Riverwords

The Internet is changing Des Moines, and it’s about time. I’ve started using Twitter in the past few weeks. It took me a while to appreciate it beyond some freakish obsessive compulsion to share what we’re all having for lunch. It turns out, it’s a very interesting peep hole into a growing scene of digerati in Des Moines.

I now follow a bunch of strangers who are really excited about Internet technology and social media. And, that alone is pretty interesting to me. It’s part of my profession, and how I spend far too much leisure time. But, along the way, I get glimpses of far more interesting things. What people are like. What they’re doing. What they’re passionate about.

None of that’s particularly new. What’s new is that they’re right here in flyover country trying to get together with like-minded souls to make the most of their home town. I find it hopeful. Even a little inspiring to get discover some new things for myself.

Tags: Des Moines, Iowa, Social Media, twitter

Several months ago, I was flipping channels and watched coverage of a comic book convention on the G4 channel. One of the reporters shared her favorite pick of the convention with the show hosts in the studio. It was something called Queen & Country, a  hard-boiled modern espionage comic featuring female protagonist, Tara Chace.

The very brief review intrigued me.  I actually managed to remember the name of the book. It took me several weeks, but I tracked down Queen & Country: The Definitive Edition volume 1 at my local comic store. I was hooked.

I found volume 2 later on, and read it with the same enthusiasm. Tense writing, tought issues, modern relevance, and a complicated woman hero that was more interesting to read about than just the lady James Bond I first figured her to be. I still await volume 3. But, in the mean time, I caught on that author Greg Rucka penned two Queen & Country novels as well. I chewed through that 1,000 or so pages faster than any reading I’ve done in a while.

A Gentleman’s Game is the first novel, which squeezes in somewhere between other mission “arcs” in the comic book volumes. It’s easily the best Tara Chace story I’ve read (I later caught on that Rucka is more novelist than graphic novelist; fortunately he’s no slouch either way). It’s a story revolving around Tara Chace’s need to feel useful, perhaps seek some revenge on Islamic fundamentalist terrorists active in the UK and beyond. And, it also has Chace chasing after a genuine love interest in her former colleague.

Rucka does an admirable job shifting perspective among Chace, her hard ass boss Paul Crocker, and an English born Muslim terrorist antagonist. Rucka’s not shy about putting his protagonists in ugly territory, trusting that the reader will stick around. similarly, his work at making a messy character in the terrorist both utterly disgusting and fascinating. He manages to make a fanatic — and the terrorist truly is that — interesting. We get the inside voice on the terrorist’s resolve, but we’re not foolish enough to buy his madness and see it for the manipulative evil that he performs.

The book’s a thriller, and fills that role well. While I saw the dramatic ending coming in those final chapters, the pacing and excitement throughout makes for a great read with enough carefully considered real-world relevance to avoid the escapism route.

A Gentleman’s Game: A

Up next, Private Wars, the second Tara Chace novel, and a bit more about the woman character.

Tags: Greg Rucka, Review

Over a month ago, my wife and I visited Colorado. We went to Ft. Collins and went rafting on the Cache le Poudre, a beautiful mountain river that turns out to be a lot of fun in a raft and wetsuit! Ft. Collins is a cozy little ag college town, and we had a fine time.

Then it was off to Denver to see my sister-in-law. She and her husband have lived in Aurora for a couple years now. We shopped and ate and saw a ball game. A wonderful  trip all around.

The whole thing had a particular purpose, though. We went to see Robert Plant and Alison Krauss at Red Rocks. The concert didn’t disappoint. Krauss’ voice is incredible live. Plant was infecting everyone with his grooving enthusiasm. And Red Rocks. It is the most spectacular venue in America. Breath taking. You could tell the performers were more excited to see this place than the audience was!

Now, all of that was great. I really hoped that would be my impression. But, they snuck one in on me, too. Plant and Krauss teamed up with T Bone Burnett. He’s a legendary producer and a performer in his own right. They let him play a couple songs with just the band. The guy looked like an outlaw undertaker. He wore a long black coat, which just made his tall frame look leaner and meaner.

I had never heard his music before. It was good. Probably still not my style, but I enjoyed it. But, he played a song that just knocked me out. It’s called The Primitives. I had to go look it up later; the studio version is just as stirring. The chorus makes me smile and damn near frown at the same time:

Primitives dress in feathers and masks
To scare away their enemies
The frightening thing is not dying
The frightening thing is not living
Scientists guess which is worse we will ask
The medicine or the disease
The frightening thing is not dying
The frightening thing is not living

I’ll drink to that.

