art taylor

Midaq Alley, by Naguib Mahfouz

Kat's a bit of a Mahfouz fan, and I was out of books I wanted to read before leaving last Monday morning. I needed something light enough to read in shifts. Metro, airport, airplane, hotel, airport, airplane. I knew the books at the head of my personal queue were not adequate to this requirement, so I thrashed among the bookshelves for something to read.

"Here's a book that's not too thick, has the pulpy pages of an interruptible read, and won't start a conversation with a stranger."

A kind of Immovable Fast, the book follows the decline of various individuals on a very poor alley in Cairo, generally concerned with the indirect denouncement of avarice or covetousness. Man wants to live like the british occupying Egypt during WWII, Man wants to marry the most beautiful girl in the neighborhood, Most beautiful girl in the neighborhood wants a rich husband who can support her in the style to which she feels she is entitled to become accustomed, Marriage maker endeavors to take pecuniary advantage of old widow seeking a young husband, Cafe owner seeks dalliance with young men in front of his wife and children, Cripple maker wants to slake his lust on the bakeress, upon whom he spies through a hole in the back of their shop.

From the descriptions on the back cover of the book, this is one of the earlier novels from the first serious egyptian novelist. It's naive, and naively written, but in the same way some Orwell can be, a failing easily dismissed for an enjoyable story.

What struck me was the immense cultural disparity that handicapped me in understanding aspects of the book. Mentioned above,'Cripple maker,' may have caught your eye. Wtf?

The cripple maker is the guy to whom beggars will go to increase their earning potential. The blind, the lame, the footless, the armless, the mutilated, the grotesque can pull more alms than the merely indigent. After all, there are no cries of,"Get a job," heard by the ears of a blind beggar.

But how common are cripple makers in WWII Cairo? I know they exist in India in the present, and therefore it's quite likely they existed in war-torn third-world Egypt, but is it a likely character in a neighborhood? Does his presence in the neighborhood have a significance beyond the macabre?

Another character mentions that her hair, the most beautiful and lustrous in the alley, smells of turpentine. She does not wash it often; in fact, at one point in the book she has gone over two months without washing it to preserve her hair.

Does the oil in hair stink of turpentine after two months of not washing, or is turpentine something that is added to women's hair in Egypt, perhaps to keep it shiny and relatively free of insect infestation? Was turpentine a common thing to have around, perhaps as a cure-all for sheep afflictions?

Despite the fact that I didn't understand the fullness of many references such as these, I liked not understanding. It gave me something to think about instead of just reading. I don't get much of that from books anymore, mainly because they're all written from my perspective, the whitish americanish middle-class post-modern technoplutocracy.

This is not a deep book, and it is not executed flawlessly, but if you need the light reading of a handful of short stories woven together, you could do much worse.

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Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami

The Murakami binge¹ continues with one of the more bleakly depressing books I've read in a while. This is mainly because I avoid depressing books, except that all of the Murakami books are depressing in that cloudy, rainy, "poignant" (I hate that word) Japanese way.

This book is all about ill-defined apprehension. I kept waiting for the supernatural element, present in the Murakami books read to date, to manifest. I kept waiting for the horrible realisation that was foreshadowed quite darkly from early on. I kept waiting for the reckoning that seemed due for some of the behavior and attitude criticised in the book. It's almost like reading a Stephen King book, except there, you know demons are going to crawl out and eat the brain of the nearest five year old. In this book, the fear is atmospheric.

Some of these apprehensions came to pass, some did not. The supernatural element was confined to the natural supernatural, if that exists. I.e., the phantoms of mental illness, whether via the clear physiology of brain tumors or clinical depression. All the ghosts are internal, of the sort where a gear may have several missing teeth -- when those non-teeth come around in their cycle to the point where they fail to mesh with the teeth of an adjacent gear, anything can happen. From a simple, sliding, skip that has no noticeable effect, to a horrendous misapplication of torque that shatters the movement, to a subtle malfunctioning that causes a pernicious problem somewhere seemingly unrelated.

