Servusamanu.com

In five hours I’m off to Albany and then tomorrow off to Lake George.  More pictures forthcoming.

Mostly I’ve been busy with class this week – two winners and a dismal third string math class.  I’m all caught up on classwork for both this week and next week so maybe I’ll write? Probably not.

In lieu of anything productive, I’ve been watching Madmen Season 1. It was suggested to me by a few different people who’ve pegged me correctly before so I finally decided to give it a chance. Also, I worked at an advertizing firm for a year and I tend to like period dramas.

I can see why it won a few Emmy’s over the last few years – it’s the sort of slow, moody drama that always tends to win awards.  Reading a few reviews, the majority of the praise fell on the settings, the style, the ambiance.  I will admit that it has managed to find a nice balance between a too subtle setting that puts everything off kilter and an overt pistache that makes everything a comic book.  That much is completely impressive.

The plot though?  Perhaps it is Lost, Rome, or a hundred other more ‘modern’ series and their roller-coaster pacing, but I am always surprised when an episode ends – it doesn’t seem like anything has happened yet – and the episodes are an hour long.  I can appreciate a slower, more nuanced drama but the bumps in the first season roll by so smoothly you wonder if you’re not just watching one guy’s routine in a 60′s museum.  To throw up one particular example: Don Draper (the lead) receives a call from his mistress that is overheard by his secretary.  The ante is upped when later Don leaves mysteriously and Draper’s wife appears to take a family portrait.  For a few scenes, the secretary confides in a coworker and then bumbles around entertaining Mrs. Draper until Don returns.  Flash forward a few more scenes and the pictures are taken, the wife doesn’t think they came out very well, and the secretary presumably goes back to work.  Any great confrontation…nope.  Will it play out later?  Presumably yes, but six episodes in and even a long lost brother’s arrival failed to command more than a tenth of an episode.   Maybe it’s the gloomy lead or the molasses resolution, but I’ve yet to find a plot in this beautiful setting.

I’ve got half a season left to watch.  If it picks up I’ll consider #2 otherwise an interesting diversion, but I think I’ll find something else.

My travels this month are finally over – Vegas, Wisconsin, a few dozen library visits for work. It all begins again next month with a trip to Boston, possibly Maine, and a few dozen more library visits, but for now it’s time to talk a big deep breath…

There isn’t as much as to write about as I admittedly would like. No reading, not much writing, but my favorite living band - Apocalyptica – is releasing a new album. It just went up for sale — I’m currently waiting on my preorder version. If their new CD is anything like their previous six, it’ll be well worth the price.

With nothing else to write about, here are some pictures from Wisconsin.

I’ve opened a store! Or rather, I’ve opened up a page that links to an Amazon Affiliate store that I’ve created…or configured…or managed to go through Amazon’s really simple and almost completely automated sign up process. Basically, it’s a new thing and I’m impressed by it.

Linkity Link

Right now my Servusamanu Store has categories for Science Fiction Books and Movies, and also for general books and movies. One of these days I’ll get it setup to show just the things I like, but for now it’s a more general category of…things I might like. Important stuff I know.

And maybe once I get that done, I’ll finally get around to getting my own stuff for sale. Oh well.
…
And now back to vacation.

A week away from another vacation (Wisconsin this time).  Maybe I’ll have something more interesting to say once I get back…

What an absolutely strange book!? It’s a horror love story narrated by a damaged, paranoid maybe schizophrenic, as pulled off in documentary form. The sheet number of footnotes is a testament to a certain madness itself.

Most striking is the book itself. I mean, quite literally, the pages, binding, type etc. A casual flip through the pages is a startling experience; oddly spaced text, font changes galore, flipped text, mirrored words, scattered poems and cross outs. The term, I believe, is ergodic literature. Passing through the airport, my bag was pulled for screening. TSA skimmed the book; I got some strange looks.

My initial reaction to the “ornamentation” was one of dismissal. It seemed gimmicky. About halfway through, when the weirdness really starts, I found myself won over. The text, a physical element, proved as disorienting as Navidsons house was to that character. I’m not alone in discovering the odd format to be psychologically jarring.

