What Does Dave Think?

There should be a word

There should be a word "affectious." It would mean "deserving of, or attracting, affection."

A Good Weekend

So, Elisabeth and I got married.

Hooray! I am incredibly excited about this, although it's still a little surreal five days later. I assume one of the reasons people go on honeymoons is to practice saying "husband" or "wife" without cracking up. The ring is a reminder; I am waiting for my hand to adjust to it, and I keep bumping it on things.

I feel like I owe people an explanation for the way in which we handled the wedding: the secret parents-and-siblings-only affair, snuck in  five months earlier than the originally planned date.  The truth is, it was a huge decision, and definitely not an easy one. It was based on the fact that, even very early on in the planning, our ceremony was generating more stress than excitement between the two of us. A LOT more. We both wanted to be married - but we didn't love the location, or any of the locations we looked at; the expense was intimidating;  we kept putting off the invitations. We kept not discussing it, until eventually we realized we were avoiding it altogether.

Let's face it, we're shy people. When we first seriously discussed the idea of a private ceremony, it was as though a great weight had been lifted. It never came back - we got married in our own home, and it felt low-key, low-stress, and, well, right.

I missed my friends. That was the hardest part,  no question about it. When we were still planning a big wedding, the ONLY part we looked forward to was having our closest friends beside us. I mean, that's kind of the whole point. That was the sacrifice, I guess - the price we paid for turning inwards, for extracting the ceremony from the  celebration. I'll always regret it a little. But it wasn't the wrong thing to do - it was essentially what we needed to do in order to be standing here now, married - and still sane. The introvert triumphant, I guess.

And we are married. That's the change in my life that I am still absorbing. I keep rolling the word around in my mouth - "married" -  and I like the taste of it. I am looking forward to the rest of our lives. It is - and I couldn't quite sneak this word into the ceremony - awesome. So thanks - and I am going out on a limb here - for your understanding.

And Elisabeth, if you're reading this - we're going to have so much fun!

Guess what?

Three weeks after the fact, it's time I made this announcement on some kind of public forum. If you read it here first, it meanns you and I don't talk enough, but: Elisabeth and I are engaged!

I asked her to marry me on Saturday, June 23, on the shore of Surprise Pond near Greenwood Lake, NJ. To my relief, she said yes. Three weeks later, I still think this is pretty awesome.

Pirates of the Caribbean, At World's End

I heard a lot about the third Pirates film before I saw it: that it was too long, that it was heavy on plot, that it wasn't as good. Well, to be brief, I've learned one thing:

I really like plot.

I like a packed story, which this is; I like the revelation of old history, the large cast of characters, the bad decisions, the right decisions for the wrong reasons, and the brilliant decisions that change the course of a story. I think that, taken all together, the three Pirate movies are surprisingly good. I never would have expected it.

(It's strange that a movie in which hundreds of people are brutally killed can feel like good, clean fun; yet it does. Is the Disney technique of avoiding the blood and gore healthy or unhealthy? Does it desensitize us, or simply let us immerse ourselves in old fashioned story themes without offending modern sensibilities? You decide.)

I like the ending; it doesn't make it easy on anybody. I felt I was missing one little piece when the credits rolled, so i stuck around, and was rewarded with an epilogue.

I like epilogues.

I also like undersea ghosts, and pirate mythology, and broadsides, and stirring last stands, and kisses stolen in the middle of a swordfight, and minor characters standing up rising to an unexpected challenge, and a haunting score that runs throughout a film that I am still whistling days later. And Kiera Knightly.

Backyard Battlestar

In my dream, the last remnant of humanity is huddled in the back yard of my dad's house when the Cylons close in. I'm with the humans, crouched behind card tables and bushes and long grass; the Cylons are arrayed in ranks up by the house. There's a long dramatic pause before the shooting starts, and in that moment I stand to give a speech. Perhaps I'm the president. Both the Cylons and the humans listen.

I wish I could remember the speech. I remember fragments.

"...I wish there was some other way, something we could do that would change things... but maybe all that's left is to point everything we have at he enemy and keep firing as long as we can..."

"We may be it - the last humans in the Galaxy. So maybe we need to ask ourselves, how do we want to be remembered?"

