Walking on the Moon

This is a collection of brief satirical essays on networking and Internet design topics from the 1980 and 1990s.  This makes for something of a niche market.  Danny Cohen, the author, was a long time ISI-er with whom I never quite overlapped, though we passed rather closely for ships in the night.  He had headed off to found Myricom around the time I appeared on the ISI scene.  We certainly knew many of the same people. When I heard this collection was being published through a mutual friend, I made a note to check it out.

The essays here are actually better written than I was expecting.  I wasn’t expecting anything bad, mind you, but they’re a significant cut above the usual academic tomfoolery or April 1 RFC. Cohen does a rather nice job making sound technical points while keeping his tongue firmly in cheek.

That said, these are primarily making points about protocol design, the old ISO/OSI vs. TCP/IP wars and other technical battles.  While many of the points raised remain valid – even compelling – sifting through the history and obliqueness to get to them can be tricky.  I find it humorous that Cohen uses mass transit analogies to describe his protocol insights where a modern writer might use protocol analogies to make transit points.  Funny old world.

Overall these are primarily interesting to networking/technical folks, but there are a few gems.

Logicomix is the kind of grand experiment I like to see in comics. The creators, Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos Papadimitriou, Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna, approach a mature theme thoughtfully with thorough research and the intent to tell a human story.  There are no capes or supernatural powers to be see.  This is non-fiction or at least topical exploration with sound research behind it.  Through such experiments is the form advanced.

Their topic is the advancements of math and logic in the early part of the 20th century, primarily centered on the work of Bertrand Russell, and how those inform logic as a tool for living a reasoned life.  It’s a fertile set of ideas driven by an interesting set of eccentric characters.  This is a great story to tell.

I think they miss a bit on the execution.  The first problem is one of taste.  They back into the story slowly with a few instances of “well,we’ll tell you about that later.” I understand teasers, and that not every story starts dynamically. In this case I think that because they’re wading into waters that threaten to be abstruse they should grab the reader as quickly and directly as possible.  As I say, this is an issue of taste.  They opt for a slower ramp up and more discursive overall style.  Not a choice I advocate, but not offputting.

More troubling is that large parts of the story never become visually interesting.  The characters are deep thinkers and their work is in the most abstract areas of mathematics, but there has to be a way to involve the reader more visually.  If not, a comic is probably the wrong media to tell the story.  There are many pages of Logicomix that are literally panels that are half characters head and half speech balloon.  I think that’s largely a waste of the power of the comics medium.

This reads as a pretty negative review, but overall Logicomix works to tell a thought-provoking story in a novel way.  I don’t think they were entirely successful, but I think the experiment is worth a look.  I certainly learned from it and was inspired by it.  Don’t let my faint (or non-existent) keep you away.  It is worth reading.

Recommended.

Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs are (among other things), the creators of a well regarded but somewhat obscure comic, The Trouble With Girls, that is a spot-on send-up of heroic serial fiction. I mention it because there are elements of that sort of satire here in Splendid Man, but more rough and clumsy.

Splendid Man reads much more like fan fiction than Girls.  In fact Splendid Man is pretty much Mary Sue fan fiction.  The POV character finds himself cast in the role of the best pal of Splendid Man, a direct Superman stand-in.  It’s never clear exactly why Splendid Man would spend time with our Mary Sue, or why we are interested.  Jones and Jacobs eventually get better at this.

A fan of Superman and Jones and Jacobs – like me – can find things to divert themself. It’s interesting to see a snapshot of their writing skill at the time.  One can see little quirks and stylings that remain as they mature.  The structures of the stories are well executed.  Seeing how their later writing animates these skeletons is instructive.

The two authors are also quite knowledgeable about comics in general and the Superman mythos in particular. It’s interesting to see the in-jokes and commentary on the comics that they incorporate. That encyclopedic knowledge is, again, better deployed in their work to come.

Finally, it stands as a snapshot of attitudes and biases of the 1980’s.  The Mary Sue spends a lot of time smoking and drinking in ways that I found cheerfully anachronistic.  In addition, the attitudes toward gays which were probably considered controversially compassionate when the stories were written have become quaint.

As anthropology, the stories are recommended.

Drawing Blood is Molly Crabapple’s memoir. It is keenly and carefully observed. Each simple sentence amplifies the sentence before it.  Each captures a sharp observation about the world.  Molly herself is part of the world.  Some of the sentences describe her, inside and out.  Some describe her world, unique and diverting.  Some describe the how each affects the other.

Molly Crabapple is a peerless visual artist.  Drawing Blood is an illustrated manuscript that features her work. She draws incredibly dense scenes of metaphorical power.  She draws clear, simple sketches of people exploited and manipulative. She captures beautiful places in the throes of revolution. Her art hurls the viewer’s heart from their rib cage and electrifies their brain.

These two forces meet and combine throughout Drawing Blood. Each alone is remarkable, but when combined their power is unrelenting.

A must.

I’m not so much part of the target audience for Charles Stross’s Laundry Files books as I’m a member of its core constituency. His blend of fantasy and horror tropes, spy thriller homages, and computer systems in-jokes is pitch perfect to me.  There is a great joy in following the combination of humor and plot allusions and realizing what’s coming a beat or two before one of the characters explains it.

None of that would be worth anything if Stross put together a less diverting story behind the trappings.  He’s quite an excellent and fun writer, executing a good story populated with believable characters – even when they’re supernatural.

Strongly recommended.

I love to read history and I love to read Sarah Vowell.  I expected to love reading Lafayette. And I enjoyed it a great deal, but I didn’t love it.

