I have been doing some very depressing reading in the last little while. Like a good little librarian, when Nana got sick I ran straight to the stacks to do research on Nursing Homes, since that is exactly where Papa is going to end up now that Nana can't take care of him. Let me share some gems of wisdom with you.
1. The name "Nursing Home" is not the correct nomenclature. Care Facility, please.
2. Alzheimers is both tragically sad and hysterically funny. Really, how can you not laugh when your grandfather puts his pants on backwards like KrisKros?
3. Any family member who gives a damn will feel like a murdering ungrateful son of a bitch for even thinking of letting their loved on set foot in the door of a care home. The only ones spared this miasma of guilt are those assholes who don't care anyhow, which strangely makes them the only people who are really able to make objective decisions.
4. There are two types of books on Nursing Homes. First, there are the kind that actually give you good information on the different types of homes, making the transitions, assuaging your overwhelming guilt, etc. These books tend to be written by medical professionals or researchers. They are often helpful.

Then there are the books that average-joe authors wrote to assuage their guilt for putting their own parents/grandparents in crappy awful nursing homes. These books vacillate unpredictably between telling you that your parent will be just fine, and giving you examples of the horrific treatment their own loved one suffered at the hands of the demonic care aides before gasping out "how could you?" with their dying breath. These books are not helpful.

Sadly, there is no way of knowing which type of book you have got your hands on before you jump onto the rollercoaster ride of either medical detail or heartrending stories of someone else's crappy experience. I would like to send a general notice out to all authors of books on care facilities: IF YOU DON"T HAVE A SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM DONT TELL ME ABOUT IT!!! If my grandfather might be restrained upside down from a chair in the ceiling so that the psycho head spinning care aides can watch him better, and YOU KNOW A WAY TO PREVENT THIS, then by all means, include problem and solution in your book. If you don't have a fucking clue how to prevent said tragic problem, DONT" TELL ME ABOUT IT because it will just make me freak out, and want to send my grandfather to the SPCA instead of the BC health care system.

Ok, i'm quite sorry. That was quite a rant there, please forgive. Signing off,
Guilt-ravaged-moderately-coping-granddaughter.

Not so Ivory After All

I've been reading this book slowly since I went to a session about it at the PSA (Philosophy of Science Association) meeting in November. I went to the session, in part because someone I knew was speaking there, and in part because I actually do have a professional interest in the subject matter (shameless plug goes here), even though it's not what I primarily work on. But after the session, I really really wanted to read the book.

But first some background about what it's actually about. Despite the title, it has almost nothing to do with logic, and everything to do with how the Cold War climate in the US managed to eliminate the social and political side of academic philosophy of science. The cover picture is from the Second International Conference for the Unity of Science, in Copenhagen, 1936. (I know this, because the back cover says so. Don't be too impressed.) Pictured are several prominent philosophers of science, like the wonderful Otto Neurath, who is largely the subject of my co-authored paper, and scientists, like Niels Bohr (front right), as in the Bohr model of the atom you learn in highschool physics class.

The Unity of Science movement was associated with a group of philosophers of science, most of whom had training in at least one scientific discipline such as physics, mathematics, logic, or in Neurath's case, economics, called the Vienna Circle, who have been much misrepresented. Several members of the Vienna Circle were instrumental to a project known as the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, one of whose principal goals was to foster communication and cooperation among scientists of different nations and across different scientific disciplines. The project was conceived with an awareness of the social value of science,
and of the role that science and technology could play in shaping society. The political background informing these projects was largely left-wing; but this caused many of them a great deal of trouble when they immigrated to North America during the war.

And that's the story Reisch tells in the book: how the anti-communist fervor and McCarthyism of the Cold War climate managed to eliminate this social and political aspect from philosophy of science. Several members of the Vienna Circle were investigated by J. Edgar Hoover under suspicion of being communist collaborators, due to their European political backgrounds, and left-wing sympathies. The internationalism built in to the encyclopedia project was viewed as dangerously "red". Left-wing supporters of the unity of science movement were professionally attacked and then marginalised. Unity of science was seen as a totalitarian communist movement - not something to which an academic would want to be linked (if he wanted to keep his job, that is).

But what makes this even more interesting is how timely the book is now, given the current (anti)intellectual climate of the US, as a cautionary tale about how we don't want things ending up again. I really don't think academia is such an ivory tower as it's made out to be in the first place, but it's fascinating to see the political pressure at work trying to force it to be that kind of isolated institution.

