Jargon

I am trodding through Iain M Banks' 'The Algebraist', and finding it a painful read.   It is so incredibly jargon loaded as to be nearly unreadable.  This gem nearly gave me an aneurysm
"It was two base ten orders of magnitude..."
and at first I chuckled, because obviously the 'base ten' part of that sentence is useless jargon, as 'two base ten' is merely two.  The book used an extra two words to say 'it was two orders of magnitude...'
And then the counter argument came to me.  "What if this is being said be someone not using my systematization of numbers?  Is this sentence meant to emphasize the very alien-ness of some alien character?"  But to that counter argument came another counter-argument.  That cannot be the case because we only need to refer to different bases when writing the numbers out, not when we speak them.
If I were to say 'Two base one orders of magnitude...' it would be indistinguishable from my having said '2 base 1 order of magnitude' which is the same as saying '2 orders of magnitude' (said in base ten) or '11 orders of magnitude' (said in base one).
Reaching as far as possible to give Banks some credit, we could say this is a linguistic problem, perhaps making the argument that in the speakers language two is a completely different numeral.  But if that were the case why make the reference to the base system at all (unless the one these people used was different from the one we would use) and even so why would you refer to a numeral in a different number system that happens to be homophonic to a number in our language!
Nope.  Can't seem to justify it.


Ugh.  God Damn it Banks!
And this is why I hate jargon loaded sci-fi.

Traveling thoughts

I am going to be travelling tonight.  I will be going 1422 km (884 miles), and I have decided to go by bus mostly for economic reasons.  Buses are, even in today's age of low cost air fare, the cheapest way to travel.  But I think there might be a forgotten efficiency to traveling by bus that we might forget to take into consideration.
The bus ride will last 29 hours, which I recognize to be an absurdly long amount of time.  But in that 29 hours I go from point A to point B, from city center to city center without any major hiccoughs.  The bus leaves at midnight and arrives at 11 AM, no problems.
Air travel does not have these luxuries.  There is not an international airport near the city I live, and thus I have to travel an hour and a half to the nearest airport to catch a flight 6 AM flight, the only time planes to my destination leave.  I can show up to the bus station mere second before the thing takes off and I will still be fine, but at airports the airport regulations insists I show up at least an hour (though two is preferable) prior to the flight.  This means that to catch my flight I need to leave my house at three AM to just barely make it.   This means waking at 2 AM.  As an alternative, I could go stay with some relatives who live 45 min from the airport, but that would mean going to their house the night before, and at that point the total travel would truly start to rival the bus route.
And then there is arriving at the other damn side of things.  Once you touch down at your destination, the plane insists on taxing for 15 min before letting you off, followed by a 15 min taxi on a small bus to a place where you have to wait for your luggage.  If all that goes smoothly (and likely, it won't) you will get out of the airport and find yourself in some far outskirt of the city, with another hour or so commute to actually get to your damn destination.
Frankly, I wonder if a day and change on a bus is worth this trip (probably - my time isn't worth so much these days).  But even if not, it still beats travelling by air.
Oh well,
Adelantando.

The novel is as tenacious as a cockroach.
China Miéville

Teiresias:
I have gone free.  It is the truth sustains me.

Sophocles

-Oedipus Rex

From the Harcourt edition 1939 translation by Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald, transcribed exactly.  One really wants to insert that presummed missing word; 

Teiresias:
I have gone free.  It is the truth [that] sustains me.

Let every man in mankind's frailty
Consider his last day; and let none
Presume on his good fortune until he find
Life, at his death, a memory without pain.

Sophocles

-Oedipus Rex

Whirl upon Death, that all the Undying hate!
Come with blinding torches, comes in joy!

Sophocles

-Oedipus Rex

But rule over men, not over a dead city!
Ships are only hulls, citadels are nothing,
When no life moves in the empty passageways.

Sophocles

-Oedipus Rex

The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, & breeds reptiles of the mind.

William Blake

-The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.

William Blake

-The Marriag of Heaven and Hell

“While we venerate and mourn our own dead we are curiously indifferent about those we kill.  Thus, Killing is done in our name, killing that concerns us little, while those who kill our own are seen as having crawled out of the deepest recesses of the earth, lacking our own humanity and goodness.  Our dead.  Their dead.  They are not the same.  Our dead matter, theirs do not.”

