Distrust that Particular Flavor

I'm excited to pick up Distrust That Particular Flavor, William Gibson's debut essay collection. You can read more about it at Boing Boing.

While I can't say that Gibson's my favorite author, he's a writer that I love to read: he's always very interesting, and the erudition on display in his interviews and essays are intimidating in his breath of knowledge and analysis. For example, take this from this Art of Fiction interview from the Paris Review:

I think the popular perception that we’re a lot like the Victorians is in large part correct. One way is that we’re all constantly in a state of ongoing technoshock, without really being aware of it—it’s just become where we live. The Victorians were the first people to experience that, and I think it made them crazy in new ways. We’re still riding that wave of craziness. We’ve gotten so used to emergent technologies that we get anxious if we haven’t had one in a while.
But if you read the accounts of people who rode steam trains for the first time, for instance, they went a little crazy. They’d traveled fifteen miles an hour, and when they were writing the accounts afterward they struggled to describe that unthinkable speed and what this linear velocity does to a perspective as you’re looking forward. There was even a Victorian medical complaint called “railway spine.”
Emergent technologies were irreversibly altering their landscape. Bleak House is a quintessential Victorian text, but it is also probably the best steampunk landscape that will ever be. Dickens really nailed it, especially in those proto-Ballardian passages in which everything in nature has been damaged by heavy industry. But there were relatively few voices like Dickens then. Most people thought the progress of industry was all very exciting. Only a few were saying, Hang on, we think the birds are dying.

Actually wants to make me pick up Dickens!

Making Money from Money, not Work

Brian Beutler at TPM explains why Romney is so reticent to provide his tax returns to the public: he suspects that it will not only let people know just how stinking rich he is (hint: he's probably in the 1%), but also drive home that money fund managers make a lot of investment profit that is not taxed at the normal tax rates:

In private equity, fund managers are typically compensated with both a fee (two percent of assets) and substantial share (20 percent) of the fund’s profits. Those profits are called “carried interest” and they’re classified as long-term capital gains, which are taxed at 15 percent — much lower than wage income, on which the top marginal rate is 35 percent. But unlike the fund’s main investors, the manager typically doesn’t put up more than a nominal share of the fund’s actual capital. In other words, this so-called “carried interest loophole” allows private equity fund managers to treat the money they make in exchange for their labor as if it was a return on an investment — even though they haven’t made such an investment at all.

This kind of information is not really common knowledge. To me, these types of rules are so byzantine, and so unused by regular folks, that exposing them is a good thing, even if it might not be politically expedient to Mitt Romney.

Review: Jean-Christophe Valtat’s Aurorarama

Jean-Christophe Valtat’s Aurorarama is a beautifully-written novel that combines steampunk, revolutionary and authoritarianism politics, druggy subcultures, and anthropology together in an extremely entertaining brew. It takes place sometime in the not-so-distant past in the Arctic city of New Venice, a metropolis filled with wondrous Victorian-era inventions, including machinery that sustains life so close to the North Pole. The story focuses on two heroes: Brentford is the greenhouse administrator in charge of growing the city’s food. He’s part of the city’s nobility but dreams of reviving the city from its corrupt government by democratically integrating New Venice with the surrounding native cultures. He makes up half of an odd couple with Gabriel, a dissolute dandy musician who staggers through the book under the influence of a wide variety of drugs (a commonplace New Venetian pastime for combating the boredom of the short winter days). They both struggle in their own ways – high and low – against the authoritarianism creeping through the city, and one of the more fascinating aspects of the book is how convincingly Valtat depicts the creeping reach of the government, the dread of those subject to it, and the diverse and subtle ways that different subcultures combat it.

Aurorarama feels like a steampunk novel, but Valtat rarely allows the conventions of that genre to become stilted, partly as a result of his inventive wordplay drawn from English, his native French, the Nordic languages, and the Intuit, the latter from which he references wondrously bizarre arctic mythologies (the Kiggertarpok, or the Intuit “polar kangaroo,” plays a major role.) His Pynchon-lite sentences snake around their meaning, never afraid to take a digression into a fascinating detail or fun description before working its way back to the main point. The effect is relentlessly inventive, as when he writes: “Snow redesigned the streets with hints of another architecture, even more magnificent, more fanciful than it already was, all spires and pinnacles on pale palaces of pearl and opal. All that new Venice should have been reappeared through its partial disappearance. It was as if the city were dreaming about itself and crystallizing both that dream and the ethereal unreality of it.”

Despite all of its strengths, the book’s tone oscillates wildly as the action leaves New Venice to wander around the arctic wastes. For instance, a well-scripted horror scene featuring a group of undead explorers dubbed the “Phantom Patrol” awkwardly gives way to a utopian society living in a giant emerald embedded in the arctic permafrost. These tone changes take their toll on the main story, although the refreshingly revolutionary ending picks up the pace again, despite what I thought were sub-plots that were tied up a little too neatly (it read like a pale imitation of one of Neil Stephenson’s apocalyptic endings (The Diamond Age being the best example)).

But don’t let these quibbles disparage a novel that’s a hell of a ride. Valtat’s a great storyteller, and his bizarre and wonderful world has continued to linger in my mind in the weeks since I’ve read it.

Cross Posted on Reading, Running and Red Sox

First Lines of The Angel Esmeralda

"It was an hour's drive, much of it a climb through smoky rain. I kept my window open several inches, hoping to catch a fragrance, some savor of aromatic shrubs."

- Don Delillo, from "Creation," the first story in the The Angel Esmeralda

In Honor of Yesterday's Quick Snowstorm

green leaves or fallen leaves
become one--
in the fallen snow

- Chiyo-ni

For the Winter

The blizzard seemed to be dying down, and it was now possible to enjoy the sight of the buildings and embankments and bridges smothered in the diamond-dusted whiteness. There's always something soothing in the snow, thought Gabriel, a promise of happiness and absolution, of a new start on a clean sheet. Snow redesigned the streets with hints of another architecture, even more magnificent, more fanciful than it already was, all spires and pinnacles on pale palaces of pearl and opal. All that new Venice should have been reappeared through its partial disappearance. It was as if the city were dreaming about itself and crystallizing both that dream and the ethereal unreality of it. He wallowed in the impression, badly needing it right now, knowing it would not last...
- Jean-Christophe Valtat, p. 201 of Aurorarama

Moscow in Timelapse

Москва'2011(Moscow/Russia) from zweizwei |motion timelapse| on Vimeo.

I love old Russian architecture. Would love to see St. Basil's Cathedral in person some day.