I read most of this book dreading what was going to come next. I really don't like books such as this in general, and the meta-brain kept telling myself that it was odd that not only couldn't I put this book down (ok, I took a break to read Terry Pratchett's new book to avoid carrying a hardbound book onto the plane), but I was really enjoying it, if a word such as "enjoy" can be used in the sense of "engrossed in the bloody naked slide down a sheet of unlubricated metal, slowing tearing away thin, thin layers of flesh."

It's an odd little romantic book about how effed up people are, how simple complex people can appear to be, how something such as 'love' can mean forty bazillion things to forty bazillion minus one people. While the book lacks much of a plot and substitutes almost impressionistic vignettes of the various characters' lives, it's spare and perfect and completely confusing at the end.

No, really, I have no idea what that ending means.

¹ I bought Dance Dance Dance on a trip to the local B&N because the back cover sounded appropriately (and accurately) surreal and absurd, which are two words that have the same effect as "chocolate and peanut butter" or "warm and wet". Before finishing the book, I ordered everything Murakami was selling on Amazon.

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Rebel Without a Crew, by Robert Rodriguez

Two things:

If you have any interest in making film, read this book. If nothing else, if you ignore every piece of advice in it, it's inspirational. As you can guess from his films, and you can conclude from the frequency that he releases films, the guy has an incredible amount of drive and energy. It's very infectious.

If you have any interest in doing anything that you feel is "too expensive" because of equipment or whatever, read this book. It's a great reminder that resourcefulness (which Rodriguez refers to as "creativity") is worth dozens, hundreds, thousands, or millions of dollars in expensive equipment. Sometimes, the resourcefulness involves more work, sometimes, not. It's an incredibly accessible (almost too much so) book, and you will finish it with your head full of those projects you have wanted to execute, but didn't have the equipment or money.

The book is divisible into three parts. The first and largest is a diary of the entire process of making, selling, and releasing El Mariachi. This actually includes useful information that is often left out of other accounts of filmmaking, such as the size of deals, cost of equipment rental, video tape markets, etc. The second, very short, section, is Rodriguez's "Ten Minute Film School," which is just that. It's a bunch of small pearls of advice on how to strip thousands of dollars from your film budget. The third section, which I consider padding because these things are of no interest to me (YMMV) is the script for El Mariachi.

I loved this book, and it's just long enough. Near the end, it repeated itself a lot as he described the same interviews with different people, but it reads more like someone amazed at the turns their life has taken than anything else. After all, it's a journal.

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The Confusion (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 2), by Neal Stephenson

I have this weird relationship with Neal Stephenson. I mean, apart from getting our shirts made at the same tailor. I like some parts of his work. I really like a lot of the first 80% of Zodiac and Snow Crash. I like Cryptonomicon & friends less (about 30%), and Diamond Age least.

The thing is, Stephenson really likes to write, and that's cool. However, a lot of what he writes just isn't interesting. Thomas Pynchon, the author I'd probably say Stephenson is most trying to be, does this a bit, but his digressions are so much more enjoyable, because they tend to be so insane. I've gotten the feeling in the past that Stephenson doesn't have an editor. I remember Cryptonomicon especially had huge quantities of typographical errors, at a probability of about Num_page/2000. I.e., over about page 500, you had a 1/4 chance of seeing an error on any given page. It was as if he petered out and just sprinted to the end of the book.

The content of the end of his books lends support to this accusation. They tend to veer off into an unusual place like most pomo books tend to. I rant about this, so I'll spare you the usual babbling on this subject.

All that said, this was easily the best-edited book Stephenson has produced, from a typographical standpoint. There were a few errors, but I could deal with them without feeling as if I were reading a pre-release copy.

However, the content is still undisciplined and, honestly, uninvolving. The characters are flat and not developed well, and it feels very much like the middle book of a trilogy. This book is just a way of pushing the characters along until Interesting Things happen in the third act.

All of us have the idea that we're good at various things. Some of these things are accurate. I'm awesome at juggling flaming chainsaws.

Others are less accurate. For example, you probably think you're great in bed. You're not. She told me .

At some point, Neal Stephenson got the idea that he was good at written explanations of semi-complicated subjects. Whether it's cryptosystems or bills-of-exchange, he likes to drop a big turd of an explanation into each of his books. They are usually not long, perhaps 10-20 pages, but they're insipid. They overcomplicate, rather than elucidate, the issue, and there is very little color that improves the description above an encyclopedia entry.

