dfan says - dfan says

Fox Go Server rank calculator

2025-10-23T00:00:00+00:00

The Fox Go Server has an interesting way of handling ranks, but many players are unclear about the subtleties of it, so I wrote an online calculator</a> to help visualize the criteria for promotion and demotion.

The Fox system</h2>
Western Go players may be most familiar with having a fairly fine-grained rating, regularly updated with some mathematical formula based on recent results, which is then discretized to produce a rank.
The Fox server uses a different method, which I like to think of as a graded league system rather than a rating. If I'm currently in the 3d league, then I face other 3d players, and based on my recent record I might be promoted to the 4d league or demoted to the 2d league.
The actual criteria are summarized in a table you can see by hovering over “Ranked game rules” in your stats window, but they can be a little hard to interpret.
I'll use the `3–4D</tt> row as an example. To determine if your rank should change, only your most recent 20 games at your current rank are considered. If you have won at least 14 of those games, you are promoted (unless you still have a chance of a double promotion), and if you have lost at least 13 of those games, you are demoted (unless you still have a chance of a double demotion).`
If you have won at least 18 of your first 20 games at this rank, you are promoted two ranks instead of one. To give you a chance to meet the double-promotion criterion, if you have earned a promotion but still have a chance at a double promotion, your promotion is delayed until you either earn the double promotion or it becomes impossible, at which point you are immediately granted the single promotion you already earned. Similarly, losing 17 of your first 20 games will cause a double demotion.
Interpreting the stats screen</h2> Your recent results can be seen in your stats window: This shows that this account of mine has gone 9–11 in my last 20 games, and the O</tt>s (wins) and X</tt>s (losses) show those results in order, most recent on the right. After my next game, the new result will be added to the right of that string and the oldest result in the window will be removed from the left. Since a win will be removed, my new record will be 9–11 if I win and 8–12 if I lose. The bottom row is often misinterpreted. It shows that if I win my next 8 games straight I will be promoted (you can verify that that would make my recent record 14–6), and if I lose my next 4 games straight I will be demoted (and I have no way to be doubly promoted or demoted). That's all it says. In particular, it doesn't say anything about what will happen if I go 8–1, or 1–4.The calculator</h2> If you want the full rundown on how future results will affect your rank, that's what the calculator</a> is for. Enter your rank and recent results and click on Go</tt>, and you'll see something like this: Here I can confirm that winning my next 8 games will earn me a promotion to 4d, but I can also see that if I lose a single game I'll have to go 10–1 to earn the promotion, not 8–1 or 9–1. You need to enter your entire string of recent results and not just your won-loss record, because it matters in what order old results fall off the edge of the window. For completeness, here's what the top of the table of someone with a chance of double promotion looks like: 10–0 or 10–1 from this point on earns you a double promotion. 6–0 (or 6–1) means that you have earned a single promotion for sure but will remain at your current rank until you either earn that double promotion or are disqualified from it by picking up a second loss.

