Anything you can do...

Well, hell, if J can hijack the blog to read whatever she damn well pleases, I can hijack the blog to talk about other things.  And what I want to talk about at the moment is Parkes.

Some of you will know that I'm currently installed at the Parkes, NSW radio telescope, affectionately known as The Dish (yes, the one from the movie, and it's exactly like that).  Tim, beloved flatmate and astroboy extraordinaire, was given a week's observing time out here, with the first 80 hours being continuous.  Amazing though he is, even he could not manage that by himself, and when no other astronomers were available he asked if I'd be willing to pitch in.  So here I am, running the telescope on the first of three overnight shifts: entirely alone, utterly unqualified and having very little concept of what I'm actually doing.  Tim has promised to explain it to me better in the near future, but for now, all I'm doing is entering the same set of commands into a GUI over and over and keeping an eye on several computer screens to make sure nothing 'weird' happens.  Which, you know, assumes that I'd recognise weird if I saw it.

The bigger part of my job, which hopefully I won't be called upon to do, involves making sure that the telescope doesn't crash into the ground or burst into flames.  Those of you familiar with my track record with household appliances might be surprised that I'd be trusted with such a task, but what The Powers That Be don't know won't hurt them.  An interesting aspect of this, though, is that my complete ignorance has nothing to do with my lack of astronomical qualifications or experience: Parkes is the only radio telescope still in operation that has to be operated on-site.  All the rest of them can be done by computer from wherever you are in the world, but Parkes is old-schoolin' it and demands your constant physical presence in the Control Room (whence I write this entry).  Everyone arrives here having no idea how to do it no matter how much other observing experience they've had, which is kind of heartening for me.

On the flip side, this degree of back-to-basics-ness means that it is not unlikely that I will be called upon to drive the telescope manually.  Which is terrifying, frankly.  I mean, I don't doubt that I could do it, but... look, right now I'm getting a minor case of the shakes (I've been up for 24 hours, less a three-hour nap that concluded 14 hours ago), and I really wouldn't trust my hands or my brain to do anything more complicated than make tea - and that includes carrying the tea up the steps to the Control Room without losing most of it.

I've also got a bit of that weird, addled euphoria that kicks in at a certain stage of exhaustion, so I'm bouncing around in my chair and singing loudly and giggling at nothing.  What kills me is that Tim only went to bed a few hours ago and he had been working - and doing serious work, not just pushing buttons in sequence like I am - for 19 hours straight at that point, without even a meal break, and it barely showed.  How the hell do you do this sort of work on those hours?  I am only managing to be upright at this point thanks to his incredibly vast musical collection, which is bringing me back into contact with bands from my misspent yoof whom I saw dozens of times and fully adored and have since forgotten completely.  Most of this happened in the move from tapes to CDs; a lot of my cassette collection never got replicated, and I am just now realising to what extent my life is the poorer for it.  (Hi, Velvet Crush!  Whatever happened to you guys?)

I hope to do a couple more entries because I have heaps more to say.  The sky alone... I wouldn't even know where to start.  It's just bigger here, in defiance of all logic and natural law.  And The Dish itself is spectacular.  It's mesmerising.  In the middle of some truly spectacular scenery, it still manages to be the most beautiful sight in view.  I'll try to put up some photos soon, not that they could ever do it justice.

In other, more Lit-Girls-y news, I have finally gotten around to _To the Lighthouse_, and in the words of Dorothy Parker, 'This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.'  So after about 35 pages I'm giving it zero strings and chucking it at the nearest wall, with firm instructions for the stream-of-consciousness types to bite me.  If you want my attention, earn it with a good story; don't try to trick me into feeling impressed because you talk in circles and struggle to stay on top of your own fancy foofaraw.  I'm not that easily fooled, Woolf.  Not by a long shot.

Review: Midnight's Children

The previous post's image felt about right as a review, although admittedly a little light on critical engagement. A month later, I've got nothing to add.

I've seriously been racking my brain, attempting to come up with something to say about Midnight's Children. Something that hasn't been said before. And better. By someone else.

Nothing doing, I'm afraid.

Midnight's Children is everything you've heard. It's "huge, vital, engrossing ... in all senses a fantastic book" (Sunday Times). It's "the literary map of India [...] redrawn" and "a country finding its voice" (New York Times). And yes, London Review of Books, it's a "brilliant and endearing novel."

