By root and twig

I see the funny term "urban forestry" and am tempted to imagine forests marching into the streets, crumbling asphalt and concrete, ripping parking lots out with their roots. The entwives return after the dust settles to create peaceful parks between the skyscrapers. Humans come out at noon and eat their lunches in these shady, fountainous picnic groves.

According to this study around San Antonio, "residential shade trees were shown to save each home an average of $76 a year" in air conditioning costs. It also gives much more impressively-scaled statistics, but this one is nice in its significance to Billy Bob's wallet.

Another fantasy I have is that the city planning people will be practical enough to start considering the vegetable world in their budgets before I'm dead.

Aliens in the Beltway

I first became acquainted with Christopher Buckley when an excerpt from his Florence in Arabia was published in the Atlantic Monthly, and I thought it was hilarious. It has taken me a while to get around to reading one of his complete books, and I have to say I'm a little bit disappointed.

Little Green Men begins with a funny enough premise; a secret organization within the US government, dubbed MJ-12, has been faking UFO sightings and abducting Iowa farmers as a way to keep up public support for the space program and the military while persuading the Russians that we had access to extraordinary alien technology. One bored member of MJ-12, Nathan Scrubbs by name, decides to order an abduction of John Oliver Banion, the most prominent political TV commentator in the country.

Banion begins to use his show and his column and all his clout and connections to discuss "alien issues." The Washington establishment and all of respectable society immediately subjects him to shun and ridicule; but three million regular citizens begin to treat him as some kind of Messiah. He sets out to force the government to reveal the truth about aliens with the help of his UFO brain trust, consisting of Roz, the attractive editor of Cosmos-politan, an astronomer named Dr. Falopian, and former Air Force Colonel Murfletit. Meanwhile, Scrubbs is on the run from his government employers, who are not to happy with him for abducting someone with such a high profile.

The results are funny but never quite side-splitting. Many of the jokes have to do with fashionable Beltway society and how this society intersects with politics, and those jokes were lost on me. Dr. Falopian and Col. Murfletit have a lot of comic potential as characters, but this potential is never really developed; in fact, both of them can be summarized by the phrase "crazy UFO nuts." That's only funny for about five pages.

Little Green Men also suffers from a distracting lack of polish. On a couple occasions the author refers to a character by another character's name, and he also has a tendency to confuse real people with their fictional stand-ins. One gets the feeling Buckley wrote his book with real politicians (Henry Kissinger, for example) in mind and then went through with an imperfect search-and-replace in order to avoid lawsuits.

Perhaps the funniest part of this book is the inside front cover, where, under the heading "Also by Christopher Buckley" we find the entry "Moby Dick (with Herman Melville)". Now that I've told you that, there's no need to buy it.

Brother Cadfael

Recently finished two books in the Brother Cadfael mystery series by Ellis Peters (real name Edith Pargetter). I read #5, The Leper of St. Giles, and #7, The Sanctuary Sparrow. Both are fun murder-mystery page-turners set in 12th-century England (Brother Cadfael is a monk in a Benedictine monastery in western England).

I won't recap the plots of either book, but reading them made me think about mysteries and how hard it is to craft them. There are only a few named characters in each book, and one of those characters turns out to be the murderer in each case. I actually figured out who the murderer was in #7. Which points to a dilemma murder mystery writers must have: If you make the murderer plausible and provide real clues, it's more likely your reader will figure it out. Whereas if you hide clues and have the murderer be a character from the fringes, that's kind of cheating.

Which is why I don't think I'll ever try a murder mystery. Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Dorothy Sayers--and Ellis Peters--are safe.

Oh, one more thing: Nerzhin, we're not offended that you have started your own blog. We are, however, deeply offended that you don't even have a link to this blog on your page. For shame!

Quantum brains

Recently finished The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose, an Oxford physicist. According to Penrose, the action of the brain is fundamentally different from and cannot, even in principle, be reduced to the working of a deterministic computer. The argument is one I have some sympathy for, though I'm not sure Penrose makes his case completely convincing. Even so, the book is a fascinating trip through issues of computability, determinism, and the mind-body problem that I hadn't considered before.

