Logicomix

Oh MAN. I enjoyed this WAY too much. It is a biography of Bertrand Russell in comic form. Awesomely, there is a meta-level to it, in that parts of it are comics of the comic artists wrestling with the right way to tell this story. The amazon reviews had me not expecting much, so I was a little shocked at how much I enjoyed it. I suppose that is because it is about the tortuously emotional side of math, logic, and philosophy, which has always fascinated and consumed me. I thought the whole thing was clever, interesting, and well told. Parts of it are exaggerated for the purpose of storytelling -- which I endorse because obscuring the truth with mere facts is like putting your light under a bushel. Reading this, I feel close to Bertrand Russell in a way I never thought possible.

Breakfast of Champions

When I was a teenager, I heard people gush about Vonnegut, and so I tried reading some of his books that I found at garage sales. I read Slaughterhouse Five, Player Piano, and a few others, and wasn't too impressed. I wish I instead had read Cat's Cradle (did I really read that before I started this blog?) and Breakfast of Champions. I've seen references to Kilgore Trout in his other novels, but here, we really get to know him, and to understand him. The best part of all is the way Vonnegut writes himself into the novel, playing with levels of reality, but somehow managing not to break them. I guess, in a way, it's funny that I read this and saw Synecdoche around the same time. Stanley Tucci made a very interesting reader for this. I loved his Kilgore Trout voice.

I hear the movie is terrible, and I can't imagine how it could not be.

Women

I continue to be fascinated by Charles Bukowski. I have to admit I was a little disappointed by this book, which has a very different feel from Post Office or Factotum. I guess what was disappointing was that in this book we a different Chinaski -- one who is not free. The Chinaski I'm used to doesn't give a care about much. He drinks, he gambles, he debauches, and he moves on. Not this Chinaski. This one has had some success -- he's not drifting from job to job -- his writing and readings are paying the bills. This Chinaski is imprisoned by women. It's sad to see, but I guess that is the point. It is an interesting study in the differences between what men and women want from a relationship, and a very clear illustration that neither of them actually know. He ends it perfectly... in a way only he could.

Though it was sad to see Chinaski in a cage, it's always nice to visit him.

Born on a Blue Day

This is the autobiography of Daniel Tammet, who is a most unusual individual, in that he has savant syndrome, giving him powers similar to those of Kim Peek, upon whom the film Rain Man was based. The difference with Daniel, though, is that he is not handicapped nearly as much as most of those with savant syndrome, and can actually communicate his methods of performing remarkable feats of mathematics. The book was fascinating, but I was disappointed not to learn more of his methods. Towards the end, in particular, the book really drags, as Daniel gives a great deal of detail of his first time living alone, and the challenges he faced -- very little happens, and he goes into far too much detail for me. I was much more interested in learning about the ways he visualizes numbers (he claims to have a clear visual picture of every number from 1 to 10,000), and the games and imaginary friends that entertained him when he was young. It was also interesting to hear the challenges of language that his extreme Asperger's syndrome confronts him with -- for example, he finds phrases like "He's not tall, he's giant" baffling -- after all, how can a giant not be tall?

I've heard there is a BBC documentary that shows more detail of his mathematical methods -- I have tried to find it online, but haven't had any luck.

One thing that this book spurred me to do -- get a better handle on the calendar. I had a friend when I was a boy who had a touch of savant syndrome, and could easily tell the day of the week for any date. I would ask him how, and he would just say, "I don't know -- I just see a picture of it in my mind." Well, I figured this would be a useful skill, and I came up with a method I've been using. No, it doesn't go back in time very well, but if you want to know the day of the week for any date in the current year (or even next year) it is quite serviceable.

It works this way:
1) Memorize the "zero day" for this year. That is, the day before the first day of this year. So, January 1, 2009 was a Thursday, so the "zero day" for 2009 is a Wednesday.
2) Memorize the "offset table" of days for each month of the year. This is a simple list of numbers: (0, 3, 3, -1, 1, -3, -1, 2, -2, 0, 3, -2) that maps to the months of the year. Some are easy to remember -- "October" is 0, for instance. But really, memorizing that list of 12 numbers isn't very hard.
3) So, if you want to know what day a given date is on, simply divide 7 into the day, add the remainder to the offset, and add that to the "zero day", and you have your date.

