Patrick O'Brian's THE FORTUNE OF WAR

Very nearly everything bad, or at least unpleasant, that can happen to an 18th century sailing man happens to Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin in The Fortune of War, the sixth in Patrick O'Brian's amazing chronicles of life in England's Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, making this novel perhaps the most aptly titled of the series. Though maybe it should be The Misfortune of War instead?

And they don't just happen for the sake of happening, these misfortunes. Pretty much everything that befalls our splendid duo is in some way a consequence of a prior adventure of theirs, or of suppositions relating to those adventures, to wit the "horrible old Leopard" which they barely survived commanding in Desolation Island and limp into New Holland after having been given up for dead at the beginning of The Fortune of War. The Leopard was an actual and infamous ship due to an incident in 1807 when its crew attacked the USS Chesapeake as part of an effort to capture some deserters from the Royal Navy, causing a diplomatic row and earning the Leopard a bad reputation among Americans*, with which reputation Jack Aubrey is tarnished when a series of calamities land him as a sort of convalescent/prisoner in Boston.

All that, though, is merely prologue to the land-based adventures of Maturin in Boston! For at its heart, The Fortune of War is a spy novel, and Maturin has been a very effective secret agent, even to planting a heap of poisonous misinformation on American spy Aphra Behn Louisa Wogan last novel, a feat that has resulted in serious disruption of the French intelligence effort, who weren't suspecting a pretty American dilettante would be so manipulated until it was too late and several of France's own agents were dead, dismembered, exiled, etc. This and other feats of espionage and counter-espionage render Maturin a marked man once he and Jack Aubrey find themselves prisoners of war in America, and in Boston specifically, which is crawling with French agents now that America, too, is at war with Britain. Yowza.

And of course, this is also the novel in which Maturin sort of half-assedly gets his heart's desire -- meaning the dashing, courageous, graceful and good-looking Diana Villiers, who has broken said heart several times but is now as trapped in America as are Maturin and Aubrey and Needs Stephen's Help. Just as Stephen has sort of decided maybe he's not in love with her anymore. Ah, me.

On to the next Napoleonic War adventure!

*And is also considered by some to be one of the causes of the War of 1812.

Patrick O'Brian's THE MAURITIUS COMMAND

I'm realizing anew, this read-through of the Aubrey-Maturin novels, how much this series really depends on its fascinating array of guest stars, of which there are two in The Mauritius Command, both of great and sad importance: Captain Corbett, a vicious "flogging captain" whose idea of discipline is severe even by the standards of Nelson's navy, and Lord Clonfert, with whom Jack once served as a youngster but who hasn't done quite as well as Jack since. So, um, uh oh. We see trouble before we even meet the gentlemen in question.

We meet them on Jack and Stephen's latest mission, to take charge of a frigate, hang a commodore's broad pendant on it (thus signifying that Jack is, at long last, to command a squadron!) and head out to the African islands of Mauritius and La Reunion, there to take these potentially highly strategic islands away from the French, who are doing rather a half-assed job of using them as a base for action in the Indian Ocean. Consult a quality atlas if this confuses.

The action in The Mauritius Command highlights better than any we've seen so far just how much military vessels of this time period and since served as vast mobile artillery batteries. How else can ships take on an island? Float around and around in that effortless-looking way and unleash hell with the big guns on anything that looks like it might contain Frenchmen. Boom! And if the French are so bold and impetuous as to send out ships of their own to put a stop to this harassment, well, Commodore Lucky Jack Aubrey knows how to take care of those. This all goes off tolerably well, but for a couple problems, problems intimately tied in with the personalities of the two guest star captains I mentioned above. The trouble with Corbett is pretty straightforward; his crew are tired of getting fifty lashes every time a bit of tar plops down to mar the perfection of Corbett's decks and thus grow mutinous. The trouble with Clonfert....

Ah, Clonfert. Lord Clonfert is one of the most fascinatingly tragic characters O'Brian has written. A son of the Irish aristocracy -- who are not considered Irish by the Irish and are not considered real aristocrats by the rest of their class in the U.K. -- he's already got a chip on his shoulder before Jack shows up on the scene. Once Jack does, Clonfert pretty much loses it (and he's bi-polar to boot, I should mention; his crew are used to his mood swings and tolerate them because sailors "dearly love a Lord", but Stephen and Clonfert's own surgeon spend a lot of the novel shaking their heads over Clonfert's case) and mounts an all-out campaign to prove that he's just as good as his old shipmate, with disastrous results.

Fortunately, even as Jack is dealing with the consequences of having Corbett and Clonfert under his command, he is also working closely with an army colonel that is an infantry version of Jack himself, the capable and vaguely Sharpe-like Colonel Keating. Together they manage to overcome most of the obstacles created by the fractious captains. Most of them.

For of course, no officer, however capable, has any control over what his superiors say or do, or where they show up, just in time to steal his thunder. Feeling outraged on Jack's behalf is, however, all part of the fun of reading these novels.

And fun they most certainly are!

Summer of Jest Part the Eighth - Chapter 11, Mostly

So now the Entertainment, aka the Samizdat, has claimed lots of victims, we meet yet another character (Tiny Ewell) who's on his way to his rendezvous with all of the other characters in rehab, we've learned that the United States Bureau of Unspecified Services thinks the Quebecois Wheelchair Assassins are responsible for the distribution of the Entertainment (and have only gotten hints so far, via perhaps the extensive footnote that lists JOI's entire filmography in exhausting detail, as to who the creator of said Entertainment might be) by way of protesting/fighting against the Great Concavity/Convexity (into which the United States' Empire Waste Disposal service literally flings great catapult loads of U.S. trash -- it's a giant uncleaned Superfund site-cum-landfill occupying territory that used to be Maine and Vermont and New Hampshire, is the Concavity), and that junior tennis players are stressed out, self-medicated and weird.*

I won't say that all the pieces are in place, but quite a lot of them are, enough to where DFW now indulges, in Chapter 11, in quite an extensive round of character development via first, a bitching session in the locker rooms of E.T.A. after PM drills, when all the upperclassmen are showered and trying to work up the energy for dinner and Little Buddy time and are just venting their frustration and paranoia and annoyance and exhaustion, and then the Little Buddy sessions as well, in which DFW winds up pulling a Ted Sturgeon (for an explanation of that see footnote to this post) in that midway through the Big Buddy riff he stops identifying speakers and rooms altogether and just lays heaps of dialogue on us and we can tell which speaker is easily, if we've been paying attention at all.

Curiously missing in all of this, I notice this time around, is any actual spoken dialogue from N.R. (as in "Not Really") John Wayne, the one ETA student most clearly destined for the pro circuit ("The Show"), whose portrayal reminds me a lot of DFW's real life portrait of middling pro Michael Joyce for Esquire magazine (also collected in his A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again); he is focused completely on his game (and on a certain semi-illicit liaison we'll learn about later, but that doesn't require him to talk much, either. Though how he'd get a word in edgewise...) to the point of seeming terribly dull. He says close to nothing, letting one of his Little Buddies do the talking for him in his session and his only contribution to the conversation in the locker room bitching session is to lift one leg, Canadian style, to fart.**

Which speaking of farts, there is a hilarious conversation about to fart or not to fart in one of the Big Buddy sessions, conducted in earnest, that kills me every time.

There really is something for everyone in Infinite Jest...

*Like using Lemon Pledge for sunscreen weird. Which my friend Heather and I are now borderline obsessed about, this time around. Are there people out there who really do that? Because it has the weirdly specific ring about it of something that DFW, once a middling junior tennis player himself, actually did and is recalling with his trademark mixture of fondness and horror. Does anybody know? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

**Again, I'm wondering if this is really a thing. I've spent a bit of quality time in Canada and never observed this behavior and suspect it's urban legend, but...?

