a hundred degrees

Everything Must Change

I've finished a read-through of Brian McLaren's book which is well reviewed any number of other googleable places.

I mentioned to manasclerk that I thought there was some similarity between Emergent ideas and Agile programming concepts. He summarized this as, "We don't need no stinking hierarchy." He also put forth his opinion that McLaren was probably stratum IV and this was why his work is more appealing to young people than older folks.

The Fidelity of Betrayal

Perhaps the simplest expression of the main idea I took away from this book is that any objectification of God is an idol. When you believe you can contemplate God then you reduce him to an object. Any object is a graven image. Too limited. While your description may reflect a past experience of God it may be a barrier to an experience to come.

Peter Rollins tells us that we cannot experience life. Instead, "life" is the thing that allows us to have experiences. Thus the new life in Christ is not a propositional framework that sets a religious codified set of boundaries, but a transformation that gives new perspective on our experiences.

He argues that Christianity must constantly tear itself down because the Christian should ever be an advocate of the neglected and oppressed. If you fight authority, as Mellencamp tells us, authority always wins. Either you don't overcome the existing regime, or you do and find that you have created a new authority and new outsiders.

I learned a long time ago that no thing lasts forever. My self-centered response has been to withhold personal investment. The temporary nature of things was linked in my mind (if I needed any justification for cowardice) to the fact of the fallen state of man. Perhaps, though, it is not evil that brings all good things to an end, but God, who is the only Good. God who clears away the distracting idols. How then am I to act? As fully as I can understand until my understanding is next renewed?

It starts to sound like transcendentalism that left Walden pond and went to work in a homeless shelter.

HP VI

My family was all asleep by 11:45 on Friday night, but I was a little restless. I decided to go pick up the book. I have a discount card for Barnes and Noble, so I went over to the location at Northwoods. I got there at probably twenty after twelve. I naively thought that by that time there would be no line. I ended up wishing I had brought my camera. You had to get in line to get a ticket to get in line to buy the book. If you weren't on the reserved list, you could get in line, but they might run out of extras before you got to the counter in which case you were out of luck. It was just a weird and silly scene. People were lined up between the racks through half of the store. I saw employees holding signs at the front of aisles with "151-200" and "201-250" on them. Lots of kids were in costume. There was face-painting happening. It was one time when the crush of people was actually kind of entertaining to me.

I left after about fifteen minutes of people watching. I went across the street to Wal*Mart and walked right up to the counter with no line and purchased the book for $15.82, a couple bucks cheaper than my card would have gotten it for me at B&N. Actually, there were lines when I walked in the door, but I first went to check the game aisle for Heroscape wave two (Utgar's Rage) booster packs. I found them and was delighted to find the several cashiers without lines by the time I got back to the front of the store.

I traditionally read these books aloud to my wife. We are only four chapters in.

Seventeen Months Later

I finally finished reading The Baroque Cycle. I started Neal Stephenson's three volume excuse to ramble about the beginnings of modern science and finance, and anything else that piqued his phant'sy about the time around the turn of the eighteenth century, shortly after I started this log. I predicted that it would be a bit of work then and must say that I was right.

The main central figure, Daniel Waterhouse, is depicted in scenes from the 1660's to the 1710's. There were certainly some enjoyable scenes along the way. Overall the second volume was the most fun. The third one had a little too much unity of time and place going on. If you're going to write a rambling work, then ramble far and wide. The second volume has world spanning maps while the third one only needs to provide a visual geographic reference for London and surrounding environs.

Still, I read this type of thing for the language at least as much as the story. Like the bible, it is usually a pleasure to read except when getting into genealogical histories. I'm sure Neal had to wade through a lot of these in his research and I should be grateful that he exposed us to as little of that as he did.

And even though I just read for pleasure, I have learned some things. I have something of a feel for the main motives of the Puritans and Tories and other religious-political groups of the period. I couldn't hope to recount the histories of shifting alliances and agressions in Europe around that time and know better than to ever seriously inquire. I know to respect the Sun King. Not a slouch. And Peter the Great, jeez, stay out of his way.

I wonder what will stick though. Will I retain anything from this journey of a year and a half? Will I ever be tempted to read any of it again?

