Unsolicited Advice

I've given up on the series of CPTSD book reports I planned. I spent too much time wanting to throw the books at the wall. Which is a problem, because most of them are e-books, and I'm pretty attached to my Kindle. Plus the noise would scare the rats. Almost all of the available books on the subject are formatted as self-help texts, and fall afoul of the same thing all self-help materials do. They're written for the lowest common denominator. They don't necessarily assume the audience is stupid, but they do assume the audience is starting from a place of complete ignorance. This is great if you are indeed starting from scratch, but irritating as fuck if you've already gotten past the 400-level research class and really just need to know how the last guy to run this lab kept the still from exploding all over the inside of the fume hood. The books also spend a lot of time holding your hand. They talk in circles and spew a lot of words reassuring the reader that they a...

When I was a kid, I had no friends. There were a couple of other kids whom I was told were my friends. In retrospect, none of them liked me or wanted me around, they were just forced to include me because my mother wanted to gossip with their mother without interruptions. The one whom I was told was my "best friend" didn't like me to the point where she ignored me at school, but she was the kind of kid whose mother picked out her clothes and hairstyle every morning, and she got clocked with a hairbrush if she protested, so clearly she couldn't do much to stop it. The message this sent was that friends were people who would tolerate you when you were there, then roll their eyes and start running you down to others whenever you weren't. So far as I can tell, this is how my mother actually believes friendship works. She consistently behaved this way with all of her friends, back when she had them, and sailed merrily onward with her siblings once my sister and I aged...

It's been a rough couple of weeks. Discount Cheeto Hitler is refusing to admit he lost the election, which he did, by a fairly wide margin. The response of the Biden campaign to Trump's refusal to concede is -- and I am quoting directly here -- "[T]he United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House". On the personal side of things, one of my housemates is having (non-virus-related) breathing problems off and on, and at the time of this writing is in the ICU again. We're waiting to be COVID-evicted on the first of January, because none of us can get enough work to pay for anything. I have started feeding the rats entire sandwich cookies for brekfiss, because it makes me feel better. So you will all forgive me for thinking way too hard about Star Trek . I've seen conflicting reports on whether the novelization of The Motion Picture  is canon or not. Roddenberry seems to have thought it was, inasmuch as he wrote it an...

I was asked a while ago to read through a book by Catherine Hakim, called Erotic Capital: The Power In The Boardroom And The Bedroom . The library finally coughed it up, so I did. tl;dr: Hakim's thesis is interesting and absolutely deserves an entire book of analysis. She didn't bother to write one. The book is bullshit and you will just throw it at the wall. The review inquiry came to me from one of my readers, on the grounds that I've worked in an industry where attractiveness, specifically conformist femininity, is an asset. So you are all absolutely clear where I am coming from, this is me (NSFW, if your work is hostile to cleavage):

One of my commenters suggested I read some of the synaesthesia research published by Richard Cytowic, so of course I immediately went and got basically everything he ever wrote -- well, the books, anyway; I haven't been through the papers -- through the Boston Public Library system. (To steal a quote from Moggie, I don't know how to like things casually.) The Central Library is under construction right now and I am a lazy bastard, so if I want specific volumes I just put a hold on them and have the librarians pull them for pickup. Wandering aimlessly through the shelves is for when I want something to read but don't know what. Boredom is a known hazard with me. The library card has joined my T pass, ID, and debit card in the phone case, as part of the minimum possible set of items I might need to keep myself out of trouble at any given moment -- I can't go anywhere without a music player, which means I can't go anywhere without the phone, which means I can't go ...

Quite a while ago, I was gifted a copy of "Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes". I poked at it and made some comments about the writing style here , but I am a terrible person, especially when it comes to things that have no formal deadlines, and it's taken me this long to figure out how to make my draft of the book report into a readable document. I admit to having little patience with these sorts of books. Aside from resisting the urge to snap something about not teaching your grandmother to suck eggs, a lot of them are boring. You can only reword "pay attention to your surroundings and remember to think about stuff" -- which is the actual mechanic of the trick -- so many times before your 300 page magnum opus  starts to get tedious. Konnikova peppers hers with bits of memoir, which to me are the more interesting part. She also shovels in a lot of pop psychology, so if you're tired of hearing about how you can only hold X things in working memo...

I managed to finish Johnny Weir's book some time ago. Seriously, you need to see this thing. It is very pink. And he is wearing one hell of a pair of shoes on the cover. High-fashion ankle-breakers, if I ever saw them. Some of the reviews charge that the book sounds immature in places. A fair cop, but irrelevant. It's a memoir, not a scholarly biography; he's putting these things down as he remembers them happening, and during most of them he was suffering from an inconvenient but common medical condition called 'being a goddamn teenager'. He is quite able to apply hindsight, and sometimes hops back into the present to comment that he'd just done something of consummate stupidity in the story he was telling. He was also occasionally not an idiot at that age. He recounts a moment when he was maybe nineteen-ish, when he had the sudden realization that his crowds of adoring fangirls were fawning and helpful and showering him with presents not because he was bet...

One of the more interesting things about having a taste for elderly mysteries is that popular books give a lot of casual insight into contemporary society that more formal literary masterpieces don't. Whodunits have historically been regarded as sort of clever trash reading -- of no particular artistic merit, but a more sophisticated way to pass the time than sitting in a vaudeville show. Character archetypes are rampant, but with the constraints of trying to consciously produce something that would be acceptable to literary critics, they're much more illustrative of how ordinary people mentally divided up the world. Particularly surprising to see are some of the examples of gender roles. We have this idea of the past as a uniform blanket of male chauvinism, where all women were seen as weak ornaments and kept barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, or at least severely constrained. In fact, we mostly get this from 1950s America -- the mods, rockers, and hippies of the 1960s an...