Alastair Reynolds' THE SIX DIRECTIONS OF SPACE #ReReads2013

A prized possession of mine is a limited signed edition of The Six Directions of Space in hardcover, and not just because it is a limited signed edition, my only signed Alastair Reynolds (to date; hope springs eternal while there is life, etc.), but because it is one of the coolest stories ever, and I do not engage in empty hyperbole there.

Three words. MONGOLS. IN. SPACE.

Yes, that's right, oh my blogettes, this story concerns the future that sprang from an alternate past in which the Mongol Empire did not fall apart after the death of Temujin, better known to history as Genghis Khan, but went on to conquer the entire world, which became known simply as Greater Mongolia. Sure, there are still pesky pockets of, e.g., Buddhists and Nestorian Christians and the odd Muslim here and there, but basically the Mongol culture, horses and all, dominated everything right up to and including humanity's journey to the stars.

A funny old thing, though, Mongols in space. The culture transmits to a space-born empire pretty well, if one can imagine people taking their steppe ponies with them on their spaceships (and hey, Reynolds has depicted a people who plan to take elephants into space with them, so why not ponies?) and still functioning without the Zero, which these Space Mongols still insist is a fruity Arab affectation they'll have no truck with, even though it makes their science and engineering a bit clunky and cumbersome. These are people who get drunk on fermented mare's milk and found a way to sing more than one note at a time, folks. They do stuff their own way. Even in space.

I'm ever astounded at how Reynolds managed to convey the scope and sweep, not only of a galactic Mongol Empire, but of what is essentially a multiverse, in just 85 tight pages.* And it's not just this empire he's describing, but its unique settlement of inhospitable worlds, like in this passage:

"There were no fixed communities on the moon. Instead, immense spiderlike platforms, mounted on six or eight intricate jointed legs, picked their way across the ever-shifting terrain in awesome slow motion."**

 And oh, there's a tight and nifty little plot that still manages to convey a sense of grand scale, too. It involves a secret government agent, a woman named Yellow Dog (one of a series of Reynolds' ass-kicking female characters who would not pass a Bechdel test so much as beat the crap out of you -- literally or metaphorically -- for suggesting it to her) whose mission is to investigate a series of phantom intrusions into the empire's (found and scavenged, a la the Gateways in Frederick Pohls' Heechee books***) interstellar transport network, and who runs afoul of a petty official who turns out to be anything but -- and discovers some mind-blowing secrets about the way things really work out there.

Truly a marvel, this one.

*Anyone who accuses him of bloat obviously hasn't had a look at this story (or any of his short fiction for that matter).

**Shades again of Volyova's Spider Room on the Nostalgia for Infinity in Reynolds' Revelation Space universe.

***Thus perhaps a bit too neatly solving the problem of how a zero-less science and society would someday achieve faster-than-light travel, but I don't care. It's awesome. Did I mention it's Mongols in Space? It's Mongols in Space, people. Drop everything and take the time to listen to Dan Carlin's awesome multipart podcast on the Wrath of the Khans and imagine all of that in space, minus the diminishing/loss of empire bits. Would I want to live in that universe? Hell no. I wouldn't have been allowed to grow up, most likely. But I can admire them from afar, especially their women (Borte!). And cheer them on. And stuff.

Summer of Jest Part the Seventh: A Good Chunk of Chapter 11

I will persist in referring to Hugh Steeply, agent for the United States' Bureau of Unspecified Services, as Helen because he spends pretty much the whole novel in drag and seems to enjoy it rather a lot. At any rate, I am always somewhat jarred on the odd occasion when, as here, he is referred to by his actual name.

When I first encountered him and his foil, Remy Marathe, I didn't know what to make of them or what in the world they could possibly have to do with anything else, but that's been true for almost everybody we've met at this stage of the novel; the only stuff that hangs together involves the Incandenzas. This scene, too, involves them, but in ways we (mostly) won't even begin to realize until much later on, so for now it just hangs there, like Helen's and Remy's giant shadows over Tucson as they meet in semi-secrecy to discuss, as it turns out, what has happened to the medical attache and dozens of other people who have come into his apartment looking for him or for his wife or for the neighbors and later emergency services types who have gone in, never to return, all just happily watching the unlabeled cartridge (referred to as a samizdat) on infinite replay; it's so entertaining no one is eating or sleeping or using sanitary facilities, no one is doing anything but watching, turning into the giant eyeballs JOI once posited in a film...

Helen thinks Marathe's cell of Les Assassins des Fateuils Rollents (Wheelchair Assassins) are somehow behind this weird form of attack-by-entertainment ; the medical attache is also of French Canadian descent, after all, and is of some strategic importance to ONAN by way of his job for the Saudi Minister of Entertainment and whatnot. Marathe scoffs at this but doesn't really convince Helen. Nor does he convince me. Guys weird enough to deliberately jump in front of trains that they might lose or cripple their legs and be confined to wheelchairs as part of an initiation into anti-ONAN terror protesting the "gifting" of most of uninhabitably polluted New England, inhabited by devastating locust-like herds of feral hamsters (as we see in an interlude, here) and worse monsters, to Canada, well, they're weird enough to hit people with fatally entertaining film cartridges, too.

Oh, the Concavity (which Canadians refer to, usually resentfully, as the Convexity). Any other writer would treat us to more than a few odd glimpses of its wilds, but DFW just teases us with tantalizing little bits of it, because while its existence is vital to the backstory of IJ, that's all it is: part of the milieu. I'm sure some enterprising souls have written Concavity-based fan fiction, though, involving fighting off giant overgrown feral infants and whatnot, and I bet it's a hell of a lot of fun to read, but we're concerned with the place's geopolitical importance here, not its phenomena. One staggers to think of how much longer IJ would be if DFW had included more than just the odd vignette...

At any rate, here we leave them, Steeply getting ready to go back undercover as a journalist who shall shortly be pestering Orin Incandenza; Marathe to his double-life as an agent for the Wheelchair Assassins and as an informant for the Office of Unspecified Services (they have been providing unspecified [heh] medical care for Remy's wife in exchange) -- or is he? Is he only pretending to betray the Assassins? Intrigue upon intrigue!

Summer of Jest Part the Sixth: More of Chapter 10

Just as I seem to be sympathizing more with James Orin Incandenza than his son this time around, I'm newly fascinated with another fixture at Enfield Tennis Academy that I've usually just treated as local color: Gerhardt Schtitt. He is a striking, incongruous figure to find there even before he dons his leather aviator helmet and goggles and starts tooling around in an old BMW motorcycle with Mario in the sidecar. That alone, even before we get into his philosophy of education and junior level competitive sport, makes him someone I dearly wish I could have actually seen, riding the streets of the greater Boston area behind the jogging files of ETA students on their daily conditioning runs.

But his philosophy intrigues me more, even as it makes me a bit melancholy. In Schtitt's view, education, and sports at the junior level (and perhaps even beyond?), are chiefly valuable as training for citizenship -- an outmoded idea to be sure, even more so now than when IJ was written, I sometimes think, for the focus on education as training for the assumption of some economic role or niche seems greater than ever, and how is competitive junior level tennis in any way preparation for that, unless you really are training little pros to entertain the masses in big Grand Slam type events someday?

But that old-fashioned idea, that competitive sport prepares one to be a citizen by training him to submit to the needs of a team and to a set of rules, that's still a very, very good one. I'm not sure Schtitt -- or anyone -- achieves his goal in IJ, but of all the agendas at work in IJ I think Schtitt's the most admirable. Which makes Mario's dialogue with him in Chapter 10 all the more wistful and disappointing and sad, because Mario casually leads the discussion to its most depressing conclusion. Tennis is not a team sport, he posits, and Schtitt agrees: it's just you versus the other guy. Ah, but, Schtitt says, your opponent is not the other guy; the other guy is your partner in your competition with yourself. Then how, Mario asks, is playing tennis different from suicide -- the ultimate defeat of the self. Schtitt cannot answer, and neither can we, and suddenly we're back in Kate Gompert territory and IJ suddenly starts feeling like a gigantic suicide note written decades before the deed.