Greater implication? House of Leaves is not the sort of book I would write, but it has convinced me that format matters. There is a tangible difference between a paperback and a hardcover. Digital novels are even more disorienting than that.

My claim, unimportant as may be, is that digital media devices will change how stories are read. Not only will popular stories of the future be written to digest the strengths of a new format, but old stories will be reappraised thusly as well. A new canon of classics will arise from digital ashes.

What will this format look like? I would guess that short micro-chapters will reign supreme. Stories will, novelized or not, take on an episodic nature. Terseness and short sentences will prevail, a general trend regardless. Vocabulary however will become more diverse. The easy access to an “in reader thesaurus” will make the barrier to big word entry just a little less.

Most of all, the biggest change will be the verisimilitude of sourcing. Ancillary material, both real and fictional, will be linked into the primary text. Stories, even between authors, will interconnect (almost literally but I’m cautious to say so) between themselves much like the Cthulhu mythos, but on a much more mythic scale.

Jump cut: I promised Vegas stories. Next week…maybe… no promises.

On Thursday I’m off to Las Vegas for Defcon.  Reading material for the trip: House of Leaves.  It’d probably make more sense to read Fear and Loathing again, but then again maybe it’s better that I don’t.  Vegas stories forthcoming!

http://iwl.me/

I threw a few paragraphs into it and got Stephen King.  The next few paragraphs I checked out linked me to Steve Palahniuk.  Fun fact: I’ve never read more than a chapter or two of either of them.  On the list, on the list.

Sadly, I’ve yet to link my name with Phillip K Dick, my current author du jour.  I just finished reading Valis, The Mind in the High Castle, and Ubik.  I’ve run out of books, but I haven’t gotten bored yet.  Another Barnes & Nobles run may be in order…

I found Valis to be similar to The Illuminatus Chronicle.  It’s part of that same conspiratorial, pseudo-spiritual half-comedy genre that science fiction likes to dabble with.  As a story, it’s an extended, narrated, autiobiographical journal entry from a man suffering an existential and psychological crisis?  That’s as close to a one-liner as I can come up with.

The Man in the High Castle is a revisionist history.  What if Germany and Japan won?  That’s the world premise.  The story follows a handful of characters through sort life vignettes as they cope with a world suffering a very different sort of Cold War than our historical one.

Lastly, there’s Ubik.  It’s about a group of anti-psychics hired to nullify a group of active psychics at a secret lunar base. My description is poor, but my summary is perhaps better: it”s the scariest book I’ve ever read.  There’s no shock horror, not even Lovecraftian weirdness.  It’s not a frightening book in that sense.  Instead, it’s disorienting, claustrophobic, paranoid. It’s scary in the sense that The Ghost Writer (Polanski’s film) was scary.  The whole effect is as mysterious as the book.  The words taken individually aren’t confusing, but together the story from the very beginning suffers from a sense of dizziness.  Nothing is blantantly wrong, but nothing feels quite right either.  It makes for a tremendous read.

That’s the reading for this week.  A few exciting prospects on the horizon, but nothing to announce for a few weeks, if ever.  The next book on the list is Planet of Adventure by Jack Vance.   I read some of his short stories about a year ago and was blown away.  Phenomenal stuff, but unfortunately my writing didn’t match his name either.  Hmm.  Back to work,…

1. When the documentation isn’t there, you write around it.

2. When the customers act rude you make like Salinger, and in doing so win even more renown.

3. A book has a beginning, middle, and end.  Tech support has beginning, middle, and forfeiture.

4. No one expects an author to be familiar with every book every written.

5. No one asks an author to write things for them.

6. The world acknowledges your existence even when everything is going well.

7. New technology makes writing easier…and tech support unbearable.

8. Authors never have to take calls beginning wtih: “As an author of ten years, I know the problem “, also known as the Asshole’s Creedo.

9. Authors are never expected to fix pages broken in shipping.

10. An Author’s product never (or at least very rarely) breaks spontaneously with no apparent reason while in the possession of the rudest, most anal attentive, incompetant boobs to ever walk the Earth, a decidedly common tech support happenstance.