This is an excellent book, and a good reminder to those of us in academia to take a lesson from the unity of science movement, that academia does not have to be that isolated institution. And that given that we're lucky enough to have a lot of academic freedoms which these philosophers of science did not have in the 40's and 50's, to be socially responsible about what we do with it.

Notable Books

Nothing new for me to review lately, since I've mostly been buried in end-of-term work. However, the New York Times did put out its list of the year's 100 most notable books.

Though two which would make my list too are Arthur and George, by Julian Barnes, and Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays, by David Foster Wallace.

the Chairman would not be amused...

Ok. Repeat after me.

"I am very glad I never lived in China during the Cultural Revolution. I am especially glad I was never an uneducated Chinese soldier during the 1970's hoping the Russians were not on the verge of attacking."

Got that? Good.

Because if you didn't get it, you will after reading Ha Jin.

I really recommend reading Ha Jin as being able to capture the bloody unfairness of life under a huge monolithic bureaucracy, where people live under the constant threat of being labelled as "counterrevolutionaries". Because there are Rules. Rules which aren't always clearly defined, but which can't be violated. You get a picture of an incredible perverse culture, where people live afraid of being denouced by others as being bourgeois liberals, even though it's not always clear what is necessary to be a True Revolutionary. What really makes the unfairness stick out, though, is that it's almost never explicitly discussed. There's just a big ugly Way Things Are in the background of the entire book.

Ocean of Words is technically a set of war stories, but there's almost no physical fighting that goes on. They're really stories about barely literate Chinese soldiers trying to navigate a world with rather complex norms, while at the same time preparing for an enemy who may or may not attack. There's just so much uncertainty, it's painful. And yet somehow they go on.

Also in the same vein is his more recent novel War Trash, which is a lot grimmer and harder to read than Oceans of Words, which at least leaves you with hope that some of these young soldiers will go on to lead somewhat decent lives. War Trash takes place, for the most part, among Chinese prisoners in Korean POW camps, and you just can't expect any sunshine or fluffy kittens out of that. (Unless, of course, the sunshine is burning your vulnerable flesh as you trek through the desert with no water, and the kittens are actually sabre-toothed tiger kittens who are preparing to tear you limb from limb.)

And the moral is...

Ugly fish is an excellent, if totally amoral, picture book. Ugly fish starts off as king of his tank, and every time a new fishy little friend joins him, he shows off his lovely abode before eating the unfortunate tankmate. Well, once all the friends are eaten, Ugly Fish comes to realize that he is lonely. Perhaps eating all those other fish was a poor idea. Think you smell a moral? Yes, so did I. I could not have been more mistaken.

Ugly Fish is pleased when a new tankmate, Shiny Fish, joins him. He proudly shows off his tank to the much larger Shiny Fish, who likes the tank just fine, thanks, and polishes off Ugly fish in short order. The end.

What, you say? What about character development, learning from mistakes? Couldn't Ugly Fish have found a non-violent solution, and seen the error of his ways? What will this book teach our children? The answer, my friends, is absolutely nothing. They will learn not to make mistakes at all, and go to bed haunted by nightmares of Shiny Fish eating them up because they were mean to the kid sitting next to them in kindergarten. You, however, will be howling with laughter on the floor, which is a very good reason to read this picturebook.

Ambulance Idiot

Never have I disagreed so throughly with both Booklist and the general reading public in my assessment of a book. Ambulance Girl is the "heartwarming" "inspirational" and "honest" tale of a fat, middle aged, phobic, depressed woman (all her words, not mine) who decides, along with her therapist, that a job as a small town volunteer EMT will be lift her out of her slump. She proceeds to sign on to the local firehouse (in the states, municipal fire stations=EMS services for small towns) and drags her whining ass through the minimal required training. Upon "graduation", she recounts tales of such astounding ineptitude that i'm shocked she wasn't fired immediately on publication, or at least sued. Although her unprofessional bumbling improves marginally by the end of the book, it is made up for through a sharp increase in self importance and woe-is-meing over the emotional stress and strange hours that are (hello!?!) part of the job.

There are so many things I hate about this book, I am having trouble organizing them. Perhaps point form will help.

