stoutfellow

I first became aware of Sophie B. Hawkins after hearing her sing "As I Lay Me Down". I enjoyed the song enough to take a chance on buying her Whaler album, and after that Wilderness as well. I'll discuss those albums in some detail under the cut.

( Split Decision )

I recently finished reading Geoffrey Nunberg's Going Nucular. Nunberg is a regular at Language Log; the book is a collection of short essays on "language, politics, and culture in confrontational times", as the subtitle puts it. Some of them are rather dry, but many raise unexpected insights and some of them sparkle.

The general topic is not words themselves, but the ways in which they are used, and the way these change. The change in the connotations of the word "plastic"; the misunderstandings between the West and the Islamic world over the meanings of the words "crusade" and "jihad"; the curious inversion whereby it became possible to speak of a "pro-government protest"; the peculiar freight belonging to the word "Gallic"; these are among the things Nunberg discusses. He talks about the connotations of the word "face" (as in "save" or "lose"); about the words we use in discussing matters of race; and about the words "liberal" and "leftist", and the strange relationship between them in USAn political discourse. He points out the fact that the phrase "on the up and up" has two different meanings, and that most people use it with one and are completely unaware of the other. He complains about those who complain about language (and, so often, know next to nothing about the subject) - and then complains about language himself, though with a gently self-mocking tone. He discusses the disappearance of line drawings and photographs from dictionaries (and oh, I do remember the glorious prints in my family's old two(massive)volume dictionary!), and drily comments (of the word "lucubration") that "[w]hen William F. Buckley, Norman Mailer, and the editors of the New York Review of Books have all lost their grip on the meaning of a word, maybe we should think about putting it out to pasture". He defends the word "ain't", sketches the nature and origins of the pronunciation "nucular", and complains about songs whose titles are adverbs in "-ly", and generally has a grand time of things.

A good book; not all that weighty, in the sum of things, but a fun read for lovers of words.

To clarify, if it's necessary, these are the books that I read for the first time in 2007 that I enjoyed the most, or got the most out of. I don't think any of them were actually published in '07.

( The List )

In a previous post, after a Vernor Vinge marathon, I described a recurring theme in his work, involving betrayal, deception, and subversion. I've recently read two more of his novels, the early work Tatja Grimm's World and this year's Hugo winner, Rainbow's End, and I can say that the same themes recur in both of those, although to a lesser extent in the earlier novel.

It occurs to me now that one way of looking at Vinge's stories is as suspensers, more specifically stories of espionage. I'm not that familiar with the genre - I've read some of Helen MacInnes' Cold War novels and a couple of early works by Tom Clancy - but the focus on plotting (in the nonliterary sense) seems to be a central element. Is it coincidence that so many figures in Vinge's novels are in government, and specifically in the security services - the military, the police, intelligence? The drawing of... call them civilians... into the struggle, the choices they face, and the sometimes crucial role they play in the denouement is another common plot element. Now, Vinge is less Manichaean than MacInnes or Clancy; the plots in his stories are more complex, and people on both (or all) sides engage in them; and, of course, there is always the strong sfnal element; but I think it would be fair to trace at least part of his literary ancestry to that genre.

It was reading Rainbow's End that led me to this conclusion; this novel is, among other things, quite clearly a suspenser, and good of its type. The setting is on Earth, some twenty years from now, and the Singularity is clearly on its way. With the increase in power available to each individual, there is a serious and rising risk of racial extinction, and several of the characters (including the chief villain) are engaged in efforts to head off that possibility. The "civilians" I alluded to above include several schoolchildren (in their late teens) and a number of older people who have not been able to keep pace with accelerating change. (One of them, at least, has the excuse of being a recovering Alzheimer's patient.)

How does it compare with Vinge's earlier works? Well, I didn't find it as entertaining as A Fire Upon the Deep or A Deepness in the Sky. Granted, I have a taste for space opera, but I think there's more to my reaction than that. One of Vinge's strengths is his ability to evoke sensawunda - of current authors I'm familiar with, only Greg Bear is his superior in that area - and Rainbow's End doesn't quite achieve that. (YGBM is a disturbing threat, but scarcely a new idea; Poul Anderson used it to great effect in the short story "I Tell You, It's True", some thirty years ago.) Beyond that, the story isn't as intricate as in the earlier novels; it's fairly clear, relatively early, what the main players are doing, and Vinge springs no great surprises.

I'm not saying Rainbow's End isn't a good story. It is; Vinge still spins an entertaining yarn, and manages to give a great deal of detail without over-obvious infodumps. (He also mocks himself rather adroitly at one point.) I'm also not saying it didn't deserve the Hugo; I haven't read any of the other nominees, so I'm in no position to comment on that. It's just that... it's a good, satisfying read, but I was expecting more from him.