Because what all of the interconnected plots in the book have in common is people desperately trying to find something worth giving themselves away to -- sport, drugs, or, as we are gradually watching in the medical attache updates, mindless entertainment. And nothing ever really fills the hole, but will gladly take over your life. And give what in return?

That's all I've got the energy for today, but there is hope on the horizon, for the bizarro figure of Helen Steeply awaits. Which means we're soon going to meet the weirdest terrorists, maybe EVAR.

Image source: a Slate article about a 24-hour long stage production of IJ in Berlin! Imagine!

Summer of Jest Part the Fifth: Chapters 9 and some of 10

Even after all these years and all these re-reads, I still find the first part of Chapter 10 of IJ some of the most difficult reading the novel offers -- not for any matters of technique or comprehension or anything, but just the nature of the scene it depicts, the character and the subject matter. And the difficulty only grows, it seems. Eugh.

But first, Michael Pemulis!

A Google image search brought up this absolutely perfect image of him:

Perfect even though he's missing his maroon paratroopers' pants and orange turtleneck, which is the ensemble he wears, along with the yachtsman's cap, whenever he has to meet with Authority. This is one insouciant motherfolklore, Pemulis, though he's got some ridiculous habits that belie his cynical coolness, like the way he always looks both ways before he speaks...

Here we come upon him at long last, in all his pedantic goofy glory. An upperclassman, he is a Big Buddy, assigned a small group of Little Buddies that he might help them acclimate to Enfield Tennis Academy and its rigors, a role he interprets to mean having to spell out for them, in excruciating and painstakingly researched detail, the precise biochemical and psycho-pharmeceutical effects of every last recreational substance that the littler kids might encounter, from crappy synthetic Bob Hope (local argot for marijuana) to high grade designer drugs that still only have chemical nomenclature designations. He lectures blithely on, oblivious to all of the attention his Little Buddies aren't paying him. His future, both within the narrative of the novel and in general, is not great, but he doesn't care. He is Pemulis. Wolf Spiders Rule.

From there we have, it would seem, nowhere to go but down. From Pemulis in his jaunty cap telling his Little Buddies what drugs he would sure as heck avoid were he they, we move to the psych ward of a nearby hospital, where one Kate Gompert, another marijuana addict with all of the same problems Erdedy displayed in Chapter 6, plus crippling clinical depression to boot. She's hospitalized following a very nearly successful suicide attempt. When asked why she wants to hurt herself, she says, she doesn't want to hurt herself, she wants to kill herself. There is a difference.

Kate then goes on to describe The Feeling in excruciating detail, and I do mean excruciating. I've had a brush or two with that kind of depression since I first read this book, and I sometimes catch myself slipping into Gompert-Instead-Of-Sherrod when things get really nasty. As did DFW, we now know. Oh do we know. And really, I should have realized back then that his descriptions and verbalizations on this topic were a bit too spot on to be merely literary productions. And we know that depression is what got him in the end. This passage still really, really scares me.

And so there I'm just gonna stop for this post. Ya gotta be careful with Kate. She can annihilate everything, in a perfectly ordinary, animated voice. Just don't look at those dead eyes. Eugh.

Summer of Jest Part the Fourth: Chapters 7 and 8 with a bit of leftover 6

First of all, I have to say oops, but to add that this is the sort of thing that can happen to someone who has read a large and complicated book like this multiple times. I've mixed up the appearance of an incident, namely Hal's and Mario's discussion of Avril's reaction to their father's death with an earlier scene in their dorm room when Orin makes a kind of pointless, aimless phone call that basically just serves to introduce his character. Apologies! I wonder how many lazy students' homework I've just screwed up.

Also, I left out of yesterday's post the last bit of Chapter 6 in which we meet Bruce Green and Mildred Bonk, a charming, melancholy interlude in which we meet the housemates of the pot dealer with the harelip who is the supplier, one way or another, for most of the marijuana users in the story. In Wire terms, he's maybe Proposition Joe, though without Joe's sophistication or swagger, being instead a trailer trash guy who keeps snakes whose stinky tanks he can't smell due to the harelip blocking his nose. How Bruce and Mildred become his roommates is deftly told in a sketch that could come straight from the Wire: boy falls for girl when they're in middle school and she is "a vision in a sundress and silly shoes", girl starts to hang with a bunch of burnouts in high school, boy becomes the biggest burnout to win girl, boy impregnates girl but they're both such burnouts that living with Harelipped Pot Dealer seems like a reasonable choice for living environments in which to raise their child. Ah, me.

I also left out our first Orin interlude, in which he sleeps in and we learn about his routine with women whom he refers to as "Subjects" and regards them as interchangeable and just sort of makes me want to kick him in the crotch almost as much as it makes me want to scream at them to have some self-respect. Which is really all I have to say about that part, as Orin mostly just bores me, at least until the wonderfully Tim Powers-esque Helen Steeply gets hold of him later on, and even then it's mostly for Steeply that I read, there.

But so finally moving on to Chapter 7, we are at last getting a good look at the physical plant at Enfield Tennis Academy, founded by Hal's and Orin's and Mario's parents as a serious academic institution-cum-sports academy, and aping the old, old curriculum of the great medieval universities to make sure that the next generation of hotshot tennis pros is full of highly erudite smartasses who will do things like quote Spinoza in interviews with the jock sniffer press and make everyone else feel really, really dumb. Or at least are prepared for unspecified brainy careers of some sort if/when they fail to make it as professional tennis players and all the "prorector" positions at E.T.A. are taken by earlier washout alumni. As such.

DFW goes into staggering detail in describing the school's layout and facilities and especially its equipment for turning the middle section of its outdoor tennis courts into habitable playing space in wintertime: the Lung. I'm pretty sure a talented HVAC professional could build the apparatus from DFW's descriptions, shared with us from the point of view of Hal Incandenza as he goes through his elaborate rituals for getting high in secret. Of course, this interlude just makes me anxious for when we'll finally get to meet his friends and schoolmates, who are highly entertaining people of the sort I wish I'd had as friends and classmates when I was growing up but who would probably have eaten me alive because I'm nowhere near as athletically or intellectually gifted as they were so I'm probably just better off being a fly on their walls via DFW. Sigh. Anyway, them. I'm really looking forward to them.

But first, back to the Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland (the year before YDAU, i.e. this is a one-year flashback from the perspective of most of Hal's story) and one Don Effing Gately, whom I now cannot imagine as anything other than Rory Cochrane on steroids (Cochrane turned in a bravura performance as Charlie Freck in Richard Linklater's film adaptation of A Scanner Darkly). I'm not sure I can exactly justify or defend this, but that's how my brain casts this part now.

Gately has perhaps the broadest character arc of anyone in IJ and sometimes I think of him more than Hal as the novel's real hero, even though he appears much less.* Oh, what's not to love about Don Gately? I mean, if you're going to love a character who's a drug addict and a criminal and kind of a dumbass until he finally learns all of his lessons the hard way. I still laugh like a loon at the story of the revenge he took on an Assistant District Attorney who got him convicted of one crime, revenge I won't spoil for first time book readers who will have to read its disgusting hilarity for themselves. And I still shake my head in wonder at the bumbling, ridiculous story of how he accidentally became a murderer due to a language barrier and a headful of snot. Someone else's snot. In someone else's head. Oh, go read the story. I don't want to spoil that either. Except insomuch as to observe that Gately's choice of burgla-murder victim wound up having vast implications for the rest of the story in that said victim was a key figure in Quebecois objectionism to the United States' having "gifted" Canada with a big chunk of uninhabitably polluted and ruined former New England territory and other such "experialistic" crimes, which objectionism takes on some truly bizarre and surreal forms and will be discussed at length later on, I'm sure.

