Category: Journal

I’m currently out of town visiting family and the weather has suddenly become exactly the sort of weather which encourages snuggling and my snuggle-ee is a couple of hundred miles away.  Bother. It turns out that it’s possible to enjoy visiting and to seriously miss someone at the same time. It’s just that, right now, the “missing” part is winning the tug-of-war.  Anyway, after an unseasonably warm Thanksgiving, Winter seems to have happened all at once. In this neck of the woods, that means hours of rain just above the freezing point. My mother always said that this was lovely weather for ducks, but I give ducks more credit than that.  I finally finished The King In Yellow. It took me quite a while longer than I expected because Victorian fiction is kind of verbose and obtuse. Maybe not all of it, but this example certainly is. The first four stories in the collection are proto-Lovecraftian tales of glimpsed horrors and madness that lies just beyond our ability to comprehend it. They range from riveting to just interesting, but they’re well worth reading. The remaining six stories are more conventional romantic tales.  I have to question the decision to print the stories in descending order of strangeness. Most of the appeal comes from the The King In Yellow stories. I can’t really recommend spending too much time on the rest of it. It’s not bad, but it’s relatively ordinary and not what I imagine most people are looking for when they pick up the book.  I hope everyone had a lovely Thanksgiving. I have more to be thankful for than I have energy to write right now. I want to write more about that, but I think I want to sleep even more. G’night, all.

Warning: This post is mostly about sports. Well, really one sport. Specifically, football. The sort of football one plays with one’s feet. I just wanted to make that clear from the beginning. In the extremely unlikely event that you’re not already aware of this fact, I’ve been a supporter of Leicester City Football Club for almost two decades now. I’ve listened to or watched nearly every match this century, I’ve seen the team win cups and beat top clubs, and I’ve seen them relegated several times. I believe in demi-divinity of Martin O’Neill, that the midfield of Izzet, Savage and Lennon was as good as any in England, that Matt Elliott made a fine makeshift striker, that Jermaine Beckford had no business wearing the LCFC badge, that it was a mistake to let Nigel go the first time but probably not the second, and that no matter how great the King Power stadium is, that it’ll never be Filbert Street. I am, in short, a Very Serious Fan. I’ve never had so much fun following the team as I have the last eight months. Going in to April of 2015, we were about as doomed as a Premiership team could be. We played reasonably well up to that point, but we were unable to turn performance into points.  With only 19 points from 29 matches and only 9 more matches to play and in 20th place since November, the outlook was beyond bleak.  I was mentally preparing for another relegation. If you don’t follow football of this sort, you may not appreciate what relegation means. The bottom three teams in the Premier League, the 18th, 19th, and 20th place finishers, are demoted from the league and replaced by the top teams from the next-lower league. Imagine your last place baseball team having to play in AAA the next year. Leicester weren’t merely in last place; unless they climbed to 17th, they would be out of the league.  Of course, as you might have guessed, the nigh-impossible happened. Andy King scored a late winner against West Ham to give us a hint of hope. Then, Jamie Vardy (more on him later), scored a last-minute winner at West Brom and suddenly, we started to feel a glimmer of hope. This is what a man who scores a goal to take his team out of last place looks like. We beat Swansea and Burnley to win four on the trot before losing to eventual champions Chelesa. By this point,we were in 17th place and appeared to be poised for a dramatic finish. Instead, we beat Southampton and Newcastle, then drew with Sunderland to secure survival, then walloped Queen’s Park Rangers on the last day of the season and wound up in the most 14th place. It was, by a huge margin, the most exciting 14th place finish I’d ever experienced. The summer, however, went…badly. Three of our youth players decided to record their visit to a brothel in Thailand, the home country of the club’s owners. The three players, including manager Nigel Pearson’s son, were sacked. The relationship between Pearson and the owners never recovered and Pearson was removed shortly thereafter. Bookies made us favorites for relegation as Pearson received a huge amount of credit for our survival the previous year. We hired former Chelsea manager Claudio Ranieri and it was hard to know exactly what he’d bring to the table. He was successful, but perhaps not successful enough, at Chelsea ten years ago. Most recently, he’d managed the national team of Greece and resigned after losing to the Faroe Islands.  We really needn’t have worried. It’s mid-November and, somehow, we’ve only lost one match and we’re third in all of England, one point behind Manchester City and Arsenal. I can’t explain it. Well, ok, I can. We’ve had some good fortune with the referees, we’ve played a fairly weak schedule thus far, and we’re winning all the close ones. It feels like a bubble that could burst any moment, but I cannot tell you just how much fun it is to support Leicester City right now.   The table as of 18 November, 2015. Not a misprint. It’s not just that we’re winning; it’s that we’re playing exciting, attacking football and we seem to be able to come from behind every single match. Jamie Vardy, who was playing essentially semi-professional football until a few years ago, is the leading scorer in England and has scored in nine straight matches in a single season, something no one else has accomplished in the Premiership. He’s our talisman. He chases lost causes and runs himself into the ground every match and never gives an opponent a moment’s rest. It now looks very likely that he will be in the England squad next summer in the European championships. I’m getting a great deal of pleasure out of all of this. As I mentioned, I’m a long-time fan, and there have been as many, if not more, down times over the years I’ve followed the club. I almost never miss a match. I have a closet full of blue replica shirts. I’ve even had my photo in the Leicester Mercury, even though I’ve never been to England.  Some of you might ask a very reasonable question at this point: “Why?” I’ll tell you why I let myself care so much about a team playing a sport I didn’t care about as a kid in a country I’ve never visited: I find it incredibly useful to have something objectively unimportant I can pour emotion into and care about deeply. I won’t make he argument that this team’s fortunes are provably important. I can’t. I’m ok with that. I can let myself get worked up and yell and scream and question the existence of justice in the universe and when it’s done, I can walk away and life is pretty much the way it was before the match started. Except, of course, these days, you may see me smiling a little more often than usual…