I'm no King Henry, but it's a pretty good speech. And then the shooting starts, and some of the bad guys go down, and... in a movie it would be all smoke and fire and death, but this is a dream, so surrealism rules. There comes a showdown, me face-to-face and gun-to-gun with a head lady-Cylon; but by that time, the story is falling apart and the absurdity of the situation is sinking back in.

I don't remember how it ends. But I really wish I had a copy of my speech.

The Sky So Big and Black by John Barnes

"Up until about 2000, they just didn't need anybody very smart or capable - what they needed was people to buy stuff and follow rules."

John Barnes has a few things to say about the 20th Century educational system, as compared to the school system in place on the Martian colonies. He claims that most civilizations get the education they need, and we don't need much. Those Martian kids, though, they learn to orient themselves on a featureless plain and travel hundreds of miles by foot to the nearest airlock in a malfunctioning space suit using only an Apple Newton. Which turns out to be fortunate.

Actually, if you like Philip K Dick, you'll probably like John Barnes. He writes with a similar voice, damaged narrators telling unreliable stories in a deceptively simple style that almost masks the complexity of the plot and characters. This is hard science fiction, with a convincing look at Martian terraforming that doesn't really resemble anything else I've read. Barnes plays with memory, another trick of Dick's that he uses to heartbreaking effect.

The narrators are alternately a shrink - a cop on the forefront of the meme wars - and his patient, a teenage girl Martian prospector and terraformer. The plot follows the girl through the tragedies that mark her coming-of-age, against a backdrop of a changing planet and a nebulous war with an Earth that has fallen to hive-mind.

Barnes is an excellent writer, and manages to pull off a "classic" piece of science fiction with contemporary ideas, which is very hard to do. An excellent book for people who like future history, Mars, giant mutant beavers, idiot lectures, father-daughter stories, critiques of our culture, and those Reader's Digest "trapped under a tractor" stories.

Seriously, though, this book is great.

The Good Fairies of New York by Mark Millar

"Don't worry," said Heather. "Fairy vomit is no doubt sweet-smelling to humans."

I probably shouldn't bother reviewing this book. Neil Gaiman wrote the introduction, and he goes all fan-boy in it, which is impressive since he's a rock star himself. This means that this book has already found its audience, and my plug here won't help it. But I completely forgot both title and author yesterday, which drove me nuts for ten minutes, so I am definitely writing it down for future reference.

Anyway, to sum up: this book is awesome. It's short, it's sweet, it's funny. It has an excellent jacket design, truly incredible, illustrated and designed by Edwin Tse, that makes me want to find and read other books he's done covers for just on the off chance that they're anything like this good. And it's a hopeful book, lacking that note of bitter despair I've noticed in a lot of British writers. (Of course, Millar is Scottish.)

The plot involves troops of Scottish, Irish, and British fairies arriving in New York, where they fight and fiddle and screw and generally get into more trouble than they expect; there is New York's worst fiddler, and a beautiful artist with a wasting illness struggling to master every guitar solo on the first New York Dolls album. There is at least one ghost, and a pack of squirrels, and a Celtic flower alphabet.

Like The Last Unicorn or Forgotten Beasts of Eld, this is a small perfect book destined to be remembered and reread. I highly suggest it. Alexis, Mary, Michelle, Greg (and Greg) - this means you. Ben - I'll loan it to you today.

Resenting the Hero by Moira J. Moore

Somebody didn't know how to market this book.

The cover art, the jacket design, the blurb on the front, the text on the back - they all say "humorous fantasy farce." The brevity of the book doesn't help, nor does the fact that Moira is shelved next to John Moore, who writes, well, humurous fantasy farces. More on him later.

But this is a reasonably serious, straight-forward magical adventure novel, blessed with some original thinking. In the fantasy world where it is set - which is actually a science-fiction world - there are two types of magical workers. Sources control great power, and can stop storms, earthquakes, firestorms, and like - all of which are pretty common. Shields don't do much else besides protect their Sources, who otherwise would burn themselves out the first time around. The heroine, Dunleavy, is a non-nonsense Source who has just been paired with the infamous rake Lord Karish - for life. This could be an odd-couple comedy, but it evolves nicely into a character study, as Moore refines her two characters into reasonably deep and complex human beings.