Also, yuck, thanks a lot, DFW, for making us focus on snot and matters nasal again. No, really, thanks.

Now we move on, back to YDAU and the good old ETA, where there is as yet no sign that there is any connection between the ETA/Incandenza story and the Gately story OR the sad tale of Wardine OR that of the medical attache, we just have to have faith that there WILL be and yes, indeed, there is, but hundreds of pages of text and footnotes and thinking on your part, dear reader, yet separates you from all of those aha moments. For now just trust us and enjoy finally meeting some of Hal's schoolmates, whom up till now we've only seen in footnotes. Chief of these here, in terms of focus, is Jim Troeltsch, the one who dreams of someday being a sportscaster and spends most of his non-tennis-playing, non-academic time practicing/pretending he already is one, but whom we find here at first in bed with a cold, allowing DFW to indulge in another round of rubbing our noses in various studies and observations of the theory and practice of nose goblinology, as it were, ew and harumph. Fortunately, though, this go-around DFW is more interested in making observations about the kind of fugue state-cum-four-alarm-nightmares that I usually only get when I take Nyquil but which Troeltsch just needs to be sick to have -- observations which are startlingly accurate, I think.**

While that's going on, we get the barest glimpse of another favorite character of mine, Michael Pemulis, townie from good old, bad old Allston Mass ("broken dreams strewn amongst the broken glass" as the old song says), affector of a yachtsman's cap the way Hal affects a bow tie (yes, bow ties were cool long before Matt Smith), discriminating drug connoisseur and dispenser of dubious advice, but only at a remove. We will hear more of his wisdom later.

Then it's on to the story of the Enfield Tennis Academy itself, and of its founder, James Orin Incandenza, aka Himself, sometimes also known by his initials JOI. We learn he was sort of forced, Dondi Snayheever-style, into becoming a semi-tennis prodigy, but parlayed his tennis scholarships into advanced degrees in optical physics, which he then put to work pioneering, among other things, the research that led to "annular fusion" and the solution to North America's energy independence issues. He met Canadian braniac Avril Mondragon, the most gorgeous blond bombshell ever to grace North American academics, and married her despite a series of bureaucratic hurdles complicated in no small part by her slender ties to certain angry Quebecois objectionist types (we are told the birth of their first child, Orin, was at least partly a legal maneuver) and together they founded ETA, after which optical genius JOI discovered his true calling as a filmmaker. This last bit being the most important thing about him aside from his being the father of Hal and of ETA.

But speaking of Orin, dreary old Orin, enduring some of the novel's best pure satire, the pre-game spectacle at an away game (he is the punter for the National Football League's Phoenix Cardinals) at none other than Denver, CO's  Mile High Stadium***. This is one of the funniest and stupidest passages in IJ: DFW has taken the hype machine show biz silliness of the NFL's penchant for spectacle and turned it up to eleven. In IJ's world, the players have to dress as their mascots and enact a big dumb and sometimes dangerous bit of pageantry before the game. The Denver Broncos just have to caper about in two-man pantomime horse rigs, but the Cardinals have to don bright red feathers and some kind of hang-gliding suit and jump off the edge of the stadium and swoop down over the crowd to land on the field. Financial incentives exist for players who squawk or otherwise make an effort to sound like a bird to descend. Orin, though, just bitches to the old quarterback plummeting next to him, who tries to cheer him up with a "cleavage check" as they descend. See? Pure foolishness. Like Idiocracy. DFW having apparently shared Mike Judge's general perspective on the American Future.

Tell me he's wrong.

Next on Summer of Jest: we finally meet Pemulis directly. Hooray!

*Kind of the way I've become convinced that Jaime Lannister is the real hero of A Song of Ice and Fire. Hero in the sense of being the most important actor in the plot(s) and in the sense of being what passes for a moral center in the books. I mean, aside from the sister-schtupping, of course. But as a wise woman once told me, we don't get to choose whom we love, or who loves us. But anyway, I may also favor Gately as Hero just because his Boston story comes closest to being something like mine; he winds up in a halfway house for a good bit of the novel and my first real job in Boston was as a temp secretary at a pre-release facility that still counted as a by god Massachusetts State Correctional Center but was focused towards drug and alcohol recovery for the less hardcore types like say, Tobias Beecher on OZ, who was a perfectly law abiding citizen until his drunk driving killed a girl and landed him in the clink. IJ was published just maybe two years after I left that job, so I could totally picture Gately and the rest of his gang as residents of my former workplace though, as I said, it was still a prison rather than a residential halfway house.

**Conveyed as they are in an odd second-person interlude, all they could make me think of, this time around, was what horrible experiences inspired them. I bet DFW was a helluva cabin- or dorm-mate at whatever summer camps he got sent to when he was a kid.

***I'm amused that DFW, inventor of "subsidized time" has the name of Mile High Stadium surviving into his brave new future; that joint was torn down some time ago and is now known as Invesco Field. Unless some other corporation has taken over the naming rights. I can't keep up.

Summer of Jest Part the Third: Chapters 5 & 6

These next two chapters have neither of them ever been favorites of mine, though one is a giant plot mover and the other is a pretty remarkable literary achievement. I admire but do not love them.

They made me realize this time around, though, just what a big task DFW set for himself in this novel; the only comparable endeavor I can think of is the brilliant HBO series The Wire. The Wire wasn't so much a police drama as an anthropological/ecological study of community-as-ecosystem, as food web, with the Baltimore Police Department and its internal struggles as pretty much just a convenient framing device for the storytelling. Similarly, IJ is looking at a whole city, Boston this time (and, to a lesser degree, an imagined nation of ONAN), as ecosystem, with the Enfield Tennis Academy in the role filled by the Baltimore Police in The Wire. And DFW did it first, all by himself, and did a whole lot of science fiction-y world building to boot!

But so, Chapter 5 brings us around to the weirdly delimited little world of a Saudi Arabian medical attache, an Ear Nose and Throat specialist whose job is to keep his country's Minister of Entertainment's never-ending naso-pharyngeal yeast infections at bay* while the big man is in Boston striking a big deal with ONAN's big Netflix/Redbox analog, Interlace Entertainment. Which yeast infections the Minister is pretty much constantly aggravating via his staggeringly poor lifestyle choices. Our unnamed attache is pretty much in Sorceror's Apprentice mode without having had the fun of casting the spell, poor guy.

Attache's only happiness is to come home, sink into a futuristic superchair that converts into a bed, sheets and all, when he's ready to go to sleep, strap on a tray that's more like a feedbag, and eat dinner and watch "entertainment cartridges"** while his wife does the hard work of keeping crumbs out of his beard and whatnot. Except on Wednesdays when he usually works late and she gets to go play Burqa Tennis. Aren't we all jealous as hell of her life.

On this particular Wednesday, though, our man gets home early, to no dinner, no pre-selected DVDs, nothing but crap on broadcast/cable ("spontaneous dissemination"), his mail unsorted, himself bereft of options. In desperation he decides to watch an unlabeled DVD some unknown party mailed to him, a decision which seems utterly innocuous and utterly time-wasting, but will turn out to be pretty much fatal and crucially important to the overall plot of Infinite Jest. I'd say it's probably equivalent in its combination of banality and importance, if not in, you know, actual content, to McNulty's spouting off to a judge about how the Barksdale Outfit keeps intimidating witnesses in The Wire.

Our only hint that something unusual is going on is hints toward the end of the chapter that the attache is watching the program for like the third time in a row. It's that entertaining, apparently.

Moving onto the next chapter, we are jolted further out of our contemplation of the Incandenza family's drama (remember the Incandenzas?) by an entire chapter written in, what appears to this white girl anyway, perfectly rendered Black English, a study in unconjugated verbs, phoenetic spellings and all. The chapter, from the point of view of a pre-teen black girl, tells an old, old story, of a pretty young woman, Wardene, who is desired by her icky stepfather figure, Roy Tony, is brutally punished for it by her mother, and runs to her boyfriend Reginald for shelter and comfort. We get hints of a future conflict between Reginald and Roy Tony. All of this will have implications in the larger plot later on, but for now it's just sort of sitting here confusing readers and perhaps annoying them even as they might admire DFW's dual achievement of technical skill and sheer ballsiness.

