carving cats in a blizzard

I'm making a custom cat portrait for a customer in Japan. She runs a cat rescue with her husband, because Yokohama doesn't have shelters for strays. This is the lovely Papico, her permanent pet, rather than one of the cats for whom they hope to find new homes.

Meanwhile here in Toronto, we're in the midst of the largest snowfall in five years. The media are having a field day with it, of course, riffing on the fact that this is the meeting of two 'cowboy' weather systems, from Alberta and Texas respectively. Though, really, this is Canada in February and supposed to happen; it's been the lack of snow in recent years which is the real anomaly. It started last night. I shovelled at 6 pm. RJH shoveled at 8 pm. Then this morning, RJH shovelled at 7:30 and by 7:35, I could see a centimeter already on the recently cleared steps. I went out there this afternoon and shovelled again. I'm sure it will need more shovelling by the time he gets home. It is very quiet, despite being a busy street. There are more entrepid pedestrians out there than cars.

I need to make Papico into a pillow, but I am out of stuffing. I've decided that it is entirely reasonable not to try to get a 25 pound bag of stuffing on a day like today. It's an unwieldy sort of item to wrangle on public transit on the best of days.

8.9

I keep checking the news to see updates on the aftermath of the magnitude 8.9 event off Japan's Honshu Island last night (or afternoon locally, 2011 March 11 05:46:23 UTC). The initial estimates of lost of life were far too low for an event of this magnitude which triggered a tsunami. It's beyond Hawaii now, but tsunami warnings were issued throughout the Pacific, including coastal BC. The problem is the nature of the coastline, as people in Port Alberni, where a 1964 tsunami swept away homes and swamped businesses, know well.



Though I don't have any instruments in the water which could sense the wave, at the moment, people still called me at the crack of dawn. I don't envy friends who work in earthquake seismology or in disaster preparedness on days like these.* I'm glad the epicentre was not further south - closer to larger population bases and known significant gas hydrate deposits. There are fears that earthquake shaking could destabilize gas hydrates, which may both hinder slope stability (another tsunami risk) and release large amounts of methane.

*For the most seriously affected people: Médecins Sans Frontières and the Canadian Red Cross can be found at these links.

(figures from Bunting et al., The Science of Tsunamis, Oilfield Review, 2007)

Reading is sexy XLIII

(image by Sophie Blackall from her 'Missed Connections' series)

The connections I notice between the three first novels I read in 2011 are the manuscript within the novel, family, love between siblings, a quest for a father, video games, creative use of fonts, and visceral, unexpected violence. Don't say I didn't tell you.

1. Invisible by Paul Auster. Like his in New York trilogy, a manuscript, or in fact two, play a vital roll in this novel - providing a voice from the past, or even the dead. It begins with the engaging story of a young poet and Columbia student, named Adam Walker in 1967, whose life changes when he makes the acquaintance of a French political science professor named Rudolf Born and his intriguing girl friend Margot. Before long Adam find his life enmeshed with theirs. By the end of the first section of the novel, a shocking event draws the reader in. I was riveted. The novel proceeds in three more sections, with other voices, spanning the rest of 1967, and subsequent events up to 2007, in New York, Paris and a remote island in the Caribbean. The book is about love, lust, family, mourning, justice, war, violence, the value of life and how a single event can change a life. Read it.