It’s Memorial Day, and I finally remembered to actually continue with Riverwords.

I haven’t posted in some time. Time has a way of knocking a fellow around. I managed to read a few things in the meanwhile, and endure some ups and downs in life. I’ve been fighting a minor medical malady that doesn’t seem so minor sometimes. And, stress piles on among a blast of joys. Oh! And graduate school sneaks in there, too. I’m pursuing my MBA part-time, which started in Janurary.

Anyway, since I last posted, I’ve only managed to read about one book from my reading list from last year. But, I did manage to read a couple other books, too.

I finished White Noise a few months ago, but never posted my review. (I did bother to post a grade of C+ on the reading list entry.)

Of course, the problem with collecting my thoughts on a book I finished a few months ago is that they’re as fleeting as a dream now. The book is clever. Delillo’s nothing if not clever. The protagonist’s friends and family suffer all manner pop-culture neuroses, the most obvious of which is the mysterious chemical explosion that erupts over their town.

The post-nearly-apocalypse for the family becomes a tense affair between the protagonist and his wife (among which are nestled bizarre hypochondriac interludes involving mainly his children), and I think I started to suffer my own neurosis because I wanted the characters to stop talking like clever Don Delillo and start acting like smart people who are frustrated and unhappy.

When I finished the book, I tried to describe it to someone like this. “Well, it’s entertaining and funny, I guess. But, I just wanted the characters to stop talking like a writer and start talking like people.”

Delillo has something to say here, and I think there are times I agree with his black humor commentary on modern existence, consumerism, and family. I even giggle a little. But, whether or not his quirky academic protagonist and quirkier (if possible) friends and family have a point, I just can’t bring myself to care about their plight. Or, thus, ours. And, considering the climactic love-affair-gone-attempted-murder, I think I should. I can’t count the number of times I wanted to smack them around a little bit for being fools.

White Noise: C+

It could be worse. I still think Delillo’s a highly admirable writer. I can’t say that of Paul Coelho. The wife and I decided that we needed a hobby together. So, we thought reading a book together to talk it over would be a good way to go. We toured Borders and settled on The Alchemist by Paul Coelho. I had suspicions then that this was a thinly disguised self-help book, which I don’t see as a benefit.

Turns out I was right. I caught on pretty quickly. Coelho’s tale is a well-meaning fable of a Spanish shepherd boy who learns his Personal Legend (capital letters and all) is to seek out treasure buried near the Pyramids. So, he goes out to seek his Personal Legend and travels across Gibraltar and through the Sahara.

I don’t mind the tale. Oh, it’s contrived, certainly. But, the short little narrative is reasonably entertaining with it’s adventurous romp. The boy encounters some personal calamity, and waivers on whether to continue his Personal Legend. He meets others variously failing and succeeding on their own Personal Legend. He meets a terribly uninteresting love in the desert. He meets other mostly uninteresting characters, too. And, in the end, he finds his treasure after learning some accept-it-on-faith lesson about wisdom and patience (or something).

The tale is inscrutable. It’s exactly the kind of book that, when faced with criticism, can be answered with something nonsensical like “Well, then you just aren’t pursuing your Personal Legend.”

I can’t say the book didn’t make me think about what I’d like to accomplish in life. For that, I give it credit. I can say that the book reminded me that one of the things I want to accomplish in life is not to succeed by attributing success to interpreting omens set before me by supernatural agency!

The Alchemist: D

I think I needed to get those reviews out of my system and flush out frustrations I had about not posting here. I look forward to posting more frequently now.

A while back, a co-worker told me about Blood Meridien by Cormac McCarthy.

This guy was older than me, like most of my co-workers at the time. He was thin, and had a kempt beard as long as I knew him. He had a bleak sense of humor, and as I got to know him over the couple of years I appreciated it more and more. He and his counterpart co-worker used to leave this mannequin in various hilarious poses. It was funny to find Al, as they called the dummy, sitting in chairs, wearing ties, bivouacking in a file cabinet. But, mostly, that damn mannequin made me jump out of my skin when I caught him out of the corner of my eye where nobody was supposed to be.