1. If you have serious emotional and mental illnesses, coupled with a physical disability that prevents you from moving with agility, you are NOT a good candidate for an emergency services job. Even if the service is starving for people and willing to accept you while holding its nose, you should probably do your hapless patients a favour and donate some money to the service instead. People's lives are depending on you being fit, alert, and competent.
2. If you work in the medical field, you should be aware of something called confidentiality. The author, Jane Stern, has a professional reputation as a writer. People know her work. They can find out where she lives. Therefore, they can figure out who the people are that she writes about. This presents a problem. Either she is flagrantly and outrageously violating the privacy of her patients for financial gain, or she has lied lied lied about her exploits for financial gain. Neither option really promotes a professional view of EMT's.
3. A professional complaint. Some of the stories in this book are, shall we say, padded for effect. But hey, in the words of James Frey, it could have happened. I prefer my non-fiction to be, well, non-fiction. Is that so wrong?

Anyhow, the upshot is that this strange and misguided woman has done everyone but herself a disservice by elbowing into Emergency Medical Services. To read a book filled with self aggrandizing drek about her misuse of the job was annoying in the extreme. Being a paramedic is a tough and rewarding job. It demands commitment and a tenacious will to work without glory. And in the end, the thing that really sunk this book for me was her astonishing lack of professionalism.

I love you, Nanas!

Ok, this is my first stab at Manga review, so please bear with me as I stumble through it. Nana is a Shojo Beat serial that reads like a soap opera for young adults. No! Wait! I mean that in a good way! Since Shojo Beat is VIZ media's "manga from the heart", it's really no surprise that the 2 stories contained separately in this publication are all about the loves and losses of Nana Komatsu and Nana Osaki. Both young women are hovering on the brink of adulthood, and both end up moving to Tokyo for love. But there, the similarities end. I read Nana 1 tonight, and despite the utter silliness of Nana K and the posturing bad-assedness of Nana O, I ended up rooting for both. The girls are just so perfectly teenaged; they do stupid things, waffle and whine and take ridiculous moral stands, throw love away and date the wrong men...but every once in a while, they both display an inner strength and determination that makes it all worthwhile. They make the same mistakes as I did, or could have, and they recover from them with a fragility and fortitude that I hope I recognize.

Reading this installment was literally like watching the Nanas grow up, and I can't believe it, but I'm now addicted. I *MUST* read the next installment, as soon as possible. This first book is really just a prologue, telling you about how Nana K gets dumped by an older slimeball and mends her broken heart, and how Nana O gets left behind in a small town by her rock star boyfriend. Both Nana's end the installment by moving to Tokyo, and the forthcoming books will tell about how they meet and become best friends.

Audrey, these books are so good that next time I come over I'm going to bring them for you to read. You can return them at any Victoria public library, because BC just instituted a program where libraries have to ship returned books all over the province for borrowers. Nice, huh?

In which our heroine rants again

I might still have time to review something else more Halloween-themed, but I did just read Howl's Moving Castle, by Diana Wynne Jones, recently, and I thought at the very least I could perform the dual function of plugging an ever-so-fantastic author, and talking about an issue I have with fiction, which is the idea of the Strong Female Character.

Diana Wynne Jones does this right.

Many many authors (and TV/movie writers) do this all wrong. I think a lot of people somehow think that a strong female character has to have everything. Everything! She has to be thin and beautiful (and if you're Heinlein, at least a 36C bra size), brilliant (if I had a nickel for every heroine with a photographic memory...), possibly some kind of spectacular fighting ability even though the author has gone to great pains to describe how slight and willowy her build is, and you're fairly certain she can't weigh more than 100 lbs (and I say this is ridiculous, as a small-ish woman with non-trivial martial arts ability, knowing full well that it is damn hard to fight someone a lot bigger than you, even if you do know what you're doing, which is a whole other rant for me), and assorted other perfections associated with the storyline.

Probably magical powers. She might be an elf. Or at least, she has elfin features, which is pretty much the same thing, right?

It's as though they're afraid that if they don't give their heroine all possible perfections, nobody will recognise her as the heroine.

Diana Wynne Jones knows that those who wear A cups and weigh more than 100 lbs, without photographic memories, or surprising physical ability, can still make excellent heroines, because there's just more to it than that. It gives the rest of us hope.

Sophie Hatter, who never thought she was all that pretty or special anyway, is turned into a 90 year old woman by a witch's curse. So for the majority of the book, the heroine is not especially beautiful (except, you know, inside, which doesn't manifest itself in any paeans), gets aches and pains all the time, and never kicks anyone's ass, except possibly through the magic of cleaning supplies. And she is a fantastic and wonderful character in a really excellent story. There's a Miyazaki movie now (which I also love) based on the book, but with some fairly significant differences. But in both, Sophie is still a wonderful character, and a perfect example of a female heroine who doesn't just feel like a blow-up doll, or something out of Weird Science.

