It's quite acceptable to hate hate hate Songs from Liquid Days, a pop-minimalist fusion album of songs composed by Philip Glass. The music doesn't fit into normal and accepted parameters. It's as if a space traveller explained rock and roll and other popular American music to an alien on a distant planet, sang a few songs with air guitar accompaniment, and then that alien composed songs to obscure poetic texts from the distant planet he'd never visisted.

Alien: Is it difficult music?

Earthman: No. It's simple music! Just a few chords.

Alien: Rhythmically?

Earthman: Make syncopation integral to the music, and you've got it.

Alien: What instruments do you use?

Earthman: Well, use whatever you like. For pop music you just mic them closely and they can sound electric.

Alien: So that's all I need to know?

Earthman. So that's all you need to know.

The texts, of course, are not quite so simple. They are by Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, and Paul Simon (maybe others; I've forgotten). The title song cryptically speaks of a couple undergoing the woman's menstrual period (yes, liquid days). It's sequel, Open the Kingdom, continues the sexual references in the form of a religious parody, sung full get-out by classical singer Douglas Perry, but about the end of said menstrual period. You figure it out, what this kingdom is, and how it can be opened.

The first song on the album, Changing Opinion, has fantastic lyrics by Paul Simon, and great singing by Bruce Fowler.

The song Freezing is, for me, the gem. A brief sad epigram sung beautifully by Linda Rondstadt, accompanied by the Kronos Quartet.

The whole thing is sui generis. Most people will chortle in incredulity. It is not pop. It is not classical. What the heck is it?

As one friend of mine put it, I have no trouble with simple; but this is simple-minded! Well, maybe. But simple-minded is really nothing more than a pejorative for simple. As I see it, The Arkansas Traveler is also both simple and simple-minded, and still a lot of fun to sing. Or, perhaps more in a minimalist spirit, think of Rolling Over the Billows.

The world has a lot of room for a lot of different stuff. Stuff to fill our heads and our lives and chill the spine a myriad ways.

Freezing chills my spine even today.

Even today, listening to the album on my old LP.

Even even today, listening. To the album. To the songs. On vinyl. An old LP. Repetitive? Yes. But not too.

In the July 2007 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Ray Vukcevich ably tackles a staple of magazine sf, the short short. Fredric Brown was the master of this. Vukcevich, in this entry, Cold Comfort, adds an amusing example to the literature.

OK, maybe it's not a short short, but just a short — it's three pages long. Whatever its designation, it explores the idea of the Turing Test in an amusing way (a way I wish I'd thought of), and, were it not for the last sentence, which lays on false piety too thickly, it would be a classic.

I just came across this, an early (ancient) play on an old theme:

Gala wants me, Gala wants me not.
Because she wants and wants me not,
To say what Gala wants, I cannot.

Amusing, no? Good recreation by Donald C. Goertz.

In the last several years, I have found myself unable to read fiction with my old wide-ranging zeal. Science fiction, in particular, wears on me, and I stop after a few sentences.

Parasites Like Us, by Adam Johnson, is an exception. This book grabbed me from the beginning, and, had I not lost track of it in the mess of my office, and then in the mess of my bedroom, I would have read it immediately upon purchase, in as close to one sitting as possible. As it is, it's taken me many months to read. (I've since cleaned up my bedroom, and I'm cleaning my office as I move to the room next door.)

It is a first-person narrative, but one of those with plenty of description and opinion, and one that builds up its story. In structure, it most resembles (or so I say in dim memory) Gore Vidal's Kalki. But this book is far superior to that.

And, though billed as literary fiction, and obviously written at a high level, this book cannot help but be called science fiction. It is more science fictional than most books so labelled, for here we are not only dealing with an imagined future, but a science is focused on as a living, breathing human enterprise, and the focus of that science provides the major plot points.

The science? Anthropology. The focus? The Clovis hunters, who (may have) eradicated the bulk of the large mammals of the North American continent. A Clovis discovery by the narrator's star pupil turns into something almost farcical, and then horrific. The general tone of the novel is satirical.

This is one of the better end-of-the-world stories I've read. It is one of the best novels I've read in some time.

The title is meant, I think, to be evocative, not literal. Towards the end there is something said about parasites:

The successful forms of life are the parasites, the ones who bleed their environment to optimal exploitation, who stunt everything by taking a lion's share, who leave their hosts alive but shriveled.

