No, not More Spaghetti I say, great book though it is, more concordances. I've generalized my concordance code a little bit and added some other books. See the full list and perhaps even offer suggestions for improvements...rich@testingrange.com

I've read some of Charlie Stross' other books-Iron Sunrise comes to mine, and Mike Liebhold keeps raving about Accelerando, and I finally got around to reading it.

Accelerando is available on line (legally) in various forms. I downloaded the plain text version and wrote a small bit of code to create a concordance with links to lookups.

The Basic Concordance is here, and then Schuyler made some random request...

19:10 <@Schuyler> I want to see the concordance ordered by frequency, personally.
19:11 <@Schuyler> we are listening to  http://ordkunskap.se:8000/stream.ogg which seems to be a funny 
                    Internet radio channel of 8-bit video game themes
19:18 <@rich_gibson> http://testingrange.com/accelerando/accelerando_freq.html

So you can also See the concordance ordered by frequency

The whole project is fraught with peril, it is incomplete and horribly broken (the 'word' "s" appears 2366 times, probably because it is part of "'s"), but so what...it does something

This is how I generate it... tr -cs A-Za-z ' ' < accelerando.txt | tr A-Z a-z | sort | ./count.pl | ./makelist.pl Source of count.pl and makelist.pl (which are both rather unfortunate bits of code...sorry).

You get the words, the number of occurances of the word, and links to 'define word' in google, in wikipedia, and wiktionary.

It's a curiosity with humans, how so much productivity can come from searing pain. Of course, much stagnation also comes form searing pain. Heck, searing pain is big fuel.

Isn't that the truth? I go through cycles of massive productivity, mixed with a near inability to move...

Feb 2005

Smith turns all his stories into (almost) mawkish postcards of place. Fortunately for me I manage to retain interest, and don't (quite) find them too cutesy. But sometimes it is a near thing. He also wrote the NO. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, about a female detective in Botswana. But here we spend a lot of time wondering how the Kantian Imperative applies to everyday life if you have a bit more money then you strictly need...in this case, Isabel Dalhousie lives life and solves a bit of a mystery of why a man would fly off the balconey at the concert hall in Edinburgh.

...is great. When one is having particular challenges, say in their work, it is good to read Crutcher and have things made more clear. Catharisis and all. And I had some recent challenges, and obsessive reading kept my sane.

I read or reread _Iron Man_ and _Athletic Shorts_, and Stotan, and Running Loose, and some other things as well...

2/11/2005

Brent also wrote Geography Club Where do you go if you've caused trouble in foster homes? You end up at the last chance for gas before the empty desert of reform school and worse. At Kindle Home... Date unknown...fall 2004?

Once before I tried to read this, but became bogged down. And then we went to Italy, including Venice, the scene for the story, and my interest was called forth anew. After our renew I asked Richie Partington of Richiespicks.com for a copy and I read it to Maddy and Spencer. It took us a while, but they loved it. Dec 2004

I loved the Giant's Books, and Inherit the Stars, and Entoverse, etc. The multiplex man's hook is 'He had a stranger's face and a dead man's memories.' The problem is that the book started with a protaganist who ends up cruelly cast aside. Now, that protaganist was not all that sympathetic, but I was hoping for a nice story arc in which the character recognized the error of his ways and all was made right in the world. Instead I was given four protaganists living in one head, none particularly symptathetic, and three of them doomed to the irrelevancy of a passing mist. 2/12/2005 or so.

Jane Langton writes a series of mysteries based on the character Homer Kelly and his wife Mary. He is a former homicide detective, current professor, and he travels about professing and running into murders.

I started with _The Dante Game_, in which our hero spends a year in Florence. Since I spent four days in Florence I felt a certain attraction. "It was true that Homer Kelly was an exaggerated person, somewhere at one end of the curve of human possibility." I then moved on to _The Shortest Day_, in which a jealous academic murders people he suspects of flirting with his wife. Fortunately everything ends all right. Etc. And again...these 'reviews' are for my benefit, not 'yours' (unless you are me). Feb 2005

Lives of the Popes: The pointiffs from St. Peter to John Paul II. Richard P. McBrien

My ignorance of all things religious is profound. Touring the Vatican, and exploring St. Peter's was fascinating. Now that I've read (parts of) this book my appreciation is improved. Favorite line, from memory... "this was the period of the germanic migration, often referred to as the invasion of the barbarians."

Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling by Ross King

After Brunelesschi's Dome I was psyched for a bit more of Ross King. Good stuff. April Blood: Florence and the Plot against the Medici: Lauro Martines.

The ruler of Florence and his brother were attacked, and the brother killed, in the cathedral of Florence in 1478. This is the 'Pazzi rebellion.' The pope Sixtus IV (he of the Sistine Chapel) was involved. Much scandal and blood letting..

The Alias Man, Bill Pronzini

Sort of intended maybe to be a revenge fantasy...the Alias man marries, lives with women for about 4 years, and moves on. Bigamist and fraud. Now three of the women come together and take his ass down.