Very Bad Deaths

Just finished Spider Robinson's 2004 suspense novel, Very Bad Deaths. The bad guy is really nasty. Bad enough that uneasy thoughts related to this book invaded my dreams.

Very smooth writing style and the author laid down an enjoyable recording.

Spoilers Follow---------

His Dark Materials - The First Half

I'm about halfway through the second volume of Phillip Pullman's popular fantasy trilogy. I'm really getting a lot of pleasure out of this entertainment. Possibly because it's is heavy-handed enough that even I don't miss it's subtleties.

The first book was a little slow developing, but was inventive enough to stay interesting. The heavy-handedness early in the book "Her destiny is to save or destroy us, but she must not be guided, she must be allowed to choose her own way" is forgivable as a Russian novel stating of the theme. The twist at the end led me to believe that there would be something here really worth pursuing. I came away from that volume saying, "So this is what Terry Brooks is shooting for."

The second book, though, has really opened up about what he's really playing at. There's some Larry Niven science fiction explanation for religious myth, some Greg Bear physics meets psychology, and some Dan Brown science versus the church. There's moral complexity galore: multiple bad guys each with their own agenda, and one of those just might be the right thing, or maybe good is in fact bad, or bad was just trying to be free. Freshman Philosophy, perhaps, but the book is filed in the Young Adult section at the bookstores as well as SF.

Like I said, I'm getting a kick out of it, and that may be just because I'm simple enough to feel proud of understanding what he's doing.

Wanted

Got the last issue of Mark Millar's Wanted today. In some ways it is a meaner, uglier Man in the High Castle. Phillip Dick's novel is set in a world in which the Axis won World War II. At the end of the novel the protagonist meets the title character who knows that the world is wrong. He describes our present world and that seems to feel more correct to the hero, but then the guru says that that world is off the mark as well.

Millar, too, calls our attention to the world's fallen state through the use of a golden age known only to a small elite. In Wanted the supervillains have won. They rule the world and behave as horribly as they wish without repercussions. After all, they have super technology to make the masses forget anything that they might remember differently. They didn't even bother to kill all the superheroes. Many of them have menial jobs, never remembering who or what they were before "the fall."

The plot follows one who crosses over from the enslaved to the elite fellowship. The book has several endings which get progressively more depraved. I can't help but think, however, that Millar intended the reader to create an ending beyond the final fourth-wall-breaking one. Like Dick, he gives you reason to believe that the world is not supposed to be as bad as it is. The fact that the villains still relish their depravity means that they still feel like they're getting away with something. That they aren't absolutely positive that their dominance is unbreakable speaks to a chink in their armor. Hope remains.

"It will not be like this forever." - Mark Heard

The Word on the Street

I pulled the dust jacket off of "The Wizard" on the way to the car a little after one this afternoon. On the way I grabbed the baby bag which I had already loaded with milk, green beans and orange slices. When I got to the car I put the baby bag in the back, looked in the passenger seat and found several bags. I got the stuff out and got in and we left.

About fifteen minutes later I was getting a little bored with the kids' music on the radio and remembered the book I had brought to read. When I looked down into the floorboard and around my seat and in the backseat I couldn't find the book. Immediately I knew that I had left the book on the roof of the car when I messed with the bags.

It was nearly four when we got home and as we drove down our street I did not spot the book. I aired up the tires in my bicycle so I could take a closer look. I rode all the way to the entrance to our subdivision but did not find it. I figured that someone must have picked it up. So now I had a dust jacket for which I had paid about twenty-seven dollars.

I got in the car to go to the park for a round of disc golf (four over {901 090 x00 - 11(01)0 010 010}) About three hundred yards down the main road outside our subdivision I saw a white square flap up and down on the side of the road. I pulled over at the next parking lot and ran back. Sure enough, there was the book. There really wasn't that much damage. A few streaks on the back where it slid and the cloth was slightly torn in a couple places on the edges. Nothing a dust jacket won't cover.