We'll be doing that a lot.

*Thus introducing the icky theme of dealing with mucous membranes and nasal secretions that recurs in IJ in surprising and sometimes seriously plot-propelling ways, as we'll see shortly in the backstory of one Don Gately.

**Let's just make like they're DVDs, because DFW was very close on this. To the point where I call the TV in my living room, not connected to cable but via an Xbox 360 to Hulu Plus and Netflix and Amazon Instant Video, the teleputer. Which confuses the hell out of my lodger who has not read IJ. Tee and also hee.

Summer of Jest Part the Second, Chapters 3-4

One of the weirdest, saddest and most strangely touching bits of Infinite Jest for me is always this next scene, in which our man Hal, at age ten in the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, is persuaded to take a detour from his normal routine to keep a mystery appointment with a service provider of unspecified function. "Are you a dentist?" he keeps asking as the provider implores him to have a soda to allay the dry mouth sounds Hal is allegedly producing as he talks.

No, he and we learn, this is a professional conversationalist, which (as far as I know) does not exist in our real world, but well might in the IJverse and so we're in danger of just accepting that surface fact and rolling with the scene, at least until Hal notices a lack of credentials on the wall. And that his interlocutor has a great deal of specific knowledge about Hal, such as the boy's fascination with Byzantine erotica, and is also startlingly well-informed about Hal's mother Avril's entertainingly varied sex life.* And other little details that are somehow off.

I love the way this scene unfolds, purely through dialogue, dialogue that is perfectly natural (if you're David Foster Wallace or his alter-ego at least) but still conveys all the details of what's physically going on in the room as the professional conversationalist's disguise and act start to melt away and collapse, revealing none other than The Man Himself, James Incandenza, Hal's Own Dear Personal Father, who may be a "towering figure in optic and avant garde cinema" but at home is sort of coming apart just like his disguise is and suffers from a wide range of delusions, including that Hal doesn't talk to him; even when Hal does talk to him, James seems to think** that Hal is merely moving his mouth, that no sounds come out.

Hence this elaborate charade, staged with the full cooperation of Avril, a charade that, once Hal penetrates it, he abandons immediately for a return to his demanding schoolboy-cum-tennis prodigy life. Nothing gets resolved; James is left forlorn and clinging to his deception and his delusions. It's heartbreaking.

This time around, reading, I feel much more for James than I do for Hal, with whom I of course identified when I first read IJ at age 26. Now I'm at James' time of life, though I don't have children to fret over, but the image of him trying so desperately to connect with his son affects me nonetheless, and more deeply than identifying with Hal's disgust at this ploy ever did.

We then move along to another glimpse of Hal's family life, in Y.D.A.U., which year we can pretty much regard as the novel's present. Hal is trying to sleep, but his older brother and roommate Mario wants to talk, and to talk specifically about Avril, whom the family calls "The Moms" the way they call James "Himself", and how she was the only member of the family who doesn't seem to have been sad when Himself died (we do not yet know the spectacularly weird way that happened, nor will we for a while, but re-readers probably flash forward to such outbursts as "something smelled delicious!"), indeed, seems to have gotten happier. The important bit here is Hal's metaphor for a half-mast flag. There are, he explains to Mario, two ways to bring a flag to half-mast. One is to lower the flag to the necessary height, and the other is to double the size of the pole, the implication being that Avril chose the latter means. I'm not quite, quite sure she deserves that much credit, but just as I find myself identifying way more with James this time around, I may come at last to have some sympathy for Avril. We shall see.

But so, already in just these few chapters we're juggling a lot of themes, aren't we? The impossible illusion of connecting and communicating, first elucidated by Hal's disastrous college interview and then illustrated in new iterations through our brief tour of Erdedy's skull to round out with the Professional Conversation; the agonies suffered by the addict (and especially the addict who is addicted to something most people consider lame and harmless), the challenges of precocity and hyper-awareness, the burden of self-consciousness... it's all, isn't it, very Hamlet. Wow!

*I love this kid. Seriously, does anyone ever read this book and not just freaking love this kid?

**I say "seems" because I can't ever shake the notion that James only pretended to think this, that it's an elaborate passive-aggressive pretense of delusion designed to convey to his middle son that he wishes they'd communicate more. Although really that's more Avril's style, isn't it?

Summer of Jest: Post the First: Chapters 1 and 2

Already, as these first chapters get going, David Foster Wallace is indulging in a bit of reader annoyance, but also quite cleverly confounding a common habit of a certain type of science fiction reader I call a Prediction Sniffer.*We don't know where the Year of Glad is supposed to fit in our timeline so it sort of hangs there in a literary timelessness that encourages us to let it go, nerd. Maybe O.N.A.N. doesn't exist for us yet in whatever year it's actually supposed to be, but that's not to say it mightn't someday, you know?

Furthermore, only re-readers like me who have paid attention to the chronology presented somewhere in the middle of the book and bothered to remember it know immediately that Chapter Two, which is set in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (Y.D.A.U.), is actually taking place the year before the events described in Chapter One, though again, so far, that doesn't seem to matter much, as there is really nothing more timeless than a closet stoner getting anxious about how his next big marijuana binge needs to be his absolute last even as he is self-consciously and anxiously repeating almost exactly his time-honored rituals established in previous absolute last marijuana binges.

But so, back to Chapter One, in the Year of Glad (and don't we love Subsidized Time? Can't we just imagine our governments choosing to make an extra buck or two by selling the naming rights to a calendar year as they might to a football stadium? And doesn't it just scare us to death that someday this might actually seem like a reasonable idea? DFW would have lost his mind watching our current Congress and POTUS and SCOTUS in action. It's hard to say which branch would have driven him craziest), in which our hero, Hal Incandenza, is juking his way through his college admissions interview with the help of an influential alumnus from his prep school and his uncle. The tension in this chapter is marvelous: we are sharing Hal's internal monologues in which his dazzling precocity and erudition are in full evidence, the kid is near genius level and quite marvelously level-headed about it, and that he is also an awesome "balletic" tennis player just makes him seem like even more the kind of kid every school would be chasing after with scholarship offers and letters of intent even though he plays a minor sport, but there is a creeping sense that something is very strange, even very wrong. We re-readers know what has happened to him -- there is a positive "Dick Click" type revelation that finally explains this scene at the end and makes it even more terrible than it is on first reading -- but even knowing why and how it happened, we're riveted a the results on display here. Something has come profoundly unstuck in Hal's mind, something has created a vast gulf between his mental processes and his outward aspect. The erudite and articulate thoughts to which we have been privy are not translated to his speech: he gibbers and makes animal sounds and twitches and we-don't-know-what-all but whatever he does, it terrifies his interviewers to the point where one tells Hal's uncle that his sleep will be forever disturbed by what he has witnessed.

As far as setting up mysteries go, that's pretty original, and first rate, I'd say.

Then we go back in time to sit and wait with Ken Erdedy, who has started up his marijuana binge machine again and is caught in brain loop after brain loop of pothead anxiety, waiting for the girl who said she would show up at a certain time with a good quantity of high quality weed and worried that his attempts to make it seem casual were maybe too successful, worried, too, about all the other kinds of self-versus-other, reputation-obsessed, relationship analyzing, self-flagellating habits of mind that all humans, really, get caught up in but that potheads like Ken seem to be especially, acutely, painfully conscious of to the point of minute over-analysis of their own aspects, thrown in with more than a little magical thinking. All of this is exhausting and exquisitely uncomfortable to read, and it's the kind of thing David Foster Wallace did better than just about anybody, and thus even more uncomfortable to read now, knowing how things ended for Wallace. Honestly, at one point re-reading this chapter, which is only a taste of the kind of stuff that is to come, I doubted whether my going on to read the whole book again was such a good idea. I might have even cried a little. But then Wallace made me laugh again.