Wookash interview 2025-10-18T00:00:00+00:00 I recently had a lengthy chat</a> with Łukasz Ściga of the Wookash podcast</a>, where he conducts lots of technical interviews, largely about game programming. We talked about my experience at Looking Glass Studios and Harmonix Music Systems, making such games as Ultima Underworld, Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri, and Guitar Hero. We actually didn't get into the technical weeds all that much, which might come as either a relief or a disappointment to you. If you came here from there and are interested in more stories about the old days, you may be interested in a few other posts here: The dangers of self-modifying-code</a></li> Ultima Underworld bugs</a></li> One more Ultima Underworld story</a></li> </ul> When is a move sente? 2025-08-21T00:00:00+00:00 Diclaimers</h2> This post just represents my own thoughts about a specific subject: deciding whether a particular Go endgame move in a very simple situation is locally sente or not. Global issues (e.g., which area should I play in at all?) are not addressed at all. I have a particular sweet spot between rigor and intuition that I try to hit when explaining things to myself; your preferences may be different in either direction. More rigorous formulations like thermographs are outside the scope of this post. Motivation</h2> Working through the “Sente or gote?” examples in Part 4</a> of my series on endgame counting, and seeing a position slowly change from gote to sente as the size of the followup increased, got me thinking about the various semi-formal definitions of sente I’ve encountered: A move is sente if your opponent wants it to be; that is, if responding is a more efficient use of their local moves than not responding. </li> A move is sente if the followup is bigger than the move itself. (One intuition here is that if your first move used to be the biggest move on the board, now the followup will be the biggest move on the new board.) </li> </ol> Clearly these definitions should match up, and it doesn’t take much symbol manipulation to show that they do, but I felt that there should be an obvious intuitive explanation that was eluding me. So I used a principle that has always served me well: if it is possible for a mathematical relationship to be portrayed geometrically, doing so will provide important mathematical insight. So let’s do that! The generic example</h2> I’m going to try to avoid Go diagrams completely in this post; let’s see if I’m successful. Everything will be based on a completely generic example. Positions will be specified by a sequence of Ws and Bs showing who made local moves in what order. In our root position X, White’s best move (which we are assuming for this example to always be gote) would result in position W, and Black’s best move would result in position B, after which Black’s best followup would result in position BB and White’s best followup would result in position BW. (I will abuse notation to use BB to refer both to the sequence of two Black moves and the position that results after they are played.) I’m going to use definition 1 of sente here and later we can see how it matches definition 2. Remember, White gets to decide whether your Black move is gote or sente. All you can do is play it; they’re the ones with the choice to either respond to it or tenuki. So the value of move B is always the minimum of its value if White considers it to be gote and its value if White considers it to be sente. As your followup BB becomes bigger and bigger, the value of B if White decides it’s gote keeps increasing as well. That’s because half the time you’ll actually get to execute the followup. Meanwhile, the value of B if White decides it’s sente doesn’t depend at all on the value of the followup, because White will never let you execute it. If the followup is small enough, B is certainly actually gote. As we increase the size of the followup, the gote value of B gets bigger and bigger (linearly), until it reaches the sente value of B, after which point B becomes sente forever. Here’s all of that in a graph. As we move from left to right, increasing the followup value, the gote value goes up until it hits the sente value, at which point White would prefer to think of it as sente. Endgame tree diagrams</h2> Now that I have a better idea of the big picture, I’m going to draw a completely different kind of diagram to explore the crossover point between gote and sente. Each one of these will correspond to a different vertical slice of Diag. 1, moving from left to right. Here’s the simplest possible gote endgame, with no followups. In this new diagram type, the x axis shows how many extra local moves have been played by one side versus the other, and the y axis shows the local score (higher is better for Black). From our starting position X, Black can make the blue move from X to B, or White can make the red move from X to W. We assign a score to X that’s midway between the two because either player is equally likely to be the first to play in this area. In these graphs I’ll make the nodes gray if their score is derived from other nodes’ scores. The value of a move is the slope of its line; that’s as much as you can change the local score in one move. You can see here why we divide the swing $B-W$ by two when computing a miai value; the difference in stone advantage on the rest of the board between W and B is two. Now we’ll add two nodes for the Black and White followups from position B. Black’s move from the the original position X takes us to an intermediate position B, which has two smaller gote followups the same way that Diag. 2a did. The score of B is declared to be the midpoint of BW and BB, just like we did before. This means that we now have to go through two steps to calculate the score of X, since we need to calculate the score of B first. Let’s make BB bigger: W and BW are still in the same place as before, but everything else moved, because BB pulled B up with it, which pulled X up in turn. This what I was talking about before in the “generic example” section when I said that increasing the size of the gote followup increases the value of the original gote move. Now let’s make BB really big: At first this looks like more of the same, but there’s a crucial difference; we pulled B up so far that BW is now on the other side of the W-B line. I’m now going to use dashed lines to draw two different ways that White can interpret this situation. The top dashed line is the same as before, where White treats Black’s move as gote; White is saying “either I’ll play W or Black will play B, and the value of my move is half the difference.” The bottom dashed line is when White treats Black’s move as sente; now they’re saying “either I’ll play W or Black will play B and I’ll immediately bring it back to BW, and the value of my move is all of the difference.” As we raise BB, when do we flip over from gote to sente? When the slope between BW and B is the same as the slope between X and B. But the slope between BW and B is the same as the slope between B and BB, so this happens exactly when the followup BB from B is as big as the original move B from X. QED. Effectively. this last position really looks more like this, disregarding situations like Black playing B at the wrong time or using it as a ko threat that White ignores: There are only two normal outcomes; either Black plays B and White immediately responds with BW, or White plays W. Therefore the local score will never be more than BW, and so we might as well just call that the score of X. You may have heard the phrase “sente gains nothing”; basically, B’s sente move is already baked into the score of X, and the best that Black can expect is just to get what they deserve. OK, that was a lot of work to prove a fairly basic conclusion you probably understood already, and if your reaction is to all of this was “That was already all obvious from the start!”, I am jealous of you, but I’m glad that I now understand it too. Fast determination</h2> I published the above a few days ago, and then realized that I wanted to tie up one more simple loose end. We know that a move is sente for Black when the slope from B to BB is greater than the slope from X to B (“the followup is bigger than the original move”), but that’s a little annoying to compute because B depends on BW and BB, and then X depends on B. What do we get if we simplify the calculation so that it just depends on the terminal states W, BW, and BB (the black nodes in my diagrams)? Those are the scores we can just count instead of having to take averages. It’s simple: the crossover point is when the distance between BW and BB is twice the distance between W and BW. I said I was going to try to have no Go diagrams in this post, but I’ll reuse the example from Part 4 of the area counting series to illustrate. Of the $6$ points at stake, Black could get $0$ (W), $2$ (BW), or $6$ (BB). The difference between $2$ and $6$ is twice the difference between $0$ and $2$, so we’re right at the crossover point between gote and sente. If the BB score were any bigger, it would be sente. I really like using area counting here because we only have to keep track of one sort of value: how many of the points at stake Black is getting. One more example, since the answer surprised me: My first instinct was that White’s hane at A is sente, since they’re threatening to hane again and pick up two stones. But is it? Let’s see. Seven points are at stake, since if Black descends to A it’s their privilege to push. White’s share of those seven points is $0$ if Black goes first, $3$ if White goes first and Black responds (White will get the corner point for free while Black connects), and $7$ if White goes first and then follows up. But the second difference of $7-3=4$ is not nearly twice the first difference of $3-0=3$. So this area really is gote, with a move value of $4$ (the difference between $0$ and the average of $7$ and $3$, minus one). Go endgame values with area counting: part 4, odds and ends 2025-08-17T00:00:00+00:00 I meant for part 3</a> to be the last entry in this series, but a few people had extra questions and I also discovered a few more subtleties while applying the theory. Double sente</h2> I got a couple of questions about double sente, which I had originally skipped over because I have been brainwashed by the modern endgame theorists who contend that double sente doesn’t really exist. Computing the old-fashioned deiri value is no problem; two intersections are at stake, and the local tally difference is $0$, so playing here is $2\cdot 2 - 0 = 4$ points in double sente, just like we all learned when we first saw this position. The problem, which exists with the usual method of counting as well, comes when you try to convert this into a miai value by dividing by the local tally difference. This means dividing by zero, so we get an infinite value! How can this be? To be brief, if this is truly double sente, then whoever plays here will pick up $4$ points for absolutely free, no opportunity cost or anything, so it should be played immediately and will then disappear, like a subatomic particle that decays instantly, so it’s never really around long enough for us to bother analyzing. But what if it isn’t really free? What if the opponent could tenuki? Well, then I guess it wasn’t really globally double sente, was it? While your head is reeling from that, I will refer you to the references (Rational Endgame in particular discusses the issue carefully) and quickly move on to other topics. Forcing the opponent to play inside</h2> Here’s a position that is a little easier at first to think about with territory counting: if Black plays A, they’ll get the point at B, and if White plays A, they’ll get the point at D, so playing here is $2$ points in gote. With area counting there’s a little more to keep track of. As usual, we think in terms of intersections at stake. Here they are A, B, and C; the ownership of everything else on the board (including D) is already determined. If White goes first, they’ll get two of those three points; they’ll play A, and then the two players will split B and C. If Black goes first, White won’t get any of them, because the C-D exchange is Black’s privilege. So the difference between the two variations is $2$, and playing here is $2\cdot2 - 2 = 2$ points in gote. So the reason for the extra point is expressed differently in the two methods, and this is also true if we score by area at the end of the game. By territory, White is penalized for having to fill in D. By area, Black gets a free dame at C instead of having only 50% equity in it. That isn’t really any different from saying “White will have to fill in at D”, like you’re used to, but it’s worth realizing that Black benefits just from putting down a stone on C. You do get used to playing out these exchanges in your head, especially once you start getting obsessed with viewing everything as being about borders. (If the concept of “Black’s privilege” is foreign to you, the references in Part 3 have good discussions of it.) Area-territory duality</h2> In mathematics there’s a concept that frequently comes up called duality, where you can look at a problem in two very different ways, but they’re isomorphic, so the solutions will always correspond to each other, and the concepts generally map to each other as well. These two ways of counting remind me of that. I think it’s sort of beautiful that both territory and area counting agree that because of the weakness at D, A is exactly one point more important than usual, but have very different ways of explaining why. In fact I think it’s often fruitful to view Go concepts through an area lens, especially if you’re used to thinking using territory. For example, if you play a threat inside your opponent’s territory that must be responded to, with territory counting you note that your opponent gained a prisoner but filled in one of their own territory points, while with area counting you simply note that the borders haven’t changed. (Easy but educational question for the reader: if the opponent didn’t need to respond, the borders still haven’t changed, but now your move was terrible; why?) I also find it easier to believe that forcing moves can be discarded after they have served their purpose when I view the situation with areas. Viewing Go as being fundamentally about borders between the two colors, rather than fundamentally about surrounding empty space, has been very eye-opening for me. Black getting to play the dame point of C for free in Diag. 2a isn’t a weird accounting trick to make the numbers come out right, it’s intrinsically valuable. I encourage you to spend some time trying to view endgame sequences as a matter of fighting over area ownership of a fixed set of points rather than as expanding and reducing territories, even if you end up coming back to the territory view. Odd vs even</h2> Here’s something that is hard to show unless you look at it from an area point of view: if there are no followups, gote values are even unless the difference in dame is odd. Let’s look at a pair of examples from Part 1 again. Because we calculate the gote value by doubling the number of points at stake and subtracting $2$, it must be an even number unless there’s a half point at stake. The way that can happen is when an odd number of points belong to one side for sure in one variation, and are up for grabs in the other, as in Diag. 3b. Similarly, sente moves are usually worth an odd number of points. Seki</h2> Seki is a little annoying because we don’t get to depend on our usual rule of “every point belongs to one side or the other”. By territory, Black has either $6$ points or $0$, so playing here is $6$ points in gote. By area, if we look at the five points at stake, Black will either be up $5$ to $0$ or down $0$ to $3$. That’s effectively a difference of $4$ (if you’re a baseball fan, you know that a $0$–$3$ team is four games behind a $5$–$0$ team), and $2\cdot4 - 2 = 6$. But I think it’s easier to think of the two sides as sharing ownership of all unplayable points, so we can go back to using our favorite principle. Looking at it that way, Black owns either $5$ points or $1$ (half of the unplayable dame), giving us the desired difference of $4$. If your ruleset does not award points for eyes in seki (Japanese does not, but AGA does, even when you use territory counting), you will have to do the same thing with those ownerless points. Sente or gote?</h2> In any given position, it may not be clear whether we should be doing the sente calculation or the gote calculation. I like to do this the same way as Antti Törmänen does in Rational Endgame, which is that a move is sente for Black if White wants it to be. Here’s a brief set of examples. There are $5$ points at stake. If White goes first, Black will get none of them. If Black goes first and it’s gote, they’ll get either $2$ or $5$ for an average of $3\frac12$. That would mean that Black’s fair share in this position is the average of $0$ and $3 \frac12$, or $1 \frac34$. What if it’s sente? Then Black’s fair share would be $2$, since they’d just make the sente exchange at some point. But that’s worse for White than if we consider it gote, so White will claim that it’s gote and not respond to Black’s first move (or possibly play here first themselves). Let’s sweeten the pot. Now there are $6$ points at stake. As before, Black gets none of them if White goes first. If White treats it as gote and Black goes first, Black will get either $2$ or $6$ points for an average of $4$, so their fair share in the original position is $2$. If White treats it as sente, Black’s fair share is also $2$. So White has the choice of treating this position as gote or as Black’s sente. Now there are $7$ points at stake. Black still gets $0$ if White goes first. If White treats it as gote and Black goes first, Black will get either $2$ or $7$ points for an average of $4 \frac12$, so their fair share in the original position is $2 \frac14$. If White treats it as sente, Black’s fair share is $2$ as always. So White now does better by considering this to be Black’s sente, and will respond when Black captures, and the move value is $2\cdot 2 - 1 = 3$. The nice thing is that you can do all of these calculations with just a single type of number: Black’s equity in the points at stake. There’s no need to add and subtract territory and prisoners, or even convert to a move value until the very end. Of course, you can do exactly the same thing to decide whether followups are gote or sente. Go endgame values with area counting: part 3, ko 2025-08-14T00:00:00+00:00 Ko</h2> By now we have enough tools that ko is a straightforward extension of our previous work. If you’ve evaluated kos the normal way, you already know that this is “worth a third of a point”. Now we really have to use miai counting to make sense of the numbers. By territory, the difference between one side or the other winning the ko is one prisoner, and the local tally difference is $3$, so the miai move value is $\frac13$. By area: two intersections are at stake, so the move value is $\frac{2\cdot 2 - 3}3 = \frac13$. As noted last time, you could also calculate this as $\frac{2 \cdot 2} 3 - 1$, and that’s the way I’ll generally do it in the future. To me it’s actually a little nicer to just say “two intersections are at stake” rather than “the difference between the difference between the prisoner counts is one” (that’s not a typo), as you would calculating this the territory way. We don’t have to cancel out, even theoretically, all the stones captured in the ko fight, just eyeball the final state. Let’s do a multi-stage ko, for fun: Four intersections are at stake, and the local tally difference is $4$ (White can finish by connecting, and Black can finish by taking two kos and connecting), so the value of a move here is $\frac{2\cdot4} 4 - 1 = 1$. With territory counting we’d have to calculate that the end states are $3$ points for Black (two extra captures and one eye) vs $1$ point for White (one eye). Comparing work</h2> OK, that’s it for the description. How much work does this really save (or cost) us, compared to normal territory counting? I’ve spent so much time describing it that it may look like much more of a bother than it actually is. The main work-saving idea is that with area counting every point ultimately belongs to one player or the other. This is why you only need to count one side when computing the winner of the entire game, and is also why you only need to count one side when computing the size of a move. We do have to multiply by two to get the full swing, the same way that the difference between $3$ and $-3$ is $6$. Going back to our formulas from part 1: $$ \begin{aligned} V_T &= (B_T^1 - B_T^2) - (W_T^1 - W_T^2) \\ V_A &= 2 \cdot (B_A^1 - B_A^2) - \Delta T \end{aligned} $$ Before we had to juggle four territories and now we just have to juggle two areas. We do also need the local tally difference, but we can get that without thinking just by considering whether the sequence is gote or sente. More examples</h2> To recap everything we’ve learned, let’s do a few problems from O Meien’s book Absolute Endgame. In each case we’re going to calculate the miai value of a move in the local area. Gote</h4> Just looking at the $2\times5$ rectangle in the corner, Black will own all $10$ points if they go first, and will own either $6$ or $3$ if White goes first, depending on who plays the gote followup afterwards. The difference is $10 - 4\frac12 = 5\frac12$, so the value of the gote move here is one less than that, or $4\frac12$. (Technically we should double the difference to get a swing and then immediately halve it for being gote.) By territory counting, we’d say that Black would locally lead by $10$ ($3$ prisoners, $1$ dead stone, and $5$ spaces vs. nothing) if they went first, and lead by either $3$ ($1$ prisoner and $2$ spaces vs. nothing) or $-1$ (nothing vs $1$ prisoner) if White went first, which averages to $1$, so the total difference is $10 - 1 = 9$, halved for being gote to give us a miai move value of $4\frac12$. (Before you wonder why the answer in the book is $5\frac12$, that’s because it’s asking a different question: how many points can we consider Black as having right now? That’s halfway between $10$ and $1$.) Sente</h4> Four points are at stake (a $2\times2$ rectangle with the second-line Black stone in its northwest corner), so the miai value of a move is $2\cdot4 - 1 = 7$. (It’s sente because Black has to play a move to live if White goes first.) I will leave the territory calculations as an exercise for the reader (or go read O Meien’s explanation). Ko</h4> $10$ points are at stake, and it’s a direct ko, so the miai value of a move is $\frac{2 \cdot 10}3 - 1 = 5 \frac23$. To do this the territory way you’ll need to carefully count up Black’s bounty if they win and connect the ko: $6$ dead stones, $2$ empty points, and $1$ prisoner, for a total of $15$ points. (Then you compare it with White’s two points if they win, and divide the whole thing by three.) Two-stage ko</h4> For the grand finale, we’ll take the most complicated position yet. White has played the tesuji of 1 to start a two-stage ko for life. If they win the ko by making three captures from the position after Black 4, it’s their privilege to make the square-triangle exchanges on the right side. If Black wins it by making one capture from the same position, it’s their privilege to make the triangle-square exchanges on the bottom side. This means that every circled point in Diag. 2e is at stake. There are $20$ of them, so each move is worth $\frac{2 \cdot 20}4 - 1 = 9$ points. O Meien arrives at the same conclusion, declaring that between the two variations Black’s difference in territory is 17 and White’s is 19, giving a move value of $\frac{17+19}{4} = 9$. Perhaps you’d like to check his counts; the whole reason I did this research is so that I don’t have to. Creating the ko</h6> By the way, how much is White 1 in Diag. 2d worth? If Black had gone first instead, then every one of the $20$ marked points in Diag. 2e would be Black. As it is, after White 3, White has half equity of all those marked points. So it was a gote sequence that effectively changed the ownership of $10$ points, therefore it’s worth $\frac{2\cdot10}2 - 1 = 9$ points, just like the moves in the ko! (Since the values of the ko moves are all $9$, we’d get the same value if we treated 3 as sente.) This shouldn’t really be a surprise; basically, the original position was exactly equivalent to the situation after Black 4, where Black can win the ko in one move or White can play a move to bring it to a perfectly intermediate state. References</h2> Unsurprisingly, I’ve been told that this way of calculating endgame move values is not original, but I’ve never seen it presented anywhere. (Edit: that's because I hadn't made it all the way through Jasiek's Endgame 2 – Values; see below.) Hopefully these posts are enough to make it clear, since I don’t have anywhere else to point you (now I do!). If these concepts seem cool but your endgame-counting foundation still feels shaky, here are your main written options. They all cover miai counting thoroughly. Sensei’s Library page on Basic Endgame Theory</a>. Pros: it’s free! And it’s quite up-to-date with theory. </li> Cons: it’s written by committee, and is a bit more of a reference than a textbook. Of course it is written by amateurs, but some of them are as much experts in the theory as anyone. </li> </ul> </li> O Meien, Absolute Counting</a>. Pros: written conversationally, covers more topics than just move values, tons of examples. </li> Cons: written conversationally. Sometimes I want a proof and instead I just get an exhortation that the point is very important and I must remember it. </li> </ul> </li> Antti Törmänen, Rational Endgame</a>. Pros: written like a math textbook. He tends not to repeat himself much, so you really have to make sure you understand every sentence, but it’s all there. Also, it’s a very nice-looking book. </li> Cons: written like a math textbook, fewer examples. </li> </ul> </li> Robert Jasiek, Endgame 1–5</a>, Basic Endgame Problems 1–2</a>. Pros: Exhaustive (seven books!), extremely precise, written by one of the principal researchers of modern endgame theory, zillions of problems. Area counting is discussed at length in Endgame 2 – Values (I didn't realize this until after writing these posts). </li> Cons: Seven books, dense and stilted writing style. </li> </ul> </li> </ul> Bonus content</h2> It turns out there was still some more to say, so now there's a Part 4</a>. Go endgame values with area counting: part 2, sente 2025-08-13T00:00:00+00:00 Sente</h2> In part 1</a> of this series we evaluated gote endgame moves using area counting instead of territory counting. Now it’s time to look at sente moves. It’s basically the same thing, but our local tally difference is now $1$ instead of $2$, so that’s what we subtract. $2$ intersections are at stake, so this is $2\cdot 2 - 1 = 3$ points in sente. If you remember the derivation from last time, the switch from $2$ to $1$ makes sense, as the local tally was explicitly part of that formula. We subtracted out the local tally in our derivation so that the players don’t get credit just for playing stones. Territory counting, by area?</h2> But wait a second, I thought we were dong area counting! Shouldn’t players get credit just for playing stones? Well, actually, we’ve been computing territory-counting endgame values using an area-counting method, so we have to subtract the tally to get the numbers to agree. It would be totally legit to count endgame values by area, although I’ve never heard of anyone doing it. In that case we’d give extra credit for White’s additional stone in Diag. 1c and call this a $4$-point move. In fact the miai value (we’ll get to that) for every move would just be one greater than before. That’s because every move in area counting is worth $1$ point right off the bat just for existing on the board. We’re used to just treating that $1$ as a baseline so we only give credit for the value that exceeds it, in which case we end up with territory-based values. Miai values</h2> I grew up with what is known as deiri counting, where you look at the difference in points between Black going first and White going first (the “swing value”), and then qualify it with gote or sente. Then to compare these numbers to decide where to play you have to use rules like “sente is worth double”. Miai counting (aka “absolute counting”) instead tries to find the actual value of a move so that they can all be compared on a single scale. The reasoning behind the method is beyond the scope of these posts (see the references section in the next one), but the math is simple: you just divide the swing by the local tally difference. Now the previous section should make a little more sense. For both gote and sente moves, we’ve been computing the swing value by taking the swing in area (which is twice the number of intersections at stake) and subtracting the tally. Now to get a miai value we’re dividing by the tally difference. That means that the miai value is (area-swing - tally) / tally, which we could also write as area-swing / tally - $1$. There, just like we said, all moves are more valuable by $1$ in area counting. $$V_T = S_T / \Delta T = S_A / \Delta T - 1$$ So you don’t have to bother with subtracting the tally difference if you use miai values and don’t care that your numbers will be different by 1 from everyone else’s. Next: ko</a>. Go endgame values with area counting: part 1, gote 2025-08-12T00:00:00+00:00 Prerequisites</h2> None of this will make much sense unless you play Go/baduk/weiqi and already have some familiarity with endgame move value. I’ll put some references at the very end of the series. Thanks to the folks on the BeginnerGo Discord server for helping me work through some of these ideas, especially @Taran who had come up with most of the same concepts independently. Counting by territory</h2> Everything that I’ve seen about counting endgame move values in Go assumes that you’re using territory (Japanese-style) counting. But it can be a big pain keeping track of four different territories (Black and White in two variations), for me at least, and I always wondered whether using area (Chinese-style) counting could be a simpler way to compute move values. Take this classic $6$-point (swing) gote situation. To determine the size of a move here, we compare the result of Black going first (the triangled stones are a fair average of what ensues after moves $1$ through $3$ are played) with the result of White going first: With the traditional approach, we now squint and imagine the difference in territories between the positions at the end of each variation. In Diag. 1d below, the triangles are the points that would be Black territory only if Black went first, and the squares are the points that would be White territory only if White went first. Computing these regions requires us to keep track of four distinct types of points (territory and stones of both colors) in two variations, not to mention that there may be prisoners to track. Switching from Black going first to White going first is a total of $6$ points difference ($3$ fewer for Black, $3$ more for White), so making the first move in this area is $6$ points in gote. If you’re bad at doing big geometrical diffs in your head like I am, you can try to simplify this a bit by calculating values like “how much territory does Black have if they go first?” But this usually means picking some arbitrary reference point for where their relevant territory starts (how much relevant territory does Black have in Diag. 1b? $5$?) which is very easy to lose track of. Counting by area</h2> Using area counting instead of territory counting makes things simpler, at least as far as keeping track of things on the board goes: we just look at how the boundary between Black and White areas changes between the two variations. The triangles in Diag. 1e below are the points that switch ownership between Black and White when comparing Diags. 1b and 1c. We don’t have to distinguish between stones and territory, just the boundary between areas. To compute the size of playing here, we take double the number of those points and then subtract two, giving us a gote value of $2 \cdot 4 - 2 = 6$. I’ll explain why soon, but intuitively, the doubling is because switching an intersection from being White to being Black is a difference of two points, and $2$ is the “local tally difference”, the difference in number of local stones played in the two variations (one more Black move vs. one more White move). Here’s another example that should really drive home the difference between the two approaches. White has just played a ko threat against Black’s corner. How big is it to respond? Doing it by territory: if Black responds, they have $4$ points ($2$ from the dead stone and $2$ from empty spaces) and White has none. If White finishes the kill, they have $14$ points ($2 \cdot 6$ from dead stones and $2$ from empty spaces; don’t forget that they have already placed two stones inside) and Black has none. So it’s $14 + 4 = 18$ points in gote. Doing it by area: $10$ intersections are at stake. $2 \cdot 10 - 2 = 18$. The end. Is this always more convenient?</h2> No, not really. Here’s an example that’s trivial to calculate using the territory method: Calculating by territory, capturing two stones or not is obviously $4$ points. We could do this the area way and say that $3$ intersections are at stake, so the swing value is $2 \cdot 3 - 2 = 4$, but it’s overkill. Not by a ton, though! Dame</h2> Because dame are worth points in area counting, you have to take them into account here too. Often they even out, but you may have to count them as half a point for each player. Here’s a simple example: By territory, either player might gain one point by playing A, and no one cares about the leftover dame, so it’s $2$ points in gote. By area, Black will own $2 \frac12$ of the points at stake if they go first, and just $\frac12$ if they go second (because the remaining dame point will be up for grabs in either case), for a difference of $2$, and $2 \cdot 2 - 2 = 2$. You could just say “there are $2$ points at stake and the dame will even out”, but it’s a little sloppy. Here’s a case where they don’t even out: Black will own either $2 \frac12$ or $0$ points; $2\cdot 2\frac12 - 2 = 3$. You might have found it weird that we don’t care about the capture, but it’s the usual area-vs-territory thing: White gets credit for the live stone when they save it, rather than a penalty for the prisoner when they don’t. Yes, this is another way in which area can be more annoying than territory. It’s nice to have both techniques in your pocket. And once you get used to counting by area, the above calculation does not feel like much extra work at all. The gnarly details</h2> Why does this formula work? The short answer is that it works for the same sort of reason that area and territory counting are practically equivalent when scoring the board as a whole. But if you demand proof, here it is. If it makes your eyes glaze over, skip it. I’m going to define eight sorts of points that can exist in variations. $B_T^1$ is the amount of Black territory if Black goes first while $B_T^2$ is the amount of Black territory if White goes first. We also have $B_S$ variables for numbers of (living) Black stones on the board, as well as $W_T$ and $W_S$. This means that we can also define some helper variables for Black and White areas, $B_A = B_T + B_S$ and $W_A = W_T + W_S$. The size of a gote move in territory counting is $V_T = (B_T^1 - B_T^2) - (W_T^1 - W_T^2)$, Black’s gain by going first minus White’s gain by going first. With area counting, our formula is $V_A = 2 \cdot (B_A^1 - B_A^2) - 2 = 2 \cdot ((B_T^1 + B_S^1) - (B_T^2 + B_S^2)) - 2$. We don’t need to look at White’s values because we only care how much Black’s area expanded; White’s area contracted by the same amount. It’s more work, but we could write this out the long way as $V_A = ((B_T^1 + B_S^1) - (B_T^2 + B_S^2)) - ((W_T^1 + W_S^1) - (W_T^2 + W_S^2)) - 2$, and that’s what I’ll do below when proving that $V_A = V_T$. Now we need to prove that $V_T$ and $V_A$ are equal. First of all, note that $B_S^1 - W_S^1 = 1$ and $W_S^2 - B_S^2 = 1$, because we asserted that playing here is gote for both sides (Black played one more stone in variation 1 and White played one more stone in variation 2). Then it’s just a question of substituting and cancelling, as usual with this stuff: $$ \begin{aligned} V_A &= ((B_T^1 + B_S^1) - (B_T^2 + B_S^2)) - ((W_T^1 + W_S^1) - (W_T^2 + W_S^2)) - 2 \\ &= V_T + (B_S^1 - W_S^1) + (W_S^2 - B_S^2) - 2 \\ &= V_T \end{aligned} $$ Magic! Next: sente</a>. Updates 2025-08-11T00:00:00+00:00 One reason I haven’t written anything here in a long time is that the Wordpress framework I was using got a little stale. I finally moved everything over to a simple new framework (Zola</a>), which should make it a little less daunting to make updates here. One thing that fell by the wayside as part of the transition is comments, for better or worse. For now, the easiest way to make a brief public comment is probably Bluesky</a>. “Once in a Lifetime” and the case of the mysterious shifting downbeat 2014-06-30T15:47:11+00:00 For over thirty years I’ve been disturbed by the location of the downbeat in the Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime”. I listened to it dozens of times without paying a ton of attention to the meter, and naturally heard the verses like this: (vocal rhythms extremely approximate) and the choruses like this: Once I paid attention, though, I realized that there were two things kind of funny about this way of hearing it. One was that the bass line was exactly the same throughout the whole song, but was shifted by half a bar when you compared the verse and the chorus. The other was that there was a half-bar hitch both going into and coming out of the chorus. Of course you can resolve both of these issues simultaneously by just shifting your perception of the chorus by half a measure; then the bass lines up and you don’t have to throw in any 2/4 measures: But this really isn’t the way I want to hear the chorus! I can hear it this way if I have to, but it feels artificial, like in reality the band has shifted the beat and I’m just hearing it this way for intellectual reasons. So how did the band hear it? Did they really hear the chorus the second way and were playing in 4/4 the whole way through, or did they hear the downbeat shift and thought that it was cool that the bass line went in and out of phase throughout the song? For decades I’ve wondered what the “correct” way to hear it is. Until now, that is, when I read Sasha Frere-Jones’s profile of the song’s producer Brian Eno</a> in the New Yorker. From the end of the article: Eno’s production of this transparent, polyrhythmic light box, it turns out, is based on a mistake—his own. “That song was a very good case of people not agreeing about the one,” he told me, referring to the first beat of each measure. “I always heard it in a different place from everyone else, so I just kept sort of building things onto my one.” </blockquote> Aha! So my reconstruction of the song’s evolution is: The song as originally conceived by the band is in 4/4 throughout with a consistent bass groove, as in the second version of the chorus above. At this point it’s probably very natural to hear it that way.</li> However, Eno hears it in the other way, with the chorus displaced by two beats, and starts pushing the arrangement in a direction that emphasizes that hearing.</li> We end up with a rabbit-duck</a> situation that has been specifically engineered to be confusing, and which was based explicitly on the producer’s confusion.</li> </ol> In conclusion, Eno is a genius, but we already knew that. Bond songs 2014-06-03T16:27:48+00:00 I recently went on a James Bond binge and watched all the canonical movies, ranking the theme songs as I went. Ethan Iverson graciously offered to host the resulting piece on his super usually-jazz-but-always-interesting blog Do The Math</a>. It begins: One of the more entertaining categories of popular music of the last 50 years is the James Bond movie theme. Having recently watched all of the canonical EON/Broccoli Bond movies, I can assert that sometimes the four minutes of opening credits is the high point of the entire film. As with any art form, my first instinct when encountering these specimens was to rank them. Despite the wide variety of style to be found in these songs, there’s a lot of commonality too. Usually there’s a sense of danger, demonstrated by minor keys, chromaticism, or menacing orchestration. There’s often a pinch of swagger as well, though, communicating how Bond can confidently overcome any crisis no matter how dire. Of course the music also often projects sexuality; at its best this coexists with the dangerous vibe, though there is a sub-tradition of straight-up ballads. Often the main Bond theme is quoted, a tradition I found charming at first though it quickly wore on me. My ranking is of course informed by my own prejudices about what makes a good song and what makes a good Bond song in particular. As I listened to them over and over when making this list, I developed a bit of Stockholm syndrome; even the songs I disliked the most started to take up residence in my head. But the bottom one stubbornly refused to get any better: </blockquote> Continued at Do The Math.</a> Henry Threadgill, “To Undertake My Corners Open”, part 3 2014-01-16T17:49:20+00:00 I’ve had a little more time now to study the structure of this piece. First, I’ll lay out the form as I see it: 0:00—0:13 (mm. 1—5): Intro figure</li> 0:13—0:28 (mm. 6—9): Guitar & bass cycle 1</li> 0:28—0:43 (mm. 10—15): Head</li> 0:43—0:48 (mm. 16—17): Bridging material (based on m. 2)</li> 0:48—3:31 (mm. 18—41, 42—65, 66—89): Trombone solo (based on mm. 3—4, 10—15)</li> 3:31—5:13 (mm. 90—94, 95—99, 100—104, 105—109, 110—114, 115—119, 120—124, 125—129): Guitar solo (based on mm. 183—185)</li> 5:13—7:04 (mm. 130—150, 151—171): Flute solo (based on mm. 193—213)</li> 7:04—7:21 (mm. 172—176): Guitar & bass cycle 1</li> 7:21—7:35 (mm. 177—182): Head</li> 7:35—7:59 (mm. 183—191): Guitar & bass cycle 2</li> 7:59—8:03 (m. 192): Coda intro measure</li> 8:03—8:27 (mm. 193—213): Coda</li> 8:27—8:35 (mm. 214—217): Ending tag</li> </ul> And here are what I could make of the harmonies of the solo sections. These were deduced by looking at both the actual comping performed during the solos and the source material that the solo structure comes from. There are some discrepancies, which is to be expected, although a few them turned out to be transcription errors, which is a good sign (for the model). Interestingly, I didn’t notice any regular correspondence between parts for the flute and trombone. Some future steps: Look for any rules governing the harmonic skeleton. For example, there often seem to be common intervals between one “chord” and the next.</li> Look for rules governing the flute and trombone solos; they seem to be much freer than the guitar solo.</li> See if I can find any way that the flute and trombone parts in the through-composed material (such as the head and coda) are reused or referred to. Currently only the guitar and bass parts seem to be structurally interesting.</li> Try to discover the function, if any, of the sections that I haven’t linked to any other sections yet, for example the coda intro measure (m. 192) and ending tag (mm. 214—217).</li> </ul> Herb Healy Open House 2014-01-01 2014-01-09T21:45:04+00:00 One of my favorite tournaments at the Boylston Chess Club</a> is the annual Herb Healy Open House</a> held every New Year’s Day. You get to socialize and play four relatively quick (G/40) games of chess, and there’s an unrated section if you stayed up too late the night before. This year I played in the unrated section as usual and had four interesting games. Let’s take a look! In the first round, my opponent and I both fumbled around through a weird opening move order until we ended up in a King’s Indian sideline that neither of was familiar with. Schmidt 2003 — Rood 1634 after 11.Ra1-d1</figcaption> </figure> I think that this position illustrates a frequent 2000 vs 1600 phenomenon. As White I haven’t done anything super tricky yet, but all my pieces are developed and ready to take action in the future. Black’s pieces are scattered all over the place; his queen and bishop haven’t moved yet and his knight on a6 isn’t much better. One of the things I feel I’ve gotten much better at in the last couple of years is just putting my pieces on good squares and seeing what opportunities present themselves instead of constantly pressing and trying to make things happen before I’m fully developed. Black tried to get a little more developed with 11...Bd7? but this takes a retreat square away from the knight on f6 and leaves the bishop in a spot with two possible attackers and only one defender. After 12.e5! Black’s only reasonable move is 12...Nh5 but that’s clearly not what he wants to be doing in this position. After 12...Ng4? 13.Bf4! there was no way to avoid losing a piece to the upcoming h3. He resigned a few moves later. In round 2 I ended up in a weird kind of reversed Benoni position and I found myself on the defensive, with my pieces rather tied up. The tide started to turn in the following position: Huntington 1916 — Schmidt 2003 after 17.Ng5-e4</figcaption> </figure> White’s been making me rather unhappy with threats against my d4, c7, and b7 pawns all game. Searching for a way to untangle myself, I looked in desperation at 17...Nd8! and was surprisingly pleased with what I saw. Moving the knight frees me to play ...c6, blunting the effect of White’s light-squared bishop, removing a target from c7, and forcing White’s b5 knight back. I also protect the b7 pawn in the meantime so White doesn’t have any tricky discovered attacks against it. Despite all those pieces on the back rank, I finally felt really good about my position and expected to bounce back off the ropes with great force. White went all in with 18.h5 Bh7 19.Be5, attacking the d4 pawn, but I hadn’t thought this would work. After 19...Ne6 20.f4 f6 (my point; the bishop is trapped) 21.f5 fxe5 22.fxe6 Qxe6, I was already pleased with my extra pawn when White suddenly played 23.Ng5!? Huntington 1916 — Schmidt 2003 after 23.Ne4-g5</figcaption> </figure> Yikes! After 23...hxg5 White pins and wins my queen with 24.Bd5. For a while I thought I was in big trouble; if 23...Qf6 24.Bd5+ Kh8+ 25.Nf7+ Rxf7 White has 26.Rf1, which looked like it would win the exchange once I moved my queen. But then I realized I could just take on f1 with with 26...Qxf1+ 27.Qxf1 Rxf1+ 28.Rxf1 and I’m still a piece up. Gratefully, I played 23...Qf6 and White bailed out with 24.Nxh7, but after the intermediate 24...Qf2+ White’s king was in trouble. In the ensuing complications I picked up a piece and exchanged down to an easily winning endgame. My 2-0 start meant that in round 3 I got to play on board 1 against Mika Brattain, who at 2402 is the third-best 15-year-old in the country. (One of the things I really like about playing in chess tournaments is the way that it totally flattens out lots of differences like age. I’ve literally seen a 90-year-old play a 9-year-old on equal terms.) He played a Najdorf with ...h5, a plan that I know a little about but have never encountered myself. The main idea is that it stops White’s g4-g5 plan in its tracks. I thought I remembered that the standard antidote was to push on the queenside, so I did so, but a couple of moves later I was not too pleased to find myself in this position: Schmidt 2003 — Brattain 2402 after 14...Qc7-c6</figcaption> </figure> Black is about to get ...d5 in with the help of his queen, and then he’ll already have accomplished everything he could have hoped for from the opening. After the game, Mika said that he thought that my earlier a5 was a big mistake because now I can’t push the queen away with Na5. What am I supposed to do, take the rook that I just moved from f1 to c1 and put it back on d1? Yes, I am! After 15.Rd1! Black’s queen doesn’t have much point on c6, so the tempo loss isn’t a big deal. I can bring my a1 rook over to c1 and everything’s nice and tidy. This has been played 4 times in my database (out of 6 games) and White did fine, winning two games and drawing two. It can be really hard in chess to look at a position with fresh eyes and be willing to basically undo your last move, and I was not up to the challenge here. I played 15.Na4? and after 15...d5 Black was already better, and although I put up a decent fight, I lost in 30 moves. The fourth round pitted me against the wily Tim O’Malley, whose rating is “only” around 1800 but who has a keen tactical eye and is always a threat; in fact, he had already dispatched two higher-rated players this tournament already. I thought that it would be a short game when he fell into the famous “Noah’s Ark” trap (so-called because of that’s how long it’s been around): O’Malley 1812 — Schmidt 2003 after 7...d6</figcaption> </figure> White played 8.d4? Nxd4! 9.Nxd4 exd4 and now he can’t play 10.Qxd4 because after 10...c5 and the queen moves, Black plays ...c4 and traps the bishop. At this point I kind of mentally chalked up the game, but Tim kept fighting, playing for maximum activity, and I found myself having a little trouble getting all my pieces working well, although it seemed like just a matter of time until I could simplify down to a winning endgame, especially since I was up on time 10 minutes to 1 in the following position: O’Malley 1812 — Schmidt 2003 after 29.Qe5-g5</figcaption> </figure> Probably the easiest way to keep everything under control here is 29...Rd7, protecting against Re7. Instead I immediately tried to trade pieces with 29...Bd5?, and after 30.Bxd5 Qxd5 Tim bashed out 31.Re8+! Argh, it’s the infamous hook and ladder</a> trick, winning my queen for a rook! After a minute of staring disbelievingly at the board, trying to decide whether to resign, I played on with 31...Rxe8, because hey, at least there’s not a lot of time left on our clocks, so the duration of my misery is limited. Besides, I remembered a fortress pattern from one of the Yusupov books and it seemed possible that I might be able to set it up, especially since Tim only had one minute and probably didn’t know what I was aiming for. Long story short, I got there 20 moves later: O’Malley 1812 — Schmidt 2003 after 51.Qf6xf5</figcaption> </figure> I wasn’t 100% sure at the time, but according to the tablebases, this is in fact a theoretical draw. I played 51...Kg7 and from that point I can just shuffle my king between g7 and h7 and my rook between e6 and h6 as the situation warrants, and White can’t make progress. It’s very important that my pawn isn’t any further up the board, or there would be room for White’s queen to sneak around from behind. On move 72, with 7 seconds left on his clock, Tim finally gave up and agreed to a draw. I was upset that I turned a win into a loss, but on the other hand I kept fighting and turned the loss back into a draw with the aid of some endgame knowledge that a lot of masters don’t know, so I could be pleased with that. And the spectators enjoyed it! Henry Threadgill, “To Undertake My Corners Open”, part 2 2014-01-08T19:39:43+00:00 Over a year ago</a> I started transcribing Henry Threadgill’s “To Undertake My Corners Open”. I got to the 90% point a long time ago, but as with many projects, it’s the last 10% that takes the most calendar time. One thing that slowed me down is that Threadgill’s flute is super sharp, especially in the high registers, approaching 50 cents by the end of the piece, playing havoc with my ability to match pitches as well as my motivation. I finally got out of that rut when I realized that he was consistently sharp and not just all over the place from one phrase to the next. Once again I could never have finished this project without the great software Transcribe!</a>. Here’s the PDF</a> of the score; I won’t reproduce it here because it runs to 14 pages. Some analysis is coming up, but this has been so long in coming that I didn’t want to slow it down further by waiting until I had a complete essay written up about it. A few general points: Each of the solo section has a different harmonic cycle. The trombone has 3 cycles of 95 beats, the guitar has 8 cycles of 22 beats, and the flute has 2 cycles of 96 beats. As far as I can tell they’re all completely independent.</li> The structure of each cycle definitely includes chords, or at least pitch collections, not just bass notes. They vary a bit each time around but in general the “changes” for each cycle are pretty consistent.</li> Just as the trombone cycle (mm. 18—41) is the head (mm. 1—15) slowed down,, the guitar cycle (mm. 90—95) is the little bit between the recap and coda (mm. 183—191) slowed down, and the flute cycle (mm. 130—150) is the coda (mm. 193—217) slowed down. I was particularly happy to discover this last one, since I was having trouble making sense of the coda before; I couldn’t even figure out how to bar it. If it seems a little over-barred now, it’s because I matched it to the meters of the flute cycle, and the rhythms don’t make any less sense than they would with any other barring.</li> Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like the cycles get further out harmonically as the piece progresses. The trombone solo feels very tonal in a lot of places, the guitar solo is a bit less consonant, and the flute solo feels really abstract (although perhaps the fact that he is 40 cents sharp doesn’t help).</li> </ul> Still to do: Write out the “harmonies” of each cycle.</li> See how those harmonies compare to their “source material”.</li> Look for more rules about how the melodies and harmonies are constructed.</li> Compare to other recorded performances of the same piece to see how much is kept consistent. For example, I assume that the entire coda is through-composed, but perhaps there’s some room for variation there.</li> </ul> All thoughts on the analysis and/or suggestions on the transcription itself are welcome. M-x insert-c++-scope 2013-08-12T18:34:26+00:00 If you write C++ code like I do, when you add a new method to a class, you: type the function signature into the declaration in the header file;</li> copy and paste it into the source file;</li> either type in the name of the class by hand or hunt around looking for another instance of it to copy and paste in.