I missed Before Sunrise a decade ago when it came out. It was one of those movies that I always meant to see, but every time a chance came to rent it or put it on the Netflix queue, it felt like its moment had passed—that listening to an hour and a half of a couple people in their early twenties Talk About Life was something I was too old for, even if one of them was Julie Delpy.

And I also missed Before Sunset, at least in the theater, but at least now I had a reason to see them both. (Super-brief synopsis for those who haven’t seen them: Sunrise is an American young man meeting a French young woman on the train in Vienna, convincing her to spend the day with him, walking and talking, falling in love, and agreeing to meet at the spot six months later. Sunset is them actually meeting, nine years later, each of them having gone on with their lives. What follows will contain spoilers, btw.) The opportunity to get an epilogue—to see both people nine years later, i.e. as old as I am now, and to see them one right after the other, was too good to pass up.

They’re both very fine films. The whole “two people just talking and talking” thing can be tricky to pull off, needless to say. But Linklater is relaxed about it, lets the conversations build to their natural climaxes but doesn’t try to force too much drama into them. Has ultra-picturesques backdrops, which doesn’t hurt. Before Sunrise had me looking at the clock a couple of times, I don’t know if that’s because the filmmaking wasn’t quite as mature, or whether the subject matter didn’t speak to me as directly. Certainly Ethan Hawke didn’t quite have the acting chops to pull off his role in the first one, though he’s great in Sunset, and Julie Delpy is perfect in both. What Sunrise has going for it is the core energy of a budding romance—not the kind of thing I’m usually drawn to in movies, but everybody’s susceptible to it if it’s done right, which it certainly is there.

I had a couple days between seeing Sunrise and Sunset, and I found myself thinking a lot about what was going to happen to the characters and what they were going to talk about. Jesse (Ethan Hawke’s character) has a line in Sunrise where he worries about settling down/getting married/having kids because the things he wants to do in life (not that he knows just what they are yet) will take all his attention and if he settles down he’ll look back one day and realize he never got the stuff done. I remember thinking such things too, and as someone who has unambiguously set foot on the “settling down” path, I was very curious to see what Linklater was going to do with that dilemma in the second movie.

And he dodges it, kind of, but in a way that works for the movie he wanted to make. Jesse is married, and has a kid, but it’s a loveless marriage, at least from his side. Celine is only loosely commited—thus, there’s room at the end for them to get together, although (thankfully) Linklater has the presence of mind to end his film at only the hint of it. And ultimately for Jesse it’s not that he didn’t have time to Do Those Things—he is, after all, on a book tour—but that he, like her, gave up on romance, if just unconsciously, after they didn’t meet again in six months, nine years ago. Which, if you can imagine that real people might have had just such a filmically perfect encounter as they had in the first movie, makes a certain amount of sense.

They do talk about more grown-up things, like the state of the world and spirituality and getting older. But none of that achieves any particular depth. I should be disappointed by the film more than I am, because it doesn’t wrestle with the sense of lost time, the disappointments, and the what-ifs that are an inevitable part of aging. What it does do is build in a subtle, steady way from their first uncomfortable attempts at conversation, on to the veneers they maintain as they dig deeper, and finally into the raw feelings they’ve both been harboring all along and the realization that neither of them have gotten over their long-ago moment. So it turns into another romance movie, not a post-romance movie. But their conversations are so fresh, their performances so convincing, their dialogue—which I have to believe is largely improvised by the actors—so natural and believable, that it works purely on the level of just enjoying them in their ambling conversation. Sunset turns out to be just a much more artfully constructed film in all respects, though I think you need to see Sunrise first in order to care enough about the characters to notice.

Anyway—both worth seeing, especially if, like me, you haven’t before.

Curse you, Gene Wolfe!!

I know, I know, I should have expected it. But I must have read somewhere that The Knight and The Wizard, Wolfe’s recent duology, were his take on straightforward genre fantasy. That led me to expect that they might be just a little, y’know, straightforward.

But these is Gene Wolfe we’re talking about here. So we get Fairyland, dream logic, sudden shifts in scene and plot that feel like they might be anchored in some allegorical significance that you’re just not catching but maybe is just an illusion anyway. I admit, I had hoped that what I’d find in The Knight was Wolfe, a real master of language, telling a straight story. But having made my peace that this was something else, if I have any complaint, it’s that all the wackiness isn’t that far afield from Book of the New Sun.