Most physical laws are deterministic, which means that given the state of a system at one time you can, at least in principle, predict its state for the entire future. But at the quantum level things are a little bit more tricky and certain things (the position of an electron, say) are observed to behave probabilistically. Though most physicists and biologists would argue that quantum effects are not important at the level of human brains, Penrose disagrees and sees this as an opening for the presence of conciousness and free will.

Now may be as good a time as any to reveal that I've started my own blog. I hope no one's offended; it has a different kind of feel from the Crawdad Hole, and I will continue to post here from time to time as I have things to say that seem to fit better here than there.

Hello & Riding the Iron Rooster Review

Greetings to everyone from the newest member of this group. I'm honored to count myself one of the posters to this page. In the spirit of Tree of Valinor's book mandate, I'll begin with a short review of a book I almost finished over Christmas vacation, Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China by Paul Theroux. The fact that I didn't finish it should tell you something. It's a little dated, being over 10 years old, and I found Mr. Theroux's condescending attitude towards his fellow travelers annoying. Whether it was the fat ingorant Americans he began the tour with or the strange, spitting Chinese he spent most of his train time in the company of, it seems like Mr. Theroux had nothing but criticism. In fact, I can't remember a single person he gave an overall positive impression of.

To be fair, travelling is stressful, and sharing a sleeping car with a constantly spitting, loud-talking companion would not be a picnic. And who hasn't had wicked thoughts about people on the bus or in the next cubicle? So we'll give Mr. Theroux points for being honest, and points for writing vivid descriptions of people and places. I will never forget his description of the cold in Harbin. He made me feel it. And any book in which the author spends the majority of his time on steam-driven trains can't be a total loss. Still, in the end, Mr. Theroux's lack of sympathy for his fellow travelers turned me off and allowed me to put the book down before the end. I probably will never pick it back up.

Joseph Loconte has advice for the religious left and the religious right.

New year, new blog posts

Happy new year.

The most recent book I read was a collection of short stories, A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies by John Murray. It has a powerful emotional voice, and interesting believable characters, but nothing really happens in any of the stories, that is to say, the plots are less than gripping. All the stories seemed the same; if I had read only one of them I probably would have really liked it, but as a collection it was a little disappointing.

The other book I want to mention from 2005 is Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. Definitely a bit more lowbrow than what's typically discussed on this blog, but in terms of reading pleasure it's the best book I've read in a while. It has a real story, a fun story, even if it's not a candidate for the National Book Award.

The Hero and the Crown

Plenty of girls like fantasy novels. “Eowyn” is not in the Social Security Administration's top 1,000 names for any year, so I can't verify this, but I imagine it's rapidly increasing in popularity. And they beefed up Arwen for the Lord of the Rings movies to make another female hero for little girls and young women.

I wonder how I would have related to Aerin of Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown if I had read it earlier in life. I think I would have liked her a lot. She's clumsy, antisocial, bookish—and one of those women who suddenly everyone notices is beautiful.

Why does she have to be beautiful? Do all heroines have to be beautiful? It seems like the author has to play the Miss America game—giving her female character a skill and a talent and a philanthropic interest so that we can tell ourselves we admire her for more than just what we can perceive as she struts across the stage.

It's true that just beauty isn't enough to make us love a character. I like Aerin much more for her stubborn persistence and her endearing awkwardness than for her beauty. I want her to be different from other women. I want her to be the best dragon-killer in the country. I want her to effortlessly slay every foe in her path. But I still want her to be beautiful. I want all the men to desire her in the way that men desire women. I want her to have everything.

So why do I resent the fact that the author felt obliged to make her beautiful? Why do I feel slightly like Robin McKinley has sold out?

One of the few fantasy-type books I've read that has a non-beautiful main character is Till We Have Faces. But that book is different in many other ways. We don't admire the main character for much besides beauty, either. She's not really a hero. She's disturbingly like us. It's a great book. But it's in a different, more psychologically complex genre, I suppose.

I suppose Robin McKinley is not trying to upset the tradition, not trying to make a point about beauty. A book in the classic fantasy genre, if it is to have good female characters, requires them to compete not only with other women but with all men. Aerin's strength and ingenuity set her apart from the other women, and her beauty sets her apart from men.

