Thursday, February 19, 2004
ART: I've decided that I'm going to learn more about art (and music, but one thing at a time) and I need help. I spent a few minutes looking over the art textbooks at the local university's bookstore and I found a few titles but I'd rather not waste $60 - $100 on textbooks that are overpriced and bad, like so many college textbooks are. So I'm hoping people with much more background in art than I have can give me some suggestions on titles to read to get a sort of non-university art course. I'm looking for explanations of different periods, different styles, the major contributors to those periods/styles, all the stuff I imagine you get from a good art history / art appreciation course. If you have some suggestions for me, please post them in the comments or email me. I'll post the list of suggestions for future searchers. Thanks in advance.
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
BOOK REVIEW: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
Boy, my streak of getting really, really good audiobooks continues unabated and I'm enjoying the hell out of it. I'm a big science geek and science-history is one of my favorite subjects. I love the little stories and coincidences that led to some of the most important discoveries and inventions in history. The TV show Connections is one of my favorites series of all time for this very reason. So many things we take for granted wouldn't be here if things had happened just a tiny bit differently and if you look at it, Earth and all the life on it is no exception.Bryson starts this book on that note, that we are all exceptionally lucky to be here. He then continues on to what really does amount to a short history of almost everything in science and how we discovered the world. He covers cosmology, physics, chemistry, geology, biology, and human evolution all the while not losing sight of the people who made it all happen.
Even if you're not a "science person" I recommend this book. Bryson does a great job of explaining some very difficult subjects but as I said, it's all really about the people. Did you know that the guy who put lead into gasoline also came up with using CFCs in aerosol products, thus giving us two of the most environmentally destructive products of the last century? I didn't, before I read this book. There are a million little stories in the history of science and Bryson does a great job of highlighting some of them here. Between this book and his Dictionary of Troublesome Words, he's quickly becoming one of my favorite authors. I'm going to end up buying this book for my shelf just so I can have it to reference and give out to people, which for me is one of the highest compliments I can give a book.
Saturday, February 07, 2004
BOOK REVIEW: The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
I just keep getting lucky with these audio books. So far, 3 of the best and most affecting books I've read in a long time have been audiobooks. I'm not sure how popular this book is so I'll explain it if you haven't heard of it. It's the story of a man with 'chrono displacement syndrome' who travels, against his will, around in time. He jumps from wherever he is back (and sometimes forward) in time, ending up naked and hungry in various places and times of his life. It's also about his wife, obviously, and their strange relationship. Strange not only because he's always leaving her to travel in time but she meets version of him from his future meaning she knows things about her that he hasn't done yet and he knows all about her because he's been jumping back to meet her since she was 6.
The main thing I know about this book is that if it were being marketed as a straight science fiction book, nobody would have read it. It certainly wouldn't have been in the Today Show book club. But instead, it's been marketed as a romance and it's being read by millions of people who wouldn't go near the sci-fi section of a bookstore unless it's to go through it to get to the restroom. That says more about the ghetto-ization of bookstores and book tastes than it does about this book although I think it were sold directly to a sci-fi audience it would meet with a lot of nitpicky criticism. I can only hope that this being sold as a romance means that more people will take away the sense that science-fiction is more than just aliens and Star Trek.
As a science-fiction reader though, I do have some issues with the time travel in the book. If I may be allowed to indulge my more geeky side for a moment, I have some questions maybe someone can help me with. You can skip this paragraph if you don't care. My first issue is the old problem with time travel I like to call the Terminator Paradox. In Terminator 2, it's explained that the machine that created the Terminators (Skynet) was created based on the Terminator technology that was found after the first one was destroyed in it's past. The problem is, how did it get created in the first place? Skynet had to have been created in order to send the Terminator back which supplied the chip to create it. It doesn't work. The same with some of this book. The time traveller, Henry, teaches his younger self to steal wallets and says he remembers the older him teaching him how to do it. He had to have learned how to do it the first time before he knew how when he went back and taught himself. The knowledge has to enter the loop at some point. These types of paradoxes aren't explained other than to say things like "Cause and effect are a little mixed up for me" and "It's all a little circular". A minor point but it's one paradox of time travel in books that I've never seen explained very well. (To get even geekier for a moment, I would accept that by going back and teaching yourself something, you've changed the timeline so you wouldn't remember the first time through but as you're teaching yourself, the old memories would still be partially in place. That would be an interesting idea to explore, the systematic erasure and simultaneous creation of new "replacement" memories of an event. I've never seen it done though.) The other issue I had was with the fact that Henry never travels outside his own lifetime or to places he hasn't been to, except the meadow outside Claire's house as a child. It's never explicitly explained that he only goes within his own lifetime and only to places he's been before but you have to infer that is the case based on where and when he goes. You'd think if he went back to the Civil War or to the time of the dinosaurs that he'd mention it but he never does. He only goes back to places he knows and often to the same place over and over. The only time that's not the case is the meadow where he meets Claire, his "future" wife. He never says that he's been there before but he goes back there over and over. The only reason he has to go there is to meet Claire and it's never explained that his love for her was preordained or whatnot and that's what drew him there. WIthout going to the meadow there's no book though so I'll give that a pass.
As I said, this was a book written for people who don't read science fiction and on that front it succeeds beautifully. Outside of the very good job Niffenegger does at explaining and intricacies of a relationship between two people who see future and past versions of each other all the time, it's a very well done romance. The relationship between Henry and Claire is incredibly believable and lovely to watch. More importantly, this book made me think more about really appreciating the moments of my life. It's also made me want to learn a lot more about art and music I haven't ever made a point of studying so I can help educate my daughter about them. I read fast enough that I don't feel I need to get a lot out of most books to make it worth the effort so when I find one that makes me think and change how I move about the world, I appreciate it a lot. I will remember this book for a long time to come.
Tuesday, February 03, 2004
WRITING: This is one of those things that all new writers need to read, more than once. It's a very well done look at the way a lot of people take rejection letters for their writing personally. I've received the exact letter used as the first example here and it blows my mind how people can assign such sinister motives to such a small thing. The way I look at it, if I get a rejection letter it just means that I can then work a little more on the story and send it out again. Of course you hope that someday you'll stop getting rejected and start getting paid for your work but you cannot look at these form letters as anything other than an impersonal business communication. I would rather get a rejection letter than nothing at all, which seems to be the main response for publishers in my two chosen fields of comics and science-fiction. If you have any regard for your self-esteem and want to be a writer, you need to see that rejection letters are not in any way related to your personality, your worth as a human being, or anything other than the financial (and to a lesser extent, artistic) sensibilities of the person who read your manuscript. There's about as much point in thinking that a rejection letter is a personal attack as thinking that your car broke down because it didn't like you.