Thanks, Diana Wynne Jones, for being generally great.

Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro's new book, Never Let Me Go, is an undercover masterpiece of horror. Kathy H. is a 31 year old caregiver living in England, and this book follows the nostalgic reminisces of her childhood spent in an English boarding school. Slowly, we come to realize that Kathy's comfortable life is not at all what we assumed from the first half of the book; our initial assumptions are terribly wrong. By the middle of the book, I wanted to shout a warning to Kathy the child, and to shake Kathy the adult out of her inculcated apathy. The complete shocking horror of this book lies in the characters' inaction when faced with a fate worse (although including) certain death. Reading Never Let Me Go is rather like watching a lobster boil to death in a pot of water, hardly noticing as you turn up the heat. I'm trying not to give too much away, because really, you should read this book and give yourself the worst halloween nightmares ever.

La pipi della zebra

oh, the things you discover when you travel to foreign lands. Being a librarian, i discovered this book. Actually, rob discovered it, as he was transfixed by the sight of a cartoon zebra with a rubber-hose-like penis, peeing all over the cover of this hardcover children's reader. For the uninitiated, readers would cover ages 6-8, roughly.

Anyhow, we found this book in Rome, in a tiny bookshop near the pantheon, and although it is entirely in italian, the gist is fairly easy to get. In translation, the first page says...this zebra is a zebra with a little problem. He pisses all the time. Psssssssssssss.... (the accompanying pictures portray a gleeful zebra urinating happily in a piazza).

First the unfortunate zebra pees in a restaraunt, into his friends duck and pig's soup and dessert, respectively. Next, he pees out the window onto their heads, to their dismay. Repulsively, he pees into his bath, and overflows it, and the apartments below. The lovely pen and ink illustrations of these events invariably show zebra with a beatific smile on his face as he contemplates his spouting nether regions. I especially liked the well drawn and substantial ball sack that the illustrator added. Nothing like anatomical correctness in a reader.

Anyhow, by now you also get the gist. The story progresses to pig and duck banishing zebra for fear he will overflow the whole town; a fire breaks out; only zebra's unending stream of urine can save the day! Zebra returns in triumph and is made the fire chief, and everyone is issued regulation umbrellas.

A happy ending? yes, except for the poor librarian who accidentally orders this title on spec from a publisher, and gets fired due to patron complaints when little johnny tries to pee on his sister's head. My favourite part of all is the tiny illustration on the endpaper of the bakc page, where zebra, wearing his new fire hat, pees out the sun. Good job zebra.

i'm too tired to connect a link, so the isbn for interested parties is 9788880331841. Do see if you can find a cover illustration! Sadly this book will never be release

What did Godel Prove?

It's hard being a logician sometimes. You tell people that you work in logic and philosophy of mathematics, and they immediately assume that you either have nothing comprehensible or nothing interesting to say to them. Sometimes both. There's definitely a view of the world that there are Mathy People and The Rest of Us, and all this math stuff can be shied away from like mad. But that rant doesn't actually have anything to do with the book that I'm talking about.

Kurt Godel, in the 1930's, proved two of the most important results for logic and the philosophy of mathematics, (the nice thing about a relatively young discipline is that you can pick out these milestones more easily), which were the Incompleteness Theorems for arithmetic. Arithmetic, if it is consistent, cannot prove its own consistency. And furthermore, there isn't any systematic way of laying out axioms for arithmetic so that you could prove everything. These are just rough statements, admittedly, but it's hard to make them precise if you don't know much about logic. And that's probably why these theorems get so abused. (They really do.)

So when I get students in my intro logic class wondering what's up with this Godel guy I mentioned (I show them pictures of famous logicians and mathematicians sometimes), I went back to this book called Godel's Proof, by Ernest Nagel and James Newman, which I'd once read when I was trying to understand the proof for the first time. It strikes me as a really solid introduction to the proof for readers without much technical background. You have to be willing to read some logical notation, naturally, but they give a lot of intuition behind things, and suppress enough of the picky details (and the proof itself has many) to let the big ideas come through. And for anyone who really wants more details, they put a lot of extras in the footnotes.

