Feeling bookish

A few recent reads.

It's been a couple months since I finished The Light Ages so it's not fresh in my mind. We start with the discovery of a manuscript that describes the construction of an astrolabe. Geoffrey Chaucer is attributed authorship but it turns out it was written by a monk, one John of Westwyk.

I thought this was going to be a broad survey of medieval science demonstrating the many innovations during the period derided as the Dark Ages. Instead we let John of Westwyk's life guide us as his wanderings and the people he encounters serve as the launching pads for investigations into medieval learning. The book's emphasis is on the rather amazing mathematics and astronomy of the medieval period. Astrolabes were like the Swiss Army knife/smartphones of their day. Sailors needed to know where to sail, Christians needed to know when Easter was to be celebrated, healers wanted to know where a given planet was at a given time, and so on and so forth.

Mankind has looked to the skies for thousands of years and men created precision instruments like astrolabes and clocks long before the Industrial Revolution. They conceived mathematics that explained what they saw in the heavens long before Newton and Leibnitz.

A fascinating book. While it doesn't cover many areas of medieval knowledge, it does go in-depth into astronomy and mathematics and does good on its subtitle. This was indeed a surprising story and showed that there was much more than superstition capturing the minds of people during the Middle Ages.

I watched Arrival on my flight back from England back in September and resolved to read the short story that it's based on, "Stories of Your Life" by Ted Chiang.

The tale is only about 50-60 pages, if I recall correctly, and it was easy to see how the film's script was forged from the source material. The stories are mostly the same in the broad sense and in much detail. But it's the differences that really count.

Minor ones include the thingies that actually come to Earth. In the movie they're big spaceships that our heroes must ascend into to meet the aliens behind large windows while in the book, these screens come down to the surface and are activated a bit like televisions. Another difference is that the short story has no scene where disgruntled young men who consume the rantings of the likes of Alex Jones try to kill the aliens.

The biggest difference is that Chiang's tale is littered with flashforwards that strongly hint at the linguist's ability to see into the future whereas that was more of a big revelation in the film. (Right?) Not only does the question of being able to change the future if you know it come into play but also what would it do to a person if they could not only mold stories about their lives from their past but also their future?

I saw mention of The Tainted Cup months back but I do not recall where. It wasn't until after I had bought it that I learned that it had won a Hugo award. What attracted me was the murder mystery aspect of the plot, that it fit into the fantasy category didn't sway me one way or the other, though I admit that I am not a big fantasy reader.

The setting is the Great and Holy Empire of Khanum. We get a map of it and can see that it is a coastal domain. Every wet season gigantic creatures called leviathans emerge from the seas and attempt to make landfall which is quite bad for the Khanumians. And so they've erected massive walls to keep out the unwanted visitors and fortified them with various range weapons. If the term "fantasy" gives you Silmarillionphobia  and you tremor at the thought of epic creation stories and lengthy family trees, fret not. This is the majority of the fantasy world building that the novel gives us. We get a bit more about the various cantons that the empire is divided into and the various social groups that make up hierarchies but that's about it. We get enough to drive the plot and deepen the mysteries that unfold.

Oh, I suppose it bears mention that magic is alive and well in Khanum. Most important is the use of magic to alter people. Dinios Kol, a.k.a. - Din, has been altered so that he has extraordinary memory and recall abilities. A young man, he has been assigned to Ana Dolabra, a detective with a reputation as an eccentric. Ana doesn't like to leave her residence, much preferring to don a blindfold to sharpen her senses and her mental acuity as she speaks with those who come to her home.

And so she dispatches Din to examine the scene of a particularly gruesome botanical death. An imperial officer, Taqtasa Blas, was found dead in a mansion belonging to one of the most powerful aristocratic families in all the land. Din is surprised to find that the cause of death was a tree that grew from inside his body and sundered it apart.

Blas led the engineers whose work protects the empire from the leviathans and soon after his death, there is a breach in the sea walls that allows a giant inland to wreak havoc. Soon Ana and Din learn that several engineers whose duty it was to keep that section of the walls in good stead have died - in the same manner as Blas.