Anyway, this co-worker of mine was quite the reader. And, it took even longer for me to catch on he was quite the writer, too. Turns out he was a playwright and screenwriter, and a local director filmed his movie. I still haven’t seen his movie. I really want to.

They laid him off one day about two years ago. He had great taste in books, and he and my old boss used to exchange notes. They let me in on the gag once in a while. I had to go look up his name, because I forgot it. It was two years ago, and I forgot. It’s funny how long something feels when you get wrapped up in a place like work.

I picked up Blood Meridien right before he was laid off. When I did, a newer novel of McCarthy’s caught my eye. It was No Country For Old Men. That was in my Western buying phase. I bought several novels I thought would help inspire me for Dust Devils, a Western role-playing game I created. So, I made a note that it looked like a good candidate for later on.

Fast forward many months. Last year, I was strolling through my favorite used book store, and I found a nice trade paperback edition of No Country For Old Men. It was a little worn, but it sure was cheap. I’d heard a movie was coming out, and I wanted the edition before all the copies were blasted with movie marketing and actors for the cover. It’s a small vanity, I know.

I read it. I strayed from my reading list, but I wanted to have it in my brain before the movie tainted anything. More vanity.

I was taken with with that book — the kind of adoration you feel when something hurts you, moves you out of comfort to confront some hard ideas. It stuck to my ribs. I couldn’t get it out of my head, because I was very troubled by the fate of Llewellyn Moss, and even more troubled by Ed Tom Bell, the sheriff whose story it really is.

I knew I wanted to see it in the theater when the movie came out. So, two weeks ago, on a cold and blustery friday, I found myself alone from my wife and kids. She took them to her sister’s for supper and movies with the girls. After work, I shuttled around in the winter weather for a quick bite of tacos, then off to the theater to stand in a long line that nearly made me walk away for fear of missing any part of the movie.

I watched it alone, seated in the second row to the right. It was marvelous. As close a match as any novel-to-film translation I’ve seen.

When it was over, there was silence. Dead silence. The end scene took the air out of the room. I don’t know all the baby boomer couples there with me were as shocked I felt them to be. But, it seemed to me they sat theredumbstruck, as though they’d been tricked into watching a “good movie” and gotten suckerpunched instead. For me, having read the book, it was no shock. Just another kick in the soul. That’s how I described it to my wife.

I can’t really describe it here. It disturbs me greatly. Oh, yes, the book and the movie are disturbing. There’s terrible, heartless violence, and the tale doesn’t end well. But, that’s not quite what I’m getting at. Not quite. What disturbs me is that I have no quibble with it. I have nothing to add. I just have to shrug and nod and think, yep, that’s how things are.

I would be a damn fool to think no one else is affected as much as me. That’s more vanity, and really awful vanity at that. But, still, No Country For Old Men resonates with me. It hits close to home. I can say I admire the film and the novel, and I say that because I find it both to be powerfully true as art. I believe they hit close to home to me especially (among others, no doubt). But, in very brief and few discussions with others, they seem less affected, less troubled and more wowed by a great movie they’re enthusiastic about. Maybe I just need to talk with others more.

I do not think I’ll be able to see the movie again soon. I feel as though it spoke directly to someone like me, someone with my particular impression of the world. It’s not because my life is teetering on the edge of violence like that in the novel and film. But, it hits me harder and closer than any other art I’ve experienced.

And, I hate that idea, that I’m just one of those suckers who sees some movie and tells all his friend it changed his life. That’s so useless to me. It didn’t change me. I didn’t walk out the door and think, you know what, I really out to go climb a mountain before I die. What horseshit that’d be.

I just drove home with the radio off. Felt like thunder in my chest for a little while there. Going alone was probably both the wisest and the stupidest thing I could have done.

At midnight, When my wife brought the kids home — one asleep on her shoulder and bundled up, the other staggering half-awake — she said “What’s wrong?” She knew I really wanted to see it. “Didn’t you like it?”

I couldn’t form an answer. I don’t like it. It’s not something I can talk about like I can with other movies. I don’t love it. It haunts me. I told her I didn’t want her to see it, ever. I said it was because I think I’m afraid of what she’ll think, and that it might ruin some secret hope I have that maybe I’m wrong about it all. Like seeing it might take away her innocence or something.

If you’ve seen the movie, and think anything like I do about it, you’ll know it’s a false hope.

She looked at me like I was crazy, but then she shrugged. “Well, I don’t want to see it now!”

And, I think I’m fine with that.

