PhyrePhox

I'm home on break, with a pile of books up to my knees. Books that I have not read that need to be read, books that need to be reread with an eye to my fantasy screen-writing career, books that I want to reread because the movies are coming out soonish, books for the sake of books on top of books.

One of these books is Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, a second attempt at reading Stephenson that's not The Baroque Cycle or Cryptonomicon.

Here's the thing about Neal Stephenson. I fucking love this guy, outside of his books. He's incredibly well-spoken, stays far, far away from his fans (he's said numerous times that the best way for an author to communicate effectively with people who like his work is to keep writing great novels) and appears to be an all-around great guy. When he wrote the behemoth that is The Baroque Cycle--by hand, it must be noted, on custom-made period-appropriate paper--he decided not to shave or cut his hair. The jacket photo makes him look like Rip Van Winkle. If I had to describe Neal Stephenson's writing style, it would be: Method. He wants to write a book about cryptology, he becomes a fucking great codebreaker. Wants to write a book about the scientific revolution, he walks in Isaac Newton's steps and learns the Real Character. His books are full of family dynasties that stretch for centuries, so that when you read one book, you can look back and thing "man, their ancestors would have been so proud." He writes almost everything extremely well, except for sex, which I feel like he chucks in deliberately badly to make his readers see that the sex scenes weren't what they really wanted anyway.

I could write for hours on the theories of masculinity that Stephenson examines without actually examining them, just puts different kinds of dudes in different kinds of situations and lets them run. But instead, I'm letting Diamond Age slowly, relentlessly, thoroughly blow my mind. The last Stephenson I tried to read was Snow Crash, which despite having a main character named Hiro Protagonist was nearly incomprehensible, and this book starts off sickeningly similar, with the traditional sci-fi throwing at you of new technologies and terms without any fucking explanation whatsoever, and I'm really kind of over that. But damn. It's so worth it. For one, because this book is mostly about fathers and daughters, something I've never seen Stephenson do before. For another, there's all sorts of things still happening, and I have no idea which plot threads are going to get resolved at any given point.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go read. And eat 82% chocolate. Also, apparently the browser which I am currently using was named-ish after-ish a one-off character in this book. Or something.

Writer of Fictions

When Mark was here, we sought out fun restaurants because that's what we do. One of the ones I'd highly recommend is l'Etoile, not only because of the food but also because of the upstairs restroom--which has lovely framed botanical prints on the wall. Being the nerd that I am, I looked closely at them: digitalis, hellebore, belladonna. There are six lethal or hallucinogenic herbs framed on the wall.

Details like that, the tiny dark details, make my life so much better.

Rendezvous

The thing that I like best about this is the description. As if "monkey straw" is either self-explanatory, or so complex that it could not possibly be described.

I've picked up another of Nabovkov's books: King, Queen, Knave. Thus far it is as good as I would have expected, but not more.

The Demon Butcher Of Fleet Street

You know what I just don't get? Clammy toilet seats. I can understand a little sprinkling, if the previous occupant was a squatter, but the overall dampness really skeeves me out.

It's either that someone with a freakishly sweaty bottom sat there right before me, or someone with a body temperature low enough to cool the toilet seat below room temperature so that water condensed on it as it warmed back up did. Neither explanation is appealing.

Argh

So my laptop hard drive crashed today, so badly that it couldn't even figure out how to read a CD. I made an emergency trip to the Apple Store with Mark (who is down, visiting. Ask me how that's going another time) and apparently my five month old hard disc died the most spectacular blaze-of-glory death ever seen. Nothing could be recovered, at all. Although the nice young man did tell me that I could pay someone else "starting at $100, but probably more like $1000" to attempt to get my notes for this semester off of it.