First person narrator with unclear background, possibly unreliable: check.
Knack for acquiring items of particular power as he bumbles along: check.
Keeps meeting the same people over and over again who are somehow drawn to him: check.
Big, bulbous mystical entity that lives beneath the water: check.

If the form is familiar, the subject matter’s pretty different, though—we have a boy who gets sucked into a surreal fantasy world, in which an Aelfmaiden turns his body into that of a muscular young man. But his mind remains the same, and so Sir Able of the High Heart, as he is known there, literally has the mind of a boy—and he’s our narrator. The dream logic aspect is strong, too—whatever errand Able is on at the moment, it is inevitably sidetracked by something else before it can reach a conclusion. He is diverted and whisked away time and again, and if the novel ends up in a place that somewhat makes sense, given where it began, it sure ain’t because of any sort of logical chain of events.

So whether this whole thing is just an extended riff on wish fulfillment or something else entirely, I’ll wait ‘till I’m through The Wizard to decide. In the meantime, it’s Wolfe, so it’s worth the ride for the language alone. There’s something refreshing about the clear, plainspoken dialogue of the people of Mythgarthr and the adjoining realms of Wolfe’s invention. Enough to make me tolerate the mind games—for a few more hundred pages, at least.

I certainly don’t intend to make a habit of referencing _Reason_ magazine, but “their interview with Neal Stephenson”:http://www.reason.com/0502/fe.mg.neal.shtml is definitely worth a read. Hat tip to “Kaedrin”:http://kaedrin.com/weblog/archive/000896.html, who has some good comments on it as well.

Yesterday was shaping up to be a really lousy day, what with me being totally laid low with a cold for the holiday. But, like a ray of hope late in the day, my new laptop arrived.

I ended up getting a Dell Latitutde D610. This is a step for me, because I’ve been anti-Dell based on anecdotes from friends, but more detailed research seemed to indicate that they weren’t better or worse than other manufacturers — as always, it depends a lot on the model.

I was worried that a slightly smaller screen (14.1″ this time around) would seem smaller, but it doesn’t. Keyboard ergonomics are fine. And the fact that it’s two pounds lighter than either of my previous laptops makes a big difference — especially when it’s in my backpack along with a book or two and assorted Ella-gear.

PCs have come a long way in the past decade. After my laptop had booted, the first thing I did was find my wireless network, and in about thirty seconds, I was online, downloading Firefox and Thunderbird, migrating my settings from the desktop, and transferring files at 802.11g speeds. And it all happened without any settings adjustments or manual consultations or editing of .ini files. In ten minutes I was all set to go. I know — that’s what we should _expect_ from computers. It’s just nice that it actually happens once in a while, and more often than it used to.

Regular and attentive readers will note that the previous piece, compared to Polytropian ramblings of similar length and scope, is an ugly mess. I have, before now, tried to put quite a bit more polish on the longer offerings. I also have, before recent months, tried to post _something_ every day or couple of days, instead of every week.

I’ve been aware of the lower frequency of posts since November, and meaning to get back into the old swing of things. But when I sat down to write about _The System of the World_, I realized that crafting my thoughts into a proper review sounded less like _fun_ and more like _work_ than similar tasks had in the past. Burnout? Maybe. Whatever the case, I’ve decided that the time and energy it would take to re-energize the ol’ blog, such as it is, would be better spent on other things — catching up on the mounting pile of books I’d like to read, for starters, and maybe at some point in doing some fiction writing, something I haven’t dabbled with in years.

This isn’t an announcement of a Suspension or a Hiatus or anything that dramatic, but an Acknowledgement that as it has been in recent months, so shall it continue to be: infrequent posts, which, when they do show up, will tend to be a little less polished, more haphazard, more quippy — more bloggy. Polytropos, which has since its inception hosted my random thoughts, creative impulses, and writerly urges, will still do so, but as a side project instead of a chief outlet. Basically, I’m going to jettison the time-n-energy I spend thinking about blogging, wondering what to blog about next, considering my place in the blogosphere, and feeling guilty about not blogging, and just write stuff quickly when I feel like it. I know, I know — it’s not like I’ve been writing that much anyway, so how much extra time-n-energy do I actually expect to recover? The slouch of recent months has been due in equal parts to Having Less Time and Not Being As Into It, and while there’s no helping the former, shifting focus to non-bloggy things will help with the latter.

Rest assured, in case something arises that calls out for my particular perspective (headline: “Liberia’s New President Pushes For Roleplaying Games As New National Pasttime”), I stand ready to return to Full Blogging Mode at a moment’s notice . . .

