Craig Berry

Many of my friends need this poem right now.  Hang in there...I love you all.

I just got finished reading Anathem by Neal Stephenson.

Oh. My. God.

This is a Heinleinesque teenagers-save-world adventure story. It's also a stealth delivery system for some of the most interesting, thought-provoking scientific philosophy I've ever encountered. The key idea he introduces as an element of his fiction may actually be correct, and would explain a great deal. I'm not going to spoil it further than that.  Just go read this book.  Seriously.  It's a thousand pages long, and that's a good thing; he needs that much room to cram in all the good ideas.  It's a rare and wonderful thing to read a work of fiction that has forever changed the way I think about some of the most fundamental questions of science and philosophy.

A great deal of the book is focused on a system of monastic communities (the "Avout") who use music as a mathematical and spiritual tool.  A composer friend of Stephenson's tackled the challenge of imagining that music; the results are available for purchase here.  I suggest doing this after you read the book; some of the tracks literally sent chills down my spine.

Unusally enough for a novel, there's also a trailer video, which uses music from the source I just mentioned.  It contains no spoilers that will make sense if you haven't read the book.

For those of you who have read this novel, I hereby declare the comments to this post a spoiler free-fire zone.  If you haven't read the novel, go do that, then come back and read the comments.

CRASH

The crash was so bad
They found pieces scattered
Over three counties.
Sweating men in orange suits,
Lurching bulldozers, strobing red lights,
And debris everywhere, everywhere.

Investigators still hope to find
A black box, a scrawled note;
Some clue.
Some answer.
Some explanation.
But they are not optimistic.
Nor have they found any survivors.

I already had "Great Gig in the Sky" going through my head before finding out about Richard Wright's death.  How do you eulogize a man responsible for expanding the minds and souls of my entire generation?  Answer: there's no adequate way.  Thank you for the music.

I got word through the YesWorld mailing list this afternoon that the Yes 40th anniversary tour has been canceled due to Jon's poor health.  Guess I can stop fretting about how much the tickets would cost.

Ambrosia's coming to town in late July, but that doesn't really make up for losing a Yes show.  Bah.

From time to time I've mentioned Michael Swanwick's Periodic Table of Science Fiction to some of you.  There's a link to it.  Finally.  Swanwick wrote short-short science fiction stories themed on each of the chemical elements.  Actually, some of them are fantasies, and some are hard to classify.  My personal favorites are Vanadium (V, third from the left on the top orange row) and Zinc (Zn, right end of that same orange row).  Fans of Ender's Game must immediately read Magnesium (Mg, third blue row, right cell).  But trust me, you'll end up reading them all.  Enjoy.

Yes will tour this summer!  I'd begun to worry it would never happen again.  It's almost the classic lineup (Alan on drums variant), except that Rick Wakeman will be replaced by his son Oliver.

So, who's on board for the August 22 Universal City show?

Sir Arthur C. Clarke died today.  He has been my favorite author from a very early age (about seven, I believe) when I read his first novel, Against the Fall of Night, and identified so strongly with the protagonist that he (Alvin of Diaspar) has been a sort of alter ego of mine ever since.  I had the pleasure a few years ago of buying a used copy of the same edition I read and re-read to tatters as a child, and the novel held up far better than I had hoped; it still moved me deeply and excited me in ways no other author has ever managed.

I ended up reading every book of his I could find up through around the mid-1980s, when I'm afraid he lost interest (or the knack) and began putting out a series of rather poor books, often cowritten.  One of the last books of his that I love is The Fountains of Paradise, which I first read while recuperating from an appendectomy.  It's a measure of Clarke's hypnotic storytelling power that I had to be reminded by the nurse when it was time to take more painkillers; I was so lost in the novel that I entirely forgot about minor details like a day-old stomach incision.

What most amazed me about Clarke was his ability to meld the hardest of hard science fiction -- spaceships, computers, hyperrealistic portrayals of planets and moons -- and the deepest religious and mystical explorations into a unified story.  His most famous work in this vein is 2001, of course, but I think that Childhood's End will be his most enduring legacy.  I credit that novel with helping to awaken a spiritual side of myself, a side whose existence I was struggling to deny at the time. 

J. B. S. Haldane once remarked that Clarke was one of the few modern writers saying anything original about God; and that indeed, he was saying several contradictory things, and were that not the case he might be considered a public nuisance.  He was also a brilliant storyteller, an ardent popularizer of science, an inventor, an advocate of ecological protection decades before that became fashionable, and a tireless explorer on all planes.

Enjoy your rest, my teacher and friend.  And yes, you will dream.

My daughter madelineusher is heavily involved in the anime video mashup culture -- taking snippets of one or more animes and weaving them together with a song to create a music video.  When she shows these to me, I usually feel like I'm missing a lot; they tend to be filled with visual and lyrical in-jokes to which I am not privy.  But this morning she showed me one that uses scenes from "Cowboy Bebop", my own favorite anime, to the tune of "The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything", a punk cover of a children's song.  The result is brilliant...though as usual, it probably helps a lot if you're familiar with "Cowboy Bebop".