And so, I say to the book and to all of you other SoJ types out there, well, okay. Bring it on.

*When a book is set in the future, but that future is now the reader's past, a reader who is a Prediction Sniffer spends a lot of time and energy going over the text to see what the author correctly and incorrectly predicted, whether to herald the author as a prophet or to indulge in Nelson Muntz laughter, doesn't matter which, really.

Summer of Jest - You Have Been Warned

And but so, if you can't tell from the prose style into which I tend to drift on this blog, I'm kind of a fan of David Foster Wallace.* I like his fiction and his nonfiction (though I do tend to be somewhat partial to his fiction insomuch as I enjoy its autobiographical character in that it reminds me a lot of my own thought processes because our backgrounds, David's and mine, are not as dissimilar as some might think) and his in-between, but first and foremost, I like his weird blend of the two that is Infinite Jest. I am one of those first generation readers of same who spoke, as I staggered around Boston with a first edition hardcover copy of same in my ubiquitous backpack, of my "Infinite Jest cramp" and who enjoyed poring over the novel's minutiae with other Boston friends solely for the purpose of elucidating how Wallace wasn't entirely accurate as regards the street map of various areas of Alston and Cambridge and other bits of the Greater Boston Area but also agreed with them that the errors we found only made the book more endearing. Mostly.

So here's the point in the post wherein I refer you to Summer of Jest, an organized group read/re-read of my hero**'s breakout novel that kicked off today but which I only learned existed a scant two days ago.

But of course one of the participants is my beloved friend SJ, whose literary dumbassery I am generally somewhat powerless to resist. Witness last summer's non-stop sojourn through The Dark Tower, from which I am still recovering. But really, I love this book. I'd probably be up for doing this even if she weren't. Because David Foster Wallace. And all the rest.

So, if you haven't read this book, I will counsel you to ignore all my upcoming posts with "Summer of Jest" in their title, because they will probably be spoilery -- although really, of all the books I've loved this one is the least capable of being "spoiled" by a mere plot revelation or two, because the plot is only the smallest tiniest element of what is on offer here in this ridiculous, impossible, ponderous doorstop of awesome of a novel/stream of consciousness/meditation composed by a man I'd long dreamed of meeting someday and whose suicide on Sept 12, 2008 is a terrible, wrenching, horrible, soul-destroying milestone in my own dear personal life that dwarfs, say, Sept 11, 2001 and make of that what you will. I still cry like a baby every year now on that anniversary, and have yet to finish reading his posthumously published The Pale King because I can't bring myself to finally complete my first reading of his last bits of fiction. Instead I just read his nonfiction collections over and over and over again to the point where I have most of the essays by heart (and completely freaked out my Simpsons-loving little sister last summer when I hilariously overreacted to an episode I was seeing at her house for the first time ever, based on his famous cruise ship indictment*** "A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again"****). And about once every year or so, and yes, during the summer, I pull out my giant herniating hardcover of Infinite Jest and read it again, just to enjoy, just to admire. And yes, just to  be annoyed all over again.

Now, of course, with my completely ruined elbow tendons (all four of them, in each arm now!) I am reading it in ebook form again. How different will it be, I wonder? Stay tuned, true believers.

Stay tuned.

*And, more importantly, a frequent and not wholly conscious imitator of his style inasmuch as certain quirks of his have drifted into my own prose style, namely lots of footnotes in works of so informal and loose a character as being not wholly but almost entirely not the sort of thing that would normally employ footnotes, but hey, at least so far I've mostly managed to confine my footnotes to the length readers of modern Standard Written English generally consider to be normal footnote length, i.e. not a printed page long or longer, so far. So far.

**So okay, I have a lot of heroes. I am a child of my age. Deal.

***Oh dude. Every bit of poop cruise type news that hits my feeds, I wish he was around to hoot at in his erudite, eloquent, pathetic way.

****One of my friends from my Boston days, who may Tweet at present under the username of @Hoover_Dam, once seized the opportunity after a talk of his to thrust a Celebrity Cruise brochure under his nose to sign, only to be told with a sigh "I thought I was done with these." Poor guy.

Patrick O'Brian's MASTER AND COMMANDER #ReReads2013

Caveat lector: this is another re-read, of one of my favorite series ever, so 'ware gushing ahead.

Much as I love the Sharpe novels -- and it should be pretty obvious that I do by now -- there is as yet no danger that they shall supplant Patrick O'Brian's magnificent Aubrey/Maturin series in my heart, even though by all rights, as a landlubber, I should probably have more sympathy for the proper bastard infantryman than for this naval captain his best friend and ship's surgeon and their little wooden world. But there is more to Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin than their offical roles in Admiral Nelson's navy. Oh so much more.

The pair's meeting at a concert in Port Mahon has to be one of the greatest literary meetings of all time. For much of the first scene they seem likely to come to blows, but both were brought up better than that; both have been taught that manners and courtesy are most especially due where there is dislike, and it is manners and courtesy, ultimately, that triumph and let them see one another's better qualities very quickly. Well, manners and courtesy and a stroke of well-deserved good fortune on Jack's part, for I doubt much beyond a nice dinner could have come of this meeting had not Jack "gotten his step" -- promotion to Master & Commander, and command of a vessel, and the impulse to invite his new acquaintance along on his first cruise.

What follows does not so much have a grand overall plot as a series of smaller plots enacted in succession: after the Meeting there is the Shakedown Cruise on Jack's first command, the Sophie; then there are their Early Successes; then the Taking of the Shore Battery; the famous action with the wonderfully named Spanish frigate Cacafuego*; the Encounter Where Too Much Is Bitten Off to Chew:, etc. This makes this first in the series a bit of an unfortunate leader, and I see that many readers have been sufficiently put off by its odd structure so as not to want to continue with the other books and to be baffled by the enthusiasm of people like me. But come on, think of it as a cheese course: Lots of little samples that give a taste of what's to come!

But so far there is little in my description to indicate why these novels stand out from the pack of novels set during the Napoleonic wars, set in Nelson's navy, set on the high seas (though really, the relationship between Jack and Stephen is key; they are Kirk and Spock in saltwater-stained canvas, these two). For me a lot of the fun is the language, though I must confess to being at times bewildered by it, having constantly to refer to the diagram towards the front to keep all the different sails and yards straight in my head, to say nothing of the differences between a sloop and a snow and a poleacre and a... but that's not really what I mean about the language, which shines most in the dialogue; even in life-or-death situations where terseness and clarity are of the utmost importance, their speech is still highly mannered, even formal. I'm not sure anyone in Nelson's navy ever really spoke that way, but I'm not sure they didn't, either. I am separated from that world by so very, very much that I cannot be sure, but it does not matter. I simply enjoy.

Part of the fun of re-reading this series from the beginning is getting my first glimpses of various characters in their, as it were, larval stages. I know what's in store for them and marvel at the journey they'll take. It's like getting a chance to see your best friends as little children. Little children firing four-pounders and scrubbing the deck with holystones and climbing precariously high into the air and slashing at enemies with cutlasses and sabers and getting their skulls trephined, but little children all the same. And through it all, there are Jack and Stephen, here still feeling each other out, in awe of each other, not sure how much trust they may extend to one another (but needing to extend much; Stephen is a complete lubber constantly in danger of committing horrible breaches of naval etiquette when he's not in danger of getting a clout on the head or falling down a hatch or getting blown overboard; Jack newly in command and discovering for the first time that it's even lonelier than he'd always suspected), playing the violin and cello in the captain's quarters of an evening and eating ridiculously named food together: soused hog's face, lobscouse and spotted dog (the latter two dishes featuring in the title of a cookbook by which you, too, could eat like an O'Brian sailor, though I suspect these recipes are light on mold and weevils).