(This is less of a traditional book review than the ones on Quicksilver and The Confusion. For one thing, it’s been so long since System of the World was published that steering clear of spoilers seems almost pointless. So, spoilers ahead!)

First: an apology for taking this long. The book was published in September, after all. I read the first half of it in fits and starts over many months, and the last half in a five-day burn once I realized how ridiculous it was that I hadn’t finished yet. There’s some reading zone that you get to, analogous to escape velocity or cruising altitude or something, where you know you’re going to keep going till you finish, not getting distracted by other reading material, and using most of your bits of spare time to keep the pages turning. Some people probably read that way all the time, but I certainly don’t, and I manage it much less often than I did in pre-Ella days. And with these huge Baroque Cycle tomes it’s worse because they’re so dense with detail that when you set them aside for a week or two you know you’ll have to spend some time flipping back pages and racking your brain to remember who that one character was—both his given name and his title—and what he had done when he was much younger in the first book, and what his opinion is on who invented the calculus.

But anyway. I finished. And the delay had absolutely nothing to do with not enjoying reading The System of the World at all, though I did have a marked twinge of disappointment on day one. The first thing I did when I sat down with the book was to look at the maps on the inside front and back cover. In volumes one and two, the maps gave some hints as to the scope of those books—when you saw maps from all over the whole freakin’ world in The Confusion, you knew that Jack and his merry band would be doing a bit of traveling. But in System, the scope is very different: the maps are of London, up close and with environs, and the insets aren’t other places but closeups of places within London. So I knew from the beginning that System was going to be Anglocentric, and while I’m sad we never got to revisit Shahjahanabad or Cairo or Boston, at least I was able to make my peace with that fact at the outset.

On the bright side, all that attention devoted to London means that this is a book all about Daniel Waterhouse. If we break things down as Stephenson would like us to, considering the Baroque Cycle as a whole divided into eight books, not three, then Daniel hasn’t really been front and center since Book One. He’s absent from Two, present occasionally in Three, and less in Four—but not at all in Five. Six, Seven, and Eight are his, though. And what a treat that is. Young Daniel was a mild-mannered Puritan turned Natural Philosopher, fearful of the circumstances he’d been thrust into, living in the shadow of Isaac Newton—a Salieri without the bitterness. Old Daniel is the same guy, hardened by experience—he realizes a few hundred pages in, much to his surprise, that he’s not afraid any more, and that people turn to him full of hope because they see that in him. The quintessential Stephenson hero, the geek-hero, must always gets by on his wits, and Daniel exemplifies this in a particular way because his wits are all he has left—he’s an old man. He can’t even walk fast.

All right, another apology. I’ve got too many little things to comment on and not enough time to organize them all nicely, with Progression towards a Conclusion with Transitions and all the other stuff that makes, y’know, good writing. So I’m going to just go down the line.

If you want the Baroque Cycle in a nutshell—at least, the parts where people are sitting around talking, which is most of it—look to the conversation between Daniel and Sir Christopher Wren on page 75—too long to quote here, though I’m tempted. It is consistently suffused with wit, and manages to incorporate the Newton/Leibniz debate, computers (i.e. the Logic Mill), organs (the church kind), courtly intrigue, and geopolitical drama, all in a couple pages. It’s wonderful stuff, though (as with the whole Cycle) you have to share Stephenson’s unfiltered glee in turning up odd historical facts and anecdotes in order to go along with it. Sometimes in passages like that you think maybe he’s being difficult on purpose, but then you hit the other parts, the swashbuckling bits, the Jack bits, and you swear the guy is angling for a movie deal. It should come as little surprise that the high point of System involves a complicated, flashy break-in at the Tower of London, masterminded by Jack Shaftoe (Jack the Coiner, as he’s known now), that takes upwards of a hundred pages to relate in full.

From there it’s all consequences and implications, leading to—yes! it’s true!—an ending that’s a proper conclusion. Jack comes full circle to the hangman’s noose, And Daniel—well, Daniel cleans up the remaining pieces of a rather complicated life. Stephenson has a habit of tying up the storylines you think are going to be the culminating ones a little early. Upnor and that dead-fish-eating Duke are gone, and Bob finds Abigail, midway through The Confusion. De Gex gets his comeuppance, and Daniel manages to get his Data Cards o’ Gold shipped out, long before System finishes up. The actual endings of the novels, and of the Cycle as a whole, have more to do with tying up character than plot—a surprising (and welcome) strategy in books that are so completely, gloriously plot-heavy.

