William Gibson's Spook Country

By Mary Foster, Associated Press Writer, via Yahoo! News:

"Spook Country", by William Gibson: Hollis Henry, investigative reporter and former rock singer, has a fascinating assignment. She's in Hollywood checking out a new art form — a virtual art that can recreate the death scenes of the famous or fill a hotel room with knee-high poppies.

Hollis is apparently doing the story for a start-up magazine called "Node." The problem is no one has ever heard of the new publication, which is contrary to the buzz most new magazines generate. And she's warned about its superrich owner Hubertus Bigend.

"Locative art," as it's called, is a change, Henry is told. Instead of experiencing virtual reality through a screen, locative art can take place in the world around us.

While she's checking out virtual death scenes, Bigend directs her to get in to see Bobby Chombo, a reclusive, disturbed computer genius who sets up the network needed to support the locative art. Bigend tells her that Chombo may be doing more than installing art works.

Bobby sees everything in terms of GPS grids. He has even divided his living space with a grid, a series of squares so he can sleep in a new one each night. Besides setting up the virtual art displays, Bobby designs military navigation systems.

"The most interesting applications turn up on the battlefield, or in a gallery," he says.

He may be tracking a mysterious ship, a modern-day Flying Dutchman, that doesn't put into port anywhere. If so, Bigend wants to know and he wants to know what's on the ship and where it will finally dock.

The intricately plotted novel is told from three viewpoints.

Besides Hollis, there is Cuban-Chinese Tito, who with his family specialize in delivery of information and misinformation. Then there's Milgrim. Hooked on prescription anti-anxiety drugs, he is being held prisoner by a man who may, or may not be connected to a government agency. And there is an old man who eventually connects all the elements, including the mysterious ship and its cargo.

As fresh and clever as the innovative locative art that opens the book, Gibson keeps the plot twisting, weaving dark and dangerous elements in a series of fascinating scenes.

Whether he's taking you inside the surprisingly lucid mind of Milgrim or into the semi-mystical world of Tito, where superb training mixes with the guidance of ancient gods, Gibson holds readers spellbound.

The Children of Hurin

By Bruce DeSilva, Associated Press Writer, via Yahoo! News:

Six thousand years before the Fellowship of the Ring, long before anyone had even seen a Hobbit, the elves and men of Middle-earth quaked at the power of the dark lord Morgoth.

Hunted by easterlings and orcs, they fled to the fastness of Nargothrond and to the deep forests of Brethil and Doriath. Among them, a hero emerged. Strong and courageous he was, but foolhardy and impetuous. His name was Turin, son of Hurin.

His story, released today by Houghton Mifflin, is a publishing event: It is the first new book by the creator of "The Lord of the Rings" in 30 years. The publisher calls it the culmination of an effort to bring to the public the vast body of work J.R.R. Tolkien had left unpublished, and largely unfinished, when he died in 1973.

Tolkien began writing "The Children of Hurin" 99 years ago, abandoning it and taking it up again repeatedly throughout his life. Versions of the tale already have appeared in "The Silmarillion," "Unfinished Tales" and as narrative poems or prose sections of the "History of Middle-earth" series.

But they were truncated and contradictory. Outside of Tolkien scholars and Middle-earth fanatics, few read them.

These works were, after all, largely unreadable — dense, hard to follow histories and legends of Tolkien's vast, imaginary world, crammed with complicated genealogies, unfamiliar geography and hard-to-pronounce names. Readers who took up such books hoping for another Rings saga or charming yarn such as "The Hobbit" abandoned them after a few pages.

"The Children of Hurin" is the book for which these readers have been longing.

It is the fruit of 30 years labor by Christopher Tolkien, the author's son, who has devoted much of his life to editing and publishing the work his father left behind. By meticulously combining and editing the many published and unpublished versions of the tale, he has produced at last a coherent, vivid and readable narrative.

Beautiful Sunrise

Beautiful Sunrise 2
Originally uploaded by m_andrew.

“Before the gods that made the gods / Had seen their sunrise pass, / The White Horse of the White Horse Vale / Was cut out of the grass.”
(G. K. Chesterton)


“The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.” (John Muir)

Top 10 Canadian fiction titles

Here are the top 10 hardcover fiction books in Canada compiled by Maclean's magazine. Bracketed figures indicate position the previous week.