Since Ana doesn't like to leave her home, Din goes out and does the majority of the legwork. He commits the scenes and interviews to his supercharged memory and returns to Ana where he spills the beans. In turn, Ana uses her experience and nimble mind to make all sorts of deductions and postulations.

Bennett does a very nice job of broadening the mystery, of introducing us to new characters, new regions of the empire at a very deliberate pace. We don't just get a heap of stuff dumped on us, we get everything at a speed that allows us to digest what we've been given before moving to something new.

Din is young and attempts to conceal a secret of his from Ana. He is also from a poor background so we come to understand the decadence and corruption of much of Khanumian aristocracy through his eyes. We get to know a group of others that assist with the investigation with Tazi Miljin standing out for me. He's a war hero, a grizzled veteran who proudly sticks out for his incorruptibility. This is your typical working class guy who shakes his head a lot at the behavior of his superiors but ultimately isn't interested all that much in rocking the boat. Ana too has a past that she must contend with.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Tainted Cup. It was a fine mix of procedural, character study, and world building. The initial death had me hooked and then Bennett drops the bomb that many others died the same way and it was buy the ticket, take the ride. No going back. He masterfully introduced and then deepened & widened a mystery, built a new world, and let us get to know a selection of characters at just the right speed for me. The book is a rich stew that simmers most of the way through until it reaches the boiling point at the end. 

The opening scene when Blas' death revealed has some serious Annihilation vibes for me and so remains quite memorable. But the scene that hit me on a gut, emotional level came towards the end of the novel. Our gang of investigators is out seeking a soldier named Ditelus whom they suspect is a collaborator with the brains behind all of the deaths. Ditelus is what they call a crackler, someone whose body and strength has been enhanced via magic. They find him hobbling along far from any town mumbling about going home, though his homeland had been destroyed several years ago. In my head he was this Lennie Small type led by the novel's villain and he just had a ton of pathos for me. He knew he was going to die and just wanted to go home. He wasn't this big, bad guy - more of a big child. The scene just had this dark fatalistic feeling to it that really had me in its grip.

The Tainted Cup is the first entry in what is currently a trilogy and I am looking forward to the digging into the second book. It will be interesting to find out if we learn anything more about the leviathans as they are not simply big, threatening creatures. Their corpses literally become part of the landscape in addition to being the source of some magics. They are more than a simple menace and I wonder if the leviathans as a type of ritual sacrifice will be further explored in the series. Plus characters note multiple times that they have increased in size over the years. Why is that?

Ana's past surely has more to it than we know. Perhaps an explanation for her peculiarities? Plus Din is young so he will surely mature as the series progresses.

Coming soon - 26 April 2025

Seen before a screening of Warfare at Point. Warfare was very intense, edge of seat tension from almost the get-go. Loved that there was no non-diagetic music. Great flick.

Marcus sure slips in a lot of commercials before their movies. I am not in the market for a pickup truck. Lame.

Coming soon: 20 April 2025

Seen at the IMAX in Fitchburg before the excellent Sinners. If I was one of those unfortunate fellows in Plato's cave watching these, I'd know that summer is coming soon as there was a mix of big budget action movies and horror flicks.

This was a shorter teaser trailer and more of a commercial as there was no MPAA band preceding it. I don't think the name of the movie is in it. I thought it was Maybrook Missing as that's the website name that flashes at the end but the movie's title is Weapons, I just learned.

 

Coming Soon: 19 March @ Marcus Palace

Trailers before Opus and after a commercial for Thunderbolts:

 

 

I am looking forward to Warfare. I wonder how Alex Garlandy it's going to be.

The Corona Diaries Vol. 120: Mixing memory and desire

(Listen to the prelude.)

(late April 2024)

It wasn’t long after March had given way to April that we got a snowstorm. Nature was not quite ready to breed lilacs out of the dead land.

Since the temperature hovered around freezing, we ended up with a real slushy mess out there. Still, I rather enjoyed it as I love snow and knew that I’d be sweating and uncomfortable in 80+ degree temps soon enough. Besides, I don’t drive to work, so I could let the bus drivers deal with my commute.