And there you go. I teach logic for a living, so I want to review the occasional logic book. Math and logic, unlike most other academic disciplines, seem to be things that people will happily profess to hating. (How often do you hear someone say, "I hate math. I failed Math 11." without any sense that they might actually want to be good at math. Ok, now how often do you hear someone say, "I hate reading. I failed English 11." without remorse at their lack of ability to read? See my point?)

Math is interesting and makes science work, and logic is what makes you make sense when you say things. So read about this stuff too.

Oooooooooooh, I'm so Scaaaaaared!

Scaredy Squirrel, by Melanie Watt, insists that everyone wash their hands with antibacterial soap before reading his book. Ever met a rodent with OCD? Read right on! Scaredy squirrel never leaves his nut tree because he is a furry little control freak who just can't deal with the possibility of meeting up with any of the several things that terrify him out in the big wide world. These things include, but are not limited to, tarantulas, poison ivy, green martians, germs, sharks, and killer bees.

Good point, Scaredy Squirrel.

But one day, Scaredy Squirrel's comfy routine gets wrecked by an event that not even his carefully stocked emergency kit can save him from! A killer (ahem) bee approaches, and as he flails around wildly, he falls (?) from his tree to his death. OK, he glides from his tree to a bush where he scares himself so much he plays dead for 2 hours, then climbs back up. Scaredy Squirrel ends the book by making some big changes to his safe little life. (ok, not so big...read this book dammit, and find out!)

Cutest book ever. Written for neurotic adults who want to feel better about themselves and preternaturally tightassed preschoolers. And Audrey, do you remember a certain jumping-off-roof incident that occurred somewhere south of the border when we were 14, due to a killer, enormous, deadly, coming-right-at-me bumblebee? hmmmm. I wonder why i loved this book so much...

Note to readers; this is a picturebook. I will review anything I want to in this blog. You too should read more kid's lit.

Best Ferry Reading Ever

I feel vaguely guilty doing this book review, since it's kind of like stealing the words that Maryn was just about to guess when we were playing Taboo. She lent me this book that she'd been talking about, called Simple Pleasures, by Madeleine Thien, so I'd have something to read on the ferry ride back from Vancouver, and it was definitely the best thing I've read in quite a while.

These stories are amazing and incredibly touching. Admittedly, part of what made it hit so close to home for me was that several of the main characters were women and girls with Chinese ancestry, raised in Canada, and Vancouver, no less. So that made things all that much more personal for me. But the impact, I think, goes way beyond that, and I don't think that you need to have a particular cultural or ethnic background to appreciate them. A word of warning, though: they may make you want to cry on public transit, so be warned where you read them. My steely exterior got me through, though. See if yours does.

Warning: graphic content

This is heroine number two signing in. Yes, when Audrey and I get together, we cook up the most amazing (often illegal) plans. Yesterday I read Neil Gaiman's Sandman: The Doll's House while floating around on an air mattress on Buntzen lake. And yes, being a librarian gives me absolute freedom to do with books all the things I forbid you to do. This includes, but is not limited to, activities such as reading in the bath, reading while eating sloppy joes and fizzy pop, reading while lounging around on floatation devices, and reading while seriously impaired.

Anyhow, back to the book. Love the story, hate the art. Need more detail? I thought this book was a tease. Gorgeously horrifying photo art on the cover and front pages, creepily blurred and superimposed introductory text, followed by...crap. Art that I would expect from a failed out DC comics hack with a mild brain injury. Even Gaiman's consistently excellent storytelling can't save this graphic novel from crapdom. I only read it cuz i was trapped on a floaty thing; normally i bail out immediately from such a yawnorama.

But don't be deterred; Sandman comics in general are good. Find out more about this generally superior series at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman_(DC_Comics/Vertigo). Just don't bother with this particular edition. Instead, check out Kabuki, David Mack's hauntingly slow paced graphic novel at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabuki_%28comic%29. Enjoy!

Introduction.

The idea for this blog came out on a sunny afternoon in Victoria, BC, when the heroines of your story realised that the magic box over on the desk, which was connected to the Internet, could save them the trouble of scrawling book recommendations on scraps of paper found at the bottom of their purse. Everyone knows that those scraps of paper are never to be found until the ink has become more or less illegible, and the person who owns the bag can't even remember who wrote the note in the first place.

So instead, what their little brains full of post-graduate education mustered up was the idea of starting a group blog, where they could just post about the more notable books they read. They're very smart, you see.

And for the record:
Maryn thinks Audrey should try out Gillian Cross and Robin Hobb.
Audrey thinks Maryn should try out Kelly Link and Haruki Murakami.