If I were his editor, that's the first thing I'd cut. I could easily reduce The Confusion from 832 pages to about 400 by cutting out these little appendices (in the biological sense) and likewise removing useless description. In that case, it'd be a decent book.

As it is, wait for the paperback version, and read it over a boring weekend. Maybe even wait until book three is out, and read 1-3 in a long weekend. Then, perhaps, it won't feel like wasted time.

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The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami

The first chapter of this appears to be a revision of "The Wind-Up Bird And Tuesday's Women," a short story collected in "The Elephant Vanishes". Details were changed, but it is the same story.

I do not know if the first chapter was extracted into a more-or-less self-contained short story, or if the short story was extrapolated into a larger work. I suspect the latter, not only because it's the common case.

Let it first be said I really, really liked this book. Reading Murakami is like eating a big stick of fresh normandy butter or a big pile of seared foie gras with a little maple sauce. It's rich and perfect and I can't stop shoving it into my head.

With that out of the way, this book lacked a certain integration. It definitely felt as if there were three or four short stories, expanded and brought together at some point in a larger work.

Many of these threads touched at a single point in the story, in a way that advanced the plot slightly. After that point, the primary character in the thread continued relating their story. Because this happened, and because these threads were all kept trailing forward, I expected them all to tie together in the end.

To break the suspense, they did not come together. I have no idea why Lieutenant Mamiya had to run into Boris The Manskinner years later, both Gulag prisoners. Mamiya's contribution to the primary plot line was minor, and could have been as complete if one of the other characters, such as the dry cleaner, had said,"Hey, you can do a lot of thinking from the bottom of a well."

This book, and my favorite of his, Dance Dance Dance, all rely on a certain melding of dream and reality. In this way, they may be compared to the better-known "melding of dream and reality" in our popular culture, the stranger films of David Lynch.

The reason I say this is two-fold. On the one hand, a dream-like red herring distracts and draws attention away from the primary plot line, obscuring what is actually a pretty linear chain of development. On the other hand, these apparently indulgent digressions provide a rich opportunity for the artist to display their mastery of the craft, whether that craft be writing fiction or making film.

This book is dark, and parts of it are rather unpleasant to read. Bad things happen to decent people, and horrible things happen to slightly bad people, and really bloody awful things happen to bad people. Because of Murakami's narrative skill, a very well-formed and clear image will appear in the reader's head.

I cannot recommend the book to someone who needs a clear resolution where all the plot elements and twists are tied together, nor can I recommend it to people who don't want to read about a substantial amount of misery.

If Pynchon, Joyce, or Faulkner frustrate you, if you throw up reading Bret Easton Ellis, or if you think Neal Stephenson is the top of all postmodernism, you probably shouldn't read this book. Your brain will itch when you hit page 570-580 and realise that there's no feasible way all the plot elements can come together without some horrible Farina-esque battery. (Sorry, I used up my Stephenson metaphor up above.)

For those who like reading a highly-skilled writer's (or translator's) work, or enjoy the japanese metaphysical fiction of someone like Banana Yoshimoto, I can't recommend Murakami enough.

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Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968 by Heda Margolius Kovaly, Franci Epstein

I don't like most "downer" books, except for holocaust stories. I don't like those either, but I've been brought up to believe that it's important to keep the fury fresh, so I read a lot of them.

This isn't really about the holocaust. It starts out that way, with the author (Margolius Kovaly, not Epstein) as a young girl dragged off to Auschwitz. This part is really discursive, and honestly, not that involved. It reads very much like the disconnected recollections of someone forty years past the event. In fact, this isn't really the important part of the book, but merely a way to start off the story of her life.

The interesting part is what happened in Czechoslovakia after the war. Prague was liberated by the Stalin-era Soviet army, and then established a satellite administration. Margolius's husband was a gifted and dedicated idealist, and advanced in this system to the position of deputy minister.

In the Warsaw Pact implementation of socialism, the higher a position a person held, the more exposed and likely they were to be the victim of persecution. As the state needed scapegoats, it would look to ministers, deputy ministers, and other ranking administrators.