It took the Booker in 1981, when it was published. It took the Booker of Bookers in 1993 and again in 2008. It's on Time's Top 100 Novels since 1923 List.

How could I give it anything other than Five Strings?

XOXO

Interim Review: Midnight's Children

It's like this. (With less masculine arms, admittedly.)

XOXO

Meet my new girlfriend.

Her name is Sarah Vowell, and I LUUUURRRRRRVVVVVE her.

So yeah.  I still haven't finished This Is Your Brain on Music, and don't even talk to me about Virginia Woolf.  She is still not a presence in my life, and we're all just going to have to make our peace with that.

But don't get me wrong, I've been reading.  I've been reading up a storm... if you consider reading Take the Cannoli three times in a month to be 'a storm.'  That's not all I've read, I hasten to add: I also got through Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans (the McSweeney's Press humour collection, which was awesome), as well as Nick Hornby's Shakespeare Wrote for Money (laugh-out-loud-to-myself-on-the-Red-Line funny).  But Take the Cannoli and Assassination Vacation brought me back to reading in a big way.

All of you who know me (which, let's face it, is all of you) will be familiar with the particular brand of ish that I went through in the last several months.  It hasn't been good, and there were a million and one ways that it reverberated through my life.  But one of the most troubling, to me, was that I found it really hard to read.  Reading has always been my #1 displacement activity: it's what I do when I'm sad, or fretful, or bored, to make me feel happy and relaxed and entertained.  I get sucked into books to the exclusion of pretty much everything else around me; when I go to someone's house for the first time, I make a beeline for the bookshelf; I get twitchy fingers when I'm deeply into a book and have to put it down.  I've been like this for as long as I can remember.  It's what I am.

So you can understand, then, why it was so unsettling for me to find myself unable to focus on print for more than a couple of minutes at a time.  I felt like (still yet another) piece of me had been suddenly and inexplicably ripped away, and I didn't know what to do about it.  I kept trying to read, retreating to old favourites like Douglas Adams and [heart] Nick Earls [heart], but I'd struggle.  The only things that seemed to hold my attention were Jacob's 'Gossip Girl' recaps from Television without Pity, but as awesome as they are (and they are - go, run, read them now.  I''ll wait), they didn't fill the hole that losing my book love had created.

This all changed when I picked up Take the Cannoli.  To be fair, the shift had started with Hornby's Shakespeare, but as that's a collection of columns, I still didn't get the feeling I was reading a single-entity book.  Take the Cannoli, while also a collection of essays, felt much more book-like to me, and I suddenly felt on much more solid ground: I was excited and moved, I laughed and cried, and I tore through it while desperately not wanting it to end.  All of this was heightened when I went on to Assassination Vacation, her story of touring sites related to the assassinations of U.S. Presidents Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley: I actually fell asleep hugging the book to my chest, and not because I had dozed off while reading it.

I like my room tidy.  This may come as a shock to anyone who has lived with me, but it's true: my decorating inclinations lean more toward minimalism than any other aesthetic; unfortunately, I also have an abiding devotion to books, stuffed animals, and Japanese kitsch, and this plays hell with my attempts at clean lines.  So I live with the conflict, mostly comfortably.  At the moment, this means that my books are migrating from my bookcase downstairs to my bedroom upstairs at an alarming rate.  Most of them end up on, in or beside my bed, even if I'm not reading them right that second.  I like having them close to me, falling asleep with them and waking up with them and knowing that they're there whenever I need them.  It's about way more than the text; it's their feel and smell and size and shape that I find comforting.  It's about the pages I fold down so I can find favourite lines quickly.  It's about the stains on the pages from sloppy laksa or suntan lotion, the sand between the pages and the weird water-marks from that time I dropped it in the bath.  I'm glad to have it back.  I feel like myself again.

Review: Going Nucular

So yes, I loved it.

Those of you who know me know that I am a language dork.  I like talking about it, reading about it, and thinking about it: how it's used, what it means, where it came from.  Geoffrey Nunberg has similar interests and infinitely more knowledge, so I was bound to enjoy his work.  And I did: he's funny, insightful and articulate.  And the articles are short essays (mostly transcripts of his NPR pieces, with the odd magazine bit thrown in), which means that it's a good book for the way I read (mostly bus rides, with the odd bit before bed thrown in).

