March 2005 Archives

So I continued to slack from my Tolstoy and finished reading the remaining five Earthsea novels, three of which I hadn't read before. Each took me about a day to read, the last of which was read on a plane ride to Portland, Oregon where a smarmy 7-year old boy traveling alone and sitting next to me said that my book was "easy" and that he could read at a 4th grade level. I told him that he should go back to watching "The Incredibles" and next time I'd share Anna Karenina with him. (Actually, the kid was quite funny. He was also, to overuse a term, quite precocious.)

Anyway, the remaining five novels in the series were good but not great. Essentially, "The Wizard of Earthsea" is not just great fantasy, but also a great book. The rest of the novels are just really good fantasy. As the series goes on the reader learns more and more about the world of Earthse and the "rules" that govern life and magic there. The stories start revolving around that world. A lot of really good fantasy and sci-fi creates a universe, defines that universe, and then crafts a story which works as a challenge within that universe. It's more of a logic puzzle than character development, and while it makes good genre it doesn't necessarily make good literature (Asimov's robot stories are the perfect example).

A notable exception was the fourth book, "Tehanu," which involved almost no magic at all. It wasn't as good as the first book, certainly, and it fell into the pattern of trying to define the rules of the Earthsea universe. But, aside from that, it was actually just a story about a widow who had grown estranged from her children and an old man who was dealing with the loss of his former fame and power. It was a story about dealing with age and loss that, with only a few changes, could have taken place in a normal country town with no magic whatsoever.

Now, back to Anna...

On the way to work today, I heard an ad on the radio for a house of ill repute, aka a strip club, which claimed to have "the world's most exotic dancers." What does that even mean? This appears to be a case of an idiom crossing the boundary into the absurd, or, as the case may be, a mixed metaphor.

Let's deconstruct. Dictionary.com defines "exotic" as follows:

exotic adj.
1. From another part of the world; foreign.
2. Intriguingly unusual or different; excitingly strange.
3. Of or involving striptease: an exotic dancer.

It appears that the strip club is somehow confusing definition 3 with definitions 1 and 2. Since an exotic dancer is someone who does a strip tease, I don't see how an exotic dancer can be the MOST exotic dancer unless they somehow do the MOST strip teasing. Perhaps one strips down to the very base of her soul. Unlikely. Perhaps they mean that these strippers are foreign? Come see our foreign strippers, shipped in from India, outsourcing at its best! Also unlikely, and, to be nit-picky, based on definition 1 still somewhat nonsensical: How can something be the most foreign IN THE WORLD? When you consider the scope of the whole world, nothing is technically foreign, unless you're talking about extraterrestrials. What you'd really need to say is "America's Most Exotic Dancers" or, perhaps just clarify the original statement, "The World's Most Exotic Dancers, But We Mean Exotic From An American Perspective". Finally, perhaps our strip club marketers mean to imply definition number 2, that their strippers are the most intriguingly unusual and/or excitingly strange in the world. Perhaps this would be an effective slogan for a circus freak show, but somehow I believe that drunken frat boys are actually looking for the intriguingly USUAL and the excitingly NORMAL. And I suppose it is possible they simply meant that they have the most exotic dancers as in sheer number of exotic dancers, that this particular club has hundreds and thousands of exotic dancers, hence the MOST exotic dancers of anywhere in the world.

In summary, obviously the strip club was using the word "exotic" to mean "beautiful" but got confused by the use of the term "exotic" in "exotic" dancer. I suppose this is a whole lot of hoo-ha for me to make fun of one stupid ad. Be it a lesson for all cheaply made strip-club radio advertisements: DO NOT MIX METAPHORS OR YOU WILL FACE OF THE WRATH OF MY MIGHTY PEN!

Though not really a pen... My mighty keyboard, then.