It’s been a rough couple of weeks and I keep trying to say something but everything feels either trivial or boring or just “wrong.” When I don’t feel up to introspection or addressing serious topics, I fall back on my old LiveJournal crutch: Making lists! The majority of them are exactly the sort I would have posted on LJ a decade ago, which is to say, I can’t imagine anyone finding them compelling. For example, while I might be interested in trying to remember every concert I’ve attended, I suspect this might make for less than gripping reading material for anyone else. That’s a long way of saying that I have two weeks worth of drafts which are unlikely to ever see the light of day. You can thank me later.  On an unrelated note, I recently read Frederik Pohl’s short story collection Pohlstars. I’d forgotten just how much I enjoyed his voice. I’ve read and re-read his Heechee books several times, but I’d never read anything else he’d written until this. The thing I love about science fiction short stories is that they give the author an opportunity to take a single, usually weird, idea, and let it play out for as long as it’s interesting. Larry Niven’s at his best when he’s writing short stories. I suspect Warren Ellis would be brilliant at this, or maybe he already is. Global Frequency and Secret Avengers were nothing if not short stories based on strange ideas.  Bah. It’s taken me two hours to write just this bit tonight. My tongue remains pretty knotted. It’s late. Let’s just hit the “publish” button and call it a night.  

Here’s the thing: You see obituaries which cite a “heroic battle with cancer” with some regularity. What you don’t often see is a description of someone losing a heroic battle with depression. I don’t know why that is. Untreated depression kills. Treated depression can still kill, and fighting it is heroic, because it’s a battle every day just to remain functional. I lost another friend to depression and I can tell you with absolute certainty that her struggle was every bit as difficult as that of anyone else afflicted with a chronic and potentially terminal disease. She didn’t take the easy way out; she managed to beat the damned thing for decades.  