Hope Lit

My friend has borrowed my Sandman collection to read. I honestly can't remember anything about the longer stories, but some of the one shots stick in my mind. The one about the Emporer of America ("Three Septembers and a January"?), "Dream of a Thousand Cats," and "A Hope in Hell" all made some kind of lasting impression. The last recounts a wizards battle between Dream and the devil in which each claim a form that can destroy the previous one (eg. cat, coyote, farmer with a shotgun, wife with divorce papers, etc.). The claims escalate until the devil claims all of the horrors of hell. As the title suggests, Dream wins by claiming Hope. The idea of course is that hope endures all things and cannot be defeated.

I told my wife the other night that some of the pressures and greedy striving passions are released when one accepts that "Everything ends." Steve Taylor sang "Since I Gave up Hope, I Feel A Lot Better" sarcastically. Dylan Thomas (whoever he was) wants us to "rage against the dying of the light" even in the wisdom that we are not God.

I guess that thermodynamically speaking I should say everything breaks down. Entropy happens. But my practical side says "Perception is reality." In other words, this may not be the real world, but it's worth paying attention to it. When things break down or change significantly they lose the gestalt that I associated with their identity. So while there may be pieces remaining, the original thing is, as far as I'm concerned, gone.

Eek, I'm rambling and blurting. I was just going to talk about what I read today at lunch.

I'm a little over two hundred pages into "The System of the World" and Daniel Waterhouse has had a little epiphany while floating down the Hope (a portion of the River Thames, right near the mouth). He realized that people kept turning to him because they percieved him as having hope. By not giving outward signs that he was "scared shitless" and appearing relatively confident others saw him as a beacon. He reflects that his manufactured hope in turn gives real hope to others. He likens this to the alchemical dream of turning lead into gold.

On my drive back to the office Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation" played at me. He wrote that Las Vegas is a city of the present. It is entirely manufactured having no connection to it's surrounding geography. Nothing there is built to last. Some of the big names like "Sands" and "Mirage" exemplify the temporary nature and illusory reality of the place.

It got me to thinking about the value of past, present, and future. The balance necessary with all of them. Learn from the past, but do not dwell in it. Love the present, but do not try to make tomorrow like today. Plan for the future, but do not worry. All things in moderation.

Angels and Demons

I finished listening to Dan Brown's prequel to The DaVinci Code several days ago. Several folks had mentioned that this was the better book, so I gave it a shot. This is the sort of book that I was lamenting to my wife when she said I should stop reading crap.

Spoilers follow:

The Charm School

This novel was pretty slow in the fourth fifth. It was just long to no purpose. If I had not been driving I could have had a drinking game based on occurences of "yeb vas" and calling Russians "those bastards." If it hadn't been in audio form I'd have been hard pressed to stay with it.

The last part opened with a sudden shift into very technical details about flying a helicopter. This was the setup for the final action climax which was about an hour or more of tension over the fuel gauge, air speed, and deadlines when read aloud and could be summarized, "they ran out of fuel just as they made a close landing on the ship and got away."

Still, it must not have been that bad, because when I started Dan Brown's Angels and Demons immediately afterward, I found myself groaning and rolling my eyes. A lot.

Written Like It Is

I'm somewhere between a third and halfway through The Charm School by Nelson DeMille. I can't tell exactly since I burned the whole thing onto one CD. I can say that I just started Part Four.

DeMille did something interesting for the last several hours (couple hundred pages?). He conveyed the sense of the story through his style as much as through the words. What I mean is that he told us that Russia is tense and dangerous, but that the KGB isn't actually around every corner. They're less omnipresent than they want you to believe, but they are also unpredictable and dangerously powerful. Then he writes the book that way.

He writes page after page of tedious detail as the protagonists actions follow their stated plans. As each scene unfolds we expect trouble to interrupt. And each time they carry through their intentions unscathed we feel a little further out over the edge. Through long passages of dreary settings and mundane detail we appropriate Moscow's bleakness. DeMille knows that we sophisticated readers don't believe he would ever tell the same story twice, so tension builds as we wait for the other shoe to drop. And then at the end of Part Three, just as we've decided that they will get away and this novel will have a very different second half, we get rudely and brutally kidnapped by the Comittee for State Security.

