cahn

1. D fed me Order of the Stick (which I'm still in the process of reading), and as a result I've been playing a lot of NetHack. (I'm really bad at it -- the sort of careful thinking-through of potential options when that leocrotta shows up isn't my forte, and I die a lot.) NetHack... can be a sort of interesting laboratory for studying probability, if you play enough. Sometimes you get that wand of wishing on an early level. And sometimes you get the master mind flayer.

2. I'm really grateful that I know and understand elementary statistics and can apply Bayes' Rule correctly. I suppose it doesn't actually make my life any easier, really, but I like knowing what I'm getting into.

3. It doesn't actually stop me from occasional stupid emotionally-fallacious thoughts about probability, although it does mean that I can hit myself on the head when I catch myself doing this. God, I think human beings are wired not to understand probability.

4. Via metaphortunate, Che Fece ... Il Gran Rifiuto (Constantine Cavafy):

For some people the day comes
when they have to declare the great Yes
or the great No. It’s clear at once who has the Yes
ready within him; and saying it,

he goes from honor to honor, strong in his conviction.
He who refuses does not repent. Asked again,
he’d still say no. Yet that no—the right no—
drags him down all his life.

It has stuck in my head, I think, because it is true.

With apologies to Heather for using the same source (but hey, great minds think alike): Happy Valentine's Day!

I never have known love but as a kiss
In the mid-battle, and a difficult truce
Of oil and water, candles and dark night,
Hillside and hollow, the hot-footed sun,
And the cold sliding, slippery-footed moon--
A brief forgiveness between opposites
That have been hatreds for three times the age
Of this long-'stablished ground.
-On Baile's Strand, Yeats

And, on a sillier note: a video. My husband showed this to me on our anniversary last year, because we share his, um, slightly unconventional view of romance, probably because we know a little statistics...

Cheer up, Hamlet; chin up, Hamlet; buck up, you melancholy Dane!
So your uncle is a cad who murdered Dad and married Mum.
That's really no excuse to be as glum as you've become!
So wise up, Hamlet; rise up, Hamlet; perk up and sing a new refrain.
Your incessant monologizing fills the castle with ennui.
Your antic disposition is embarrassing to see.
And by the way, you sulky brat, the answer is to be!
You're driving poor Ophelia insane.
So shut up, you rogue and peasant; grow up, it's most unpleasant;
cheer up, you melancholy Dane!

Richard: Geoffrey, I am worried about the future of the entire festival. Now: what is the point of putting on a play if no one comes to see it?
Geoffrey: Which would you prefer: an empty house with a great play, or a full house with a piece of garbage?
Richard: GARBAGE! GARBAGE! I want GARBAGE!

Darren Nichols: I must say, I've fallen in love with the musical genre. It's the art-form of the common man. If you want to communicate something with the proletariat, cover it in sequins and make it sing. It's noisy, vulgar and utterly meaningless—I love it!

Geoffrey: There will be struggle. There will be sacrifice. There will be tears, there will be the occasional fistfight. And in the end, there will be transformation.

-Slings and Arrows (assorted episodes)


You guys, I know I have talked about nothing else for months... I finally watched the pilot of Smash (it is on youtube and also on NBC's site) and just loved it. It's pretty clearly a not-particularly-deep soap opera, mind you, but a soap opera about Broadway WITH BROADWAY MUSIC; therefore, I loved it. (And I am incredibly bored by Glee.) Because, I guess, shows about serious putting-on-a-show really speak to me.

It isn't nearly as this is clearly really awesome as Slings and Arrows (from which all the above quotes are taken -- I could not pick just one) -- which you should all go watch right now, by the way; it's got the dialogue-and-humor awesomeness of the West Wing coupled with the creating-a-production themes of Smash as well as performances of Shakespeare. Smash has neither S&A's amazing dialogue and humor nor its deep treatment of performance themes (which is what I was really hoping for), and the Marilyn Monroe musical is fun but not particularly amazing (the Hamlet lyrics above are much more impressive than any of the Smash lyrics)... but the show speaks to the same parts of my psyche as S&A (it made me utterly bouncy to see how much all the characters clearly loved the musical world), and I actually liked it more than I liked the pilot of S&A, because the characters are more likeable, even if S&A's pilot impressed me a lot more.