I was first exposed to classic literature in high school and, at the time, I didn’t really understand why Dickens, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and their ilk were so highly regarded. My working theory has always been that my high school experience was rich in content but short on discussion of what the content was actually about. We discussed theme and mood and style and plot and things like that, but we never talked about the issues the authors were addressing. I understand that some of the issues might not have been appropriate for discussion in a public school classroom (Brothers Karamazov, I’m looking at you!), but this approach meant that I read a lot of books without properly understanding them.* That’s been my theory for several decades, but I’m wondering if there wasn’t another variable in play. I’m currently reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is a delight to read, or at least, it would be if it were printed well. I picked up a paperback edition at Half Price Books. I’ve seen the cover of this particular edition before. It’s the version of the book in almost every classroom where students are assigned to read this novel.  This is not a fun version of this book to read. The print is tiny, the typeface is squat and wide, a problem which the cheap paper only makes worse, and there are very few pages which aren’t printed at a noticeably skewed angle. If it weren’t such a fabulous book, I don’t think I’d be able to slog through it. This is very much how I remember books in high school being. I assume that they haven’t improved much in the last thirty years, that high school students are still being assigned to read barely legible copies of some of the greatest books they’ll ever read. I doubt this is the sole reason why it’s so hard to instill a love of reading in students, but it can’t be helping.  Putting aside pesky details like school budgets, the idealist in me would love to see if making reading a more pleasant experience would result in more people developing a life-long habit. Maybe I’m blowing this out of proportion due to picking up one very bad copy of a very good book. One conclusion of which I’m completely certain: If you want to read One Hundred Years of Solitude, do yourself a favor and pick any other edition than the one pictured above. * Let’s be honest. The late-teen version of me was very much a factor in this equation. I was not nearly as ready for the challenges of literature as I thought I was.. I was also kind of a doofus.  

This is my cat: Fashionable bow tie from Oskar and Klaus His name is Winjamin Failclaw. Originally, his name was just Win. I adopted him at a shelter event named for a music festival. I’d seen The Arcade Fire at that festival and their vocalist is named Win. Yeah, it’s a stretch. It also wasn’t sufficient. Just like people, cats respond better when you call them by their formal name rather than their nickname, so Win needed a longer name. “Winston” would be fine, I suppose, but I preferred “Winjamin” as I have a friend named Benjamin. In my experience, three syllables are ideal for scolding-names, so this was a huge improvement. Winjamin still has his claws, but he’s not particularly good at using them. Or, rather, he’s good at deploying them but he struggles when it’s time to retract them. He tends to get one of them hung up in whatever he’s sharpening his claws on and then look around with a “As God as my witness, I have no idea how this happened, can you help me?” look on his face. It was at this point that “Failclaw” was added to his name. He was four or five years old when I adopted him and I don’t have a lot of information on his history. He was getting over an infection in one of his legs when I brought him home, and his hips are a little displaced, so he’s not particularly limber. The folks at the shelter must have been giving him something because he walked reasonably well when we got him home, but soon afterwards he was limping badly. He’s healed up nicely, thank you for asking, but he’s not a champion climber. The notches on his ear suggest that either he was neutered when feral, or he’d been in a few scraps.  He’s one of the kindest animals I’ve ever encountered. He’s a little stand-offish but once he settles in to have his ears scratched, you’re not going to be going anywhere for a while. Some nights he sleeps with us, other nights he runs wild with the Red Velvet, our youngest cat. They play a lot and he’s a good sport about losing. That’s a good thing, as he loses pretty much every time. Oh, and he loves the red laser dot. I mean, I’ve never seen an animal who loves the laser like he does. One time, he jumped over to the neighbor’s porch and wouldn’t come back. We didn’t really want to climb over on to their porch and he wouldn’t respond to calling or food or anything…until Nicole thought to bring out the laser. We had him back in a heartbeat after that. My favorite thing about Mr. Failclaw is that he’s incredibly affectionate towards me. When I get home from work, he trots over to the door and raises his nose up and meows quietly until I reach down and pet him. I don’t believe I’m projecting human emotions on to him, or at least not doing so without good cause. The fact that an animal with whom communication is limited appears to feel genuine affection towards me is one of the things that makes me feel like I’m doing something right. So…that’s my cat. He’s a good kitty. I wanted to say something nice about him before I went down the rabbit hole of a Halloween story and then….November.

