Life, the Universe, and Everything

Life, the Universe, and Everything Life, the Universe, and Everything by Douglas Adams
Publisher: Del Ray
Year: 1995
Pages: 240

It may behoove you to first read my review of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

Though not originally intended to be a Hitchhiker’s book, Life, the Universe, and Everything ended up being reworked from a rejected Dr. Who script into this. It continues the series’ tradition of devolving from a semi-coherent satire into a collection of random-is-funny vignettes loosely tied together with characters.

There are some very serious Hitchhiker fans who believe that this is the last book in the series worth reading—that the remaining two were tacked on, redundant, derivative, and not worth the time. We shall deal with those accusations in later reviews. Life, the Universe, and Everything betrays its roots as a non-Hitchhiker piece by having some semblance of a plot. The important story arch is that of Krikkit, a extremely xenophobic planet on the far edge of the galaxy that was sealed off, billions of years ago, after their attempt to destroy the rest of the universe. Now, a band of murderous, cricket-bat-wielding robots are piecing together the key that will unlock their bloodthirsty masters. It is into these machinations that the hapless Arthur Dent, the pragmatic Ford Prefect, and the gibbering Slartibartifast (he of the fjords) are thrust. Along the way, they meet up again with Zaphod Beeblebrox and Trillian.

The vagaries of the plot are what you might expect from the series. I remain somewhat galled by Adams resistance to any sort of characterization whatsoever beyond the basic comedic archetypes. Dent’s awkward relationship with Trillian, for instance, flummoxes readers whose instinct is to read it romantically. In fact, despite overtures to that effect, nothing ever happens between them. Trillian makes a comment near the end of this novel that could almost certainly be taken as a confession of such feelings, but the moment is quickly forgotten.

This, I think, is my main grievance with the series (not just this book in particular). Adams has actually made interesting characters with whom readers want to relate and be interested in, but they are steadfastly two-dimensional and satirical. They’re simple constructs who act as straight men to the comedy act of the universe. By the time one reads Life, the Universe, and Everything, the Law of Diminishing Returns has kicked in and one feels less satisfied than ever.

§1939 · December 6, 2007 · (No comments) · Tags: , , , , ,

Shakespeare: The World as Stage

Shakespeare: The World as Stage Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson
Publisher: Harper Collins
Year: 2007
Pages: 208

Let me first say, in the interest of full disclosure, that I am absolutely crazy about Bill Bryson. Really, the man can do no wrong. I think perhaps the worst thing I’ve ever said about his books is that his very first one was kind of dry. I therefore look forward to each new Bryson release with a fervor most people save for Harry Potter.

Shakespeare: The World As Stage is a short book, written as a (sort-of) one off project for Bryson. The book is one in a series of brief biographies. Luckily, it’s not as short Bryson’s African Diary, but I was disappointed nonetheless, not by the quality of the book, but by my selfish desire for an endless amount of Bryson’s prose.

Bryson does manage to pack his 200 pages with excellent material, however. Writing a biography about Shakespeare is a difficult process, because despite being one of the most revered authors in the English language, he is shrouded in mystery, his legacy built by a canon of plays and poetry and piecemeal legal documents and snippets of text. If you were to play a drinking game wherein you did a shot every time Bryson uses phrases like “We can’t know for certain” or “It’s impossible to know,” you’d be comatose by the end of the book. Yet, as Bryson points out early on, we know more about Shakespeare than any other English playwright of that era. Much like I thirst for new Bryson material, so society at large thirsts for information about this demigod of Elizabethan/Jacobean drama.

Given the relative paucity of direct historical data about Shakespeare, much of Bryson’s biography is told with context: he talks about the era, and the places where Shakespeare would have likely been. He talks about the vagaries of playwriting and performance; he talks about Shakespeare’s father John, and Shakespeare’s various and sundry relatives. He also talks about what others of the time had to say about Shakespeare. He even, ironically enough, transmits a great deal of information about the lack of information about Shakespeare.

Finally, and with great gusto, Bryson deals with the conspiracy theorists: those that think Francis Bacon is Shakespeare, or that Ben Jonson is Shakespeare. Or that a slew of different people are Shakespeare. The author comes down hard on the conservative side, insisting that despite the many holes in our history of Shakespeare, there’s no convincing evidence for most of the marginal theories about his life. The truth is simply that Shakespeare was an exceptional writer that left us very little about himself.

Bryson does all this without fawning or obseqious language; he manages his trademark blend of anecdote and information. Like every other Bryson book, this one is fantastic and you’re a horrible person if you don’t read it.

§1938 · December 4, 2007 · 9 comments · Tags: , , , , , ,

Friday Random Ten CXXXIV

The “November’s over already?” edition.