</li> </ol> I finally got tired of step 3 and wrote a little Emacs Lisp code to semi-automate the process. It scans through the source file looking for things that look like scopes, presents you with a list of them to choose from (in descending order of frequency, so the one you’re most likely to want is first), and then inserts the one you choose. Here it is: (require 'ido) ;; Returns a list of all strings of the form "<x>::" in the current ;; buffer, sorted by decreasing frequency. (defun all-c++-scopes-in-buffer () (let ((scope-alist nil)) (save-excursion (goto-char (point-min)) (while (re-search-forward "\\w+::" nil t) (let* ((scope (match-string-no-properties 0)) (ass (assoc scope scope-alist)) (pair (if ass ass (setq scope-alist (cons (cons scope 0) scope-alist)) (car scope-alist)))) (setcdr pair (1+ (cdr pair))))) (mapcar 'car (sort scope-alist (lambda (x y) (> (cdr x) (cdr y)))))))) (defun insert-c++-scope () (interactive) (save-excursion (insert (ido-completing-read "Insert scope: " (all-c++-scopes-in-buffer))))) </code></pre> If you don’t use ido</code>, then 1) you are nuts, and 2) you can just use completing-read</code> instead of ido-completing-read</code>. Of course, I have this bound to a key rather than type M-x insert-c++-scope</code> every time. My Emacs Lisp is rusty, so I imagine that there’s a more idiomatic way to do this (no convenience function to look something up in an alist and automatically add a default pair to it if it’s not already there? really?), but it works, and makes the experience of writing C++ in Emacs a little more pleasant. Mnemosyne, part 3 2013-07-07T16:19:24+00:00 Mnemosyne</a> is a spaced repetition program for aiding memorization; see my first</a> and second</a> posts for more information on the program and how I use it. I guess it is high time for another update; when digging out the above posts I was startled to see that they’re from four years ago. I’ll mostly discuss my experience using it for chess, since that’s what the majority of my 8000 cards are. I’ll skip to the exciting conclusion first: since starting to use Mnemosyne for chess knowledge, my USCF rating</a> has risen from a pretty stable 1800 over fifteen years of on-and-off playing to over 2000. That may not look that impressive, but the chess rating system is effectively logarithmic; the difference of 200 points means that new me would score about 75% against old me, so that’s a pretty big jump, especially for a middle-aged person with a previously stable rating like me. Of course, correlation does not imply causation, and there’s always a bunch of noise involved in chess results, but I’ve now played enough games in a row (around 60) with a performance rating of over 2000 that I feel comfortable assuming that I have actually improved. The majority of my chess flashcards are opening positions. Here’s an example: Sometimes the answer includes some explanatory text to help me remember why the move is good. Having openings memorized has had the most obvious effect on my play of any of my flashcard categories. Although rote memorization of opening lines is generally frowned upon, I’ve noticed the following benefits: Most obviously, I have internalized thousands of good opening moves, so I am less likely to make bad moves in the opening, or spend lots of time figuring out good moves on the fly.</li> I am often able to gain time on my opponents in the opening, as they are “out of book” and thinking on their own before I am. Even if they find good moves, they use up valuable time on them.</li> I am now able to play very sharp (tactical and tricky) openings because I’m confident that I can navigate their waters. This allows me to play much more interesting and dynamic chess than I previously felt capable of doing.</li> </ul> There are drawbacks as well: my memory can fail me in a complicated line, or my memorization can run out too early in a tricky position if I was careless entering the line, or I can enter a position by rote that I haven’t spent much time thinking about strategically and have to wing it. But overall it is a clear benefit. Most of my other chess flashcards come from exercises in books. I started with theoretical endgame positions, which require concrete fact-based knowledge in the same way that openings do. (I used Bernd Rosen’s Chess Endgame Training for this.) But then I decided that since chess is largely about pattern recognition (so that your eye is drawn to promising moves), I could try shoving tons of patterns in my brain and hopefully they’d stick around subconsciously influencing my thought as I played. For this purpose I’ve used exercises from the following books: Yusupov, Build Up Your Chess et al</li> Ivashchenko, Chess School</a></li> Cheng, Practical Chess Exercises</li> Hellsten, Mastering Chess Strategy</li> </ul> It’s hard for me to assess how these cards have affected my play. I don’t think I can recall any particular situation in a tournament game in which I consciously remembered a particular card (even an endgame one), prompting me to notice a specific good move that was otherwise eluding me. But they certainly haven’t hurt, and the effect I was hoping for was more of a subconscious one anyway, and as I said my rating has gone up along with this regimen, so I’m continuing to proceed with the assumption that they’re helping my play. How much time does this all take? On any given day I have to review about 60 to 100 cards, which takes me probably between 10 and 30 minutes (opening positions can take a while, since when a card comes up I first play through the variation on a virtual chessboard), though I usually don’t review them all at once. Making cards can be a little tedious (I don’t want to do the calculation to figure out how much time I’ve spent making all 8000!), but it seems a small price to pay to prevent the knowledge I’ve just acquired from leaking out. The other topic that spaced repetition has been the most useful for is math. I enjoy reading math and physics textbooks but my retention is poor, so I’m constantly starting over. This causes even more problems because I already half-know the early material in the book, so I skim it, which means that once again I’m not really internalizing it. Memorizing formulas and concepts means that I don’t have to start from square one every time. Other categories in my deck: Esperanto vocabulary: I still haven’t picked this back up since the last time I mentioned it, but it’s nice to know that because I review a few cards a day, it’s still in shape if I ever pick it back up.</li> Go problems and joseki: I’m not sure how much this has really helped me, since I haven’t played Go very actively in the last few years, but it’ll be interesting to see if I have less rust than usual the next time I pick up the game.</li> Japanese hiragana and katakana: I clearly still haven’t still internalized these, since once I do well enough on one of them that I go a few months without seeing it again, I tend to forget it the next time. I’m sure this is due to the fact that I’m not doing anything with this knowledge, so I never have any context other than the flashcards.</li> Cyrillic: so I can read proper nouns on Russian chess websites. Definitely a success.</li> Keyboard shortcuts for Sibelius (music scoring program): mixed success. A lot of shortcuts are very abstract like Ctrl-Shift-Down, so they’re pretty hard to memorize. I think I need to learn these more with my fingers than with my eyes and brain.</li> </ul> Overall, using spaced repetition has been a tremendous benefit to me. To take the chess example: even if I hadn’t seemed to have improved as a result, knowing that all the studying I do is not just pouring water into a leaky bucket (as it seemed to be for the previous 15 years), but instead is permanent in some sense, has made me immensely more motivated to learn. The same is true for other subjects like math. If any of the above discussion makes you jealous, I highly recommend you give it a try. David Temperley: Music and Probability 2013-01-13T02:52:48+00:00 This is a book about music cognition: attempting to understand how people understand the music they hear. Temperley’s main thesis throughout the book is that a profitable way to study music perception is to pretend that the listener is doing a Bayesian analysis to determine the structure (e.g., time signature and key) behind the musical surface (the audio signal being heard). Bayes’ Theorem seems to be pretty hot these days. It’s a statement about probabilities, the main point of which is that the a priori likelihood of certain states is useful information when trying to figure out what state actually exists. A standard example is that if a certain disease is incredibly rare, then even if you test positive for it with an only slightly fallible test, it’s still quite unlikely that you really have it. The whole idea that musical perception is largely about creating models in your head about what’s going on, with associated expectations about the future that can either be met or thwarted, and that composers are constantly playing with those expectations, is associated in my mind with the late Leonard Meyer, who is definitely worth reading. I recommend in particular Emotion and Meaning in Music. Temperley uses Bayesian analysis to simulate how listeners create a presumptive model for a given musical signal; for example, if a note arrives a little later than expected, the listener has to make an on-the-fly guess whether that is due to a syncopation (the tempo remains constant and the note is offset from its expected location relative to it) or rubato (the tempo has slowed down slightly and the note is exactly where you’d expect in the slowed-down tempo). If you have a model for the relative probability of the two cases, you have good grounds for guessing which is actually going on. (Note that the model can change according to what kind of music you’re listening to: the answer to the above question is much more likely to be rubato if it’s a classical performance and syncopation if it’s a rock performance). Temperley creates these sorts of models to generate proposed probability distributions in varied domains, from time signatures to key determination to modulation detection. There are some good standard corpora of analyzed musical examples so he’s able to evaluate his models to existing ones fairly accurately, and they perform well though not groundbreakingly so. One nice thing is that the models tend to be fairly simple compared to many other ones in the field, which tend to be rather special-cased and apparently a bit fragile. I was very pleased, by the way, to find that a scale-determination system that I had come up with independently in the late 90s for use in creating automatic accompaniment for MIDI renditions of karaoke songs was basically exactly the same as one of the standard systems that the academic world came up with. (The short version is that for a given timespan you take the total duration of each pitch class and take the dot-product of that 12-dimensional vector with a vector representing a signature for each hypothetical scale, then take the maximum. Not rocket science but it was nice to come up with a simple quantitative algorithm that performed well in practice.) Even though there’s no silver bullet here, the ideas in it are quite interesting. I particularly like that the models end up being fairly straightforward and don’t require a ton of specialized tweaks, which is a promising feature. The math involved is real, but if all you care about is the music you can probably gloss over most of it if you trust the author. Worth reading if you’re interested in how people perceive music, either for its own sake or because you want to exploit it as a composer or performer. Henry Threadgill, “To Undertake My Corners Open”, part 1 2012-12-30T16:48:29+00:00 Henry Threadgill’s Zooid group has made some really interesting recent music in an original musical language, but I’ve seen very little discussion of what the language is, and Threadgill himself doesn’t seem to be very forthcoming. The best description I’ve found comes from guitarist Liberty Ellman in a phone conversation with Nate Chinen</a>, but there’s still not enough detail for me to reverse-engineer it. A diagram would probably clear it all up, but it’s hard to provide a diagram over the phone! So I started transcribing a piece to see if I could start to make some sense of it. I chose “To Undertake My Corners Open” (YouTube link</a>) from This Brings Us To, volume 1. It’s pretty gnarly stuff, so I’m pausing a couple of minutes in to report my findings so far. If I waited until I finished the whole thing, it would be a really long time before I wrote anything, plus I would have a novel’s worth of things to say about it; this way I can write as I go, and maybe even get some feedback. I’ve transcribed the “head” as well as the first “chorus” of the trombone solo (his solo lasts just under three cycles of a repeating bass progression). The score so far is below but it’s probably handier to look at the PDF</a>. Caveats: I have a pretty good ear, but this stuff is hard! It’s not particularly tonal and there are two “analog-pitch” instruments (trombone and bass). Meanwhile the guitar has nice discrete pitches but is hard to hear behind the other instruments. The beat can be hard to identify; Threadgill tends to deliberately avoid obvious downbeats, aiming for a more homogenous pulse. I tried to switch meter only when I really had to. I should mention that I use the fabulous Transcribe!</a> program, and there’s no way I could have gotten remotely close to this amount of detail without it. Does the opening phrase of the trombone remind any one else of the beginning of Berg’s Lyric Suite? Probably a coincidence, but I get the impression that Threadgill knows twelve-tone history. I’ll come back to the head, which seems pretty through-composed, in a minute, but moving ahead to the trombone solo (the bass cycle starts at m. 18): one thing that surprised me when transcribing is that it’s a lot more normal than it sounds at first. The trombone is following the bass progression very faithfully, and even navigates it in a quite tonal manner, measures 21–27 being the clearest example. It’s mostly the guitar that colors the harmonies in an interesting and dissonant way. The thing I’m most interested to find out next is whether the guitar part’s structure is more vertical (choosing notes each measure from a harmony relative to the bass) or horizontal (charting an independent path that creates interesting harmonies by chance). Ellman’s comments give the impression that it might be the latter. Once I finish the next two choruses of this solo, I’ll have a better impression of what is consistent each time around, which will help illuminate the structure behind it. Here’s the bass structure of the trombone solo. Like I said, it repeats three times, starting at m. 18. (I get the sense that it changes for the following guitar solo, but I haven’t listened closely yet.) I said I would get back to the head later, and here’s why: the structure of the head is basically exactly the same but twice as fast! Even the lead-in, not pictured above, corresponds: m. 2 is mm. 16–17 at double speed. The intro goes through one of the two G♭–D♭–C–B♭–F cycles, skips the second one, takes a weird repeated 7/4 break that could be related to the 5/4 D♭–C measure, then meets up again with the E and corresponds perfectly the rest of the way. That’s the most interesting tidbit I’ve found so far, and something I never would have noticed without writing it all out. Note by the way that the repeated guitar figure in that 7/4 section is almost palindromic. That’s about all I have for now. Open questions: What’s the structure behind the guitar lines underneath the trombone solo? Whatever it is, it seems to be changing at about the same rate as the bass progression.</li> Are there any particular harmonic or melodic rules behind the through-composed head? Nothing has leaped out at me so far, but I haven’t looked very hard.</li> </ul> More later, I hope. Wayne Shorter: "Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum" 2012-12-09T03:53:51+00:00 Another step in my continuing quest to learn more about jazz by transcribing recordings. I like Wayne Shorter's 1960s albums a lot, and “Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum” (YouTube video</a>) is my favorite tune from the most famous of them, Speak No Evil. The spur to do a Shorter tune came when Ethan Iverson transcribed his solo from Lee Morgan's “Party Time”</a> and I found that our conceptions of Shorter's rhythm were pretty different, largely because he is so lazy (behind the beat). There's a fine line between playing ahead or behind the beat and syncopating; in one case you're turning a knob in an analog way and in the other the knob has turned so far that it's reached the next “notch” and you've actually created a different rhythm. Shorter straddles that line really interestingly, playing in such a fluid way that even when he's super late you can feel the “real” rhythm that he's relating to, like the note is a balloon on a long string tied to the beat. I did all the parts except for Herbie Hancock's piano comping during other solos and Elvin Jones' drumming, so the whole thing came out to 10 pages and I won't dump it all here, but the PDF file is here</a>. Some thoughts I had about the song while working with it: Those piano chords at the beginning are really tasty. I haven't the faintest idea how to analyze them from a jazz harmony theory viewpoint; from a classical perspective I'd say they serve the same sort of function as a I64, sitting on a dominant drone, setting up a real arrival on I (which, eight bars into the head, turns out to be B♭). I'm not certain about every note in every chord but it sounds pretty right to me when I play it on the piano. The tune itself is really interesting. It starts out in a clear G minor; then the B♭ that the melody lands on basically turns into an A♯, creating a major-seventh dissonance in the bass, and resolves to the B♮ of G major, but the line still ends like a question, largely because it curves up to the fifth (D) rather than down to the root (G). The second four measures imitate the first four but end up in the parallel major, B♭, with the melody again landing on the fifth instead of the root as the underlying B♭7 harmony immediately moves us away towards E♭. The middle eight measures have a pretty simple implicit harmony from the bass (and the solos later refer to that harmony rather than what's going on in the melody here), but the melody instruments do a cool parallel-fourths-and-tritones thing that adds some nice dissonance. A standard ii–V–I progression brings us back to a recap of the first eight measures, in which the melody finally lands triumphantly on B♭, but the bass refuses to follow suit, obstinately sitting on C♭/B♮, forming the exact same major-seventh dissonance that was the first hint of harmonic oddness back in the third measure. Freddie Hubbard's trumpet solo feels the most classical of the three in its rhythm and harmony. He plays most straightforwardly in the bluesy middle third, a pattern the other soloists will follow. Wayne Shorter's tenor sax solo is really rhapsodic by comparison. He takes two choruses and I'm glad he does. It's not super virtuosic but he stretches and pulls the beat in really interesting ways. The simplest rhythms are the ones he massages the most, like the simple eighth-note riffs starting on measure 69; they're so laggy it's tempting to try to notate them differently, but they're clearly really lazy eighth notes, not some crazy syncopation. I particularly like the syncopated three-note blasts starting at measure 93, especially the way that they gradually subside back into the A section rather than exploding as you might expect them to. After I finished it I discovered Kevin Sun's transcription</a> of the solo, and the comparison is really interesting. We agree 99% on the pitches (unfortunately for you, my transcription is at concert pitch and his is in B♭), but we often have big disagreements on the rhythm. Herbie Hancock's solo is the least lyrical, in the sense of sounding like a vocal line; it comes more in little bursts of riffs. The left-hand voicings are probably the component I'm least sure of in the whole transcription; I wouldn't be surprised if I accidentally put in something unidiomatic there. The style is really interesting to me, since my instinct when I try to improvise is still play something that sounds like a sax plus harmony, rather than this more interesting collections of riffs and stabs. The rising pattern of four triplets as he finishes is really tasty. I transcribed Ron Carter's bass all the way through because I noticed that transcribing the bass is something that Ethan does, and I learned a lot from it that I'm sure will be useful for my left hand. It's tough to hear the bass and sometimes he's between pitches, so you may not agree with me about every note. In general I was impressed by how he was able to sustain interest but not distract from the soloing going on on top of him. I'll try to pick something more simple next time! Maybe something from the 50s. In the meantime, comments and proposed corrections are encouraged. Perri Knize: Grand Obsession 2012-08-20T15:46:11+00:00 I recently spent a fair amount of time and energy researching a piano purchase, and as I had always concentrated more on the notes than on the instrument making them, it was very educational both to listen closely to a bunch of pianos and to read about differences in construction, tone, action, etc. After all that, Grand Obsession looked interesting; it’s a work of non-fiction about piano manufacture and maintenance (such as all the work that is done on the feel of the physical mechanism, the tuning, and the tone of the sound), wrapped in a personal story about the author’s quest to find the perfect piano and then get the perfect tone on it. The information on the piano industry was pretty much all very interesting. Knize got to have in-depth conversations with lots of different sorts of people—manufacturers, dealers, tuners, voicers, other players—and I learned a lot from them. There is one chapter on “physics” with exciting updates on topics like “vibrational healing” and the fact that apparently string theory implies that each of us has a fundamental frequency that our “cellular structures respond to”, but I am going to be charitable and just pretend that it doesn’t exist. The framing story was more problematic for me. The author spends over a year traveling over the whole country in a quest for the sole piano (within her budget) that she can possibly stand the sound of, and then spends a few more years obsessively trying to get it to sound tolerable to her ears after it arrives with a tone that she doesn’t like. The following passage, after an episode replacing the hammers, is representative: Something is dreadfully wrong with the piano. It sounds horrible. Strident. Harsh. Too much sound pouring from the belly, sound that clashes against itself until it turns into a storm of dissonance that whips itself into a furious tornado of ringing tones that actually hurt my ears. (p. 217) </blockquote> The reader is constantly reminded of how exquisitely sensitive Knize’s ears are, to the point that I wonder how she can enjoy listening to 90% of piano recordings out there. I don’t doubt that she does have sensitive hearing, but it feels to me like a drawback, like being a supertaster is for many people, rather than a feature. The capper for me is that she (at least during the time that the book covers) is not a very accomplished pianist; the repertoire that she describes learning is pretty basic. It’s actually a little sad to me how much time she spends trying to optimize her piano that could be spent playing it instead. The book reads a bit to me like the story of a someone who decided to write a novel and then immediately spent two years searching for the perfect font. In the end, I learned to pay attention to the parts that interested me and skim over the parts that bugged me, so I don’t regret reading it, and if she had been less obsessed with finding the perfect sound, she probably wouldn’t have been inspired to write it in the first place. By the end, though, I was ready to move on to an authorial voice I could empathize with a bit more. Richard Taruskin: The Oxford History of Western Music, volumes 2–5 2012-06-25T14:42:48+00:00 I wrote about volume 1</a> of Richard Taruskin’s history of Western music a couple of years ago. Although I finished volume 2 shortly thereafter, I never got around to writing about it, and then I stalled on the whole thing early into volume 3 until this year, when I got motivated again and ended up tearing through the rest of it in the space of a month. See my old post for opinions on his style in general, which I haven’t really changed my mind about. One big difference is that once he got to the year 1700 or so, I was suddenly about 80% familiar with the music being described rather than 10%. You may question the wisdom of reading 2000 pages of material on a subject that I already knew pretty well, but it was actually quite nice; it’s fun to nod sagely in approval as the author declaims to readers things that you already know, and having the context of that 80% made me appreciate the remaining 20% more than I otherwise would. I also knew the repertoire a lot better than the history, so it was nice to get a sense of the connective tissue that lies between all of those individual works. Taruskin tells a good story, and he is pretty good at not falling prey to the temptation in a history book to divide everything very neatly into discrete boxes. In fact he takes great pains to blur the traditionally stark lines between Baroque and Classical music (in the mid 18th century) and tonal and atonal music (in the early 20th century), showing that there was much more of a continuum at the time than often appears in retrospect. One particularly interesting take was his assertion that modern music really began in the mid-1800s, not in the early 1900s where most people put the dividing line (when traditional tonality was dissolving). His point is that it was the mid-1800s when music criticism became established, one consequence of which being that composers and listeners started to think of historical progress in music, with composers having some sort of scientist-like responsibility, against which they can be evaluated, to push the boundaries of music forward. It’s that change in perception that to Taruskin really marks the beginning of the modern attitude towards composition. As I said, there was a fair amount of material I wasn’t really familiar with, so it was nice to fill in the gaps in my knowledge of musical history, such as the development of Italian opera and early Russian and East European music. I feel like I much have a better bird’s-eye view of the developments of classical music over the last few centuries now. Taruskin continually warns against the temptation to treat music history in a teleological way, in which music composition “makes progress” over time as composers invent and discover more advanced and “better” techniques. But I felt like he falls victim to the same trap a bit when he enters the 20th century. There is very little attention paid to some very fine 20th century composers, presumably because they don’t fit his forward-pointing narrative. Sibelius gets a couple of pages. Nielsen gets one sentence. To take a few examples of superb recent composers who have created lots of important work, Nancarrow, Lutosławski, and Nørgård are not mentioned at all. On the other hand, Roy Harris gets 13 pages (maybe he was considered a lot more important at the time than he is in retrospect, but still, it’s weird) and David Del Tredici gets 7. (There’s a general American slant to Taruskin’s 20th-century history that he acknowledges but claims to be based in fact.) Especially given that the last volume is shorter than the others by 200 pages, you’d think that he could have found room for a couple of chapters surveying some of these important composers that didn’t fit so neatly into his narrative. Despite my issues with what he chooses to concentrate on in the 20th century, I did find the material that he did write about very interesting and thought-provoking. I think that his take on who-cares-if-you-listen complexity vs more traditionally audience-oriented music is pretty fair, although I understand why those of the complexity school (especially if you have been raised with the music-history-as-progress meme) might not think so. I should also mention that the whole thing, all 3800+ pages of it, is also a great read. It’s not dry at all, and Taruskin occupies just the right position on the facts-vs-opinions spectrum to keep things interesting but still grounded. Not only did I learn a lot, I also enjoyed it very much and was sad when I ran out of history to read about. Evan Dara: The Lost Scrapbook 2011-07-31T03:26:22+00:00 Another one of those long difficult books that I bought on principle and then let languish on my bookshelf for a decade (literally; I just went to Amazon to see what the reader reviews were like and it informed me that I had bought this from them in 1999). Like many Gaddis books, it consists almost entirely of unattributed dialogue, although in this case much of it is more like monologue, as (unnamed) people recount occurrences that have happened to them. Adding to the difficulty, the book consists largely of “scenes” that have nothing at all to do with each other, at least overtly; also, there are no breaks between scenes, even by starting a new paragraph, and in fact a scene/speaker change can sometimes happen in the middle of a sentence. (I say “sentence” even though there is only one period in the whole book; all other sentences are demarcated instead with semicolons; or ellipses... or occasionally both;... you can imagine that this can get a bit wearying). So basically it’s a big collage, and when you approach it that way it’s actually pretty interesting. The individual stories that make up the “novel” (I feel a little funny calling it that) are generally quite compelling, even in their fragmented form, and about 60% of the way through the book the granularity of the collage changes, so that instead of getting ten pages at a time of different stories, you get one paragraph or even just one sentence at a time, but of the same basic story. This technique, in which a plot plays out just by reeling out hundreds of unattributed sentences relaying people’s varying reactions to off-screen events, is really cool and fairly gripping. I was expecting all the threads of the book to tie together in the end, but I had to be satisfied with some loose inter-story connections and a well-earned climax to the eventual main plot. It turns out to be a book more about establishing a mood and way of looking at things in the reader than about a plot, which is fine. At close to 500 pages, you’d think it would take months to get through, but it’s actually a pretty quick read, largely because the writing of the individual scenes is very compelling. I was glad to move on to a more normal book when I finished it, but it was a really interesting reading experience that I’m glad to have had. Ted Gioia: The History of Jazz 2011-07-20T01:56:58+00:00 So I have gotten really interested in jazz over the last year. (Apparently this is de rigueur for men as they enter middle age.) I’ve always had a vague understanding of the musical syntax, and can fake playing cocktail-piano renditions of standards okay, but I’ve never really had a good knowledge of the field as a whole. My three-pronged approach to remedying this has been 1) reading about jazz theory (largely through Bert Ligon’s Jazz Theory Resources and Mark Levine’s Jazz Piano Book, about which maybe more later), 2) reading about jazz history, and 3) listening to a ton of music. Reading this book, unsurprisingly, was part of prong 2. Any book about music starts out at a disadvantage in that the actual subject it is discussing is apprehended by the ear and not the eye. With classical music, at least the score is the definition of the piece, but with popular music even a transcription is just a lens that inherently distorts the subject. The History of Jazz doesn’t even try to display musical excerpts; it’s purely text, and although the text is fairly descriptive, simply reading about the music is completely insufficient if you want to understand anything about its history. Luckily YouTube is around to fill in the gap. I don’t know how much less I would have gotten out of this book if all I could do was read it, but being able to immediately reach out and listen to 80% of the referred-to repertoire was completely invaluable. Anyway, the actual book itself. Given that it could only really describe the music at one level of indirection, it was actually really instructive. Jazz, especially once you get to the 1950s, consists of a giant interconnected family tree of artists and styles, and it was really impressive to me that Gioia was able to construct a fairly reasonable linear narrative navigating the entire maze, jumping on to an artist’s path for a few years, taking a couple of detours to describe his peers, and coming back to him later when his subsequent style was more relevant to the current story. The music that I am most interested in (bebop and its descendants) doesn’t even enter the picture until halfway through the book, but that’s probably unavoidable, and the material on early jazz is really interesting. It hadn’t really occurred to me, for example, how impossible it is to disentangle jazz’s roots from the effects of slavery, which turns the love of jazz into an inherently ambivalent kind of prospect. (Another downer is that everyone seems to die young; if they make it past 40 it’s kind of surprising. I swear that being a jazz musician is more dangerous than coal mining.) If you’re looking for a 400-page overview of the entire giant field of jazz (up through the mid-1990s), I bet it’s hard to do much better than this. It certainly gave me a broad bird’s-eye view of the genre that enabled me to focus on the artists and periods I thought I would be interested in, and when I came back to it after learning more about a given subject, its summary still seemed pretty good to me. Supplement it with YouTube and you’ve got a perfect multimedia introduction to the genre. Daniel Abraham: The Price of Spring 2011-07-07T01:58:44+00:00 This is the fourth and final volume of the Long Price Quartet fantasy series, of which I have previously reviewed the first three</a> volumes</a>. Basically everything I said about the other books continues to hold true; it’s totally character-driven (almost all plot developments occur because someone acted or reacted in a manner wholly consistent with their personality) in a really nice way. The life paths of the two major characters continue to diverge (and it’s now 45 years since the series started), with the marked difference in their fortunes simultaneously being no one’s fault (good/bad luck) and totally their fault (it is the result of their decisions and actions). The plot is very well done, and brings the series to a conclusion with a fitting climax, but is almost secondary to the exploration of how these characters ended up as they did. I actually found books 2 and 3 to be the most successful (as with book 3, I though there was a slight sag between the point where you can see what the denouement is going to be and when it actually occurs), but that’s to praise this one with faint damnation. The whole series is great, and is a really nice demonstration of what you can do in the wide genre of “fantasy” without feeling the need to go down the whole elves-and-knights epic fantasy route. Of course, the series didn’t end up selling that well (Tor didn’t even release this fourth volume in paperback, so I recommend you pick up the 2 UK omnibi, titled Shadow and Betrayal and Seasons of War), and perhaps in response, Abraham has recently released the first volume, The Dragon’s Path, of his new series—which is epic fantasy. It kind of feels like a retreat, but I’m sure it’ll be great (though I’ll probably wait until I can read it all at once). Steven Erikson: The Malazan Book of the Fallen 2011-07-05T03:16:45+00:00 I’ve already posted about the first three books of Steven Erikson’s mammoth epic fantasy series The Malazan Book of the Fallen [1]</a> [2]</a> [3]</a>, but I’ve finished the series in the meantime and if I try to write one post each about the remaining seven, I’ll never get anything else done. So I’m going to rush through the rest and see if I have anything interesting to say about any of them. IV. House of Chains. The “I can’t believe how epic this series is” moment of this one comes when, in contrast to the usual bouncing back and forth between viewpoint characters, the entire first quarter of the novel is devoted to telling the back story of a single character who so far has only briefly appeared in book two and didn’t even have a name then. (Naturally, he turns out to be one of the more important characters in the series.) Once we get back to the main cast of characters, things move along at a good clip, and it ends with a very effective resolution of one of the main plot lines of the first four books, with a couple of cliffhangers added, including one fairly new character saying that he’s going to tell his backstory... V. Midnight Tides. Which is this book, my favorite of the series and many people’s least. Once again Erikson starts completely from scratch, with what is effectively a prequel on an entirely new continent featuring an entirely new cast of characters, which I think annoyed a bunch of people who were on tenterhooks waiting to get resolution for the things left hanging from House of Chains. This is actually a fairly self-contained story (I might even argue that it’s the best starting point for the series as a whole) which is much tighter and less sprawling than most of the other books. There’s some Wodehousian humor (the best yet), some horror, some allegorical social commentary, and some great plot twists. A big success, in my opinion. VI. The Bonehunters. As we begin the second half of the series, events begin to converge a bit instead of just expand, which makes it just a bit less compelling for me. A lot of this book is setup for the rest of the series. There are some highlights, like an awesome single-gigantic-chapter set piece featuring a city on fire, but by the time we get to the last over-the-top set piece (in Malaz City, which we had not visited since the prologue to the first book), I was a little exhausted. VII. Reaper’s Gale. Here the II–IV–VI and V plots start to converge a bit. I liked the political stuff that carried over from Midnight Tides the most (though, as before, I seem to be in the slight minority here) but an issue that started in the last book continues here: the book gets clogged up with frequent long sections that are basically character studies illustrating the boredom/terror of dozens of individual soldiers. It’s a valid artistic decision, but I felt that those sections could have been pared down a bit. It doesn’t help that a gigantic climax is promised from page 1 (basically, there is to be a showdown between the three biggest badasses in the world) and held tantalizingly out of the readers’ reach until the very end. Still, there is a lot of good stuff here, especially with a plot thread dealing with an entirely new civilization (as usual, I am most excited when stuff keeps expanding). VIII. Toll the Hounds. And we’re back to the I–III strand! This is a bit of a weird one, as Erikson suddenly goes full-out Dickens. He’s always examined different strata of society, one thing that makes the books’ scope so great, but here I feel him straining to explicitly include all the different groups he can (and, unlike Dickens, the strata reach all the way up to those of the gods!), and there is a ton of authorial intrusion (although under the guise of an in-world character) directing us to cogitate upon all that is being presented to us. That didn’t totally work for me, but there is a lot of great plot and character development, although also a fair amount of getting characters from point A to point B (a general issue throughout the series). There is a pretty excellent “What the hell just happened?” point near the end, which however could have been explained a little better (another general issue). IX. Dust of Dreams. Now we’re really in the home stretch; this is explicitly part one of a two-part finale. It continues to suffer from the Unending Soldier Character Studies issue from VI/VII, and in general things feel slightly overstuffed, as if Erikson had 1.5 books worth of material and expanded them to two instead of contracting them to one. One (sentient) species that had previously mostly just been alluded to finally takes center stage, which is a nice payoff, In a very Eriksonian moment, one large storyline is launched and comes crashing down all within one book, which some people find a complete waste but I consider to be generally a positive thing, proving that anything can happen to anyone at any time in this world. X. The Crippled God. And so we reach the end. I probably need to read this again to form a good unbiased opinion of it, but I’m not sure if I ever will, so I’m going to have to go with what I got. It is a good page turner, though I do have some issues with it; for one thing, the main Big Bad, which could have been drawn in some interesting shades of gray (which Erikson does very well in other contexts throughout the series), is not really explored in any interesting way. Although a lot of long plot arcs converge and are resolved in this book, it becomes clear by the halfway point that it’s not going to epically resolve every last thread of the entire series in an narratively orgasmic climax; the story is huge but it’s just one more story. So at the end the series basically is the sum of its parts, rather than transcending them. That’s okay; the parts are pretty great. But if you’re slogging through hoping for some gigantic payoff that will make everything that came before amazing in retrospect, you will likely be disappointed. When I was at the series’ halfway point, I was hoping that I would get to the end and immediately want to start again at the beginning to pick up all the subtleties I had missed the first time around, and that’s not going to happen; but it was a pretty excellent ride. What's wrong with this sentence? 2011-07-02T14:19:19+00:00 “The federal [student] loans are a good deal, but they are often not enough [to] make up the difference between what a family has saved or can spend out of current income and what the student gets in grants and scholarship money.” [from the New York Times article A New Type of Student Loan, but Still a Risk</a>] A gripe about chess annotations 2011-05-01T00:38:53+00:00 More and more these days, analysis of chess games relies on chess engines (playing programs), whether to come up with ideas or just to double-check the human annotator’s calculations. That is not my gripe; computer analysis is just a fact of life these days. My gripe is that the people who are writing the analyses and using the computer programs are oddly reluctant to actually name them. Instead of saying “Rybka suggests 25.Nxf6” or “Fritz thinks this is now a draw”, they’ll simply refer to “the computer”, e.g., “The computer has a brilliant idea here”. As a software programmer, it really bugs me that the creators of these programs, of which there are dozens with highly individual characteristics, don’t get any credit for their work, as if chess engines (which require an immense amount of both creativity and detail) were completely fungible and simply sprang into existence by spontaneous generation. Annotators, cut it out! Dmitri Tymoczko: A Geometry of Music 2011-04-25T21:14:37+00:00 I have always been a sucker for music theory and analysis. The combination of the fairly strict rules underpinning the way in which music works with the creative freedom expressed on top of them is really appealing to me. It is probably true of any art, but music is the one I know best and it feels especially true there. This new book promised “a revolutionary approach to music theory”, which set off my bullshit detector a bit, but everything else about it (blurbs, published by Oxford University Press) checked out, so I gave it a shot. And it was great. There is a lot of exciting new stuff here, but Tymoczko doesn’t claim to have replaced the entire field of music theory, just to have discovered an additional way of looking at music that provides interesting insights, and he totally succeeds there. A quick overview, focusing on the stuff that was interesting to me: n-part counterpoint can be visualized as the movement of a point through an n-dimensional space. Pretty obvious stuff in retrospect, especially if you have a math background, but it lets him do some neat analytical things, especially when he gets to 4+-note chords. Also, that n-dimensional space repeats in a very interesting way (the 2-dimensional case is a Möbius strip; the higher-dimensional ones are even weirder). There’s a continuum all the way from local 2-part counterpoint to long-range modulation. Basically, Tymoczko is looking at music as much as he can through the concept of efficient voice-leading (transitioning from one set of pitches to another with each individual part moving as little as possible). In the small, this is about melodic counterpoint. In the middle, the same principles can be applied to harmonic motion (and he shows how a lot of chromatic music from Schubert on is best analyzed from this viewpoint). And in the large scale, you can treat scales (and therefore tonalities) as being akin to 7-note (or so) chords and do exactly the same sort of analysis. So for example, your standard modulation from C major to G major can be thought of as following a voice leading from C–D–E–F–G–A–B to C–D–E–F♯–G–A–B. Obviously there are qualitative differences as you move along this spectrum, but the fact that you can be using similar tools at each scale is really neat. 20th century tonality is a natural evolution of classical tonality, not a clean break. The standard history of music is that tonality slowly got stretched and stretched, as harmony got further and further out, until it reached a breaking point in the early 20th century, where it pretty much split into complete atonality on the one hand, and on the other a “tonality with non-functional harmony” that was qualitatively different from the tonality that came before in that the chords in it, although they were still consonant, had lost much of the semantic meaning that they had had through the 19th century. Tymoczko argues pretty strongly that rather than there being a real break between old and modern conceptions of tonality, the transition is actually relatively smooth, in that early 20th century composers were solving perfectly natural problems that had arisen in perfectly natural ways. These problems, as above, tend to be ones of voice-leading and the relationship between chords and scales. He also draws a compelling line from 19th century harmony through 20th century harmony through jazz harmony to 21st century harmony. Clearly everyone can hear jazzy chords in Debussy, for example, and you can think of it as being kind of a coincidence, but he shows that impressionist composers and jazz musicians were faced with similar musical problems, and solved them in similar ways. There’s a ton more in here, and pretty much all of it was thought-provoking at the very least and genuinely conception-altering at the best. As far as background needed: although it doesn’t have much in the way of music-theoretical prerequisites (because it is approaching a lot of ideas from a different direction), it probably wouldn’t be that interesting to anyone who wasn’t already interested enough in music theory to have learned the more standard approach (if that makes sense). There’s a bit of math terminology but I don’t think it’s that scary. Highly recommended. Steven Erikson: Memories of Ice 2011-04-02T22:38:27+00:00 Book three of The Malazan Book of the Fallen does at least return to the same general location and cast of characters as the first book, but in a way, doing so makes the giant scope of the project even more clear, by launching off into entirely new plots with those characters instead of continuing the trajectories they seemed to be on, and throwing in scads of new characters and plots as well. The first time I read Memories of Ice I was a little frustrated by this. After spending a whole book away from the setting of Gardens of the Moon, I thought that returning to it would entitle me to the answers to many of the questions left hanging in that book. Instead I got a dozen new mysteries, and new characters where I wanted to learn more about the old ones. Combine that with a length of 1200 pages (in mass market paperback, at least), and it’s no wonder that I started to get a little fatigued. But as with all of the books in this series, it improves on rereading, especially after reading later books in the series so that you have a better sense of how the events and themes of this book fit into the greater plot arcs. In fact, what seems to be the main plotline of the entire series doesn’t even start until this book (I say “seems” because, being only up to book 7 as I write this, I’m not actually sure exactly where things are going). You could regard the “really needs multiple reads” as a positive or negative aspect; I think it’s a positive one. I don’t generally reread books much, but a lot of classical music requires (and expects) many listens before the full structure becomes clear, and it doesn’t seem unreasonable for a book to ask for the same. All of the things I’ve said about earlier book in the series hold true in this one as well: the epic scope, the cast of hundreds featuring gods just as much as mortals, the relentless tragedy (I think this book is even more of a downer than Deadhouse Gates). I liked it a lot more this time through, even though I think the series really gets off the ground in book 4 when we leave this continent behind (apparently we return in book 8, though). Anyone who gets this far is probably in it for the long haul, and I am no exception. One more Ultima Underworld story 2011-03-18T02:21:09+00:00 I can’t believe I forgot this one. One of the levels (5, I think?) was largely populated by ghouls, with standard flesh-eating names like Eyesnack and Kneenibble. Naturally you could talk to them instead of just fighting them. Jon Maiara (the same guy responsible for the Pac-Man homage) was writing the conversations for them, and included all sorts of things like the opportunity for you to make fun of Eyesnack’s name, to which he would respond by making fun of your name in return. You see the edge case, of course, right? That’s right, part of our precious 640K was devoted to checking for whether the player’s name is also Eyesnack, in which case, in response to your mockery, the ghoul proclaims indignantly, “But your name same as mine!” Maybe that will make you feel better about Judy falling into the lava. Double pin 2011-03-06T02:18:37+00:00 It's not every day you get to make a move like this. From a 3-minute ICC game: It was very pleasing to be able to play 25.Qxd6. Ultima Underworld bugs 2011-02-21T14:16:01+00:00 While I'm reminiscing about the old days... As we (Blue Sky Productions, later Looking Glass Technologies / Studios) were developing Ultima Underworld in 1991–1992, largely in a basement room in an office building in Somerville’s Davis Square, we received bug reports both from our own people and the QA team at Origin Systems, who published the game. “Our own people” largely meant MIT friends of the core programming team (me, Doug Church, and Jon Maiara) who we roped into helping out. Our lead tester was Tim Stellmach (now at Vicarious Visions), a math major. You could tell he was a math major because his bug reports would start with “Consider a door.” Our producer from Origin was Warren Spector, already a pretty important guy in the industry but someone who has since received yet more accolades for working on, well, Ultima Underworld, not to mention other games such as System Shock (with us), Deus Ex, and Epic Mickey. He is a super down-to-earth guy and we wasted no time in making fun of him, which he took with impressive grace. I guess it was a tradition at Origin to insert characters based on Warren into their games, so we figured we had to as well. Luckily we already had a “spectre” type of monster so it took no work to name one of them Warren. We made sure that Warren was in town the day that Tim was reading through the daily bug report list and said “Bug: There is no reference in the game to Warren Spector”, to which the rest of us immediately piped up, “Fixed!” without further explanation, much to Warren’s chagrin. We were working with a lot of pretty raw graphics technology, as you can imagine, and it created some unintended graphical results fairly often. The upside was that whenever we ran into some heinous graphics bug that resulted in crazy psychedelic effects, once we figured out what was causing it, after fixing it we kept the code that would make it happen and enabled it when you ate too many mushrooms. Speaking of graphics... well, probably most of you are far too young to remember the Apple ][, but it had a seriously weird graphics mode, which had not only a crazy palette (black, white, green, blue, orange, and purple) but also placed additional restrictions on how you could use the colors near each other (see here</a> if you really need to know the gory details). Paul Neurath, our CEO, never tired of telling stories of what a pain it was to work with that system when he had written his earlier game Space Rogue. So naturally we added code that would specifically look for a certain file we had planted on Paul’s computer, and if it found it, would switch to a green-blue-orange-purple palette for one frame every half hour or so. Unfortunately I honestly can’t remember whether Paul ever actually noticed it. One part of one of the levels, designed by Jon, was a Pac-Man homage. You had to run around a maze, which I believe faithfully duplicated the first level of Pac-Man picking up “ore” while avoiding ghosts. How Origin let this through I’ll never know, but they did have one complaint: Jon had named the ore “unobtanium” (yes, the same joke that Avatar used 20 years later), and they insisted that that name was too silly. So we changed it to “zanium” in protest... and apparently they were perfectly fine with that. The worst bug that made it into the shipping game was probably mine. One of the quests involved talking to a woman named Judy</a>, who could be found hanging out next to a river of lava. It turned out that, given our emergent-gameplay physics-driven simulation philosophy, we never actually prohibited characters from walking into the lava (although of course their AI tried to avoid it). So it was possible (although thankfully rare) for Judy to wander into the lava and die, making your game unwinnable. If you have been enraged at me for the last 20 years, I apologize. But the best bug report I remember came from Origin. We rendered the world in true 3D but most of the objects (monsters, objects you could pick up) were 2D sprites. There were a few actual 3D polygonal objects, though, such as boulders. When we added the 3D object capability, we needed something to test it out, and we hadn’t created any ourselves yet, so we used a red sports car from some friends who were developing a game with the Car & Driver license, which we plopped down in the middle of a cavern. Sure enough, you could walk all around it and it looked just like a red sports car. Then the bug report came in, of course. “On the fifth level, at this particular location, there is a red sports car sitting on the floor.” OK, I guess we could have expected that. What we did not expect was the next sentence: “I should be able to enter it and drive around.” The dangers of self-modifying code 2011-02-20T17:13:03+00:00 One of my coding stories</a> recently showed up on reddit</a> and spawned a giant thread. Having it brought up again reminded me of another fun