I strayed off the path of my reading list, but only by way of a country road.

A couple weeks ago I found No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy for sale at Half Price Books. I’d eyed it since picking up Blood Meridien and, later, The Road, which is on my reading list posted previously.

Let’s just get this out of the way. Cormac McCarthy is a sunnuvabitch of a writer. This book is not for the faint hearted. My wife would probably throw it across the room and yell at me for making her read this despressing as hell mess.

I loved it.

It’s a book that teases your sympathies. It begins with Llewellyn Moss, a Texas veteran of Vietnam who lives in a trailer and spends his time hunting. He finds a drug deal gone wrong in the desert countryside. Dead drug dealers abound, as do dangerous firearms, heroin, and a bundle of millions of dollars. Moss takes the money and runs, knowing full well he just kicked off a bloodbath, and he’s likely to see some of his own blood spilled. He does, and much worse.

McCarthy paints scenery with a kind of language that his southern Texas denizens would appreciate. How he captures such vivid beauty and horror with what at first blush looks like broken grammar and colloquial ignorance is a mystery. His prose is Faulkner-esque. It captures the music of a people that his own narrator describes as “common as dirt.”

In the works I’ve seen from McCarthy, this is his trademark. He writes this sparse prose devoid of much punctuation. Few apostrophes. No quotation marks, so the dialogue blends in with the prose. Hell, he writes sentences that would get his old grammar school teacher to break out the brass ruler on his knuckles. No verbs. A sentence, at once barren and colorful. (Take that, grammar school teacher!)

He also does a trick of shifting perspectives. He begins a new perspective with a pronoun, often “he.” The effect is that we’re piecing together this mess of a moving crime scene story, and I think it makes the reader pay more attention, to sit up and consider not only who’s doing what, but especially how they compare to one another.

At times, my tired eyes had to re-read a sentence, perk up my mind’s ears and hear the colloquial phrase. But, it’s all there. Every mean as hell piece.

At its core, this is a story with a painful resolution. For me, at least, the story wasn’t about what I presumed. I waited for something, some kind of justice to the awful killing spree of Anton Chigurh, the hitman after Moss.

It never comes. Which means that whatever I thought I was paying attention to was misguided. McCarthy sucker punched me with Moss. He had me hooked the moment Moss was stupid and decent enough to go back out to the dying drug dealer with a jug of water. And, same for that girl he got killed. Cocksure and all, I still love Llewellyn Moss.

But it’s the sheriff. That’s were the story is, it turns out. And, the story is a kind of apocalypse for the Western. It’s the sheriff’s last round, and he knows he’s done. He is. I feel sorry for that old boy, as they’d say in Texas.

He’s no Llewellyn Moss, but I can’t say I blame him. Neither am I.

No Country for Old Men: A

The job goes ever as the job must, with apologies to Seamus Heany.

Fortunately, today there was plenty to enjoy. It was my night to cook. I got ambitious and tried to make chicken pad thai, one of my favorite treats at local Thai eateries. The experiment was a god awful smelling mess at first. That ubiquitous Thai ingredient, fish sauce, is potent stuff. Canada and the kids huddled in the front room while I tried to turn lead into gold for dinner.

Damnedest thing was, I managed to make it remarkably edible. We ate pad thai, and it had the right flavor, but not well blended. I could taste each ingredient, especially that fish sauce. It needed a subtler hand or a secret I don’t know. But, it was successful for a first stab.

After dinner, I told Canada I’d but us a new album. She quickly turned cynical and translated that as “Album for Matt.” Then, I made her listen and pick out the voices. She pegged Alison Krauss straight. That other vocal took a few minutes, but it hit her. Robert Plant.

Raising Sand is another bit of magic ingredients. I’d never have guessed Plant and Krauss would pair up and release an album. Turns out the thing’s damn good! Melodic and wistful, sprinkled with a bluesy swagger here and there. I picked it up on Amazon to test out their new MP3 downloads. A little bit of browser fuss didn’t outweigh their cheaper prices and lack of pesky digital rights management! Now, Canada and I can share tunes of an album with two of our favorite artists.

There’s gold in there somewhere.

It’s harvest time in Iowa, but the sky isn’t cooperating. We’ve had a caravan of clouds rolling west to east for days. It just spits enough rain all the time to keep things damp, but sometimes it comes down hard and pounds the vent outside my bedroom window like an out of tune drum.