Chris Hedges

War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

There were an entire retinue of books I read ages ago that I greatly appreciated, but even back then I appreciated them with an air of caution, and asked myself whether I would still appreciate them a decade later.  Many of Philip K. Dick’s books are in this category.  I cannot at this point recall with any kind of certainty the sentiments I held towards this book then.  What I do recall is that I gave it three stars when I first ranked it.  But considering that it was the book that got me started reading PKD, I don’t think that rating is terribly fair.

Regardless, when I found the paperback about my house not too long ago, I figured it was certainly time to give it another chance and to see what I really think of it.

Certainly more than it did then, Dick’s writing style stood out, and unfortunately not in a good way.  Certainly there are moments where he could have used a better editorial hand; such as when he phrased things in such a way as to cause confusion about which subject is being referred to, or perhaps worse when he leaves pretty obvious redundancies in his writing (for instance “’I wonder about blah blah blah…’ he wondered” is a fairly accurate imitation of some such redundancies.).  But PKD has never been famed for being a great writer.  He is famed for being an ‘ideas writer’, something which would make Nabakov turn head down-ward in his grave in order to get further away from the living.  But even as far as ideas go I didn’t feel it was great, though mostly to no fault of the writer.  Having influenced generations of other ‘ideas writers’ the ideas now come off as a little thin.  We’ve seen such idea before, over and over again since about the time off Philip K Dick.  Nor do the ideas seem particularly well fleshed out to begin with.  Mercerism, Dick’s stand in for Catholicism, requires the reader to fill in many gaps with Catholic sentiments to function, and might lead the reader to wonder why Dick didn’t use Christ to begin with.  Obviously, because Christianity is complicated and not everyone believes that it necessarily entails an empathetic perspective from it participants.  But that diversity of interpretations is exactly what seems to be lacking in the novel (er, rather what seems to be lacking in how the novel deals with Mercerism).  I couldn’t help but feel odd over what seems to be an overwhelming homogeneity among the human character’s attitude towards Mercerism.  I think the only time I have ever encountered such homogeneity in opinions about anything is when people refer to TV shows.  Even at the novel’s, when Mercerism has been ‘debunked’, all the character excepting the protagonist seem to have a lofty ‘oh no now what ever shall we do?’ to them.  One would expect a little more dynamism from a world.

Was anything redeemable?  Yes.  The novel had charm.  Much of it came from the imposed symmetry of the story structure.  There are humans real and humans fake, animals real and animals fake, and interlacing them seem to be a set of social patterns that cause us to think hard about our own treatments of others, particularly in situations where the dividing line is less obvious for our world.  Dick of course loved to add in moments where the protagonist or other character of note begins to question reality.  It is for Dick very much a gimmick, but one that adds much to this particular discourse.  Empathy is little more than to be put into another’s shoe, and the fact that the protagonist is at some point being told that he is likely an android with a false memory implant seems like the fastest route to that path.  This would have been the focus of another, equally PhilDickian novel that exists in some other world.  But the real beauty is found in that latticework reactions among the novel’s various types; how fake humans treat real animals, how real humans treat fake animals, how real and fake humans treat one another…

But then we also find ourselves with the terrible moment where the protagonist is told he must sleep with an android to be able to better kill it (though he has had no trouble up to this point), and one can’t help but lift the whole scene up and sniff it for misogyny. 

All things considered the book stood well to a second reading.  I am curious to see what I think of it in 2024, three years after the story takes place.

"We define ourselves.  All other definitions do not count."

Chris Hedges

-War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

"My father may have been a natural musician, but he was not a natural teacher.  A wholly dogmatic man, he wanted things done his way - now.  He had no sense that four-fifths of all meaningful instruction is the attentive silence teachers must provide students, during which silence, among his or her own fumblings, the student actually learns - a silence in which teacherly attention must all be on which errors not to correct."

Samuel R. Delany

Eric, Gwen, and D.H. Lawrence's Esthetic of Unrectified Feeling

The Pen is Mightier. Meeting 1

Our Choices:
Fool - Christopher Moore
Geek Love - Katherine Dunn
City of Thieves - David Benioff

Selected:  Fool, by Christoper Moore.