Peter Spufford's Power and Profit: The Merchant in Medieval Europe is not an easy read. It's pretty hefty, for one thing - more than 400 quarto pages, not counting endmatter. It's also rather dense. My first attempt to read it foundered somewhere in the first chapter, after which I set it aside for a year or so. But if you're interested in how things work in human society, and how modern Europe began to come to be, reading this book is rewarding. Details under the cut.

( Medieval Commerce )

The book is, as I say, very dense, and the details can be overwhelming, but overall I found it very much worth reading.

Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word is rather different from other books of linguistics that I've read. Make no mistake, it is a book of linguistics; though Ostler rarely dips into the technical jargon of the field, he does not hesitate to do so when appropriate. But Ostler approaches the field in a rather new way. (He is not alone in this approach; he mentions, in the text and the bibliography, several other authors following the same track. But it was new to me.)

( Imperial Languages )

I've said on several occasions that I regard Queen of Angels as Greg Bear's masterpiece. I'd like to put some flesh on that opinion, under the cut. I'll try to avoid serious spoilers.

( Blessed are the single-hearted )

Christopher Frayling's Mad, Bad and Dangerous?: The Scientist and the Cinema is an exploration of the presentation of scientists in the movies; it's fairly interesting, if for no other reason than the categorization of types and the connections between them. More under the cut.

( Mwahaha! )

Sylvie and Bruno is Lewis Carroll's longest work; it was originally published in two parts, each of which is roughly as long as the Alice books combined. It's an odd book, a melange of disparate and, sad to say, discordant elements. There is Carrollian whimsy, complete with fairies, two über-cute children, a couple of absurd Professors, silly songs and talking animals. There are political machinations, discourses on science and mathematics, meditations on Christianity, a touch of satire, a light romance and a large dollop of melodrama.

Unfortunately, it's not a very good book. There's a reason why it's less well known than the Alice books or "The Hunting of the Snark": it simply doesn't hold together well. The whimsy never reaches the level of the Alice books; the depiction of the children is infected with the Victorian propensity for child-worship; the shifts between Fairy-Land and 19th century England are disconcerting; and the resolution is an over-hasty attempt to make everything Come Out Right.

Still, I don't regret taking the time and effort to read it. Embedded in the dross are lumps of gold, or at least high-grade copper ore. In addition to the discussion of free fall I quoted earlier, there is an impromptu demonstration of the properties of the Möbius strip and the Klein bottle. There is a brief meditation on the shortcomings of punctuation and the uses of white space. Some of the philosophical passages are thought-provoking (though some are simply sophomoric), and the silly songs are, if not on a par with, say, "The Walrus and the Carpenter", entertaining enough. The discussion of dinner-table conversation, and the techniques adopted in Mein Herr's homeland to encourage it, is hilarious.

I think the best I can say, in rating Sylvie and Bruno, is to call it an interesting failure.

As far as content goes, the songs of the Guess Who are unremarkable. (When they try for significance - "Guns, Guns, Guns" - they generally achieve pretension, and lose their actual merits.) As far as I can make out, in "No Sugar Tonight" the singer is upset because the girl he likes, and who likes him, won't break up with her jock boyfriend. This is not exactly the stuff of tragedy. Still, I enjoy the song a great deal; I think it's my favorite song from the "Greatest Hits" album I bought back in January.

I've mentioned before that, listening to some Spanish-language singers (notably Shakira), I simply treat the singer's voice as a musical instrument, paying little attention to the meanings of the words. (The fact that my Spanish is too rusty to follow fast-paced lyrics makes this easier...) Something like that applies to this song as well. There is a passage towards the end of the song in which the voices of the two singers separate in an interesting way. The lead singer stays within a narrow melodic range, and his words are heavily and regularly stressed; the second voice soars and circles around the lead, with greater melodic range but less variation in stress. The best way I can describe it is to say that it's the vocal equivalent of, say, a drum-and-sax duet, and, so interpreted, it's quite enjoyable to listen to:

Lonely feeling
Jock says yes and I believe him
Deep inside
When we talk about the things I say
Find a corner
She hasn't got the faith or the guts to leave him
Where I can hide
When they're standing in each other's way
Silent footsteps
You're driven back now to places you've been to
Crowding me
You wonder what you're gonna find
Sudden darkness
You know you've been wrong and it won't be long
But I can see
Before you leave 'em all far behind

(The second voice is italicized.)

Similar comments apply to quite a few of GW's songs: "Hand Me Down World", "No Time", "Share the Land", "These Eyes", "Laughing"... "Star Baby" and "Follow Your Daughter Home" are also fun, but rather disturbing when you think about them. ("Star Baby" is about a celebrity, and sounds rather stalkerish; "Follow Your Daughter Home" takes the form of advice to a father and seems to be satiric, but attitudes have changed enough that it could be half-serious...)

I can enjoy a song, or an album, for its form (if the content isn't completely dull) or for its content (if the form is adequate); the best music scores well on both counts. (Some groups, like Wilson Phillips, score badly on both counts, and Michael Bolton's inability to do anything but wail poisons everything he touches.) This album falls into the first category; not great, but generally enjoyable listening.