The Book Thread! What are you reading?

[Idol Tenshoku Ondo]

I've been reading Murder on the Orient Express, I somehow never got spoiled on the end, and find it a fun read. I was never a big mystery reader but the book landed in my possession from a family member, now I want to read And Then There Were None after! Speaking of spoilers, ATTWN's title is itself a spoiler yet it's one of the most circulated books in the anglosphere. Makes ya think.

[boinsie]

Oh wow, that reminds me--I read ATTWN a few years back, and intended to continue down the Agatha Christie train with The Orient Express, but it somehow got put on the back burner. Time to go hit up Libby!

Speaking of spoilers, ATTWN's title is itself a spoiler yet it's one of the most circulated books in the anglosphere. Makes ya think.

Even the UK's original offensive title was a "spoiler", but I feel like both are used moreso as dramatic irony. You know it's going to happen, but not HOW it's going to happen!

[erilaz]

The Modern Lovers by Sean L. Maloney, one of the volumes in Bloomsbury's 33⅓ series.

It's ostensibly a study of the Modern Lovers' debut album, which the blurb on the book's back cover rightly describes as "One of punk rock's foundational documents". A considerable amount of space on the book's 139 pages, however, is devoted to stuff about the political and cultural history of Boston in the '60s and '70s. Sure, it's useful for context, but there's so much of it that it seems like padding. I guess you do what you have to do, if you're writing a book-length examination of an album whose vocalist and primary songwriter rarely grants interviews.

I find it cute and charming when Jonathan Richman spells out "G-I-R-L-F-R-E-N" on the album in question, but the parade of misspelled words and apostrophic atrocities in the book causes me to groan and shake my head constantly. A few examples:

"The city had been a principle location in the Folk Revival...." (p. 8)
"Steve Paul ... wants the band to open a show for Edgar Winters...." (p. 72; his name is Edgar Winter)
"Rumor is Aerosmith payed to play at Max's Kansas City." (p. 82)

As for the apostrophes, there are plenty of misplaced ones, as in "Parson's wake" with reference to Gram Parsons (p. 91). More frequent, however, are the opening single quotes that appear in place of apostrophes, as in "May of ‘67" (p. 11). Yes, I know that Microsoft Word does that automatically when changing straight quotes to smart quotes, but that just means that you have to put in more of an effort to get it right.

[erilaz]

Just finished:

A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order by Judith Flanders. It is what it says it is, but also more than that. It's really a history of classification and categorization in general. Yes, these things have a history.

Just started:

The Chinese Typewriter: A History by Thomas S. Mullaney. Creating a typewriter for a language that uses an alphabet with two or three dozen letters is one thing, but creating a typewriter for a language that uses a script with thousands of different characters is something else entirely. This was an issue in the days before computers.

Both of these books are typical of the sort of stuff that interests me: Communication and associated technologies, yes, but especially the backroads, not the mainstream. I'm drawn toward the obscure, the underappreciated, the neglected, and the obsolete — from the decipherment of forgotten scripts to artificial international languages to collectible telephone cards.

[erilaz]

Just finished:

Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film by Carol J. Clover. This is the book that introduced the term "final girl" to the vocabulary of film criticism. Very interesting and influential, but the lit-crit jargon and Freudian psychobabble made it a rather hard slog for me. Joe Bob Briggs gave it his highest rating, though: "Four stars. Joe Bob says check it out."

Carol was my professor when I took a course on Icelandic family sagas at UC Berkeley some thirty years ago. The subject matter is not as far removed from slasher flicks and rape-revenge movies as you might think, though. The focus of the seminar was Brennu-Njáls saga, the 13th-century tale of Njáll Þorgeirsson, who tries to maintain peace while his family and neighbors perpetuate a cycle of violent revenge killings.

Recently started:

A World Without "Whom": The Essential Guide to Language in the BuzzFeed Age by Emmy J. Favilla. Going in, I wasn't sure how I would react to this book, but I find myself largely agreeing with it. Favilla's statement on p. 12 encapsulates my own feelings perfectly: "It's fine to flout 'the rules' when you have a solid understanding of what the rules are and a calculated reason for doing so—for tone, for humor, for readability."

Re "whom" specifically: I am perfectly comfortable saying (or writing) either "To whom are you speaking?" or "Who you talkin' to?" depending on the social context (the register, as linguists call it). But using "whom" where "who" would be grammatically correct drives me bonkers, because hypercorrection annoys the crap out of me. I often see examples of this on a stamp collecting forum that I frequent, such as "Whom issued these bogus stamps?"

[erilaz]

Just finished:

Another volume in Bloomsbury's 33⅓ series, namely Dig Me Out by Jovana Babović, discussing Sleater-Kinney's classic third album, its making, and its impact. This was considerably more engaging and informative than the Modern Lovers volume that I read a few months ago.