For the period ending: December 5, 2006

1. (1) Secrets from the Vinyl Cafe -- Stuart McLean

2. (4) The Custodian of Paradise -- Wayne Johnston

3. (5) Against the Day -- Thomas Pynchon

4. (6) The View from Castle Rock -- Alice Munro

5. (7) The Lay of the Land -- Richard Ford

6. (3) The Law of Dreams -- Peter Behrens

7. (9) What Came Before He Shot Her -- Elizabeth George

8. (8) The Friends of Meager Fortune -- David Adams Richards

9. (10) The Other Side of the Bridge -- Mary Lawson

10. (2) DeNiro's Game -- Rawi Hage

Quote of the day

We have to trust in that perfect unadorned perception. The very mind that wants to control things is the mind that's caught up to begin with. When you're caught up, you have fewer possibilities. Your mind can manifest in more ways if you keep it from taking form. Technique is just a means for understanding that. Do you understand what it means to not let your mind take form? When you allow the mind to harden itself into a shape, a feeling, an intensity, technique, or strategies rather than allowing that clear, mirror like perception to arise, that is allowing the mind to take form.

The technique is something you do while you try not to let it interfere with the spaciousness of your mind. If you let your mind take form, it becomes localized. When you feel that happen, Return and come back to a formless state. The more that you can do that, the more you'll be your own person. The less you can do that, the more circumstances will dictate to you who you are at every moment.

(Takuan Soho, from unpublished transcripts, 1998)

Book review

Quill & Quire Online has a review of Wayne Johnston's new novel The Custodian of Paradise. Here is an excerpt of the review by Maureen Garvie:

"In The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, his acclaimed 1999 novel fashioned loosely around the life of Joey Smallwood, Wayne Johnston created a brilliant foil for the undersized premier in the towering character of Sheilagh Fielding. Apparently agreeing with many readers that she was unforgettable and too good to waste, Johnston gives Fielding her own story to tell this time out."

And the closing paragraph is a good summation of any of Johnston's works:

"By the book’s end, many mysteries have been laid to rest, only to be replaced with new ones. This raises the happy possibility that Johnston intends to return to the scene again."

Dutch reading campaign

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Dutch libraries are giving away 575,000 copies of a 1973 bestseller in the hope of turning the nation into one big book group and getting more people to read long-term.

As part of a national reading campaign from Friday until mid-November, library members can pick up a free copy of "Dubbelspel" ("Double Play") by Frank Martinus Arion, the library association said.

The libraries are giving away free copies of just one title -- enough for one in 30 citizens -- so that as many readers as possible can discuss the book, inspired by the success of similar "One Book" projects in U.S. and European cities, where books became the talk of the town, campaign organizers said.

"Dubbelspel," first published to rave reviews in 1973, tells a story of four men on the island of Curacao, a Dutch dependency in the southern part of the Caribbean where the author was born.

"It's a novel you can read on several layers: an exciting and moving tale about friendship and betrayal, a political allegory and also as an atmospheric picture of the Netherlands Antilles in the 1970s," organizers said on their Web site.

On Lying in Bed by G. K. Chesterton

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling. This, however, is not generally a part of the domestic apparatus on the premises. I think myself that the thing might be managed with several pails of Aspinall and a broom. Only if one worked in a really sweeping and masterly way, and laid on the color in great washes, it might drip down again on one's face in floods of rich and mingled color like some strange fairy rain; and that would have its disadvantages. I am afraid it would be necessary to stick to black and white in this form of artistic composition. To that purpose, indeed, the white ceiling would be of the greatest possible use; in fact, it is the only use I think of a white ceiling being put to.

But for the beautiful experiment of lying in bed I might never have discovered it. For years I have been looking for some blank spaces in a modern house to draw on. Paper is much too small for any really allegorical design; as Cyrano de Bergerac says, "Il me faut des geants." But when I tried to find these fine clear spaces in the modern rooms such as we all live in I was continually disappointed. I found an endless pattern and complication of small objects hung like a curtain of fine links between me and my desire. I examined the walls; I found them to my surprise to be already covered with wallpaper, and I found the wallpaper to be already covered with uninteresting images, all bearing a ridiculous resemblance to each other. I could not understand why one arbitrary symbol (a symbol apparently entirely devoid of any religious or philosophical significance) should thus be sprinkled all over my nice walls like a sort of smallpox. The Bible must be referring to wallpapers, I think, when it says, "Use not vain repetitions, as the Gentiles do." I found the Turkey carpet a mass of unmeaning colors, rather like the Turkish Empire, or like the sweetmeat called Turkish Delight. I do not exactly know what Turkish Delight really is; but I suppose it is Macedonian Massacres. Everywhere that I went forlornly, with my pencil or my paint brush, I found that others had unaccountably been before me, spoiling the walls, the curtains, and the furniture with their childish and barbaric designs.