There is some suspension of disbelief required to put Katherine McPhee on anything like the same plane in Broadway acting ability as Megan Hilty (who is gorgeous and wonderful and I just wanted to jump up and down every time she was on screen -- although to be perfectly fair her voice sounds a little hoarser than McPhee's, but it may just be an artifact of a naturally lower voice?). Hilty is perfectly, perfectly cast. Have I mentioned how much I adore her? Christian Borle was also perfectly cast. He gets to do a lot of very nice acting with a character who has his good points and bad points too -- it looks like he really has a much larger part than it looked like in the previews -- and he does not have to sing anything seriously, which is also a good thing. (But, since he's the songwriter, it looks like he will still get to sing on occasion, not seriously. Which is also a Good Thing.) Everyone else is really, really good, but I was really watching it for those two. (Although I never noticed before what a big nose Borle has!)

I loved Hilty's line "It was amazing getting the chance to work with you!" Just the way she says it, and her expression... it is totally clear what she means. Also, in breaking news, I love Hilty.

I WANT MORE HILTY/MCPHEE DUETS please thanks.

I am so pleased that the love interest gets to be a non-white boy!

Also, ahahahaha Spider-man jokes!

Why random house boy is in all the audition scenes, I DO NOT KNOW. That was the one extremely jarring note for me.

So, definitely going to keep watching it. It could get better, and it could also get a lot worse (especially if they start piling on the cliches -- there were definite directions that way in the pilot). We'll see.

(Also... I have to go back now to S&A and watch Richard Smith-Jones! And Anna! And Geoffrey Tennant! And who could forget Darren! It's been too long.)

There are three things that will beggar the heart and make it crawl--faith, hope, and love--and the cruelest of these is love.

3+/5 (subject to sequel revision). I finished my first Valente! So this is a book that I would never have read except on iPod. I read this in dribbles and drabbles while getting my hair cut, in airports, while getting gas for the car, and so on.

I had sort of a weird reaction to this book. It took me a really loooong time to get into it, for one thing, which is why I had to read it on iPod. I don't know that I take well to Valente's style. I mean, she is clearly a good writer, but I think that writers with distinct styles tend to polarize people into "love" and "don't love," and I'm definitely in the "don't love" camp with respect to Valente. (McKillip, who has a similar lyrical style, is totally in the "love" camp for me, although I certainly know a number of people who put her in the "don't love" pile. I have no idea why I love one and not the other.)

Then, around the third-to-halfway point, I decided I was kind of in love with its strange Pentexoreans and their ways of dealing with immortality.

Then, a little more than halfway through, it decided to turn into a Polemic Against Christianity, and I was all... uhhh, okay, what? What upset me about this development was not the polemic itself, which was annoying but not particularly upsetting (annoying not least because the beginning of the book had me hoping for some at least quasi-deep theological discussion), but the part where it seemed to be putting itself forward as avant-garde and daring for pointing out the flaws in Christianity. Um, no. About seven hundred years too late to be avant-garde (the Divine Comedy did it earlier and better), and almost thirty years too late to be daring (in the 80's Mists of Avalon might have sort-of been daring for pointing out the patriarchial hypocrisies of Christianity, but these days... not so much). Also, it annoyed me that the Pentexoreans are basically sophisticated twenty-first-century voices. Prester John himself is extraordinarily irritating, because his character is basically that of Stupid Ignorant StrawmanFundamentalist!Christian who gets his mind blown. Part of my irritation is that apparently John had read pretty much zero theology, because any early christian church theologian worth his salt could have come up with way better answers than John did when the Pentexorians asked him theology questions. You can imagine that conversations where a twenty-first-century sophistication is asking a really, really stupid and ignorant guy questions are at best demolishing of straw men and at worst John sitting around stammering, "Uh, okay, guess you're right."

