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Gibson was one of the most influential authors of my childhood. I had not kept up with him in this millennium, but have begun to rectify that by reading Pattern Recognition a while ago and now Spook Country.
Dick Griffith has pursued human-powered travel in the wilderness areas of the American West since 1946. He pioneered the use of a packraft in 1952. This book chronicles his travels.
If you’re at all interested in bikes, lightweight backpacking, or a combination thereof, you must read this book.
In 1986, Dick and Nick rode lightweight, steel race bikes from the Bay of Bengal across Bangladesh, up and over the Himalaya, across the Tibetan Plateau, and through the Gobi desert to the point of the earth furthest from the sea. They were sawing their toothbrushes in half and cutting extraneous buckles off of their panniers before “bikepacking” (or “ultralight backpacking”) was a thing. The appendix includes a complete gear list and relevant discussion.
The book is currently out of print, but used copies can be found. A PDF version is available here.
I’ve never found any appeal in general social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook. They seem pointless. Sites that primarily serve some actual function and secondarily offer social networking features make more sense to me – something like Flickr: a photo hosting site that happens to offer social networking features. And now I’ve signed up for LibraryThing: a book catalog service that happens to have some social networking.
A friend recently told me about LibraryThing. It appealed to me as a way to keep track of all my books, and I thought it might be interesting to see who else owned copies of some of the more obscure books in my collection. I intend only to add books that I actually own to LibraryThing – not all the books I’ve read, which would take far too long. This makes LibraryThing’s recommendation service rather irrelevant for me, since most of the books it currently recommends are those that I have read, but do not own.
It appears that I currently own 160 books. Over the past year I’ve been heavily pruning my library, getting rid of a great many books. The remainder is probably one quarter the size of what it used to be. It is made up of books that I like and reread frequently, or that I find significant, or that serve as reference material. I’ve tried to do away with all the books I owned that I didn’t think I’d ever read again (no matter how much I like them). Now that I have an accurate count of my books, I think I’ll continue pruning till I get the collection down to 100 (quite a ways away from the cult of less or 100 things challenge, but I’m getting there.) It promises to be difficult!
It used to be that I didn’t have a bookshelf. All my books were just in stacks on the floor. I still don’t have a bookshelf, but a few years ago I came up with a solution while reading The Dharma Bums. Japhy Ryder – the character based on Gary Snyder – is described as owning little other than mountaineering equipment and books. The books he stores in crates. I thought it was a great idea, and promptly went out to acquire a collection of milk crates for my own. The crates can be stacked against a wall to function as a bookshelf and, when moving, all the books are already boxed and ready for transport! Multifunction.
About a mile from there, way down Milvia and then upslope toward the campus of the university of California, behind another big old house on a quiet street (Hillegass), Japhy lived in his own shack which was infinitely smaller than ours, about twelve by twelve, with nothing in it but typical Japhy appurtenances that showed his belief in the simple monastic life – no chairs at all, not even one sentimental rocking chair, but just straw mats. In the corner was his famous rucksack with cleaned-up pots and pants all fitting into one another in a compact unit and all tied and put away inside a knotted-up blue bandana… He had a slew of orange crates all filled with beautiful scholarly books, some of them in Oriental languages, all the great sutras, comments on sutras, the complete works of D.T. Suzuki and a fine quadruple-volume edition of Japanese haikus. He also had an immense collection of valuable general poetry. In fact if a thief should have broken in there the only things of real value were the books. Japhy’s clothes were all old hand-me-downs bought secondhand with a bemused and happy expression in Goodwill and Salvation Army stores: wool socks darned, colored undershirts, jeans, workshirts, moccasin shoes, and a few turtleneck sweaters that he wore one on top the other in the cold mountain nights of the High Sierras in California and the High Cascades of Washington and Oregon on the long incredible jaunts that sometimes lasted weeks and weeks with just a few pounds of dried food in his pack.
This past week I read Dominic Reeve’s Smoke in the Lanes. The book is a first-hand account of the lives of Romani in England during the mid-1950s, which marked the end of the era of horse-drawn wagons. It’s an interesting read if you’re at all interested in itinerant lifestyles.
Toward the end of the book the author describes lighting his daily fire in very wet conditions:
Nobody had collected any wood for the morning's fire, so I scrambled into the middle of a tangle of thorn-bushes, the limbs of which were heavy with rain that showered down on me; and within a matter of minutes I was completely soaked. I did not possess a raincoat and my old jacket and cord trousers were inadequate to withstand the water. Nevertheless, I managed to gather quite an imposing amount of dead wood, all sodden, and I returned with it to the site of the previous night's fire. I took a stump of candle from my pocket and broke it in half, then I lit one half and set it upright in the watery ashes, piling some twigs and small wood round and above it. When I had placed sufficient twigs above the tiny flame I laid the other half of the candle stump in the wood directly above the flame so that the heat from below gradually rose upwards, melting the wax which then caught fire and ignited the soggy twigs. It is an old Romani trick, and a very successful one.
