Archive for April, 2010

It’s an addictive genre and it is hugely popular these days: adventure meets multidisciplinary pop-sci meets biography. The survey style of writing that’s hard to resist and, when well executed, provides a page-turning synthesis of a given topic. Epitomized by Simon Winchester in his bestsellers Krakatoa and The Crack in the Edge of the World, the approachable, storytelling approach to nonfiction tends to lend itself well to journalists and generalists: here breadth works better than depth.

The Lost City of Z tells of Percy Fawcett, Victorian explorer extraordinaire, Royal Geographic Society hotshot and generally immortal geographer of the Amazonian basin. Fawcett represented the last romantic gasps of the centuries-long quest to find something like the mythical golden city of El Dorado. His life’s obsession to be the first to discover proof of an enlightened and materially affluent civilization in the unexplored jungle ended with his mysterious disappearance and the spawning of a new obsession, a shared obsession for all those who sought to uncover what happened to him during the following decades.

We are the meekest of dilettantes. But I think we harbor modest visions of the future, in which, while ruling our intergalactic empire, we might also have ten to twenty thousand important paintings, not to mention the collections of rare manuscripts, pillaged Bronze Age statuettes, ancient codices, amulets/crown jewels, signed first editions of Nabokov’s and Steinbecks great works and Shakespeare’s First Folio. Oh, and maps. O!, the maps. Halls and halls full of maps. Perhaps the maps could go in the wing with all of the Rothkos. Or near the Magrittes and Tanguys and Cornell boxes.

Over the past couple of years, we have made barely-lightly-informed, impulsive purchases by dint of haunting local auctions and art shows. Our acquisitions are a leap of faith: they’re mostly tragically-framed (it is ceaselessly amazing to see the dollar-store frames things end up in), possibly worthless, definitely displaying signs of age and fading. But they make us inspired, as art should, and they make me excited about the future.

I owe an update. Boy howdy, I owe an update. Where did all of those days just go? Gone. This past week has been one of the more blistering ones of late. I spent five days in San Francisco attending DrupalCon and suffering from massive camera equipment misplacement (about which I have already lamented) and a visual migraine aura so long-lasting and freaky that I had to seek medical attention.

I’m going to skip to the chase: I left my camera, a Canon 5D Mark II, and a Canon USM 17-40mm lens under seat 1A of Horizon flight 2609 PDX -> OAK yesterday. I’m busily trying to expand my professional and technical horizons at DrupalCon San Francisco at the moment, but I’m dolorously heartsick.

I have all sorts of good excuses about how this happened: bulkhead seating, my camera getting separated from the rest of my carry-on items by a helpful flight attendant named Cliff, a good conversation partner/someone I know next to me in 1B. But still. I feel like a daft moron.

Photo of Canon EOS 5D by Thomas Hawk

If you can shake off the burdens of its serious themes—gender, sexism, totalitarian political regimes—The Left Hand of Darkness is actually an interesting story, one that, as Le Guin’s own Introduction explains, pushes the envelope of the science fiction genre. The critics seemed pleased with Le Guin: the 1969 novel won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. But does the story age well? Its treatment of feminism, as well as the thinly-veiled parallels between the planet Winter’s fantasy politics and our own earthbound nations keep peg it squarely in its origins: the late 1960s.

David’s 35th birthday was last week. After my first four gift ideas went wholly south, I decided to get him something he’d been asking for. Well, sort of. Our kitchen’s mortar and pestle complement was sorely lacking. Our little guy only held a few ounces and served more to spray bits of things around than to crush or muddle them usefully. David had, for some time, been on the warpath for a new mortar and pestle, a big, manly, indestructible one.

I took it a bit further and found something shaped like a pig. Instead of an outsized marble variant or, even less usefully, a ceramic one, I found a jumbo-sized Mexican molcajete. These three-footed vessels are traditionally made from volcanic rock, tend to shed dust and grit until they’re seasoned, and have been around in some way or another since the Aztecs ruled Tenōchtitlān, awesome calendaring system and all.

Vetiver: it’s present in nearly 90% of western perfumes[wiki] and its aroma is a complex weave of (I’m smelling some right now) smoke, earth, wood, secrets, calm, nuance, sap. It has almost no edges to its smell; it’s a viscous, amber syrup in its distilled form. You feel like you could almost put it on pancakes.

But vetiver also provides excellent erosion control, serves as a natural filter for industrial toxins, is non-invasive, antiseptic, and, possibly, anti-inflammatory in a way that I find intriguing.

Photo by Treesftf

The story begins: I once had an Amazon Kindle. I love to read and I love technology. It seemed like a good match. Except I kind of hated it.

Enter the iPad, with its iBooks application, and then re-enter Amazon with a Kindle reader for the iPad. Then there’s Kindle on iPhone and other options on the iPad, and, holy moly, what a morass of possibilities.

Things rarely get me unreservedly excited in my ripe old age. I’m thinking excited in terms of the way I felt about birthday presents when about ten. When I could, I’d stack them in order and slowly open each one and try to stretch out the event as long as possible, coaxing open paper and laboriously untying ribbons. The kind of excitement that actually makes me slow down instead of speeding up, because it’s just that good that I don’t want it to end.

We are building an Orrery, a brass-and-gears wonder of a mechanical thing (and heavy!) that models the planets in the solar system. I can’t stand how much fun I’m having with this. Even cutting the pieces out of their wretched blister pack and setting them out on the table (set screws, gears, axles, planets) is bliss.