bug from the early days, in this case 1991. I had just graduated from college and joined Blue Sky Productions, soon to be renamed Looking Glass Technologies</a>, where we were working on the PC game Ultima Underworld</a>, a first-person 3D dungeon crawl. I needed a machine so I was given an 33 MHz 80486 PC. Everybody else was jealous because not only was it immediately the fastest PC in the office, it was also the only one with a floating point unit. The downside was that everybody wanted to run their tools requiring floating point on my machine. Anyway, of course the first thing to do as soon as the machine showed up was to run the in-progress version of Underworld on it to see how zippy it would be—perhaps it could get all the way up to 15 frames a second! Unfortunately, the game completely failed on my machine. I can’t remember whether it just crashed, or everything on screen was just black, or what, but it just did not work at all. After much hair-tearing, we figured out the problem. The texture mapper (in software, not hardware, of course), which had been written by an outside guy (Chris Green—I see he’s now at Valve) and handed to us, was using self-modifying code in an attempt to squeeze as much performance as possible out of the system. Where a normal program might have a loop that accesses a variable each time through the loop, our texture mapper’s loop would just refer to a constant value. Before entering the loop, it would do the variable lookup once, poke that value into its own code, replacing the constant, and then run the loop a bunch of times without having to waste time looking up the value again. Brilliant! Impossible to debug, but brilliant. Unfortunately, the 486 had its own optimization—an instruction cache. So we were dutifully poking new values into program memory that had already been read and was never reread, which meant that all of the updates were completely ignored. Oops. I see that the Wikipedia article on self-modifying code has a section</a> on exactly this problem. Carlos Ruiz Zafón: The Shadow of the Wind 2011-02-20T00:16:24+00:00 I feel like too many of my book posts lately have been of the form “Eh, didn’t really float my boat.” Well, in this case my watercraft was 100% buoyant. The Shadow of the Wind not only should have been my thing, it actually was my thing. I guess it was a big hit in Spain, where it was originally published, and I can see why. It’s full of books and (metaphorical) ghosts and romance and melodrama in a way that is slightly over-the-top but always enjoyable. It’s set in post-WWII Barcelona, and I really enjoyed the evocation of the time and place. It has a fairly standard metaplot of Young Man Digs Into The Mysteries Of The Past While Getting Dragged Into A Modern-Day Plot And Also Falling In Love With Someone Who May Or May Not Be Good For Him, but it implements it superbly. The characters are kind of two-dimensional (which is to say, they don’t really have three dimensions, but at least they don’t have only one), but who cares. I found myself tearing through it, both wanting to know What Happens Next And What Is The Real Identity Of That Mysterious Guy but also wanting to see how the personal relationships played out. I would call it a guilty pleasure but it was too well written for that. Zafón has written a few other novels, and I have a feeling I’ll be reading one of them during my next summer vacation. Zoran Živković: Seven Touches of Music 2011-02-12T22:12:31+00:00 I have a list I keep in my head of things (books, musical artists, etc.) that I should love, based on the other things I like, but don’t do it for me. In some ways it’s more interesting than the opposite list, of things that you’d never think that you’d like but you love. The reason I mention it is that, as you have probably guessed, this book is on it. Every mention I see of Živković makes me think I would adore his work, and it’s not like those descriptions are false. Seven Touches of Music is a group of vaguely related slightly fantastical minimalistic short stories, in which each protagonist fleetingly catches a glimpse into a weirder world (in each of these cases triggered by music), which then (in most of these stories) fades again, leaving an unsettling feeling. Sounds like just my thing! But somehow, as I read each one, it faded from my memory just as these glimpses of alternate reality or deeper connections underlying the world did. I don’t doubt that the fault lies in me; I have the feeling that there were some beautiful subtleties going on that flew under my radar. Perhaps I read it at the wrong time, but it somehow failed to get under my skin the way that I imagine it was meant to. Cardiacs: “Odd Even” 2010-11-06T21:19:50+00:00 Six months ago I made some general comments about the musical vocabulary of Tim Smith</a> (of Cardiacs). Here are some notes on “Odd Even”, a song that illustrates a lot of his standard tricks. The song is on YouTube here</a> and my transcription is here</a> (PDF file). The form could not be simpler: three repetitions of verse (a 7-bar phrase repeated twice) and chorus (8 or 12 bars; in the second and third choruses the last 4 bars are repeated). The third verse is instrumental. The introduction (which foreshadows the end of the verse phrase) is a straight-out “Smith cadence” (♭III—v—I in the key of E), which already renders it unclear whether we're in the key of G major (starting on the tonic and repeatedly raising the tension) or E major (starting on the flat mediant and repeatedly resolving the tension). This ambiguity will persist throughout the song. The start of the verse seems to resolve the question by claiming that we're in G major, and could not refer more explicitly to the Lydian mode, with a C♯ over the G chord. Already this is a hint that we might be moving back to the sharp side soon. There's an interesting clash between that C♯ of the melody and the C♮ of the C chord that arrives on the second bar. The harmony then moves through A and E back to G, apparently establishing that E is subordinate to G—but then immediately repeats the introductory Smith cadence twice, reestablishing the ambiguity. The phrase rhythm of the first verse phrase is also quite interesting. From the melody alone it looks like a pretty straightforward [4+4]+4 beats, but the harmonic rhythm, as well as the way that the instruments enter during its first statement, implies 6+6. The chorus starts by moving fairly strongly to the flat side of G, going all the way to E♭ before slowly relaxing back to G, and right through G all the way to Bm and E again. The feeling of resolution provided by G is lessened this time by it happening for only two beats on the second half of a bar, rather than lasting a whole measure as it did before. The melody here is really nice; a drone-like D is continually returned to on the bottom (it's a common tone of all the scales passed through, including the E Mixolydian implied by the final destination of E) while the upper implied voice of the line descends from B♭to A to G, then returns up to B♮ and G♯ to both chromatically fill that third and also strongly establish the “surprising” E (not so surprising in reality since the G—Bm—E sequence has been repeating the whole song). The chorus ends by following yet another path from G to E, this time by repeating the triple plagal cadence G—D—A—E and sitting on the final E for an additional bar. That relaxation of the harmonic tension certainly makes it seem like E was the final destination after all—but when the next verse starts up again, back in G, it feels like a return to the tonic rather than a jump away from it. The instrumental verse suddenly triples the melodic speed, and it's interesting to see such a relatively hyper solo in the middle of what is otherwise a fairly sedate song. I wouldn't have thought of it when I first heard the song, but after listening to a lot of jazz in the last month, the solo has sort of a bebop feel to it, at least when you look at it on the page and imagine it being played by a saxophone rather than by a keyboard. It looks complicated but it is largely doing the same things found elsewhere in this song or Smith's work in general—emphasis on that Lydian C♯, liberal use of whole-tone scales, and near the end a gleeful insistence on B♭, a note dissonant against both G major and E major. The song ends with a final chorus, repeating that G—D—A—E progression four times in a long exhalation and landing with relative finality on E. So maybe it was in E major all along? But I think the fight between the two potential tonics the whole time was a charade; the whole point is that both G and E are equally important, and to proclaim one of them superior to the other is to force one point of view on a song that is all about presenting two. Bud Powell: “Cleopatra's Dream” 2010-10-12T02:52:18+00:00 I’ve always liked the sound of jazz but have never been as interested in it as rock or classical. Recently my interest has flared up a bit, and I’ve been trying to make up for lost time by listening to more of it with active ears. The standard approved way to work on your analytical technique seems to be to make transcriptions of classical recorded solos, so I picked up the first random jazz CD that was at hand, Bud Powell’s The Scene Changes, and sat down to transcribe the first number, Cleopatra’s Dream</a>. Unfortunately 1) it’s a very fast tune (quarter note = 240), 2) it’s in A flat minor (that’s seven flats), and 3) Bud Powell, like I suppose any good pianist, uses both hands. So maybe it was not the best song to transcribe first. Nonetheless I ended up with something that is at least moderately accurate, especially in the right hand, and it can be found here</a> (PDF file). I did learn a bit from this exercise about how Powell improvises, and it was good practice for my ears, so it was certainly a success on those fronts. If anyone has suggestions or corrections, especially actual jazz musicians who can tell me, for example, “this line you sketched out in the left hand is not what anyone would ever actually play, he must be doing this instead”, I’d love to hear them. (By the way, I noted on Twitter that I hear this as being in Ab minor (7 flats), and not G# minor (5 sharps), which you’d think would be more “simple”, and I think I realized why. The leading tone is an important part of the scale, and the major dominant chord that contains it is an important chord; and it’s much easier to think about a V chord that’s an Eb major (Eb, G, Bb) than a D# major (D#, F##, A#). So I think I chose the right key after all.) Steven Erikson: Deadhouse Gates 2010-10-03T19:00:15+00:00 The second volume of the ten-book epic fantasy series The Malazan Book of the Fallen, which was begun with Gardens of the Moon</a>, Deadhouse Gates is regarded by many fans (though not me) as the best of the bunch. It’s true for sure that you can see Erikson hit his stride here in a way that is new. For one thing, the plot feels a lot better controlled. There are still a half-dozen independent threads going on, and in fact they don’t even all end up tying together in the way that they did in the first book, but perhaps it is that independence that lets Erikson take each one to a conclusion instead of trying to combine them all in the last chapter. This book also contains the famous Chain of Dogs sequence, which is pretty wrenching and gives the whole book an emotional weight that was less present before. Once again, all the stuff going on can seem pretty random, most memorably when a ship of manages to go through a series of weird dimensions in quick succession, each crazier than the last. It is easy to regard this as Erikson just randomly chucking in every weird idea he can think of, but as I mentioned before, if something is introduced out of nowhere that seems to bear no relation to the plot, it is likely to be a call-forward to something in a future book. This can be a little frustrating but it certainly does contribute to the epic feel. I would say that at this point the dimensions of the larger plot start to become clear, but that’s a lie—the most important plot thread in many ways doesn’t even really get hinted at until book 3. But you do start to get a sense of the scope of the thing. That scope will widen even more in the next book... Andrew Crumey: Sputnik Caledonia 2010-09-19T22:48:36+00:00 I discovered Andrew Crumey a while ago through his awesome novel Pfitz, about which all I really remember now is that there are lots of neat fictional-worlds-within-worlds tricks. I also really liked his next, similar, novel, D’Alembert’s Principle, and his first, more conventional, novel, Music in a Foreign Language. Some part of the appeal additionally came from the fact that his books were often not published in the US (he’s Scottish), or published after great delay, so I’d have to order them from the UK, which made it more exciting, like I had stumbled on a private secret route to great fiction. So I’ve kept buying his novels as they are published, but the last three just haven’t done the same thing for me. Maybe it’s me; Sputnik Caledonia in particular seems to have been received very well. Crumey is still doing a lot of the same things I really like in fiction—nested stories, parallel worlds, weird unexplained correspondences between different parts of the story—but maybe I’ve read enough of his books by now that it seems more like a formula than new. There’s also a sensibility that doesn’t always mesh with mine; in Mr Mee a lot of intended humor derives from a senile old man not understanding anything of modern life, which I just rolled my eyes at, and a lot of this book reads like an adolescent fantasy—and the fact that after a while there are hints that it actually is an adolescent fantasy doesn’t really help. There are still a bunch of ideas in here that I liked, and it was an interesting read with an affecting ending, but maybe it’s time to stop ordering his new books from the UK and go back and reread the ones that excited me originally and which I have forgotten. Steven Erikson: Gardens of the Moon 2010-08-30T18:53:07+00:00 Steven Erikson’s epic fantasy series The Malazan Book of the Fallen is about the most ambitious writing project I can think of short of Henry Darger. It’s not just the number of words in the thing, which is immense enough already (each of the ten books is a doorstop), but also the scale of the conception. There’s a giant amount of detail in there, with a backstory going back thousands of years, the uncovering of which is often just as much of a gasp-inducing plot element as any action sequence. Hints are often dropped which don’t pay off until literally thousands of pages later, and clearly Erikson had the entire thing largely planned out from the start. Just a peek at the locations of the books is impressive. The second book drops almost all the characters and plot threads from the first and starts up a giant new collection of characters and threads on a different continent. The third book does jump back to the first book’s location, but then the entire first quarter of the fourth book is the backstory of what had originally appeared to be a minor character from the second book, and the fifth book starts all over again on a completely new continent. After that the threads start getting woven together a little more, which is almost a disappointment when you’re used to giant new vistas opening up every book. As you might guess, this sort of thing is right up my alley. The sheer size of the worldbuilding, both in space and in time, is amazing, and the revelations that occur regularly are often jawdropping. Plus the guy can actually write, and the themes are largely about real human experience and emotions, and the characterization is pretty good; you can see why I’ve devoted an embarrassing number of hours to reading and rereading these books as they’ve been published. The tenth and final volume is coming out in early 2011, and I’ve started one more reread so I’ll be in place to read it at that time. All that said, the books aren’t perfect. For one thing, although Erikson is a good writer, he’s not quite as good as he thinks he is, and sometimes passages can be overwritten or unclear. (And the excerpts of fictional poems that open the chapters are often just horrible.) Although there are occasional romantic relationships, he’s not that good at them—it’s generally hard to understand just why characters are falling in love (or, more usually, in lust). And although it’s hard for me to complain about the size when that is one of the things I love about the series, there’s just so much to keep track of, and so much to physically read, that it can be hard to remember it all and sustain my motivation all the way through. The first book, Gardens of the Moon, also suffers somewhat from being written long before the other ones, before Erikson had really matured, and the violently in medias res nature of it is even harder to deal with as a reader than with the other books, since you’re starting from a blank slate. If you do read these books for the first time, I have one caution: don’t roll your eyes too much at the occasional seemingly completely random plot event or deus ex machina, especially in the first few books. In the context of a single book, they do appear to come from nowhere and have no good function except to tie up plot threads, but in the context of the entire series, they are usually used to introduce key elements that will become very important later in the series. These books are not for everyone; they’re one of those things, like the band Cardiacs, that I love but am reluctant to actually recommend to anyone. But if this is the sort of thing you like, you may love it. And this is just about the best time to give it a try; it’s wrapping up soon so you can read the whole thing without waiting a year between each book, and tor.com is doing a pretty insightful reread</a> through the whole series, which they just started a few weeks ago. 1960s Polish music videos 2010-06-27T21:57:18+00:00 A few weeks ago I was browsing the web looking for fake Beatles songs, one of my favorite musical genres, and unexpectedly happened upon the awesome video for “Nie zadzieraj nosa”</a> by the Polish group Czerwone Gitary. A quick glance at the sidebar made it clear that I would spend the next few days poring through a treasure trove of old Polish music videos. Here are the highlights of my findings, with the understanding that I know nothing about the Polish language or culture. If you don’t have all day to watch them all, my personal favorites are in bold. “Nie zadzieraj nosa” itself really is a superbly crafted and performed fake-Beatles song. It’s perhaps just a touch too regular to be a real Lennon-McCartney, but all the idioms are spot on. Just watching their evident joy (especially the guy on the right) at performing music this awesome makes me smile. Czerwone Gitary apparently still exists and is one of the most popular Polish bands of all time, but unfortunately for me they seemed to grow out of their faux-Beatles phase pretty quickly and transition into more of a folk-rock style. Another 60s band that seems to have followed a similar trajectory, with even more of a folk influence, is Trubadurzy. “Znamy sie tylko z widzenia”</a> is worth watching just for the bass balalaika and (slightly) fancy footwork, but the video I’m obsessed with is “Kasia”</a>. The song itself is a great earworm, a simple six-line verse sung over and over (with different words), and I can’t get over the charm of the video - the cinematography somehow making it seem like they’re all six inches tall, the fact that it takes five seconds for them to decide where the beat is despite the fact that they’re lip-syncing, the apparently terrified bass player, the barely-adequate dance steps. I must have already watched it thirty times. Trubadurzy seems to have then gone through a brief more rocky phase (“Usmiechajcie sie dziewczeta”</a>) before descending into gloopy folkiness. Another contemporary band worth checking out is Skaldowie, featuring a charmingly nerdy heartthrob. “Medytacje wiejskiego listonosza”</a> is rather Monkees-like both in its song and its video, while the video for “Śpiewam bo muszę”</a> reminds me of the Monkees again, but in some sort of weird dystopia. The singer pulls a prank on everyone by dressing up in a polar bear suit... then removes its head while solemnly declaiming the rest of the song. Righto. Perhaps the most reliably entertaining videos of the bunch for me belong to Alibabki, a group of six women singers with rotating membership. “Kiedyk pasła bydło”</a> seems like a rocked-up version of a traditional tune or something, including those awesome piercing open Eastern European vocal harmonies, but its most arresting feature is the occasional banshee shriek, which I assume is meant to be laughter because it is always followed by a broad and very unconvincing smile. My favorite is “Niech wie jak jest”</a>, with a very nice bittersweet chord progression and a gently burbling accompaniment that somehow reminds me of early R.E.M. Most of the groups here seem to have lasted forever, or at least decades, constantly changing their musical style to fit with the times (which makes them less interesting to me once they hit the 1970s). I wonder if this is at all correlated with Poland being a Communist state then, or if it’s just sampling bias. The best example is Czesław Niemen, “arguably the most acclaimed Polish singer of all time”</a>, whose career you can follow from a Twist and Shout-style raveup (“Ciuciubabka”</a>, featuring Alibabki again—with the bonus that you can pretending they’re singing “Chewbacca”) to It’s A Man’s World-style wailing (“Io Senza Lei”</a>) to electric gospel (“Jednego serca”</a>) to early electronica ("Mleczna Droga"</a>). These are the videos that grabbed me the most, but this is just the tip of the iceberg—there are literally hundreds more. Go spend a day checking them out; I’m moving on to Yugoslavia. China Miéville: Kraken 2010-06-23T01:36:37+00:00 Number two in my package of books from amazon.co.uk. As I mentioned before</a>, I love some but not all of Miéville’s books, and this one looked enough like it was right up my alley that I was sufficiently excited to order it from England before the US release date. And... it was pretty good. My opinion of it sort of went through a U shape. It starts out as kind of a romp. A preserved giant squid has disappeared from a London museum and all sorts of crazy supernatural cults are getting involved. But somewhere around the 25% mark I stopped looking forward so much to picking it up again. For one thing, it just felt kind of overstuffed. There are like six major players, and I kept wishing there were more like four. Although I usually like big messes of books, and I’ve enjoyed Miéville’s unfettered creativity in his other works, here I felt more suffocated by the number of groups involved, not to mention the n-squared issue of keeping track of how they were all interacting with each other. My other issue is that all of the secret underground supernatural stuff, despite a lot of it being pretty original (e..g, one major villain is a sentient face tatooed on someone else’s back), wore on me after a while. Maybe I’ve just read too much of it, but I spent a lot of the novel feeling like I was reading Miéville’s Neil Gaiman impression that he was tossing off between real books. But with about a quarter of the book to go, the pace really picks up, there are some awesome set pieces, and most importantly, all of these pieces of the plot actually fit together in a satisfying way. So overall I’d say I enjoyed it—in particular some of that overstuffedness makes more sense in retrospect after seeing where it all leads to—but it wasn’t quite the awesome experience that I know it’s possible to get when I pick up a China Miéville book. I’d put it below Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and The City & the City, but above Iron Council, which I didn’t even finish. David Mitchell: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet 2010-06-15T02:07:51+00:00 I first encountered David Mitchell through his debut “novel” Ghostwritten, an intricately linked collection of short stories that really tickled my structural fancy. Of course, he is now mostly known for Cloud Atlas, another linked set of stories that span from centuries in the past to millennia in the future with impressive facility. In between he’s written another couple of more conventional novels, which I have not read. This is his latest, and I was actually excited enough about it to place an order from the UK, since it was released a month earlier than the US and so was China Miéville’s Kraken, about which more in a subsequent post. It’s a historical novel, and much has been made of the fact that it’s supposedly Mitchell’s first, but honestly his previous work already has many historical elements. It takes place around 1800, largely on a small artificial island outside of Nagasaki where the Dutch trade with Japan. The historical stuff works well. It’s a very interesting time and place, and the writing is the sort of historical fiction that I like, demonstrating the setting with a nice amount of detail without hitting you over the head with it. The plot and structure are pretty odd, though. I don’t like to spoil much in these reviews, but I will say that the entire focus of the novel changes fairly radically multiple times, each of which caught me by surprise, and one of which made me pretty uncomfortable for a while. I guess Mitchell’s tendency to divide a novel into contrasting parts dies hard, even when writing a book that is more unified on the surface. But it really does end up being one story, and once you get through the slower scene-setting chapters, it’s a pretty gripping one. I would still recommend Cloud Atlas or Ghostwritten before this one, and they will probably stick with me longer, but it was still an excellent book and I’m very happy to see that it’s already been a bestseller in England. Fun little math problem 2010-05-17T23:59:45+00:00 I love math and logic puzzles that seem like they could require a lot of thinking but turn out to be answerable in 30 seconds if you think about them the right way. Here’s one Jake Wildstrom recently posed that I liked: Take a random permutation of the n integers from 1 to n. On average (that is, we’re asking for the mean), how many elements will be in their “correct positions” (e.g,. 3 in the third slot)? 2010 US Chess Championship 2010-05-15T20:15:38+00:00 This year’s US Chess Championship</a> is currently being played in Saint Louis; it started yesterday and runs through May 24. The reason I bring it up here is that I think that the organizers are doing a good job of making it accessible and interesting for casual chess players, one of which may be you. The live coverage</a> in particular is very nice; it’s hosted by Grandmaster Maurice Ashley and Woman Grandmaster (don’t get me started on that title) Jennifer Shahade, who are both really good at making the game exciting for people who are already a little interested in chess. They’re not trying to “jazz it up” for people who don’t care at chess at all; they assume you already know a bit about the game and are inherently excited by, say, someone sacrificing a rook for a knight, or pushing a pawn closer to queening. There are also a bunch of different types of players, ranging in age from 15 to 50+, with a variety of personalities and styles, so it’s not hard to find someone to root for if you like that sort of thing. If you already have a casual interest in chess but don’t know much about high-level tournament play, I recommend checking it out and seeing if it grabs you. (If you don’t, never mind this post!) The games run about 2pm-8pm Central Time every day. Hilary Mantel: Wolf Hall 2010-05-15T17:15:20+00:00 This novel takes the all-too-familiar career of Thomas Cromwell and turns it inside out, revealing an unexpectedly thoughtful and empathetic character. What’s that, you’re not familiar at all with the career of Thomas Cromwell? Well, neither was I, and I suspect that that made my reading of it much different from the intended one, as I ended up reading it purely as a historical novel and not as some great reimagining. But it was a really good historical novel. Thomas Cromwell was born a commoner and rose to become one of the must trusted advisors to Henry VIII (the one with the six wives—we just get the first two of them here). He seems to be regarded by history mostly as a villain, largely based on his standing as the chief nemesis of Thomas More, who opposed the king’s declaring himself the head of the church. Mantel turns Cromwell into a real person, who is not perfect but is generally always trying to do the right thing. Her writing style here is intriguing; it’s very restrained, avoiding much emotion or florid description, and you get the feeling that it is meant to reflect Cromwell’s own character. Cromwell himself, although present in every scene (as far as I can remember), is hardly ever mentioned explicitly by name, but is just called “he” unless it is really necessary to distinguish him from another man in the scene. There is pretty much no “As you know, Bob” exposition; the characters talk to each other as if they already know the subject they’re discussing, which can make it a little hard for the reader to catch up, but is rewarding once you do, making it feel a bit like you’re in on a secret. The plot moves fairly slowly, and I think I might have been happier with it at 400 pages instead of 550, but it remained very interesting all the way through. I imagine that part of the slowness for me was that Mantel wanted to visit and reinterpret a number of important historical incidents, none of which meant much to me. So I feel like I didn’t get everything out of it that the author put in; it’s sort of like hearing a cover of a song without knowing the original and thus not being able to hear what original aspects of the song the new performer kept or discarded or reworked. If you are already familiar with 16th century English history this book is probably revelatory (and in fact it has won all sorts of prizes); if you’re not, it’s still an excellent read. Cardiacs: musical vocabulary 2010-05-09T18:31:40+00:00 It’s been a while since I first posted about Cardiacs</a> but I’ve been fitfully taking some notes and doing some transcribing, and I should post some of it before I forget about it entirely. If I list a song here without a video link you can probably find it in the previous post. Although a lot of the music of Tim Smith (leader and main songwriter of Cardiacs) might seem pretty random, he has a pretty consistent vocabulary that makes it easier to get a handle on his songs after you’ve heard a few of them. Going through his oeuvre, here are the things that stand out to me: Melodic movement by whole tones. One common consequence is the use of chord sequences involving I, ♭VII, and ♭VI (think “All Along the Watchtower” for one classic example). Even more common is the next item: Use of the Lydian scale. That’s a scale on the white notes if you start on F. Its distinguishing characteristic is that it starts with three whole-tone steps (F—G—A—B) rather than two whole-tone steps followed by a semitone (F—G—A—B♭). Smith really loves that sharp fourth and it shows up all over the place in his music. v—I and ♭III—v—I cadences. These are sort of related to whole-tone melodic movement as well. If you play a normal V—I cadence (say, B major to E major) but use a flatted seventh instead of a leading tone (D♮ instead of D♯ in this case), so that you’re moving by a whole step instead of a semitone to get to the tonic note, you get a v—I cadence instead (B minor to E major), which has a much more ambiguous quality. In Cardiacs songs, this frequently comes in the context of the progression ♭III—v—I (e.g., G—Bm—E), which has quite an unstable feel. Often the ♭III has been heavily tonicized, which can make the sudden shift feel like the rug is being pulled out from under you; when repeated, it can also create the impression of shifting back and forth between two tonics, never fully coming to rest on one or the other. “Odd Even”, for example, is fundamentally based on a G—Bm—E progression, and it’s hard to decide whether to take G or E as the key of the song. The coda of “Dirty Boy” is another classic example that just repeats this progression over and over. Quick-changing chords, often every other beat and accompanied by their dominants. The harmonies can often move at a dizzying pace, but because Smith usually precedes or follows a chord with one a fifth away, you get a little more stability and each chord at least has a bit of context to it. “Anything I Can’t Eat”</a> is a classic example (sorry about the bad recording). Hemiolas and other rhythmic ambiguity. A hemiola is when you take a six-beat-long phrase and go back and forth between treating it as two groups of three and three groups of two, creating a sort of rhythmic pun that throws the listener off. Smith uses explicit hemiolas (“Gibber and Twitch” and “Too Many Irons in the Fire”</a> both switch from 3/4 to 6/8 mid-chorus) but is also happy to use any other technique he can to disturb the perceived meter of the song. Tempo shifts, particularly a slow last chorus. It’s astonishing how effective this is, given its relative crudity—just shift down a gear entering the final chorus and have everybody sing along, and the majesty of the song doubles. There are probably ten Cardiacs songs that do this, though it never seems to get old; the classic example to me is “Big Ship”. I am probably the first person to ever compare Tim Smith to the classical composer Olivier Messiaen, but one thing they do have in common is a very personal musical vocabulary (in Messaien’s case, it’s things like birdsong and harmonies built on top of palindromic modes). In both cases, initial experiences can be rather befuddling, but once you start hearing the common building blocks from piece to piece, the broader context helps in making sense of each one. Next up, a case study of one Cardiacs song. Snatching mediocrity from the jaws of victory 2010-04-10T22:35:25+00:00 The worst possible blunder you can make in chess is to resign in a winning position. Accepting a draw in a winning position is only half as bad, but it is still pretty disappointing, especially after working hard for hours. In the Boylston Chess Club</a>'s ongoing Paramount tournament, I've already managed to accomplish that dubious feat twice—and against the same player each time! Schmidt—Ho after 26...Kd7-c7</figcaption> </figure> Against Ken Ho in the first round, I misplayed a tricky opening and he took advantage of it to win the exchange. As often happens at these levels, losing material freed me to just try to deploy my pieces actively while he hunkered down and tried to simplify at the expense of the initiative. After a little combination (which had a fatal flaw, but neither of us noticed it—welcome to chess at the 1700s level!), I had gained a pawn, put his king on the run, and had a couple of nasty passed pawns. A few checks back and forth to gain time on the clock and it was time decide whether to go for the win or accede to the perpetual. All my attention was focused on pushing my passed pawns, but after moves like 27.e5 I just didn't see a way past Black's blockade, especially since his a8 rook was going to finally be able to enter the action. After using 8 of my 32 remaining minutes before move 40 to think about it, I played 27.Qe5+?? and Ken played 27...Kd7, repeating the position for the third time and claiming the draw. But as club champion Chris Chase always says, “Check the checks!” 27.Nb5+! wins trivially. If 27...cxb5 28.Rc1+ Kb8 29.Qd6+ and mates; if 27...Kc8 28.Nd6+ picks up the queen; and if 27...Kb8 28.Qe5+ Kc8 29.Nd6+ gets the queen again. Why didn't I see it? I was tired; I was focused too much on the passed pawns; and the c-file had only just been half-opened so the idea that Rc1+ could happen didn't register. But with all of those things working against me, I still would have found it if I had just checked the checks. Ho—Schmidt after 41.Kh3-g2</figcaption> </figure> Our rematch occurred a few weeks later (the Paramount is a double round robin). I acquired what I thought was a nice positional advantage, and when Ken sacked a pawn that was ultimately doomed anyway, I thought I would cruise to victory. But I exchanged the wrong set of minor pieces, and he ended up with a nasty outposted knight and open lines into my position. Seeing the chance for a perpetual check, I flung a few pieces forward, and it worked, as Ken saw through one perpetual check idea but not the other. Clearing the move-40 time control with minutes to spare, I accepted White's draw offer. But Black is winning! After 41...Qe2+ 42.Kh3, 42...g5! threatens Qf1 mate, and White has no way out. It's a little tricky, especially since my own king is in some danger, and I think I didn't even really think about Qe2+ since my queen had come from e4 and it was natural to move it back there. It's also unintuitive to be able to mate with basically one piece. But I had tons of time, and worst, we were 10 minutes away from the game being adjourned, at which point I could have gone home and analyzed it at my leisure (and offered a draw over email if that didn't turn up anything). There was nothing to lose from letting my clock run down 10 minutes, since I had the draw in hand. What is painful about both of these situations is that it was simply a process failure, not a failure of imagination or calculation. In the first game, I had 30 minutes left and a draw in hand, and just had to check the checks, as I should be doing every move of every game. In the second, I had nothing to lose from checking out the position at home instead of immediately accepting the draw. I would say live and learn but apparently I didn't learn from the first game! Well, at least I didn't resign either game... Sergio de la Pava: A Naked Singularity 2010-04-08T01:34:16+00:00 A couple of months ago I got a random email saying (paraphrased) “Love your Infinite Jest notes, love your blog, can I send you a free copy of this novel that appeals to a lot of the people who like Infinite Jest?” I looked it up and saw that it was self-published, which is not a great sign, but a few pages on the net did praise it effusively, and I figured that there was no downside, so I said sure. I wasn’t planning to read it any time soon, but a few weeks ago I picked it up and read a few pages, and then read a few more, and then I read the whole book, and damned if it wasn’t really good. The novel is A Naked Singularity, and it is a big mess, but luckily for de la Pava, I love big messes. Infinite Jest itself, Gravity’s Rainbow, Sandinista!, Zen Arcade—if it’s some gigantic work that overflows its banks and doesn’t know when to stop, chances are good that I’ll love it. It’s a 700 page book, but we’re at about page 300 before the plot even really gets started; most of the beginning of the book is filled with a depiction of what it’s like to be a public defender, as the narrator is, in between a bunch of entertainingly digressive dialogues dealing with subjects ranging from abstruse philosophy to pop culture. Actually, once the plot really gets started and the book gets more focused, it gets a little less interesting and more conventional, but it never stops being entertaining. Most readers would likely disagree, but I almost wish that the novel was even more of a big mess. It’s already 700 pages; why not add a couple hundred more and keep the second half of the book as crazy as the first? Back to the good points about the book. As I said, the writing style itself is super entertaining. For example, even though about 5% of the the book is taken up by the narrator going on about the professional boxing scene of the 1980s, I didn’t mind. And learning about the life of a public defender was very educational, and naturally enraging as well. There were a bunch of interesting stylistic experiments (there’s one great chapter in particular that keeps jump-cutting back and forth between different scenes during one day) which I would have been happy to see de la Pava take even farther. A Naked Singularity is self-published but it’s not that easy to tell; the physical book and its layout are very professional, and the only thing giving it away to me was a larger-than-usual incidence of typos. I’ve seen other reviewers wish that it had been edited down some, but as I said earlier, I kind of wish it had been edited even less. I don’t know how hard de la Pava looked for a publisher—it seems hard to believe that no one would have taken a chance on this being the breakout hit of the year. Hopefully his next book will find a wider audience. I’ll certainly read it. P.S. I am required by the FTC to disclose (as I already did, but here it is again, explicitly) that I received this book for free. Richard Taruskin: The Oxford History of Western Music, volume 1 2010-03-28T16:56:27+00:00 One of my 2010 projects is to read this 4000 page, 5 volume history of Western classical music. It got outstanding reviews when it was published in 2005, and last year it was released as a reasonably-priced set of paperbacks, and when I finally got to browse them in the bookstore I was impressed enough to make the investment in time and money. I’ve just finished volume 1, which takes us up to 1600, so I’m pretty much on track to finish this year (I figure my pace will go up once I get to the music I’m much more familiar with, about halfway through volume 2). It was very interesting, especially since I didn’t know a lot about the early evolution of classical music already. Despite the fact that the work as a whole is thousands of pages long, Taruskin clearly intends this to be read front to back as a narrative; it’s not a reference, or even really a textbook. This has many advantages and a few disadvantages. One nice thing (to me) is that it is clearly written with some subjectivity; although of course he is writing a history, the author isn’t afraid to inject his own opinions on occasion, which makes it a much more interesting read than it could be. The biggest disadvantage to me is that it’s not as easy to use as a reference as a textbook would be. If he introduces some new term, it’s not going to be in boldface or set off in a sidebar; if you run into it again later and forget its meaning, you’ll have to flip around looking for its definition (and it’s not always in the index). This was a real issue for me in this volume because I’m unfamiliar with most pre-1700 musical jargon. On the other hand, I’m reading it for pleasure, not so I can pass an exam, so it wasn’t a huge deal. He makes a big point about this actually being a history of written music, which is very different from being a history of music; we really don’t know a lot about pre-literate performance, or even a ton about the performance of the works we have scores of. And of course a lot of written music has been lost, or even intentionally destroyed (grr). So it was neat to read about the ways in which we have to piece together knowledge about what music was really like during this period. The material itself I found really interesting. I wish I got a slightly better sense of the evolution of certain musical vocabulary from a more theoretical point of view. For example, somewhere during the hundreds of years covered by this book, harmony gradually changed from being mostly just a succession of consonances into having semantic meaning on a more “sentence-sized” level. Taruskin points to some individual examples of this, but I found myself wishing for a higher-level overview of how the shift occurred. Of course, the individual composers who made this shift happen probably didn’t think about it that way at all, so any attempt to impose some sort of teleological post-facto history on it is going to be pretty artificial anyway. In any case, so far the series has been very entertaining and informative, and I’m not regretting my time spent with it at all. On to Monteverdi! Michal Ajvaz: The Other City 2010-03-14T16:43:17+00:00 This is a short Czech novel from 1993 that just got translated into English last year and showed up on lots of SF/weird readers’ 2009 best-of lists. The genre is magic realism, which is to say highly-literate fantasy that takes place in the real world. The narrator (I don’t think he ever gets a name) starts discovering clues to an alternate fantastic city that exists in parallel to Prague (shades of China Miéville’s The City & the City</a>). And this other city really is fantastic, full of arresting poetic images that don’t make much rational sense. Those images, at their best, are really gripping and memorable—two scenes that come to mind are a fight to the death with a shark on top of a tower and a bushwhacking expedition through a library-jungle—but just as often seem more random, as if the author was picking words from a dictionary and then trying to connect them in some sort of Oulipian manner: “Of course it was all in vain, you fool,” she said disdainfully. You purged geometry of polar animals… You’ve forgotten that the first axiom of Euclid states that there will always be one or two penguins in geometrical space? Wasn’t it you who tattooed that sentence on my thigh in your automobile of ice? […] You turned us against you when we discovered you on the lavatory squeezing oranges onto a pocket calculator. We don’t like you and find you ridiculous." </blockquote> Which rather than making me savor each crazy image makes me just skim until I can find something that makes a little sense again. So although there are some reoccurring images and themes that do give the book some structure, I sometimes had the same experience I have with David Lynch movies, where, after a bit of seeming to have some strange internal logic that is tantalizingly just beyond the reach of my rational mind, the work just goes off the rails entirely. It was short enough and cool enough that I am perfectly happy with the time I spent with it, but overall for me it didn’t fulfill that top-ten promise it started out with. Go problem books 2010-02-27T22:30:13+00:00 I haven’t had much to write about books lately, for a couple of main reasons: I’m trying to get all the way through Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music in 2010, which is close to 4000 pages long, and I got sucked back into the game of Go (I’m using the Korean word, baduk, for the tag since that seems to be the standard search term—“Go” is pretty terrible for obvious reasons). I got to my current level (AGA 4 kyu) largely by reading lots of instructional books, which is pretty much the main way I like to learn (which is also true of chess or math or science), as opposed to playing a lot or doing lots of exercises. But I’ve become convinced that the way to really improve is to actually do a lot of problems, and in both chess and Go that’s what I’ve been concentrating on lately. So here are some of the Go problem books I’ve used in the past and present and what I think of them. Graded Go Problems for Beginners (4 volumes). When I am forced to give only one recommendation for problem books, this is it. It’s a super collection of all sorts of problems, although by the later books it concentrates a bit overmuch on life and death, which gets a little tedious. Volume 1 starts at the very beginning (e.g., capturing stones in atari), so if you have any experience at all you probably want to start with Volume 2, which is still pretty basic but even I still spend an hour reviewing it every once in a while (like when I’m returning to the game after a break). Volume 4 is probably useful all the way to 1 dan level. One Thousand and One Life-and-Death Problems. Exactly what it says. Starts out around 10k level, probably close to 1d level by the end (I’m only on problem 534 so far so who knows!). They can get a bit samey after a while but doing life and death problems is the single best way to improve your reading skill. Get Strong at Tesuji. A good collection of tactical problems from ranging from very easy to 1d level. One nice thing is that a lot of them are mainly about making good shape rather than more obviously concrete goals like living or killing or separating or connecting. So you’ll learn how to place your stones effectively and flexibly in the first place, which will put you ahead of the game when the actual living and killing problems come up. Lee Chang Ho’s Selected Life and Death Go Problems (李昌镐精讲围棋死活). Tons of people raved about this series of six Chinese books so I had to pick them up. The nice thing about problem books is that it doesn’t matter a lot if you don’t know the language (which I don’t); the diagrams have most of the information. Anyway, these problems are indeed great; they feel interesting in a way that some other collections don’t, and they build on each other nicely. Volume 1 is probably tractable at 10k, I pretty much hit a wall in Volume 4, and Volume 6 is probably suitable for dan players. Lee Chang Ho’s Selected Tesuji Go Problems (李昌镐精讲围棋手筋). Naturally I had to pick up his tesuji series as well. This had gotten less stellar reviews, but I like it just as much. The problems are simpler, but that’s good; this is basically a giant practical compendium of all the standard techniques you should have in your fingers during the middle game, so it’s more for, say, reminding you that if you’re trying to connect two groups you should think about clamping the opponent stone sitting between them than it is for practicing intense reading. I’m only in Volume 3 so I don’t know how hard it gets, but I’d say you could get a lot out of this at 10k. Cho Hun-Hyeon’s Lectures on Go Techniques and Lectures on the Opening. So far two out of three books have been translated in the former series and just one of the latter. These are really super. At least in Volume 1 of each series, the problems are very simple, but 1) even I only get them 90% right and it should really be 100%, and 2) he goes into detailed explanations about why alternative moves are bad, in a way that is incredibly useful when you’re learning and don’t have good shape intuition yet. Lectures on Go Techniques Volume 1 is about simple joseki (although it doesn’t really feel that way; it’s more about “applied fundamental principles”) while Volume 2 takes that knowledge a little further into the middlegame. Lectures on the Opening is more about opening principles, which you likely have picked up somewhere else but are always useful to review. But again, if you want to start with just one book, I still would go for the relevant volume of Graded Go Problems for Beginners and take it from there. Cardiacs—a video primer 2010-01-31T21:36:14+00:00 Cardiacs are my new favorite band of all time. They’ve been around since the early 1980s at least but astonishingly I never heard of them until last year, when I discovered the video for their early song “Tarred and Feathered” (not for the faint of heart or ear), which made me gape deliriously with a “you can make music like that?” reaction, one I’ve only had a few times in the past (Conlon Nancarrow and Phil Kline come to mind). They’ve been described as “pronk”, or “prog-punk”, and I guess I can see that; there’s the musical interestingness of a lot of prog, combined with a punk sort of energy. Some of my favorite bands (the Pixies, the Minutemen, etc.) have that sort of mix, in varying ratios, and it rarely fails to please me. With Cardiacs the music is even more out there than usual, though. It is amazing how relatively obscure they are—I spend a lot of time looking for music like this, and I somehow was able to miss them for decades—but fortunately they’re really well represented on YouTube, partially because the fanbase they do have is so rabid. Here are ten links to explore, in roughly chronological order, if the above description sounds appealing. Gibber and Twitch (rehearsal</a> (with misspelled title)) is a great example of their early hyper can’t-stay-in-one-place-for-more-than-ten-seconds style, though it’s actually a 2003 rehearsal video (there are keyboard parts you can’t see played because they use backing tapes in performance these days).</li> Tarred and Feathered (video</a>) is an amazing piece of work, with enough musical ideas for four songs, and the gonzo ’performance’ (the keyboardist and percussionist, at least, aren’t making any attempt to play their real parts) makes for one of the more arresting videos I’ve ever seen.</li> Big Ship (live</a>) is off-the-wall and catchy at the same time, with a giant maestoso singalong chorus at the end that gives me chills. A good litmus test—if this is too crazy for you, you probably don’t stand a chance with most of their repertoire, but if you can imagine acquiring this taste, the rest will probably follow.</li> Everything Is Easy (live</a>) is pretty straightforward but boy does it rock.</li> Is This the Life? (video</a>) is their one hit, so I have to include it here, but honestly it’s one of my least favorite songs of theirs—it sounds like a Cure song to me.</li> Baby Heart Dirt (live</a>) shows off their early funhouse style with an awesome riff and some great synchronized instrumental insanity in the second half.</li> Odd Even (music</a>) is unusual in many respects for a Cardiacs song, but it shows that Tim Smith can write pretty (but still quirky) ballads when he wants to. And that keyboard solo!</li> Fiery Gun Hand (music</a>) rocks with a righteous fervor, and as with Baby Heart Dirt, the second half of it is stuffed with more random awesome musical ideas than you can count.</li> Dirty Boy (music</a>) is for many fans the ultimate Cardiacs song, nine majestic minutes of slowly-moving chords, spiraling ever higher and higher.</li> Wind and Rains Is Cold (fan video</a>) is from their last full-length (so far), Guns. Not the one song from that album I would have chosen, but it’s the one I can find on YouTube, and it’s nice to have something like this after all the rockers above to show off their range a little.