Another series I have had my nose into for years is the Ellery Queen collection of mysteries. They are quite cheerily metatextual. The books are published under the byline "Ellery Queen" -- actually a couple of cousins from Brooklyn, working together -- and feature as their protagonist a detective named Ellery Queen. Who is himself a writer, writing detective novels. The concept that the novels were written by the protagonist about things he actually witnessed is threaded through quite nicely; Ellery takes a lot of notes while he pokes his nose into things, and other characters both seek out his help because they know of him through his novels, and sometimes complain about being involved in one of his escapades that they don't especially relish seeing on the shelf someday in written form. Later in the run, when out in the real world "Ellery Queen" the author(s) ended up editing a monthly anthology called Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine , the Ellery Queen ins...

The thing about having a magic palimpsest an electronic book is that, if you are a particularly voracious reader who was previously limited mostly by the amount of reading material you could carry without dislocating your shoulder with the messenger bag, it will suck up loads of your spare time. I've also been working on another, larger project -- an autobiography, sort of -- which has eaten up the rest of it. I'll try to catch up. Really I will. One of the... er, three hundred and seventy-seven... things that have been eating all my time is The Innocence of Father Brown , a collection of short mysteries by G. K. Chesterton. Featuring, obviously, a Roman Catholic priest named Father Brown as the primary detective. If you're a fan of deadpan absurdity, and you haven't read anything by Chesterton, you should. His description in the very first story of a small out-of-place restaurant as "an unreasonably attractive object" is but a faint ancestral echo...

The Library at Alexandria was the greatest of the ancient world. It was actually a Musaeum in the original sense -- a house of the Muses, a school and a repository for the arts and sciences. Their collection came partly from donations and partly from purchases, but largely from simply passing a law that any boat that docked in Alexandria had to let the Library scribes copy any books on board. Since Alexandria was a huge trading port, that meant a great many books passed through the city. Nobody actually knows how many scrolls were in the collection; accounts range from 40,000 to 700,000. The most oft-cited number I've seen is 400,000. Nobody really knows when or how the Library was destroyed, either. Common knowledge for centuries has been that it went up in flames, but who exactly set the fire, why, and whether they intended to gut the Library or merely failed to pay attention to what was in their way is unknown. Virtually everyone agrees that it was a horrible loss for humanity...

The nice thing about ebooks is that they come from all over the world. It's ridiculously difficult to get foreign-language works in the US. If it ain't English, it ain't here. There are the occasional exceptions, but you really have to get up to the notoriety of "The Little Prince" or "Don Quixote" before anyone will stock a work in anything but the English translation. Consequently, a lot of the stuff I read, I can only get by shipping things from halfway around the world, or electronically. I do the former occasionally; one of the most expensive non-class books I've ever bought was a first-edition printing of „Die unendliche Geschichte”, the original source of "The Neverending Story" that was made into the film I remember so fondly from my childhood. It's a beautiful piece on its own -- the German edition is printed in green and black, will full-page illuminated capitals at the start of each chapter. I have another Ende book also, ...

I have of course been poking at the Kindle with a proverbial stick ever since I got it. I finally got around to testing the claim that it supports Unicode by loading it with pretty much every language I read. Japanese does work. The Kindle will display unadorned shift-JIS in the home page listings, although books are easiest to read if you convert to PDF first, so you can keep the customary vertical columns and Ruby-coded furigana. There are also converters available for taking folders full of scanned manga and converting them to clear PDFs sized for the Kindle screen. The display is sharp enough that the furigana in speech bubbles doesn't get any more lost than it does in print, and since most manga are printed in black and white plus screentones, the pictures are easy to render. If it handles shift-JIS, then it probably also handles traditional and simplified Chinese, which shares part of the character pool, although I don't have any e-materials in Chinese to check it with....

This Kindle thing still amazes me. I came around about the same time as the space shuttle and CDs, and look what else they've invented in my lifetime. Somewhere in their garage, my parents have a platter from a hard drive that died in Dad's lab at work right before I was born, which is actually the size  of a platter, and has a big obvious groove in the surfacing where the air gap collapsed and the head scraped a ring of magnetic material off. I asked them once how big a deal the disk was, and they agreed it would have been maybe a couple of megabytes, been stacked with a bunch of other platters in a rack the size of a small dishwasher, and cost some insane number of thousands of dollars. I'm typing on a $500 laptop that weighs about five pounds and has a 120GB hard drive. The Kindle is solid-state, the size of a trade paperback book, and holds about 3GB of text; my MP3 player is half the size of a matchbox, has a multi-color display on the front, and can hold 4GB of audi...

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I mentioned in a previous post that I am a Sherlockian . This tends to strike people as being a bit bats, a little like being a scholar of the history of Middle Earth, whilst pretending it wasn't made up out of whole cloth. The idea is that, from one counterfactual premise -- that Holmes and Watson were real people, with Doyle being Watson's literary agent -- you jump off into a huge game of recreational research and logic, where you try to figure out where and when the cases happened, in what order, who some of the "disguised" names might really have been, etc. Sherlockians, in fact, call it "The Great Game", which if you've been watching the BBC's modern series Sherlock  you'll note they used as the title of the finale of series one. It's loads of fun if you're the sort of person who reads academic papers in your spare time, which I am -- I have a lot of anecdotes that start with sentences like "It was Friday, so I was drinking and...