Michael Kevane

One of my favorite authors.  And now he proves he could be writing for Harpers… a science fiction story in the style of an extended essay.  And you learn more about how to think about the technology of writing than reading Jack Goody’s impenetrable prose.  Oddly, few reviewers mention that the Tiv are a real people, written about extensively, most well known by the anthropologists Laura and Paul Bohannan.

People consult their lifelogs for a variety of reasons—everything from reliving favorite moments to tracking down the cause of allergic reactions—but only intermittently; no one wants to spend all their time formulating queries and sifting through the results. Lifelogs are the most complete photo album imaginable, but like most photo albums, they lie dormant except on special occasions. Now Whetstone aims to change all of that; they claim Remem’s algorithms can search the entire haystack by the time you’ve finished saying “needle.”

via The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling by Ted Chiang — Subterranean Press.

Got The Real Cool Killers by Chester Himes from the library after reading a Burkinabè author cite him as an influence. I was like, “Who is this guy?” Fascinating and sad story. The fiction is exactly as advertised: lurid hardboiled Harlem detectives and criminals. Lots of action, no character development, impossible stereotypes.  But a fun read, of course.  Not nearly as taut as Elmore Leonard, but broader, more slapstick.  Lots of vocabulary that I am sure Google will enjoy looking up for you.

The Six Dollar Fifty Man  Sukie and I had watched it several times some years ago. We just watched it again.  Wow, great job, Directors – Mark Albiston & Louis Sutherland, Writer – Louis Sutherland, Producer – Wendy Cuthbert

I had recently read a short story and then Nekropolis by McHugh, so I ordered China Mountain Zhang.  Great novel.  But not what you think it will be.  As numerous commentators point out, it is an ambitious sci-fi novel about ordinary people living fairly ordinary lives in a sci-fi future that is not too far away (certainly closer than 1992 when the novel was published).   I kept comparing it to Michael Cunningham’s The Snow Queen, another novel about “regular” folks (hey, we’re all special, as we learn in elementary school).   It is quiet, the epiphanies are small but important for the characters lives, and their lives change with a natural flow.

So I have nothing but praise, except for the long lecture by Zhang when he teaches his first class. Read like something McHugh had written elsewhere, or maybe before writing the novel, and she stuck it in at the end.  Just does not work, and not really necessary.

Funny you ask, yes I can.  I love going on a long run and listening to someone read and short story and then discuss.  This week I heard three.

Richard Ford reading Raymond Carver’s “The Student’s Wife”.  Pretty sad. OK very sad.  The way Raymond Carver is sad.  You can’t even get pleasure out of the artistry because it services the sadness.

Thomas McGuane reading “The Tree Line, Kansas, 1934,” by David Means.  McGuane more enthusiastic about the story than I was. He reads it well, and I understanding the point. but the story feels (hears) more like an exercise than something authentic. Like a museum diorama.  The craft more on display, compared with Carver.

David Gilbert reading “Leg,” by Steven Polansky.  Any parent of a teenaged boy who is going through a certain period is going to feel an immediate resonance with this story.  In fact, inside your head you’ll probably change the name of your child to Randy.  Triesman and Gilbert have a nice discussion: from a super obvious metaphor you can keep drilling down until you can honestly decide you don’t really know just quite what you get out of the story.  A feeling that can quite be fingered, a sense of ambiguity and mystery.

Michael, don’t you listen to fiction podcasts read by women? Yes I do, that these three were all men and male authors is purely coincidence.

Found this in the university library.  Realized I had never read Dick.  All books, or just this one, use abbreviated sentences?  Makes for interesting style. Noted.  Light rain falling in San Jose. Just south of setting of novel. San Francisco in alternative history. Nazis and Japan won the big one.  America divided into three occupation territories. Defeated. Insecure. What are we worth: Nothing.  But maybe. Deep inside us.  Like Bourbon.  Consult the I Ching.  Worth reading bad novel?  Can bad novel win prestigious prize? All timelines coexist.

BECAUSE I LIVE IN MONTANA and because I have always heard Montanans talk about Thomas McGuane, I set myself the task of reading all of his work: 10 novels, several books of essays, and three collections of short stories, including his new one, Crow Fair (Knopf). I now understand why the majority of Montanans claim him. McGuane’s body of literature is like a well-wrought symphony, with all the important parts of a tragicomic concerto, with an overture, crescendos, and requiems. And, taken together, it is almost magical to read the linguistic shifts in style from the psychedelic gonzo style of the ’70s to the meditative and spare tone of his more recent work. And throughout the chaos of his plots, and the chaos of his characters’ inner worlds, McGuane never, ever, loses his comic touch.

via Pushing Along, Pushing Along | The Los Angeles Review of Books.

I was skeptical before starting China Miéville’s The City and the City.  I had read and enjoyed Embassytown, but he did go on and on towards the end and I found myself skimming a lot.  The City and the City was far more gripping, until the final quarter when it descended into conventional detection (really almost Agatha Christie) genre resolution.  “The old man did it, Scooby!”  I guess, what else can you do?  But until then, an amazing concept of the city and the city unseeing to each other.  You could discuss for hours (well maybe 30 minutes?).  My loss, I stingily read books from the library, years after everyone else has read them, and they no longer remember nor do they care.  The mood of this novel will linger.

I checked this collection by Gardner Dozois out from the library (yes I still do that).  Science fiction generally holds its own: 20 years later most of the stories in the collection read like they could have been written now.  Here are my highlights (and I did not read all of the stories in the collection, and others fell into the “Ugh, what an awful story.” category.).

• Tony Daniel, A Dry, Quiet War.  This was an exceptional story, I thought.  A line I will remember for a long time: ‘”Don’t you worry, skyfaller,” he said, “I know exactly where I stand now.”‘  A bit heavy-handed on the long time frame angle (billions of years) and the reluctant duty of the soldier.  But I fell for it.  I loved this line too: “In that moment, I spread out, stretched a bit in ways that Bex could not see, but that Marek could…”  I like how he used spread and stretched to try to convey the sense of the ability to “read/see” into multiple dimensions.
• Maureen McHugh, The Cost to Be Wise.  Blogged about this when I read it, I really enjoyed the anthropological-style immersion.
• Gregory Feeley, The Weighing of Ayre. A very nice historical sci-fi story, wonderful evocation of Holland in the 17th century and the discovery and uses of the microscope.
• Michael Cassutt, The Longer Voyage. Very reminiscent of the sci-fi I read as a youth, about taking that voyage.  I guess it is the opposite of Joyce’s Eveline?
• Nancy Kress, Flowers of Aulit Prison.  I really liked the story, even though there were seeming oddities in internal consistency.  I looked her up, but maybe it was a tawdry covers of her novels, or the plodding plot summaries of Wikipedia, but they did not seem as interesting.  I’ll try something else of hers, just in case.
• Gregory Benford, Immersion.  A decent read, but the whole psycho-history trope, endlessly looped back to, was a bit risible to a social scientist like me. And pretty stale for sci-fi I would think.