Then, a little further, and the book turned (well, somewhat; the Christian-bashing is still around; for example, the above quote is a beautifully done dark take on Paul -- but, um, sort of a set piece) into something else... a rumination on immortality and identity, and that part was really awesome.

Then I got almost to the end, and the Christianity part started to actually get interesting, and then... everything sort of ended in the middle and mushed into a pulp. (Actually, it mushes into a literal fictional pulp, but anyway.) ... I don't know what I think, because this is book 1 of a (three-part?) series, and I have no idea of how much of the stuff that abruptly ended in the middle is going to be taken up in subsequent books, but I suspect not the parts that I thought were really interesting... but maybe so, in which case I'll be pretty excited.

And then I got to the end, and Plot Happened, and Setup for Next Book happened, and, okay, whoa, yeah.

So in the end, I liked it, enough that I'll probably read the next two books. But it was a bit of a rollercoaster for me. And I suspect after reading the second and third books there will be backaction on my opinion of the first, though I do not know what it will be.

I think those who already love Valente will really love this book. I think those who have more than a passing familiarity with Christian theology will be annoyed by this book. I think that those who have no opinion on the first two things, but who like fantastical writing, will like this book very much, probably more than I did. I think (and am living proof) that it is possible to be annoyed by this book and still be impressed by it.

It's getting near the end of February, so I thought I'd do another overheard-in-our-household quiz thingie -- some version of all of these quotes were spoken in our household during the month of February. Books and movies both are fair game, with one from a musical. Frighteningly enough, more of the quotations are not from books than are, which is really Just Wrong, but oh well. I'll do an update to this post on Monday with the answers.

1. 'You're altogether too full of bobance and bounce and high spirits. You've got to learn that life isn't all fricasseed frogs and eel pie.'

2. "Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life."

3. "He lay there like a slug. It was his only defense."

4. "Well, I'm back."

5. Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you!”

6. Nigel Tufnel: The numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven and...
Marty DiBergi: Oh, I see. And most amps go up to ten?
Nigel Tufnel: Exactly.
Marty DiBergi: Does that mean it's louder? Is it any louder?
Nigel Tufnel: Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?
Marty DiBergi: I don't know.
Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
Marty DiBergi: Put it up to eleven.
Nigel Tufnel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.
Marty DiBergi: Why don't you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?
Nigel Tufnel: [pause] These go to eleven.

7. Don't squeeze your bosoms against the chair, dear! It'll stunt their growth, and then where would you be?

ETA: ( Answers here. )

I had finally come to see that Coco was an animal, with intrinsically far less potential than Sophia and Lulu. Although it is true that some dogs are on bomb squads or drug-sniffing teams, it is perfectly fine for most dogs not to have a profession or even any special skills.

Naturally, both girls felt the book shortchanged them. "You should definitely dedicate this book to Lulu," Sophia once said magnaminously. "She's obviously the heroine. I'm the boring one readers will cheer against. She's the one with verve and panache." And from Lulu: "Maybe you should call your book The Perfect Child and the Flesh-Eating Devil. Or Why Oldest Children Are Better. That's what it's about, right?"

Okay, so if you have kids or are Asian, and don't live under a rock -- probably even if only one of those applies -- you have heard of this book. So there was the WSJ excerpt declaring the superiority of "Chinese moms," the huge backlash, and the backpedaling by Chua pointing out that in fact her book wasn't like that, and somewhere in the middle of this my sister bought it, and so of course I read it too.

And Chua's right, it's nothing like the WSJ excerpt. It's... actually... really good, painfully aware of her shortcomings and inconsistencies as a mother, and howlingly funny, although judging from some of the reviews I've read, perhaps sometimes the humor can only be appreciated if you yourself have had a "Chinese mom." (She defines a "Chinese mom" as the highly controlling, highly demanding behavior that tends to characterize Asian-American parenting, and does not of course restrict it to Chinese moms alone; similarly, she talks about "Western parenting" as the opposite lenient choice-based model.)