I remember an issue of Cerebus where Dave Sim used this technique. He also pointed out that he was doing it so that even stupid comic readers like me would understand. Instead of writing "the moment seemed to last an eternity," he wrote about twelve paragraphs of material that bogged the reader down. He sought to have time dialate in the reader's perception in the same way it did for his characters. I don't remember the story being very interesting, but I did remember the technique and his subsequent discussion of it. Dave does a better job at telling a story graphically than verbally.

Cold War Fiction

Is it historical fiction if it is set in the present day, but the present day is far enough in the past to the reader that it is recognizably separate from his present day?

I've begun listening to Nelson DeMille's The Charm School. It's not LeCarre, but it is along those sombre spy fiction lines.

'A' is for Abridged

My folks bought me some books on tape from the used book store for my birthday. I listened to the first of them over the last couple of days. Sue Grafton's first alphabet mystery A is for Alibi was condensed to two cassette tapes. I haven't listened to very many abridged books. The last, John Grisham's The Runaway Jury on four cassettes, was over three years ago.

Mystery books are usually pretty tight. Sometimes meta data gives the mystery away. They don't introduce too many characters that don't play some role in the mystery. Often, the shortage of suspects will point to the obvious culprit. I can't believe that real life is like this too often. Abridging the story only makes it that much shorter a suspect list. All that said, the telling only felt rushed in the last half hour.

I have to admit, that the meta data really helped me pick out the bad guy this time. I knew that this was the first of a series. Therefore, the love interest was bound to end badly. Not hard to make the leap from there to pegging him as the bad guy.

Still, it was a breezy enjoyable diversion as I tripped back and forth between home and work.

I, Robot

I finished listening to Asimov's I, Robot about a week ago. It was written in 1950 and it felt a little like gee-whiz magazine fiction. I can't imagine an action movie being faithful to the book, but perhaps it is in spirit. I thought that AI was a fair extension of Super Toys Last All Summer Long. In fact the Aldiss story is a little reminiscent of the first story in Asimov's book. Perhaps I will attempt the "Foundation" series sometime.

The Confusion

I finished the second book of Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle. The Confusion tells the two related stories of Jack and Eliza over a thirteen year period (1689-1702). Enemies become allies and vice versa again and again. I liked it better than the first volume.

The Davinci Code

Dan Brown's popular novel is better than that Stuart Woods book I listened to just prior. Serious readers should skip it. It's a movie waiting to happen. You'll get all you really need in ninety minutes.

I'm spoiled on conspiracies by having listened to Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum" and read (mostly on the toilet) Shea and Wilson's "The Illuminatus! Trilogy."

One of the first hard things to buy in this book is that a room full of top cryptanalysts fail to recognize some anagrams, even if they are French.

Mr. Trivocational

My friend, the pastor of our church, is officially a published author.

Our church is small and cannot afford to pay him the full-time salary he could command elsewhere in the preaching market. To make up the shortfall, he has been running a web design business for a number of years.

A couple of years ago, he started blogging. When he began, it was a release valve for stuff he couldn't say to church people. Eventually the church people found him. And he's reintegrated a bit. He's a bit more filtered on the blog, and a bit more "radical" in church.

A local independent bookstore held a book signing event for him today. Eerdmans published a collection of his essays. We bought a copy for my folks and Forrest as well as ourselves. We also discovered a cool bookstore that we will be returning to for kids books and other neat stuff.

During the prayer request portion of the service this morning a couple folks mentioned "a friend who is moving on to a new season in his life" and "a friend who is enjoying an exciting time right now." There are members of the church who do not know about the blog or the book. He's still keeping the ministries separate. It's not as clean a division as his other vocation, though. As far as I know, no one has come to the church because they appreciated his web designs, except perhaps that of the church's own website. We've already had a few drop-ins who came to see the Real Live Preacher.

Incomplete but Finished Nonetheless

I finished listening to my first Stuart Woods book today. For some reason I didn't have the last twenty minutes or so. I have to say that I didn't really miss them. There was only one way for the silly thing to end. This wasn't a courtroom book, so I had to figure that the crook must die.