Interesting, but not glorious. One might say that's the author's view of humanity: interesting, but not glorious.

One of my favorite sf stories, White Fang Goes Dingo, came out in a collection of same, years ago. I owned a copy. I no longer have it.

Which of my friends borrowed it and did not return it? Or did I actually give this book without expecting it back?

I've forgotten.

I miss the book, though.

If you really want to disappoint your parents, and don't have the nerve to be gay, go into the arts.

Thus spake Kurt Vonnegut, as of today, dead . . . this latter concept captured brilliantly by a Vonnegut drawing on today's front page of vonnegut.com:

Flown the cage, eh?

My drawing for my event would add a hand reaching into the cage and daintily pulling out, by one claw, an inverted bird.

It's not only my parents who probably are glad I didn't go into the visual arts.

But back to Vonnegut's advice. The greatest sorrow for parents, is when one of their children dies. The real sorrow, for the child, is when parents die.

Readers? Their sorrow at the passing of an author is not usually so great. Being at several removes of distance, we can take to heart the usual advice at death: As long as we remember him [or her], there's still life.

Still life.

Amazing, after all these years. Life still goes on, going it just so. That Vonnegut himself died of irreparable trauma to the head, that seems, oddly, fitting. He saw so much in civilization that he took at repeated blows to the head, to the sensibility of the humane man. Humans are such frail creatures. And yet, we endure. Vonnegut himself endured for quite a long time, no matter how many cigarettes he smoked, no matter how many pills he took. He even tried to kill himself once.

He found reason to laugh at in his survival. Even as we are saddened, can we find reason to laugh at his death? That, I bet, would be carrying laughter too far.

And yet we'll laugh again. Perhaps at a Vonnegut quip. His words will be remembered for a long time.

Vonnegut's novels, in my order of preference:

1. Mother Night




2. Slaughterhouse Five




3. Sirens of Titan




4. Bluebeard

The latter is, I believe, one of his books that most people never read. It is not sf. It is not considered major. But I'm very fond of it. It is Vonnegut's satire on modern art (abstract expressionism in particular) and on art-as-investment, and a whole lot more. And once again he brings up the matter of genocide.

Vonnegut was obviously obsessed with the subject. It was his touchstone concept. Man's inhumanity to man? Genocide is the ultimate form of this inhumanity.

The thing about Galapagos, the book of his that disappointed so many readers (including Jesse Walker), the chilling thing about it? In that book Vonnegut contemplates post-human evolution, and in a sense seems to be wishing for genocide. It has the same problem that Vidal's Kalki had: is this satire or is this wish fulfillment?

It's easy to be "against genocide." Vonnegut explored the idea, and tried to make some sense out of human senseless slaughter.

A human death, on the other hand, is just one natural death among so many . . . there's no use trying to make too much sense of that. Death is just the final burst of the glorious bubble of an individual life, and, though one hates to burst a bubble, every bubble will indeed burst. That Vonnegut's bubble lasted as long as it did is amazing in its way. And, iridescent as the bubble was, its longevity was something for which we could be grateful.

George Meredith is undoubtedly the most unjustly under-appreciated 19th century British novelist. His repuation has fallen not for want of high praise, but for want of readers. He was and remains a highbrow author, a writer whose comedy was not too sophisticated for the average reader, but whose prose sometimes (too often?) was. Chaos and lightning! That's how Oscar Wilde characterized his work, and I agree.

I'm by no means an expert in his work, having only taken on a novel or two. But I aim to take on them all. For one thing, Meredith does one of the things I wish all novelists would do: contrive a brilliant opening. A great first sentence, or paragraph, or scene. I want to be drawn in from the first words. And Meredith usually does this. No boring opening lines for him.

Take The Amazing Marriage, one of his lesser works, by most critics' accounting. Take the first sentence:

Everybody has heard of the beautiful Countess of Cressett, who was one of the lights of this country at the time when crowned heads were running over Europe, crying out for charity's sake to be amused after their tiresome work of slaughter; and you know what a dread they have of moping.