Within a week the snow was gone and we had a lovely sunny day for a solar eclipse. While we weren’t in the path of total blackout, Madison would see something like 85% of that refulgent orb in the sky obscured. Some co-workers and I wandered over to the south side of the building to catch a glimpse as it started. I was equipped with a shiny new pair of solar glasses that I had bought last month on my visit to the planetarium. After putting them on and gazing upwards, I felt a bit like I was in Sunshine staring at the sun from that viewing room.

I saw this:

Or rather my phone did. But that is a fair representation of what I was able to see through my glasses.

A co-worker without special spectacles did the old pinhole trick.

It was rather creepy just how dark it got at midday and I can imagine that it was very scary for my ancestors to witness this without friendly astronomers around to explain what was happening. 

Another co-worker who had a much more expensive phone caught this image as close to totality as we got:

Someone remarked that they thought that the birds that would normally be seen on the parking ramp were missing. Perhaps all those Mourning doves decided to lay low as the sun dimmed. I wondered if Piper was reacting to the eclipse. More than likely she was sleeping and hadn’t noticed. Otherwise she was simply annoyed that the big heat source outside the window had been turned down.

********

Just a few days later I was to be found getting set to head down to The Big Easy. The purpose of the trip was ostensibly to visit The National WWII Museum but, as you can imagine, more hijinks ensued.

It was one I had hoped to take with my brother but it never came to fruition. My father was a huge World War II history buff and the apple didn’t fall far from the tree in my brother's case. Although I am fairly well-versed in the history of that conflict – certainly better than most people – the apple fell a bit further afield in my case. I am not able to give precise casualty numbers for both sides at the Battle of Guadalcanal, for example, while my father and brother could. There were many times when I was watching a war movie with my brother and he’d note that the tanks onscreen had not yet been introduced at the time being portrayed.

“There were no Panther tanks when Germany invaded Russia in 1941!” he’d rant before helpfully concluding, “They weren’t introduced until ’43!”

This is the level of history nerdiness that I had to contend with in my fraternal relationship.

I really don’t recall why we never took the trip. There may have been financial reasons or perhaps we were just too lazy to actually organize things. In addition to not visiting the museum, I found a story that my brother had been writing that lay unfinished amongst his things when we were clearing his stuff out of his apartment.

Vita brevis.

After my brother died, I took the adage carpe diem to heart. More to heart, anyway. Do it before it’s too late. Putting something off more than likely means it will never happen.

At some point, I broached the subject of the museum visit with a couple of friends, T and P, whom I got to know through my brother and who are also big World War II buffs. Together they formed a triumvirate of history nerds who could spend hours arguing over the strategy of German General Heinz Guderian during Operation Barbarossa or discourse on the effectiveness (or lack of it) of the Japanese kamikaze pilots. What better people to go to The National WWII Museum with? We hemmed and hawed for a bit but finally decided we’d take the trip this spring. And so plans were laid. P, T, and T’s wife, L, would join me on the Official Memorial Trip for my brother.

L is not particularly interested in World War II history but my brother was her companion on the couch to watch many a tennis tournament.

It was also a trip I'd hope to take with my Frau but her chronic pain issues continued to plague her and hoofin' it around The Big Easy was out of the question, sadly. While I understood her decision, it was still a great disappointment.

********

We were to fly out of O’Hare on a Thursday morning and so the plan was that I’d drive down to T and L’s place in suburban Chicago on Wednesday after work and spend the night as would P. Wednesday evening rolls around, I throw my luggage into my car, say goodbye to my Frau, and I am off. I make a quick stop at my credit union’s drive thru where I get some cash.

The interstate was fairly busy as the stretch between Madison and Janesville gets a lot of use at rush hour. About 10 miles outside of town the podcast I was listening to suddenly stopped. I glanced at my phone and saw that I had an incoming call. The number looked vaguely familiar – I thought that it was my credit union. What could they possibly want? Well, they’d have to wait as I was driving.

