Bookpost assumes the Party Escort Submission Position

[roadrunnertwice]

Balls to chronology! Here’re the Aug/Sept reviews I’m done with, and I’ll post the other ones when I finish ‘em.

A subset of things I read during August and September:

August

Maile Meloy – “Travis, B” (8/7, short story)

Someone linked this. coffeeandink, maybe? It’s good.

It feels… old fashioned, somehow. Like something everyone decided was good a long time ago.

Steve Oualline – Practical C Programming (8/?)

C is weird. Closest to the metal I’ve ever gotten. This is a quality intro to the language, and I can now read C code with reasonable fluency, but I’ve not really built anything of consequence with it, and have no particular ambition to do so; as xwrn said, learning C is valuable because suddenly you understand why all software sucks so bad.

It’s also valuable for other reasons; I learnt it because it was a prereq for learning Objective C, about which more anon.

Matthew Loux – Sidescrollers (comic, didn’t finish, 8/18)

The dialogue bored me, the art was noisy and hard to read (I had major problems with depth here; felt like trying to drive with one eye covered), the characters didn’t grab me, and I couldn’t tell whether or not there was a plot. Skip it.

David Foster Wallace – “Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise” (8/19, essay)

I guess this was later edited and republished as “A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again.” Ultimately, not my favorite Wallace, but it definitely cemented my desire to oh god never go on a luxury cruise.

Harry G. Frankfurt – On Bullshit (8/?, audiobook)

I’m no longer accustomed to reading philosophy, and this seemed unwilling to fairly declare whether it was analysis or polemic, so I kind of held it at arm’s length.

Short version: Frankfurt identifies and explores a class of untruthful/peritruthful utterance which is distinguished from ordinary truths or lies by the speaker’s complete lack of interest in the statement’s truth value, said utterances being intended to gain the speaker something largely unrelated to their content. He dubs these utterances “bullshit,” based on what I found to be interesting but not fully convincing lexicographical arguments. Awful repetitive for being just a single CD, but a valuable core idea nonetheless.

Clinton Wong – HTTP Pocket Reference (8/30)

Now I know about headers, yey.

September

Naoki Urasawa – 20th Century Boys vol. 4 (comic, 9/2)

Still with the insane shifts of tone, still improbably good.

BONUS LEVEL: Portal (video game, 9/?)

Newsflash: Portal is amazingly great! Yeah, I know, when you need your gaming info to be up-to-the-minute, tune in to Roadrunner Twice.

Anyway, Schwern loaned me his Windows box, and I finally got to play this. It’s short and sweet, extremely witty, just hard enough to bend the old brain-meat in a way it’s not used to bending, and actually kind of a triumph of video game storytelling.

Which doesn’t look remotely like being a triumph of any other type of storytelling. Listen, have you all been reading the second Gamespite Quarterly? I mean, it’s a good idea in general to stay abreast of Parish & co., but in particular, I want to reference Philip Armstrong’s Super Mario Bros. article:

By being interactive and making the player into a part of the story, the strange excesses of the game are overlooked. In no other medium would this story be accepted without a healthy amount of suspended belief.

Interactivity fundamentally changes the way information moves around. It “allows for new excesses in storytelling,” Armstrong says, and yeah. But it also allows for new subtleties in storytelling, and Portal exercises both of those capacities with a deceptively effortless fluency.

Reams of text have been spent on the game elsewhere, and I’m not completely up to date on the state of games-as-art conversations, but I want to drop kudos for two things in particular: The way the instructive robotic narration gradually ceases to be part of the structure of the environment and becomes a proper (and terrifying and psychotic) character, and the way the graffiti left by previous victims is (at first) left for you to freely discover, with the game only hitting the freaky musical cues after you’ve been staring at it for a few seconds.

The graffiti in the android training room was the point where I got sucked entirely into the game. You could have the same story cue in a non-interactive medium, but it would be absolutely impossible to give it the same effect: getting the information across would require a large and noticeable distortion of the pacing—a long-ass camera linger with musical cue in film, and a ramping-up of detail resolution (with associated slowing of perceived reading speed) in prose. It’s the fact that the player controls Portal’s pacing that enables the android room’s nasty, crawling sensation of dawning horror. It’s a more perfect hijacking of the pattern-matching areas of your brain, a total engagement of systems that evolved to warn you when something’s about to make a play for your neck.

All told, kind of amazing stuff, and most notable for how natural and inevitable it feels in practice.

Terry Bisson – Numbers Don’t Lie (9/12)

Random grab at the Title Wave. Fun and silly, not particularly important or memorable, and exactly what I needed when I read it. (The middle of this September was a little stressful for me.)

Anyway, it’s three stories about a ridiculous Buckaroo Banzai type named Wilson Wu and his various adventures in the field of applied spacetime anomalies, as told by his confused-but-game sidekick Irv. It’s one good one and two clunkers, to be honest, and my advice is to just read “The Hole in the Hole” and skip the later two stories. Irv is actually competent and somewhat interesting in HitH, and Wu spends an appreciable amount of time on-screen; furthermore, it has a legit-feeling sense of place and the Hole in Brooklyn is kind of wonderful, and no setting in the other two stories feels anywhere near as vivid.