For example: Christmas, 2009 is the 25th. 25 / 7 = 3r4. The remainder is 4. Add 4 to December's offset (-2), giving you 2. Add 2 to Wednesday (the zero day), and you get Friday. So, Christmas 2009 is on a Friday. With some practice, I find this pretty easy to do in my head, and I can answer questions about what day of the week a date is on in about 5 seconds. Unfortunately, when you tell people this, they immediately want to test you to see if you know what day of the week they were born on. Somehow, people have the idea that knowing distant days of the week is more useful than knowing upcoming ones. I mean, I can figure out the distant ones -- each year, the zero day creeps forward by one, except in leap years where it creeps forward by two (thus the "leap"), and this creates kind of regular cycles -- but it takes me almost a minute to work out a distant one. I'm sure there are better methods that my crude one for that. But I like my simple method for upcoming months!

Synecdoche, New York

I've been a fan of Charlie Kaufman since I first saw the surreal Being John Malkovich. And earlier this year I saw Adaptation, which I liked a great deal. Synecdoche is the first film he has directed, and wow -- unfiltered Charlie Kaufman is a pretty crazy, intense thing. The premise is that a stage director having a mid-life crisis gets a MacArthur Genius Grant, and uses it to create a play that is a reconstruction of his life in a huge warehouse. The catch is, though, that the play is part of his life, so it too must be reconstructed within the play. And, well, it gets more and more complex from there. It is not a friendly film -- it makes you work to keep up with what is going on. It's message, like the message of almost all mid-life crisis movies, appears to be the Christian message -- the only escape from despair is to help others. At times it was a little too arty for me, but aspects of it were very haunting, and will stay with me for some time. It certainly forced me to confront the relationship between art and artist, and I feel like it gave me some keys to that conundrum that I haven't figured out how to use yet.

More and more I wonder about art and creativity. I used to think that creating a thing for a specific audience was the best and wisest method -- but as I grow older I see more and more that creating a thing for an audience can spoil a thing, and riddle it with compromises, that ultimately make the audience turn away from it. More and more, it becomes clear that the best path is to let a thing you create be true to itself, and to focus on nothing but that. Now, sometimes, part of that involves visualization of the audience interacting with it, or observation of the audience interacting with it -- but that *only* helps in the weird context of helping the created thing be true to itself. This is very hard for me to talk about -- but more and more I think it is the only important part of any creativity. I hope I can find ways to talk about this more clearly.

PS -- Synecdoche (sin-ek-duck-ee) is a greek word meaning "shared understanding", more or less.

Fresh Air: Laughs

So, I was short on audiobooks, and this caught my eye on the library shelf, so I grabbed it. It is a collection of interviews that Terri Gross conducted with comedians. Comedy process is always interesting to me. But here's the weird part -- for me, this ended up being a journey into the nature of memory. When I read the list of comedians interviewed, I thought, "Hey, these sound interesting -- some familiar, some I've never heard of." But when I started listening to the first track, I think it was Al Franken, I realized I'd heard it before. "That's okay", I figured, I haven't heard the rest. But as each track came on, I realized I had heard them before. "Well, maybe," I rationalized, "I only heard the first disk before, and I returned it early for some reason." But, track by track, through the whole thing, each interview became familiar to me ONLY when I heard it. I would look at a name on the box, like Phyllis Diller, or Drew Carey, and tried to recall whether I'd heard it, and if I remembered anything -- and I couldn't. I remembered nothing. But when I started listening to each, I recalled that, oh, yes, I had heard it before. And as I listened, I could not only remember details about what was coming next in the track, but where I was when listening to the track last time, in fact. So, listening to this was a strange experience for me -- and a humbling one -- I am not at all sure I understand the difference between remembering and forgetting.

This strange experience aside, the interviews are excellent, and give great insight to the variety of methods of comedic process.

Here Comes Science

I'm the biggest TMBG nerd in the world, and also I'm a massive nerd in general, so obviously I was psyched about "Here Comes Science." I remember buying the EP of "The Sun is a Mass of Incandescent Gas" in 1993, or so, and thinking, "Hey, they should put that song with Mammal, and maybe get some other science songs together, and that'd be pretty cool." Well, Mammal isn't here, but there are a lot of fun songs and videos. I am a Paleontologist and Meet the Elements are my favorites. Kudos to Disney for being brave enough to release an album whose first track is "Science is Real", and makes clear to kids that angels are no more real than unicorns. Or maybe the Disney police just weren't paying attention, or didn't care. Only nerd kids are gonna hear this, anyway. So, feast away, nerd kids!