2. Luka and the Fire of Life by Salman Rushdie. This is a sequel (though it can be read separately) to the marvellous, or rather fabulous in every sense, Haroun and the Sea of Stories. This story is about the second son of storyteller Rashid Khalifa and his wife Soraya - Luka, who is born 14 years after Haroun. Luka has a dog named Bear and a bear named Dog, who are refugees from a circus where they were mistreated. Luka cursed the ringmaster, Captain Aag, aka Grandmaster Flame, upon learning about the state of the circus. The animals adopt his family when the circus subsequently burns down, and provide extra entertainment when his father is story telling. Luka, and Bear and Dog, get an adventure of their own, when his father falls into a deep, unrelenting sleep, and he inadvertently takes a step to the right to the World of Magic. There he meets Nobodaddy, who is Nobody, but looks like a ghost of Rashid, and who would reap his father's soul upon his death, unless Luka can steal the Fire of Life. From there, the novel proceeds like a fairytale quest, with Luka meeting various challenges and fabulous characters along the way including the elephant-headed ducks on the River of Time, the fearlessly rude Insultana of Ott, various Respecto-Rats, and other stealers of fire like Coyote or 'the Old Boy', Prometheus himself. There is all the wonderful wordplay you would expect from Rushdie, somewhat veiled political satire for the grown-ups, and a well-crafted tale for all, but the way the story is written to mimic a video game (à la 'Scott Pilgrim versus the Whole World'), complete with multiple lives and a counter that is the corner of Luka's field of view, did not resonate with me. Also, I love typography, so I think I am the sort who might appreciate the typographical games he plays with some of his gods and other mythological creatures. However, I thought having Ra the Supreme speak in Wingdings was a bit weak. The SPEdessa font employed for the 'Sumerian' dialogue of Anzu was better, as it was less recognizable and more plausible as cuneiform. However, I think that today, especially if one happens to be Salman Rushdie, and thus in the position to ask his publishers to humour him, one could have made the effort to actually print hieroglyphs, or at bare minimum, avoid characters which are so obviously unrelated to ancient Egypt (including icons for pencils or bombs and so forth). So, of the two novels which he has written more as fairy tales for children, I prefer Haroun and the Sea of Stories, but there is plenty to appreciate and enjoy here as well.

3. number9dream by David Mitchell. number9dream is also a quest for a father, but in this instance, 19 year old Eiji Miyake has come to Tokyo from his small, southern, island town, to find the father he has never met. As the story unfolds we learn how he and his twin sister Anju, were left by his ill-prepared mother to be raised by his grandmother and various uncles. His mother had escaped small town life to work as a 'hostess' in Tokyo, and became the mistress of a clearly powerful man, who anonymously paid support for his offspring. Eiji begins his quest by staking out the Panopticon building -where his father's lawyer keeps his identity- from the Jupiter Café, where he first spies the waitress with the perfect neck. He soon finds that discovering his father's identity will not be easy, but he makes connections with people who prove invaluable. The novel seamlessly combines reality, fantasy, dreams, video games, surreal cinema, past and present including WWII tales of an ancestor and a manuscript of fairy tales. The structure keeps you on your toes. The characters are excellent. Eiji Miyake will be with me for a long while; forthright, unworldly, brave and forgiving. The depiction of Tokyo, from capsule apartment, to Ueno train station Lost and Found, to love hotels, to computer hackers, to a harrowing yakuza underworld, is striking and vivid. It's excellent.

{Series so far: books read, more books read, books read, books read continues, more books read, I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII,XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII XXIV, XXV, XXVI, XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX, XXX, XXXI, XXXII, XXXIII, XXXIV, XXXV, XXXVI, XXXVII, XXXVIII, XXXIX, XL,XLI, XLII}

Reading is sexy XLII

{image 'Robot Reading' by CarlosNCT} The themes of my reading lately seem to be mass consumerism, war, environmental degradation (see mass consumerism), people stranded waiting for their boat to come in and robots. I don't know why.

Also, I've left this too long and these books aren't as fresh in my mind, but here goes nothing.

36. White Noise by Don Delillo. I got the 25th Anniversary Edition (by Deluxe Classics - incidentally, one with a beautifully illustrated cover and elegant design), which I mention because it does stand up 25 years later. It does seem farsighted (with the exception perhaps of the state of air travel, which Delillo did not foresee) - our world is full of more and more noise. It's a great novel, though hard to categorize. Part academic satire, send up of consumerist society, Big Pharma, television, and government, part environmental warning, both poking fun at the modern 'blended' family while simultaneously gently portraying the relationships and love there, it is also about death, and our obsessions and fears. It follows a year of Prof. Jack Gladney's life (Chair, and inventor of 'Hitler Studies'! at The-College-on-the-Hill, despite ignorance of German). He's on his fourth wive Babette - who teaches breathing in church basements and has a morbid fear of death - with whom he's raising four of their various children and this and previous relationships. Everything from the Airborne Toxic Event to the mysterious drug Dylar manages to be both entertaining and provide insightful commentary on the state of our world. It is a great read.