Probably the aspect of Vowell’s writing that I love the most is her enthusiasm for her topics – especially when it’s America and history. Her first book that wasn’t a collection of columns, Assassination Vacation was full of excitement and gleeful asides. I had the impression that finding out everything she did was so exciting and so much fun that she couldn’t control the desire to tell everyone.

Better than that, she clearly could control that desire and turn that excitement into a wide-ranging, beautifully written book. It includes delightful historical facts, a sincere paean to the National Parks Service, and a dozen other merits. One of those merits is an ability to connect history and modern times with a brilliant turn of phrase.

All of these are present in Lafayette as well, but not to the same extent. There is a lot of the book that reads like a well-researched, well-written popular treatment of Lafayette’s time in America and its effect on our nation. That’s a great accomplishment, and we need more books like it. And yet, I miss the sparks that fly from every sentence in Vacation.

Recommended.

I’ve been skirting reading Borges for some time.  Several authors I greatly enjoy point to him as an influence.  Those pointers are always delivered in the sort of hushed tones that one reserves for the influential and unique. A close friend recently recommended Borges’s work and that was the kick I needed to actually go get some.  Hushed tones from Warren Ellis are one thing, but no reason for avoiding the experience sounded good when I tried to say them out loud.

The short stories in Ficciones turn out to be witty and playful in an intellectual sense.  Borges takes an idea and runs as far as he can with it, often under the guise of a literary review. Creating a fictional writer who exemplifies whatever odd approach he wants to explore and then critiquing that author seems the long way around, but the structure is generally powerful and engaging.  He manages to convey the idea of taking himself too seriously and not seriously at all in the same constructs.

It helps that his writing is both technically brilliant and fantastically dense. The first paragraph or two of one of his stories often contains the whole of the story.  The remaining pages simply illuminate it from other angles, as a hologram.  Most of these are master classes in composition and structure.  Often this is where I say an author makes that look easy.  Not Borges.  It looks like he worked hard to get these stories perfect.

Overall, these stories are rewarding and entertaining on many levels, but expect to invest time to reap those benefits.

Strongly recommended.

Stone Mattress collects several of Margaret Atwood’s recent short stories.  The collection seems a lot like a series of etudes. In the notes she mentions that several are from stunt collections – authors produce works within loose but binding constraints.  Etudes are often interesting, but rarely satisfying.  So it goes here.

The collection certainly has its enjoyable passages.  This is Margaret Atwood, after all.  every story has at least one passage that is worth reading the whole story for, even if the passage is taken in isolation.  Most of the works do considerably better than that, having some structural or thematic points of interest that are unexpected at the outset.

Still, these stories feel fluffier than Atwood’s long fiction.  Worth it if you like to see a great writer noodling around on the keyboard.

Recommended.

Dale Gronic’s Tales is misnamed.  There are some stories in here, but by and large they aren’t fascinating anecdotes.  Largely Tales is a fairly ad hoc study of the Steelers’ draft classes.  I will say that the Steelers’ draft history turns out to be pretty checkered – much more so than I realized – but this treatment doesn’t capture things very well.

From Gronic’s research, it does seem clear that a book about the Steelers’ drafts would be interesting.  The various coaches have had widely varying philosophies on the role of the draft in team building.  When coaches are changing every few years, this can lead to extremely unusual personnel. Furthermore, each coaching staff brought different skills to the draft. It was common to have a principled plan and a poor eye for talent, that added further noise to the signal.

The 1970’s dynasty was as much a product of the staff’s continuity as its philosophy, but both contributed to some incredible years.

Now, as interesting as that analysis is, it doesn’t fit well with the title.  That title promises me great stories from exciting characters or interesting games.  This is pretty much lacking.  Gronic primarily follows a few draftees who would grant him interviews and tells their history in Pittsburgh.  This is diverting (at best) but never compelling.

Laurie Penny is a feminist.  She’s not a feminist in the way that many dilettantes – and I include myself here – are.  She is a deep thinker on matters of sex, gender, and society.  She’s also a vivid, engaging writer.  She’s compassionate without excusing accidental sins.  Her writing is passionate and analytical at the same time.  Readers always know a person is speaking, but never hear someone excusing poor thought with emotional language.

Her book, Unspeakable Things, largely reflects these brilliant qualities. It’s a fine introduction to feminist thought in our modern, daily, technical world. If you’re interacting with people on the internet, it’s a great book to read.  If you’re thinking about why women’s issues and diversity issues are moving to the core of so many discussions, the book is a must. It has ramifications for hard core techies, too, but that’s not what I mean by “technical world.”

Unspeakable Things expanded my thinking about these issues from the personal to the political.  Other friends and Internet writers have made me understand how often and effectively individuals’ rights are trampled.  Penny showed me how these same attitudes and the mores and laws that they have spawned create our society.  Viewing that society in terms of how those mores and laws control and constrain populations in society was new to me.  It’s the difference between sympathizing with people who have been harassed and seeing that the same attitudes prevent women from taking part in the world. Things is very effective at opening the mind.

Particularly enlightening to me was the discussion of birth control.  That’s a technical innovation that could restructure society, except for the fact that society – people who make it up – are resisting that technical change.  As powerful as the personal stories one often hears are (both sides) – the political issues are at least as important.  Penny brought those to me.

Unspeakable Things is not a perfect book, of course.  There are times when I found the writing repetitious.  Some parts were more opaque than others. I can’t tell if it will make others think new thoughts as it made me do.

Overall, the ideas in here are powerful and the writing accessible.  Strongly recommended.