Nowhere did I find a really clear space for sketching until this occasion when I prolonged beyond the proper limit the process of lying on my back in bed. Then the light of that white heaven broke upon my vision, that breadth of mere white which is indeed almost the definition of Paradise, since it means purity and also means freedom. But alas! Like all heavens, now that it is seen it is found to be unattainable; it looks more austere and more distant than the blue sky outside the window. For my proposal to paint on it with the bristly end of a broom has been discouraged - never mind by whom; by a person debarred from all political rights - and even my minor proposal to put the other end of the broom into the kitchen fire and turn it to charcoal has not been conceded. Yet I am certain that it was from persons in my position that all the original inspiration came for covering the ceilings of palaces and cathedrals with a riot of fallen angels or victorious gods. I am sure that it was only because Michelangelo was engaged in the ancient and honorable occupation of lying in bed that he ever realized how the roof of the Sistine Chapel might be made into an awful imitation of a divine drama that could only be acted in the heavens.

The tone now commonly taken toward the practice of lying in bed is hypocritical and unhealthy. Of all the marks of modernity that seem to mean a kind of decadence, there is none more menacing and dangerous that the exaltation of very small and secondary matters of conduct at the expense of very great and primary ones, at the expense of eternal ties and tragic human morality. If there is one thing worse that the modern weakening of major morals, it is the modern strengthening of minor morals. Thus it is considered more withering to accuse a man of bad taste than of bad ethics. Cleanliness is not next to godliness nowadays, for cleanliness is made essential and godliness is regarded as an offence. A playwright can attack the institution of marriage so long as he does not misrepresent the manners of society, and I have met Ibsenite pessimist who thought it wrong to take beer but right to take prussic acid. Especially this is so in matters of hygiene; notably such matters as lying in bed. Instead of being regarded, as it ought to be, as a matter of personal convenience and adjustment, it has come to be regarded by many as if it were a part of essential morals to get up early in the morning. It is upon the whole part of practical wisdom; but there is nothing good about it or bad about its opposite.

Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before. It is the great peril of our society that all its mechanisms may grow more fixed while its spirit grows more fickle. A man's minor actions and arrangements ought to be free, flexible, creative; the things that should be unchangeable are his principles, his ideals. But with us the reverse is true; our views change constantly; but our lunch does not change. Now, I should like men to have strong and rooted conceptions, but as for their lunch, let them have it sometimes in the garden, sometimes in bed, sometimes on the roof, sometimes in the top of a tree. Let them argue from the same first principles, but let them do it in a bed, or a boat, or a balloon. This alarming growth of good habits really means a too great emphasis on those virtues which mere custom can ensure, it means too little emphasis on those virtues which custom can never quite ensure, sudden and splendid virtues of inspired pity or of inspired candor. If ever that abrupt appeal is made to us we may fail. A man can get use to getting up at five o'clock in the morning. A man cannot very well get used to being burnt for his opinions; the first experiment is commonly fatal. Let us pay a little more attention to these possibilities of the heroic and unexpected. I dare say that when I get out of this bed I shall do some deed of an almost terrible virtue.

For those who study the great art of lying in bed there is one emphatic caution to be added. Even for those who can do their work in bed (like journalists), still more for those whose work cannot be done in bed (as, for example, the professional harpooners of whales), it is obvious that the indulgence must be very occasional. But that is not the caution I mean. The caution is this: if you do lie in bed, be sure you do it without any reason or justification at all. I do not speak, of course, of the seriously sick. But if a healthy man lies in bed, let him do it without a rag of excuse; then he will get up a healthy man. If he does it for some secondary hygienic reason, if he has some scientific explanation, he may get up a hypochondriac.