Instead of watching the apparently "unmitigated disaster" that is the Sci-Fi channel Earthsea mini-series, I decided to take a break from "Anna Karenina" and reread the Ursula K Le Guin novels. I'm really enjoying Tolstoy, but it's a looong book (the longest I've read since David Foster Wallace's brilliant but slightly wordy "Infinite Jest"). I loved "A Wizard of Earthsea" when I was younger (and when I read primarily fantasy and science fiction), but this book has always stuck in my mind as one that really influenced me creatively. I hadn't realized it until I read about the Sci-Fi channel mini-series, but apparently a lot of other people feel the same way about the Earthsea Cycle, and it seems to be universally compared (in scope and accomplishment) to the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Narnia series, the fantasy genre big boys. I've read LotR (but not Narnia) and think that, at least for the first Earthsea novel, the accolade is justified.

Instead of comparing Earthsea to LotR, however, I'm going to compare it to a more contemporary wizard series, Harry Potter. "A Wizard of Earthsea" is also about a young boy wizard who (for part of the novel, at least) goes to wizard school and who faces great evil, but aside from that Harry and Ged (Le Guin's protagonist) are complete oppisites. In fact, when considered against some of the negative attention Harry Potter has gotten for either promoting anti-Christian occult or for teaching kids to disrespect their parents, "A Wizard of Earthsea" is even more starkly contrasted. The novel is almost a morality tale about how pride is wrong and can lead you down the wrong path towards great evil, how one should always listen to elders, how study, humility and respect for life are the ways of a good person. I'm sure there are some religious people out there who would object to Earthsea simply because of the presence of magic, but, in reality, the magic in the novel is all found through the understanding of the balance of the world (which is very religious) and through the "true names" of things, which, in my opinion, is very much like the word of God. Le Guin is not heavy handed and she is not preaching religion (unlike, as I have heard, the Narnia books do) but there is no lesson in Earthsea that can be said not to align with a Judeo-Christian morality.

Harry Potter and religion aside, it is a wonderful story and a wonderful book. I started reading it at dinner and stayed up late to finish it because I couldn't stop, and it's always nice to feel a little bit guilty and excited about staying up past your bedtime to read, probably the way I did the first time I read this book. (Not that Anna Karenina isn't a page turner...) I'm looking forward to reading the whole series when I'm done with the Tolstoy.

Yesterday for lunch I spent a quiet hour on the patio of the newly opened, too-giant Wholefoods in downtown Austin. But this post isn't about the pros and cons of the mega-organic-grocer, rather, I need to discuss a much more complex matter. It was quite windy out there on the patio, and despite my best efforts to keep everything on the table, one napkin escaped and blew onto the ground, skipping across the wooden deck with the wind currents. Not wanting to litter, I ran to grab it, only to discover it had landed in a pile of twenty napkins. Apparently, the layout of the Wholefoods patio is such that it creates a napkin vortex, the wind corralling all loose napkins into one paper-filled corner. Thus came my dilemma. Should I:

a) Pick up one napkin from this pile of twenty napkins, thus cleaning up the mess I made, but leaving the rest of the napkins untouched?

b) Pick up no napkins, since the complete set of strewn napkins represented a larger janitorial problem, therefore absolving me of my duty to clean up my one lost napkin?

c) Pick up all the napkins, since I was already there to pick up my own napkin?

It was quite a conundrum. I didn't want to be responsible for littering yet I didn't even know which napkin was mine. I certainly wasn't going to abandon my lunch to clean up all the napkins, some of which were dirty. What to do?

In the end I picked up two napkins. One to represent my lost napkin, thus exculpating myself from littering guilt, and one to satisfy the time-trusted axiom, "Leave the place cleaner than you found it."

n.

A long word.

adj.

1. Given to the use of long words.
2. Long and ponderous; polysyllabic.

You've got to admit, that's a great word.

It seems there have been a rash of blog-related firings lately. Employees have been sacked for posting private corporate details, photos or content that tarnished the reputation of the company, or simply unflattering information about the business. While I certainly haven't done the first two, I suppose it could be argued that I've made a few not-particularly-flattering posts about my job. Though, really, my comments have all been of a generic nature, lambasting general corportate culture rather than my particular employer. Plus, my employer is never mentioned, and, in fact, my full name is never actually mentioned, so unless you happen to know me and know that this is my website, there's no chance of besmirching the good folks who send me a paycheck.