Friday Random Ten

  1. Solomon Burke – [Don't Give Up On Me #03] Diamond In Your Mind
  2. Beirut – [Gulag Orkestar #03] Brandenburg
  3. John Vanderslice – [Emerald City #03] The Parade
  4. Maudlin of the Well – [My Fruit Psychobells #04] The Ocean, The Kingdom And The Temptation
  5. Ours – [Distorted Lullabies #05] Miseryhead
  6. Live – [Secret Samadhi #11] Merica
  7. The Pineapple Thief – [What We Have Sown #06] What We Have Sown
  8. Radiohead – [In Rainbows #04] Weird Fishes/Arpeggi
  9. The Bad Plus – [Prog #01] Everybody Wants To Rule The World
  10. Ulver – [Shadows of the Sun #01] Eos

The sea nymphs glide through courseless heaven:

  • The Smedley Log (Sarah MacLachlan one’s of those artists whom everybody likes but no one wants to admit to liking)
§1933 · November 30, 2007 · 1 comment · Tags: , ,

Tech punditry is hit or miss

In Don Reisinger’s case, it’s miss. I’m struck by the inanity of his recent article about Vista, even though I might agree with it in theory.

But I digress. Although Windows XP running Service Pack 3 is almost twice as fast as Windows Vista running SP1 and major hardware manufacturers are still selling XP machines out of desire for once, Microsoft wants to hold on to Vista regardless of where it takes the company. Will it force the company into a tailspin? I think it already has. Will it get worse? Possibly. But if Microsoft heeds my warnings and follows some of the tips I will outline below, Windows Vista may not be the utter failure I think it will be if nothing changes.

Of course Microsoft is going to hang onto Vista. Does he really think they’re going to just drop the product, say “Oh, sorry, guys, that one sucked. Check back in three years, and we’ll try to have gotten it right”? Here’s what no one seems to realize: Microsoft doesn’t live on the quality of it’s operating system. It lives on its entrenched market share and the breadth of software available for the platform. Vista can be as bad as it wants, but most OEMs bundle it regardless; those that don’t will probably do so in the next year. Most software will work unmodified on Vista; newer hardware generally has drivers available. Vista won’t make or break Microsoft because most people are too lazy to bother switching. They’ll upgrade when the time comes or someone else upgrades for them. Eventually, Microsoft will force the issue, and that’ll be that. Perhaps Microsoft’s 90% grip on the market will lose a couple of percentage points to Apple or Linux, but they’ll still rake in the dough from people buying Office 2007 (regardless of the Ribbon UI) and the same corporate shills buying bulk licenses of Vista. It’s inevitable, and opining about a “tailspin” is both lazy and ridiculous.

But Don doesn’t leave it there. He offers handy “tips” to Microsoft that they’ll ignore at their peril.

Read more…

§1937 · November 29, 2007 · 1 comment · Tags: , , , , ,

The Undertaking

The Undertaking The Undertaking by Thomas Lynch
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 1998
Pages: 224

My reading The Undertaking is all Lauren‘s fault. I had, surprisingly, never heard of Lynch until she mentioned him, and then I was struck with a morbid curiosity for what a third-generation funeral director (they prefer that term to the antiquated “undertaker,” despite the appropriateness of the name, and to the rather called “mortician”) would have to say. Add to this that Lynch is a semi-celebrated poet, and you have the makings for either an excellent book about death and dying or an overly maudlin piece of smarmily-constructed prose better left for brochures and sympathy cards.

The good news for everybody is that Lynch usually stays pretty solidly in the former case. Only occasionally did The Undertaking stray into sentimental weeping and wringing of hands, usually when it took on the aires of the self-righteous and unforgivably saccharine Paradox of our Time. Thankfully, those moments are few and far between, and Lynch spares us the creative nadirs of the truly obnoxious.

The crux of Lynch’s book, and I quote, is this: “The dead don’t care.” He says it a number of times. “The dead don’t care.”

This is important, and it’s a theme that runs throughout the short essays of the book. The funereal process, from the body preparation to the ceremonial rites to the lowering of the body, is done entirely for the benefit of the living. The attendant rituals of death are merely a process by which we assign meaning to the departed and signify in some way their relationship to us. The body itself can be fed to dogs, and it wouldn’t materially affect a damn thing.

This all sounds quite crass so far, I’m sure. But let me assure you that Lynch—used to, I’m sure, being delicate—treats the topic with a bit more poetry and dignity. Some of it is the nuts and bolts of the mortician’s life, and much grand theororizing about the nature of humanity as it pertains to our imminent demise. Most, though, is Lynch sharing with his readers what a lifetime of obsequies has taught him about people. The most touching, perhaps, is the very last chapter, when he muses rather sadly about his own death, planning his rites of burial, and then catches himself, remembering the advice of his own father, and decides to leave the details to his own children—he, after all, will not care one way or the other.

At 200 pages, this won’t take you very long to read. While the musings of a mortician are not perhaps what you would consider enjoyable reading, I stress that Lynch is actually an excellent writer, and that the vast majority of the work is a pleasure to read. Give it a try. And hattip to Lauren.

§1936 · November 28, 2007 · 1 comment · Tags: , , , ,

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