Shut Up, I'm Talking

For all those who have ever stumbled, bluffed, or bullshitted their way into a job that they're supremely underqualified for...I give you Gregory Levey! Greg is a second year law student when he applies for an internship at the Israeli embassy in New York. After surmounting the predictable bureaucratic runaround (and surviving a series of hilariously random security interviews and questions) he finds himself the new speechwriter for the Israeli UN delegation. This seems a little strange; yes, he's a Jew, but he's also a Canadian citizen with zero ties to Israel. At first he can't believe his luck, but Greg soon finds that the Embassy is populated by a pack of neurotic, lazy, shiftless weirdos. For example, the librarian is the only person in the place with a lock on his door, and he spends his days screaming at invisible people behind it. The head of security is convinced that his Japanese roomate is a Syrian spy. The foreign minister can only be given speeches with sentences less than six words long, and Greg repeatedly finds himself representing Israel on the UN council at strategic meetings and votes. Did I mention he's not even Israeli?

Now, this might seem like a recipe for disaster to you and me, but Greg soon finds himself promoted...to the Prime Minister's office in Jerusalem! Of course, the madness is only heightened at headquarters, and soon Greg is reduced to slipping Seinfeld references into the Prime Minister's speeches just to keep himself sane.

A horrifying but hilarious look at the slapdash, off the cuff political structures behind the Israel we think we know.

The Ten Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer

This is honestly the most depressing piece of self-therapy that I have ever read. I'm sorry to not post for so long and then post a rant, but honestly, i thought this book might be good, and I became more and more pissed off as I read it.

Some background. I've been thinking about having kids lately (spawning, as my sister so genteely puts it) and so I"ve been consumed by a frenzied need to research and prepare. (was I always like this, audrey? so preparing?) Anyhow, I've been reading whatever I can get my hands on about moms who combine work and kids. It seems like such a shitty balancing act, and before I read this book I was leaning heavily towards the realm of working only part time. Seems like the author made that choice, and is bitterly, resentfully, snidely, unproductively, meanly regretful.

The book follows the lives of four or five friends (I was never interested enough to count exactly how many) as they galumph around sponging off their overworked and dramatically flawed husbands. The complain nonstop. They bemoan the fact that their 10 year old kids don't need mommy anymore. They pine for the sense of meaning work gave them. And yet they DON"T GO OUT AND FUCKING WORK!!

Instead, they have boring and dreary conversations with each other about their boring and dreary lives. They become resigned to mediocre sex and mediocre marriages. They have failed and boring affairs. They are Boring. Eventually some of them go out and make halfhearted changes and get undesirable and boring jobs that they don't care about. I didn't care either. I wish I could unread this book.

The worst part was the air of inevitability that the author gave to these women and their shitty half ass lives. This is a book about a bunch of disillusioned, depressed women who don't like their lives and should have made better decisions. The message? I"m not sure. It could have been "don't have kids, they will fuck up your life and drain your soul", or maybe "middle age is the end of meaning". What crap.

News flash: if your life sucks, change it. If your husband is a jerk, dump him. Better yet, don't marry him in the first place. Life is a maddening, jungly brilliant explosion of change and growth. Ageing is not a disaster or a decay. It is a fabulous journey into the unknown, where no one has ever gone before. Disaster is opportunity. Every moment counts, and if you treat them like they don't, it's your own damn fault. I hated this book and its sad, lame characters; they were like literary entropy aimed directly at middle aged women. My life isn't like that. Yours isn't either. No one's has to be.

Halloween Post II

Here's scary post II.

I picked up Cosmopolis, by Don DeLillo from the public library as an audiobook to help stave off the godawful boredom I feel when I'm on long runs. Except what I forgot is that godawful boredom is not best staved off by a godawful book. It really bothers me that DeLillo is thought of as such a brilliant author. I know this isn't his best work, but honestly, it's appalling and listening to it almost put me off running, because it's hard to run with a little voice in your head screaming "Shut up!" every 30 seconds.

I've tried to make my peace with him before, given that people I respect seem to find him important in some way that I've never been able to understand, because it's always such a struggle to get through anything he writes. His characters are written entirely unsympathetically, or at least in such a way that I can't muster up even a scrap of emotional investment in them. I hear people say he's witty and insightful nonetheless, but why?

