Darwin8u

We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
- Joan Didion, The White Album

I wish I could dance like Fred Astaire and write like Joan Didion.

I find myself attracted to Joan Didion. The younger Didion, I can understand. She was a Miss Shiv and a Ms.Shank. She was sharp, California cool, and seemed to slide clean and straight along a razor-thin line between madness and coldness that was absolutely sane, true and beautiful. But it isn't just the young Didion I find attractive. I dig the older Didion. The one who seems more hard-wrinkled priestess of the California desert than an elderly queen of cool laying in bed with another GD migraine. I know this is the stuff of cults and hero worship. I know this is already a cliché. It isn't like I DON'T know my diet Coke is bad for me and that nothing is ever, EVER as advertised. But still I long, I lust, I linger too often over just the idea of Didion.

After reading her essays in 'The White Album', I think it would have been dangerous to breed Joan Didion with John McPhee. What rough New Journalism beast, its hour come round at last would awaken and slouch towards the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the New York Review of Books to be born? But where John McPhee is rolling hills and farmer's markets, Joan Didion is a raging river, breaking waves, and rock and roll. McPhee feeds you. Didion gives you the whiskey you might need after a bad dream, or bad trip. McPhee is a rocky mountain cut-through. Didion is an LA Freeway. I can't imagine my life without either. There are certain writers that make you want to read more. Didion is one of those writers that make you want to think and write more.

Be careful folks. You might fall in love with Joan Didion, but she sure the hell won't ever love you back.

It is like J.P. Donleavy lifted Harold Skimpole out of Hard Times and made a whole whore of a novel of him as a young law student in Dublin. There are novels about drinking and there are novels about being shitfaced. This is a shitfaced novel. It ranks right up there with Lowry's Under the Volcano. Except insead of meszcal, there is plenty of stout and Irish whiskey. The prose is distilled three times: once with food, once with f#cKing, and once with irreverant flippancy (maybe once too for finances, but that would ruin my trinity of distilation image).

But the prose? Dear God, Mary and the baby Modern Library, J.P. Donleavy can write crazy post-Joyce juice. He was rock and roll before rock and roll. His sentences hit you like Mick Jagger dancing on John Bonham third drum stick. It doesn't seem like a long novel, but requires slow, devoted reading. You have to put it down and sober up every few pages. More than 80 pages in one sitting will leave you shitfaced with veins breaking and uncontrolled shaking of the hands.

Go easy my friends, and enjoy drowning in the softness.

I’ve found that one must try and teach people that there’s no top limit to disaster – that, so long as breath remains in your body, you’ve got to accept the miseries of life. They will often seem infinite, insupportable. They are part of the human condition."
- Ian Fleming, You Only Live Twice

Ian Fleming took James Bond off the interstate of his more traditional espionage novels with the last couple books. 'You Only Live Twice' is Fleming putting James back into the "game". The settting for most of this novel is Japan. Bond is hunting (for the Japanese) Dr. Guntram Shatterhand, who turns out to be Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the head of SPECTRE. It is interesting enough, but seems a bit dated with the NINJA scenes and Yellow Face.

"Love of life is born of the awareness of death, of the dread of it. Nothing makes one really grateful for life except the black wings of danger."
― Ian Fleming, The Spy Who Loved Me

Reads more like a John D. MacDonald thriller than a typical James Bond novel. I liked it. It was like James Bond was tired of catching crap about not being able to write or develop female characters, so he wrote a novel entirely from the perspective of the woman. Unfortunately, at the end, it was STILL a woman in peril cliche. But a good read, still.

"Anything written in a book has a certain sacredness, all the established authors are authorities, and all are timeless, from Aesop to Horace."
- Joseph & Frances Gies v

A nice survey of Troyes in 1250 AD. Joseph and Frances Gies examine everything from medicine to women to the church and cathedrals in Medieval Europe, focusing their historical lense on Troyes, which at the time was a prosperous center of commerce in Europe. Not super deep, but VERY interesting with some great nuggets. This book is written for general readership and seems to always jump to the next chapter just as soon as my interest was piqued. Here is a list of the chapters/subjects:

* Prologue
1. Troyes: 1250
2. A Burgher's Home
3. A Medieval Housewife
4. Childbirth and Children
5. Weddings and Funerals
6. Small Business
7. Big Business
8. The Doctor
9. The Church
10. The Cathedral
11. School and Scholars
12. Books and Authors
13. The New Theatre
14. Disasters
15. Town Government
16. The Champaigne Fair
* After 1250

“Try to remember that artists in these catastrophic times, along with the serious scientists, are the only salvation for us, if there is to be any.”
― William H. Gass

“Science certainly is not the static statement of universal laws we all hear about in elementary school. Nor is it a set of arbitrary rules. Science is an evolving body of knowledge. Many of the ideas we are currently investigating will prove to be wrong or incomplete. Scientific descriptions certainly change as we cross the boundaries that circumscribe what we know and venture into more remote territory where we can glimpse hints of the deeper truths beyond.”
- Lisa Randall, Knocking on Heaven's Door

Loved it. In this book Lisa Randall writes about scale and science, while surveying the state of modern physics just as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was getting warmed up (2011).

Randall is a theoretical physicist working on both particle physics and cosmology. She teaches at Harvard and specializes in supersymmetry, the Standard Model, cosmological inflation, dark matter, etc. She is one of the most cited modern theoretical physicists and is yearly on the short-list for the Nobel Prize in Physics. She is also a bit of a renessainse woman. Beyond her ability to scale from the super small to the super big, she enjoys art, literature, and the outdoors. There are some geniuses who seem to exist comfortably only in the small box they excel in. That is definitely not Lisa Randall. She seems to enjoy those spaces where literature, art, and the sciences overlap.

Lisa's collection of interests (beyond physics) is the prime reasons why she is such a gifted translator of theoretical physics. I'm a pretty smart guy, but would have been even more lost without her sharp metaphors and patient untangling of the bleeding edge of physics. I'm still pretty damn confused, but feel just a bit more confident WHERE I'm confused. I think her gift comes both from her varied interests, her wide friendships, and her basic humanity.

Amazingly, it was during a recent gift from the Universe that I met Lisa. Last year in August (on the 21st) a total eclipse of the sun was going to throw its umbral shadow over my sister-in-law's house in Southern Idaho. My brother Matt and I and his friend from the CIA decided to do a road trip. Soon, it wasn't just us three, but friends of friends, were on our way to Rigby, Idaho. Walter Kirn asked if he could meet us, and soon he asked if his friend from Harvard could come. Lisa showed up with a couple friends (one was an artist from LA, (Landon Ross, whose art is informed and influenced heavily by science) and we climbed up the South Menan Butte (owned by a Mormon Capitalist selling tickets) for a prime viewing spot. There we watched the shadow of the eclipse racing towards us.

Anyway, on this butte in Southern Idaho theoretical physicists, artists, writers, and a motley crue of naturalists, retirees, and Mormons were together humbled by the size of the Universe, the scale of what we know and don't know. We were also thrilled that, with the help of science, we knew where to be and together watched the moon's shadow roll over us. In some ways, it seemed a brief echo of how Lisa must have felt watching the LHC go online. Evidence would either show that the Standard Model worked or didn't work as far as the Higgs Boson particle (often called the "God Particle") was concerned. Shortly after this book was published in hard cover, and right before it came out in paperback, the LHC provided evidence that once again theoretical physicists were correct.

"Life is a devious business."
- Ian Fleming, "Quantum of Solace"

After having read about 7 of his novels, this was the first set of Fleming short stories I ran into, as I moved up the Bond collection. For Your Eyes Only contains the following stories:

1. From A View to a Kill
2. For Your Eyes Only
3. Quantum of Solace
4. Risico
5. The Hildebrand Rarity

The first three titles would probably be familiar to anyone who has watched more than a couple James Bond films over the last 20 years. The only issue is, they are only BARELY (if at all) recognizable. They share the title with the films, but that is about it. And that isn't a bad thing. I rather enjoyed the three movies, but the stories here are (for me) more nuanced than most of his books and all of his movies. Fleming is experimenting a bit. He is upping the literary and dialing down a bit the adventure. Not so it isn't recognizable. They are still all Fleming novels and ALL James Bond stories. But they each, in different ways, bring a bit of humanity into the Bond collection.

