Books, plays, poems, TV, and other things: the last few weeks
The last couple of weeks have been a bit hectic. First, Laurie and I traveled to Boston to go to Boskone in mid-February. As always, it was a good convention, with some very good program, a very nice art show, and so on. The guest of honor this year was Ken MacLeod, whose Learning the World is one of my top choices for the Hugo this year, and who is always interesting to talk to or to listen to. Charlie Stross, whose Accelerando and The Family Trade/The Hidden Family were also among my favorites of 2005 also attended, as did Cory Doctorow, who, along with Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Beth Meacham participated in a great panel discussion on copyright and “intellectual property.”
I got back from Boskone for a few days, only to travel back to Boston for an IBM meeting. The editors of IBM’s developerWorks site get together once a year to work out strategy, discuss best practices, etc. and this year’s gathering was in Lexington, MA. It was both a useful and a fun week; I manage a group that’s spread out all over the US, so it’s always great to get together with them, go out to dinner, and so on, since I often see them only once or maybe twice a year.
From there, it was back home where Laurie had been looking at houses and wanted to show me a few. We looked at a couple of newer houses in a nearby suburb and began thinking about them – they were a bit bigger than our current house, and we’re running out of space. Then Laurie found that the same builder also had some larger houses in a somewhat farther out development. The price was at the top of our range, but the house that seemed the best of this new group was 4800 square feet. It was a tough decision. The house is in the boonies (defined as “not within walking distance of a Starbucks”), but it was a great house (see http://www.dpsinfo.com/images/wyndhamalllarge.gif for the plans). In the end, we decided to go for it. We’ll be able to fit all of our books and DVDs, etc., though we’ll be broke for a while (at least until we sell our current house). So, we put down some money. The house will be complete in late April, so we’ll be moving in the first half of May.
All of this is my way of explaining in part why I haven’t read and reviewed as much as usual over the past few weeks. I have read some things, which I’ll mention briefly here, and hopefully I get back to a few longer reviews later this week.
I’ve been reading and rereading some Shakespeare as well as some material about Shakespeare. Central to this was re-reading King Lear, which I hadn’t done for several years. Lear is both a great and a devastating play. It is quite possibly Shakespeare’s greatest work (only Hamlet really challenges it) and one of the greatest works of the last 500 years. I first read it when I was a teenager, and even then I was impressed and shaken by it, even though at that point I really didn’t try to analyze why, didn’t look at the structure, or at Shakespeare’s use of language. Now, I read such things more slowly and think more about that. What I also like to do with Shakespeare is read the play, then read criticism about the play. I think this is the equivalent of being able to have a discussion of a work, something I always enjoyed in my college days (so long ago).
I keep two books of recent Shakespeare criticism nearby – Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human and Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare After All. After reading a play, I then read the chapters on that play in Garber and Bloom. Bloom is idiosyncratic, enthusiastic, and very firm in his opinions. (In some ways, he’s the modern version of his favorite critic, Doctor Johnson.) His essays are interesting and provide some insights into the plays. Garber, however, is more comprehensive. She provides very thorough examinations of each of the plays and really helps you appreciate and understand what you’ve read. Thus, while I like both, if someone were to ask me to recommend just one, it would be Garber.
I’ve also been reading Shakespeare’s sonnets. I’d of course read many of them before, but never all of them. But yesterday I started with the first and am making my way through all of them. They are beautiful and striking. I’m not the right person to review poetry, since my knowledge of it is rather spotty, so I won’t say more here.
Finally on the Shakespeare front, I’m reading the biography Will in the World. Look for a full review of that in a week or so.
The only other thing I’ve read recently is Kelly Link’s marvelous collection Magic for Beginners. The first story is the award winning “The Faery Handbag,” which tells the story of how an entire village moves into a handbag to hide. And it is perhaps the least strange story in the book. All of the stories are weird and creative; many are also very interesting from a narrative or structural point of view, telling stories within stories or playing games with structure. Link is a major writer of fantastic short fiction and is also getting attention from the wider critical world (Time, for example, included this collection as one of it’s best fiction books of 2005). If you haven’t yet read her work, you should.
And of course, in the midst of all this, I have been keeping up with the few TV series I watch. Thank goodness for Digital Video Recorders and, when there are glitches, for iTunes (where I was able to buy the episode of Lost I forgot to record to $2). Last night, the three major Sci Fi channel shows had their season finales. All ended on cliff hangers. Galactica was especially impressive, with an hour and a half finale, that, like most Galactica episodes, pulled no punches and provided no easy answers. Galactica if full of shades of gray and moral ambiguity. Is it right, for example, to try to fix an election when you know your opponent is going to lead you to disaster. (I think the answer in the end is still “no” but it is unsettling.) It’s going to be a long summer, waiting for the next episodes.