I went looking at reviews at Amazon and interpolated that he has actually written some decent books. Capital Crimes was consistently reviewed as crap by fans and first timers alike. The stereotypes were simply jawdropping. I was fascinated by the sheer audacity of it's awfulness and I was not alone.

You Don't Have to Change the World

"I don't want the world, I just want your half." - "Ana Ng" They Might Be Giants

The pastor told us today that it was not our responsibility to change the world. Our responsibility was to change bits of it we could reach. Like working with Habitat for Humanity or the SAMM Shelter.

This reminded me of a scene I recently read in "The Confusion." Daniel Waterhouse comes as a prophet to Sir Isaac Newton. Newton has been distracted for a number of years by alchemy and another long term project in that field has proven fruitless. Daniel tells him that it is not up to him to save the world; it will be sufficient that he is the greatest natural philosopher ever.

It's good to know your limits. It's even good to test them for a time. It's best to do work at your capability.

A Morbid Taste For Bones

This Brother Cadfael mystery could well be summarized like the last. The author really drags out the endings. It seems these books go on about thirty pages or more after the story has ended. The characters and what's in their hearts are more interesting to her than the crimes, mysteries, and solutions.

The girl whose father is the victim of foul play in this story is as strong of character as Cadfael. Near the end, there is some question in my mind as to whether she actually is more clever than him or whether events can be attributed to supernatural intervention.

For sweet morals and simple mysteries, these books are great reading.

Dave Barry Does Japan

I finished listening to this short book a few days ago. It was written nearly fifteen years ago when it was still possible that some readers might not be familiar with Nintendo.

It was moderately entertaining. I got the biggest laughs (okay the only real laughs bigger than a chuckle) in the chapter about sports.

For the most part Dave just needs to stick to the short articles he's so famous for.

Rowling's Next

I have to say that I dearly hope that Harry will not be so whiny in this one. People with fifteen-year-old children tell me that book five was true to form. Look for me to reach heretofore unimagineable heights of grouchiness in the second half of the next decade.

I don't know what caused Kevin to don this particular ensemble, but it was his own whim. I'm just glad he let me capture the moment.

Hard Eight

I finished listening to Janet Evanovich's Hard Eight. At the beginning of the book I thought, "boy this is some rotten writing." By the end, I was a little more forgiving of the writing (probably just more impressed with the reader), but the plotting seemed pointless. It's one of those "stuff happens" plots. Kind of like a mystery, but nobody really solves anything. Maybe this is just the way mysteries are done these days. Nobody likes a showoff detective. Except of course all those fans of Vincent D'Onofrio on "Law & Order Criminal Intent," or Tony Shalhoub on "Monk."

Morally Ambiguous Piracy

I read about twenty pages of The Confusion today at lunch. In the passage from about page 175 to 195 one of our protagonists survives a daring plan to steal silver from a ship just arrived from the Americas in the Spanish harbor where it will unload the following morning. One of the cabal is a dutch former ship captain who is conflicted about the plan's morality. The others have just barely convinced him that it is okay, since the booty is not rightly the Spaniards' either as they have used slaves to gain it.

I just discovered that one of the things pirated on the internet is Audio books. They have those at the public library, right? So I'm just saving myself a trip. Doing my part to protect air quality in the city.

Of course, public lending libraries are kind of a raw deal to authors. I like to think that my city taxes go there, that I really am paying for books I borrow, but I'm not sure if the authors get paid for library copies. Guilt over this issue is a big contributing factor in my choice to slide over to buying hardbacks instead of waiting for mass market editions.

Baroque Progress

Around the end of January I began reading Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson which is part one of a trilogy he calls The Baroque Cycle. Five months later I have finished its 916 pages. I immediately began reading The Confusion which is part two. It only runs 815 pages. I bought it when it was new on the stands in April. The System of the World, according to Amazon.com is due out on October first and will span 944 pages. For now my goal is simply to be done with them by the end of the year.

Dead Until Dark

Friday night Lexie and I made a stop at Barnes and Noble. Browsing the science fiction stacks I found a book that sounded like something she might enjoy. Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris. Small town girl meets vampire. Nothing serious.

Lexie agreed that it sounded fun and we bought the book. Lexie finished it last night. I think it may have taken her about three hours total to read all 260 pages.

