I enjoyed this book but don’t have much respect for it, and not just because English appears to be Hamilton’s second language (odd, as I think he’s British) — it’s essentially Triplanetary back from the dead, but without the buffer of quaintness. That said, it was a perfectly fine time-killer, and I’m currently reading the second one. Which makes me a hypocrite in need of a “guilty pleasure” rating.

I just bought Philip Glass’s Solo Piano, and this is causing me some confusion.

My prior encounters with Philip Glass have been few to none — other than some exposure at organ concerts in Brown’s Sayles Hall, and of course the same exposure everyone gets in movies, I know Philip Glass primarily as a gag. Think Triumph the Insult Comic Dog:

Avril Lavinge, punk queen, now there’s a kidder,

Go back up north, Celine needs a baby-sitter

Philip Glass, atonal ass, you’re not immune

Write a song with a f****** tune

So, why did I buy the damn CD? (Nor was it easy to do so — I first attempted to buy it via iTunes, then to download via p2p, neither attempt being successful, then tries Rasputin before breaking down and ordering it from Amazon)

I heard one of the tracks on an episode of Battlestar Galactica, and was subsequently totally unable to get it out of my head¹. At first I just assuaged the audio-itch by watching the episode, but this also requires me to sit through a landing on Kobol and compartment-to-compartment Cylon boarding party action, both of which are enjoyable in themselves, but sort of get in the way of the listening experience².

I’m enjoying it so far, though my capabilities as a listener of classical music (or whatever the hell you call piano music composed in late modernity) somewhat limit my appreciation. Anyway, if I start acting strangely or go catatonic a la Clarke’s “Ultimate Melody” in Tales from the White Hart, feel free to sue Philip Glass on my behalf.

¹ The episode was “Valley of Darkness,” in which Starbuck refers to it as “her dad,” though whether we’re supposed to understand that to be her dad’s music or her dad as musician I don’t know. Crazy-ass plot theory note: We know that all of Starbuck’s fingers were broken by an abusive parent when she was a child. Hmmm.

² Side note: Why the hell do ITMS video files not have bookmarked navigation like enhanced AACs? For that matter, why do they not have motherfracking captions?

The Namiki Vanishing Point (now in the Pilot-branded Mark II) is a fountain pen that, with a push of a long plunger at the back end, retracts into the body and is sealed within a patented (and, more importantly, highly effective) seal. I had one of the original models years ago that I broke by dropping it on its point (I suck); the new version has a different body with somewhat higher production values, though I haven’t decided whether I like the weight of the new model. (A bit heavier, which I normally like in a pen, but it’s not what I was expecting here.)

It also has a very good nib for its price point (14k, pretty flexible).

I’m fond of both of the Norah Jones tracks on this disc, and also of some of Hunter’s other stuff, and the name is absolutely spectacular. Found a copy at Rasputin while I was looking for something unrelated (Philip Glass’s Solo Piano, the first track of which has been stuck in my head, as I’ve been watching the Battlestar Galactica S2 ep "Valley of Darkness?? rather a lot.), which I was not able to find.

http://kukkurovaca.textdriven.com/gramarye/archives/hunted

Lovecraft is a brilliant writer of very short stories. There’s a reason why most of his worth doesn’t get as long as the stories that form the center of this particular collection. He rambles, he gets repetitive, he can’t hold a plot together, and there’s only so many times you can make a veiled reference to some unspeakable horror in the same story.

Meh. Harry Potter was never exceptionally original, but this is feeding cannibalistically on the still-twitching carcass of the other HP books, and not in a clever or surprising way. The plot moves forward in a satisfying way, but the storytelling is not there to back it up, and character development seems to happen between pages or between chapters.

The darkness is satisfying—Chamber of Secrets, which is still, in my opinion, the darkest of the series, and the best, remains my favorite—, but the characters don’t really seem to have shifted with the tone of the text, and the result is an odd juxtaposition of adolescent angst and war drama; the sort of thing that makes sense in the campy atmosphere of, say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but has more trouble getting off the ground in the more fanciful, naive, and un-ironic world of Potter.

As with many Harry Potter books, this makes me wish I had access to Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising (my copies are unavailable or destroyed), of which Harry Potter can be seen as a vastly inferior copy. I seem to recall reading in Zelazny somewhere (Isle of the Dead, I believe) that in James Bond (et al), sex and violence are proxies for love and death; I think that Harry Potter has some of the same issues (though obviously manifesting somewhat differently); and Cooper’s grasp of love and loss and her ability to present it through the experience of children is far more impressive than Rowling’s. Fantasy, especially British fantasy, has long been a breeding-ground for morals, but one must deal well in subtlety, complexity, and nuance; Cooper, L’Engle, White, Tolkien, and Lewis all have this quality (in varying degrees—Lewis, for example, tends toward the obvious at times); Rowling does not, at least not yet, though it might be interesting to see where she is at in ten years, if she can ever recover from having written Harry Potter.

That said, it was reasonably entertaining, and, as I said, the plot moved forward—and these things are not necessarily guaranteed; witness the lack of plot in book four and the look of entertainment in book three.

Block is one of my sister’s favorite writers, and I’ve been meaning to check her out for a while, but I haven’t seen her on the shelves used, and Rosie is not big on lending out books, owing to her intense paranoia. But she snagged me a copy of my own, a few days ago.

Impressions; Block’s style is interesting. Extremely…hasty. She’s not big on deep description, more into dropping names and words and stringing events together. The result is a shadowy and dreamlike structure without a lot of meat on it. Not sure how much I approve or disapprove.

The content is very hippie or post-hippie. Good ethos—normally kids’ fantasy reinforces relatively traditional family values, and of course it’s usually disproportionately anglo-saxon; Block definitely breaks out of these constraints.

Lethem’s first non-fic collection is interesting—highly introspective, at once academic and uber-geeky, and pretty neurotic. Most of the essays deal with the relationship between Lethem’s family, popular culture, and the formation of his identity during his adolescence through his twenties. At times the self-indulgent nature of memoir and pseudo-memoir writing is annoying, but Lethem is a thoughtful and funny writer, and handles the genre better than most.