Books

I've made it a point recently to finish reading some of the books I've borrowed from friends, something I'm kind of bad at, considering I've always got five or six books started at any one time.

Jim lent me Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, a funny, imaginative novel about Foer's Ukrainian Jewish ancestors and his search for a woman who saved his grandfather from execution by the German army during World War II. The novel is essentially an epistolary in three parts, with a character named Jonathan Safran Foer sending chapters from his novel about Foer's ancestors and their shtetl near the Poland/Ukraine border on to his Ukrainian translator after his trip, the translator's letters back to Foer, and the translator's narrative of the events that happened during Foer's visit. Foer's exuberant reimagining of his family's history keep the disparate threads of the plot together, and he conveys real pathos for characters that may or may not have existed. But Foer's effervescent prose often can't handle the weight of the subject matter: collective guilt, genocide, willful historical lacunae. Some character's moods swing from quirky indifference to suicide with no intermediary steps and little explanation, and the effect on the reader is jarring. When the plot subsequenty collapses under these strains, the sudden seriousness feels forced, and I felt the characters and this reader hadn't earned the catharsis expected by the writer. There aren't many shades on Foer's pallet between acryilic orange & electric blue on one side, and the the darkest crimson & ink black on the other, but the authentic experience of tragedy comes from the slow, inevitable darkening of the middle tones.

James Dickey's Deliverance—the basis for the notorious movie from the '70s starring Jon Voight and Burt Reynolds—is a completely opposite work: it is all middle tones. Dickey, a former business executive who became a poet in middle age, is comfortably in charge of the pace and feel of the book, which mimics the river the characters canoe down. The gathering menace experienced by the characters was surprisingly muted, but this didn't diminish the malevolence of the antagonists or the horror of the protagonists. Although I still haven't seen the movie, I essentially knew the plot, as has I suspect anybody who has heard of the movie. I nonetheless was genuinely riveted by the book. My only real complaint was that only two of the characters (the narrator, Ed, and his Kit-Carson-by-way-of-Friedrich-Nietzsche friend Lewis) were fully developed and three dimensional.

From the L.A. Times:

"My concept of death for a long time," he told McKeen, "was to come down that mountain road [in Kentucky] at a hundred and twenty and just keep going straight right there, burst out through the barrier and hang out above all that � and there I'd be sitting in the front seat, stark naked, with a case of whiskey next to me, and a case of dynamite in the trunk � honking the horn, and the lights on, and just sit there in space for an instant, a human bomb, and fall down into that mess of steel mills. It'd be a tremendous goddamn explosion. No pain. No one would get hurt."

I suppose it's instructive that this bit of morbid theater didn't happen, and instead Hunter S. Thompson's self-inflicted end was a gunshot wound to the head, indoors, inside a Colorado cabin in late winter, with his son in the next room. That he was a great writer is undeniable, but I think the fact that his writing was so incisive and exceptional and even coherent depite the mayhem of his personality (and the mayhem fueled it all) demonstrates his true genius.

I recently finished Peter Robb's Midnight in Sicily, a fascinating and bewildering look at the culture of modern Sicily and the Mezzogiorno. Robb lived in Palermo and Naples for 14 years in the '70s and '80s, when the Cosa Nostra and the Demochristian party's powers were at their respective zeniths. Robb returns to Sicily in the mid '90s for the trial of Giulio Andreotti, the former Demochristian prime minister and senator who was put on trial for ordering the murder of one of his political enemies.

Robb attempts to make coherent Sicily's tangled mess of crime, politics, psychology, history, art, and cuisine. He doesn't entirely succeed, which is less a matter of Robb's skill as a writer than the subject matter being both incomplete and byzantine, a reflection of the Sicilian identity. The character of the island is secretive and conspiratorial, obsessed with the nuance of the half-truth, and the odd theater of intergroup and interpersonal relationships that have developed in this client state over hundreds of years.

It's difficult to keep track of the endless cast of mafiosi, as almost every chapter introduces some new mafia family, "man of honor", or "distinguished corpse". As an outsider it's similarly unclear why, despite the endless killings and obvious corruption, Sicilians have never put up more than token and distracted resistance. Even within the mafia, it's difficult to see the appeal of being a made man, what with the inter-syndicate feuds, betrayals, and rigidly enforced hierarchies.

Robb's at his best when he's analyzing the art, food, and people he's encountered while living and travelling in Italy. I liked his discussion of the novelist Sciascia, and why Italian literature after WWII became more abstract and alleghorical. I also enjoyed the story of Renato Guttuso, the artist, lifelong communist, and eventual senator who was badly exploited by Andreotti and others while he was ill during the last months of his life.

Robb's is an ultimately tragic rendering of the Mezzogiorno, where the beauty of the landscape, culture, and people is mostly offset by corruption, violence, and decay. Sicily's knots are too tightly wound, too intricate to unravel, and it's hard to imagine how a hypothetical Alexander would even begin to cut through them all.

The J2EE Tutorial, 2nd Edition is listed on Amazon.com, which means I'm an author, the 11th Ian Evans in the results page.

The book will be released in June, coincident with JavaOne.

In three acts:

1. Sarah Vowell was interviewed as part of the City Arts & Lectures series last Monday night. She was interviewed by David Kipen (the San Francisco Chronicle's book editor), who was OK, I suppose, but lobbed some really lame questions her way. Vowell didn't do him any favors, responding to the dumb questions with one word answers. Vowell was pretty funny, in her extremely dry manner, but didn't reveal too much of herself. Which is not too surprising considering her proclaimed love of being left alone.

