Bridge of Birds

Back after a long hiatus. This is an update regarding a friend's book suggestion: The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox. It's a collection of three books by Barry Hughart set in the ancient China of folklore and legend. I am now reading the first book, Bridge of Birds, in which Number Ten Ox meets Master Li and a whole bunch of freaky shenanigans go down with dancing ghosts, invisible Hands of Hell, tiger-masked despots, misers, monks, and a woman of limited beauty but immeasurable charm who wraps every man she sees around her finger simply by smiling at him.

I am thoroughly enjoying the humor and grace with which the stories are told, the style being more reminiscent of a fireside folktale than that of your typical epic fantasy. From the moment Master Li Kao slops onto the scene in a drunken stupor, and recovers enough to say, ``My surname is Li and my personal name is Kao, and there is a slight flaw in my character. You got a problem?'', I fell in love. Add to that the fact that a beloved friend read me the first four chapters aloud to get me started, and what resulted was complete enchantment!

Which brings me to the real point of this post. Read out loud, and find someone who will read aloud to you. The exchanges that result are magical! Better yet if you can find a read-aloud partner with a good voice.

(Cover copyright: Kaja Foglio, 1998. Source: fantasticfiction.co.uk)

H.P. Lovecraft

So, I've been reading a lot of Lovecraft lately. Particularly curious to me is the pantheon of Old Ones: powerful extraterrestrial beings who ruled the earth in its prehistory and who were occasionally worshipped as gods, and who the very thought of can drive a student of the enlightenment completely insane.

I'm having trouble keeping all of their various attributes and roles in the end of days straight. Basically they are devoid of comprehensible morals, desires, and such...save the one desire to return to the earth, subjugate all life, and bring about a new era of badness for humanity.

In an effort help myself remember who all these guys are, I have composed the following, to be sung to the tune of ``The Farmer in the Dell''

Lovecraft’s Dream of the End
(to the tune of ``The Farmer in the Dell’’)
The Howler in the Void
The Howler in the Void
His name is Nyarlathotep
The Howler in the Void

The Howler finds the Gate
The Howler finds the Gate
The Gate is kept by Yog-Sothoth
Who also is the key

The Gate is opened forth
The Gate is opened forth
Cthulhu wakes and walks the earth
The Gate is opened forth

The Old Ones stomp around
The Old Ones stomp around
Shub-Niggurath stalks all the woods
And has a thousand kids

Cthulhu takes tribute
Cthulhu takes tribute
Dagon eats a lotta folks
Cthulhu takes tribute.

Azathoth he reigns supreme
Azathoth he reigns supreme
From his black throne of madness
Azathoth he reigns supreme

The Shoggoths get away
The Shoggoths get away
From their icy prison neath the ice
The Shoggoths get away

The innocent are food
The innocent are food
Worthy victims of the sacrifice
The innocent are food

Eventually it ends
Eventually it ends
The best thing `bout the Universe
Eventually it ends.

I’m sorry - I'm gonna go hide under my bed now.

Good Fathers in Horror Stories

NB - THERE ARE SOME SPOILERS IN THIS ENTRY. If you want to read Parasite Eve or play the video game Silent Hill and don't want to know the storylines, read no further!!!

Reading Parasite Eve by Hideaki Sena, and surprised to find that among many subtexts, I found one concerning good fathers. Good fathers of mysterious daughters, in particular. One father in the book is a single man trying to bring up a teenage daughter who is in need of a kidney transplant. This father feels he has failed his daughter because her body rejected the kidney he donated to try and save her. The daughter, Mariko, feels a premonition of evil when she discovers that a suitable donor has been found. Her father is frightened and confused by this, but doesn't know what to do to comfort Mariko.

Another father in the story is the unwilling sperm donor to the eponymous Parasite Eve. His name is Toshiaki. Eve rapes him for the sole purpose of obtaining a sperm sample, because she still carries the memories, though twisted and self-centered ones, of Toshiaki's dead wife who loved him. Eve was sleeping inside the body of Toshiaki's wife, a conciousness controlled by ESP-lke communications within her mitochondria, and now she wants to create a perfect and demonically powerful daughter with the aid of Toshiaki's sperm.

Toshiaki took a cell culture from his wife's liver so that she could, in a sense, live forever. The goulish act was inspired by the mitochondria in Toshiaki's brain cells, also controlled by Eve. In fact, Eve (yes of the very real Mitochondrial Eve) has controlled all of our mitochondria ever since they first entered our cells and created eukaryotic life.

In real life, all plant and animal cells contain modular organelles including the once-autonomous mitochondria. The theory (called the Endosymbiont Theory) is that mitochondria were once bacteria-like prokaryotes that were eventually incorporated into our cellular progenitors. All mitochondria in plants and animals are derived matrilineally, from our mothers' ova. We all contain highly a similar genetic code within these mitochondria, and Mitochondrial Eve is the theoretical human ancestor female to whom we owe that genetic signature.