--Gilbert Keith Chesterton, excerpt from Tremendous Trifles (1909)

Endgame

One of my favourite authors, Derrick Jensen, has two new books: Endgame, Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization, and Endgame, Volume 2: Resistance.

Here's an excerpt:

"Having long laid waste our own sanity, and having long forgotten what it feels like to be free, most of us too have no idea what it’s like to live in the real world. Seeing four salmon spawn causes me to burst into tears. I have never seen a river full of fish. I have never seen a sky darkened for days by a single flock of birds. (I have, however, seen skies perpetually darkened by smog.) As with freedom, so too the extraordinary beauty and fecundity of the world itself: It’s hard to love something you’ve never known. It’s hard to convince yourself to fight for something you may not believe has ever existed."--from Endgame, Volume I

I have read two of his older books, A Language Older Than Words and The Culture of Make Believe. Both are beautiful and tragic, shocking and revealing.

I encourage everyone to visit either his personal website, www.derrickjensen.org, or the endgame website, http://www.endgamethebook.org.

Quote of the day

"Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of the soul in order to encounter it. But error is endlessly diversified; it has no reality, but is the pure and simple creation of the mind that invents it. In this field the soul has room enough to expand herself, to display all her boundless faculties, and all her beautiful and interesting extravagancies and absurdities." (Benjamin Franklin, from his report to the King of France on Animal Magnetism, 1784)

Quote of the day

"From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put." (Sir Winston Churchill)

Suzuki reveals outsider status in book

“The time I arrived for Grade 10 at (London) Central, social circles were pretty well established and I was a total stranger, a hick from a farm, an outsider.”

Award-winning scientist, environmentalist, author and broadcaster David Suzuki — recently voted the fifth greatest Canadian in a CBC debate — has always felt he doesn’t belong.

So much so, in fact, that the former Londoner wanted to title his new book The Outsider.

Instead it’s simply called, David Suzuki: The Autobiography and he’ll be reading from it tomorrow night at the Grand Theatre, where he’ll also get a Green Umbrella award from the Urban League for community citizenship and involvement.

By KATHY RUMLESKI - London Free Press

At last, a big screen adaptation of "Atlas Shrugged"

Rand adaptation hitting big screen

By JAM! Books

After a few failed attempts to bring to life Ayn Rand's sci-fi novel "Atlas Shrugged," a deal has finally been inked with the producers of "Ray" to adapt the book for the big screen, Variety reports.

Howard and Karen Baldwin acquired the "Atlas" film rights from businessman John Agilaloro, who will also produce the film.

The 1957 novel revolves around the economic collapse of the U.S. in the future.

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, both fans of the book, are reported to be interested in playing the lead roles of Dagny Taggart and John Galt.

For several years, attempts have been made to bring it to the big screen with Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway all originally attached to it.

Most recently, a 1999 deal with TNT to adapt "Atlas" into a miniseries failed to materialize.

[To the tune of Pearl Jam, "World Wide Suicide", from the album "Pearl Jam".]

Top ten hardcover non-fiction books in Canada

Here are the top 10 hardcover non-fiction books compiled by Maclean's magazine, via Canoe. Bracketed figures indicate position the previous week.

For the period ending: April 16, 2006

1. (1) The Weather Makers -- Tim Flannery

2. (5) Marley & Me -- John Grogan

3. (7) Freakonomics -- Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

4. (4) The Autobiography -- David Suzuki

5. (3) Six Words You Never Knew Had Something to do With Pigs -- Katherine Barber

6. (6) The Jesus Papers -- Michael Baigent

7. (9) Sorry, I Don't Speak French -- Graham Fraser

8. (8) The Force of Reason -- Oriana Fallaci

9. (2) The Great Transformation -- Karen Armstrong

10. (10) The Bedside Book of Birds -- Graeme Gibson

Book review: The Brief History of the Dead

From The Associated Press, via Canoe:

(AP) - At its best, the printed word provokes thought. It makes a human being stop and contemplate the fabric of existence through the wisdom of carefully chosen clauses and sentences and ideas. But the sad fact is that, in an age where the image trumps all, such text-paper epiphanies are increasingly rare.

When they do appear, they often are clothed in such ethereal subtlety that the depth of their wisdom is not immediately evident. You must dig, burrow, push forward to find the secrets that matter.

This is not the case with The Brief History of the Dead, Kevin Brockmeier's new novel.

Click here is peruse the full article.