Le Loup often talks about carrying a beeswax candle in his 18th century fire kit. I always assumed that this would be used to keep a flame below damp tinder to dry it out, similar to how today we might take advantage of the long burn time of cotton balls soaked in petroleum jelly to light slightly damp materials. It never occurred to me to break the candle in two and melt the second half above for even more heat. Neat trick!
None but the Romanies, or perhaps the few remaining tramps, can know how great a comfort is afforded by a fire. Once its warming tongues lick upwards into the pile of sticks and one's tingling, numbed fingers are eased in its glow, one experiences great pleasure and satisfaction. It is a creative, aesthetic, pleasure. On countless grey winter mornings, often in company with other travellers, I have sat huddled close to an immense [fire], my front glowing and steaming with heat and my back running with rain or heaped with snow. The fire is everything to us. With it we can cook, eat, survive and live: without it we should perish.
After re-reading Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age last November, I had an inkling to do the same with The Baroque Cycle, Stephenson’s tome on Alchemy, Economics, Technology, and an agreeable amount of Swashbuckling in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. It is an account of the birth of our modern world-system.
Quicksilver and The Confusion I first read when they were published, but at the time The System of the World was released, I was distracted by other ruminations. By the time I was free, I felt too much time had passed since my experience with the first two books, so I never read the third. Now, I intend to read them back-to-back.
Quicksilver I finished in a week and half. The Confusion I’ve been reading for near the same amount of time and am roughly halfway through, though I fear it will take longer to complete. Allowing for (un)necessary distractions, I should like to finish the cycle by the end of February.
Steampunk: a history that wasn’t quite. At once both Victorian and Dystopic. A world filled by brass gears, pin-stripe suits, and a steam powered Deus ex Machina.
I’ve been familiar with steampunk as both a literary spin-off of cyberpunk and as a modding community, but only recently – through SteamPunk Magazine – come into it’s aberration as a subculture.
This third issue of SteamPunk Magazine is my first. I found it to be a most delightful mixture of short-fiction, interviews, tutorials, and rants. My preferred rant was My Machine, My Comrade by a one Prof. Calamity, in which he sees steampunk as “seeking[ing] to liberate the machine from simply existing as an instrument of work, while at the same time not elevating mechanical forms above all else… Steampunk seeks to find a relationship with the world of gears, steel, and steam that allows machines to not only co-inhabit our world but to be partners in our journey.” My favorite fiction was Margaret P. Killjoy’s Yena of Angeline in “Sandstorms by Gaslight” which (very much like mine own fiction) seems to go nowhere. It has no direction, and does not leave its reader with a sense of anything being accomplished, which makes it a disappointing first read. But, again and again, I find my mind wandering back to the world that Killjoy crafted and the characters that inhabit them. Ant that, I think, is some element of praise.
A SteamPunk’s Guide to the Apocalypse is a survival manual of sorts, covering basic aspects of shelter, water, and food. It should provide nothing new to the established crazy and serves as no replacement to In the Wake (or any of the works listed in the Guide’s Appendix B), though features thoughts on reclaiming urban resources that are lacking in other guides. But, like In the Wake, it is available as a free download, thus nullifying any excuse to not peruse the contents and keep it as a handy reference. I purchased it partly to support SteamPunk Magazine, but mostly for Colin Foran’s artwork, which provides a wonderful backdrop to the gritty subject of post-Civilization apocalyptic survival. Beyond comparisons to other manuals for outliving Civilization, my main criticism is that of the style of writing. Writers in the Victorian era were much more liberal than us in their use of capitalization, but there was a system. When I read those works, I feel the capitalization adds a certain emotion to the writing. Being a SteamPunk’s Guide, the author of this work (by happenstance, the same Margaret Killjoy whom I praised above) attempted to duplicate this capitalization, but failed. Whether there was or was not a system, it feels arbitrary, and detracts from the overall work. The Guide does present an attempt to emulate that era’s vocabulary, and I think does a good job of that – combining a sense of Victorian grace with modern punk and a bit of wit, for an agreeable solution of steampunk.
Jason Elliot’s An Unexpected Light: Travels In Afghanistan is a beautifully written book, on par with The Places In Between. The author’s aimless wanderings in Afghanistan during the rise to power of the Taliban record the country and its people in an undeniably alluring way. He captures the daily life of Afghans throughout the country and, in his honest and provocative writing, the impact of decades of war.