The funniest part was when she tried to apply Chinese parenting to their dog. The first quotation above is pitch-perfect "Chinese-mom" resignation; my (Korean) mom has probably said almost exactly the same thing about both the Kid and me. The ending, where she is talking to her daughters and ends up in a rant against Western moms ending with calling the Founding Fathers Chinese, while her daughters point out she's being overwrought and rather silly, is priceless.

Also, my sister and I agreed that a) Amy Chua sounds exactly like our mom in personality and temperament, and probably our mom would have been exactly like that had she been born in the US and married to a Jewish guy and a law professor at Yale instead of a stay-at-home mom in NC, b) as it was Amy Chua was actually crazier than our mom -- at least we got vacations from practicing when we went on short vacations, and c) Sophia and Lulu reminded us a lot of us; we would totally have had similar comments as the above had our mom written a book about our childhoods.

One thing Chua mentions sometimes briefly but doesn't really dwell on, but which I think is key (and which assumption runs throughout her book -- she says to Lulu, at the climax, "We're giving up the violin," not "You can give up the violin"), is that success is really a joint family effort in the "Chinese-parenting" household in a way it's not in the "Western-parenting" household. My family is extremely close in a way that D finds a little unnerving, and any success we have is a team effort. I'm serious. I was editing the English in my dad's work reports when my English skills got better than his up until he retired, and I was expected to have a turnaround in hours unless I had something else more important going on. Similarly, when I need something from my parents I expect them to put it at the top of their priority list and deal with it Right Now. My mom even volunteered to look after E. for the first year of her life (we didn't take her up on it, but wow). Along the same lines, when my sister and I applied to college our essays were subjected to intense scrutiny and editing by the other three of us, not to mention my dad dragged his half-brother into reading them as well. No, no one wrote them for us, but yes, there was heavy revision going on. Because if I get into a good college that glory reflects on the whole family, and the whole family is invested in me. Et cetera.

I believe that this plays in with the concept of control. The problem is that there's a huge power disparity between parents and kids, so "I am invested in your success," which I think is a very positive thing, can too easily become "Let me control you so as to maximize your success, because I know better because I'm the parent" which is... I think, not as good, even if the parent does know best. Chua tries to have total control over her kids and it backfires spectacularly with Lulu. My mom had a somewhat similar thing with both of us.

What's the takeaway message? Chua and I are both conflicted on this. On one hand I feel it's important for kids to do things they don't necessarily want to do, like practice. Also, I will have high standards for E. and any other kids we might have -- I don't think they should get a report card grade of B until at least high school (and probably then too), absent a clear reason, and will view it as a family failure (see above on joint family effort :) ) should it happen. On the other hand, I also think it's important for kids to have autonomy and be able to make their own choices. I don't know where the line ought to be drawn. D's family all turned out amazingly well and rather better emotionally equipped than the Kid and I, so that may be a good place to start -- on the other hand, I have this musical skill that I feel has enriched my life dramatically, and D and his siblings don't have it, so there's that.

This book actually makes me want to go find my mom and dad and sister and give them big hugs, because it reminded me so much of my extremely- (sometimes the Kid and I say too!-) close relationship with them.

There was a dead silence. In fact, the silence was so very dead that Abdullah realized that the sixty ears... [mild spoilers redacted]... anyway, that all these ears were at that moment focused entirely upon what he and Flower-in-the-Night were saying.

"Talk among yourselves!" he shouted.

The silence became uneasy. It was broken by the elderly princess saying, "The most distressing thing about being up here above the clouds is that there is no weather to make conversation out of." -Castle in the Air

Of course I liked all of these. I've never met a DWJ I didn't like! (Um, well, okay, a couple with squicky large-age-power-disparity relationships, but that just meant I hated the romance, not the writing.)

Enchanted Glass: A nice sweet little book, though nothing special. The thing I like about DWJ is that even when you're old enough you can guess the plot far quicker and easier than when you were little, it's still worth reading.