37. the stone gods by Janette Winterson Before I read David Mitchell's The Cloud Atlas I would have said I had read nothing like it, but now I see parallels in the stone gods. Both are ultimately about how we use and use and use the earth's resources and each other. Both are set in multiple times and places, linked by a manuscript, including the future, and the south Pacific of two centuries past. Both involve robots and the distinctions between natural and created lifeforms. I think if I hadn't read The Cloud Atlas, I would be more impressed with the stone gods, but it is nonetheless an excellent novel, and one of the best I've seen from Winterson. Read it. There are love stories, explorers, space travel - with pirates, robots, literature, Robinson Crusoe, dinosaurs, Easter Island, dystopian future England, woven into an elegantly structured and thought-provoking cautionary tale. She clearly loves stories, but is concerned here with nothing less than the fate of the planet. (And I for one, appreciate that she bothers to be careful and clever with her planetary science).

38. In search of the English by Doris Lessing Lessing provides us with her memoir of moving to post-war England as a young, single mother, and trying to make a go, and to fit in and survive in a working-class neighbourhood. Lessing has a sharp mind, self-deprecating sense of humour, and can - and did - make even a memoir about her cats riveting. This book is no exception.

39. R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek Karel Čapek, Czech playwright, introduced the world to the word 'robot' in 1921 with this play, in which he imagines a world where robots have been invented to relieve man of labour. They are grown on a factory on a remote island, and appear to be just like people, but lack emotions. Helena, daughter of the President of some industrialized nation, visits the island with its small group of men and one woman (manager, engineer, physiologist, psychologist, managing director, clerk and maid) with the view of freeing the robots. She is unable to incite rebellion, as they have no emotions, and she falls for Domin, the General Manager. The play continues years further into the future when the robots have spread around the globe, to do all labour, and even work as soldiers, and the creation of 'national robots' foments more war. Human births decline (presumably inspiration for Children of Men). Eventually the now universal robots - slaves- of course, do rebel, and our human characters may be the last of their kind. However, the robots can do everything but reproduce on their own... This is a fascinating play - it is as much about industrialization and the dangers of nationalism (viewed by a far-sighted Czech in the 1920s, known for his fearless campaigns against both Nazism and Communism) as much as its science fiction subject. But it also hits upon the question of what is human, and under what criteria would a machine match a human.

40. Pictor's Metamorphoses by Hermann Hesse This is an odd collection of many 'sort of fairytales' spanning Hesse's entire life. There is, of course, mysticism, Germanic dwarfs, mermen, spirits, metamorphoses and also Mary. I was disappointed that the illustrations by the author, promised in the introduction, did not appear in my translation. I tend to believe that if an author wrote text and intended it to be part of an illustrated whole, that the illustrations are part of the whole. An interesting and unexpected read.

41. The Chess Machine by Robert Löhr, translated from German by Anthea Bell This is a sort of 'intellectual beach book' like the stories of Arturo Perez-Reverte. The Chess Machine, for those of you who aren't history of science, engineering and computing nerds, was an actual automaton, presented by Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen at the Austrian court in Vienna in 1770 - 'The Mechanical Turk'. Except, of course, it was a hoax. The fearsome Turk purported to play chess - invincibly of course. At the time automatons were popular and his rivals produced a mechanized statue which could write and a sort of robot duck (which waddled, ate and well, defecated) and the like. Kempelen however, promised to wow the court, and he succeed with his Turk, a machine which allegedly could think. The novel centres around Tibor, a devout war veteran and dwarf, making his living through chess, whom Kempelen rescues from a Venetian prison and recruits as the hidden brains of the Turk, hidden behind the gears and showy machinery. Reviewers seem to have taken this novel more seriously than I - citing 'psychological depth' and 'period detail'. I enjoyed the novel, but wonder whether, for instance the chapter wherein Tibor meets Mesmer and is 'magnetized' and enjoys a threesome with two masked noblewomen using Classical monikers, or the unlikely infatuation of the lusty Hungarian Baroness with the automaton, or the rather ham-fisted recurring image of plucked eyeballs, constitute 'psychological depth' or 'period detail'. However, it's certainly entertaining, and it has some basis in actual events.