The San Francisco Chronicle said, 'If there is such a thing as a standup linguist, it's Nunberg.'  While I wouldn't go that far (I reckon that'd be Richard Lederer if it's anyone), I do agree with the basic sentiment: he's funny and accessible without talking down to the audience.  He's also topical, taking his inspiration from events of the day and investigating the role that language plays in them.  This does mean that his material doesn't always age well - I've also just read The Way We Talk Now, his collection from the early- and mid-'90s, and some of the pieces do feel a bit dated - but even so, it's interesting to watch him pull it all together.

I will say that I didn't enjoy either of his books as much as Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves, but Nunberg and Truss are writing very different books: Nunberg notes that his books are not for the 'grammar sticklers' - which seems to be an unnecessarily narky dig at Truss - but it's not that Nunberg doesn't care about grammar; it seems to be more that he's interested in meaning and usage, not in grammar for grammar's sake.  I don't think that's all that far from Truss, really (her argument that good punctuation is important because it's the good manners of language, rather than just because it's grammatically accurate, would indicate that they're actually pretty close) but Eats... is much more instructional, while Nunberg's essays are more observational in nature, and they have a very different feel as a result.

I would heartily recommend either Going Nucular or The Way We Talk Now to anyone who's interested in language, even if - or even especially if - you don't consider yourself a grammar stickler.  Four strings.

XOXO

Interim Review: Going Nucular

Yes, yes, I know I'm meant to be reading To the Lighthouse.  I'll get there, but it involves a trip to the library and setting up a membership and blah blah.  In the meantime, I picked up Going Nucular: Language, Politics, and Culture in Confrontational Times by Geoffrey Nunberg.  This was one of Tim's recommendations, and, conveniently, it was living on our shared bookshelf.

And I LOVE it.  Love love love.  I'd not heard of Nunberg before, though he has a regular spot on NPR's 'Fresh Air', but he's excellent: smart, funny and with lots of insight into the uses of language, particularly in public life.  I won't get into too much detail because I suspect I'll get through it pretty quickly and will return with a full review then, but go read it.  Absolutely.

XOXO

The Voices in my Head

(AKA Review: The Fran Lebowitz Reader)

I really wanted to like The Fran Lebowitz Reader. Really, I did. And I pretty much expected I would: it’s one of E’s suggestions and I trust her taste; it’s observational humour and that’s usually a hands-down winner for me; and it has stood the test of time (remember, most of the individual pieces were written in the ’70s and ’80s and yet it’s still out there, making good sales and keeping its writer fed and clothed despite her almost two decades’ writer’s block).

And yet? Didn’t love it.

Why? Because of the voices in my head.

Lebowitz is unabashedly, outrageously, completely American. She’s East Coast American. New York American. She is, let it be known, a Capital N, Capital Y New Yorker. With a great many of the pieces in this collection consisting of carefully crafted anecdotes about life in that megatropolis (of which "Diary of a New York Apartment Hunter" is by far my favourite), you are never not aware of that fact. Fran Lebowitz equals New York, here.

And yet, there’s something in the tone in this collection – particularly in the early section “Metropolitan Life” – that doesn’t feel American. Or more precisely, it doesn't sound American. While the subject matter is decidedly so, something in the writing style, choice of words, sentence construction, doesn’t fit. It’s a little … out of whack, somehow. So I’m reading these pieces, smiling, enjoying the tricky callbacks and creative puns when a direct reference to Christopher Street, or a sweater, or Walter Cronkite crops up and I’m completely thrown because – in my head – the whole book is being read aloud by Stephen Fry.

Now, that’s not normal for me. Yes, I love Stephen Fry. No, I don’t usually hear his voice in my head (although this definitely tops my Christmas Wish List this year). But I suspect it comes back to the writing. There’s a – and I can find no better way to describe it, so work with me on this – decidedly British tone to a lot of the pieces which then clashes with the American-ness of its content. Lines like

[…] it is not feasible to bring into one’s own home all the desirable accoutrements of discotheque dancing such as deejay, several hours of tape, and the possibility, slim though it may be, of meeting one’s own true love.

are just screaming “British!” to me. It’s the same with

It was with considerable approval that I listened one Sunday evening to my weekend host instruct his chauffeur to drive us, his guests, back to New York.

Until the last two words, that is.