Blog ground rules

I should be packing. But I thought of a rule that could potentially motivate people to contribute again. Here it is:

You can post about anything. But if you read a book, you have to post about it. It doesn't have to be an elaborate analysis or a book report. It can be as simple as "I just read The Truest Pleasure. So there."

The thing is, you have to post about every book, no matter how embarrassing. To be more than fair, since this happened before I instituted the rule, I recently read Five Paths to the Love of Your Life. Not because I wanted to. It was for mercenary motives. But still, this should make you feel better about whatever you're reading.

How does this sound? Is anyone out there?

Retraction of irritable rant

Eats, Shoots and Leaves has won me over. First of all, I had to get over the author's peevishness (see freethepeeves.com for an admirable campaign against grammatical peevishness). Then I slowly realized that she wasn't offering a systematic philosophy of punctuation. Her main purpose was to entertain, and she was doing a magnificent job of it. "If there is one lesson to be learned from this book," she writes (p. 125), "it is that there is never a dull moment in the world of punctuation." What makes her readers love her - no matter what they think of the serial (Oxford) comma - is simply that she cares about these things, and she's very, very funny.

Atkins

Today I drove by a Carl's Jr. and did a double take when I saw that their sign said "Agnus Dei."

Sometimes there is a good reason for a double take. The sign really advertised an "Angus Diet."

Irritable rant about grammar

I have started reading Eats, Shoots and Leaves and am already annoyed with it. There are a lot of people who think that the English language needs to be protected from the people who use it, and they're just wrong. I loathe the slimy and manipulative way she snuggles up to the reader and implies that we are all part of this elite layer of society that understands what no one else understands. It is ironic that she wrote her book for what she thought was such a narrow audience and then it became a mad success. Everyone likes to think they're included in this mysterious secret tribe of sneering grammarians. I'm very curious what she's going to actually do in the book, because the introduction is not promising. I know I should wait until I've finished it before I comment.

self-disclosure

I doubt anyone will feel like reading this whole article (and it's a behemoth of an article), but it is really interesting. It deals with a lot of things I've been thinking about, like the inadequacy of obituaries, and things that I've talked about with some of you, like the audiences we write for, the desire to be known, and the fear of being known. Plus it is enormously relevant to blogging. So here it is.

Mothers and souls

My comment about the kids' souls wasn't so much a condemnation of their actions as a sort of motherly surge of anxiety. It just seemed to me that they were having to face a ton of more disturbing things, and they seemed so young. Part of it was their more mature clothes. You know the thing parents always say, "They grow up too soon!" I don't know where that is coming from in my case, but I just want to protect them. Not that that would do them any good. So it was a strictly emotional comment, not a moralistic one.

To respond to the moralistic critiques, though, I would say that Harry's breaking of the rules is not necessarily laudable but certainly understandable. I think realistic characters are good. I don't know what kind of fiction these conservative fathers read. Probably none.

About the ineffectiveness of the adults, I think that's true to a certain extent. There are seemingly a lot of bumbling adults. But I think a lot of it only results from the kids' refusal to be helped. Dumbledore is just what Harry needs - a powerful person he can trust - but Harry avoids him. He's always afraid to tell him the truth. It is the classic stiff-necked Israelite scenario.

Sirius is an example of an adult with some serious flaws and insecurities. Lupin has some problems, but I think his power is understated. So is Dumbledore's. Understatement is one of the things I most admire about the books. J.K. Rowling is able to let misunderstandings remain for a long time before she corrects them.

Many cities

He left me crying late one Sunday night, outside of Boulder.
He said he had to find himself, out on the road.
- Jo Dee Messina, "Stand Beside Me"

Last time I saw her it was getting colder
But that was years ago.
Last I heard she had moved to Boulder
But where she's now I don't know.
- Garth Brooks, "What She's Doing Now"

The next challenge is to find or write songs that include the names of all the cities I will spend a night in before July is over. They are:

Eugene, Oregon; Chicago; London; Addis Ababa; Mekelle, Ethiopia; and Philadelphia.

Bonus points for including cities where I have a layover: Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Amsterdam.

Good luck.