</li> </ul> Jeff VanderMeer: Finch 2010-01-31T17:13:14+00:00 After finishing Shriek: An Afterword, I dove right into VanderMeer’s third Ambergris book, Finch. This is in yet another style—it’s a hard-boiled detective novel set in a dystopian future a hundred years after the events of the last book. It’s pretty cool how willing he is to play around with many different styles in the same world. Despite my appreciation for it, it wasn’t totally successful for me, for reasons that are not really the author’s fault. For one thing, it’s a very grim book, and it turns out I wasn’t really in the mood for grim at the time I read it. Also, it resolves a bunch of mysteries from the first two books, but as you can guess from the word “dystopian” above, not in a very happy way. It made me sad that some of the open questions about Ambergris and the underground gray caps from City of Saints and Madmen that at the time were a neat mixture of charming and menacing turned out to be just menacing in retrospect. I’d almost rather imagine this book as one possible future history of Ambergris than as the one true author-approved one. Anyway, as a book it was quite good despite my negative reactions above. The plot took a little while to get started and had just one or two too many components for my taste but was interesting and held together, and there were a few great “whoa” moments, as you would hope for in a fantastic (in genre) book. I’m not sure how much sense it would make if you hadn’t read the earlier books, but the first one (City of Saints and Madmen) is the one I would recommend for newcomers to Ambergris and VanderMeer anyway. Jeff VanderMeer: Shriek: An Afterword 2010-01-25T02:37:59+00:00 Jeff VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen is one of my favorite books, a collection of stories and other strange forms (one item is a fictional bibliography, another is a medical report, another is written entirely in code) all set in the fantastic fictional city of Ambergris, built over the caverns of mysterious underground-dwelling mushroom people known as the Gray Caps, and home to the dangerously bacchanalian Festival of the Freshwater Squid, world-famous composer Voss Bender, and a zillion other captivating creative inventions. “The Transformation of Martin Lake” in particular is one of the most arresting stories I’ve ever read. So I was thrilled to hear, a few years ago, that VanderMeer was returning to Ambergris with the novel Shriek: An Afterword. I bought it as soon as it was released, tore into it... and stopped 2/3 of the way through and didn’t pick it up again. It just didn’t resonate with me the way his earlier work did, and I found myself dutifully chewing my way through it without really enjoying it. Then VanderMeer recently released a third Ambergris book, Finch, and it got me thinking that I should really give Shriek another shot. So I did, and I enjoyed it a lot more this time. This is a similar relationship to the one I had with Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon; in each case I had anxiously awaited a book, which then turned out to be not quite what I expected, reducing my enjoyment to the extent that I put the book down without finishing it, but then enjoyed it quite a bit on a reread when I understood more what I was in for. Shriek is quite different from City of Saints and Madmen. Most of the metafictional tricks are gone, replaced by a single one: the story, Janice Shriek’s biography of her brother Duncan, is regularly interspersed with comments from Duncan himself, supplementing and/or contradicting her assertions. This could be pretty cool but it was mostly irritating; rather than adding surprising or world-overturning information to Janice’s observations, Duncan resorts mostly to “Well, it’s more complicated than you give it credit for” excuses. And where I was hoping for more revelations about the nature of the Gray Caps (especially after some teasers early on), the book mostly is concerned with the much less interesting social rise and fall of the two siblings. But taken on its own terms, as I did on my second read, the book is still pretty interesting, and it did turn out that some exciting stuff happened just after the point where I gave up the first time. So I did enjoy it the second time, and knowing what sort of book it was did help a lot. It still didn’t live up to City of Saints and Madmen, but at least this time I didn’t expect it to. I (still) don’t see anything when I close my eyes 2010-01-23T19:41:18+00:00 That’s right, I have no visualization ability. I wrote a fair amount about it here</a> back in 1999, and nothing really has changed. I’m mostly adding a pointer to it from my blog here because I often get email from people who discovered the page and I don’t have time to reply to it all, so I want people to be able to leave comments or talk to each other about it here. One person did point me at the work of Stephen Kosslyn</a>, which looks like it might be interesting (I haven’t checked it out myself). His book The Case for Mental Imagery</a> seems like a good place to start. Brian Aldiss: Helliconia Spring 2010-01-16T19:12:50+00:00 The idea is cool: the planet of the title orbits one star, which orbits another star in a very eccentric ellipse. So the planet, in addition to regular yearly seasons, has a thousands-of-years Long Season during which it goes from ice age to constant summer and back; and civilization never quite rises high enough during the summers to be able to make it through the ice ages intact. This is the first book of a trilogy, apparently set at widely separated points in that long cycle; in this one, the world is beginning to thaw and civilization is just starting to emerge again. It was pretty neat overall, although I have a few gripes. The main one is that civilization pretty much springs into full bloom from nothing over the course of about one generation, domesticating “horses”, coming up with the idea of money, figuring out that the world goes around the sun (which goes around another one), etc. It turns out that previous go-rounds left a little help, but still. The characters are not so interesting that a lot would have been lost by spreading the advance of civilization over the course of several generations (and characters). There’s also a totally incomprehensible element (that is, I can’t comprehend why the author put it in) of an orbiting space station from Earth which does nothing but observe the planet and the people on it (with apparently supernatural powers of observation, since it can observe individual conversations). Perhaps the point was to put in an omniscient narrator that somehow fits into the world; perhaps the reason for it becomes more clear in subsequent volumes. But here it just made me shake my head. Good points: the world-building is very cool (I haven’t even talked about the native civilization, sort of ice-orcs who are obviously on their way out), and Aldiss has a way of narrating a primitive society that is interesting while not pretending that they’re modern people in animal skins. I’m not sure if I would bother buying the other two books in the trilogy if I had this as a standalone, but I have an omnibus of all three volumes, so I may come back to it at some point, when and if I feel like reading something like this again. If that sounds lukewarm, I guess it is! Guy Gavriel Kay: Tigana 2009-12-31T01:18:05+00:00 I read Tigana ten years ago, and mostly liked it a lot. It’s a one-volume novel set in sort of a fantasy (i.e., there’s magic) medieval Italy. The writing is good and the plot is interesting. That said, I liked it less this time around, and this reread pretty much did away with my enthusiasm for recommending it to my wife. Since this was a reread, I’m going to discard my usual attempt to be as spoiler free as possible and talk more openly about the contents of the book. Spoilers follow! The main problem I have with Tigana stems from the fact that the villain (Brandin) is too sympathetic. I understand that Kay was going for the whole shades-of-gray thing, but I think he tried to have it both ways and failed; the triumphant end is so undercut by the tragedy of Brandin and Dianora that it just rings false. The epilogue has a cheeriness to it that seemed so forced to me the first time I read the book that I thought it must have been intentional, but on a reread I think it’s just an authorial mistake. The flip side of presenting a nuanced and sympathetic portrayal of Brandin is showing the dark side of Alessan, the heroic prince who triumphs in the end. And he does a bunch of rather shady things, such as magically enslaving a wizard who was just minding his own business. Again, this could have been really interesting if the point was to show that maybe, if you look at it from a disinterested perspective, the “hero” isn’t necessarily any better than the “villain”. But Kay tries to have it both ways again: he gets all shades-of-gray by having Alessan enslave the wizard, but hey, Alessan feels bad about it! And broods about how hard it is to be an exiled prince who has to do what he has to do! And then eventually the wizard gets turned around to their cause, and Alessan lets him free, which shows how nice he really is! And then the wizard decides to stay with the good guys anyway! The whole plot feels like a total cop-out, like when a superhero is given the terrible ethical choice of which of two people to save—and then saves them both. What was the point of setting up a terrible decision if the person making it gets to have it both ways? So on the one hand Kay is setting up a really interesting situation, and on the other hand he’s constantly authorially apologizing for it. Just to bring up one other example: the whole plot is about Alessan reclaiming what’s rightfully his; Brandin invaded the peninsula and now Alessan’s taking it (or at least his part of it) back. But, not to be too blunt about it, that’s just what war is: countries taking land from other countries. It’s not a battle of good vs evil, like in The Lord of the Rings, say; it’s a battle of Guy Who Got His Stuff Taken vs Guy Who Took His Stuff. It’s not so clear that Alessan has that much of a moral right to throw the entire peninsula into upheaval just to get his province back—although of course once he does, the whole peninsula wants to make him their king. Sigh. So, overall, a lot of interesting moral ambiguity that the author didn’t seem to have the guts to fully follow through on. The first time I read it, I tried to give Kay the benefit of the doubt; this time, knowing what was coming, that was more difficult. Brad Leithauser: Hence 2009-12-29T03:56:51+00:00 I picked this up probably a decade ago, because it was a novel about computer chess with some promising blurbs, but never got around to it until now. It was written in 1989, 8 years before Deep Blue beat Kasparov, and takes place in 1993, at which point the fictional best computer chess program in the world is pretty evenly matched with the fictional US junior champion. All the chess stuff is fairly accurate, which is a nice thing to see in a literary novel, though naturally I have a few niggles (e.g., a strong player wouldn’t talk about “the twenty-seventh move” being a blunder (they’d refer to the move itself, like “knight f5”), nor would they refer to “advancing a bishop”). The portrayal of chess players and the way they think was pretty well done too. As far as the novel itself goes, it was fine. The characters aren’t particularly sympathetic but they’re well drawn, and the themes may not be stunningly novel but they’re used well and you aren’t hit over the head with them. What I don’t really understand was the need to surround the story with two metafictional shells; the story starts out in the first person before switching to third a few chapters in, and preceding that is an introduction by yet another fictional character. They both seem totally unnecessary unless I’m missing some subtle connection, plus both characters’ voices are pretty annoying (intentionally, I’m sure, but still). Once I got to page 40 without giving up, I enjoyed the rest of the novel, but it was a weird way to start the book and subtracted from the book rather than adding to it, for me. The back cover claims that “Hence is rife with puzzles and narrative jokes in the tradition of Borges and Nabokov”, which would have been great, but except for those two extra narrative layers that I didn’t like anyway, I didn’t catch any of the promised fun. Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene 2009-12-28T01:01:48+00:00 After reading Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale, I was all excited to read about some more specific topics in evolutionary theory. His The Selfish Gene was the obvious next step. The fundamental idea is a great one, although of course less revolutionary now than I guess it was in the 1970s when it was published: rather than trying to explain the evolution of traits in terms of group selection, or kin selection, or individual selection, we should turn the problem inside out and look at the actual thing that not only gets replicated perfectly but also controls the trait itself: the gene. When you do this, a lot of paradoxes of the form “how can this behavior benefit the individual?” or “how can this behavior benefit the species?” make a lot more sense. As I said, this book was originally published 30+ years ago and it hasn’t been updated much, but I didn’t find that that affected my reading much, besides some obviously completely obsolete analogies to contemporary computing power. I don’t know how much has changed since the time it was written, but the arguments seemed to hold up pretty well. The book was quite interesting, although I was hoping for some more quantitative analysis of various scenarios. He does analyze some situations mathematically, but there was a bit too much of “This seems to contradict the theory, but we can explain it away with this clever hypothesis,” which is too unfalsifiable for my tastes. It isn’t until the last couple of chapters that things really take off. The penultimate chapter is about how it is possible for altruism to evolve, and the final one goes even further than to say “let’s concentrate on the gene instead of the individual as far as evolution goes”; it asks why we really have individuals at all, which is a question that really blew my mind. The individual organism is something whose existence most biologists take for granted, probably because its parts do pull together in such a united and integrated way. Questions about life are conventionally questions about organisms. Biologists ask why organisms do this, why organisms do that. They frequently ask why organisms group themselves into societies. They don’t ask—though they should—why living matter groups itself into organisms in the first place. Why isn’t the sea still a primordial battleground of free and independent replicators? Why did the ancient replicators club together to make, and reside in, lumbering robots, and why are those robots—individual bodies, you and me—so large and so complicated? </blockquote> Awesome. He goes on to list some interesting advantages that genes get by building organisms around themselves, which I will not spoil here. Apparently this last chapter is basically a summary of yet another Dawkins book, The Extended Phenotype, so at some point I suppose I have to read that too. But for now I have probably read enough evolution books for a while. Summary: a lot of cool ideas, and a few mind-bending ones, though my ideal version of this book would have cut out 50% of the material that didn’t fit into those categories. In any case, it is a total classic of modern popular science writing (and originated the concept of memes, though it has gotten kind of corrupted since then), and is worth reading for that reason alone. Chess/music synaesthesia 2009-12-16T00:12:31+00:00 What is even weirder than me having a sense of synaesthesia linking musical key signatures and chess openings is the fact that I never consciously realized that this was kind of a weird thing until today. Actually, calling it synaesthesia may be overstating it; it’s not like music springs into my head as I play an opening, but I definitely do feel a consistent correlation. Here’s a list off the top of my head of chess opening/musical key associations, trying to think about it as little as possible so as to let my subconscious through: Giuoco Piano: C major Evans Gambit: Bb major</li> </ul> </li> Ruy Lopez: C major Open: E major</li> </ul> </li> Sicilian Defense: G major Najdorf : D major</li> Taimanov: E minor</li> </ul> </li> French Defense: A minor</li> Pirc Defense: B minor</li> Modern Defense: B major</li> Queen’s Gambit Declined: Eb major</li> King’s Indian Defense: Bb minor</li> Grünfeld Defense: D minor</li> Benoni: B major (I know it is odd for this to be on the sharp side, but a pawn on c5 clearly implies a B natural in the tonic triad!)</li> </ul> Since I am doing this all subconsciously, it is hard for me to actually defend these associations, but I can identify some general correspondences. In general e4 openings tend towards the sharp side of the keys while d4 openings tend towards the flat side. I think there also seems to be some correlation between minor keys and Black only advancing his pawns one square. Both of these do seem to make some sort of sense: e4 openings are “sharper” and “brighter” while d4 openings are more “quiet” and “restrained”, while only advancing your pawns to the sixth rank is a little “sad”. But I would certainly not fight anyone who claimed that these associations basically make no sense at all. Stephen King: It 2009-12-15T04:16:31+00:00 I can’t handle scary movies at all, but for some reason scary books are generally fine. This is the third Stephen King novel I’ve read, after The Shining and The Stand, which seems to cover most people’s top two King novels in some permutation. It is immense, at 1100 pages, although that works out to about 500 pages of horror novel and 600 pages of a slice-of-life portrait of what it was like to grow up in the late 1950s in a small Maine city. (You get one guess as to who else was 11 years old in a small Maine city in 1958.) The realistic stuff was actually pretty good, as King is a better writer than most people give him credit for, but he’s not such a good writer that you actively want to wallow in his depictions of life, as I do with, say, Tolstoy or Proust. Still, I was never really tempted to skip over anything. The horror part of it was pretty good too, although it never actually got scary enough to really frighten me. But one thing that disappointed me somewhat, as silly as it sounds, was the motivation of the Big Bad. There are a few archetypes for horror “villains”; one, for instance, is the Lovecraftian monster too horrible to even contemplate, to whom humanity is a meaningless triviality, while another is the psycho who loves to toy with the mental state of his victims. “It” is a weird amalgam of the two, and I never got a good sense of where it was really coming from. I know it’s odd to ask for psychological consistency in a monster in a horror novel, but there it is. The good stuff: King really is a pretty good writer, and I did enjoy his depiction of the late 1950s, as well as the mid 1980s, which at this point are equally interestingly historical although of course he didn’t intend it that way at the time. I also enjoyed the structure of the book, which bounced between the two timelines in a compelling way, and the last 200 pages or so were a really well done action sequence, or actually two, since both timelines reached their climaxes in parallel. I often zone out a bit during the climactic action sequences of a book or movie, but I stayed pretty well gripped here. So although I had some quibbles, overall I did enjoy it a lot, and never had the urge to put it down over the course of 1100 pages, which is a pretty good recommendation right there. Still, I have now probably had my fill of Stephen King for a while, especially since I seem to have already hit the high points of his career. The Beatles’ most underrated songs 2009-11-30T03:43:45+00:00 I know, the Beatles are so famous that there’s no such thing as an underrated song of theirs. But I actually wasn’t familiar with a lot of their early oeuvre until recently, and even on their well-known albums there are a few sleepers that don’t get the props they deserve. Here’s my list of underrated Beatles songs, one per album: Please Please Me: “There’s a Place</a>”. From the harmonica riff that sits unapologetically on a major seventh to the irregular phrase lengths to John’s characteristic ornaments in the lower harmony part to the lack of resolution at the end of the verse, this is a much more interesting song than you’d expect this early in the Beatles’ career. With the Beatles: “Little Child</a>”. Utterly conventional (though the middle eight is a middle six) and utterly charming. You can’t imagine those “I’m so sad and lonely” harmonies sung without grins on their faces. A Hard Day’s Night: “You Can’t Do That</a>”. Shows what you can do with the twelve-bar blues. I love the sweatiness of this song, for lack of a better word. That quarter-note cowbell making the song ratchet along one powerful beat at a time instead of flowing smoothly; John’s hoarse reach for his high notes (e.g., “that boy again”); Ringo slightly rushing his reentrance after the stop-time in the refrain; the opening up of new harmonic territory with the V/vi → vi (“gree-een”) in the bridge—it’s all great. Beatles for Sale: “I’ll Follow the Sun</a>”. This has been dismissed as being too glib, but it’s too perfect for that. The first line of the verse is a beautiful example of the musical device known as a sequence (listen to how the first eight notes form four ascending pairs). Paul sure could write a melody. Help!: “The Night Before</a>”. Another song I somehow missed for years. Again, nothing groundbreaking, just perfectly executed. The vi → iv chord sequence (“Now today I find”) is particularly nice. “Makes me want to cry” is a typical great Paul high sung note. And such a tasty restrained guitar solo. Rubber Soul: “Think For Yourself</a>”. One of my favorite songwriting techniques: weird verses, perfect choruses (think “Senses Working Overtime” or “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic”). The chords (it takes a while to even identify the key) and phrase rhythm in the verses are really interesting, and I liked the chorus enough to base a song</a> (“Think It Through”) on it. And I haven’t even mentioned the fuzz bass (both the tone and Paul’s awesome part)—they must have known it was great because it’s mixed so high. Revolver: “Love You To</a>”. Now we’re getting to the point where every song is so well known that it’s even harder to pick underrated songs. But here’s an Indian-themed song from George that doesn’t outstay its welcome, and also really attempts to be authentic in some way rather than just using cool timbres (I’m looking at you, “Norwegian Wood”). Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band: “Good Morning Good Morning</a>”. What a superbly weird song. The verses can’t stay in the same meter for more than one measure at a time, but not in a “Look at me, I’m so weird” way; they’re just following the lyrics naturally without inserting extra beats to make everything come out to 4/4. Then the chorus just bounces between I and IV but swings into triplets. And the arrangement! You can barely hear the guitar over the horns, and Paul (I presume) rips off a great solo (pretty much stolen from “Taxman”, but we’ll ignore that). When my wife heard it for the first time, she said “This totally sounds like a Loud Family song”, and she’s right. Magical Mystery Tour: “Baby You’re a Rich Man</a>”. Another example of what you can do with just a couple of chords. They sit on G for so long that you’re convinced it’s the tonic, then finally relax both harmonically (into C, proving G to be the dominant) and melodically (the musical sigh of “What do you want to be”) in a great moment that has always influenced me. The chorus monomaniacally sits on one note before opening up into practically the only two syllables of harmony in the whole song (“too”), and the two chords dominating the tune are finally leavened with a little chromaticism (“you keep all your money”). And what made them think they could get away with that wheedling clavioline nose-fluting its way through the whole song? Criminally underrated, and the song that originally inspired me to make this list. The Beatles: “I’m So Tired</a>”. I was going to choose “Sexy Sadie” but I think it’s too well known, so I picked the other song with the I—VII—IV—V chord sequence. It’s awesomely lugubrious, and even the passionate chorus sounds like its boots are stuck in the mud. And at 2:03, it knows when to quit. Abbey Road: “You Never Give Me Your Money</a>”. Well, every song on this album is well known, but I think this one could stand even more recognition. Kicking off the side 2 medley, it’s basically a medley itself, and I can assure you that it’s hard to write a medley that doesn’t sound like just a bunch of unrelated pieces stitched to each other. Bouncing from style to style, it somehow hangs together. More than anything else on Abbey Road, this song makes mourn for the subsequent Beatles albums that never happened. Let It Be: “Dig A Pony</a>”. Endearingly random (the phrase rhythm in the verses is especially fun), with a killer swung unison riff that makes the song. It deserved a better context than this. Your turn! What was I crazy for including, and what was I crazy for leaving out? Daniel Abraham: An Autumn War 2009-11-29T18:56:59+00:00 This is book three of the Long Price fantasy tetralogy (I reviewed the first two here</a>), and as much as I liked the first two, this is the best one yet. The stakes have risen even higher (as you might guess from the title) but the real interest lies not in the titular war but in the characters involved in it, in a Shakespearean way. In fact, the one place where my interest flagged was in the third quarter, where most of the war occurs; the first half is fascinating as it sets up the situation, and the denouement is great, but in order to get from point A to point B Abraham needs to do a fair amount of letting the setup play out, which made me a bit impatient. In general Abraham is pretty good at moving things along fairly swiftly, though, which is a regrettably rare thing to see in a fantasy novelist. Although the book is pretty much standalone, the continuing character development really builds on what’s been set up in the earlier books in the series in a very compelling way. It’s clear that he had the whole thing planned out well, so I’m looking forward to the finale very much. Highly recommended, though if you’re considering starting it be aware that the last book is still only in hardcover for now. Ian MacDonald: Revolution in the Head 2009-11-23T02:50:03+00:00 Revolution in the Head is one of the most highly regarded critical books about the Beatles, and the Beatles have been in my mind a lot recently, having just written a game about them. My main interest regarding the Beatles is in their music itself, and in that respect the finest books that I have found are Walter Everett’s two volumes of The Beatles As Musicians, which do an amazing job of chronicling the Beatles’ musical journey from a technical perspective. Revolution in the Head occupies a middle ground between musical analysis and biography, chronologically treating each song in turn but looking at them more for their context in the Beatles’ history (and the cultural history of the 60s) than as straight musical analysis. And it’s very interesting; despite a few caveats, I learned a lot, and MacDonald has many perceptive things to say. For one thing, partially because my knowledge of the Beatles’ history has largely been through relatively sanitized tellings such as The Beatles Anthology, it was not clear to me just how huge a role drugs played in the Beatles’ creative output. From speed to marijuana to LSD to heroin, the story of the Beatles’ music is largely (and somewhat depressingly) the story of the drugs they were taking. MacDonald also has a lot of thought-provoking things to say about the individual person-to-person relationships within the Beatles and the effect they had on their music. Minuses: Well, MacDonald is a man of strong opinions, so you have to take care to mentally prepend “In my opinion” to many sentences, since he didn’t bother; if you don’t, you’re going to spend a lot of time rolling your eyes that could be put to better use. When this takes the form of dismissing certain Beatles songs that he doesn’t like, this isn’t so hard to do; when he dismisses all music written after 1970, it’s a little harder to take. But as long as you don’t take him overly seriously, his opinions are quite interesting. There are probably more interesting biographies of the Beatles, since this book accomplishes its biographical functions mostly in passing; and for straight-up musical analysis, the Everett books have a lot more to say. But there’s a lot of good stuff here, and even if you don’t agree with all of it, it will at least make you reconsider a lot of your opinions, and whether you end up keeping them or changing them, thinking about them again can’t be a bad thing. Robert Charles Wilson: Spin 2009-11-21T20:16:51+00:00 This got great reviews when it came out in 2005 and won the Hugo Award that year, but I didn’t get around to reading it until now. It’s a science fiction novel with the premise (slight spoiler, but you find this out really early on) that the Earth has suddenly been encased in some sort of field that makes time go a hundred million times slower than the rest of the universe. I could start mentioning the implications, but that would be a spoiler—half the fun of the book is trying to predict them. My wife (who had read it earlier) asked if I considered this “hard sf”. I don’t, really; although the book is largely about exploring what follows from a science premise, it doesn’t get into many technical details, and it’s just as much about the effect of the situation on the characters as it is about the situation itself. And I thought the character stuff was pretty well handled, with the exception of the main character and narrator, who tends to remain somewhat of a cipher. I think that’s a common problem; the author doesn’t want to risk turning readers off too much with whatever decisions he or she makes for the narrator, so that person ends up becoming a little boring or hard to read. As often happens with genre novels, the plot ends up with a lot of action that is not easy for me to follow totally. This gear shift can sometimes make me like the last quarter of a book a lot less than the first three-quarters, but Wilson partially gets around that by breaking up that quarter and sprinkling it throughout the book as flash-forwards. I’m not sure it was really necessary from a structural standpoint (the plot would work fine told linearly), but it did help keep my eyes from glazing over at the end. And the end is fine—not awesome but not disappointing. It turns out to be the first of three books, although I don’t know if that was the plan at the time it was written. Unfortunately, the second one has gotten fairly negative reviews, at least compared to the first, so I’m going to wait to see how the third is received before I decide whether to continue the series. Jeff Smith: Bone 2009-11-01T15:39:24+00:00 Bone is a 55-issue long comic book recently collected into a single omnibus volume. It’s a weird hybrid between funny-animal cartoon (there’s lots of slapstick, and one of the protagonists bears a marked resemblance to Goofy) and epic fantasy (saving the world from the forces of Evil). The comic is pretty widely revered, and one reason is probably that it blends those two genres. But to me the blending felt artificial, and I was never really sure exactly what sort of work it was. For example, the good guys are frequently hunted by “rat creatures”, monsters that serve the bad guys. These encounters are portrayed as high-tension life-or-death situations —but then when they occur, half the time they’re played for laughs as the rat creatures act “hilariously” stupidly. (I had a similar problem with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, where I never got the feeling that any of the characters ever really believed they were in real danger.) Often I like this sort of blending of high and low—I’m a Pynchon fan, after all—but somehow it didn’t really coalesce for me in this work. I should point out that it is drawn exceptionally well and there is a lot of pleasure to be derived just from admiring that aspect of it. And from reading reviews, I’m clearly in the minority in my lukewarm attitude. Richard Dawkins: The Ancestor’s Tale 2009-10-29T00:49:05+00:00 I’m going to list a lot of quibbles soon, so let me start by saying that this book was awesome. It looks at evolution by starting with humans and working backward in time to the beginning of life, paying special attention to the points at which other branches join the tree (moving backwards in time, that is). And evolution is pretty awesome. I learned a ton of really interesting things, some of which were expansions of subjects I already had some idea of, some of which were entirely new. I’ve seen some Amazon reviewers say they couldn’t get through a hundred pages of it, but for me it was a page-turner all the way through. But I have a few quibbles. One is that although the principle behind the book’s structure is very clear, the principle behind the content is not. Each chapter illustrates something interesting, but the thing being illustrated may be a taxonomic survey of some branch of the tree of life</li> the behavior of some particular neat organism</li> how natural selection works in various contexts and to produce certain results</li> how scientists deduce information about the history of life (fossils, DNA comparison, etc.)</li> </ul> Any one of these subjects would make for a really interesting book, but since Dawkins jumps around between all of them, it feels a bit scattershot, and you never know quite what you’re going to get in any given chapter. That said, the subjects are all interesting, and the book’s over 500 pages long, so it’s not like I really wish that he had gone into twice as much detail. Also in the “more information I wish was in there (I think)” department is illustrations. He talks about a ton of neat stuff, and a lot of it would be more interesting and easier to understand if it were accompanied by illustrations or photographs. There are some illustrations, but about 10% as many as I would like, and it seems pretty random which subjects get them. In general, though, this is a great overview of a lot of interesting facets of evolution, which is one of the most interesting subjects I can think of, and is pretty much guaranteed to make you go “Whoa” a few times. Works for me. Frank Zappa: The Läther Years 2009-10-25T21:23:36+00:00 This is an interesting transitional period. The last incarnation of the Mothers of Invention (profiled in my last post</a>) had faded away, and Zappa had just fired his manager and entered a long legal battle with him, moving to Warner Brothers in the process. Zoot Allures (1976) was made largely solo, and is very straightforward compared to the complicated music of the preceding few years (although straightforward for Zappa is still pretty weird for anyone else). In this respect it points ahead a bit to the more conventional rock songs of his later career. It feels to me like he was still trying to figure out what exactly to do next. What came next was pretty complicated: Läther (1977–1996) is a four-record set summing up pretty much everything he had done in the 70s, consisting of recordings going all the way back to 1972. It spans a whiplash-inducing variety of styles, from dumb rock to atonal orchestral compositions. Warner Brothers balked at releasing a 4-LP set, more lawsuits followed, and the label ended up taking most of the material that was going to be in the set and releasing it as four rather more coherent albums: Zappa in New York (1978) (live, rock, lots of offensive songs), Studio Tan (1978) (through-composed prog including the side-long “Adventures of Greggery Peccary”), Sleep Dirt (1979) (more instrumentals and a bunch of rejects from the earlier aborted musical Hunchentoot), and Orchestral Favorites (1979) (symphonic music, tonal and not). Eventually, in 1996, after Zappa’s death, Läther as originally conceived was finally released. The whole situation posed a question for my completist/authenticity-seeking self (augmented by the fact that some of the Warner Brothers records were further modified by Zappa when they came out in CD). I ended up buying Läther but none of the others (yet), so that’s what I’ll review here. It is a pretty crazy collection, even more schizophrenic than Zappa’s usual releases. In a way it’s nice; I can handle the songs like “The Legend Of The Illinois Enema Bandit” and “Titties ’n Beer” easier when they’re an occasional change of pace rather than the main focus of the record (as they seem to be on Zappa in New York). The proggish stuff is outstanding, and “The Adventures of Greggery Peccary” is a highlight of Zappa’s career—I would say that it’s hurt a bit by the silly storyline and sped-up vocals if not for the fact that trying to excise the silliness from Zappa’s oeuvre is as pointless as making a similar attempt for, say, Pynchon. If you’re going to make one exploratory Zappa purchase, you could do worse than buying this and then deciding which aspects of his music you actually like before deciding what to explore next. After this debacle, Zappa successfully extricated himself from his relationship with Warner Brothers and went indie. Next up, the 80s rock years. Joe Abercrombie: Best Served Cold 2009-10-24T18:15:36+00:00 This is one of those books I appreciated a little more after finishing it and reading other people’s takes on it. Last year I read Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy, which I thought was generally awesome; it aimed to turn the conventions of epic fantasy on their head, and actually did. I know some people who were disappointed by it, but their disappointment seemed to lie largely in the fact that Abercrombie actually carried through on all his narrative threats rather than just teasing us with them and resolving everything in a standard epic fantasy way at the end. I did have two political issues with it, though: 1) torture is presented as being wildly effective in producing information, 24-style, and 2) there’s an scary infidel pseudo-Arabic nation that is practically a caricature of political incorrectness. Of course Abercrombie has the right to put stuff like this in his novels, but the fact that people can read this and comfortably see their own prejudices verified, even fictionally, makes me sad. Anyway, Best Served Cold is a standalone novel taking place in the same world, and sharing a few characters, although to be honest my memory is so bad that I wasn’t even always sure which ones had shown up before. It’s a revenge novel, like The Count of Monte Cristo, and there are seven distinct people who have wronged the protagonist and need to get their just deserts, so this is a long book (over 600 pages). I think the length works against it; although the author does a pretty good job of managing some longer arcs, the episodic structure of the book forced on it by the plot does tend to induce an “okay, three down, four to go” mindset on the part of the reader. I kept on wanting the novel to take a wild left turn and it never really did, although certainly interesting things happen. But the writing is good and the character development, now that I look back on it in retrospect, is a little more interesting than I gave it credit for at at the time (since I was busy ticking off victims). Still, I think this would be a better book with a couple fewer villains and a couple fewer main characters. P.S. I don’t know if this was done specifically as a contrast with the trilogy, or in response to others’ reception of the torture thing there, but here there is a wildly ineffective torture scene. So although I would actually prefer my novels with no torture scenes at all thanks, it was sort of nice to see this one as a counterbalance. Edward Whittemore: Quin’s Shanghai Circus 2009-10-16T01:22:16+00:00 I discovered Edward Whittemore when his Jerusalem Quartet was republished a few years back and Jeff VanderMeer (author of the awesome City of Saints and Madmen) gushed over it. I got around three-quarters of the way through that series, and found it simultaneously really interesting and hard to read through. Quin’s Shanghai Circus, which was written before those books, has many of the same qualities. It’s a crazy collection of international intrigue and larger-than-life characters who are amped up practically enough to push the book into magical realism. The structure of the novel, like Whittemore’s other ones, is also odd, like a jigsaw puzzle; a decades-long history interweaving several characters is sketched out, then slowly filled in, almost at random, until the whole story is basically complete. I have to admit that keeping track of all the puzzle pieces was a little too much for me to handle; I found myself figuring out later that I had missed various “flash-forwards” (early vague references to story elements that were fleshed out later), and when surprising knitting-everything-together revelations occurred, I didn’t always remember exactly what was being knitted together, which kind of lessened the impact. Plus none of the characters were really sympathetic, which pretty much reduced the whole thing to the assembly of that jigsaw puzzle. But Whittemore’s jigsaw puzzles are pretty neat, and there were a few really striking scenes and images. Still, I’m left thinking that I didn’t get everything out of it that he put in, and although I read it pretty fast, that was largely because I was worried that I’d forget the information I needed to make sense of the upcoming events. Anyway, this is one those mixed reviews you should pick and choose elements from to decide whether you think you would like it; although it didn’t end up doing a lot for me, there are people I would wholeheartedly recommend it to, knowing their likes and dislikes. Chip Kidd: The Cheese Monkeys 2009-10-12T15:41:43+00:00 This was a weird one. Chip Kidd is a superb book designer; he might be a little overexposed by now, but there was a time when whenever I picked up a book and thought the design was awesome, half the time it was by him. So this is his first novel, and it is, unsurprisingly, largely about graphic design. The protagonist is a college student who starts out thinking he’ll be an artist and then discovers the world of design. Although from page to page I enjoyed the novel a lot, when you step back and look at it from a distance it is sort of three books in succession, and the transitions were a bit jarring for me. First comes your standard well-told comic tale of college life, stuffed to the gills with wry observations and dry wise-cracks. It comes off as a little glib, but Kidd does know how to write and it is genuinely entertaining. Then it turns into a manifesto of design principles. A teacher shows up who is passionate about graphic design, and a lot of the middle of the book is devoted to him hectoring the class about various postulates and theorems. This was actually interesting too, but I couldn’t help thinking that it was all mostly here because Kidd himself is passionate about these ideas, wanted to pass on his excitement, and thought that the best way to do so was to stick them in a novel. It felt a little more like a novel from a hundred years ago in that respect. Then, just when you are finally comfortable with the novel basically being a hip textbook in a thin fictional wrapper, the drama goes way up; it turns out that most of the characters are not just sort of messed up, but actually really messed up, everything sort of explodes, and you are left wondering where it all came from. Now, clearly Kidd understood that he was making a book with an odd structure, and had his reasons, but I’m not honestly sure what those reasons were, and the book as a whole felt kind of weird to me. Again, any individual page was quite entertaining, and I learned a lot of interesting things about graphic design, and I certainly enjoyed the book. But somehow, once I put it down at the end, it felt like a little less than the sum of its parts. That said, I am still interested in the recent sequel, in which the protagonist apparently finds himself in the real world. Maybe that will feel a little more grounded. Iain Pears: Stone's Fall 2009-09-20T20:49:09+00:00 Iain Pears's 1998 novel An Instance of the Fingerpost was one of the most addictive novels I've read, one of those books where you plan your life around when you'll get to read it. It's a long murder mystery set in 17th century England, told by a succession of unreliable narrators who keep exposing the lies and mistaken assumptions of the previous ones. I reread it a year or so ago and it was a bit disappointing—I think a lot of its impact comes from having your assumptions overturned, and when you already know what's coming you're largely sitting around waiting for it to happen—but it was a ton of fun the first time around. Stone's Fall is a similar sort of novel, this time “about” the European financial empires of the late 19th and early 20th century. As before, the story is told from the viewpoint of a succession of protagonists, each of which explains some of the mysteries left hanging earlier. The schtick this time is that each section takes place earlier in time than the preceding one, so you start out knowing how everything ends, and slowly discover the background that led to it. As usual, I'm trying to remain spoiler-free, but I can say that I enjoyed it a great deal. Most reviewers seem to agree that the middle section is the most interesting; they tend not to like all three of them, but opinion is divided on whether the first or the last is disappointing. For me it was the last that I had the most trouble staying interested in; I wanted a headlong rush of mystery-resolving surprises, and had to reorient myself to the rather slow pace of the section. But fear not, the main questions do get resolved, and in a satisfying way. If you haven't read any Pears, I would go for An Instance of the Fingerpost first (and I might even recommend The Dream of Scipio second, although it's a slightly different sort of book), but if you loved that and were waiting for another similar book, this one shouldn't disappoint you. Sergey Ivashchenko et al: Chess School 1–3 2009-09-17T01:43:16+00:00 If you know anyone who plays the board game Go, try asking them, “Hey, I learned the rules, I’ve played a bit, and I want to improve; can you recommend a good book?” I will lay even money that they will say, “Go this minute and read Graded Go Problems for Beginners.” GGPB is a series of four books containing nothing but hundreds of problems (here’s a position, find the best move) and brief answers. Volume 1 starts with problems that basically just test if you know the rules, and by the time you eventually get through Volume 4 (I can’t, yet), you’re probably a dan player, or expert. You’re led through every basic tactical technique along the way; there’s no more efficient way to improve your game. While there are tons of chess problem books, I’ve never been able to find a good GGPB equivalent. The books are usually either aimed only at beginners, or only at experts, or mix up a bunch of problems of wildly different difficulty in order to keep you on your toes. But with Chess School I’ve finally found it: a graded problem book series that starts from square one, ends at square sixty-four, and covers every basic tactical technique. They were originally made for teaching Soviet children, and it’s hard to argue with those results. There are four volumes, but Chess School 4 is an endgame collection; 1–3 are the real meat of it (to further confuse things, Volume 1 has been split up into 1a and 1b in this edition, and they’re sold separately). Volume 1 starts with mate-in-one problems and ends 1300 positions later with problems that I have to think about and sometimes get wrong (My USCF rating is 1800, for reference). Volume 2 is really the sweet spot for me. When I was taking chess lessons my teacher would give me homework problems from Volume 3, among other sources, and I’d rack my brains over them for a week; a master could still benefit from working through it. If you want to improve your chess game and are rated below 2000 or so, there’s no better way than by studying tactics. And if you’re studying tactics, it’s hard for me to make a higher recommendation than these books. It’s not a complete chess course—you’ll need to learn about openings and endgames and strategy elsewhere—but it’s a great foundation. (Unfortunately, these books can be kind of hard to find in the US. I’ve had good experiences with Chess Books From Europe</a>.) Philip K. Dick: Time Out of Joint 2009-09-12T18:28:59+00:00 I had never actually read a book by Philip K, Dick before, despite having seen what must be around twenty movies based on his works. I forget how this particular one—it's not one of his more famous books—ended up on my reading list, but there it was, and I was in the mood for a shortish science fiction novel. It was pretty good. There's a common problem with a lot of speculative fiction, which is that it's a lot easier to come up with an interesting premise than an interesting plot. So it is here; the premise is pretty cool, and the first half of the book as we slowly uncover it is interesting. Then it turns into a more generic adventure story, and that's where my interest started to wane. My attempt to keep these posts spoiler-free is a problem with books like these, since the whole point of the book is discovering the premise, so I feel like I can't discuss it at all. So I don't know how much more there is to say. The premise was cool (although totally implausible), the writing was fine, and the characterization was as good as it had to be. Apparently this is pretty early Dick, before he really hit his stride, and I will try to check out something from his classic period. Mnemosyne update 2009-09-11T18:33:45+00:00 Mnemosyne</a> is a spaced repetition program for aiding memorization; see my first post about it</a> for the whole scoop. That was the one-month report, and it’s now time to post a three-month report. The chess opening memorization is still going very well. I’m now up to 471 positions in my database and am reviewing about 20 a day. One thing that can be a little bit of an issue is that since my flashcards are just positions, they’re a bit contextless; often part of the work I have to do to recall the correct move in a position is to deduce what sequence of moves led to it, so I can consult the right part of my mental library. Of course this is not an issue in an actual game, so it makes the flashcard experience a little artificial. I could try adding the appropriate moves to the problem, but I’m not convinced that’s a good idea either. For one thing, some of the positions can be arrived at by multiple sequences of moves, and for another, the best move in a position shouldn’t depend on how you got there; I should be able to deduce (or remember) it without hints. But on the other hand, if I’ll have the hints during an actual game, why not use them here? I’ll keep thinking about it. I’ve only played four tournament games since I started using Mnemosyne, but in none of them did I have any trouble recalling the moves in my repertoire. So that’s good so far. Meanwhile, with Esperanto vocabulary I’m testing exactly the scenario I foresaw in the original post; my interest has waned a bit again, so I’m not reading regularly, but I am keeping up with the memorization. I am holding steady at 1926 cards, and the number I have to review every day has dwindled from a high of around 200 to somewhere in the 30s, which I can get through in a minute or two. I have a better than 90% recall rate, so I do seem to be retaining the information. So that’s perfect—I’m confident that if I picked up an Esperanto book today, I’d be able to read it with close to the same ability as two months ago. I’ll happily spend a minute or two (and dropping!) a day to retain that knowledge. Agatha Christie: The Mysterious Affair at Styles 2009-09-08T01:14:20+00:00 The other day I was in need of a comfort-food book, and what is more comfort food than Agatha Christie? Only her first couple of books are out of copyright and freely downloadable, so I grabbed the very first one. I read dozens of these as a kid, including this one, although of course I’ve forgotten all the details except for the famous ones like The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Murder on the Orient Express. As a first mystery it’s totally reasonable. I don’t know enough about the history of murder mysteries to know how much Christie innovated and how much she was just good at churning out quality product, so I don’t really know how it compares to similar books from the same period. It does suffer a little bit from an issue that also often plagues authors of interactive fiction. When writing a work of IF it’s easy to feel that the game you’re writing is too easy, that every puzzle is totally standard and will be solved within minutes by any half-intelligent player. So there’s a temptation to make every puzzle really tricky, and to make every object be used in a non-obvious way. The danger is that the resulting game will be a frustrating collection of tricky exceptions, with no standard puzzles to ground it that those exceptions to play against. And so it is here; pretty much every clue is not what it seems, and not only is every normal hypothesis overturned, but usually the hypothesis that replaces it is replaced in turn. It is a murder mystery so Christie is careful to ensure that the eventual solution is actually logical, but by that point she’s screwed with you so much that you just throw up your hands and say, “Okay, fine, you win”, rather than “Wow, awesome!” I don’t remember whether she got better at this or whether it’s just a standard trait of her mysteries; if I read a few more I’ll report back. Jack Vance: Night Lamp 2009-09-07T01:01:22+00:00 Another Vance novel—I guess I’ve read over twenty by now—and it pretty much goes according to formula, but hey, I love the formula. An adventurous young man has to achieve his destiny by overcoming a smattering of obstacles on various worlds spanning the galaxy, each of which has some charmingly odd culture and people who love to haggle. Night Lamp was published in 1996, so it’s pretty late Vance, and it feels kind of loose (not that his novels are ever particularly tight), but everything does pretty much fit together in the end. Around a quarter of the way through, I was thinking, “Hey, this is really good, I wonder if this would be a good recommendation for newcomers to Vance.” But then things slow down a little as the focus shifts to the reminiscences of a second character, and I felt that the pace never quite recovered. In addition, a new plot element (which, to be fair, had been hinted at earlier) popped up literally 90% of the way through the book, mostly just made me feel uncomfortable for the characters involved, and was then resolved in a completely unsatisfying manner. That left a weird taste, and the book was already a bit overlong (close to 400 pages) anyway. So overall I’m not going to put this up there with his best. If you’re not a Vance fan there are better places to start, and if you are you’ll probably read it anyway, and still get some enjoyment out of it. And how many books have as a major plot point a quest to become a member of the exclusive social club the Clam Muffins?^* — ^{*One.} The Ring of the Nibelung, ranked act by act (Part 4 of 4) 2009-08-29T22:01:31+00:00 Previously: ranks 6 through 4</a> Götterdämmerung, Act Two. Once we’ve finally gotten Act One out of the way, Götterdämmerung is awesome. Here we start with a superbly creepy Alberich/Hagen duet, then the music expands gloriously as the day breaks, Hagen’s super-powerful menacing hoi-hos summon, what’s this, an honest-to-goodness chorus, who intone the beautifully simple wedding music, then Brünnhilde (understandably) loses her mind in front of everyone, and just in case anyone thought this act was too boring we finish it all off with a revenge trio. Growing up I had inherited from my composer grandfather recordings of all the operas but this one, and when I finally heard it it was a revelation.