Then again, the other thing that really makes these novels work is the other characters, those outside or apart from Jack and Stephen's core crew. Here the two most important ones are doozies: Molly Harte and James Dillon. Molly is the wife of Port Mahon's commandant, a lovely woman, a harp player, and already Jack's paramour as the novel opens. Their liaison causes most of the troubles that follow in this first outing; the cuckholded husband holds just enough power to make life very difficult for Jack and his crew. Meanwhile, James Dillon, Jack's new lieutenant on his first command, is a figure from the Irish/Spanish Stephen's past among the rebels of Ireland. James and Stephen spend the first part of the novel avoiding each other, afraid each of being denounced; later it's Jack who has problems with James, whose guilty conscience and high dudgeon keep them from becoming friends until it's almost too late.

And now permit me a happy sigh, for I get to read all the rest of the books again now, as easy as kiss-my-hand, joy. Bring on Post Captain! Again! Again!

*I dare you not to mentally translate that as referring to burning excrement.

Tim Powers' LAST CALL #OneBookAtATime

"Last night I stayed up late playing poker with Tarot cards. I got a full house and four people died." - Steven Wright

While finishing with The Stand, the climax of which takes place in a haunting, demonic ghost town version of Las Vegas, I had to struggle not to compare King's version of bad magic in Sin City to Tim Powers' in Last Call, one of my all-time favorite novels. And the comparison was totally unfair of me to make, because as far as I'm concerned, Tim Powers is the sine qua non of making the ordinary strange, and the strange ordinary, and nowhere has he to date done it better than in this bizarrely awesome novel, in which the archetypes of the Tarot meet the warty fat man in the famous Mandelbrot fractal and Bugsy Siegel was once the Fisher King of the American West.

And it all happens because of poker. Well, poker and a special kind of demented hunger for power, the latter satisfied in an exceedingly strange way by means of an extremely strange version of the former. As in a poker game played with an exceptionally powerful Tarot deck. If you get a full house in this game, you don't kill people a la Steven Wright, but you do risk losing your immortal soul, or at least your body; you risk becoming a new host for an evil magician type who is doing his damndest not only to become the new Fisher King, but to stay king forever. Yowza.

Our hero is an aging beery bum of a semi-professional poker player, adopted by a poker legend as a young child after being deposited, Moses-like, in a trailered boat by a doomed mother frantic to escape her terrifying husband. Scott "Scarecrow" Crane is literally and physically scarred by this barely-remembered childhood trauma even before he is manipulated into joining a certain game played with a certain deck under the aegis of a certain mysteriously powerful someone who has been desperately seeking a way to become a metaphysical parent since he was thwarted in being a real one...

The dual nature of the relationship between our man Crane and the evil magician Georges Leon is the first of many neat parallels with the dual Fisher King/Wounded King motif in Arthurian legend, and is just one of the many delights awaiting the literary nerd, the student of nature and human nature, the math and probability geek, the gambling aficionado, the archetypal psychology fan. Powers' magical system, developed here and revisited in later semi-sequels/sidequels (Expiration Date and Earthquake Weather now marketed after the fact with Last Call as a trilogy called "Fault Lines") is the most compellingly believable I've ever encountered, logical and thoroughly imagined and plausible to the point where to this day if I happen to see people playing cards, I catch myself watching how cigarette smoke billows across the table or levels in drinks tilt or don't tilt, as clues to how the game is going, what the stakes might be, who is going to win -- and how all of this might somehow predict the future. And we won't even talk about what I think of a certain mathematical set, which gives me the creeps to this day.

And oh, the characters. Especially the villains, of whom there are many, in a stunning variety. Al Funo, the social maladroit who thinks he's some kind of major smooth operator, whom Powers imbues with stunning creepiness, banal phrase by banal phrase. Ray-Joe Pogue, resplendent in Elvis gear (hey, this is Vegas, baby) and the Amino Acids (who else but Tim Powers could make a bunch of guys in El Caminos scary?). Vaughan Trumbill, the illustrated fat man with the world's weirdest case of Renfield syndrome.* Dondi Snayheever, raised in a series of Skinner boxes to become the world's greatest poker player, abused into becoming a demented psychic dowsing rod instead. And then there's the bad king, Georges Leon himself, tapped into all of the godlike power this archetypal kingship offers, using it only to prolong his life and keep swapping.

What really sells this novel, though, is the magic, rendered by Powers as a precise set of analogy and correspondence between will and result. It's consistent, powerful and, unlike what we usually see in the urban fantasy genre (I've argued elsewhere that Powers was writing urban fantasy before urban fantasy was a thing), contemporary, even as it also hooks into the good old Jungian archetypes represented by the Tarot and Arthurian legend. These are not people adhering to the rituals and rites found in some dusty 500 year old spell book; there is creativity and cleverness in what they do as a result of observing and learning and, OMG, thinking for themselves. No wise old man is handing out quests here. Hooray!

Since I last read this book, I got to visit Hoover Dam, where one of the climactic scenes of the novel takes place (just before Holy Week, yet, which is next week as I dictate these lines). So of course I shivered, looking out at Lake Mead and wondering if maybe Bugsy Siegel's head wasn't down in the depths somewhere. I watched the other visitors for telltale herky-jerky movements. I prayed I wouldn't see an Elvis. Even though I knew Diana had tamed the water.

Happy Easter, everybody!

I swear all of that will make sense if you read the book. All of that and more.

*There's an illustration by the brilliant J.T. Potter of him as the Mandelbrot Man in the deluxe hardcover edition that will scare the crap out of you.

Re-reads: Umberto Eco's FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM #OneBookAtATime

Um, if you haven't read this book, this post is probably going to make no sense to you whatsoever.

Every time I pick up Foucault's Pendulum again, I worry that this read is going to be the ever-looming Last Read, the occasion when I have to admit to myself that I have drained the last dregs of utility and enjoyment from this, my favorite of all novels ever. Or, worse, that I'm going to arrive at the point where I decide I have overrated it and feel like a fool. Or...

But here's the thing. This book is really the keystone of my intellectual life, the point of origin of all of the obsessions that have plagued and enriched it from the very first time I snuck it from my mother's nightstand, wondering if it was going to be as challenging and awesome as The Name of the Rose had been, at age 16.*

Oh yes, oh yes it was. I had picked up a bomb that was going to send shockwaves through the rest of my existence. Listen, I'm not exaggerating. Every single interest that consumes me (except outerspace and transhumanism, the only ones from my childhood that survived this encounter, really), I can trace back to something I encountered in this novel, was baffled by and had to follow up, or just thought was really wickedly funny. And yes, that includes entomology, I suspect, for even in my serious insect-phobic youth I was captivated by passages in which Eco described the bizarre mechanical and scientific apparatuses in the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers as the products of the nightmare of a deranged entomologist.

As an adult with some experience of the real world now, I know that I could have picked better role models for myself than Jacopo Belbo, Diotallevi and Casaubon.** The trio participates as little in actual life as they can, preferring to observe snarkily on the sidelines (well, Casaubon has a spell of actually experiencing things in Brazil, but then he is the young one of the three). And what snark, what glorious, glorious snark. The School of Comparative Irrelevancies alone, in which the three outline a whole imaginary curriculum of ridiculous or impossible subjects like "Crowd Psychology in the Sahara" and "Urban Planning for Gypsies" is still one of the funniest passages I've ever read, even though I know it line by line like a high school debate geek knows Monty Python and the Holy Grail. But the point is, I adopted as heroes a trio of skeptics and sneerers whose greatest fear would be to be thought of as believing in something. I have paid the price for that.