Castle in the Air: Reread. This book was way more charming than I remembered -- I think part of my previous disappointment was that I was expecting it, well, to be a straight sequel to Howl's Moving Castle. But, of course, DWJ doesn't do straight sequels. Much better to think of it as a book that takes place in the universe of HMC, with some shared characters, as I did this time around, and I really liked it.

House of Many Ways: I liked Castle in the Air better, but this one did have the quality, rare in DWJ books, that there was no extra-powerful character come to save the day in the end. (Think about it. Almost all her books are like this. The Undying, the Chrestomanci, etc. Howl counts in HMC, since from the POV of the main character he's extra-powerful.)

The little food machine (whom I shall also probably refer to as Princess Baby The First) is quiet right now for once, so I shall indulge myself with a quick post instead of doing the sixteen other things I really ought to be doing. (By the way, this post is dedicated to Harvey Karp's Happiest Baby on the Block, without which you would not be getting a post at all. YAY SWADDLING.)

Once again Deaver was alone on the boundary between the pageant wagon and the town, belonging to neither-- yet now, because of the show, belonging a little to both.

From Orson Scott Card's Folk of the Fringe, which I reread the first week post-delivery. Dystopian-future-SF short stories featuring Mormons and non-Mormons. I think it's amazing stuff, and reads much better now I'm in my 30's than it did when I was in my teens. I wish Card had gone more this way-- I enjoy hearing what he has to say about community (and family as a subset of community) and belonging, but he doesn't do nearly as much of that anymore, choosing instead to focus explicitly on Families Forever. Mind you, I do think Card is at his best when he writes about Mormons, in fact, because it frees him up to actually, you know, think about ideas (and almost all of his Mormon-centric stuff has stuff that contraindicates theology for a True Believer), as opposed to Giving You a Lecture.

"Powers preserve me from thickheaded, self-centered, cocky teenage wizards!"

Diana Wynne Jones, The Merlin Conspiracy. If this isn't a shout-out to Harry Potter (the publication date is 2003) I'll be very surprised, although of course in context it has nothing to do with HP. I really, really liked this one. (Though nolly, I suspect this is the DWJ you read which made you decide you might not like DWJ. If so, all I can say is, yeah, you're probably right.) Any other author would be content with one-tenth of the imagination DWJ has, and it's in full display in this book, which pulls in Arthurian tropes, Welsh tropes, a world with a lot of hard radiation, the Little People, and an elephant, among other things. It's a sort of vague sequel to Deep Secret, which I didn't realize until after finishing it, and honestly it stands rather better on its own than as a sequel (where is any mention of Maree?) - but I just love the mad rush of ideas, plus which DWJ has that elusive quality that I absolutely love, where her descriptions can go between prosaic-English to wild-elegant-Welsh, with humor as well:

"Forgive me," [the King] said, looking up at the Count of Blest. "I haven't exactly done well, have I?"
"Others have done almost as badly," the Count of Blest said, quite kindly, riding on.

Speaking of humor, I just reread the Attolia trilogy-so-far (Megan Whalen Turner). My favorite bit has always been

"...and I threw an ink jar at his head."
..."I had not pictured you for a fishwife."
"Lo, the transforming power of love."

These books are The Best. Oh, well, The Thief is mildly entertaining, but I don't love it with overwhelming passion the way I do Queen of Attolia (though YES, I have vast trouble with the relationship) and King of Attolia (which I just love, partially because I pretend like some of the relationship from the previous book does not exist, or is tamped down a couple notches), though one must read The Thief to get to the good stuff in the later two books. Although, as julianyap points out, Gen is rather a Gary Stu, I love them madly anyway -- Turner has a precise, elegant way of writing; and her elegant plots remind me of Bujold's or Brust's in the neat way they hang together. Really, these are some of my favorite books (maybe top 20 or so) I am SO psyched for Conspiracy of Kings, due out at the end of March. If you have not read them you should go read them right away. Just be warned about The Thief not being quite as good, and Queen having the somewhat disturbing relationship thing (though, when I think about it, somewhat less disturbing than Twilight).