</li> </ol> Das Rheingold, Prelude and Scene One. This gets perhaps undeserved bonus points for familiarity because I’ve listened to it more than any part; as a kid I would generally start here, then fall asleep midway through Scene Two. But even so, you have the proto-Minimalist prelude, one of the most important passages in the history of music; a bunch of great tunes, including all-too-rare-in-the-Ring three-part harmony from the Rhinemaidens; and perhaps most importantly, a fast-moving and gripping plot.</li> </ol> Götterdämmerung, Act Three. Talk about going out on a high note; this last act of the whole cycle kicks ass from beginning to end. First the Rhinemaidens finally reappear, with even prettier music than the last time. Then Siegfried regains his memory and gives his recap of the last opera, delivered with such innocent sweetness that I actually feel sorry for him (he has not been particularly sympathetic up until now). Then comes his death, and the incredibly powerful funeral march, and as if that weren’t enough, everything wraps up with the epic immolation scene. It was worth the wait!</li> </ol> The Ring of the Nibelung, ranked act by act (Part 3 of 4) 2009-08-29T00:43:15+00:00 Previously: ranks 9 through 7</a> Siegfried, Act One. Probably the act for which my opinion most greatly exceeds the general consensus. Maybe people aren’t big fans because the hero, Siegfried himself, is kind of a fratboy asshole, and Mime is perceived as a nasty Jewish stereotype. Leaving aside the question of how intentional either of those is on Wagner’s part, the music is excellent, and both characters have lots of great things to sing. Going through these operas again, I find that one of the things that really makes an act for me is the overall structure of it. This feels like a symphony—Scene 1 being the opening allegro, Scene 2 an intermediate slow movement (and I love that Wanderer chord sequence enough that I actually like the trademark Boring Wotan Recap in this opera), and Scene 3 the triumphant finale, which even includes an honest-to-god catchy song (sing along, you know you want to) in Siegfried’s forging scene.</li> </ol> Siegfried, Act Three. This act has a reputation for being nothing but Siegfried and Brünnhilde bellowing their love at each other, but there’s really a lot of great stuff in here before we even get to that point. The introductory music is kick-ass; you can practically hear Wagner being psyched to pick up the project again. Even Erda’s scene is pretty interesting, and the tension gets heart-poundingly ratcheted way up as Wotan confronts Siegfried (this of course is another one of the climactic moments of the Ring, as the gods give way to man). Finally Siegfried discovers Brünnhilde, and the heart-stoppingly expansive music as she wakes is one of the most beautiful passages in the whole cycle. Finally, yes, they do bellow their love at each other for a bit too long, but I can cut them some slack, they’re in love.</li> </ol> Die Walküre, Act One. A great arc from beginning to end with no real weak spots — the storm and Siegmund’s arrival, the smoldering glances between him and Sieglinde, Hunding’s swagger, Siegmund’s tale (usually when someone sings his backstory in a 10 minute monologue, it’s bad news, but not here), the sword, all culminating in a glorious lyrical love duet. It’s not surprising that this is the one act of the whole Ring most likely to show up being performed by itself, and if you made this list by taking a poll of fans, this would probably end up in the #1 spot.</li> </ol> Next: ranks 3 through 1!</a> The Ring of the Nibelung, ranked act by act (Part 2 of 4) 2009-08-28T01:04:39+00:00 Previously: ranks 13 through 10</a> Die Walküre, Act Two. I know, it’s the emotional center of the entire cycle. And I actually like Wotan’s monologue fine. But it’s just too long to enjoy (as you may have noticed, this is a recurring issue with me). By the time Wotan has dictated his instructions to Brünnhilde, been relentlessly henpecked by Fricka, and then taken an entire new scene telling Brünnhilde he’s taking it all back, I’m too exhausted to deal with the only action of the whole act when Siegmund and Sieglinde finally show up. Then, when you finally think it’s payoff time, the climactic battle with Hunding that we’ve been waiting for the whole time lasts around 30 seconds.</li> </ol> Das Rheingold, Scene Four. Despite it coming at the end of a few hours of continuous music, the final scene always keeps my interest. Alberich’s rant is gripping, the treasure-piling keeps the pace up, and the rainbow bridge sends things out on a high note. Only Erda’s attempt to throw a wet blanket on the proceedings slows things down.</li> </ol> Die Walküre, Act Three. I don’t care how much it’s overused, the Ride of the Valkyries is pretty excellent. And although it sounds like a recipe for tedium, Wotan’s long dressing-down of Brünnhilde works well enough to get you through to the rightfully famous Magic Fire music. I actually like the fact that this is basically an act-long epilogue; the important stuff all happened in the first two acts, and this is just cleaning up the fallout. And despite the lack of action, there are plenty of spine-tingling musical moments.</li> </ol> Next: ranks 6 through 4</a> The Ring of the Nibelung, ranked act by act (Part 1 of 4) 2009-08-26T23:33:20+00:00 I am a sucker for ranking things, especially artistic things. I know that it goes against everything art stands for, but as long as you don’t treat it as a search for objective truth, but rather as a tool to help collect your thoughts about a variety of works, it can be a lot of fun. And it’s great fun to read other people’s lists and say “You put what as #7?” As I recently made my nth journey through Wagner’s Ring cycle, it occurred to that it might be fun to rank its constituent parts. The rules: each opera is broken up into acts, except for Das Rheingold, which is broken up into scenes, since that’s all it has. Prologues and interludes are considered part of the following act (or scene). Here, therefore, spread out over four nights in homage to the original, are the 13 parts of the Ring cycle, from worst to first: Siegfried, Act Two. How can an act featuring a battle to the death with a dragon be boring? Somehow Wagner has managed it. First you get Alberich and Mime bickering for a while, then Siegfried finally shows up and (spoiler alert!) duly dispatches the dragon in a disappointingly brief scene, then we are subjected to an interminable “comic” scene as Mime repeatedly attempts to poison Siegfried despite the fact that Siegfried can read his thoughts by virtue of tasting the dragon’s blood. At least the Forest Bird scene provides a few moments of desperately needed relief. No wonder Wagner took a twelve-year break after composing this act before continuing.</li> </ol> Götterdämmerung, Prologue and Act One. There is plenty of good music here, but it is just too damn long. If I recall correctly Wagner even had second thoughts about the length afterward. I actually like the Norns’ scene and am generally happy to listen to any scene with Hagen in it, and the climax with Siegfried and Brünnhilde is great, but it takes so long to get there. I always think we’re really close to the end and then Waltraute shows up and I realize how far we still have to go, argh. At least you get to snicker at “Siegfrieds Rheinfahrt”. My advice when listening is to break it up into two or three chunks. Of course in a live performance you don’t get that luxury.</li> </ol> Das Rheingold, Scene Two. It’s surprising how undramatic this scene feels given that it consists almost solely of gods (and giants) yelling at each other. For one thing, none of them are particularly sympathetic (of course, this is an issue throughout the whole cycle). There are a few bright spots in the midst of the relentless exposition (the Valhalla theme emerging out of the mists as Wotan wakes, the giants’ heavy metal walk-on theme) but they’re the exception.</li> </ol> Das Rheingold, Scene Three. This edges ahead of Scene Two by virtue of the awesome intro 9/8 anvil music. Once we actually emerge into Nibelheim it’s not all that interesting, and the trick by which Wotan and Loge trick Alberich is eye-rollingly stupid, but at least it doesn’t last all that long, and the Tarnhelm theme is pretty cool.</li> </ol> Coming up next: ranks 9 through 7</a>! Thomas Pynchon: Inherent Vice 2009-08-24T22:03:40+00:00 Remember when it wasn’t clear if Pynchon was ever going to write another book after Gravity’s Rainbow? Now he’s practically churning them out. The mammoth Against The Day was just published a couple of years ago, and now here’s Inherent Vice, which is—well, I guess you’d call it a hard-boiled detective novel, except that private eye Doc Sportello is more often baked than boiled. It’s Southern California circa 1970, and most of the scenes, as Sportello bounces back and forth from one typically paranoia-inducing coincidence to another, seem to involve either looking for weed or being offered it. Despite the book’s brevity and fairly lighthearted tone, this is definitely Pynchon all right; it’s just that usually the goofiness is there balancing out the deep shit and rhapsodic prose-poetry that occupies the majority of his writing. Despite all the danger that Sportello gets into, you always get the sense that Pynchon is looking out for him and is not really going to let him come to harm. This feels like a relatively recent development; I didn’t get that sense from Pynchon’s earlier novels, and for goodness’ sake in Gravity’s Rainbow he lets the main character just kind of disappear two-thirds of the way through. Maybe he’s mellowing in his old age. Anyway, it has lots of the things I generally dig about Pynchon. The sentence-to-sentence prose style is a tasty blend of informal and poetic (as compared to, say, David Foster Wallace’s tasty blend of informal and coldly analytical), and although the characterizations never seem to get that deep, they’re shallow in a pleasing way. So I definitely did enjoy it, but then again I’m kind of a Pynchon fanatic. People seem to be claiming that it’s the best way to ease into Pynchon, and I see their point, but I’d actually recommend The Crying of Lot 49 first as a relatively painless introduction to the themes that permeate his work. Daniel Abraham: A Shadow in Summer, A Betrayal in Winter 2009-08-23T16:03:28+00:00 These are the first two books of Abraham’s fantasy series The Long Price Quartet; the final one was just published last month. They are technically fantasy, as I said, but it’s more fantasy in the style of Guy Gavriel Kay; they’re normal human character-driven stories set in a vaguely Asian-style culture that doesn’t happen to exist in reality. Although the existence of the supernatural is important for the culture (largely for economic reasons), the use of magic very rarely enters the plot itself. These books are excellent in a fairly quiet way. There’s a lot of thinking relative to the amount of doing, but it’s quality thinking. The plot moves at a deliberate pace, but that gives everyone time to react to it instead of being carried along by it as it hurtles to a climax. The characters are well drawn, react believably to the situations they find themselves in, and change interestingly over the course of the books. Some of them have more moral fiber than others, but no one’s purely good or evil, and the “bad” ones have some redeeming qualities while the “good” ones have real and believable weaknesses. Fifteen years pass between the first and second book, and my understanding is that there are similar gaps between the others. As I said when I reviewed The Judging Eye, I like this approach, as it keeps the plot from getting bogged down too much as the author feels the need to continue every thread left over from the previous book. The later books have just as good reviews, if not better, as the earlier ones, so I will definitely finish the series out. William T. Vollmann: Europe Central 2009-08-02T15:25:30+00:00 I have an ambivalent relationship with William Vollmann. His first book, You Bright and Risen Angels, was a glorious spewfest, so unrestrained in its messiness that the “transcendental” table of contents was overflowing with promises of later chapters that the actual novel never even got to. After that he kept the logorrhea but dialed back the technicolor craziness, which can turn his novels into a bit of a slog. Europe Central, winner of the 2005 National Book Award and considered by many to be his best work, turned out to be about par for the course. It’s a sprawling linked collection of stories, mostly featuring actual historical characters, taking place in the Soviet Union and Germany over the course of the 20th century, linked mainly by World War II. The main character, if there can be said to be one, is the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, but many others appear, largely artists and military men. The loose theme is how people’s lives are changed (usually, ruined) by politics and war. Many of the historical people portrayed in this novel were fascinating, and new to me: Andrey Vlasov</a>, Friedrich Paulus</a>, Kurt Gerstein</a>, Hilde Benjamin</a>. I might not have been as interested in the book if I already knew these people’s stories (and maybe if you follow those links you won’t be anymore either), since much of the interest for me was just the discovery of the stories themselves. It was worth reading the book just to find out about them. But at the two-thirds point or so (of a 750-page novel) I started to get a little fatigued. For one thing, things started to get a little magical-realist in some of the stories, which was not really the ride I signed up for. Also, there’s a really long and slightly tedious section on the latter half of Shostakovich’s life (basically a long and futile attempt to write the music he wanted to unmolested by the demands of the Communist Party), and this story I did already know. So by the time I staggered to the end I was pretty relieved to finally put it down, and I certainly didn’t enjoy every page, but I am glad I read it, although I will probably take a decent break before I read Vollmann again (including the 1344-page Imperial, just out this week!). Frank Zappa: The Prog Years 2009-07-26T15:11:57+00:00 Well, that’s what I’m calling them, anyway, although it’s kind of fruitless to try to pin down the style of even one record here. This is the last group that Zappa called the Mothers (and the last group that he named after anything other than himself) and it shows; you get the feeling this is a real group of musicians creating music together and not just a bunch of session players. It’s a lot of fans’ favorite lineup and so far (I’ve actually listened through 1981) I agree. With Over-Nite Sensation (1973), Zappa discarded the big-band jazz style of his previous two records and made pretty much straight-ahead rock music. The “pretty much” hides the fact that even in the most straightforward tunes here there is often some surprising stuff going on in the background or the breaks. When I first heard it I was a bit disappointed that it wasn’t more out there but it’s grown on me a lot (you will hear this sentence again in the future). Apostrophe (’) (1974) is a bit more interesting, with more of the prog tendencies that I named this period after. These two albums were his biggest sellers to date, and I like them fine; a few more wrinkles would be nice, but they are really well done. The wrinkles come out in full force with Roxy & Elsewhere (1974), a double live album with lots of overdubs (a format Zappa used a lot). Even the regular rock tunes have a bunch of twists, and there are some really interesting instrumentals; side 2, which is mostly sophisticated instrumentals, is my favorite side of his since the second side of Absolutely Free. It manages to be superbly virtuosic while still being sweaty and down-to-earth, not bloodless at all. There are a few missteps (a swollen overweight remake of “Trouble Every Day” from Freak Out typifies everything I dislike about how music progressed from the 60s to the 70s) but there’s an amazing amount of good stuff here. One Size Fits All (1975) just about rounds out this period. It’s lots of people’s favorite Zappa album, and I can understand that. There’s a great mix of rock, funk, and prog, capped off with two versions of a winkingly pompous anthem. I certainly wouldn’t mind if he had managed to make a few more albums in this vein. Bongo Fury (1975) was made with Captain Beefheart and is pretty much the last gasp of this ensemble. I love Beefheart, and the first track, “Debra Kadabra”, really got my hopes up for some gonzo greatness, but in general it feels like Zappa and Beefheart compromised on some common ground rather than going all-out weird. In my opinion they both made better records on their own. Some of the musicians in this group (Napoleon Murphy Brock, George Duke, Ruth Underwood, Bruce and Tom Fowler, Chester Thompson) made guest appearances later (and given Zappa’s penchant for using old material for new albums, more music from this period would show up), but his next album was made almost solo, and after that he picked up a new bunch of musicians and the overall style changed again... Lev Grossman: The Magicians 2009-07-19T15:48:59+00:00 This was a free ARC from BEA; the actual book comes out in August. It’s an interesting idea, basically an adult fantasy book that is based on the experience of having read young adult fantasy books. It silently references the Harry Potter and Narnia books incessantly in a “good artists borrow, great artists steal” kind of way. Liza thought this was kind of lame but I thought it was reasonably ballsy; if the whole point of your book is to be playing off Harry Potter and Narnia tropes, why bother to hide them through an extra level of indirection? Checking off the one-to-one correspondences did get a little tiresome, though. The original part of it comes from the fact that it is basically half standard fantasy book, half standard tale of the lives of dissolute yuppie wastrels, a la Bret Easton Ellis or Jay McInerney or something. At its best this makes it a hard-hitting realistic look at what might really happen if magic were real and a bunch of imperfect youngsters possessed its power. At its worst it’s a bunch of mopey twenty-somethings who vomit up fireballs instead of liquor after drinking too much expensive port. There is a bunch of fairly interesting character development although I found it hard to bring myself to care overly much about any of said characters, perhaps because all of their flaws and imperfections are so lovingly laid bare. And the plotting and connections are mostly well done and tight; even when things kind of go off the rails, it’s clear that they were intended to by the author, although that didn’t stop me from disapproving somewhat. I do have a character development gripe in that the protagonist undergoes multiple important changes of heart within a eyebrow-raisingly small number of pages near the end, as if Grossman had sketched out a longer arc and then had to cut out most of its plot while retaining the character’s emotional journey through it. I did enjoy The Magicians—Grossman certainly knows how to write and despite the impression I give above there is a bunch of cool original stuff in it—but I put it down thinking that it had not quite reached its potential. P.S. Don’t read the back cover! Or read the Amazon description! Or... I guess it’s pointless; if you read more than one paragraph about this book (other than the above), you’re practically certain to get spoiled about something that is revealed well after halfway through the book. If I were an author I would hate that publishers do this. Arika Okrent: In the Land of Invented Languages 2009-07-08T02:17:57+00:00 After Mnemosyne reawakened my interest in Esperanto, I googled around a little and found that this book had been published just a few weeks ago and had gotten some good press. (By the way, someone has to do something about the “decent title: entirely too long subtitle” phenomenon; the full title of this is In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language. All it’s missing is an “and the Women Who Love Them”.) It was really good. I read it in about two days, laughing out loud many times, and then when I handed it to Liza she did too. It is not at all an exhaustive study of the subject; it is mostly a bunch of case studies with just enough connective tissue to link them together, and is aggressively first-person, in that she brings to the foreground her personal experience studying, learning, and meeting with the users of these languages. The actual linguistics and history were very interesting, and the personal experience of “I am really excited about this subject, but I kinda wish that the other people who are really excited about this subject were a little more mundane on the whole” resonated with me personally. Looking around on some forums, I saw some Esperantists take a little offense to her characterization of the language and movement, but I think she is more than fair. Most of the time Esperanto seems to be portrayed either as a punchline to a joke about incomprehensibility or as a practically perfect tool that could save the world and bring about world peace if only people would take it seriously. The truth is somewhere in the middle (its user base has never grown as much as hoped, but there is an active and vibrant if relatively small community whose lives are undoubtedly enriched by the language, and a strong literary tradition), and she presents a balanced picture of it. Anyway, this is exactly the kind of book I love: lots of interesting information on a subject I’m interested in, with a good level of lightness vs. depth and a very entertaining authorial voice. I enthusiastically recommend it to anyone with the slightest interest in the subject. China Miéville: The City & The City 2009-07-07T02:16:07+00:00 I have had an ambivalent relationship with China Miéville. Perdido Street Station was an awesome mess of a Weird fantasy book, with so much inventiveness stuffed into it that I could forgive its occasional failings. The Scar was just about as good, so I grabbed Iron Council in hardcover the day it came out... and gave up a quarter of the way through. It was actually boring; how can that be? I didn’t even try his young adult novel, Un Lun Dun, so it’s been a while since I read one of his books. Which brings us to the just-released The City & The City, which luckily I didn’t have to buy in hardcover because Liza picked up a free (personally signed!) copy at Book Expo America the other month. It’s a marked change from his other work. Instead of being an adventure set in a weird fantasy city of another world, it’s a police procedural set in a depressingly pedestrian fictional Eastern European city on Earth—pedestrian except for the whole point, which I will give away in the next paragraph so stop reading now if you want to experience the novel fresh, though it’s clear pretty early on what’s going on: OK, here we go: the city in which the novel takes place is divided in two, like Berlin was, only the whole thing is divided, practically fractally. On any given street corner you can see parts of both cities, and you’re supposed to pretend not to notice the other half. Miéville does a great job of making this absurd situation seem almost reasonable once you’ve read enough of the book. Naturally the crime being investigated ends up having political implications, and that’s as much as I’m going to say because I’ve already said too much. Anyway, it was great. I’ve seen some people complain about where the book ends up going, but I thought it was perfectly executed; I’d love to discuss it more but I’d have to figure out how to hide text. Maybe later. Very impressive and highly recommended for people who like a little weird in their crime novels or vice versa. Miéville’s back in my half of the city. Mnemosyne 2009-07-04T22:36:41+00:00 I have a terrible memory. I’m pretty good at remembering processes and techniques, but very bad at remembering raw information. Luckily, I went into computer science, which is all about the former, rather than biology or something. (My musical memory is quite good, but that’s definitely an exception.) I find it very frustrating to spend a fair amount of time amassing knowledge (say, reading a history of the United States because I feel embarrassingly ignorant of it) only to have forgotten most of it a year or two later. So last year I was excited to read a Wired article about Piotr Wozniak and his SuperMemo program</a>. The idea is that you can feed everything you want to remember into a program that is scientifically tuned to spit out the right flashcards for you at exactly the right times. What makes it work is the principle of spaced repetition, discovered in the 19th century, which asserts that the time between reviews of a given piece of information should increase (exponentially, in fact) over time. Since facts that you start out by needing to review every day can eventually be reviewed every hundred days or more as their period increases, you can regularly stuff more facts into the database and your daily quota of flashcards doesn’t need to increase too much. The SuperMemo program handles all of that automatically, as well as doing obvious things such as reducing the period of facts that you find you have forgotten. I didn’t do anything about it until recently, when I was reading David Carlton’s posts about writing his own SuperMemo-like system to help him learn Japanese[1]</a>[2]</a>[3]</a>[4]</a>. I had been thinking for a while about using such a system to memorize my chess openings, and someone in a comment to his posts mentioned Mnemosyne</a>, which is an open-source implementation of the same ideas, so I gave it a whirl. Mnemosyne does handle images, but it’s a little painful to enter chess positions into it. I’ll put the technical details of how I do it in a postscript. I dutifully started entering positions; my general technique is to play blitz games online, and for each game enter all the positions up to the point that I feel I should know to have a mastery of that opening (if they’re not already in the database). One month later, I’m up to a library of 200 positions (and counting). The repetitions have gotten spaced out enough that I generally have 10 or fewer positions to review on any given day (of course, the whole thing only really works if you do daily reviews, but because of the system, it’s not much of a chore, and in fact I rather look forward to it). Has it helped? I think it’s helped a lot. My former method of remembering openings was mostly to frantically cram every once in a while. Reviewing 10 positions every day, day in and day out, is much more productive. It’s also nice to know that a program is in control of the system. I trust that it is handing out positions to me when I should see them, and that my knowledge of my opening repertoire as a whole will be maintained at a decent level without me having to cram. In fact, one of the nicest results is just a large increase in my confidence. I don’t worry, “I should know this line, but I haven’t looked at it in a while, I should probably cram it again because I’ll feel stupid if I run into that person at the club who always plays it and I’ve forgotten what to do”; I trust that if the line is in the database, I have the appropriate chance of remembering it. Learning and remembering stuff in Mnemosyne is so much fun that I actually picked up Esperanto again, which I had dabbled with years ago, just to have another thing to memorize. (I figured it would be more rewarding in a shorter time than if I relearned French or Latin — though maybe I’ll do one of them next...) That has also been working out great, and I feel like I’m retaining vocabulary much better than the last time I tried. Even better than the short-term benefit is the supposed long-term benefit that if I stop actively studying it but keep on doing daily reviews—and remember, the time needed to do that will go down if I’m not adding material—I’ll theoretically be able retain most of it instead of letting it all go down the drain once more. If that is really the case, it would be great. We’ll see. [P.S. Here are the gory details of the system I use for storing chess positions, for the morbidly curious who are interested in following in my footsteps. I store my opening repertoire in Chess Position Trainer</a>, a free application that nicely handles things like transpositions. When I want to store a position into Mnemosyne, I copy the position from CPT in FEN notation using Ctrl-C and paste it into a chess diagram generator (I use this one</a>). Then I save off the resulting image into my .mnemosyne/images directory with a name like 0187.png (the number increases every time, of course). In Mnemosyne, I make a card with that image and the correct move, perhaps with additional notes that I should remember about that position. Importantly, I also enter an annotation like “[0187]” to the position in CPT, so I know that I’ve already added it to Mnemosyne and needn’t do so again in the future. It’s slightly tedious but not enough so to stop me from doing it.] Four more possible Spewers 2009-07-03T02:34:06+00:00 Now that I’ve started the topic, I’ve been keeping my eyes open, plus other people have contributed ideas, and since my last post on the subject I have four new potential entries for the list. Since I’m basically doubling the list here, I think it is fair to recap the criteria once more: incredibly prolific</li> awesome at their best</li> but with a nonexistent quality filter</li> largely intuitive in approach, as far as I can tell</li> even the best works are big messes (in a great way) rather than tightly constructed jewels</li> apparently wide-ranging in genre</li> but with enough tics that their work is instantly recognizable</li> </ul> One thing I do want to emphasize here is that there is no upper limit on quality. You can be one of the masters of all time in your craft and still be a Spewer. On to the list, in approximately descending order of how obviously they belong here: Stephen King. Perhaps less obviously so since he gave up cocaine, but still a pretty clear member. </li> Dave Sim. A little different in that pretty much everything he’s done is part of one 25-year-long work, and that he’s kind of insane, but I think he fits well enough that I’m comfortable slotting him in. </li> Woody Allen. Liza wasn’t sure about him when I proposed him. For one thing, his best works are acknowledged masterpieces, but as I said, there’s no upper limit on quality here. Also, it’s harder to fit these criteria as a film director; the fact that you’re directing a team of dozens of people rather than scribbling away in your attic imposes a certain having-it-togetherness that is a little antithetical to the Spewer aesthetic. But I think he fits pretty well, disgorging a film every year, often on basically the same subjects, whether they are any good or not. </li> Pablo Picasso. Suggested by Daniel Koning in the comments to my last post on the subject. I know about as much about him as any educated person would know, but beyond that am not really qualified to judge whether he fits into this category. For example, did he make thousands of works because he was an artist with a compulsion to create and no filter, or just for completely mercenary reasons? I feel like a true Spewer must fit into the former category, otherwise we have to start including people like Thomas Kinkade. </li> </ol> That brings us to the following population if we are as generous as possible: Writers: Jack Vance, Michael Moorcock, Stephen King (I note they are all genre writers)</li> Musicians: Robert Pollard, Frank Zappa</li> Graphic Novelists: Dave Sim</li> Filmmakers: Woody Allen</li> Artists: Pablo Picasso</li> </ul> This is starting to get big enough to get actually meaningful! Can we get it up to ten? My next nominee: Honoré de Balzac. To quote Wikipedia: “His magnum opus was a sequence of almost 100 novels and plays collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the fall of Napoléon Bonaparte in 1815.” Sounds pretty promising to me... Michael Cox: The Meaning of Night 2009-06-22T20:48:19+00:00 I am a sucker for modern takes on Victorian literature of the Charles Dickens / Wilkie Collins variety, Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx being for me the high point of said genre. The Meaning of Night got a bunch of very positive reviews and had a great first line (“After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn’s for an oyster supper”) so off I went to read it. And this is kind of a weird thing to say after spending most of a weekend feverishly plowing through it, but I was ultimately a bit disappointed. I try not to put spoilers of any kind in these reviews, so I don’t want to go into too much more detail, so I’ll just say that for me the ending of the book did not live up to the expectations set by the rest of it. Clearly most readers felt differently (it has 4.5 stars on Amazon), and I enjoyed most of the time I spent with it, so I don’t want to be too harsh, but I felt like there was a bit of a wasted opportunity here. Frank Zappa: The Big Band Years 2009-06-21T22:50:43+00:00 First an update on my previous survey</a>: after a couple more listens, I am really digging 200 Motels. It casts the widest net of any of the albums so far, ranging from very simple rock to atonal orchestral pieces (if you have any doubts that Zappa had real classical compositional chops, find The Frank Zappa Songbook and check out the orchestral manuscript excerpts there), which makes it tough to get a handle on. But I kind of look at it (this goes for a lot of Zappa albums) like an interesting topographical landscape that is mostly underwater. At first you just see a few islands; these are the easily identifiable musical elements that come along a few times per side and are all you can really orient yourself by at first. Over repeated listens, the waters recede bit by bit, and you can identify more and more elements of the musical landscape that were opaque at first. Eventually the whole work becomes familiar, and you can begin to understand it as a whole. This is the way I approach a lot of modern classical music; a few years back I spent a month listening to Elliott Carter’s first string quartet once every day in the background, and by the end of it I certainly did recognize a decent fraction of it. Of course Zappa is easier to process this way because those initial landmarks are pop riffs rather than odd intervallic collections, but the principle is the same and in some ways it can be more rewarding because there’s more to hang on to. Anyway, on to the big band years, which is really just one year, 1972. These two records are mostly instrumental and have big horn sections, and revisit some of the jazz elements he started exploring in Hot Rats back in 1969. Waka/Jawaka (1972) is less successful for me. Side one is completely occupied by a single piece, “Big Swifty”, which starts with a very promising multi-metric theme (or “head”, I guess), and then wastes it by settling into a jam for most of its 17 minutes. The two vocal pieces that follow seem to be generally regarded as space-fillers, though the second one, the country-tinged “It Just Might Be a One-Shot Deal”, is actually my favorite thing on the album, then things are finished off with the title track, 11 minutes long with again too much of it occupied by solos. (There are a lot of contradictory elements in Zappa’s work, but to me one of the oddest is the character of his solos. Most of his music, even when it’s dumb, is pretty complicated, sometimes deceptively so, but when it comes to solos he’s happy to sit on a couple of chords for five minutes wanking away. Maybe there’s more there I’m not seeing yet, but so far they’re not grabbing me.) The Grand Wazoo (1972) is a big improvement. The whole thing just feels tighter and more directed, and side two in particular has a nice arc from beginning to end. There are practically no vocals at all on this record, probably a plus for a lot of people. After a short tour presenting this music, Zappa assembled yet one more version of the Mothers of Invention and returned to rock with sort of a prog flavor. Stay tuned. Donald X. Vaccarino: Dominion 2009-06-19T02:04:35+00:00 Dominion</a> is a card game that came out last year. I heard it was the hot new game, got to play it this spring at the Game Developers Conference, immediately tried to buy it but found out that the first printing had sold out, finally bought it a month ago, and since then Liza and I have probably played an average of one game a night. So the short version is that it is awesome and I wholeheartedly recommend it, but I should probably go into a little more detail than that. It is basically a deck-building collectible card game, only you build your decks in real time and the universe of cards to collect is randomly generated (25 varieties of cards come with the game but any given session only uses a random subset of 10). Like Settlers of Catan or Puerto Rico, it has the casual-gamer-friendly aspect of each player building up their little individual empire/deck/etc; even if your opponent beat you, you get a sense of accomplishment from your deck being cooler than it was at the start of the game. As with most CCGs, the base rules are incredibly simple and the cards add interesting exceptions on top of them. I was originally a little concerned about the strategies becoming too obvious or the cards becoming boring, but we’re still enjoying it a ton and regularly having post-game discussions of how well our strategies worked and the various tough decisions we had to make during the game. It plays great for 2 player but apparently plays well up to groups of 4 as well. And in a month or so an expansion set with 25 new card types will come out! Yes, we are well and truly hooked. Highly recommended, especially for people who like more casual boardgames that they can think moderately hard about for 30 minutes as opposed to ones that you bust your brain over for two hours. Spewer #5: Michael Moorcock 2009-06-18T22:56:52+00:00 (See the previous discussion here</a> for definitions and lists.) How could I have forgotten Michael Moorcock in my list? As far as I can tell he fits every criterion. All I’ve read is the first volume of the recent Elric rerelease, which unfortunately did not engage me at all, so I probably won’t be exploring much more (although I do have a copy of Gloriana lying around I picked up when I saw it remaindered). But his whole multiverse / Eternal Champion thing combined with seeing huge omnibuses of vaguely interrelated work definitely got my salivary glands going, before it turned out that I wasn’t that into the sample that I tried. Frank Zappa: The Flo and Eddie Years 2009-06-06T16:14:46+00:00 Continuing my chronological tour through Frank Zappa’s albums (I’m in no danger of stopping yet)... As I said last time</a>, this group of albums is generally not regarded in very high esteem by Zappa fans. This incarnation of the band features the tandem vocals of Flo (who’s a guy, by the way) and Eddie, both formerly of the Turtles (the song you probably know is “Happy Together”). The music here takes a weird turn towards juvenile vaudeville, with leering and often offensive lyrics that are usually sexual and when they’re not still tend to be pretty gross. And you know what, I like it a lot more than I thought I would. Part of it is reveling in the sheer musicianship of the band; the high points of the albums are live 20+ minute suites that even though they contain a fair amount of vamping still have an incredible amount of music that needs to be performed precisely, and listening to everyone nail their cues the whole way through is kind of exhilarating. They make it sound easy, and as someone who has had to memorize hours of complicated ensemble music, I know it’s not. It’s kind of a shame that the lyrics are often stupid, but after you hear them a few times, the words stop being so in the foreground. Yeah, that is about the most positive thing I can find to say about the lyrics. Chunga’s Revenge (1970) is my least favorite album of this period, an unfocused grab-bag of leftovers from old sessions and new songs with Flo and Eddie. Fillmore East — June 1971 (1971) is a live album featuring the infamous “groupie routine”, one of the aforementioned suites. The highlight for me, though, is the last track, “Tears Began To Fall”, a glorious soul song with, unbelievably, no trace of sarcasm (which maybe is why Zappa unfortunately never performed it again). 200 Motels (1971) is a double-album soundtrack to the movie featuring the band (and MCed, mystifyingly, by Theodore Bikel), and as you can tell from the clips on YouTube</a>, the movie is a total mess and so is a lot of the music. I like big messes, but even I needed a few listens to get into it. Equal parts stupid rock and mostly-atonal orchestral pieces, with very little in between. Just Another Band From L.A. (1972) is probably my favorite album of this era. Side one is occupied entirely by another suite, “Billy the Mountain”, which is a lot of fun and for once more silly than offensive. (That gets evened out by the second side, whose centerpiece song is a cringe-inducingly gleeful celebration of incestuous urges.) Four albums of this is about all I can take, but “luckily” someone threw Zappa off the stage during the tour documented in Just Another Band From L.A. and he disbanded this group and spent the next six months in a wheelchair convalescing and composing. Stay tuned for Frank Zappa: The Big Band Years! Iain M. Banks: The Player of Games 2009-06-06T01:52:14+00:00 I wasn’t going to read another Culture novel quite so soon, but a chess/go friend of mine told me that I had to read this, so I did. It’s about, no surprise, a world-class (I guess universe-class) game player, and, no surprise either, the massive political crisis he finds himself embroiled in. He’s introduced to basically the Best Game Ever, which in its complexity dwarfs the most complicated game you know, whether that is chess, go, or Advanced Squad Leader, and naturally his mission is to defeat a rival civilization at it. It is actually much more interesting than my admittedly breezy explanation makes it sound. The plot itself is engaging although it’s not hard to tell where it’s going. The rival civilization pretty much defines itself by this game, which makes for a lot of interesting analogies between game-playing and life. Their relative barbarism compared to the Culture is also thought-provoking, as it comprises a mix of aspects that we as modern humans find abominably backward and ones that we share with them (but the far-future utopian Culture population finds just as barbaric). But what I found most enjoyable was just the take on game-playing. Banks does an admirable job of portraying the different aspects of playing games seriously: the obsession with finding the truth in a position, and the paradoxical combination of fierce competitiveness where any attempt to seize the advantage is allowable and aesthetic appreciation for the development of the game such that the actual determination of the winner is almost unimportant. Combine this with some cool plot twists and a wry sense of humor and you have a winner, at least as far as this game-playing novel-reader is concerned. Next up (at some point) is Use Of Weapons, which seems to be widely regarded as one of his best. Matthew Amster-Burton: Hungry Monkey 2009-05-19T02:28:01+00:00 (Full disclosure: Matthew is a friend, and I reviewed an early version of the book. A couple of my suggested jokes even got into the final product.) Every non-fiction book these days needs a colon and a subtitle, and the subtitle of Hungry Monkey is “A Food-Loving Father’s Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater.” Amster-Burton is a food writer, and a few years ago he had a daughter, and this is the result. It’s a collection of funny anecdotes about his and Iris’s relationship with food, restrained advice, and recipes. Taking those in turn: the funny anecdotes are really funny. This is because Amster-Burton is a really funny guy, and he and his wife, Laurie, are raising a funny girl. He’s a born storyteller, and there’s generally a chuckle every paragraph and a laugh every page. I’m sure that if I also had child-raising experiences to compare his with, I’d be laughing even more. The advice, as I said, is restrained, and that’s really nice. There are tons of advice books out there about everything, and they all like to assure the reader that they are providing the one perfect solution to his problems. Amster-Burton’s advice generally consists of two types: 1) “Hey, this works for me, you might want to give it a shot,” and 2) “This other book that claims to know all the answers doesn’t really, so don’t take it too seriously.” These both strike me as laudably moderate. We’ve only tried one of the recipes so far, but unsurprisingly it was great. The recipes are actually not generally particularly child-centric, because Amster-Burton’s main philosophy is (spoiler alert!) to pretty much cook what you were going to cook anyway (with some restrictions) and let your kid eat as much or as little of it as they want. Anyway, I enjoyed it a lot, and I’d wholeheartedly recommend it, particularly to new parents. The first few chapters are available for free at the book site, http://hungrymonkeybook.com</a>. OK, enough shilling. But I wouldn’t be shilling for it if it weren’t really good! Brandon Sanderson: The Hero of Ages 2009-05-17T15:53:49+00:00 This is the third and final book of the Mistborn trilogy, the first two books of which I talked about earlier</a>. It mostly delivers; there are lots of interesting and surprising revelations (both regular plot ones and ones about how the world works) and things come to a suitable climax. One thing Sanderson does really well is to bring his characters up from level 1 to level 30 effectively, in D&D-speak; as the books go on, their powers increase dramatically, and so do the challenges they face, but Sanderson manages to control it all pretty well—you don’t find yourself saying “Why doesn’t she just use her superpowers to vanquish this trivial problem?” The main thing that prevented me from enjoying this book fully is that much of it is very bleak. Of course epic fantasy is largely about overcoming impossible odds, and it’s natural to feel pessimistic when faced with those impossible odds, but still, the fact that for the first half of the book all the main characters are basically suffering from clinical depression about the oncoming end of the world and their inability to do anything about it is a real downer for the reader. It’s almost made worse by one bright spot of a scene that explicitly calls back to situations from the first book back when they had a brighter outlook on life. Once they actually get their act together, things do pick up, and I enjoyed the second half of the book a lot more. I liked the series overall, but I liked the first book the best, and it’s pretty standalone; there is obviously more to come, but it doesn’t end in a cliffhanger or anything. My recommendation is to read that first and then decide whether you want 1500 more pages in the same vein. P. G. Wodehouse: Carry On, Jeeves 2009-05-09T17:13:22+00:00 I needed to kill a couple days before the final volume of Mistborn showed up, so short stories seemed like just the thing. Plus of course Wodehouse is about the most readable author on the planet, so I ended up plowing through all of them quickly. Which is not really the best way to experience Wodehouse, but more about that in a minute. I should mention at the outset for people not familiar with these books that they are about the funniest things ever. Bertie Wooster is a feckless aristocrat who keeps getting himself in fixes and Jeeves is the super-competent valet who always finds a way to rescue him. Wodehouse has a way with dialogue and with Bertie’s internal monologue that keeps me constantly cracking up. I was not surprised to learn that Jack Vance, another master of funny dialogue, was a big Wodehouse fan. I had actually read these stories, or most of them, a few years ago when I first discovered Wodehouse and had already read a couple of Jeeves novels. After just reading some novels, getting concentrated Jeeves in short bursts for ten stories straight was sort of an overdose, and I haven’t returned until now. And although they were once again really funny, I still think a book of short stories is not really the best way to experience Jeeves. The novels pile up hilarious crisis upon crisis for a couple of hundred pages, then finally resolve them all; the short stories only really have room for one or two apiece. (Typically, one of Bertie’s chums has a problem, Jeeves comes up with a plan for him, Bertie bungles the execution, and then Jeeves fixes that.) That’s okay—not all plots have to be super complicated—but going through that arc ten times in a short period of time is a little wearying and, unsurprisingly, gets a little samey over time. Still, they were a lot of fun, and the good news is that most of the Jeeves books are novels. The Code of the Woosters is the one I recommend if you’re starting out. Frank Zappa: The Early Years 2009-05-03T23:18:54+00:00 I promised a couple of weeks ago to investigate Frank Zappa. Being the completist I am, I started at the beginning, and holy crap. Freak Out! and Absolutely Free are both complete masterpieces, and everything else so far is at least super interesting. Here, very briefly, are my initial impressions of Zappa’s early oeuvre. Freak Out! (1966): I can’t believe this came out two months before Revolver. It completely deconstructs rock music at a time that most people were still trying to construct it. It’s a 2-LP set (one CD). The first two sides are filled with mostly conventional (but still twisted) pop songs. Then things start falling apart. Side 3 starts with “Trouble Every Day”, a 6-minute electric-Dylan-ish rant, then eventually devolves completely into an assemblage of noise that makes “Revolution 9” look tame. I don’t know if I’d enjoy the end of the album by itself much, but as the culmination of the whole record it’s stunning. Absolutely Free (1967) has already shot into my short list of best albums of all time. Two suites full of complex yet gloriously sloppy music that ping-pongs back and forth between hard rock, faux-Broadway, faux-Pierrot Lunaire, faux-Vaudeville, you name it. There’s a giddy energy to the whole thing, as if they can hardly believe they’re getting away with recording it, that’s totally infectious. Amazing. We’re Only In It for the Money (1968) is often recommended as the place to start with Zappa, and that seems reasonable. The cut-and-paste tactics of the previous album continue, made into a coherent whole by the album’s theme of contempt for hippies and fake counterculture in general. I’ve had this album for a long time, as opposed to the others, so maybe I’m too used to it by now, but it certainly is another masterpiece. Lumpy Gravy (1968) is a total mess that is only really worth procuring if you are interested in Zappa’s history. It’s a bunch of orchestral pieces, largely atonal, that have been cut up and interspersed with old pop recordings and excerpts of seemingly high people rambling about random topics. Save it until you know you’re hooked. Cruising With Ruben and the Jets (1968) is an album of nothing but doo-wop, including reworks of songs from earlier albums, which I have not gotten yet because apparently Zappa totally ruined it 20 years later during its CD release by overdubbing new bass and drum parts, and I’m holding out hope for a remaster of the old version. Uncle Meat (1969) starts a new phase with lots of composed instrumental pieces in a modern classical vein mixed with jams, live outtakes, and random conversations. There are some really nice pieces here but you are pretty much guaranteed not to like all of it equally. Hot Rats (1969) was Zappa’s first solo record (not with the Mothers of Invention) and stands apart from the rest of these; it’s mostly jazz-rock fusion (and one of the first examples of it). I can take or leave the long jams, but the shorter fully composed pieces on it are great. Zappa then disbanded the Mothers of Invention and released a couple of archival recordings mixing lots of old studio and live performances, Burnt Weeny Sandwich and Weasels Ripped My Flesh (both 1970). I need to let these soak in a little more. There’s some great stuff but also some jams and live improv wackiness that don’t grab me yet. Still, the high points are really high. That’s as far as I’ve gotten. So far I am mostly enthralled; a lot of this music completely surpasses my expectations after hearing a smattering of Zappa’s work. The guy was obviously a total genius, which helps me give him the benefit of the doubt when something doesn’t appeal to me at first. It seems I am about to enter a period of his career (the Flo and Eddie years) that is largely regarded as a relative low point, so it will be interesting to see if I agree. If any of this sounds interesting, check out We’re Only In It for the Money or Freak Out! first. Absolutely Free is actually my favorite of all of these records, but I have a feeling the other two early records are better for dipping a toe in the water. One recommendation I do have in general is to listen to these albums one side at a time. They were written to be listened to that way, of course, and they’re dense enough that listening to more than 20 minutes at a time is a good way to tire out your ears and your brain. Jeffrey Eugenides: Middlesex 2009-05-01T01:33:48+00:00 This was high up on the list of Books I Really Should Have Gotten Around To Reading By Now. (The next highest book on the list is probably Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections.) All I really knew was that it was about a hermaphrodite, which indeed it is, but there’s actually a bit less of that than I expected. First of all, the novel starts out with the narrator’s grandparents, and doesn’t even get to the narrator’s own life until maybe 40% of the way through the book—and then only really follows that life until the age of 15 or so. So we get a lot of entertaining background (though the background is interesting and continues to shed light on the narrator’s own experiences throughout the book), and then we get the narrator’s life up until the point that she 1) discovers that she’s not totally a she and 2) decides he’s a he, but there’s disappointingly little about his life after he decided how he was going to live it. I still enjoyed it; I like these multi-generational family epics, and the science and sociology of Calliope’s condition was interesting and well written. The artistry that is put into every sentence was especially obvious since I came to this book straight from Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn books, which were written extremely straightforwardly (not that I had a problem with that). One thing that I particularly appreciated although I bet many other readers found it a little annoying was Eugenides’ willingness to make explicit the themes that kept cropping up. Oh hey, yeah, I guess the burning of Detroit does recall the burning of Smyrna 300 pages ago, now that you mention it, thanks for reminding me. I’m sure the actual literature readers roll their eyes at the author’s assumption that the