Michelangelo ran and hid from Pope Julius II. "Please Pope, don't make me paint that icky ceiling!" But Julius was so annoyed at Michelangelo's insolience that not only did he have him tracked down, but he also went to war with Bologna, Ferrara, Venice, and France!

Michelangelo wasn't even that hard to find, he just ran back home to Florence. And after Julius took over Bologna he made Michelangelo work in Bronze to make a huge ass sculpture of Julius to set up on the porch of the church of San Petronio in Bologna to loom over those rebellious sod's and remind them of who was boss!

And so Michelangelo had to spend a bit over a year casting a 10,000 pound and fourteen foot tall statue. One of the largest bronze statues since ye olden dayes.

In an amusing footnote, the statue was melted down less then five years later in order to make a BIG ASS GUN to use to come after Pope Julius, who, meantime, had broken papel law and GROWN A BEARD!

And personal hygiene? Forget about it! Michalengelo would sleep in his boots, and "...he has sometimes gone so long without taking them off that then the skin came away like a snake's with the boots."

And, oh yes, somewhere in all of this excitement, a ceiling was painted.

I desperately need to find, adopt, or create a method for adding geospatial annotations to books. The book is dense with locations. Individual paragraphs will have seven, or more, spatial references. Then there are the issues of temporal references. What came first, and last, and in between, and who the heck is everyone...

But location is the first step. The book starts out 'The Piazza Rusticucci was not one of Rome's most prestigous addresses. Though only a short walk from the Vatican, the square was humble and nondescript, part of a maze of narror streets and densely packed shops and houses that ran west from where the Ponte Sant'Angelo crossed the Tiber River.'

If one is in on the code that sentence is immensly evocative. You know much about this place based only on that description. And if you are out of loop you get the idea that it is a downscale place near a river and near the Vatican.

2004-12-13

2004-11-28...I bought this in Florence, and read it in Venice. Heather read it on the plane home. Before our trip to Italy I had a deep ignorance. I won't embarrass myself directly by revealing some of the things I did, or rather, didn't know, but I was less endowed with clue then one should be.

Now I am slightly less unendowed with clue.

From the Amazon review:

Filippo Brunelleschi's design for the dome of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence remains one of the most towering achievements of Renaissance architecture. Completed in 1436, the dome remains a remarkable feat of design and engineering. Its span of more than 140 feet exceeds St Paul's in London and St Peter's in Rome, and even outdoes the Capitol in Washington, D.C., making it the largest dome ever constructed using bricks and mortar. The story of its creation and its brilliant but "hot-tempered" creator is told in Ross King's delightful Brunelleschi's Dome.

The point of these 'reviews' is to serve as a reminder to myself of things read...so pardon the lack of original comment... In Italy I worked hard to not buy every darn book that caught my eye in every gift shop. Too often we suffer from 'last exhibit syndrome' where you feel that where you are is the most interesting place you've ever been, and so well worth investing the money, and the time! to buy and read books about that place.

I managed to escape the Colosseum book store without a purchase-though if the catalog for the exhibit had been available in English I would have bought it!, but Finally I cracked in Florence. I didn't buy 'Symbols in Christian Art' at San Marcos, but later I bought Brunelleschi's dome, and glad I was for it.

This is a fun and readable account of one part of Renaissance Florence.

What if predators 'decided' that harvesting flesh from their prey, while not killing the prey outright, was a superior survival strategy? And so developed the ability to infect the prey with a 'virus' that would protect the prey from death, even as huge chunks of meat were 'harvested' from the prey?

That would be part of the premise of The Skinner. So ho-ho-ho merry christmas to you all.

Essayist Geoff Dyer quoted in a Salon Interview Years back, okay, in 1990, my friend Roy Kienitz spoke of the developmental importance of having a bit of a crisis in your late twenties. If you don't have your existential (and other) crisis at the right time, developmentally speaking, you can't mature to have your proper next crisis. Now Geoff Dyer nails the ducky with the shotgun of precision. A continuous state of crisis! Cool! Geoff Dyer is writing non-fiction where everything occured, at least in his head...such as his newest book Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It

My friend Richie Partington is on the American Library Association's 'YALSA' committee which presents their 'Best Books For Young Adults' list (See the List). He also sends out a popular email bulletin called 'Richie's Picks,' in which he reviews the best in Young Adult fiction. I am the webmaster for Richies Picks.

Which is lengthy prolog to explain why I get to read books before they are released...

Claws, by Will Weaver is stunning. The current reviews focus on the thumbnail view of the book. Jed Berg has it all, then things go south. Then they start to get better. But we know better, or rather, we should know better. When an author quotes Chekhov on the fly leaf it is a big sign. When an author has his characters discussing the catharitic properties of tragic literature, it is another sign.

Claws delivers on Eudora Welty's premise that the ending to a (short) story should both be a complete surprise, while also being completely inevitable.

Read Richie's review or just go to Amazon and order it! (note: no affiliate link)