42. The Exquisite Book by Julia Rothman, Jenny Volvovski and Matt Lamothe. The Exquisite Corpse, of course, is the surrealist game wherein a single body is drawn by three artists in three parts, who can only see a small portion of what came before. In The Exquisite Book the creators have enlisted a veritable who's who of contemporary art and illustration to create a whole book of connecting illustrations, in a series of themes, each continuing at least a horizon line into the next. Some artists blend virtually seamlessly, some pick up themes and subjects, some differ radically. The book is, of course, beautiful. It contains a foreword by the ubiquitous Dave Eggers, who by the way, can draw. There are also questions with and biographies of the artists. I'll enjoy returning to this often.

43. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell There's a reason the New York Times Book Review called Mitchell a genius. While I can intuit the sort of mind which could create such diverse and excellent novels as The Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet each is so distinct it seems he can write whatever he sets his mind to. There are themes I can recognize - bullying, integrity, slavery, drugging people into complacency, cultural clashes, exploration - but each novel is unique. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet is set in 1799 in the Dejima trading outpost of the Dutch East Indies company, next to Nagasaki Japan. Jacob de Zoet is a devout, resourceful if overly trusting young clerk, who enlisted with the VOC to try to earn enough money to satisfy the father of his fiancée and win her hand with 5 long years in the far east. He has been sent to clean up the rampant fraud on the tiny island, where the only foreigners allowed entry to the Shogun's Japan are essentially prisoner - allowed no further into the country, and stranded until they serve their terms. Jacob learns the price of his integrity. His life also changes when he meets the stunning, but disfigured midwife Orito Aibagawa, daughter of a respected samurai doctor, and student of the Dutch doctor Marinus. The book never ceased to amaze - somehow making life on Dejima, and the wider Japan under the shogunate, as well as a staggering plot very real, while weaving in many further stories. Wow.

{Series so far: books read, more books read, books read, books read continues, more books read, I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII,XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII XXIV, XXV, XXVI, XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX, XXX, XXXI, XXXII, XXXIII, XXXIV, XXXV, XXXVI, XXXVII, XXXVIII, XXXIX, XL,XLI}