Bonus Reason: When they say ‘write what you know’ they don’t mean anything about tech support.

As one could devise: it’s been a long day of frustrated callers and frustrating calls.  There really needs to be a stress breathalyzer test for phones.  It’d save the world billions in medical bills and reclaimed productivity.

Happily for me, I’m almost finished with The Man in the High Castle.  It’s easily the best part of this week.   More on that soon.

Today is one of those no good wretched really bad days where I don’t have any time to pick up a good book.  It’s an egregious error in good judgment to even be writing about them, but I’m not giving away the last of my sanity that easily…

Over the weekend, I read Code of the Woosters and Thus Spake Zarathustra, two books about as different from each other as possible.

Code of the Woosters is, of course, part of the P.G. Wodehouse universe.  I can’t say his name tends to mean much in America, but the butler (valet really) name Jeeves has become part of the world’s collective consciousness and the excellent filmed versions brought the world Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie.  Thus: Code of the Woosters is basically House in England doing his best to escape various social mishaps with the assiduous advice of his butler.  Good stuff!

More interesting to me is the use of Bertie Wooster, a well-meaning but foolish fop, as the narrator.  It’s a strange sort of thing for the voice of the story to reveal their own general failings and in doing so make a secondary character seem so damn clever.  It’s genius really.  In truth, the stories border a bit on the ridiculous, but they run by so quickly and so smoothly you never really stop to demand more than a token plausibility.  The character’s are just too damn interesting to ask how or why the various plot twists comes to emerge in the first place.  It’s all done with a velvet hand and it’s phenomenal.

There’s no statement less true in regards to Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s self proclaimed masterpiece.   In all truth, I found it impossibly convoluted.  Perhaps I read too quickly, perhaps it’s smoother in German, either way it all came together very much a muddle.  The best sections dance around points that were explored much more cleanly in Beyond Good and Evil and other works.  The use of the faux-biblical style was intriguing, but Nietzsche’s natural style is so engaging the added flourish did nothing.  It’s not a fiction story to begin with, but any semblance of plot gets quickly lost.  All in all, I was underwelmed.  I expected more and it came out lacking.

Next up is The Man in the High Castle by Phillip K Dick.  I’d love to start tonight, but I’ve got an insurance claim to fret over,  an apartment near boiling to suffer through, classwork to study, and a wounded ego to massage.  Sigh.  Hopefully this week will be better books for better days!

Today…I hiked.  Yes, I’ve been writing and reading and putting air in my tires, but mostly I’ve just hiked. Cue photo montage:

View Lake Minnewaska from the trailhead parking.  Despite the beauty, the lake is naturally acidic (due to the rocks) and almost nothing lives there.

My normal route is to take the Lake Awosting Carriage to the Hamilton point trail, but lately I’ve been exploring the Millbrook Mountain path.  Onward!

The Shawangunk range is defined by two different rock families: Shawangunk Conglomerate, one of the hardest rocks in the region and nearly impervious to erosion, and Martinsberg Shale, which is easily broken into dirt by the elements.  The play between these rocks is the origin of the unique biological diversity of the area.

In areas of shale, the forest is thick and dark.  There’s almost no undergrowth due to the thick canopy.

Alternatively, the conglomerate doesn’t support much of anything (except small chirpy birds on the lookout).

The view over the Palmaghatt Ravine.  Not pictured the Black Ravens patrolling the skies and tossing ominous shadows over the rocks.

Another view, this time toward Hamilton Point.

These are Pitch Pines, the most common tree in Minnewaska.  It thrives amongst the low moisture, low nutrient mountain tops.

Also seen: wild blueberries.

At the end of the carriageway, the trail becomes a little less…defined.

No complaints…

Toward the end, it does get a little harder.

And harder…

And harder…

But the end is worth it.  (this is the far end of the Lake in picture #1.)  Excellent hike!  Total trip: maybe 5 or 6 miles.  Not a bad morning jaunt.