And while this experience lessens as the book continues, it was so strong initially that I couldn’t get passed it. I started to wonder, “is this a new literary technique Lebowitz is pioneering?”, “is it a greater comment on the subtleties of writing in the English language?”, “Am I going bonkers here?”. In the end, I simply couldn’t reconcile my imaginary, British voice-over with the ever-present American auteur herself and it ruins the book for me.

I love you, E but I’m sorry I’m just not with you on this one.

The Fran Lebowitz Reader: only Two Strings of Pearls from me.

xoxo

PS: Yes, I’m fully aware that this post probably says far, far more about me than it does about The Fran Lebowitz Reader but there you have it: it’s my blog and I get to write about Stephen Fry if I want to.

Recommendations, and Thoughts on Being a Chucker

A few things to say.  First, recommendation from Another Matt:

* The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages by Norman Cohn

* Hyperion by Dan Simmons

* The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

* The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

Second, I have decided to put Guns, Germs and Steel back on the shelf for a bit.  While I am enjoying it a lot more now, it's just taking me way too long, and as a result the blog is lying fallow.  Since Rule #1 of having a blog is: Post, stupid, I feel like I need to get going on some other books in the meantime.  I do fully intend to come back to Guns... in the not-too-distant, but right now I need something a bit more portable (much of my reading time occurs on buses and in random stolen moments).  I'm awaiting directions from J, and will let you know when she has assigned me something new.

In the meantime, here's what I would say about Guns...: it's an important book, and more people should read it.  There's a lot of great information in it that sheds light on human development around the world, and Diamond goes a long way toward his goal of beating the crap out of those my-people-won-because-we're-just-better arguments.  But the problem is that the book is pitched too high: the people who are able to get through it (and I don't just mean people who are able to comprehend the information, but people who would are devoted enough to read the entire thing) are almost certainly going to be the people who already agree with him and are looking to back up their own arguments.  Which isn't to suggest that the book is wasted, because Guns... is, as far as I know, the first book to collect all of the data and present it in one place, and that makes it very useful indeed.  But it's hard going, and I can't pretend otherwise.

So my verdict (for now) on Guns, Germs and Steel is this: Read it, by all means - it's certainly worth the effort - but expect to have to put some work in.  I would also advocate dipping into it over an extended period rather than trying to do it as I have.  It's too much information to take in all at once, for me at least, and trying to cram it all in over a short time just means that I'd have ended up missing important pieces of the puzzle.

XOXO

Interim Review: Guns, Germs and Steel

So.  This book has been much more of a struggle for me than I'd expected.  I enjoy science writing as a rule, and I don't need it to be especially pop-sciencey to enjoy it: I generally find that the facts are interesting enough on their own to sustain me without a lot of dressing-up.  But you still need to be able to tell a story if you want to keep my interest for 457 pages, or even 7 pages, and I'm not convinced that Diamond can do that.

Well, no, that's a bit too harsh.  I think he probably can tell a story, but in this book it feels more like he's tried to write a book-length journal submission.  I'm having trouble working out quite what doesn't work for me about his style: it's not that it's dry, exactly, nor is the density of it really a problem for me (though it is seriously dense); and it's bugging me, because I feel like I should like it more.  I'm certainly learning a lot, and about things that interest me, so why can't I get into it as much as I'd like?  (For those who don't know, it's an examination of why certain cultures ended up so much more technologically advanced than others, and the repercussions of that advancement on other aspects of human history.  It's comprehensive and honest, and goes a long way toward putting a nail in the coffin of those 'some races are just better' arguments that make me long to punch people squarely in the balls.)

That all having been said, I should note that I'm finding it much easier going now that I'm a good ways into it, but I shouldn't have to get almost halfway into a text like this before it grabs me.  Tim said that he'd started it a few times and never got far, and I now understand why; were I not reading it for Lit Girls, I suspect that I would have chucked it aside by now.  And that would have been a shame, because there is a lot worth reading in it: it's one of those books that answers questions you hadn't realised you wanted to ask by filling in blanks you hadn't realised were empty.  And Diamond has done most of his work (his 'real job' is as a biologist studying bird evolution) in the South Pacific, so he has a great deal of knowledge about the history of this part of the world, and that makes it more interesting to me: having grown up in the U.S., I didn't even get the tiny amount of education about this history that Australian students get.  But... I don't know, I still don't love it.  And the people I know who like it are really passionate about it, so I feel like I must be missing something.

Anyway.  I'll post again when I've finished it, and we'll see how I feel then.  Cross fingers it will continue to improve.

XOXO