I’d like to blame the weather, the lack of sunny days for not keeping up this blog, but I’m not fooling anyone, least of all myself. I haven’t wanted to post or do much else for that matter. We’re stuck in one hell of a rut at home anymore, and work’s a drag.

Three weeks ago, I caught a cold that managed to trickle its way into a nagging, coughing infection. It wore me down, and still traces remain. When I get a cold, things don’t taste right. Things just don’t taste much at all.

I wish I could blame the cold for all of that. I can’t. It’s one of those ruts where the flavor is gone from nearly everything. My favorite music doesn’t sound right. The house doesn’t comfort. I’ve no urge to read. No drive to create.

This week, I saw an old college buddy for the first time in years. We hadn’t changed too much. Still the wry humor. I’d missed him more than I realized, and it got me thinking about other college buddies and friends. It stood in glaring contrast to work, where my friends amount to a hip old hippy who used to be my boss.

And, with that, I knew how many foolish turns I’ve taken in my work. I chased after a lonely path. I worked for years as “the kid” among a bunch of boomers. I had few peers, and none that I stayed with along that road. Now, I’m the veteran among a bunch of kids, and still have no peers, no pals to counsel and seek counsel from. I say this is foolish because I can see it plainly now, where before it never entered my energetic little brain. I sometimes still find comfort, even pride on quiet lunches and solitary accomplishments.

It’s a fool’s pride, and now I’m finding out how little I can accomplish. And, how bad I am,  how distrustful of friends in and out of work. My most recent attempts at remedying the situation are either too timid or too insane. There is no happy medium, no exit.

I finished Cryptonomicon last night, the next block in my wall of reading for 2007. The 910 page whopper wrapped me up for a while. It’s a multi-viewpoint tale interweaving an amusing WWII conspiracy of Axis gold and Allied code breakers and operatives with their modern day descendants.

Author Neal Stephenson is verbose, and devilishly clever. He hops from character to character, and zeroes in on intricate details that swirl into essays of bizarre events and amusingly distorted views of everything from insects to submarines to Captain Crunch. The bit on how protagonist Randy, a modern day hacker and descendant of near-autistic code breaker Lawrence Waterhouse, eats Cap’n Crunch in the Philipines is usually the sort of thing that would drive me nuts, wasting space on Randy’s minutiae-ridden life. But, Stephenson pulls it off. I found it endearing. Indeed, in Randy’s case in particular, the minutiae is crucial to realizing how absurd and, well, safe his life is. It contrasts highly with Bobby Shaftoe, a morphine addicted WWII jarhead who’s all action and not much thought. He literally goes out in a blaze of glory (pun intended — his beloved is Glory, Philipine goddess and grandmother of Randy’s girlfriend in the modern day).

And this tells us a lot about both eras. It is not a simple-minded condemnation of the modern era losers to ther bygone heroic era, either. Through his characters, Stephenson reveals the complex and abstract difficulties of the modern day, and the mortal and brutally simple difficulties of the war.

The books is, at its core, an ode to nerds. Randy and friends are fantasy role-playing hackers who get mixed up in baroque Philipine politics as they try to establish a virtual data center and create their own currency. They barely know what they’ve gotten themselves into.

And neither do I. That’s the main flaw in the book. Randy’s never really in danger. He’s paranoid, and bad things happen to him. But, the structure of the book is basically flat. It ends mostly as it begins and as it continues. It remains amusing, even engrossing, throught out, particuarly the WWII era characters Lawrence, Bobby and Japanese soldier and engineer Goto Dengo, whose survivial tale against god awful tropical disease, straffing, sharks, cannibals, and building his own tomb is epic.

Stephenson sprinkles in some brilliantly fun explanations of cryptography. In one chapter, he includes real-life genius Alan Turing on a bike ride with Lawrence. He explains the famous Enigma code with a wonderful bike chain metaphor. Other chapters have equations, Unix code, line graphs (for ejaculations!) and other amusing diagrams in a kind of hyper-nerd nod to Vonnegut.

Despite its too-even build, the big novel was hugely entertaining. I kept turning those hundreds of pages, and become fond of Randy, in no small part because I identified with his white guy nerdiness.

I’ve been busy with work and house details. The writing’s been damned thing, but the music …

Denver was fantastic, and so were The Police. I’ve been a huge, huge fan for over 20 years. Never thought I’d see the day they reuninted and went on tour.