2. After Sarah Vowell, we went to Bimbo's to see Pinback, a band made up of people I imagine must have liked legos, math, and modern art growing up. The show was pretty good, although we arrived a little late due to my brain misfiring, causing us to catch a cab to the Bottom of the Hill on the other side of the city. Luckily the taxi was still around after I realized I got the venue wrong. Stupidity should be expensive, and it was.

3. I read an interview from a few years ago with the novelist Alan Furst, who writes about Europe between the world wars. He had an interesting take on every patriotic American's favorite historical anecdote, the German conquest of France in WWII. He thinks the slow response by France to German expansion was because France still hadn't recovered, physically and psychologically, from the devastation of the Great War. So they allowed Czechoslavakia to be annexed and thought that Nazi Germany could be appeased. I hadn't thought of that angle before. It's so much simpler to just believe that the childish, cowardly French surrendered because it's in their nature to surrender, and need the Americans to bail them whenever things get too tough for their delicate constitutions.

He also makes the interesting point that French collaboration (and more than a little luck, plus the German belief that the French had culture) more or less saved the country from complete devastation, such as was visited on Poland.

Well, I guess it is true that The Simpsons is the summation of western civilization. Thomas Pynchon's voice appeared in an episode last Sunday, although yours truly missed it, as I was unawares and flipping between the last thirty minutes of Casino and Goldfinger elsewhere on the idiot box. Given Mr. P's love of pop culture, it's not that surprising that he'd appear on The Simpsons.

The above clip also shows that I've been mispronouncing his name all along: Pinch-on rather than Pinch-un. As befitting a Long Island boy from a time before mass media whittled down the edges of everyone's regional accents, he's got a fairly thick New York accent.

From the preface to Victoria Price's Christian Allusions in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon:

Herein lies the reason for my directing my special concern [sic][tracing the Christian allusions in V. and Gravity's Rainbow] to a generation younger than my own: as the decades have sped by since the norm was for children brought up in a Christian tradition that included such things as regular Sunday School and church attendance, and memorizing numerous passages of scripture, I have seen the unmistakable trend away from familiarity with the Bible as a given. As I teach sudents in literature classes today, in the shadow of a new century, I find daily that if I refer to such names as Job, or Shadrach, for example, I can no longer assume that the students will make biblical associations with those names at all.

Ohboy, this one's going to be good. I just got the book from Powell's today, along with three other books of Pynchon criticism. This has to be the most bizarre one I've encountered.

Victoria Price, according to the back of the book, is "...associate professor of English and Director of English as a second language at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas." Her book was originally published in 1989, and is now out of print. Prof. Price is a pretty clearly a Christian, so it seems puzzling that she would devote her time to researching the likes of Pynchon. After I read the book, I may just email her some questions.

The other books are: J. Kerry Grant's A Companion to V., Bloom's Modern Critical Views: Thomas Pynchon, and Bloom's Major Novelists: Thomas Pynchon, both edited by Harold Bloom. Old Harry is back beating the bush for Byron the Bulb, apparently his favorite Pynchon passage, in the former's introduction, but in the later's introduction makes this suprising claim: "I suppose that Pynchon's masterwork, to date, is Mason & Dixon...."

I just received "Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide" by Stephen Burn, a companion to the David Foster Wallace novel, and read it tonight (it's a fairly short 90 or so pages). It was quite illuminating on many plot points of the book. It also includes a useful chronology of the major events of the book, as the book's chapters are not in chronological order.

Burn very clearly details how carefully Wallace plotted the book, hoping to silence critics of Wallace who think the book is overindulgent and chaotic, with no intersections in the major plot lines.

If you've read or attempted to read "Infinite Jest," this would be a great companion, in addition to the required two bookmarks and a good dictionary.

The only worthwhile thing I learned in this horrifically bad interview with Erica Jong, author of "Fear of Flying," is that Jong's daughter Molly suffers from aviatophobia. Many of the questions don't make sense unless you were actually at the interview (stuff like, "[Name withheld] supposedly did [libelous allegation]"), and Bowman's obvious sexual anxiety about meeting Jong reads comes accross as completely pathetic. Worse still, at one point Jong points out that, although she's written about many things, everyone zeros-in on the sex in her books, and nobody wants to talk about anything else. Bowman underscores this point by doing exactly that, even admitting that he just thinks of her as "the Sex woman." Way to go, sport. I like Salon, but lately they've been publishing a few too many articles that appear to be more about the author than the subject, full of meaningless confessions and uninteresting autobiographical information.

It appears that Nullsoft, the company that brought you WinAmp, has released a free encrypted communications suite called WASTE. Someone over there knows their Thomas Pynchon (my favorite author), specifically The Crying of Lot 49, the novella that features an underground mail system called W.A.S.T.E. (We Await Silent Trystero's Empire). The plot of Lot 49 involves a possibly imaginary conspiracy against the official postal channels, that may or may not have existed for centuries. W.A.S.T.E. is a mail system used by people on the margins of society--the homeless, drunks, criminals, the urban poor--that the main character, Oedipa Maas, encounters while executing the estate of an ex-lover. A friend of my neighbor works at Nullsoft, so I'll have to ask him about it.

Update: I talked with Tom, the guy that works at Nullsoft, and he said it was indeed a nod to Lot 49. Oh, and AJ, you flatter me.

UpdateUpdate: The Hollywood suits at AOL/Time Warner appear to have pulled the plug on WASTE. It was released as a GPLed project, so the it will now probably live in the software demi-monde of off-shore source repositories inhabited by DeCSS and the like.