The plot is a not unsurprising delve into magic, what makes it work, and the politics behind it - it's unpredictable, but no real surprises emerge in retrospect. Is it worth reading? It won't top any lists, but it's sincere, well-crafted, no-nonsense, and unusual enough to be interesting to fans of fantasy. Chances are, I'll pick up the sequel - it does feel a bit like the author is just hitting her stride.

Where are all the good dead bad girls?

It just occurred to me; why aren't there any good female vampires?

Think about this for a second. In the last twenty years, we've seen plenty of "good" male vampires. They are inevitably tragic, doomed, heroic figures - filled with angst, but trying to do the right thing. Anne Rice had Louis and Lestat; Buffy had Angel and Spike. L.A. Banks has Carlos, for what that's worth, and The Dresden Files has - well, I won't give anything away. Forever Knight had Nicholas.

Hero vampires. But what about the women? Whenever we meet a female vampire, she is instantly the femme fatale, the seductress, the how-bad-do-you-want-me-to-be girl. Drusilla. Darla. Anne Rice's girls, whoever they were. I can't recall a single instance in fiction of a woman heroically struggling against the darkness to become an ambiguous anti-hero in black.

(But wait! Not true any longer. By book 5 or 6 of the Dresden Files, we have one - and she's pretty good. I think it's a natural extension of having a male hero - he needs a doomed love interest - but it's well done. Nice work, Jim Butcher!)

So basically, I think I've unearthed a new strain of sexism. Women, it claims, are too eager to escape mail oppresssion and the rules of society. They are too weak to fight against the dark side. When they go bad, they go all the way. It's kind of a familiar trope, but I am not sure anybody has pointed out its obvious emergence in vampire fiction.

Veronica Mars and the Conventions of Noir

I've been watching Veronica Mars lately. I watch all my tv via Netflix, so - as usual - I am about two seasons behind on my reporting, but I want to take a stand and say it's a really good show.

If you haven't seen it, it is basically film noir plotting set in the high school milieu. That's pretty much the hook, and it got me thinking about what that actually means for show whose hero is a stylish blonde teen. Here's what I came up with: the conventions of noir.

1. Nobody is a saint.
Every character, no matter how beloved or friendly, has some kind of dark secret. Everybody has done something repugnant. In a black and white film, this usually means sleeping with your partner's wife; in a high school drama, it means... pretty much the same thing. Dad, boy friend, dead best friend - none of them will come out with clean hands.

2. History always catches up with you.
You cannot escape your past; there is no such thing as "over." Every wrong move you've ever made, everybody you have betrayed, will come back to haunt you eventually. Your future is defined by the things you have done - and in this case, those things mostly happened six months before the start of the show. It makes for a plot-rich environment.

3. The grays get grayer.
In a heroic storyline - say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer - your actions make you great. By the end of seven seasons, Buffy - whatever else she may be - is legend. But in a noir story arc, the questions only start out black-and-white. Gradually, each decision you make smudges that line between the two, until right and wrong becomes almost meaningless. The only thing separating the good guys from the bad is a matter of degree.

4. Voiceovers are cool
In a world of stoic, stone-faces PIs, it can be hard to tell what the protagonist is feeling - if anything. Having them tell you sure helps. This is one of those devices that's really clever to see in reverse: the jaded highschool girl describing the chiselled-jawed jock with a line of streetwise patter.

It's worth noting that these features are antithetical to those used in the show Buffy, where there's always a right answer, and where coming-of-age means becoming wise. It explains why two shows that could be really similar feel so different - they model two different genres.

I'll leave for another time the question of why this genre-shifting technique is so effective - mapping anyone from Chandler to Austen into the school microcosm. Meanwhile, it works amazingly well. I'm only one season into this show, so I don't know how well it holds up over time - but I suspect it will stand or fall by how well it focuses on its source material, the spirit of the trenchcoated gumshoe trudging off into the night streets.

Altered Carbon and Broken Angels by Richard Morgan

In a bookstore in Martha's Vineyard in September, a strange woman told me, "Richard Morgan is the next Willaim Gibson. You should read this." Since I always take book recommendations from complere strangers, I bought and read Altered Carbon.