Enoch Root. Where was he? I know, I know—he was in Boston. But I missed him. I missed the little cameos he’d make throughout the rest of the Cycle, little hints as to What He Was. Now that it’s complete we can all freely speculate, though of course the real answer is that he’s meant to be ambiguous. He’s probably a really, really old guy—maybe even the biblical Enoch—who extends his life by means of an alchemical elixir, and who has an interest in finding the right people (i.e. the geeks) and helping them help history along, with a special eye for (he he described it in Cryptonomicon) the metis of Athena over the brute, ugly force of Ares. But that whole conversation is so much less interesting because he’s doesn’t actually do anything in the last third of the Cycle. We learn something pretty stunning—that he used his alchemical chops to help Daniel after his operation at the end of Quicksilver. Whether “revived” or “resurrected” is the right word to put to it is one of Those Ambiguities that run alongside his identity. But while we see his footprint, we don’t see the guy in System, and that sucks.

But why does Stephenson give us Enoch at all? Or (and especially) his elixir? In a series of novels about the dawn of modern science and economics, these touches of supernatural froofroo seem a little out of place, and I wouldn’t be surprised if lots of people are bothered by them. But I think they belong. Late on in System there’s the inevitable showdown between Newton and Leibniz—they go on for several pages about free will and the nature of God’s hand in the world and all the rest, with Daniel serving as reluctant referee even as he himself has admitted to being a Materialist. The upshot of that whole conversation isn’t a resolution, of course, but an admission that they’re not there yet, and maybe people in a few centuries will finally settle these things beyond debate—which we haven’t, of course, and so we get to one of the big Messages of the Cycle, insofar as there are any, which is: Keep trying to figure it out. Don’t ever stop. The presence of Enoch and his Elixir are a nod in the direction of what Newton would call the vegetable spirit—a hat tip to the ineffable, which may someday get reconciled with everything else, or remain ineffable, but which for now certainly cannot be effed.

I wondered all along how things would end for Jack, and found it hard to imagine a way to pull it off neatly. A straightforward happy ending would be too easy, and I assumed he’s just die somewhat gloriously after having made things right by his progeny, as his descendant Bob does in Cryptonomicon. Stephenson handles it all better than I could have imagined. There’s the whole, drawn out scene of hanging-day, with all the attendant Jack moments and historical trivia—if you’ve made it that far into the Cycle you’re loving it, and if it all seems like too much, you stopped reading a long time ago. The grand myth of L’Emmerdeur is sustained by his being carted off by the Mobb—dead, according to the authorities, but with enough wiggle room for other rumors to endure in the popular imagination. But he does live, and even gets together with Eliza, albeit in creaky, broken form. It’s just like he says:

“Ah, she is a great woman,” says the King, “and you, mon cousin, are a fortunate man.”
“To meet her in the first place was fortunate, I’ll give you that. To lose her was stupid. Now, I don’t know the word to describe what I am, besides tired.”

But before I get away from Jack’s ending: to what extent did he, and others, intend it? He is given ridiculously wealthy hanging clothes by someone unknown—probably Johann, in which case probably Eliza was behind it. Is it to honor him, or so that he’ll have stuff to whip the Mobb in a frenzy? And when Jack pulls his double-cross on Jack Ketch so that his death will be prolonged, is it in some vain hope that a rescue will come? Or does he really intend the Mobb to be his savior?

Daniel also survives, and gets to go back home to Boston—assuming he survives the voyage. His reward is not the completion of the Logic Mill, or achieving harmony between Newton and Leibniz. It’s making his mark, helping things along in his small way, and then managing to get clear to a bit of peace when it’s over. That whole “they lived happily ever after out in the country with their kids” schtick always seemed terribly boring to me, but that’s changed now that I have a kid. It’s still boring to contemplate as reader, but as a person, I get it now.

On the subject of kids: for Stephenson, they are Why You Do It, whatever it is that you do. It’s the motivation to make the world a better place, and it’s the solemn obligation that, if you’re a worthwhile person in the slightest, you honor. I made a note of that at page 750 when Jack is trying to get his sons to leave London without him, at which point it was worth mentioning, but in the concluding pages of System Stephenson manages to beat the whole “it’s for your kids!” drum a little too often, turning a well-stated implication of the Cycle into a Lesson. Too bad.

I realize I’ve dwelt too long on the ending, when there’s all sorts of great stuff leading up to it. The Tower scenes, of course. But also the death of Sophie. The assassination attempt at Herrenhausen. The freakin’ cannon-duel between Dappa and Charles White. Johann and Caroline’s escape from London. System is no Bonanza, but looking back, it sure had its sure of groovy moments.