Yes, it's a longish sentence. True, it will vex the Hemingway slaves. And perhaps that clash of imagery, with crowned heads said to be running, will make some wince. But I suspect that was part of Meredith's aim. He aimed to amuse, and even the conflict of imagery amuses. The whole thing admirably starts the novel in question.

I want to read more, anyway.

On the phone, not long ago, I mentioned my love for Lucian. My friend on the other end heard Lacanian and gasped.

No, Lucian of Samosata, I said.

Very different. I prefer wriers who prick the balloons of pretension to those who fill up multiple ballons, ceaselessly.

But that doesn't mean I can't read writing that others find difficult, whether it comes from the allegedly long-winded Herbert Spencer or the obviously scholastic prose of C. S. Peirce.

Still, Lucian is a good palliative, if not cure, for excessive pomposity in speech and writing.

I'm hemming and hawing: is this edition, featuring the Vance Integral Edition text (improved and supervised by the author), worth buying? After all, I've read the originals in their paperback editions from the '60s. The Last Castle, at any rate, struck me as worth several readings. I've so far read it twice, once when I was 20, and another time 20 years later.

These are science fiction, and non-sf readers would likely not enjoy The Dragon Masters, the novella that in this printing gets top billing. But the Nebula and Hugo winning The Last Castle may provide enough character, irony, and sheer anthropological strangeness to appeal to all who like quirky literature.

And Vance's prose style never faileth.

I assume the VIE text is an improvement. I just don't know how great an improvement.

• It's cold here, for March. It's snowed the past several days, and there was a hailstorm last night. Must be global warming, eh? (The current trend is to blame every bit of notable weather on global climate shift!)

• It's so cold that I've taken to working at home. My cat really enjoys my company.

• The string quartets of Joseph Haydn strike me as the most civilized musical works of music . . . of all time. I especially enjoy his final batch, the Opus 77 creations, and the batch that contains the Emperor Quartet and The Fifths. There is nothing quite like being holed up in one's warm room, winter cold outside, visible through the window, cat at one's side, drinking an iced Coke, reading old books and listening to Haydn.

• And yes, I've been reading here; it's harder to work online (dial-up from home; egads: the horror!), harder to waste time on the Web. So I've been reading more than usual, and books off my beaten track, too.

  Taussig and Boehm-Bawerk are on temporary hold; I'm reading kids' adventure books instead! Hah! I was a Hardy Boys fanatic around age ten. But I preferred the Three Investigators books, and when I discovered the Ken Holt series and the Rick Brant Science-Adventure books, I reached apogee in this genre. Looking over these books today, I have to say that it's the Ken Holt books that bear re-reading most. Last night I read The Riddle of the Stone Elephantagain. Its prose more than matches the prose readers of today's popular adult fiction expect; I judge it better than most of today's writing, for it can't be accused of the No Style style. And yet this is what the kids were reading 40-odd years ago! The book is really quite good, its author(s) to be praised. If you were wondering what to subtlely suggest something for your youngsters to read — instead of devoting the whole of their lives to sex, drugs, and video games — consider leaving a few of these books around the house. That's how I discovered Ken Holt (though it was undoubtedly my older siblings who were responsible for that single volume of The Riddle of the Stone Elephant. You (the alleged adult) might even enjoy these classics, also.

It turns out that Neil Gaiman is a Cabell fan. From his site:

Cabell's far and away my favourite forgotten American writer — he wrote about 25 books, most of them very different from each other. The only ones to have remained more or less in print over the last forty years are the fantasies Figures of Earth, Jurgen and the Silver Stallion. I think my favourites of his books are probably the short story collections Gallantry (I decided upon reading it, aged 20, that one I day I would one day, when I was a writer, steal the structure of Gallantry; then I read it again some years on and realised that the structure I'd imagined I'd perceived might have been to some degree accidental, but I was still going to steal it one day, even if it had been only in my imagination. One day...) and The Certain Hour — if ever I were to edit a book of favourite horror tales, or favourite tales of faerie, I'd put the short story from Certain Hour about Herrick in it.

As I never tire of saying, my favorite short fiction by Cabell is The Music From Behind the Moon, which I believe Cabell himself referred to as an epitome.

I will now turn away from the computer and haul out my volume of The Certain Hour.

Socrates would have had us
All ladder up to wisdom.
But only the philosopher king
Proved whiz enough to turn
Common folly into his 'dom.