I made pretty good time and got to T and L’s place just as dinner was being served. The four of us spent the evening chatting away and P, who has a 3D printer that is never idle, presented me with this hideous Cthulhu dice tower:

Instead of rolling my dice the old-fashioned way and chancing some kind of unnameable carpal tunnel injury that only people who roll a lot of dice get, I just put them in the back of Cthulhu’s head and they tumble down into the tray. I am sure to fail every sanity check.

The next morning we had a little breakfast, gathered our luggage, and called an Uber (or was it a Lyft?) to get us to the airport. L watched the vehicle’s progress on her phone. At one point, it just vanished from the map and the little messages saying our ride was X minutes away stopped. The driver apparently decided that they didn’t want to drive us to the airport after all. The worrying thing is that the app never gave an alert that the driver had bailed on us. Luckily L had been keeping a close eye on the map. So she ordered up a new ride.

With the new Uber just a few minutes away, we start chatting about the upcoming changes in travel rules, e.g. – the requirement to have a Real ID in order to board a plane. I remarked that I had gotten one and pulled my wallet out to show folks my driver’s license bedecked with holograms and other funky mechanisms to prevent ne'er-do-wells from forging fake IDs.

I was quite surprised to find that my license wasn’t in my wallet.

Immediately I looked in my car thinking that I perhaps didn’t put it back in my wallet after my stop at the credit union and that it had fallen into a crack somewhere. My search proved fruitless and then it hit me. I can only imagine the look on my face when it dawned on me that my credit union surely called me yesterday because I had left my ID in the drive-thru teller machine’s scanner.

Oh *$@#!!!!

Missing a plane was not a big deal but missing this trip was unthinkable.

I threw my bags into my car and told my friends that I’d see them later. My brother was no doubt looking up and shaking his head at this point.

To say I was pissed off at myself on the drive home was like saying Chicago had a little fire back in 1871. Still, I somehow managed to either drive at a reasonable speed or just not encounter any state troopers. Getting pulled over without a driver’s license would have only piled Pelion upon Ossa.

My first stop upon getting back to Madison was the credit union where someone kindly returned my driver’s license to me. Not long afterwards I was home and walking in the door where my Frau was quite surprised to see me. I explained what had happened or rather how I had f*cked up. Then I set out on the Internet and scrambled to find another flight. My brother was no doubt laughing at this point.

About 3 hours later my Frau dropped me off at the airport here in Madison. While MSN is nowhere near as large as O’Hare, it was rather busy and fairly hectic, as things go for a small regional airport. The security line was jam packed but soon enough I was on a plane bound for Chicago where I’d catch a flight to New Orleans.

Once at O’Hare, I made my way to opposite end of the terminal with steely-eyed determination. Nothing short of an act of God would prevent me from missing that flight. I texted my friends with an update on my status and, in return, got pictures of them wandering the French Quarter and relaxing at a tavern enjoying refreshing cocktails without me.

“We wandered the French Quarter…”

“…wish you were here…”

My plane touched ground at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport at around 9:30 that night. I grabbed my luggage and stepped outside to find that it wasn’t blazingly hot yet was still much warmer than home. We had an Airbnb across the river from downtown in the Algiers Point neighborhood which made for a moderately lengthy cab ride. Not much to see on the way there in the darkness and the cabbie wasn’t very talkative. I arrived at the house around 10:30.

This was my first Airbnb and I found that it was a nice place.

The decorations were chosen for tourists like us with Mardi Gras colors strewn about, a lot of fleur-de-lis’s, and all the symbols of the city represented including jazz and shrimp.

There was a porch out back that overlooked a small yard while a freeway bridge lingered in the distance although I wasn’t sure which freeway. It was nice to be able enjoy the outdoors in shorts once again. The neighborhood was quiet but it was Thursday. Perhaps all the drunken debauchery would start tomorrow night.

My friends were happy to see me, doubly so because they had had a few drinks and were in a jolly mood. They were attempting to order a pizza but we discovered that there were no pizzerias nearby on this side of the river and the delivery areas of the others in close enough proximity stopped at the shores of the Mighty Mississip.

Oops.

Their munchies went unsated and they learned their lesson: go easy on the Sazeracs unless you absolutely positively have a food source at hand.