reader needs these correspondences spelled out, but it worked well for me. Middlesex won the Pulitzer Prize, and I must admit that having picked it up with Pulitzer-size expectations I felt that it didn’t totally live up to them. But it was still an excellent book, and I’m happy to have read it for reasons other than just being able to cross it off the list. Another Spewer: Frank Zappa 2009-04-15T20:21:20+00:00 To recap, Spewers are artists who are incredibly prolific</li> awesome at their best</li> but with a nonexistent quality filter</li> largely intuitive in approach, as far as I can tell</li> even the best works are big messes (in a great way) rather than tightly constructed jewels</li> apparently wide-ranging in genre</li> but with enough tics that their work is instantly recognizable</li> </ul> So far the category has consisted of Jack Vance, Robert Pollard</a>, and William Vollmann</a>, and I just thought of another: Frank Zappa. I’m very ambivalent about Zappa. He’s clearly a genius, but the juvenile humor and lack of quality control (e.g., long annoying spoken word interludes) are real strikes against him for me. I think We’re Only in It for the Money is 90% absolutely incredible and 10% repellent. Lumpy Gravy didn’t make much sense to me when I first heard it, but I tried again today and it held together better than I expected. The only other albums I have of his are a two-fer of Apostrophe and Over-Nite Sensation, which I recall finding okay but nothing special, although a bit more research today indicates that those records, while relative hits, aren’t really regarded as very high up in his creative output. I’m going to explore Zappa a little more, starting with the early Mothers of Invention records, which seem most likely to be up my alley. Further findings will be posted here. (By the way, this Crossfire episode</a> with Zappa about music censorship is awesome. If you have 20 minutes to spare they will not be wasted if you spend them on this.) Brandon Sanderson: Mistborn; The Well of Ascension 2009-04-15T00:40:27+00:00 I don’t like reading series until they’re finished because I want to know that I can read all of the books in a row. This is mostly due to my lousy memory; when I get to book 3, I don’t want to have to either reread books 1 and 2 or muddle through not remembering who anyone is. I was trying to save the Mistborn trilogy until the last book comes out in mass market paperback on April 28, but I recently had a cross-country flight and the first volume looked like a good airplane book. And it was; I read half of it on the plane, and when I arrived at my destination I bought the second one at a bookstore just to make sure I wouldn’t run out on my flight back. I’ve now finished the second book and unfortunately have to wait a couple of weeks until I can read the third. So what’s so good about them? Well, they’re not great literature or anything, but they’re crafted really well. The plot, the world, the rate at which information about the world is doled out, and even the character development (for the main two characters, at least) are handled expertly. They’re great page-turners, and the fact that I want yet more pages after turning 1400 of them so far is pretty compelling evidence. The writing is perfectly competent, and I don’t really mean that as a slight. Sanderson is more of a draftsman than a painter, and he realizes what his strengths are. He doesn’t try to be that poetic or to write particularly virtuosically; he just describes what happens and trusts that that will be sufficient, and it is. It was honestly kind of nice to read prose that is optimized for clarity. Especially after reading Black God’s Kiss and noting from afar the recent “racefail” explosion, it was interesting to me that the main character is a teenage girl (which, obviously, Sanderson is not), and as far as I can tell is drawn very well and sympathetically, not as either a girly girl or a boy in skirts. He specifically thanks a woman in his acknowledgments for help in building her character, and it seems to have helped. Another cool thing about Sanderson is that he has been putting up extensive annotations to his book on his website, similar to what I’ve been doing intermittently here with my songs, detailing the reasons for the decisions he made or pointing out things that he thought did or didn’t work. It’s illuminating and a nice use of the modern ability to communicate outside of the historically normal channels. The third and final book gets 4.5 stars on Amazon so at least I can be pretty sure that it is not a precipitous drop in quality from the first two. You can be sure it will show up here shortly after it shows up in stores. The language of chess 2009-04-08T02:18:01+00:00 There are many things that appeal to me about chess, and perhaps in some future post I’ll list them all, but one of the most important is the way that it creates a whole new sophisticated language, with inflection and shades of meaning, that doesn’t map to English (or whatever human language you care to choose) at all. Music is the most obvious other abstract system like this. Music has a whole theory of meaning and communication, of what the composer is “saying” to the listener over the course of a piece, whether that is setting up expectations and fulfilling or dashing them, or getting a reaction out of a unexpectedly piquant chord or melodic leap or rhythmic displacement or what have you. There are a few obvious correlations to “actual” semantic meaning (major is happy! minor is sad! fast is exciting!) but largely music remains an abstract closed system. It mostly doesn’t refer to anything outside of itself (tone poems aside), and although it can be analyzed and frequently is, it has to be analyzed on its own terms, and not by “translating” it; it has some sort of “meaning” in the same way that English sentences have meaning, but there’s no mapping between the two spheres. (If you’re interested in this sort of thing, I highly recommend Leonard Meyer’s Emotion and Meaning in Music.) Anyway, this post is supposedly about chess, not music. My point is that chess games and positions also carry some sort of untranslatable-to-language abstract semantic content, and that the richness of this content and the fact that it has no linguistic analog is one of the things that makes chess so aesthetically appealing to its devotees. It’s so abstract it’s hard for me to put into words, but a chess enthusiast gets a certain feeling when he or she glances at a board and sees an open position as opposed to a closed or semi-closed one; or looks at possible pawn breaks; or notices that one player has sacked material for the initiative; or sees a fianchettoed bishop, or the possibility of a standard Bxh7+ sac, or a “bone-in-the-throat” pawn on e6, or Alekhine’s gun lined up, or a good vs bad bishop, or... I could name dozens of these, but the point is that they are supremely meaningful to me (in that they literally have meaning) and probably mean nothing to you. Not everything about chess always appeals to me—the competitive aspects, the need to calculate extremely accurately and to memorize openings and endgame techniques—but I will never tire of this aesthetic aspect of it. (As I was writing this, I found an interesting attempt to make connections between two of these “languages”: Haskell Small’s “A Game of Go”</a>, a musical accompaniment to a classic game of Go (about which I could say many of the same things). It’s a really cool idea, although it doesn’t get much past some basic correspondences (ko fights are tense! things wind down in the endgame!). I suppose that if it had been easier to make one-to-one correspondences between Go and music, my whole point that they are interesting and unique complex systems would have been undermined.) Junot Díaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao 2009-04-07T02:45:09+00:00 This novel won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize, and unsurprisingly it was great. The narrative voice is quite in-your-face and virtuosic, which I could understand turning some people off and judging from the Amazon reviews it did, but I dug it. It jumps around in space between New Jersey and the Dominican Republic and in time between the mid and late 20th century in an effective way, the plot expanding outwards in all directions (time and space) from an 1980s New Jersey core. There are already a million reviews of this book so I don’t feel the need to say anything in particular for the million and first time, but one sort of interesting aspect jumped out at me. I’m used to historical novels covering the history behind the novel rather implicitly; you’re supposed to either already know the historical background or pick it up by reading between the lines as you see how it affects the individual people of the story. Díaz on the other hand is unafraid to insert lengthy (though informal) footnotes, David Foster Wallace-style, about the history of the Dominican Republic all over the place to make sure you understand everything he is trying to get across, but on the other hand peppers the narrative throughout with largely-unexplained SF allusions and metaphors. I have to admit that it was pretty neat to see him make some offhand reference to Morgoth or Tracy Hickman or the gom jabbar and get that feeling of “Hey, I understand that, all of my past reading has paid off” in the way that I usually only get when someone is compared to Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary or something. It made me realize that genre literature can actually be a fairly rich source of references, so kudos to Díaz for being willing to use it in a work with real literary pretensions. Plus I learned a lot of interesting things about the D.R., largely because he is so generous with those explanatory footnotes. Hopefully the next time I read a Latin American book, I will have another “Hey, I understand that, all of my past reading has paid off” moment. C. L. Moore: Black God's Kiss 2009-04-03T02:18:51+00:00 I didn’t really discover pulp fantasy until a couple of years ago. Fantasy fiction these days tends to be epic fantasy or urban fantasy. Epic fantasy is where heroes save the world from Great Evil, preferably over the course of three or more books; as you might have guessed, Tolkien is the unwitting root of it. Urban fantasy is magical realism that gets shelved in the genre section instead of the literature section. Pulp fantasy, on the other hand, is what most fantasy was until the 70’s or so. The archetypal pulp fantasy hero is Conan—the Conan of Robert E. Howard’s books of the 1930’s, not the movie. He isn’t saving the world; he’s just looking after his own hide, spending most of his time in search of loot or wenches. Paizo Publishing, best known for formerly publishing the Dungeons & Dragons magazines Dungeon and—wait for it—Dragon, has started publishing old pulp fantasy and science fiction books under their Planet Stories imprint. C. L. Moore looked like an interesting place to start exploring, given her status as the first woman pulp fantasist of note. Black God’s Kiss collects her six Jirel of Joiry stories, featuring an impetuous, passionate, ass-kicking heroine in medieval France. They were plenty of fun in a pulp fantasy way. Were they special because of the gender of the author? I dunno. Jirel is definitely a woman; she goes around kicking butt, but she also has men issues. If these stories were written by a man about a woman hero, would I be rolling my eyes at how clichéd she was? Maybe. I’ve read romance novels written by women and had the same reaction, but if they keep writing characters like that then I guess there’s something to it. I have to admit that nothing jumped out at me as being something I would never see from a male author, but my reaction might have been different in the 1930’s, when the alternatives to Jirel were Conan and Cthulhu. The writing was enjoyable—as usual with pulp, it’s long on description and atmosphere and action and kind of short on character development—but didn’t really grab me beyond that, not that I expected it to; I read pulp for the description and atmosphere and action. I have to admit that my interest perked up the most when I got to the last story and Moore’s regular science-fiction hero, Northwest Smith, time-traveled back to 16th century France from his usual haunt on Mars where he had been passing the time knocking back Martian cocktails with his Venusian sidekick. But maybe that’s just because I’m a guy. Catherynne M. Valente: Palimpsest 2009-03-21T17:52:52+00:00 I discovered Catherynne Valente through her Orphan’s Tales books, which were an amazing blend of beautiful poetic prose and cerebral puzzle-box structure. If I make a Top Ten list at some point they’re going to be contenders. Palimpsest is her newest novel, and it is once again full of beautiful poetic prose, though my left brain missed the more intellectual pleasures of those other books. Four people, all with tenuous and diminishing connections to the real world, find themselves able to visit a dream city named Palimpsest, though only by having sex with others who, like them, have had mysterious maps of areas of the city appear on their skin. The plot of the book mostly concerns their attempts to become permanent residents, though the plot is a little beside the point compared with the overflowingly rich descriptions of the gorgeously grotesque Palimpsest and its inhabitants, and the exploration of the characters’ attempts to find there what they’ve lost in this world. It was interesting to read a book with so much sex (it is, after all, the way that the characters travel), presented in a manner that, while often emotional, isn’t overly erotic or titillating. And I appreciated the matter-of-factness in which couplings of various gender-parities and sizes are presented without either excuse or special attention. I don’t want to give too much away, but the plotting element does pick up as the book proceeds, and the arc that it follows to the conclusion is well constructed and gripping, making Palimpsest more than just the collection of beautiful dream sequences I was initially concerned it might be. Although The Orphan’s Tales are still the books of hers I’m going to press on people first, this is a good intro to Valente’s writing for those who don’t want to commit to a thousand-page epic. Lars Bo Hansen: How Chess Games Are Won and Lost 2009-03-18T23:27:06+00:00 I already have far too many books like How Chess Games Are Won and Lost, holistic tomes that attempt to somehow improve your chess game across the board by dispensing a couple hundred pages of advice. But this one has gotten a bunch of great reviews, so I gave in. It’s actually a very good book, although the title is misleading. It’s not so much a manual as it is a collection of stuff Hansen has learned over the course of his career, supplemented with examples from his games (and some other games that he learned from). So don’t go in expecting to see a theory of chess improvement presented and supported, as you might with Silman or Rowson. That said, this is a very entertaining book. I hesitate to grade the instructional value of any book, since I have read dozens of books in the last 15 years but my 1800-ish rating has not budged, so clearly they’re all useless. But Hansen does say a lot of interesting things, and his annotations are excellent, at exactly the right level of detail for my class A brain. (For the non-chess-players, that’s class A as in “one level below expert, which is one level below master, which is still way below grandmaster”, not class A as in top-notch.) I think it would be useful for players down to the 1600 level or so, with the caveat that some of the things he’s saying are really aimed at a higher level of player than you or me, and I wouldn’t be surprised if even a 2200 learned something, although what do I know. I read the whole thing (and if you read chess books, you know that actually reading a book cover to cover is high praise indeed), and was sufficiently impressed by his writing and analysis to consider reading his other two books as well. Songbook: Hit On You 2009-03-14T23:21:46+00:00 “Entangled” is the second song on the new record, but Greg wrote it, so I’m skipping to number 3, “Hit On You”. This album is light on the “funny ha ha” songs, as people have noted, and this is probably the only outright example. I’ve always been a fan of songs in which the backing vocalists seem to have their own personalities—“With a Little Help from My Friends” is the best example I can think of offhand. Something about the other singers referring to me in the third person, as if they’re ambassadors or live translators, tickles me. And then it was natural to have them veer off in the third chorus into their own completely parallel commentary, warning the listener of the ulterior motives of the lead singer. Your mileage may vary, but I think “Pretend you’re gay / or you have the flu” is freakin’ hilarous. (I think this is largely because it’s fitting into a fairly tight rhyme scheme that has already been established.) The form is kind of unusual: Verse, Verse, Chorus, Bridge, Chorus, Chorus. It’s unusual in modern pop music to never come back to the verse after the beginning of the song, but it was a standard technique back in the days of “standards” (Porter, Gershwin, etc.) to have an intro section that never returned, and you encounter it in many early Beatles songs as well, for example “Do You Want to Know a Secret” and “If I Fell”. I wasn’t really thinking of those sorts of songs as a model, though—mostly it was just that I already knew I needed three choruses (one without backing vocals, one with backing vocals added, and one where the lyrics diverge), and probably a bridge, so those were already eating up a fair amount of time, and (probably due to the fact that the choruses are different each time) I didn’t feel like it was getting too samey if I didn’t throw another verse in. The verses are mostly in 6/4, and I was trying to get our drummer Bill to bring that out with a really emphasized which he did once and then collapsed cracking up. Uh, why is that, Bill? Oh, yeah, it’s exactly the same as the verses of “Heat of the Moment” by Asia. OK, never mind. The bridge moves to another key and then back, which is a technique I really like. “Your body’s hotter than the deepest deep-fat fryer” also cracks me up. See, deep-fat fryers are really hot, and this one is even deeper, even though that makes no sense! Is that one of those jokes that becomes less funny when you try to explain it? Sigh. The harmonic transition from F to Ab for the bridge is super abrupt, but I’m really happy with the Ab—Db—G—C—Bb—F sequence (under “I’ve got to buy myself a new pair of pants ’cause my loins are on fire”) that accomplishes the return to F. This was not a sure bet to make it onto the CD. I was worried with this song, as I always am with the funny ones, that it wouldn’t work well on record, that it’s mostly good for playing live, where people can react to the jokes in real time instead of hearing them over and over; also, because of the laid-back nature of it, it has the potential to sound kind of limp if we’re not really tight. But it ended up sounding really good, and in our final flailing song-ordering pass, I said, “You know what? We could put this right up front,” and I think it works really well there. Brian Moore: The Magician's Wife 2009-03-14T01:27:28+00:00 #3 in the list of books that have been sitting on my bookshelf for too long. I bought this a while ago and I can see why: it has lots of positive blurbs. Yet the reviews on Amazon are pretty mixed (average of 3.5 stars). Who’s right? In this case I agree with the Amazon customers. This is a historical novel taking place largely in French Algeria in the mid 19th century, told from the point of view of the dissatisfied (sexually, socially, etc.) wife of an esteemed illusionist. To my mind it is basically a short story, or movie screenplay, extended to novel length; there’s one actual interesting moment in it when the protagonist makes a real choice, and it is indeed interesting, but we didn’t need to have 150 pages leading up to it and 50 pages of repercussions. The prose is such that if I liked it I would say it had “limpid grace” or something, but I didn’t, so I’m calling it flat instead. I felt a little like I was reading a young adult novel. Everything I’m saying here is negative, but it’s not like I particularly disliked it; I just never felt that engaged with it, and I don’t think it’ll stick in my mind for long. Iain M. Banks: Consider Phlebas 2009-03-09T15:11:01+00:00 I am a sucker for series of books rereleased in handsome matching trade paperback editions, and Orbit Books seems to know it, because that’s what they’re doing with Iain M. Banks’ science fiction novels. Another one of my foibles is that if I am presented with such a collection of books, I have to start by reading the first one, even if they’re only loosely related (as with murder mysteries) and there’s no particular reason to start from the beginning. So this is the first of his Culture books, of which there are now seven (ranging in publication date from 1987 to 2008). It’s a total space opera, flinging its protagonist, Horza, from world to world across the galaxy. In fact I could have used a little less flinging and more of a regular plot arc; there are a bunch of set pieces on various worlds that do contribute a little to our understanding of this universe and Horza, but largely feel like they had been kicking around in Banks’ head for a decade and, this being his first and I suppose at the time possibly last science fiction novel, he had to shove them all in while he had the chance. But they are pretty cool set pieces, except for one which intentionally stepped over the genre line into straight-out horror fiction, which squicked me pretty bad. And all the action scenes at the end were really well done. Because of my lack of visualization ability, and my tendency to accelerate through a book so that I’m reading fastest just as the amount of action demands fuller attention, big science fiction action scenes tend to sort of whiz past me in a blur, but I didn’t have trouble keeping track of everything going on here, and it stayed interesting. One nice thing (perhaps the main feature of the book) is that there is lots of moral ambiguity. People and aliens on both sides of the greater conflict are drawn sympathetically (and unsympathetically), which is a lot more interesting than some humans-against-the-bugs scenario, or even good-humans-against-the-bad-humans. A couple of gripes: Banks starts out with one point-of-view protagonist (except for some interludes), and then slowly starts to occasionally give us other POVs. It’s kind of jarring, especially when the reader has already been experiencing some suspense precisely from not knowing just what the other characters are thinking exactly, and when he starts sliding back and forth within sections it gets even more so. There’s also a sassy robot who resents being forced to act as a servant, a la Marvin from the Hitchchiker’s books, who is probably supposed to be sort of comic relief but which I found wearying. I am starting to feel that this is a peculiarly British trope (they already having a tradition of servant-based humor). Overall, it was very good. Just when I was getting tired of Horza bouncing back and forth from adventure to adventure (around a third of the way through), the strands started weaving together, and the last half of the book had a nice direction to it, all the way to the end. I’ll definitely read another one, and naturally, it’ll be the second in the series. Warning if you read this book! There’s some supplementary material at the back, including what he calls a Dramatis Personae, that is not actually intended to be consulted while reading the novel, contrary to most SF appendices. For example, the so-called Dramatis Personae in fact details what happens to a selection of the characters after the book ends. So don’t read any of that stuff until you get there. William H. Gass: Omensetter's Luck 2009-03-06T02:22:23+00:00 Another entry in my list of books that have been languishing on my shelves for ages that I’m reading this year. This was kind of tough. It’s written throughout in a style that I would say is reminiscent of Joyce, although apparently (from reading other people write about it) if I had ever read Faulkner I would say it’s reminiscent of him. Total stream of consciousness, with no distinction made typographically (for example, using something so mundane as quote marks or even Joyce’s dashes) between description or dialogue or imagined dialogue or inner monologue. In fact, a fair bit of effect comes from the fact that the protagonist of most of the novel is going nuts, and you can’t tell whether a lot of his dialogue is imagined or not, but probably he can’t either. I’m all for postmodern, but this felt more High Modern to me, in a way that made reading sort of a chore. Also, the main character is an archetype—man of God fighting off the evil in his breast—that means a lot less to me, a happy atheist, than it probably does to many others. Around a quarter of the book (an extended interior monologue by said reverend) was a real slog, but after that an actual plot did appear, and there was certainly some striking imagery and turns of phrase, and it did end up exploring some interesting questions, and I did feel like I had gotten somewhere by the end. But I would not really classify it overall as an enjoyable experience, and I don’t think Gass’s magnum opus, The Tunnel, is going to add itself to this year’s list of long-neglected but finally-read books. Things we have called our dog 2009-03-04T02:08:25+00:00 Bad Dog</li> Baked Potato</li> Breadbasket</li> Captain Underfoot</li> Chicken Tender</li> Clotheshorse</li> Crumpet</li> Curly Fry</li> Cutie Patootie</li> Cutus Patutus</li> Dogbreath</li> Dogfish Head</li> Doglet</li> Face</li> Facebook</li> Face Face</li> Fang</li> Forest Ranger</li> French Fry</li> Good Dog</li> Good Girl</li> Greeting Card</li> Henrietta von Düsseldorf</li> Kibble Breath</li> Killer</li> Magnificent Muffin</li> Noodle</li> Noodle Nose</li> Nose</li> Party Pooper</li> Peabrain</li> Peanut Butter Face</li> Peppercorn</li> Perfect Potato</li> Pigeon</li> Pocket</li> Pocket Protector</li> Pocket Watch</li> Pointy Head</li> Potato</li> Potato Skin</li> Pumpkin</li> Pumpkin Doodle</li> Purple Princess</li> Rib-Eye</li> Rib Roast</li> Sir Sniffsalot</li> Skinny Puppy</li> Smell-o-vision</li> Sniffy Face</li> Snifter</li> Snow Shovel</li> Stupid Dog</li> Sweet Potato</li> Tailspin</li> Terrible Dog</li> Triangle Head</li> Twice-Baked Potato</li> Veezeen</li> Vision (actual name)</li> Visionary</li> Wagster Wiggins</li> Wigwam</li> </ul> R. Scott Bakker: The Judging Eye 2009-02-26T02:37:12+00:00 Well, this is book 4 of at least 6 in a fantasy series, so it’s a bit silly for me to describe this one on its own to an audience that mostly hasn’t read any of them. Anyone who did get through to the end of the Prince of Nothing trilogy probably thought it was great, and would also think that this start of the next trilogy is great too, and I am no exception—it is basically more of the same. So what do I like about these books in general? For one thing, awesome world-building. The third book has a long (like 100 pages) appendix that is basically an abridged encyclopedia of the whole world, and if you get off on that sort of thing, like I do, you will get off on this. I also really enjoy the premise. An Übermensch appears in the world, and everyone has to figure out what he really is. Is he the messiah, or is he a preternaturally talented sociopath? Bakker is a good enough writer that it’s hard for the reader to arrive at a definite answer, and the other characters’ reactions to him are interesting and believable. (I realize as I write this that this is probably also the basic plot of Left Behind. I guess that makes this a little less of a recommendation.) Negative things. It’s definitely male-centric, and the main female character, though sympathetically portrayed, is a whore. Yawn. Bakker has tried to defend this by saying (paraphrased) “Just because I’m portraying this doesn’t mean I approve of it!”, but having read enough fantasy to recognize this as a standard issue, I don’t buy it. (That is, I believe that he doesn’t approve of it, but it’s still annoying.) There’s also a over-the-top association of Evil with sexual sadism that just makes me squirm in an “ick” way, not in an “ooh this is so transgressive” way. But overall, if you are looking for a well-written super-dark shades-of-gray massive-backstory bloody-but-brainy epic fantasy, you are likely to find this up your alley. I guess I should mention at least something about this particular book, as distinguished from the series as a whole. Well, one cool thing is that it starts 20 years after the end of the first trilogy (which spanned a year or two). A standard problem with long fantasy series is that the author can’t resist the urge to describe everything that happens in the world in more and more detail, until history slows down to a soporific crawl. It takes some balls to effectively start your fourth book with “20 years later...”, and it works well here. I try to avoid reading series-in-progress—you don’t know how good the future books will be, or how long the author will take to write them, plus my memory is terrible so I keep having to either reread thousands of earlier pages or thrash around confusedly—but I’m confident I’m in good hands here, and I anxiously await the resolution of the multiple plot threads that are left hanging at the end of this one (grrr). St. Germain inventions 2009-02-22T04:05:22+00:00 When I started getting into making cocktails at home, I naturally started out with the basics: gin, rye, vermouth, Angostura bitters, etc. I didn’t buy a new ingredient (like Campari or Chartreuse) until I knew there were a few classic cocktails I wanted to try that used it; I didn’t want to spend forty bucks on a big bottle of something that I only ended up pouring an ounce from once or twice. Because of this, my acquisition rate slowed down markedly for a while. Cherry Heering, say, looked interesting, but what was I going to use it for besides a Blood and Sand? Well, in that particular case, once I tried a Blood and Sand at the Highland Kitchen</a>, it was clear that that was reason enough to buy a bottle of Cherry Heering, but in the general case, I was still unwilling to make a commitment to off-the-beaten-path ingredients. What finally got me buying interesting liquors with abandon was Thursday Drink Night at the Mixoloseum</a>. On Thursday evenings, cocktail enthusiasts from all over the country (at least) gather in a chat room and share improvised recipes, some fair and a few admittedly foul (in my defense, rinsing a glass with chili oil before adding rye seemed like a great idea at the time). Of course I have much less experience than most of the participants, but the spirit of experimentation inspired me, and I realized that there are lots of interesting drinks waiting to be discovered, and that concocting a concoction that is at least palatable is not rocket science. For example, 2 oz base spirit (rye or gin), 1/2 oz something sweet, 1/2 oz something bitter is always going to be fairly balanced, and could be quite delicious, depending on how those ingredients happen to work with each other. Which means that if I buy some crazy new ingredient, I don’t need three classic drinks that use it; I can invent some myself! So when the local liquor store had St. Germain on sale, I finally bit the bullet and bought a bottle. It is an elderflower liqueur, which if that means nothing to you, hey, it meant nothing to me either. It turns out to be pretty sweet in a tropical fruit kind of way with some herbal notes. So, what to do with it? Here are two recipes I came up with that are both delicious, and follow the basic template I mentioned above. Special Snowflake 2 oz gin</li> 1/2 oz St. Germain</li> 1/2 oz Lillet</li> </ul> Add ice, shake, and strain. Lillet is a fortified wine with some herbs and quinine (the same thing that gives tonic water its flavor); it’s like dry vermouth with an edge. It gives just the right kick to the sweetness of the St. Germain. Sans Serif 2 oz rye</li> 1/2 oz St. Germain</li> 1/2 oz Aperol</li> </ul> I shake and strain this like I do everything, but for rye drinks I think you’re supposed to stir it instead. Whatever. Aperol is a bitter amaro, like Campari but more laid-back. There’s enough of the rye for its characteristic grain-ness to come through but the St. Germain and Aperol add a really nice complementary sweetness and bitterness to it. Did I mention that the best part of inventing new drinks is naming them? Emacs: dedicated windows 2009-02-19T14:32:24+00:00 Here’s something I had been wanting to do for a long time and could never find the right docs for. When you perform some operation in Emacs, it often puts stuff (search results, some new buffer, etc.) in a window other than the current one. (I’m using window in the Emacs sense, to mean a portion of what you might call a window but it calls a frame.) But I have a huge Emacs frame, and always want to keep some buffers present in particular positions while rotating the rest of it around. In my case, it’s my org-mode windows, which keep track of most everything about my work day, but you could imagine it being some documentation reference or something. Because I have these buffers up for long stretches of time but rarely actually go to them and edit them, Emacs thinks they’re not important and is happy to reuse their windows when it has new data to display. How to stop it from doing so? It turns out that what I want is a dedicated window (if I had realized this, I could have found the answer a lot faster). The details are in the Emacs Lisp docs</a> or you can just put this trivial but handy code in your .emacs, and use the Pause key to toggle the dedication of the current window: (defun toggle-current-window-dedication () (interactive) (let* ((window (selected-window)) (dedicated (window-dedicated-p window))) (set-window-dedicated-p window (not dedicated)) (message "Window %sdedicated to %s" (if dedicated "no longer " "") (buffer-name)))) (global-set-key [pause] 'toggle-current-window-dedication) </code></pre> Dream #1 2009-02-14T17:00:05+00:00 I am arrested for driving without a license. The policeman leads me to the bank of a muddy river and hands me a thick sheaf of paper. “This is a test to determine your moral character,” he says. I leaf through it; it’s just page after page of multiple-choice Planet of the Apes trivia questions. I am upset because I know next to nothing about the subject. “How are you supposed to determine my moral character just from Planet of the Apes trivia questions?” I cry. “Well,” he explains, “there are a lot of them.” Levitate Me 2009-02-13T04:13:49+00:00 In which I take all the magic out of one of my favorite songs by analyzing it to death. “Levitate Me” is from the Pixies’ first record, the EP Come On Pilgrim, recorded and released in 1987. If you want to follow along I recommend this live performance</a>. It’s by Black Francis so who knows what the lyrics are really about, but to me they’re about transcendence through sex, being lifted up by someone to a higher plane. I’ll start at the beginning. Musically, the verses are mostly about a continued attempt to leave the tonic chord, E. The chord sequence is E (for a long time,) G#, A, four times in a row. When Francis sings “Levitate me” the first two syllables are supremely dissonant against the underlying harmony; the guitar’s playing a G# chord, which includes a B# as its third, while he’s singing a B natural, creating the mother of all dissonances, the minor second. We’ll see a different minor second dissonance against a B# (or C natural) shortly. The third line speeds up the meta-rhythm; it’s 12 beats long instead of 16, because we move to the G# after just 8 beats, not 12. At the same time it feels slowed down, as the lyrics are stripped back to “Higher place... levitate me”, and the yodel-like leap on “place” leaves him suspended on a high G# (as high as he gets in the whole song) for a whole bar, until the band finally switches to the G# chord underneath him so we can return to making progress. In the fourth line we return to a normal 16-beat period, but the temperature is raised both because he’s singing straight eighth notes instead of the former sparse phrases and from the cross-rhythm: “Elevator lady” is 6 half-beats long against the 4-or-8 period underneath it, forcing him to throw in an extra “lady” near the end in order to end up in the right place. What is easier to notice on this line is that everyone starts really rocking out, but the structure is supporting that feeling as much as the volume. Finally we move up to the dominant harmony, B, for the “If all in all is true” section. (The structure of a piece of classical music is, at its most general, a long move from the tonic (I) harmony to the dominant (V) harmony and back. Rock music is of course a lot less academic than that but this song happens to follow that pattern.) Here we’re in groups of 6 beats (a Pixies trademark) except for the fourth line, which now lengthens the period out to 8 beats to increase the anticipation of the resolution of the dominant to the tonic just that much longer. The arrangement also opens up a lot at this point—everyone drops out except for the rhythm guitar. Combined with the increased tension of the move to the dominant, the effect is to keep us suspended in the air, waiting for the rest of the band to join back in for the return to the tonic. On the second line of this section, Joey Santiago on lead guitar throws in a repeated C# that’s dissonant against the B harmony. The rest of the band gradually rejoins the party, and we return to the tonic in a classic F# (V of V)—B (V)—E (I) progression, with a C chord thrown in between the F# and the B, giving it a little minor flavor. Joey’s sustained C# finally makes sense than before when the band moves to the F# chord underneath him, then immediately makes even less sense when they proceed to a C chord (same pitch as that B# earlier), making a grinding dissonance against his note. The same dissonance keeps occurring in the refrain; the harmonies are repeating C—B—E, continuing to emphasize the C natural, while Joey’s riff goes E-D#-C#-B against it, continuing the C against C# friction. So that’s halfway through, and it’s time for another trip through the basic structure. This time it’s even more stop-start than before; the instruments stay in suspended animation while Francis’s utterances become ever more gnomic before proceeding to each G#—A—E conclusion. Meanwhile, Joey spends the whole verse sitting on the low E (the lowest note on a guitar) in a menacing tremolo. The high point of the whole song for me (just beating the awesome Sprechstimme of “Come on pilgrim, you know he loves you”—listen to the Live at the BBC version if you really want to feel your heart stop) is in the second “elevator lady” section. Without warning, in the very middle of it, two extra beats are inserted. All the pitched instruments drop out as the drums throw in an out-of-nowhere ka-POW!, and then everyone picks up right where they left off. Meanwhile Francis has continued to barrel through with his repeated mantra, and because of the extra two beats, ends up in exactly the right place without having to insert an extra “lady” this time. The total effect is like motoring at top velocity through a speed bump, experiencing a second of zero-g while flying through the air, then landing with authority and speeding on with no one the worse for wear. I will never tire of it. After that amazing moment it’s basically just a long slow return to earth, repeating the moves of the first refrain. There are a few extra cycles of the C—B—E pattern, performing a harmonic deceleration to accompany the tempo deceleration as we arrive at our destination. But boy, that was a pretty good two-minute trip to get there. Wanna hear it again? Flann O'Brien: The Third Policeman 2009-02-12T02:36:14+00:00 One of my projects this year is to read a bunch of the books sitting on my bookshelves that I have heretofore ignored. I never buy a book I don’t intend to read, but often something else takes precedence and I never get around to reading it. Until this year, that is, I guess. I read At Swim-Two-Birds, “O’Brien’s” (it’s a pseudonym) most famous work, around a decade ago, and didn’t really get it. As I recall it’s very postmodern (far ahead of its time, in 1939), with stories within stories and various fictional and mythical characters careening back and forth between them. I read the whole thing in kind of a daze and nothing about it really stuck. But a friend with whom I share many tastes said I had to read The Third Policeman, and so I bought it, and now have finally read it. It’s pretty weird too, though easier to take in than At Swim-Two-Birds; at least it has a linear plot. An unexceptional (except for having a wooden leg and being a murderer) man suddenly finds himself in an odd environment with at its center a police station whose inhabitants seem to be interested in pretty much nothing but bicycles and the afterlife. When I put it like that it sounds kind of odd, and you know what, it is. He has a bunch of strange adventures and strange conversations, and the book actually sort of goes somewhere in the end, which was kind of a surprise after the first 180 pages. Halfway through it I realized “Hey, this reminds me a lot of Alice In Wonderland”, and apparently I am smart, because this is what the scholars say too, although because they have Ph.D.s in literature they seem to say “Menippean satire” instead of “Alice In Wonderland”, or so I gather from a brief jaunt through the web. The book is actually frequently hilarious in a verbal Monty Python kind of way. You will perhaps understand my comparison when I inform you that much of the humor involves the attempt to have logical conversations with policemen who are unable to understand any concept unless it is framed in terms of bicycles. I found the funniest parts of the book to be the narrator’s ongoing earnest attempts to relate his situation to the life and writing of the fictional de Selby, the most moronic philosopher who ever lived, complete with extensive footnotes detailing the history of scholarly investigations of his work. Your mileage may vary. As usual when reading classic novels, I totally enjoyed it on the surface, while undoubtedly missing a lot of the interesting stuff that lurks beneath. I could tell that a lot of what was going on was probably referencing and making fun of contemporary scientific and philosophical fads, but as the “contemporary” in question was 70 years ago, it was less pointed to me than I’m sure it was at the time. P.S. When I finished this supposedly obscure book, I headed over to Amazon to read what I figured would be 3 or so reader reviews. There were 79. Apparently, a couple years back one of the characters on Lost was reading it, so all the fanatics had to immediately buy it and scour it for clues. Hey, if it gets people to read classic postmodern literature, I’m all for it. Songbook: Bucket 2009-02-05T04:32:36+00:00 I thought it would be fun to write about some of the songs I’ve written. (I should point out for those coming to this cold that I’m the principal songwriter for Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives</a>). I’m going to start with songs from our latest record, Third Time’s the Charm. If you don’t have it, you can at least listen to a chunk of each song at our CD Baby page </a>. “Bucket” started because I felt that we had a dearth of songs in 3/4 and I wanted to remedy the deficiency. And what do you think of when you think of songs in three? Sea chanties, of course! The one-note-to-a-bar chorus is meant to be bellowed with your arms around your fellow men as you sway back and forth. It comes in groups of 9 bars, which doesn’t subdivide easily—the idea was kind of to just keep you swaying, bar by bar, without having that overall structural feeling of “okay, now we’re halfway through”. The verses are mostly in groups of six bars, keeping the ternary idea going. Originally the guitars followed the bass as it went C—C—F—Bb—C—C, but it turned out to work out better to offset them slightly and ratchet up the tension a little—they pretty much go C—C—F—F—F—C over that bassline, which makes it feel like the bass is pulling them reluctantly along through the chord changes. We don’t prog out much in general but I totally gave into those tendencies with the unison break at the end of each verse. We drop one beat during it for extra proggy cred. The lyrics are pretty silly. “Tomatillo” was a just a space-filling word I was using for the chorus, and it stuck. It took me a long time to come up with bridge words I was happy with—for a long time the bridge ended with “I’m a telegram” instead of “if you telegram”. If they mean anything at all it’s a general sense of leaving the quotidian trivialities of everyday life behind and achieving transcendence, which, hey, rock music never hurts in the pursuit of. “Hale-Bopp” from the first record had a similar basis. The form is Verse, Verse, Chorus, Verse, Bridge, Chorus. Originally there was another chorus before the bridge but it made the whole thing too long; by the last chorus you were just waiting for the thing to end instead of being swept away in a final flourish. It’s a little unusual to head into a bridge after hearing just one chorus, but the end of the verse is enough of an event that I don’t think you feel like you haven’t had enough resolution points yet. We started out with everyone just coming into together, then we decided to give our drummer Bill a couple bars of intro, then one rehearsal he played a full eight and it was awesome. Which made it a clear album-opener as well. There’s some Hammond organ starting in the bridge that I really like; it adds to the balls-out atmosphere I was looking for. I wrote the part in less time than it took to perform it. One take and it’s good to go! Springsteen 2009-02-02T02:13:55+00:00 I just finished watching Bruce Springsteen perform at the Super Bowl halftime show (and I’m not a big Springsteen fan, but that was a pretty great halftime show). Anyway, it got me thinking: Bruce Springsteen has sold millions and millions of records, and he has a ton of cred as an Important Artist and all, but I can’t think of any major bands that follow in his footsteps. It seems very weird for someone so big both commercially and artistically to not have a slew of imitators. Am I wrong? Is it more common than I think for an artist of his stature to stand so alone? Or am I missing a big group of Young Springsteens? Roberto Bolaño: 2666 2009-01-31T16:08:36+00:00 Well, that was something. The quick context is that Bolaño was a Chilean writer who died in 2003; this novel (basically finished at the time of his death) was published posthumously to great acclaim, and when the English translation appeared in 2008 it was immediately hailed as a masterpiece and made every critic's top 10 list. Which surprises me. Not because it's bad—it's very good—but because it's very unconventional and very uncompromising. With a book like this I'd expect the responses to be one-third rapturous encomiums, one-third “I'm impressed but it's not for me”, and one-third “the emperor has no clothes!”. It's 900 pages and consists of five sub-novels (Bolaño intended for them to be published separately, largely for financial reasons, it seems) that have frequent connections and illuminate each other, but generally don't really go anywhere. It's also very dark, with hundreds of meaningless deaths and a constant tinge of gloom even in the happier parts. Anyway, you can read all the details elsewhere. My personal reaction was somewhere between the first two of the three categories I mentioned above. It was undeniably a bit of a slog in places, even if obviously intentionally so, but after coming out the other side, I find that it's really sticking with me, in a way that makes the whole more than the sum of its parts. I said while I was in the middle of it that I would probably like it more in retrospect than while reading it, and that turned out to be the case. Jack Vance: Ports of Call / Lurulu 2009-01-29T02:33:28+00:00 I’ve read most of the Jack Vance that’s in print in the US, and some that isn’t, which means that in order to read more I have to either track down out-of-print books or read his grade-B material. This is the latter. It’s published as two novels, but it’s really one novel ripped into two halves; Ports of Call ends abruptly, without even a cliffhanger, and Lurulu picks up where it left off. (They were published six years apart, in 1998 and 2004, which makes for entertaining reading as one watches people at the time being irritated by the first book cutting off without warning.) It’s the last thing that he wrote, except for supposedly an imminent autobiography—he’s over 90 and blind now—and it kind of shows. Throughout most of it, a bunch of buddies planet-hop in their space-yacht without any real structure, having the usual Vancian adventures with the wacky cultures of each planet, which are distinguished from each other mostly through the color of their hats, the name of their local beer, and the relative ferocity of their haggling. This may not sound like much fun, and most of the reviews I’ve read have been rather negative, but although not much happens from page to page, most of the individual pages are a lot of fun, just because Vance’s style is so awesome. If you’re not already sold on Vance, this is not the place to start, but if you’re already a fan, you’ll probably get more pleasure out of it than a quick browsing of reviews would lead you to believe. Another member of the Vance/Pollard group 2009-01-26T14:56:23+00:00 Can I call them the Spewers? I seem to have a knack for coming up with derogatory names for groups I like. Anyway, going to sleep last night I remembered a name that fits in that group perfectly - William Vollmann. He passes every criterion, as far as I can tell. Unfortunately I’m not actually a big fan, although I feel like I should be. I adored his first book, You Bright and Risen Angels, a giant mess that I still consider the best marriage of literary and fantastical fiction to date, but apparently after that he decided that that sort of book was too easy. (The book is literally overflowing—the actual novel only covers the first 40% of the table of contents.) I enjoyed The Ice-Shirt, but only got around two-thirds through Fathers and Crows (I always feel pretty lame only getting two-thirds through a thousand-page book). I do want to give Europe Central a shot. Vance : books :: Pollard : music 2009-01-23T19:59:09+00:00 I discovered Robert Pollard (the guy behind Guided By Voices) around 1996. His music seemed boring at first, but after a few tries I recognized his genius and since then have acquired most of his recorded output (I own 67 CDs of his by a quick count). I discovered SF author Jack Vance a few years ago. His books seemed boring at first, but after a few tries I recognized his genius and since then have acquired most of his books that are in print in the US (a little over 20). I realized recently that they have more in common than the fact that I love both of them. incredibly prolific</li> awesome at their best</li> but with a nonexistent quality filter</li> largely intuitive in approach, as far as I can tell</li> even the best works are big messes (in a great way) rather than tightly constructed jewels</li> apparently wide-ranging in genre</li> but with enough tics that their work is instantly recognizable</li> </ul> I can’t think of anyone else (in any field) who is analogous. If there is, I want to find them, since I bet I would love them too. Shudder To Think, Get Your Goat 2009-01-20T21:11:43+00:00 In a comment to my last post</a> Matthew Amster-Burton asked me what I thought of Shudder To Think. The only album I have of theirs is Get Your Goat from 1992 (Matthew has since informed me that he doesn’t think that’s their best, but it’s what I have), so I gave that a listen for the first time in ages. I didn’t like it that much, which is pretty interesting. (I always think it’s interesting when I turn out to not like something that I should like based on my general tastes. Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale is a good example.) I guess there are two questions here, why I don’t think it fits into this category and why I don’t like it much. In answer to the first, I think they’re too conscious of their artiness to qualify for the “naive” part. I’d put them in the same broad category as Deerhoof (who I do love) in this respect. Another thing making them seem like they’re explicitly trying to be artsy is that the singer seems to think he’s a real Singer rather than just some guy singing. Secondly, why I don’t dig it? The dramatic singing bugs me some—that’s just personal taste (well, everything in this paragraph is personal taste). Also, the harmonic vocabulary rubs me the wrong way in a way that’s hard to verbalize. There are definitely stretches of music (and some whole songs) that I like, but overall it’s not my thing. Naively complex music 2009-01-18T18:17:26+00:00 My recent chronological voyage through the XTC back catalog, and excitement at hearing many early songs I hadn’t listened to in ages, got me thinking about some aspects that much of my favorite rock music has in common. I like to think of myself as having pretty varied tastes, but it’s true that a certain class of music is just about guaranteed to tickle my fancy. I was going to call this Idiot Savant music, but that name is both not all that accurate and I guess kind of derogatory. Here is my basic set of criteria for a band to belong to this category: A high level of musical inventiveness that appeals to me in a music-theory-nerd sort of way, such that I could explain to another theory-literate person what is interesting about it.</li> A corresponding lack of ability of the artists to explain their methods theoretically.</li> A high level of ROCK.</li> </ol> Point 2 is what prevents pretty much any prog rock from falling into this category (although some of my favorite rock music still scores high in points 1 and 3, like Led Zeppelin and Red-era King Crimson). But point 1 is important too, and is what prevents me from getting similarly excited by artists like Daniel Johnston or Jad Fair. Artists who I love and who I’d more or less place in this group include: Early XTC (you will see the word ‘early’ a lot)</li> Early Pixies</li> Early Throwing Muses</li> A lot of Guided By Voices / Robert Pollard</li> Captain Beefheart</li> The Minutemen, perhaps, but I feel like they understood what they were doing more</li> </ul> Generally the bands eventually start figuring out what they’re doing and slide out of this category. The Fiery Furnaces are sort of on the line. I have the feeling that Matthew Friedberger is pretty aware of the techniques he is using, but he deploys a lot of them so charmingly ham-handedly that it has the same sort of effect. When I read about these bands, often one of the members is quoted as saying something like “We thought we were making poppy dance music and would shoot up the charts!” Which is pretty much the point.