The experience I obtained from Cosmopolis, running aside, could probably have been equally obtained by parking myself in the kitchen (stone cold sober) at a party between the hours of 2am and 5am, with a small handful of stoned misogynists with enormous egos, asking them earnestly how they really feel about international currency markets, world music, automobiles, sex, haircuts, and green tea ice cream.

Halloween Post I

In honour of Halloween, I'm going to write about two scary things, which are coincidentally, the two books that I have most recently finished. The first one is this book by Virginia Valian, a psychologist at Hunter College, about the question of why there are so few women in prestigious positions. In particular, it uses the idea of a schema (like a stereotype, but with fewer negative connotations) and a whole lot of research studies on the subject to explore various reasons why women might be held back in various areas.

This book should really be read by anyone interested in feminism, and should be read to anyone who doesn't think that sexism is still a factor in today's ever so enlightened society. Schemas affect the way in which we treat people and the way in which we evaluate them. Small yet continual pieces of negative reinforcement and negative evaluations result in a huge disadvantage for many women for whom their gender schema and the schema for their profession clash. (As a totally random example: university professor.) But here's the thing: almost all of this bias is unconscious and unintended.

People think that sexism isn't a problem anymore because we have laws against discrimination, and nobody would get taken seriously if they said, "Don't promote her because she's a woman." But we do take seriously statements such as, "Don't promote her because she lacks leadership ability." That's a real reason not to promote someone and doesn't sound sexist in the least. But it's not so simple, when you look at the research. Valian quotes a lot of studies in which our pre-existing schemas cause an evaluation bias. For instance, in a study in which identical resumes were sent out, some with male names attached, others with female names, people tended to rate the resumes with male names more highly. But if bias exists there, why are we so sure that our everyday evaluations are so impartial, and that we live in a meritocracy unblemished by prejudice?

There is so much more to this book than I could possibly touch on here, but it's amazing and eerie. At least, the section on academia was spookily accurate (see, this is a Halloween review) with respect to my own experiences. One of the anecdotes Valian uses, about an academic talk, to illustrate that unconscious judgments about who in the audience is likely to have a worthwhile comment, was almost identical to an experience I'd had a few weeks earlier and remarked on. (This is a case of a woman's comment being brushed off, while other comments made by men were taken seriously. In my case, what made it stand out was the fact that one of my male colleagues made the almost identical comment later in the talk and got an extremely different response.)

Anyway, the book is amazing, and is both scientific and readable. The situation outlined is an awfully depressing one if you're a woman in a position like mine, but isn't it better to know what you might be up against?

Is it just me, or is it hot in here?

People don't like change. But without it, Brian Fagan demonstrates in his conveniently forgotten "The Long Summer: How Climate Change Civilization" that you wouldn't be sitting at a computer reading this right now. In fact you might still well be sitting around a fire chipping stone tools cursing that you have to go out into the snow tomorrow to kill a mammoth. Again. Using science and sociology, Fagan points out in his third best seller that the earth has been getting warmer for the past 5,000 years and it isn't because of all the coal China is burning. In fact, the earth has been variously an iceball and a tropical swamp without any help from us. Quite the opposite. In this convincing and entertaining read, we learn that human development and domination of the earth has only been possible due to the natural changes in climate over our recent evolution. Without the natural warming of the earth we wouldn't have left Africa, collected crops and animals in the Middle East, and then spread out across the globe. For those of you who can't get enough of Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse) this work seals the deal on how fate, and not necessarily our large craniums, has put us on the top of the food chain. This work is pre-global warming hype and should be on the list of anyone who's gone to the trouble of turning off the lights or buying a hybrid. It challenges what the media and scientists are saying and provides a solid position for anyone wanting to make their own informed decision on where we fit in a warming planet, and just how much it may have helped us along.

Stephenson, the father of Cyberpunk

Oh Lord, I have committed the cardinal sin of bloggers. I have left my blog for months without posting squat! Forgive me, for I have been adulterously posting on other blogs (work ones, no less!).