I was feeling glum and tired on the bus to work this morning, listening to random music on my mp3 player and not liking anything I heard.  Then it played the live version of "The Song Remains the Same" by Zep, and suddenly I was smiling, tapping my foot, and struggling not to sing out loud on a crowded bus.  It's amazing what the right music at the right time can accomplish.

That segued into "Lunatic Fringe" by Red Rider, which made me grin for other reasons, but let's not go there. :)

I updated every driver I could think of on my home PC last night.  It seems like the lockups are happening mostly during heavy graphics usage (watching flash videos, playing Second Life), so I was especially careful to update and test my graphics card driver.  All checks out perfectly.  Now the waiting begins.

I had a relatively calm and happy four-day weekend.  It started well with a pleasant Thanksgiving dinner at laurellady's parents' place in darkest Riverside County.  During the drive out there we introduced madelineusher to the cheesy glory that is the musical Chess.  We're not sure whether our car works if people inside aren't singing along enthusiastically with loud music; it's never been tried.

The remainder of the weekend mostly involved catching up on sleep and working on various computer projects, with a commando shopping raid on Westside Pavillion on Saturday for variety.  During the many hours I spent in front of my monitor, I got mostly caught up on various OTO updates and fixes, solved a lingering sound card driver issue on my new PC, and spent an inordinate amount of time puttering around in Second Life, enjoying the enhanced environmental rendering provided by the new "Windlight" client.

As a result of that puttering, the Cathedral of St. William Blake in the Isles is ready for visitors; it's not done by any means, but it's close enough to be presentable.  If you have Second Life installed properly, clicking this link will take you to a web page from which you can click another link which will open your Second Life client and present you with the opportunity to teleport there.  You'll arrive just west of the Cathedral, on the next small island over, so you can see the whole facade.  There's no bridge to the Cathedral; you'll have to get virtually wet (or fly) to reach the Cathedral steps.

The other big software news is disappointing: I'm over Ubuntu.  All was going reasonably well with it until last Wednesday night; I'd had some disturbing signs of instability, but nothing bad enough to put me off.  Then I was offered the chance to install a boatload of automatic updates, and naturally took it...and the update process froze in the middle, completely locking up my computer.  I finally had to power-cycle it, and when Ubuntu tried to start affter that, I got a screen full of random video with a half-off-the-screen warning box saying something about "operating in low video mode".  I tried booting in recovery mode, and it still didn't work correctly.  Finally, after a lot of reading and a couple of questions posted to the Ubuntu forums, and with great trepidation, I decided to try a from-scratch reinstall of ubuntu.  I booted from the Live CD, then started the install tool, where I planned to either revert to a single Windows partition as a fresh starting point, or figure out how to reuse the existing partitions.  But I needn't have worried about that decision, since the installer locked the entire system solid at the 33% loaded mark.

Sorry, rodneyorpheus, but I just don't think Ubuntu is ready for prime time; it seems like more effort has gone into UI eye candy than system plumbing.  Reading commentary on the web, I find I'm not the only one to reach this conclusion; here's one pithy example.  I think began to lose faith when I discovered that gcc comes preinstalled, but you need to apt-get a separate package to get the standard C headers.  There's no coherence to this system, no architectural vision; it's a bunch of very interesting pieces thrown together with little thought to the whole.  If anyone can recommend a more coherent Linux distro, I may give it a try.

Meanwhile, my next task is to figure out how to safely uninstall the debris of Ubuntu, recovering the partition and removing the dual boot controller.  The latter will be the trickier task of the two.  I'm thinking of it as a distorted echo of my favorite line from "Battlestar Galactica: Razor", which we watched on Saturday night:  "Get that thing off my boot sector."

As if it weren't hard enough going to work (or to bed) when I have a new computer to play with at home, yesterday my copy of The Other Conquest arrived. This is a film set just after the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, and concerns the spiritual battle between an Aztec prince who struggles to keep the old religion alive in his heart and the Spaniards who try to force his conversion to Christianity. It's a beautiful and moving film. For me, one of its great attractions is that quite a lot of the dialog is in Nahuatl, the Aztec language which I've been studying for the past several years.

So, there the DVD sat on the coffee table, beguiling me as I ate breakfast this morning. It will probably be Sunday before I have time to watch it with laurellady, who has never seen it. Having a rich, busy life is great until you want to squeeze something in like this.

laurellady and I watched Fargo last night; neither of us had seen it before. Now I know why people have been pestering me to see it for more than a decade. What a weird, wonderful film! Frances McDormand in particular gave one of the most textured, beautiful performances I've ever seen; for once I agree with the Academy. Her "I just don't understand" at the end of the film was heartbreakingly honest. All through the story she came across as a brilliant but uncomplicated person trying to make her way through a world far stranger than she was ever built to handle -- and doing it well.