But honestly, I am wary of anybody looking for the next William Gibson. I don't really think there is such a person - he's still writing, for one thing. And frankly, he is defined by his place in sicence fiction literature: the man who defined a style and sense of the future world, who could write poetically about the line between technology and culture, and inspire a legion of imitators and techno-fetishists. What my fellow book buyer meant was: "This is an author who captures that sense of grit and moral grayness, who can move his characters through a world defined by technology that he doesn't explain, leaving the reader to build the future in his mind based purely on immediate imagery."

Which is more or less true. Morgan doesn't really have Gibson's style - the ability to paint an entire world with a few well placed paragraphs, the ability to write a short book that feels eternal. But he puts together a pretty solid fast-paced sci-fi story about life on the hard streets of the future.

Altered Carbon follows Takeshi Kovacs, a sort of soldier-of-fortune with special UN training to make him especially flexible, brutal, and effective. His future is one where the mind can be stored on an implant and dumped into a new body as often as you wish, and he's called across space from some distant war to be downloaded into a new body on earth, where he can stamp through the slums of the homeworld and figure out why a certain billionaire was murdered. The billionaire in question is his client, of course, reborn from his downloaded copy, and more curious about than outraged by his own murder. It goes without saying that there is more to this than there seems.

The book is pretty good, if you like grit and technology and ambiguities of identity and the occasional bit of "I'm badder than you" dialogue. The sequel, Broken Angels, is a whole new story set in a behind-the-lines war zone on, yes, a distant planet. The war is the backdrop, an illustration of "how bad things can get;" the real plot revolves around a piece of alien technology, a destroyed archeological dig, and... actually, I won't spoil the plot. I liked it a little better than Altered Carbon, although I couldn't say why. It is certainly a very different book, as though by changing planets Kovacs has changed genres slightly. The large scope is what defies the noire label that is usually hung on Morgan's books.

In conclusion; decent writing, not much humor, plenty of grit, solid technology, tight crime-drama level of plotting. A good read if you're into that sort of thing.

Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds

"Believe me, when you're dealing with infectious alien mind parasites, I always find primitive is best."
-- Ilia Volyova

There are three eras of sience fiction (I've just decided). The first is based on the question, "What if there's life on Mars?" The second was based on the realization, "There's no life on Mars!" The third and current phase seems to be: "Wait a minute, why isn't there life on Mars?" The third question is based on Fermi's Paradox, which basically states, first, that our models of the universe suggest there should be aliens everywhere; and second, if that's true, why haven't we met any?

Good question. Alastair Reynolds sets out to answer this, with a plot that involves the million-year-old murder of an entire alien race, the mystery of who or what the killer was, an archeologist with an uneasy relationship with his father's computerized ghost, a cold-frozen soldier who was accidentally shipped to the wrong planet and awakened to become an assasin, a ship of unimaginable power crewed by a pack of mercenaries, a nano plague, an infectious alien mind parasite, at least one ex-wife, and the fate of intelligent life in the universe.

I liked the book. The writing is pretty good, the science is hard and crunchy, the characters are odd and arrogant and sympathetic , and the plot keeps hopping. I recommend it to anyone who likes alien mind parasites and big gravity weapons.

Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children

I just watched Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children on dvd the other night. Just to be clear, this is a movie sequel to a ten-year-old Playstation video game, which itself was the seventh in a series. It has nothing to do with the movie Final Fantasy, except being computer animated anime. I expected mediocre animation and no plot.

The animation is amazing. The fight scenes put the Matrix movies to shame, and that's a valid comparison, because the Matrix fight scenes were entirely digital. The shear depth of detail and color, the costuming, the urban landscapes and fantastic decay... breathtaking.

The plot is cryptic even if you played FFVII back in the Nineties, like I did. If you did fight through the eighty or so hours of gameplay, this film actually resonates emotionally - there is nothing like having BEEN a character to make him sympathetic in film. Even if you renamed him something stupid at the beginning of the game.

I don't really expect anybody to go out and rent this dvd - but I will recommend it to you if you like computer animation, motorcycles, really big swords that break into other smaller swords, balletic martial arts, and the word "genovah."

Manifold Time and Manifold Space by Stephen Baxter

Stephen Baxter has been reading the same pop-science books that I have - stuff about string theory, and quantum physics, and the arrow of time and the creation of the universe. The difference is that, unlike me, he is actually a rocket scientist - it says so right in the jacket - and he went out and wrote a bunch of sci-fi novels based on, you know, science. I am halfway through the second one right now.