And so we sat around outside and chatted in the cool night air. I relayed to them my hastily revamped travel plans and they, in turn, chronicled their strolls about town that day. Also, we talked a bit about tomorrow’s itinerary. We were not far from the Algiers Ferry Terminal so we decided that’s how we’d get across the river and to not hire any taxis. Any taxis with wheels, that is.

My experience with New Orleans until that point consisted solely of driving through it on I10 back in 2002 when a friend and I were on our way to Breaux Bridge, about 2 hours to the west, to attend the crawfish festival there. I knew folks who’d been there, of course, and had heard tell of the fun to be had there. Another friend had attended a conference in New Orleans many years ago and returned to Madison with a black eye, the result of an encounter his face had with one of the city’s sidewalks. While he fessed up to having drank a Hurricane or 3, he noted extenuating circumstances: New Orleans’ sidewalks were in dreadful shape.

I knew the typical northerner kind of stuff: it’s on the Mississippi and has a major port, the New Orleans Saints are the football team, it was part of the Louisiana Purchase. There’s Cajun food and music, jazz, Hurricane Katrina, Bourbon Street, old-timey streetcars – you know, the usual stuff everyone knows.

My goals for the trip were rather simple. Enjoy the company of my friends, honor my brother’s memory by visiting the World War II museum, sample local beer, and eat as much gumbo as humanly possible. It’s what my brother would have wanted.

We awoke the next morning, showered, and were out the door to catch a ferry for downtown. Algiers Point had an odd mix of homes. Not the architecture, necessarily, but rather condition. Our Airbnb had obviously been renovated recentlyish but there were other homes on the block that were in less than ideal shape.

As you can see, the street on our block was pretty rough. So were the sidewalks.

I could now fully grok how my friend had tripped and fallen. They would be fun traversing in the dark. I presumed/hoped that there were no wheelchair users or old folks who used walkers living in the area.

We ran across an empty lot that still had the tile floor and mosaic entryway of the building that had been there.

A disused commercial building sat uneasily next to a church.

But there were also stretches of houses in good condition that made you forget the blighted blocks. For example, there were beautiful homes such as these that I assume are in a French colonial style.

The flora provided a lot of wonderful sights and smells with a lot of trees and bushes that were unfamiliar to me such as this tree with the helix trunk.

I recognized the sight and smell of magnolia trees but we wandered through spots that were sweetly scented and I would bend down to take a whiff of the flowers responsible without any idea what variety they were.

We discovered The Crown and Anchor Pub which had a TARDIS at the entrance.

There was a coffeeshop a block or two away from the pub, Congregation Coffee, and it became our first stop in the morning for the rest of the trip. Well, maybe not our last day in town but definitely the rest.

I got a cup of joe and a couple bags of coffee to take home including their coffee/chicory blend.

On the way out, one of the feline denizens of the neighborhood ambled on by. I tried my best to get it to come to me for some pets but it ignored the Yankee tourist.

We discovered that there is a Louis Armstrong memorial at the ferry terminal. Satchmo has a lock on public transit terminals in this city, it seems.

I felt like I had come full circle having seen his house in Chicago last year on my Bronzeville tour and now here I was in the city of his birth.

Algiers Point was, as far as I could see, a Janus-like place. Dilapidated houses where nature was slowly reclaiming the land stood next to gorgeous homes in excellent repair and with well-manicured yards. Coffeeshops are usually a sign of gentrification and Congregation appeared to draw a typical middle-class crowd. On the other hand, The Crown and Anchor looked to be something of a dive bar.

I wondered how much of the neighborhood’s condition was due to Hurricane Katrina. As it was, Algiers Point seemed to be a mix of working- and middle-class residents and majority white. The owner of the Airbnb had left a note indicating which parts of the neighborhood we ought to avoid at night but I didn’t see any spots on our morning walk which looked particularly sketchy.

We paid our fares, boarded the ferry, and were soon off to the other side of the river.

********

Bonus photo. I may have used this one already but I ran across it recently and it never fails to make me smile. This photo reminds me of my grandmother and all of my great aunts.

 

 (On to the vernal postlude.)