dfan says - dfan says

Fox Go Server rank calculator

Wookash interview

When is a move sente?

Go endgame values with area counting: part 4, odds and ends

Go endgame values with area counting: part 3, ko

Ko</h2> By now we have enough tools that ko is a straightforward extension of our previous work.</p>

Bonus content</h2> It turns out there was still some more to say, so now there's a Part 4</a>.</p>

Go endgame values with area counting: part 2, sente

Go endgame values with area counting: part 1, gote

Updates

“Once in a Lifetime” and the case of the mysterious shifting downbeat

Bond songs

Henry Threadgill, “To Undertake My Corners Open”, part 3

Herb Healy Open House 2014-01-01

Henry Threadgill, “To Undertake My Corners Open”, part 2

M-x insert-c++-scope

Mnemosyne, part 3

David Temperley: Music and Probability</em>

Henry Threadgill, “To Undertake My Corners Open”, part 1

Wayne Shorter: "Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum"

Perri Knize: Grand Obsession</em>

Richard Taruskin: The Oxford History of Western Music</em>, volumes 2–5

Evan Dara: The Lost Scrapbook</em>

Ted Gioia: The History of Jazz</em>

Daniel Abraham: The Price of Spring</em>

Steven Erikson: The Malazan Book of the Fallen</em>

What's wrong with this sentence?

A gripe about chess annotations

Dmitri Tymoczko: A Geometry of Music</em>

Steven Erikson: Memories of Ice</em>

One more Ultima Underworld story

Double pin

Ultima Underworld bugs

The dangers of self-modifying code

Carlos Ruiz Zafón: The Shadow of the Wind

Zoran Živković: Seven Touches of Music

Cardiacs: “Odd Even”

Bud Powell: “Cleopatra's Dream”

Steven Erikson: Deadhouse Gates</em>

Andrew Crumey: Sputnik Caledonia</em>

Steven Erikson: Gardens of the Moon</em>

1960s Polish music videos

China Miéville: Kraken</em>

David Mitchell: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet</em>

Fun little math problem

2010 US Chess Championship

Hilary Mantel: Wolf Hall</em>

Cardiacs: musical vocabulary

Snatching mediocrity from the jaws of victory

Sergio de la Pava: A Naked Singularity</em>

Richard Taruskin: The Oxford History of Western Music</em>, volume 1

Michal Ajvaz: </em>The Other City</em>

Go problem books

Cardiacs—a video primer

Jeff VanderMeer: Finch</em>

Jeff VanderMeer: Shriek: An Afterword</em>

I (still) don’t see anything when I close my eyes

Brian Aldiss: Helliconia Spring</em>

Guy Gavriel Kay: Tigana</em>

Brad Leithauser: Hence</em>

Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene</em>

Chess/music synaesthesia

Stephen King: It</em>

The Beatles’ most underrated songs

Daniel Abraham: An Autumn War</em>

Ian MacDonald: Revolution in the Head</em>

Robert Charles Wilson: Spin</em>

Jeff Smith: Bone</em>

Richard Dawkins: The Ancestor’s Tale</em>

Frank Zappa: The Läther Years

Joe Abercrombie: Best Served Cold</em>

Edward Whittemore: Quin’s Shanghai Circus</em>

Chip Kidd: The Cheese Monkeys</em>

Iain Pears: Stone's Fall</em>

Sergey Ivashchenko et al: Chess School 1–3</em>

Philip K. Dick: Time Out of Joint</em>

Mnemosyne update

Agatha Christie: The Mysterious Affair at Styles</em>

Jack Vance: Night Lamp</em>

Bonus content</h2>
It turns out there was still some more to say, so now there's a Part 4</a>.</p>