When I first saw the original Star Wars movie back in 1977, my father commented on how much it reminded him of Frank Herbert’s Dune. Being obsessed with anything even tangentially related to Star Wars, I tore through Dune as soon as I could. Dune was a brilliant book*, but I was a little disappointed that at the time because I didn’t see a great deal that reminded me of Star Wars. You had a desert planet, an exotic religion, and a rebellion, but other than that? Dune was about much more about intrigue than space-swashbuckling. Even now, the resemblance strikes me as largely cosmetic. But… Is it just me, or did episodes IV-VI set up the potential for the next trilogy to parallel the next three Dune books? It’s been a while since I read Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, and God Emperor of Dune, but if memory serves, the could pick up right from where Return of the Jedi left off, couldn’t they? You start with a power vaccuum as the empire has been, if not destroyed, than at the very list shown to be vulnerable and ripe for overthrow. You have siblings (a generation off from Dune, but still) who been thrust to the forefront of the revolution. You have a creepy dead relative who has to potential to remain influential as a spirit. If you squint, you can even kind of cast old man Solo as an analogue to Duncan Idaho.  I’m not saying that episode VII should walk the path of Herbert’s books. I’m just saying that, given where we left off, a Dune Messiah-ish plot would fit remarkably well. I’m also saying that it would be so, so awesome. * I wound up being a bigger fan of Dune than Star Wars. I absolutely wore out my copy of the Dune Encyclopedia. Funny old world, innit?

I’m finally, finally reading One Hundred Years of Solitude. It’s taking me a bit to effort to get in to it, not because of anything to do with the book, but because the public transportation around here has been a little too crowded for reading. Based on what little I’ve read, I suspect it’s going to be every bit as good as you’d hope a Nobel prize-winning novel would be. The little bit early on about alchemy made me laugh, in part because (and how’s this for an over-stretched segue?), I use that term to describe cooking and often have similarly unexceptional results. Cooking combines various fluids, solids, and magical spices along with copious amounts of heat and timing and produces things which seem, to the layman, like a very unlikely result. It’s as close to magic as any activity I’m aware of.  I am the fortunate to share a kitchen with a woman who can improvise soups on the fly. Soup making is probably the most alchemical* form of cooking. When you cook a steak, you start with beef and you end with beef. If you did it right, it’s much tastier beef, but it’s not exactly a mysterious process. Soups, on the hard, along with sauces, and all manner of soup-like dishes (gumbo, I’m looking at you), require a leap of faith, a trust that what ever comes out of the cauldron will be greater than what you put in to it. It’s not quite gold from lead, but I’m not sure it’s anything less magical. This is all a long way of saying that we dined on homemade tortilla soup tonight and will be doing so the next several evenings. I’m not sure what I did to deserve this, but I need to make certain I keep doing it.  * Yes, it’s a word. I had to look it up to be sure.

I’m not going to make a habit of writing book reviews here as, frankly, I’m not very good at them. If you want good book reviews, just follow Warren Ellis in all of his myriad online forms, and you’ll get some of the best.  I do, however, want to share my thoughts on Greg Graffin’s new book Population Wars. It’s an odd piece of non-fiction in that it’s difficult to say exactly what it’s about. There are dense chapters concerning viruses and bacteria, the theories of evolution, military and colonial history, the history of mass-extinctions, and personal stories about living on a farm in upstate New York.  The overarching theme of the book, as you might have guessed from the title, is a response to the question “What happens when differing populations come in to contact?” Graffin draws parallels between the conflicts that arise when microbes come together and when human populations come together. It’s not the most obvious extended metaphor, and it creaks a little under the strain, but overall, it holds up. Even with all of the science and history tucked into this book, I would probably classify it as a philosophy book more than anything else. Graffin’s goal is to derive a worldview from science and history. It’s an atheist worldview with a strong sense of morality based on the interconnection of populations and the desire to see our species beat the odds and avoid extinction.  This book is a huge step forward for Graffin. His previous work, Anarchy Evolution, was solid but far less ambitious in scope. Population Wars is much more fully developed, more informational, and written in a more assured voice. This is not the work of a musician dabbling in writing. This is the work of a serious scientist and educator. That’s not to say I agree with all of Graffin’s conclusions. Some of his philosophical conclusions are less than convincing to me, and I’m not comfortable with how detached he can be from certain events and actions. Graffin’s a good academic and he shows his work, explaining how and why he reaches the conclusions he does, but I did scratch my head several times and think “I’m not sure that follows.” That didn’t stop me from giving Population Wars are 5 star review on Goodreads. It’s a book that both teaches and invites you to learn, and Graffin proposes positive solutions to problems rather than just complaining. There are times I think his reach exceeds his grasp, but it’s such an ambitious reach that I’m very confident in my rating.