Worth reading? Sure. Here's the downside. They are traditional "Big Idea" stories, based on recent theories about cosmology. This means that they sometimes read like this: "A scientist comes up with a theory that life will end in the next 200 years. Bold maverick businessmen decide to act on this. It turns out to be true. Crap."

Two problems here. One, a story feels contrived when a theory generated in the first fifty pages is fulfilled in the last fifty. It feels like the author is faking it, like he's given his characters a peak ahead in the book, and it somewhat kills the suspense. Two, one of the big theories is, in my view, a statistical trick - I don't agree with it. (This is the theory that the says, statistically speaking, we are nearing the end of human culture simply by calculating the odds of us being anywhere else.) With that in mind, the rest of the Manifold Time just doesn't convince me.

And, of course, the main character in this story isn't really a character, it's humanity itself - the actual characters seems a little flat, like they are merely stand-ins for Us (although with more vision and G-tolerance, and a better grasp of Calculus.)

Having said all that, the story picks up by book two, Manifold Space. Book one backs the premise that "we are the only life out there," a popular curent theory based on statistics and the fact that, well, we haven't met anyone. But the two books are not sequels - instead, they play out the same characters in slightly different universes (as required by string theory, natch). In book two, life is EVERYWHERE. The universe isn't just populated, it's over-populated, as earth finds out the hard way. (There are statistical models for this, too.) There's a lot of cosmic-scale thinking in both books (a Dyson sphere is pretty much child's play for Baxter), but it's much more interesting, more gripping, in Manifold Space. Earth may still be destroyed - but this time, I'll care when it happens.

And then I'll read the third book in the series.

January at Macy's

I walk by Macy's most days, on Broadway and something or other. The Christmas windows are down, now: all that's left of the fantastic sculptured frames are empty bolt holes drilled in the marble facing.

Do they drill new holes every year? Does each Christmas put another constellation of scars on the front of the building? And if so, how many years before they tear the marble down entirely, and haul in new blocks, and start again?

The Big Speech

It's almost time. Everybody has been wondering: is he going to propose something new, something different? Or just more of the same? These speeches have been hyped before, but often they're a disappointment. This time, though, the media is buzzing, and insiders are whispering. The guy's got a certain reputation to live up to, after all. And there's a lot at stake.

Wait, are we talking about the George Bush's war plans or Steve Jobs's MacWolrd keynote address?

Some Kind of Record

For those of you not living in New Jersey or Manhattan, here's the situation: it's hot.

I don't mean it's simply unseasonable hot, unusually warm for this time of year. I mean that today, January 6, 2007, it is 69 degrees in Rutherford, NJ. It is uncomfortable to be outside in anything heavier than a short-sleeve shirt. People are washing their cars and mowing the lawn.

I really don't know what else to say about this.

Resolved

It's 2007. I had no special expectations for 2007 when I was a kid, so I'm not too disappointed that I don't have a flying skateboard yet. I am feeling pretty good about the upcoming year, so here are my resolutions. They will prove, once and for all, that I am in my thirties.

1. Learn to play the mandolin.

2. Shine my shoes (done).

3. Practice guitar every day, even for just fifteen minutes, before I go to bed.

4. Write every morning. This is the Big One. Wake up at 6:00 and write for an hour. That's sufficient to write a novel in a year, if I can actually keep it up.

5. Cut down on sugar. Eat better. This is my survival plan for middle age: avoid accumulating weight from year to year. I'm skinny enough now, but I know how these things creep up on you.

6. Develop my personal style and be more deliberate about how I dress. This may or may not include sweater vests.

7. Be a better person. Blah blah blah.

8. Actually, #7 covers everything else, including increased conviction, eliminating debt, seeking out activism, buying a new bookcase, and one or two other half-formed big ideas. It's enough to get me started. I think these personal decisions of life-direction are important to make, although posting them on a public forum is probably counter-productive. I'll go back to reviewing science fiction soon, I promise.

The Bahamas are Islands

Elisabeth and I are back from the Nassua, in the Bahamas. Since it's been two months since I posted a word, you might think it was a long trip - but it was really a long weekend, celebrating my friend Greg's 30th birthday. (It was a success: he's now 30.)