But I would not change a thing. I cannot imagine my life without a library full of texts on Christian heresies and Manichaeism, of Marsilio Ficino and Paracelsus and Carlo Ginsburg... and James Hillman and Ginette Paris and all the other tracers out of the history of ideas and crackpottery, all the attempts to understand how other people attempted to understand the universe, to fill in the gaps in our knowledge, with imagination if not with fact. The Nag Hammadi library is there. So is about a third of the Loeb classics offerings, collected from secondhand shops over the years (though I dug Greek mythology before FP, I wasn't nearly as into the philosophy and history of the Greeks and Romans before this). Listen, if I were to tie a piece of string to all of the books in my library that connect me back to Foucault's Pendulum, well, that room of my house would probably be solid twine.

But so, does it still stand up? I'm sure I cannot give an objective assessment at this point, but if standing up can mean still bringing meaning to me, then yes. For now I am much closer to Belbo's age than to Casaubon's, and his regrets make more sense to me, and his sense of emptiness is more nearly mine now. I think I am more courageous; I want to think Belbo has served me as a sort of self-defeating prophecy, as Robertson Davies' character of Parlabane became for me later on, a personification of the negative consequences of saying, to everything, "Do you really think so?" as a way of dismissing belief, squelching passion, preventing being taken in. Belbo who hummed literature so as to avoid creating any. Belbo who, more than either of the others, played a nasty joke at the expense of a pack of true believers that, honestly, pretty much demanded to be punked on just the epic scale the trio's Plan punked them, and wound up just as much the butt of it as the credulous seekers did when they took him all too seriously.

Funny enough, several of my closest friends (geographically and in my heart) are Templar seeker types like those the trio punks in this novel. And really, sometimes I don't know how they put up with me, because they bring out my Inner Belbo like nobody's business. But all the crazy paths my reading and studies have taken in emulation of Belbo and Diotallevi and Causabon have, I think, left me with enough of a command of the language of belief that we can still converse satisfyingly. My friends' belief is as sincere as my disbelief, but nobody's trying to convert anybody (I don't think...?) and we can all find humor (see also an old, old post from my old, old blog of mine in which we did just that one night at our favorite local dead animal dive bar in Saratoga, WY) in talking about it. I think. I mean, they still ask me out for drinks...

This is feeling more like Confessions of a Pretentious Skeptic Wanker than a post about my favorite novel, but I suppose it still says something about said novel that it got its hooks into me so very deeply. Part of it may have just been the timing; had I encountered it later in life I might have thought it merely extraordinarily good. I like to think I wouldn't roll my eyes at it, the way people who see Buckaroo Banzai or This is Spinal Tap for the first time too late in life always seem to do, to the unreasoning range of those of us who first saw those films as teenagers when you're supposed to. Heh.

*Little knowing that in not too many years time, I would be living in the orbit of Eco's translator, William Weaver, who joined the faculty at Beaudacious Bard College about halfway through my career there. I got to meet him a handful of times but never had the opportunity to take a class with him. But still, funny old world, innit? And at around the same time came Chinua Achebe, and I missed Caleb Carr by just a year or two.

**Oh, Casaubon. The Sam Spade of culture. Little did I know when I formed the ambition to be you that in just a decade or so you would be made surpassingly obsolete, not because, as I might have feared in 1986, nobody gave a crap about what you could find for them anymore, but because the internet would enable us all to do your job effortlessly! And Casaubon, just your name led me in so many directions... adopting the Renaissance philologist Isaac Casaubon as an sort of totemic hero and leading me to discover another of my all-time favorite novels, George Eliot's Middlemarch, because Casaubon.

Re-Reads: Alastair Reynolds' REVELATION SPACE #OneBookAtATime

Oh, the memory of the chills that ran up and down my spine when my sweetheart-at-the-time handed me this book. I couldn't tell you whether the cover art or the title thrilled me more. And then to find that the contents were worthy of both! Suddenly I had a new favorite living science fiction author. And this was his very first novel!

That was ten years ago. And I've lost track of how many times I have re-read Revelation Space since. Each time, I get completely lost in the atmosphere of awe, and the intricate noir-ish plotlines of Dan Sylveste, a noir Indiana Jones in space, Ana Khouri badass military bee-hatch and assassin, and Ilia Volyova triumvir of the giant lighthugger spaceship, the Nostalgia for Infinity. To say nothing of the grotesque, baroque horrors of the Melding Plague, a hybrid of biological and computer virus that corrupts flesh and machinery in equal measure and, as its name implies, melds the one into the other, resulting in a captain that is becoming one with his spaceship, and a city full of buildings that have warped to resemble giant vertical pieces of driftwood. I mean, wow!

And the book holds up to multiple re-reads, both in its own right and as the first in a trilogy. As is so often the case with my favorite novels, re-reading only enriches Revelation Space. To read it for the first time is to be distracted into focusing on Dan Sylveste and his travails of leading a vast program of space archaeology and holding political power on a distant research planet, losing that power, and being induced to reveal his lifetime of staggering secrets. All of this forms the main plot of the novel, but it is the stories of Ana Khouri and of Volyova and the rest of the crew of Nostalgia for Infinity that continue onward in Redemption Ark and Absolution Gap. Sylveste's deeds and revelations are just what sets them in motion.

So this time, as Sylveste realized just how important the extinct alien race, the Amarantin*, are, and the greater theme of what came to be known as the Revelation Space Trilogy (coming up with a frankly chilling explanation for the Fermi Paradox) gets teased out, I focused more on Ana, whose story is frankly tragic: a soldier, wounded and temporarily cryo-suspended; shipped light years from home through a clerical error and separated from her husband, probably forever; manipulated first into acting as a sport-assassin for what amounts to a far-future reality TV show and then -- by two completely different parties -- into joining the crew of the Nostalgia for Infinity. She is the only character to appear in all three volumes of the trilogy and its side-quel, Chasm City, but is kind of the Frodo of the piece (though she gets some moments; see below), mostly manipulated by others and only just keeping a piece of herself back -- though with such manipulators as she faces, that's probably quite heroic right there.

And our Frodo is thrown up against some of the most magnificently bitchy characters in all of science fiction: arrogant, selfish scientists (some of them acting from beyond the grave!), singleminded obsessive jackasses, would-be murderers with cosmic vendettas, sociopathic and psychopathic maniacs in charge of weapons that could destroy whole planets without even needing a change of batteries. The dialogue among these characters is just the best:

"You prick," Khouri said, spitting in the process. "You narrowminded, egotistical prick."
"Congratulations," Sylveste said. "Now you can progress to words with six syllables."

And this is before she has a plasma rifle pointed at her sort-of-ally's crotch!

And then there are the set pieces, which never get old -- the discovery of the ancient Amarantin city on the planet Resurgam; the Shadowplay chase through Chasm City and its "Mulch";  the unbelievably cool spacesuit-cum-shuttles by which Volyova and Khouri pull a Baumgartner to the surface of Resurgam: the vast baroque bulk of Nostalgia for Infinity and its haunting secret, which is also the secret not only of the Amarantin but of yet another and even more mysterious alien race from Sylveste's past. Like his fellow "New Weird" author China Mieville, Reynolds thinks big -- but Reynolds was a working astronomer, still at the European Space Agency while writing this book, so his weird is cosmic in scale and scientifically plausible. He hit me like a piece of space debris at hyperspace speeds and he's never disappointed me, as numerous entries on this blog demonstrate.

All that and he's a lovely bloke on Twitter. You'll probably hear a lot more about him from me this year

Also, check out this boffo cover for the Serbian (or Croatian?) language edition of the novel! Why couldn't this be the cover art for the American -- or any -- English language edition? It's even better than the one that originally gave me the chills! So much better. Look, that's totally Cerberus under attack by the bridgehead. The spaceship is maybe not as cool, but so what!

*And coming off of Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men as I am, I couldn't help but imagine the Amarantin as his Seventh (Flying) Men. Hey, why not? It's my brain.