After she and the kids left for her mother's place this afternoon I read the book. Took me about seven and a half hours, but I did it in one sitting. It was as expected. Fluff. "Candy," Lexie called it. Kind of told as a murder mystery, but given the lack of clues, really more of a suspense.

The author has written three more in the series so far. We might pick up another just because it took so little investment.

The Golden Globe

On Sunday we finished John Varley's The Golden Globe. The book starts off in a pretty fun way depicting rather bizarre events on and offstage of a backwater production of Romeo and Juliet. But about a hundred or so pages into the book Lexie began complaining of being confused by the events and bored by the cliches. I persevered, and it wasn't much further along before her interest was rekindled by the story of the young Sparky.

I'd be hard pressed to tell you what themes or lessons this book proffered. The plot is loose and fairly uncomplicated. Steel Beach, Varley's prior book in the "eight worlds" universe, was more wildly inventive, but even less concerned with plot. Probably the most frequently treated ideas regarded personal freedom and privacy in tension with safety and accountability.

The Man Who Fell to Earth

  In the sixties, nuclear holocaust was a foregone conclusion. We were going to destroy the planet. You don't get a lot of nuclear holocaust fiction these days.
  Walter Tevis wrote The Man Who Fell to Earth in 1963. The action in the book takes place between 1985 and 1990. People ride monorails, use picture phones, and when the math gets hard they break out their slide rules. The United States is practicing increasingly isolationist policies, and many foods are being replaced with synthetics.
  Then there's the martians. Apparently they had their own devastating wars 500 years ago. Now there are only 300 of them left and they've been watching our television broadcasts. Their resources are limited and they will die out in another 50 years. But they've managed to get enough together to power an old single-occupant spacecraft for a one way journey to earth. And they're really smart.
  So T.J. Newton walks into a small Kentucky town one early morning. He converts a nice ring into some cash at the jewelry store and moves on. When he has enough cash, he goes to the patent lawyer's office and shows him some patents and makes a business proposal.
  He proceeds to make a lot of money. The idea, though he doesn't tell the humans, is to build a ship to bring the rest of the aliens to earth in. By 1988 work begins in earnest on the ship. Then, right after Christmas, it comes apart. The FBI arrests him, the CIA interrogates him, and in a bureaucratic SNAFU he is blinded.
  It's a short book. Only five cassettes. It doesn't end in nuclear holocaust, but the characters see that as more likely than not to occur in the next few years.
  This book was made into a movie in 1976 starring David Bowie as the alien. After reading reviews on Amazon, I'm not rushing out to rent it. Tevis, who died in the eighties, wrote two other books that were made into movies: The Color of Money and The Hustler.
  I'll come out and admit that when I borrowed this book from the library, I was actually looking for The Queen's Gambit which got a mention in a recent comic book (Superman : Secret Identity #2 p. 10) written by Kurt Busiek.

PS 238

  PS 238 became known to me as a backup feature in Dork Tower. In simplest terms it's kindergarten superheroes. I always enjoyed the stories.
  I picked up my first full issue (#6) yesterday. The book is cute and fun and successfully carries the spirit of the short features to the longer story. It is one of those increasingly rare comics that I wouldn't feel unsettled about seeing in the hands of a nine-year-old. It doesn't have the more generic appeal of Halo and Sprocket, but it has fun with the superhero genre without requiring you to be a fanboy geek to enjoy the story.
  Looks like there are back issues available from the publisher. Of course, with six issues in the can, there may well be a trade coming soon.

Monk's Hood

  I've just about finished listening to this Brother Cadfael mystery. From reading some of the blurbs on the others in the series, I discovered that Ellis Peters is a pseudonym for a female author whose name I can't remember. She apparently wrote quite a bit under her own name. Anyway, this is the second one I've read. It's apparently the third in the series. The first one I read was somewhere around the ninth or so.
  This has been a rather simple and formulaic mystery. The characterizations are what make it enjoyable. One of the best things about the recorded version is that the reader, Patrick Tull, pronounces all these Welsh names that I would butcher.