Heda saw that this was likely, and sought to encourage her husband to resign. For various reasons (including a failed attempt) he did not, and was eventually arrested as part of the Rudolf Slansky trials. He was eventually convicted on the basis of a coerced confession and subsequently executed.

The bulk of the book deals with her collateral persecution as the result of her husband's trial. She not only lost the privileges brought by his deputy status, but was also tainted by the stigma of being associated with a traitor to the state. Those who did not vilify her husband were afraid to be labeled collaborators or conspirators by being seen to speak with her.

This memoir is a good reminder of how easy it is for a fascist or totalitarian state to abuse its power. While we'd like to believe the people would rise up to defend their freedom, there are a number of reasons they will not. In this case, the primary reason revolution did not begin at an individual level because prosecution and elimination was guaranteed the instant State Security discovered dissent. This was very likely, as neighbors would readily turn in neighbors both to secure any reward, and to avoid future punishment when the dissenter was found out.

Remember that the next time the Secret Service shows up at a high school in a tiny town in a small county in Eastern Washington.

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Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players, by Stefan Fatsis

This would be about three great, compelling, magazine articles.

• The process the author went to in the course of improving himself from gifted amateur status to expert in the competitive Scrabble circuit.

Each of these themes could support a long magazine article of anywhere from three to fifteen pages, probably sorted from longest-legged to shortest.

As a 400-page book, though? Not quite.

I read it, and I didn't put it down unfinished, but it felt like work, and I wished for the end on multiple occasions. To its credit, it is very lucidly written, so it's quite accessible, the primary reason, I think, that I didn't put it down. However, I did take many, many breaks to play Scrabble against my computer, because the book is quite inspiring in terms of word play, tedious and over-detailed though it may be.

The reason I had to play against the computer is that Kat knew better, she could tell that I wanted to try out my new "bingo"-heavy strategy, instead of the typical amateurish pattern of holding the wrong tiles too long in the hopes of a low-probability, high-scoring, word. ("ah, I have E-R-S-A-T-Y-Q, I just need Z for 'ersatz'!") In that way, I'd really like to have read this in Esquire or the New Yorker instead of spending the time reading a book-length treatment.

Wait for excerpts, as I'm sure they're coming.

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The AcomData External SATA Drive has the distinction of being the very first thing I have ever returned to a store. Ever. I've put up with a lot of expensive dreck just to avoid the inconvenience of gathering up my receipt and packaging, driving to the store, standing in line, and explaining to someone why I should get my money back. AcomData has given me reason to do this.

How did they manage to overcome my sloth?

The drive came with a PCI SATA card with an external connector. I thought this was a nice idea, because not everyone had external SATA or E-SATA connectivity, and for a desktop, the option was pop out one of the PCI slot covers to run the cable out from the motherboard, which isn't a smart idea, but one I was prepared to execute.

However, I bought a PCMCIA SATA card for my Mac on the same trip. I knew there was a very real possibility that it wouldn't work. It claimed to require some version of Windows or Linux, but it was $40, so I figured I'd give it a shot in case the vendor had updated drivers on their site. No such luck.

Because of my two options, the PCI card seemed to be one of those things that cost $2.50 to make, but recover a lot of otherwise-would-be lost sales, and at any rate, superfluous to my purchase.

Not so!

If you look carefully at this picture, you'll notice the square SATA connector, but you'll also see a little round connector. What are you, little round connector?

Power supply.

That's right. It turns out that this external (i.e., "portable") hard drive has no power supply, but is instead fed by a 5v line out from the pci card. The four-pin header on the top of the PCI card is where the host PC's power supply feeds data in, to be routed out through this jack.

After realising the futility of using it on the Mac, I gave up and installed the PCI card on my Linux box, only to find that it totally screwed up my LVM volumes, so it came back out, went in the box, and back home to Fry's.

What's the point of an external drive if you're tied to a single computer, can't hot-swap devices, and have to buy an additional stupid, disruptive, redundant PCI card for each additional machine with which you want to use the drive?

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I'm fairly happy with the Garmin Nuvi 350. I haven't had one since my Garmin 45 that I got in 1995 (jeez!) back when I was working on marine navigation software. The reason I've done without is that we did cool stuff with GPS charting, and all of the handheld or portable units that offered similar functionality all came up very much wanting.