Parasite Eve in the book is a hypothetical collective conciousness connecting the mitochondria in our cells within our bodies and even between individuals.

Back to fathers: Toshiaki becomes the unwitting father of a daughter with incredible destructive capabilities and a drive to obliterate eukaryotic life so she can free the mitochondria she controls from ``cellular slavery''. He defeats this Eve Daughter's intentions with an expression of fatherly love. As it turns out (and I didn't quite get this part) because Toshiaki's sperm did not unite with Eve's egg in the usual way, some of his mitochondria, over which he has some control, are now a part of his Eve Daughter. This makes her unstable, and she shifts constantly and painfully between male and female, perfectly formed and formless...and Toshiaki in the end tells her that he understands how conflicted she is.
``Share your pain with me...I am your father...I understand''. When she runs to him for comfort, he fuses with her, causing her cells to self-destruct and killing himself in the process.

Another horror story, this time in the form of a PC game that I am too chicken to play, concerns good fathers of daughters that they try to understand and protect through impossible circumstances. In the Silent Hill game series, Harry Mason is the adoptive father of Cheryl, a baby that he and his wife found abandoned in a graveyard. Years later, after the death of Harry's wife, Cheryl disappears into the mysterious and monster-ridden town of Silent Hill. Harry soon learns that his daughter is not at all who she seemed to be, and that she may even have something to do with the horrors that have swallowed the town and turned its residents into monsters. Driven by a love for his daughter that overcomes his fear, he pursues Cheryl in an attempt to save her (quite literally) from herself.

The only thing that I dislike about all this is that these good fathers all have to get embroiled in such terrifying circumstances! I want to find good fathers in books I can share with my own father, and horror is really not his thing. If you can think of a good book with a good father - Les Miserables for example...there's one, please share it in the comments below!

Dad, if you're reading this, I love you!

Interim shout-out for Librivox

Recently finished Heinlein's short stories - Waldo and Magic, Inc. and have started on Parasite Eve by Hideaki Sena. A more pithy entry will follow, but for a between-meal snack, so to speak, I would like to give the following shout-out.

Librivox.org is my new religion. Or at least my new Vatican City and interwebs Mecca. Free downloads of readings of public domain books! Could anything be BETTER??? Yeah, OK I can think of a few things, mostly involving dark chocolate and all the members of The Mighty Boosh. Seriously, though, these are pretty not-bad public domain free MP3 files of volunteers reading some of the greats!

So far, I've downloaded Dante's Inferno, a compelation of short stories by Mark Twain, the first book of the Brothers Karamazov, and the first few bits of The Canterbury Tales. There are several different file-type options so they should work with most MP3 players and media programs out there.

The goal of librivox.org is to eventually record all books in the public domain. Since that list will continue to grow, I'm pretty stoked.

For the Hitchhikers

I was playing with the now-ubiquitous built-in webcam on my laptop computer a few days ago, and I started exploring some options and came up with a couple of favorite-book-based videos that made me laugh hysterically. It was very early in the morning.

To preface - Douglas Adams is by far one of my favorite authors. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is just after Jabberwocky on my ``must be read aloud whenever possible to anyone who will listen'' list that I just made up. So, it being 3am and my having many other better things to spend my time doing, I imagined these two pieces of silliness.

Below are two Guide entries, with myself as a ``friendly''-looking alien avatar relating them to you (the avatar was created from a still photo of myself using the Dell webcam central program that came with the laptop).

I, Dusty, was designed by the Guide's publishers to pleasantly relay the indispensible information contained therein with just the right amount of politely modulated, computer-generated emotion. A feat, by the way, covered in real life in a New Yorker article about voice recognition software. It was like reading a Heinlien story. More on that later...

Kindle, eat your motherboard out.

No, my eyes aren't really that color. NB: These videos are parodies (can you have a parody of a comedy?) and thus to the best of my knowledge are protected under copyright law. No infringement is intended. Buy Douglas Adams' books!

Heinlein

Started Heinlein's short story Waldo this week.

Waldo is a man who lives in a space station in freefall around the Earth. He lives in 0 G to overcome a congenital muscular disorder that makes him so weak he can hardly lift a fork with both hands. He has created several variations on mechanical ``hands'' (called Waldos by the Earth-bound public) that respond to feather-light pressure of his fingers inside gloves that work as remote controls. Even the subtlest movements of his fingers register with receivers on the robotic hands - some of which are enormous, some tiny - to allow him to build fabulously elegant inventions that would be impossible with normal human hands.