Reading is sexy XXX

(image Courtesan reading a love letter (Edo) via this site) It occurs to me that this is not a well-advised post title, but, c'est la vie.
1. A Whistling Woman by A.S. Byatt. This is the fourth and final (?) book in a cycle by Byatt, completing the quartet which began with The Virgin in the Garde, Still Life, and Babel Tower. This is a rich world Byatt has created, around the life of the North Yorkshire Potter family, and red-headed, independent, intellectual Frederica Potter in particular, during the 50s and 60s. The first novel is intertwined with a play about Queen Elizabeth I being performed for Elizabeth II's coronation. The second is intertwined with the story of Van Gogh. The third is intertwined with a battle over censorship, freedom and pornography with a character's novel Babeltower. The fourth is rich in symbolism, but does not have as much of a dualistic structure. The character Agatha's fairytale story Flight North begins the novel, and the story of its publication is a thread in the novel, but plays a far more subtle role than say, Babeltower in Babel Tower. Ironically, now that I've claimed the final novel is less dualistic, one of the major themes is the syzygy in the Gnostic sense (a male-female pair of aeons), in the Jungian sense of archetypal pairings, and in the zoological sense (and the discussion of sexual versus asexual reproduction) - not to omit, the on-going story of the twins John Ottokar and Paul/Zag (and his rock band Zag and th Syzygy Zy-goats) and the discussion of whether monozygotic twins are an example of asexual reproduction with the one twin as both mother and genetic pair of the other. Other major themes include blood, birds, mind & body, reproduction, mirrors and light, Manichaeism and the Biblical stories of Abraham and Issaac, and that of Joshua. The novel, as you may have gathered, takes on a lot: mental illness, religion and cults, psycotherapy, changing role of women in society and evolution of the actual family unit, duty, media and television in particular, love of knowledge, love, domestic violence and counter culture. Frederica and her son Leo are still living in South London with Agatha and her daughter Saskia. Byatt makes various allusions to The Golden Notebook and the concept of free women, or unmarried women with children sharing a home to share child-rearing duties. Frederica is still seeing computer scientist and Quaker John O., but soon he accepts a job at the University of North Yorkshire (where several characters from previous novels work including Marcus, Frederica's brother). Frederica is convinced by Edmund Wilkie to host a television show about ideas called Through the Looking glass. This is a way for Byatt to weave in all sorts of knowledge, whether it be neurology, sociology, art history to even things not found in universities, like astrology, along with the imagery of Lewis Caroll (not without its own binary pairs). Meanwhile, the Quaker Spirit's Tigers (including psychologist Elvet Gander from Babel Tower) merge with Gideon Farrar (Still Life)'s Children of Joy, and we watch in increasing dred as the budding cult falls under the sway of Manichaen Joshua Lamb (or Ramsden), a charismatic man whose mental health was shattered when his father acts on the belief he was commanded by God to sacrifice his family. Joshua survives, his family does not. The group contains other religious characters and one ethologist from the previous novels and centres around Lucy Nighby, a woman battered by her husband, who may, or may not have attacked both he and their children - again the bloody image of sacrifice of children. At UNY, biologist Luk Lysgaard-Peacock is in love with Jacqueline Winwar (who in turn loves Marcus, who may love Ruth, who is embedded in the Children of Joy). Gerard Wijnnobel is organizing a conference on Mind and Body (another means of Byatt to express her love of knowledge) while a growing encampment called the Anti-University of counter-culture student protesters, plans their response. Byatt deftly weaves all her strands together, making a strong argument for interdisciplinary, unfettered celebration of knowledge, for real people living true, if messy lives, and for independence.

One could easily write a doctorate on these books. Consider the symbolism of names alone (Marcus and his mystical, instinctive approach to mathematics, compassionate Ruth, Lady Wijnnobel is née Eva Selkett, Joshua Lamb, Elvet Gander, Daniel with his foresight and tests of faith, Lucy Nighby who makes a religion of light, Lyssgard-Peacock, and even Avram Snitkin). I'll refrain from attempting to summarize such a richly-woven a web with a few lines. The cycle as a whole is both long and heavy, but very rewarding, and I highly recommend them.

2. Noh - The Classical Theater. Performing Arts of Japan IV by Yasuo Nakamura, introduction by Earle Ernst. No one is going to read this post and then read this book, if for no other reason than its obscurity. I found it in a used bookstore, years ago. I would have prefered Bunraku: The Puppet Theater, but this is what I found, and I do have a thing about masks. The author varies between claims that the ancient theatre is in fact avant guarde or whether it is so slow and stylized to be undoubtedly boring. The history of Noh, in excruciating detail, is likewise a mix of the undoubtedly boring with some real gems of ideas and stories. The introduction vivdly presents Tokyo, immediately after WWII, where Prof. Ernst was ironically tasked with censorship in name of the democracy, to prevent the feudalistic from re-appearing. He recognizes art, rather than nostalgia for neofeudalism. The author, mathematician-Noh expert Nakamura, relates the history of Noh from 200 BC to (his) modern day, the training of actors, the masks, music, sets and costumes (down to the socks). Just when it might get boring, he explains the difference between dramatic and supernatural parts as akin to the difference between living in three and four dimensions (with a metaphor that could have be straight out of Flatland), or a juicy story about an emperor's advisor who became addicted to Noh, or a love affair between a shogun and young Noh apprentice.