But now, I have returned to thee, O blog of my heart. I present...Snow Crash! This classic sci fi novel was written in 1992, but reads as if it had been written tomorrow. Stephenson has an incredible, Orwellian gift for accurately describing the future of technology. He covers nanotechnology, biotechnology, computer viruses, and the metaverse (he coined the word) with startling plausibility, and somehow manages to roll this all seamelessly into a smart, sexy cyberpunk story that rolls along at breakneck speed. His social commentary is somehow as spot on as his technological augury; you'll cry rather than laugh when you read about an america patchworked with corporate-franchise city states, and the hilariously commercialized jails.

But all this is merely the bones of a great story. I was totally sold already, but became a Stephenson junkie when he somehow managed to roll in a layer of Sumerian history and linguistics. The story hinges on Chomsky's idea of deep grammar, and goes one step further to imply what might happen when that deep grammer were accessed after language imprinting had occurred.

I think that this book is what sparked my deep interest in linguistics (I first read it several years ago) and Stephenson is obviously drawing on ideas about bicameral brain theory and deep grammar, with some biblical and protohistoric language theory thrown in. His scope, and his mastery of divergent disciplines, is amazing.

In short, Stephenson writes as if he knew the inside of my head. Every word in this book was fascinating, and the story never flagged. He is a true futurist, and I think that instead of Gibson, we should be touting Stephenson as the father of cyberpunk (he's much more readable). Audrey, you have to read this book. I will come and make you sorry if you don't.

Life (but not the universe or everything)

I think this is the book on paleontology that Bill Bryson would have written if Bill Bryson was a paleontologist (and that's a good thing, in my opinion).

Fortey's book, as the subtitle tells you, is a natural history of the first four billion years on earth. He starts with the earliest single-celled organisms, and ends with the appearance of human civilisation, and in a nice twist, spends roughly a proportionate number of pages on each era. Since this implies that at least 2/3 of the book gets devoted to trilobites, prokaryotes, and creatures with about the charisma of slime molds (such as slime molds themselves), you might think it would get pretty boring pretty quickly. But Fortey manages to strike a great balance between amusing anecdotes about scientists (including himself) and actually telling you about the creatures involved. Too much of the former, and it would seem frivolous; too much of the latter, and you might as well just read a textbook. By the time you get to dinosaurs, you've really got a sense of just how late in the game they turned up. It goes without saying that humans barely make an appearance.

Basically, the writing is very entertaining without coming across as condescending, and it makes the whole thing extremely readable for non-scientists. Three cheers for fossils!

Not Enough Algebra!

Well, I was hoping to have posted something in May, but for some reason, just never managed it. Well, maybe it had something to do with moving, but I think it was also just that I didn't end up reading anything I really wanted to review. Ok, I did read Middlemarch, but I couldn't think of any way to review it that didn't come across as a 2nd year English essay, so I didn't.

And I admit, I'm only reviewing The Algebraist to admit that I only picked this up because I liked the title, math girl that I am, and was subsequently saddened by the significant lack of algebra in the book (or even a character who actually was an algebraist). But I guess you can't have everything, so I won't complain too much about false advertising.

So instead of a math-influenced sci-fi novel, I got space opera, and fairly entertaining space opera, all told. Though sometimes I suspect that if Banks turned in excerpts of his books to a highschool English, he'd get put on some sort of "To Watch" list, because he writes torture and general sadism amazingly well. Way, way too well. But as a science fiction novel, it felt to me more like having someone take me by the shoulders and shake me a lot, while yelling, "Fuck! Fucking crazy aliens!" in my face. (Seriously, the characters in his book say "fuck" an awful lot. Do they still say that in the future? Anyway.) Here's a sample of the general over-the-top-ness of it all:

`What', Fassin heard a nearby Dweller say, quite quietly but distinctly through the pandemonium, `the fuck is that?'

(Another dark Mercatorial ship, another silver Dreadnought, ripped to shreds and blossoming in nuclear fire respectively. Another pair of Dreadnoughts shaking in the first beam-fall of the violet ray flicking from on high.)

And on the screen opposite, looking downwards into the wide bowl of the storm's dead heart, a huge darkly red-glowing globe was rising from the sump gases of the storm floor, dragging a great flute of gas after it like some absurdly steady fireball. It was kilometres across and striated, banded like a miniature gas-giant, so that for one crazed instant Fassin thought he was watching the palace of the Hierchon Ormilla floating smoothly upwards into the fray.

And so on. So was it fun to read? Sure. But not without a lot of moments of "okay, enough already", and really just not enough math.