuition, how to put them together, how to change your perspective, because really how does one go about doing that - changing a perspective as if it was like changing a light bulb? The journalist doesn't just hand the expose to us and admonish, instead he leads the audience gently to epiphany, teaching the reader how to learn, how to warp our own ingrained perceptions, so that the insights are exposed.

This Yale Press coffee table book features deliciously large photos that show design detail with great clarity. Considering the intent of the author to prove American designers have innovated as much as their international peers, Mears unfortunately describes garment construction textually when a simple pattern image would have illuminated the same point in a more concise way. Perhaps the publisher believed a lay audience wouldn't respond as well to flattened models, but some of the more architectural designs actively insist on a plan view. However, her narrative on how dressmaking and tailoring have evolved in response to a particular lifestyle is invaluable to an understanding of new silhouettes and approaches to American design. I especially appreciated the cross section of Charles James' Clover Dress.

She's put the spell on me, that Elizabeth Bear, with her tersely modulated prose and bitter lovemaking. All the Windwracked Stars, a cyber-norse apocalypse story, and the tragic prequel, By the Mountain Bound... Good Stuff! My favorite scene? Glistening toadstools in a barren land.

Also occult sorcery, wampyr, steampunk, and Victorian politics collide in New Amsterdam, a fetching novel that sets a stage of mystery and intrigue that leads to Seven for a Secret.

For anyone living down the shame of a fallen souffle or recovering from a disastrous holiday dinner; Sensible, funny, durable kitchen lessons from chefs who have gone through a whole lot to get where they are, creating the most amazing dishes at the top of the food chain through refinement after persistent refinement, and sometimes by grotesque accident.

'Such is the nature of the passionate cook, even at the fledgling stage. And, as Samuel Beckett so succinctly put it, forbidding us to dwell on our disasters or give up, "Try again, fail again, fail again better."'--Tamasin Day-Lewis.

This Alastair Reynolds novel is rife with verbose exposition, redundant in presentation, weak on dimensional characterization, poorly paced, with an utter lack of satisfying concrete prose. In short, an overlong mess with a very well reasoned premise. Why am I still reading this bloated book? Well, Alistair Reynolds throws out compelling ideas with a whiff of noir and techno-dystopia sci-fi, and in this case steampunk, cowboys and angels are tossed around too, but without any overly reverential genre aping. The effect is a new flavor of cybershake for our modern times and sciences with a big melancholy payoff in the end. So, I continue, sighing over each sentence begrudgingly, wishing Reynolds would develop a better command, or at least more of an interest in his words as he does in exploring his immense technical knowledge and imagination.

On the cover, this image of the spire city really helped me to understand what the world was about, how it was constructed, etc. A rare confluence of illustration and story. Although, some niggling part of me feels that I shouldn't need the picture for explication purposes.

"These are the last things. A house is there one day, and the next day it is gone. A street you walked down yesterday is no longer there today. Even the weather is in constant flux. A day of sun followed by a day of rain, a day of snow followed by a day of fog, warm then cool, wind then stillness, a stretch of bitter cold, and then today, in the middle of winter, and afternoon of fragrant light, warm to the point of merely sweaters. When you live in the city, you learn to take nothing for granted. Close your eyes for a moment, turn around to look at something else. Nothing lasts, you see, not even the thoughts inside you. And you mustn't waste your time looking for them. Once a thing is gone, that is the end of it."

Suicide groups, melamine milk, middle class apathy, vicious hunger, despair and disillusionment; approximations of these current events are both described and foretold in Paul Auster's seemingly timeless, placeless depiction of human society gone to shit. In the Country of Last Things has the raw atmosphere of Jerzy Kowalski's Painted Bird, highlighted by Auster's signature symbolic play, but the book skews experiential rather than intellectual.

Seven for a Secret - In which a life-weary wampyr and his aged mortal coven uncovers an alter-universe plot of world domination by a Nazi-ish Prussian government, a plot where little girls are schooled in the way of becoming deadly supernatural murderers in the Fascist army.

Bone and Jewel Creatures - A geriatric sorceress is confronted by a mutilated child-jackal of the streets, a warning from the chauvinistic lover who once spurned her, a lover and necromancer whose plague fueled rotting army she must overcome with the own ability to return life to inanimate things.

These books are dense, if a little bit compressed, tidy, full of anticipation, and for most of those reasons are delightful novelettes to delve into. Elizabeth Bear, the author, has an easy prose style and a vivid goth/steampunk sensibility. And while these stories are very full with themes of aging, death and transcendence, Bear's imagery doesn't get overburdened with just symbolism - wilted rose petals and maggots for death, or skeletal animations that represent a reincarnation of sorts. Rather, her facility with narrative modes underscores the personal amidst the incipient death drive behind the Wizard's War in Bone and Jewel Creatures, or the weary inevitability of war in Seven for a Secret. Those half buried resentments or regrets, still feral - as in Highsmith's animal books - rattle in fabulist worlds, highly honed with detail, and take on the atmosphere of an old school fairy tale - a grisly Grimm one.

Beef Burgundy the Julia Child way. Browned beef, carrots and onions, with a bouquet of herbs in cheesecloth.
Pearl onions and mushrooms sauteed separately on the side. Heat veg in the dish before serving.

I prefer the finished result to the CI method, even with just one bottle of Charles Shaw from TJ. Richer flavor and deeper sauce with only a little more effort. Both recipes are leisurely cooking so might as well go whole hog.

From Mastering the Art of French Cooking, a book so well organized, it makes you wonder why not everyone writes them like this... A great read, unlike the encyclopedic French classics, with useful notation. Ingredients are detailed on the left with coherent instructions on the right. In depth variations,such as Carbonnades a la Flamande, follow the master recipe for beef stew. Plus the techniques and explanations to achieve results. Oh, and a sense of humor besides.

" I don't care if I pass your test.  I don't care if I follow your rules.  If you can cheat, so can I.  I won't let you beat me unfairly.  I'll beat you unfairly first." --Ender"