3. From the Notebooks - The Unwritten Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald by Stephany Aulenback, John Beckman, Marc Bojanowski, Judy Budnitz, Ian Caldwell, Rachel Ingalls, Sam Lipsyte, Tom Lombardi, Carey Mercer, Lydia Miller, Sigrid Nunez, Michelle Orange, Salvador Plascencia, Matthew Sharpe, Miriam Toews, Jincy Willett, Diane Williams This is of course a McSweeney's project (issue 22). F. Scott Fitzgerald kept a notebook. It contained, amongst other things, 32 more-or-less wild story ideas. McSweeney's gathered authors together and asked them to select one. Everyone wanted "girl and giraffe" so they include two stories on that theme, and many others (i.e. "the man who killed the idea of tanks in England - his after life" or "Fairy who fell for a wax dummy"). I enjoyed these various stories very much, though some more than others. Stand-outs include Plascencia's "Returned" wherein the ocean follows a girl, Lombardi's "The Bear" ("Lois and the bear hiding in the Yellowstone") and Sharpe's "Bert as a Boy".

McSweeney's say they leave the unselected ideas as an exercise to the reader. So, I assign you the task of writing a story of what I deem the most promising, unselected Fitzgeraldian idea:
A tree, finding water, pierces a roof and solves a mystery

{Series so far: books read, more books read, books read, books read continues, more books read, I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII,XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII XXIV, XXV, XXVI, XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX}

That's it! I need a samurai hat.

Black-lacquered kabuto (helmet) with the arm of a guardian deity wielding a Vajra
Edo period, 17th century
Iron, lacquer, wood, and papier-mâché
H. of outer bowl, 43.5 cm (17⅛ in.)
Yasukuni-jinja Shrine, Tokyo

{via The Awl}

You know if I were an onna bugeisha, I would wear a half-meter tall arm grasping a thunderbolt of firmness of spirit and spiritual power on top of my head. My headgear would be so fearsome, there would be no need to fight.

On an unrelated note, I wonder why what appeared to be a WWII-era bomber just flew by my window?

What this blog needs...

...is clearly, an alien squid dancing next to a streetcar.




No, there were no alien squid on or adjacent to my streetcar today.*



{via Pink Tentacle}

*There was no heat in my home nor any hot water either, thanks to the City's on-going excavations, but that's another story.

modern technology angst

So Reynardin is worried about what the technocrats are up to. She worries about near-armaggedon when we destroy civilization as we know it, but some survive. She likes her iPod and assorted other amenities, and though she has a good conception of what they do, she could not make one from scratch. Well, I found her a tee-shirt for a different, but yet not-entirely-dissimilar concern: what if you find yourself back in time (a little harder to reconcile with physics as we know it, but nonetheless):


See, there you go. Just carry a cheat sheet.*

Now, if you could solve my evil-cashmere-eating moth invasion issue, we will call it even.

On an counter-productive note (because, after all, what could be less conducive to easing technological angst, and fears about what exactly are the technocrats up to, than giant robot spiders?), here is some footage of the 12-meter (40-ft) tall, 37-ton mechanical spiders was observed in the red brick warehouse area of Yokohama last Friday.





Now, I would say, "Only in Japan," however, since these steampunk giant spiders are made by La Machine of Nantes, France, that would be untrue. [via Pink Tentacle]

*The tip about Polaris being the brightest star and marking true north depends on time and how far back you go (further, it is none-too-helpful in the Southern Hemisphere)... but since we don't believe in time-like loops and rather doubt that time is two dimensional, it's rather moot.
Oh, and that icon of an atom is so early last century. Electrons come in clouds, not little orbiting things with precise locations.