"Not knowing for certain, but refusing to give way to those who claim certainty, was a privilege I had never allowed myself. My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs."
- Tara Westover, Educated: A Memoir

This book feels like it was written by a sister, a cousin, a niece. Tara Westover grew up a few mountains over from my dad's Heglar ranch. I don't know her. Don't know her family. She grew up about 70-80+ miles South East as the crow flies, but realistically, it was a 1.5 hours drive difference, and a whole planet of Mormonism over.

I didn't grow up in Idaho. I was born there and returned there yearly. But this book is filled with the geography, culture, behaviors, mountains, religion, schools, and extremes I understand. She is writing from a similar, and often shared space. I didn't just read this book, I felt it, on every page.

This book reads like a modern-day, Horatio Alger + 'The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography'. However, it isn't just a book about how a girl with little formal education from a small town in Idaho makes it to Cambridge. It is also a tale of escape, and a historiography. Westover is using her own life to do a popular memory study on herself. She is looking at how she viewed her religion, her background, her parents, and her education. She explores how those memories and narratives change and reorient based upon proximity to her family and her father.

I bought a copy and before I even read it, I gave it to my father to read (He grew up in Heglar, ID). Then I bought another couple and yesterday and today my wife and I raced to finish it. We bored our kids talking about it over two dinners. We both finished it within minutes of each other tonight.

Tara Westover's memoir hit me hard because of the struggle she has owning her own narrative. Through many vectors I related to her (we both graduated from BYU with Honors, were both were from Idaho, both have preppers in the family). My family, while sharing similar land, a similar start, and a similar undergraduate education, however, are not Tara's. And that is what made this memoir so compelling. It was like reading a Dickens novel, but one that was set in your neighborhood. It was moving, sad, and tremendous. In the end, I was attracted by how close the story felt, but I was also VERY grateful her story wasn't THAT close.

“When the odds are hopeless, when all seems to be lost, then is the time to be calm, to make a show of authority – at least of indifference”
― Ian Fleming, On Her Majesty's Secret Service

One of my favorite Bond novels so far. It contains most of the things that draws people to Bond novels and movies (action, intrigue, charm, violence) and tones down some of the more obnoxious parts too (sexism, racism, etc). The character of Bond is fascinating in this novel as his normal cycle with women is warped a bit. The movie sticks pretty close to the book's narrative on this one, which is probably due to the fact that it was already a pretty well-developed story.

If you are going to read (or listen in the bath) just one book about gay bunnies at the Naval Observatory, read this one. When I finish my bath, I might tell you why.
*****
So here are a couple reasons, now dry, as promised:

1. Love is love.
2. Friendship protects us.
3. There are bad dudes in power.
4. We can vote them out of power.
5. It is fun to hijack ironically the Pence's rabbit for a worth LGBTQ cause.

San Diego Surf Noir, Take Two.

I'm enough of a Don Winslow fan after The Power of the Dog and The Cartel to seek after al of Winslow books's. There is a cost and a benefit of going back to read earlier books of an author you admire.

Cost: The books, invariably, are a bit weaker. This is usually the case. Writers grow, develop, and yes they too eventually slump. But this one follows the typical arc of a writer's carrer. This isn't top-shelf Don Winslow. Some of the characters are almost silly. The stories are a bit too neat and symetrical. So, you end up being a bit disappointed when viewing an author backwards. Try reading Mardi after reading Moby-Dick. I dare you. It is still writen by Herman Melville, but it ends up being a bit of a let down.

Benefit: You get to see early seeds of things that will eventually grow and mature in the author's later, greater novels. These are like recognizing waves that will eventually be surfable. You also recognize that not every novel has to be perfect to be enjoyable. I like Winslow as a writer and as a person.* I enjoy reading his early stuff because it gives me a better, more rounded, view of his later work. So despite the criticisms here and there, it still helps.

The Gentlemen's Hour is part two of the Winslow's Boone Daniel series (read The Dawn Patrol first). It follows the adventures of Boone Daniel, surfing P.I. and his band of surfing brothers (The Dawn Patrol), and yes sisters, as they deal with the friction of shifting loyalties, visions and ethics of life. It was Sprite, not gin, and went down easy. Some days, you just want a Sprite.

* I think he is generous with other writers and very approachable to his fans.