There are a couple of other Coen brother films I haven't yet seen; they've been moved to the top of my Netflix queue.

The Other Conquest, the movie I've been wanting everyone I know to see for most of a decade, is finally coming out on DVD on October 16!  (Need to get home to check out what daysign that is.)

I keep forgetting to post that I saw Grindhouse with my family last Friday, and we all loved it.  If it's still in theaters where you are, see it.  It's the kind of movie that needs audience reactions to work well.  We saw it in one of the shoebox-sized theaters at the Beverly Center, but fortunately the fifteen people in there with us were in the right mood, and we all had a wonderful time laughing and cheering and groaning at the appropriate moments.  Any movie that features both a stripper flying through the air launching rockets from the giant gun that serves as her prosthetic leg and an extended homage to Vanishing Point is pretty damn good indeed.

While both the mini-movies that comprise this film were good, the fake trailers were the best part -- especially the one for the horror movie Don't.  I think I saw that one when I was a kid staying up way too late watching bad movies on static-heavy UHF stations.  I can only imagine how much fun the production team had making these films look and sound like cheap film stock that had been through about twenty too many projectors; the streaks and color cast changes and weird sound-quality shifts were both realistic and beautiful in a very strange way.

On the bus into school and work this morning, madelineusher and I were talking about Emily Dickinson, her favorite poet. Apparently Connie Willis wrote a humorous story in which she pointed out that many of Dickinson's poems can be sung to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas", e.g.

"Oh, because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me!"

madelineusher sang several other examples; she has much more Dickinson memorized than I do. Then I tossed in

"Oh, I burn my candle at both ends, it will not last the night!"

And madelineusher, in a tone of barely-controlled outrage, said "That's Edna St. Vincent Millay, not Emily Dickinson! Don't confuse your dash-monger with my beautiful bisexual poet!"

One has to wonder what people sitting nearby make of our bus conversations. Oh, and I love the epithet "dash-monger" for Millay.

Damn it, I'm at work, and I did not need to start crying.

One of the best indicators I have that I am living my life well is that I get to hang out with people like Oliver Althoen, the brilliant composer, singer, and choir director responsible for the music used in last year's production of "The Ship". Two of the tracks from that are on his MySpace page: "I Am the Heart" is a musical setting for the first verse of Liber LXV, and "Thou Who Art I" is the Priest's solo part of the Anthem (which I will be singing this weekend at Blue Horizon, if I continue to fight off this flu). Enjoy.

This morning, as I was drying off after my shower, coyotes began howling on the hillside across the road from our house. It sounded like a dozen of them, which means there were probably three or four; coyotes know some amazing acoustic tricks. It was still deep morning twilight outside, and the sudden explosion of barking and whining out there in the misty gloom stirred deep reflexive responses; suddenly I was wide awake, my fists clenched, intensely aware of every drip of water and creak of floorboard. It's nice to know that my animal survival instincts are still hooked up and working properly.

The cat was completely freaked out, and went into that amusing lovey-dovey "I'm going to stay right next to you!" behavior that indicates he's afraid of being eaten, and looking for a human to either protect him or, failing that, get eaten first. I'm glad he's nervous about coyotes; now that he's a part-time outdoor cat, that is a very important survival trait. It's the cats who aren't scared of coyotes who end up on the Laurel Canyon midnight snack menu.

The sound of coyotes in the night always reminds me of the Wild Hunt legend, which has always seemed especially numinous to me, though I couldn't tell you why. Speaking of numinous legends, last night I taught my "Holy Grail" class at LVX Lodge. That's a big topic to cram into two hours, but I thought it went pretty well. I hope people follow up on my reading and listening recommendations; the best approach to the legend of the Grail is through art, in my view.

The greatest challenge in presenting a class on the Grail is controlling the number of Monty Python references -- both by attendees and by me. The thing about Nonty Python and the Holy Grail is that it was made by a well-educated team which included a reputable medieval scholar (Jones). Thus, beyond the surface humor there are some really deep, sophisticated jokes drawn from quirks in the Grail romances. My favorites are the historically accurate pronunciation of "knight" as "kuh-NIG-uht", and the parody of the rivalry between French and English claims to Grail tradition.

fraterviao is rapidly becoming one of my favorite poets. I'm lucky enough to be able to attend his live performances at LVX Lodge. His poetry and his delivery both harken back to the Beat poets, but with his own special sardonic twist. When he gets on a roll it comes out as something between recitation and chanting; you find yourself tapping your foot to his rhythm. If you're ever in LA on a night when LVXpresso Cafe is happening, be there to catch his mojo.

But even if you can't see him live, you can now enjoy his poetry. His book Fall from Prescopia is finally available; my copy arrived last week. I've been delaying mentioning it here, because I wanted to do a full review. But it's not looking like I'll have time for that, so I'll boil my planned review down into its two essential points:

1. Wow!
2. Go buy this, right now.

That makes two published authors in LVX Lodge, by the way. who's next?