Anyway, I hope to get back to longer reviews later this week, now that travel and house hunting are over for a while (and before I have to start packing).
I got back from Boskone for a few days, only to travel back to Boston for an IBM meeting. The editors of IBM’s developerWorks site get together once a year to work out strategy, discuss best practices, etc. and this year’s gathering was in Lexington, MA. It was both a useful and a fun week; I manage a group that’s spread out all over the US, so it’s always great to get together with them, go out to dinner, and so on, since I often see them only once or maybe twice a year.
From there, it was back home where Laurie had been looking at houses and wanted to show me a few. We looked at a couple of newer houses in a nearby suburb and began thinking about them – they were a bit bigger than our current house, and we’re running out of space. Then Laurie found that the same builder also had some larger houses in a somewhat farther out development. The price was at the top of our range, but the house that seemed the best of this new group was 4800 square feet. It was a tough decision. The house is in the boonies (defined as “not within walking distance of a Starbucks”), but it was a great house (see http://www.dpsinfo.com/images/wyndhamalllarge.gif for the plans). In the end, we decided to go for it. We’ll be able to fit all of our books and DVDs, etc., though we’ll be broke for a while (at least until we sell our current house). So, we put down some money. The house will be complete in late April, so we’ll be moving in the first half of May.
All of this is my way of explaining in part why I haven’t read and reviewed as much as usual over the past few weeks. I have read some things, which I’ll mention briefly here, and hopefully I get back to a few longer reviews later this week.
I’ve been reading and rereading some Shakespeare as well as some material about Shakespeare. Central to this was re-reading King Lear, which I hadn’t done for several years. Lear is both a great and a devastating play. It is quite possibly Shakespeare’s greatest work (only Hamlet really challenges it) and one of the greatest works of the last 500 years. I first read it when I was a teenager, and even then I was impressed and shaken by it, even though at that point I really didn’t try to analyze why, didn’t look at the structure, or at Shakespeare’s use of language. Now, I read such things more slowly and think more about that. What I also like to do with Shakespeare is read the play, then read criticism about the play. I think this is the equivalent of being able to have a discussion of a work, something I always enjoyed in my college days (so long ago).
I keep two books of recent Shakespeare criticism nearby – Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human and Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare After All. After reading a play, I then read the chapters on that play in Garber and Bloom. Bloom is idiosyncratic, enthusiastic, and very firm in his opinions. (In some ways, he’s the modern version of his favorite critic, Doctor Johnson.) His essays are interesting and provide some insights into the plays. Garber, however, is more comprehensive. She provides very thorough examinations of each of the plays and really helps you appreciate and understand what you’ve read. Thus, while I like both, if someone were to ask me to recommend just one, it would be Garber.
I’ve also been reading Shakespeare’s sonnets. I’d of course read many of them before, but never all of them. But yesterday I started with the first and am making my way through all of them. They are beautiful and striking. I’m not the right person to review poetry, since my knowledge of it is rather spotty, so I won’t say more here.
Finally on the Shakespeare front, I’m reading the biography Will in the World. Look for a full review of that in a week or so.
The only other thing I’ve read recently is Kelly Link’s marvelous collection Magic for Beginners. The first story is the award winning “The Faery Handbag,” which tells the story of how an entire village moves into a handbag to hide. And it is perhaps the least strange story in the book. All of the stories are weird and creative; many are also very interesting from a narrative or structural point of view, telling stories within stories or playing games with structure. Link is a major writer of fantastic short fiction and is also getting attention from the wider critical world (Time, for example, included this collection as one of it’s best fiction books of 2005). If you haven’t yet read her work, you should.
And of course, in the midst of all this, I have been keeping up with the few TV series I watch. Thank goodness for Digital Video Recorders and, when there are glitches, for iTunes (where I was able to buy the episode of Lost I forgot to record to $2). Last night, the three major Sci Fi channel shows had their season finales. All ended on cliff hangers. Galactica was especially impressive, with an hour and a half finale, that, like most Galactica episodes, pulled no punches and provided no easy answers. Galactica if full of shades of gray and moral ambiguity. Is it right, for example, to try to fix an election when you know your opponent is going to lead you to disaster. (I think the answer in the end is still “no” but it is unsettling.) It’s going to be a long summer, waiting for the next episodes.
Anyway, I hope to get back to longer reviews later this week, now that travel and house hunting are over for a while (and before I have to start packing).
posted by Jim Mann at 11:04 AM
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