I didin't know anythin about the Bahamas for my first trip, and I still don't. I know they are a chain of islands just off Florida; I know they used to be part of the British Commonwealth; I know they drive on the left side of the road. That's about it.

I aslo know that New Providence Island is made of white reef rock, which looks basically like crushed cement. Organic matter like grass and trees and people form a thin skin over the stone - anywhere there's a scrape or scratch, rock shows through like the surface of the moon. It makes the whole enterprise seem pretty fragile - there are a lot of pits and rockpiles, presumably the result of frequent hurricanes.

We stayed at a place called Compass Point, which I will recommend. It's a small sliver of land on the seashore - a high wall and a forest of palm trees make it feel much more secluded then it has any right to. The accomodations are simple octagonal and hexagonal huts on stilts among the palms, brightly painted in yellow and red and purple and blue. It's pretty simple in a lot of ways - it plays to the climate, with outdoor common spaces and no glass on the windows. The resort closed years ago, and reopened last month - they are still sorting out details like glasses in the kitchen and vegetarian menu options, but they are getting there. After two hours in the hot tub on the beach, I will forgive any number of missing remote controls for the air conditioner.

Greg - and his wife Jessica - are both Vegan. Vegans are nature's way of telling Vegetarians like myself not to get too self-righteous - there is always somebody with better karma. Lacto-Ovo Vegetarians beat Pisco Vegetarians, Vegans beat the Lacto-Ovos, Frutarians and Raw Foodists beat the Vegans, and starving kids who have to work all day in a mine field to get a cup of rice make us all look like poseurs.

But I digress. Let's just say that Jessica was forced to terrorize the kitchen staff in order to get them to live up to their telephone assurances. I think this will probably be good for them, in the long run. Not being Vegan, I was able to eat the buttermilk pancakes and the guava duff (must be eaten to be understood.)

Anyway. Nassau is the capital of the Bahamas - it's a small but busy town dwarfed by the cruise ships in the harbor, and by the Atlantis Resort rising up on Paradise Island across the harbor. It's more ramshackle and less quaint then, say, Martha's Vinyard, which it somewhat resembles. The people are pretty friendly - not just polite, but rather nice, even more than the tourist-based economy would suggest. We watched the national marching band (?) march back and forth and play beat-perfect Christmas tunes with a great deal of flair.

We also climbed the hill to look for one of three forts on the island. This immediately took us out of the well-maintained tourist streets and into the hollow-looking residential areas; the fort - which sits on the highest point on the island over the town - is crowded by homes and apartments that are a little pretty and quite poor. Our tour was managed by the creepily insistant Shane "Dogman," so named for his pack of wild dogs who followed him everywhere and growled at eachother. It's safe to say we learned nothing on the tour, as Shane seemed a little unclear on small matters such as the national flower and construction dates.

There's not much narrrative to this trip. We spent most of our time at the resort, walking by the beach or napping in the cabins. The weather was a little grey and breezy, with at least one good all-night rainstorm, but the temperature was a perfect neutral warmth. I walked around in shirts in nothing else, or in jeans and a sweater, and I went from lunch to surf to hot-tub, equally comfortable in each. Occasionally we had the bright sun that made it feel like a real tropical vacation, but I never came within spitting distance of a tan. Greg and Jessica got a little scuba-diving in, but for Elisabeth and myself, exertion meant walking over to the restaurant for breakfast.

I'll try to upload some photos, when I put batteries in my camera. You should see the pretty little cabins, and perhaps I have a shot of one of the tiny little lizards who scurried everywhere. But I didn't devote my time to taking pictures; in the end it wasn't the vacation to write home about.

It was just the vacation I needed.

Ahem. One, two, three

The House. The Senate. A bunch of Governorships. The Democrats are back, and in the few months before they disappoint me, I feel I should write some kind of victory song. Honestly, though, I have no idea how that would go.

Maybe: "Neener neener neener neener..."

Three Down

It's 10:21 on election night. Three senate seats gone to the Dems already - three more to go if we want to take control. It turns out that alcohol is pretty good for dealing with stress; I can't imagine why nobody has ever thought of this before.