M. John Harrison – Nova Swing (9/14)

I still have no idea what in the fuck happened in this eerie, nonsensical Space-Noir confection. But I want to share a story with you:

When I was young—we’re talking like between the ages of 4 and 13—I had a mental model of dreaming that was badly broken in some really interesting ways. Basically, I conceived of dreams as being places with independent existence that one occasionally found oneself transported to and stranded in. As in, I could count on being eventually bounced back to reality, but while I was in the dream world, I was basically stuck.

(Mind you, if you’d asked me what dreams were, I’d have told you something different. I wasn’t deluded, and I knew my science, to the extent that anyone does with regard to dreams. But if my mental barriers were down—i.e., if I was dreaming—then that was the model I defaulted to.)

Which wouldn’t have been that interesting of a factoid, except for the fact that I tended to lucid dream. A lot. Which meant that I frequently found myself 1: completely awake and self-aware, and 2: trapped in bizarre worlds whose rules seemed designed to torment and mock me. (Which is kind of a metaphor for childhood in general, but let’s not go there right now.)

The funny and geeky part is that, since I so often found myself wandering around in strange and obviously non-normal planes of existence, I eventually started hunting ways to “hack” the dream-worlds. Adult lucid-dreamers will tell you about the various god-mode tricks they gain when they know they’re dreaming; I was technically capable of the same things, but since my model of the whole experience was that I was stranded in a space outside my direct control, I basically went about gaining superpowers through buffer overflow attacks: doing things that weren’t accounted for in the incomplete physics of a 7-year-old’s dream and then seeing what happened, and remembering any useful results for when I inevitably needed them.

A partial list:

• Limited-Altitude Flight: If you’re in a grassy field at night and there’s visible starlight overhead, you can do a running long jump that lasts noticeably longer than it’s supposed to. If you twist your torso during the jump to turn around backwards and then tuck your legs under you, it breaks something, and you’ll just keep floating in the direction you jumped. Once you’ve been floating for about four seconds, you can turn back around to face forward (still keeping your legs tucked under you) and steer your flight by leaning from side to side. This situation will hold at the same speed until you put your feet down and touch the ground.

  Crucially, the speed at which you fly is just a hair faster than an adult can run.

• Ignore Height: I remember being very happy that I didn’t have to worry about falling-dreams anymore. Basically, you strike out at the ground with open palms (slightly tilted off square with your wrists) right as you’re about to hit-and-die, and you’ll roll harmlessly instead of waking up yelling. The dream will then continue benignly; no one will comment on your miraculous save.

• And most useful of all: Cat Gate.

  When I was a kid, most of my really serious nightmares started out as normal family scenes, with the nasty stuff showing up later in a big dramatic reveal, but there was ALWAYS this viscous miasma of evil that settled in about five minutes before it all hit the fan. Once I felt The Dread, I could absolutely count on a nice long stay in a tiny universe of Bad.

  Unless I could find a cat before the horrors showed up.

  In the physics of my dreams, you never had to blink; it just wasn’t necessary. But I’d tried many times in real life to win a staring contest with a cat, and all evidence indicated that it just plain wasn’t possible, and I think that’s the conflict that enabled this trick. If you could manage to engage a dream-cat in a stare-down for about ten or twelve seconds, it would actually cause the entire dream to segfault, bouncing you straight back to reality and waking you up, at which point you could go get a drink of water and sit in the living room until you stopped shivering. When you went back to bed, there were decent odds that the nightmare wouldn’t be waiting for you, and you took ‘em.

Sidenote: I don’t really get nightmares anymore, and I rarely ever lucid dream.

So back to Nova Swing. In this book, there’s an area of nightmarish broken physics just outside town called the Saudade Event Site, where every rule of normalcy fails to apply. People wander out of it into the city’s nightclubs, and disappear like sparks from a bonfire. Strange noises come out of it, and the weather’s wrong. There’s a place inside where a flotilla of shoes drifts on an ocean of wind. Bad things come out of it, bad people go into it, and right alongside of it, life goes on.

Every day, at precise intervals, floods of pure white and pure black cats pour out of the Event Site and wander through the town with inscrutable purpose. At precise intervals, they stream back into the site. Most people don’t know where they come from or where they go, but if you walk partway into the site and enter a building, and if the cats aren’t currently out on the town, chances are you’ll find them, sitting down with their legs tucked under like brooding hens.

They are facing away from you. No matter where in the room you walk, the cats will turn to keep their backs to you. Inside the nightmare of the Saudade Event Site, you can never see the cats’ eyes.

And that is why Nova Swing is the most grisly, horrifying book I’ve read all year.

Next time: Return of the King, “City of Roses: Gin-Soaked,” and Infinite Jest.