dfan says

#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.

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.

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).

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 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)

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.

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?