I'm not concerned about this blog causing me trouble at work but I thought the news article was interesting. Blogging comes with many ups (for example, the chance to publicly make a fool of yourself) and many downs (for example, the chance to publicly make a fool of yourself) and, apparently, also the possibility of losing your job.

I've discovered a new web comic called "Dinosaur Comics" at qwantz.com. It's the same exact picture every single day (some dinosaurs stomping on things) with different text. The dinosaurs discuss philosophy, logical fallacies, religion, and other topics not typically covered in comic strips. Just the fact that it uses the exact same strip image every day is amusing to me. My favorite comic so far is about "garden path" sentences. Every time I read it I laugh.

I was making some pasta the other day only to discover that my linguini and my angel hair had gotten mixed together in my pasta canister. This was cause for concern, as both have different boil times if you want al dente. It required a long and annoying process of pasta separation and led me to multiple thoughts about the nature and history of different pasta types. I looked up the words "spaghetti", "linguini", and "angel hair" in the dictionary. Here is what I found:

spaghetti - Pasta in long, often thick strands.
angel hair - Pasta in long, extremely thin strands.
linguini - Pasta in long, flat, thin strands.

As anyone can see, these three definitions raise deep, troubling questions.

Is spaghetti the superset of angel hair and linguini? Based on these definitions, I'd say it is. Spaghetti is often thick, but not ALWAYS thick. Therefore, spaghetti could be extremely thin, meaning that spaghetti would also be angel hair. What about linguini? Well, we've already shown that spaghetti can be both thick and thin. But what about flat? The definition of spaghetti makes no mention of shape, just length and thickness and strand-ness. A flat strand is still a strand. Therefore linguini is also spaghetti.

So what about this concept of the flat strand? Can we assume that a normal strand is columnar? Or is a strand shapeless? Is the term "flat strand" contradictory, the linguistic equivalent of "vodka martini" or "chicken fajita"? Surprisingly, not only does the definition of "strand" fail to give any explanation of shape, it actually fails to describe pasta altogether:

1. A complex of fibers or filaments that have been twisted together to form a cable, rope, thread, or yarn.
2.a. A single filament, such as a fiber or thread, of a woven or braided material.
2.b. A wisp or tress of hair.
3. Something that is plaited or twisted as a ropelike length: a strand of pearls; a strand of DNA.
4. One of the elements woven together to make an intricate whole, such as the plot of a novel.

I suppose that definition 2.a. is the closest, if you assume that one strand of spaghetti is really just a single filament from a larger set of pasta, but that's not a tight connection. The reality is that Merriam Webster and dictionary.com both FAIL TO ADEQUATELY DEFINE "STRAND" TO ACCOMODATE ITS USAGE VIS-A-VIS PASTA!

Continuing my reading series in "classics I should have read a long time ago", I just finished "The Old Man and the Sea" by Ernest Hemingway. Instead of my standard rambling I'm going to do a comparison of this book with the last one I read, "The Pleasure of My Company" by Steve Martin.

Similarities:
- Both involve male protagonists
- Both are relatively short, quick reads

Differences:
- One involves an old man and the sea, one doesn't.
- One involves an obsessive compulsive, one involves eating raw fish.
- One has sharks.

Okay, seriously, it's a good book, though I'm not sure if I consider it as great a book as history seems to make it. The back cover raves: "Ernest Hemingway did more to change the style of English prose than any other writer in the twentieth century." I always thought that distinction went to James Joyce. Or was all prose Joycean before Hemingway had the revolutionary concept of writing tersely? I don't know.

One of the best sentences (well, two sentences) from the book, in my opinion, is:

"Ay," he said aloud. There is no translation for this word and perhaps it is just a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood.

The old man says this when he sees some sharks coming. It's one of the deeper moments of the story, when the words touch upon a deeper metaphor as opposed to simply (tersely) describe the action. As a reader I cling to those few moments.

When I was a kid I loved the Earthsea novels by Ursala K. Le Guin. Well, apparently it was turned into a Sci-Fi channel mini-series and will be out on DVD on March 8th. Did anyone see this when it was on television? Is it any good? Stumbling across the listing made me nostalgic for the books.