This story has a lot of links to practical uses. Similar technology was behind the workings of the tiny Doozers and the gigantic Gorgs in Jim Hensen's Fraggle Rock. Techno-wizard Faz Fazakas invented these little gloves that allow a puppeteer to manipulate a tiny or huge mouth puppet as though it were hand-sized. The puppeteer sticks her hands into a foam ``mouthpiece'' outfitted with servo motors, and this is connected by remote control to the actual puppet, which might be two inches tall. The movements of the puppeteers hand are sent to receivers linked to servos in the puppet, and it works and performs very close to a traditional mouth puppet like Kermit the Frog! Jim Hensen apparently saw the invention and said, ``Oh! It's a Waldo!'' It worked, and Hensen used them foreverafter. Learning this was what inspired me to pick the book up. It's in a small paperback with another short story of Heinlein's called Magic, Inc.

Apparently, gizmos called Waldos are also used in surgery. I'll be looking for other Waldos in the real world as I continue the story. If you know of any, please put them in the comments!

Poetic Digression

On Sunday, I visited a couple of bookstores and among a few other things, I picked up a copy of Pablo Neruda's The Hands of Day.

Pablo Neruda is by far one of my favorite poets. His style is very observational, and he writes about conventional sorts of things. I almost feel as though I'm sitting next to him as he points to specific objects, talking to me about them. First, he points to the broom he doesn't know how to make in the first poem of the book, entitled ``The Guilty One''.

"Why did I not make a broom?
Why was I given hands at all?''

He talks then about the broom with a sort of sensual admiration. He talks about `the golden bundle' and `the yellow skirt' of the broom itself, and uses words like `uniting' and `gathering' to describe the act of making it. When I read his poems, I not only see a handmade broom - dusty, bent, and well-used - sitting in a slightly darkened corner, but I feel the stalks of un-united grass in my hands. First they're pliant and smell alive, and then they're dry and stiff after they've been prepared in the hot sun.

There was another poem that grabbed me for a slightly different reason: ``Cycle''. Beginning with the line-->
"It repeats itself once, the humid springtime"
and ending with-->
"On the stem a rose?
I set it ablaze."

The whole poem is about waking, about the force of spring and the new blossoms pushing upwards. Immediately I started hearing Tom Waits' ``You Can Never Hold Back Spring'' in my head.
"You can never hold back spring,
You can be sure I will never stop believing,
The blushing rose that will climb,
Spring ahead or fall behind,
Winter dreams the same dream every time..."
It's on the Bawler's CD (#2) of the 3 CD set Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards. It's one of Waits' gentler songs, that sounds like a soft reminder not to try and hold things that are impermanent, because "remember everything that spring can bring...Oh, you can never hold back spring...''

And then I thought...anyone who thinks that lyrics can't be poems and vice versa can kiss my proverbial buttocks. Now, I'd put very few lyricists into the category of poets, but I can think of a couple without working too hard - Paul Simon, Tom Waits, and Neil Young for example. I've also heard some great renditions of old poems as songs. Loreena McKennitt did a great version of William Butler Yeats' "The Two Trees" as an accompanied solo voice, and it made a deep impression on me. On another album, she set Shakespeare's closing lines of "The Tempest" to music.

Anyway, a bit of a digression from my usual fare. I don't spend a lot of time reading poetry, as much as I like it. As it says in Proverbs ``A well-spoken word is like an apple of gold''. One of my labmates at work gave me that reference, by the way.

Change of plans

It recently dawned on me that just because I'm doing a book-review blog, that shouldn't change the way I usually read. I originally thought I ought to read one book and finish it before writing anything about it. But, rarely are my thoughts so linear, and rarely do I read one book at a time. So instead of only writing when a book is finished, I'll be updating more regularly with thoughts on the books I'm reading or leafing through each day. Hence the following diversion from Ravens in Winter, which has lain at the bottom of my backpack awaiting the completion of some writing projects at work.

So my holidays are just about over, but as I revisited some of the bookstores in my native Pacific Northwest, I picked up a used copy of Larousse Gastronomique in English. Not, perhaps, the wisest thing to buy at over 1000 pages just before getting on a plane...but for the most complete authority on French cuisine in existence (or so I gather in my limited experience of the subject) at under $10 I just couldn't leave it behind. I should probably mention...I like to cook almost as much as I like to eat.

And I couldn't be happier with my impulse buy. More of an encyclopedia of French-food-related terms and sayings, it also includes simple instructions for preparing everything from roast haunch of fallow deer to calf's brain fritters. It also includes instructions on how to recognize a true gourmand, and finally gave me some satisfaction as to why the Yeomen of the Guard at London Tower are called Beefeaters. Apparently, no one knows for sure. Score one for Dusty Shelves.

Larousse Gastronomique was first published in France in 1938, and was the compilation of Prosper Montagne. The edition I have is one of if not the first English translation, published in 1961. There are two prefaces by Montagne's contemporaries, Auguste Escoffier and Phileas Gilbert. Auguste apparently passed away before this magnum opus of his friend's made it to publication. There is also an informative Introduction to the Enclish Language Edition and unit conversion table.