PureGin.org

I finished Neal Stephenson's Anathem over the weekend - all 900+ pages including appendices.

Wow... I was enthralled.

I finally picked up Daniel Kehlmann's novel Measuring the World, which I was given for Christmas by my Mom. It's been a phenomenal bestseller in Germany, and is now available in an English translation by Carol Brown Janeway. Kehlmann imagines the lives of Alexander von Humbolt, the great Prussian explorer and naturalist, and Karl Friedrich Gauss, one of the most deep, visionary, brilliant (and yet enigmatic) mathematicians that ever lived.

Terry Riley is an inventor - someone whose gifts have their origin in an extraordinary imagination. Ask a musician familiar with 20th century music about him, and you'll hear the response 'In C' - Riley's 1964 work which, according to those who follow such things, launched the 'Minimalist' movement associated with such names as Philip Glass and Steve Reich. This is a work of wonderful imagination - it is scored for 'any instruments', though as the title suggests, the work is still grounded in the tonal framework of western music. The piece begins with a 'pulse' - middle C, IIRC, played in steady repeated quarter notes throughout the piece. Beyond this, there is a fixed set of phrases or motifs, which each performer of the ensemble, independently, is to play, with any number of repetitions, but in strict sequence (i.e, no going back to motif 3 once you've started with number 4). When each motif is introduced is entirely up to the performer. The piece is over when every performer has fininshed playing all of the motifs. The result is a perfect example of emergence - an incredibly simple set of rules leads to a very rich and structured outcome. It's incredibly elegant, and I think, beautiful, mesmerising, and strangely warm and inviting.

Mark Helprin's novels are filled with remarkable sentences that leap off of the page, beg to be rolled over in the mind and on the tongue, and quoted. Sometimes they are quirky and hilarious observations:

``These automobiles,'' Alessandro said, as if he were conceding the existence of a new word, ``are everywhere, like pigeon shit. I haven't seen a naked piazza in ten years. They put them all over the place, so that you can't even move. Someday I'll come home and find automobiles in my kitchen, in all the closets, and in the bathtub.

His narrative is studded with reflections on theology, memory, the relations between parents and children, lovers, friends and comrades, with descriptions of paintings, arias, and aesthetics:

I just got some e-mail from my sister S, who is doing a Ph.D. in English.

Just had a wonderful class (Sampling). Someone gave an excellent seminar on Kathy Acker's appropriation of male-authored texts into her plagiarist novel The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula. Kind of exciting because subversion seems very liberating... perhaps because it allows for different interpretations without cancelling out the "original" voice or perspective

I think that most things in the world, including natural things, are reflections, re-creations, re-uses, reincarnations, re-interpretations of other things.

It seems that so many Sci-Fi films lately are pretty shallow treatments of 'big-name', classic (i.e., dead) Science Fiction authors: Philip K. Dick (Blade Runner, Minority Report, Paycheck, Total Recall), Isaac Asimov (I, Robot, Bicentential Man); Robert Heinlein (Starship Troopers).