However, moving back to San Francisco coincided with automobile GPS kits becoming just good enough to tolerate their peccadillos while saving many hours navigating our way around the city.

I was out for a Fry's run with a buddy, and one of the things I intended to buy that day was a car GPS. I hadn't really decided which, but I was thinking about buying whatever the newest Garmin in the 2700 series (probably a 2730 at this point), or a Tom Tom GO. Fortunately, we ran across the Nuvi 350.

However, that store (San Jose) didn't have one in stock, other than the floor model. Same problem at Sunnyvale, but they would sell us the floor model, incomplete with any accessories. After driving to the closest Best Buy and asking them to look up nearby store inventory on the Employee Tool Kit (asking this kind of tipped our hand about knowledge of their internal systems.), that was a dead end. Calling the nearest Circuit City, we learned they had one in stock, so we drove past the cemeteries of Colma at breakneck speed to make sure I could pay near-full-retail because it was essential that I have the GPS NOW.

Having owned it for about a month and having two other people in my car since buying it, I have already secured for Garmin two additional sales. The buddy who was driving with me, guiding us around using his 4-month-old, $700, Garmin Quest 2 bought one soon after, and my parents, who visited last weekend, ended up with one as well.

Why is it sweet?

• It's much faster than other GPS units, especially the Quest 2. (Sucker!) It finds the necessary four birds pretty quickly, recalculates routes very quickly (think two seconds instead of ten), and the search functionality looks up nearby waypoints, markers, etc., with a minimal delay.


• The UI is very responsive -- pressing a "button" on the touchscreen results in immediate feedback, with no "think time". This is great when spelling a restaurant or store to find.
• Big screen. Nuff said.


• The voice prompts read the names of upcoming streets. Most don't do this, just saying,"turn left in 200 feet." With roundabouts and non-perpendicular intersections between more than two streets, the Nuvi has already proven to be a day saver. The only downside is that a lot of times in SF, you have to make a turn, then another quick turn into a "street" that is really an alley. In these situations, the GPS will tell you,"Turn left on Jones, and then turn left." It won't read the second street name until you're right on it.

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Moving back to San Francisco and ordering a new Digital Cable/HD/PVR box from Comcast seems to be the easiest way to upgrade cable boxes. I had a 6208 in Bethesda for a couple years, and while better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, had its downsides.

Quickly, the good things about the Motorola DCT 6412 Phase III compared to the 6208.

• Dual-tuner is sweet, especially after using the single-tuner 6208 for a while. I used to have frequent programming conflicts, and now, only when I have to do "start a few minutes early," or "end a few minutes late," recordings to get around ABC's obnoxious anti-Tivo programming.
• The new software does "Series Recording", which my 6208 lacked. It's not as good as Tivo's Season Pass, but it's nice not having to remember to record the same shows every week.


• The 6208 used to make this obnoxious noise when the fan came on, and would actually drown out the TV. The 6412 doesn't have this problem.

There are some downsides, however, and these are not completely independent from the benefits.

• A huge quantity of compression artifacts, especially while watching HD content with lots of fast movement. This wasn't the case with the 6208. I acknowledge that this may not be hardware related, but instead the result of differing signal transmission policies between Comcast in Bethesda and Comcast in San Francisco.


• It will usually "hang" with an "operation not available" after almost exactly 40 minutes into watching a second TV show. It will often take three or four attempts to "commercial skip" far enough through it that it doesn't hang up on the bad bit. It's not 40 minutes of "play time", but rather, 40 minutes of program time. Skip commercials or watch them, it's going to hang between 40-43 minutes into the program.
• See that "obnoxious noise when the fan came on" bit above? The 6412 doesn't have that problem because there is no fan. That means it gets hot, which I suspect to be the cause of the hanging and crashing when doing sustained reads from the hard drive. Putting a home fan next to it to blow cooler air across the top of the unit seems to support this hypothesis by ameliorating the 40-minute-hang problem.

Addendum, 12 August 2006:

I had to return the box today because it finally stopped recording programs entirely. It has been replaced with a DCT3412 Phase I. It's currently downloading the channel guide, so I'll see how it does in a bit.

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