Although the copy editing was far better in this volume, a few gaffes nevertheless made their way into print, such as the song title "Heart Machine" on p. 44 (which should be "Heart Factory") and a reference to the "John Spencer Blues Explosion" (which should be "Jon..."). I'm inclined to forgive an out-of-towner for referring to Berkeley's famed 924 Gilman Street as "the Gilman" (locals commonly call it "Gilman," but never with a definite article), but Babović's music journalism cred takes a beating when she calls a certain legendary NYC venue "CBCG's" on p. 75 and "CBGC's" on the very next page — neither of which is correct.

Recently started:

The Early Runic Language of Scandinavia by Hans Frede Nielsen, which examines the language of the early runic inscriptions (circa A.D. 200–500) and attempts to find its place in the geography of the early Germanic dialects as reconstructed by historical linguists. Nielsen mentions my username, which appears on the Lindholmen amulet, on p. 284.

[erilaz]

Punk USA: The Rise and Fall of Lookout Records by Kevin Prested. It's not just a history of a record label, it's also largely a history of the East Bay punk rock scene from the late 1980s until Lookout's demise in 2011. 924 Gilman Street (see my previous post) looms large in the book's pages, and reading this book has been something of a trip down memory lane for me. I've seen a number of the bands mentioned in the book, and a few of my friends and acquaintances were interviewed for it. For those interested in the subject, I also recommend the 2017 documentary film, Turn It Around: The Story of East Bay Punk.

I can't really claim to have been part of the Gilman scene myself, though I did see quite a few bands there in 1989–90, mostly punk bands sharing the bill with Kamala and the Karnivores and neo-folky bands sharing the bill with Penelope Houston. I was at Gilman for the final show by local legends Operation Ivy in May 1989. The previous month, I was at Kamala and the Karnivores' final show (until their 2017 reunion) at the Veterans Memorial Center in Davis. The headlining act at that show was a punk-pop trio called Sweet Children, whom I saw two more times at Gilman in the next two months — after they had changed their name to Green Day.

[erilaz]

Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science by Martin Gardner (Second Edition, 1957) — An interesting and often very amusing look at various individuals and movements in the history of pseudoscience.

Ever heard of Alfred William Lawson? He apparently coined the word "aircraft" in 1908 and invented, designed, and built the world's first passenger airliner in 1919. He was also an extraordinary crackpot. As the "Supreme Head and First Knowlegian of the University of Lawsonomy, at Des Moines, Iowa," he taught a theory of physics in which "there is neither energy nor empty space, but only substances of varying density. Substances of heavy density tend to move toward substances of lesser density through the operation of two basic Lawsonian principles—Suction and Pressure. The law governing this movement is called Penetrability." Light is a "substance drawn into the eye by Suction", and gravity is the "pull of the earth's Suction." Lawson also taught that two types of microscopic creatures live within the human brain: Menorgs, which "build and operate the mental instruments within the cells of the mental system", and Disorgs, which infect and destroy those instruments.

Even though many of the "cranks" discussed in the book have vanished into the mists of history, the book can still be very instructive for the present day. You may never have heard of Soviet geneticist Trofim D. Lysenko (I hadn't), but his story can still serve as a cautionary tale of "how quickly and easily a science can be corrupted when ignorant political leaders deem themselves competent to arbitrate scientific disputes."

This book may be 66 years old, but the lessons it teaches are still valid and its chapters could easily be expanded to include many more recent developments. For example, the chapter on Dianetics, as originally published in 1952, does not even contain the word Scientology, which only appears in the supplementary notes to the second edition, where Gardner writes, "I have made no effort to keep up with Hubbard's views since he plunged dianetics into occultism...." Recent anti-vax, horse paste, bleach-injecting idiocy would be right at home in the chapters on Medical Cults and Medical Quacks. The chapter entitled Apologists for Hate, despite some outmoded terminology, is still terrifyingly relevant.

[Zunu]

Wow, thanks for that, it's so nostalgic!

Spoiler: show

Gardner was one of my favorite authors when I was a kid. Although his degree was in philosophy, he was likely most well known for putting out recreational mathematics books that were compilations of columns he wrote for Scientific American way back in the day. He probably inspired a whole generation or two of young scientists and mathematicians with fun, lightweight articles on polyominoes, (sort of the progenitor of Tetris), Lewis Carroll's contributions to math and logic, and assorted takes on graph theory, cryptography, topology, and much more.

Regarding his interest in debunking fads, it could be said he was part of a pantheon of skeptics that included magician James Randi (his Flim-Flam! is a thematically related book) and Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World perhaps being his primary contribution in this area.) While I 100% agree that the lessons in his book and others like it are still extremely, desperately relevant, the reason for that being the case is because, sadly, the skeptics' mission to educate the public was largely unsuccessful. The ability of bullshit to propagate and multiply has vastly exceeded any efforts to rein it in, and as a society we have become vastly more susceptible to misinformation than we were a half century ago. And now with AI's ability to instantly create entire fake narratives on demand, what chance do we have? E.g, for kicks I just asked Bing AI a completely bs "woo" question and got an authentic looking "factual" response with only the mildest of caveats at the end:



Looks legit. It's like my own private Quora! (Disclaimer, hope I'm not offending anyone by saying the answer should be "NO crystals are best at warding off luck.")

[erilaz]

^ I know Gardner first and foremost because of The Annotated Alice.