Blake's Heaven

  While Lexie was at her mothers I read "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" by Willam Blake. It put me so much in mind of my Sunday School class that I was tempted to bring it to them for a couple weeks of discussion.
  Blake was all of thirty-three when he wrote "Marriage." The commentary (Bloom) I read speculated that it stemmed from his disdain for the writings of Emmanuel Swedenborg. Swedenborg claimed to have apocalyptic visions beginning in 1757, and turned from a career of scientific research to one of religious writing. Blake at first had some reserved affinity for Swedenborg, but his Divine Providence in 1790 did not agree with Blake at all. Blake took the facts that Swedenborg's visions started in the year of his own birth and the fact that he was now the Jesus-like age of 33 to sarcastically set himself up as a Messiah who would deliver the "Bible of Hell."

End of an Age - Cerebus #300

  It was in the store yesterday. I didn't get there until today. He's done. Well, he's been done for a while now, but the end is out now.
  After more than a quarter of a century Dave Sim has completed the race that he set for himself: a self-published limited series of extraordinary length. Early in the series he said that he thought that the character had a three hundred issue lifespan. Later he clarified that Cerebus would die in bed alone, unmourned and unloved. Well, he made it out of bed, but I don't know about the rest. I haven't actually read the comic for about a hundred issues now, so I don't know how any of the other characters feel about him.
  At twenty pages per issue, Dave has written and drawn a 6000 page comic. It has consumed the majority of his life so far. Gerhard joined him somewhere in the eighties or nineties (issues, not years) to draw the intricate and beautiful backgrounds. Some of it is great, and some of it is nigh impossible to read. Still, it is an honorable and impressive achievement. One author/artist/publisher, one story, 27 years. Hats off to you, Dave.

Still Smiling, People

  I finished listening to Smiley's People on Friday on the way to the park. In The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and The Honourable Schoolboy the title characters achieve their mission but come up short themselves. The end of Smiley's People was not as upsetting as usual. It was generally triumphant with only the title character's conscience attempting to rain on the parade.

Passing Sentences

  I finished a couple books this weekend. I traditionally read Terry Pratchett's Discworld books aloud to Lexie. We've had Guards! Guards! in the car for some time. We had just quit the reading aloud thing for a while. Not too long ago I started back into it. Anyway, we finished up just this side of Marble Falls on the way home today.
  Kevin mostly talked or sang to himself or drew on his Magnadoodle while I read. He was generally very good. Occasionally he wanted some questions answered about things he saw on the road or on his Magnadoodle and he would interrupt.

Family History

  Last night Lexie put Kevin to bed, so I wasn't involved in story time. While I was bathing him I gave him a pop quiz: "In a hole in the ground lived a ..."
  He didn't remember. He took some guesses, but eventually I had to tell him. He didn't remember Bilbo's name either. After I reminded him he stumped me with, "What's his mom and dad's names?" Nice one. I mean I can dredge up "Frodo, son of Drogo" but to find Bilbo's parentage I'd have to go to the appendices in the Return of the King.

Myths and Aspirations

  There's a coffee table book of Alex Ross' DC artwork called Mythology that I like to look at when I visit the book store. As a rule, I read comics for the stories and don't pay much attention to the art (unless it sucks and subsequently detracts from the story). Ross, though, paints these photo-realistic images that are often breathtaking. He had an eye from early childhood. There are a couple pictures in the begining of the book that he did at age 3 that would be about all I could hope to accomplish at age 35.

Music, Blood, Movement & Revolution

  The first couple of books by Greg Bear that I read were Blood Music and Moving Mars. Actually, I listened to these books, as I did later with Queen of Angels and Darwin's Radio. I got through print versions of The Infinity Concerto, The Serpent Mage, and Eon.
  After those first two books I was stirred up to take a different look at my faith. Bear doesn't address Christianity in these books, but that's where they pointed me. Admittedly to a fairly odd take which I'm told is nonsense.

Beginnings

  Tuesday. I started Smiley's People on cassette this morning. I'm not sure why I keep returning to Le Carre. I mean just about every novel ends with the mission accomplished but the reader unhappy. Nihilism. That's the ticket. But gee, I really like his wordcraft. His crystalline perceptions of the way people act.