National Put Quotes in Your Blog Month has expired, but I started writing this post in February...

His despair seemed to melt and pool inside him, until he could almost congratulate himself that he was no longer desperate, but simply demoralized and depressed -- emotions entirely accepted, even expected, in the lab.

This quotation from Allegra Goodman's Intuition captures a large part of what captivated me about this book -- it shows what it's like to do research. It simultaneously made me miss research (there's nothing like the high of discovering something) and be very very glad I don't do pure research anymore.

Yeah, so this book impressed the heck out of me. It's mainstream fic (which surprised me; I was expecting science fiction, but it's actually rather that rare beast, fiction about science) about a research lab and what happens when friction erupts in the lab over a postdoc's experiments, until it has ramifications that go well beyond the one postdoc.

But what really impresses me about this book is this: I believe quite strongly that there are empirical facts about the world that do not change. Either an experiment worked or it didn't. But people are complicated. A given empirical fact, say, a conversation between person Alpha and Beta, can to person Alpha say something about herself. Person Beta may look at that same conversation and conclude something different about Person Alpha. And the thing is, they might both be right. Because people are complicated. (And to take it a step further, it may be true that Person Beta's conclusion about Person Alpha says something, moreover, about Person Beta. That may be different from both the way that Alpha looks at Beta, and the way that Beta looks at himself.) And it seems to me that most books assume that there is one right way of looking, not just at facts, but at people and people's motivations. Even in books with unreliable narrators -- well -- it is true I am a sucker for the unreliable narrator, but the whole concept presupposes that there is some underlying truth that the unreliable narrator does not see. No, in this book everyone is a reliable POV, but reliable in different ways, and unreliable to the extent that they do not necessarily see in the ways that others see. Like real life!

The result is that there is a great compassion in this book for all the characters, and that there are no villains. Indeed, the magnitude of Goodman's accomplishment can be seen in that the character that abigail_n, in the review that got me to read the book, calls "the closest Goodman comes to an out-and-out villain" is the one I thought of, before rereading her review, as the hero of the piece (though I understand why he can be thought of as the villain as well).

I feel like I should add some caveats. I was predisposed to like this book because it describes Cambridge, MA, a city which I love, and even a concert in Cambridge that I actually watched (and which liuzhia was in)! I have no idea if her portrayal of bio-lab work is all right (I only know that her emotional portrayal of science is dead on). And indeed her portrayal of music (which only occurs a couple of times in the book, to be honest) really kind of sucks (excuse me, but no one who learned violin before his teenage years thinks about the violin spot when practicing unless it's infected, so even mentioning it is a bad sign). I found the middle section of the book, which opens up into the wider world, a bit tedious (though I understand why it had to happen).

Despite all that, my vote for my best read of the year so far, though it's only March and most of what I've read has been old Asimov novels :) I am not entirely sure about this, so take this with a grain of salt, but I think ebs98, ase, julianyap, and lightreads would like it (and if you try it out and don't, let me know so I can do better next time). joyce I'm even less sure about, but the next time someone starts yapping at you about academia you could do worse than reading the first chapter of this to remind yourself why you aren't in research!

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

Anyone who does not know that this quotation is from Isaac Asimov should go and read a book of his in penance. I've been rereading a bunch of his stuff lately, mostly because I had a cold and was not feeling up to anything less readable, and whatever else you might say about him Asimov is very easy to read.

I had never actually read his robot mystery novels before (though I've read every single one of the robot stories), and the first two are really quite good (in, of course, a Golden Age sort of way-- don't expect psychodrama), though I figured out the killer in the first book after the first third of the book. I have always loved the Black Widower mystery short stories (joyce, you might like these -- they are short and sweet and usually pretty upbeat), though they vary widely in quality. I love them honestly for the afterwords more than anything else. Which realization started me on reading his autobiography (I, Asimov, though there are three others), which is just really charming. Asimov sounds like he was a delightful person, and I am annoyed that he left us after only 300 (!) books.

Off to Yosemite for this weekend, yay! hope the weather is nice *crosses fingers*