All in all, the Baroque Cycle is a literary accomplishment that requires such particular tastes to fully appreciate, I doubt it’ll ever get all the recognition it deserves. Instead it will be That One Quirkily Long and Involved historical trilogy. But, to be fair, it is messy enough that I’m not going to be calling for its inclusion in the literary pantheon or anything. I remember the phrase “core dump” being used in one review of Quicksilver, referring to Stephenson’s inability to pick, choose, and shape all the historical info he turned up in his research. That’s an overstatement, but one that inclines in the right direction. My sense—hard to verify this close to having finished it—is that the books get sloppier as the Cycle goes on, thematically speaking.

But I won’t say for certain whether that’s the case until I read them again. And perhaps the biggest endorsement I can give to the Cycle is that, as soon as I turned the last page, my first impulse was to go back 2500 pages to the beginning, and start it all over again right away. I won’t—too much else on the reading pile at the moment—but I’ll come back to it in a year or so, and looking forward to the moment when I do.

The new-ish Baltimore venue Rams Head Live is a great place to catch a band. There’s not much in the way of decor or character there yet, but the sound is good, and they’ve set up the balcony in a bell shape to maximize the number of people who can have a good view. Higher up on the balcony there’s a little cluster of twenty or so theater-style seats, pretty far up but looking straight at the stage. I’m young enough that I was still up for standing up for a few hours last night so I could be closer and have a good view, but old enough that I appreciated the existence of those seats, in theory.

I was there to see Neko Case for the first time. I put her on my Top Five list mainly on the strength of her backing vocals for the New Pornographers, and have since whetted my appetite by listening to some of her solo work. But none of that could have possibly prepared me for hearing her voice in person.

How to describe it? When the first song started, her voice shot out like a clarion and silenced the whole crowd in a second. It is loud but not brash, powerful yet subtle, and clear, clear as a mountain stream. If God were to decide to get back into the business of delivering personal messages, through prophets or whatnot, then it’d have to be through a voice both overwhelmingly forceful and transcendentally beautiful, capable of expressing something that could only be understood in poetry and song. Her voice, in other words. And listening to her belt out some of those gospel numbers, it’s hard not to believe she’s already been picked for the job.

It’s a good thing her backing band, known by themselves as The Sadies, played an opening set on their own, because I was too mesmerized by Neko’s voice to pay much attention to them later on. I know what you’re thinking: “Oh brother — not another Canadian surf/country band with a dash of punk.” But these guys had the goods, even if the long-haired guitarist looked a little creepy when he was singing. They were easily able to keep up with Neko veering from country to folk rock to gospel — they had even co-written a lot of the songs with her.

So, yeah, her Top Five slot is secure, and catching her when she’s next in town with the NPs just became mandatory. I’ll be paying all day today for staying up that late last night, but it was worth it.

from _Death of a Salesman_ . . .

_Willy_: Then hang yourself! For spite, hang yourself!

_Biff_: No! Nobody’s hanging himself, Willy! I ran down eleven flights with a pen in my hand today. And suddenly I stopped, you hear me? And in the middle of that office building, do you hear this? I stopped in the middle of that building and I saw — the sky. I saw the things that I love in this world. The work and the food and time to sit and smoke. And I looked at the pen and said to myself, what the hell am I grabbing this for? Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be? What am I doing in an office, making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want to be is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am? Why can’t I say that, Willy?

A few years ago I was happy to learn that Alan Speer was making a go at his great passion: film criticism. Even at that point it had been a while since I’d heard from him; it’s probably been a decade since I’ve seen him face to face. We knew each other in college, insofar as we knew each other at all — we graduated the same year, and interacted as fellow writing-for-the-arts-magazine types.

Alan died this past Sunday. It happened after he had finished competing in a swim meet — without warning, his heart failed. He was far, far too young for this to happen.

Though our paths hadn’t crossed in a long time, Alan has always remained important to me for what may seem an odd reason — he was the first openly gay person I ever really got to know. It must have been hard for him, attending a religious college that was going through a tempest of community debate about homosexuality while we were there — and probably is still. In the midst of that, at a time when I was forming my opinions on a great many things, knowing Alan made it impossible for me to think of his condition as a “choice” — or, for that matter, to think of it as a “condition” at all. I’m grateful for that. The time will come when not just tolerance, but acceptance will be the norm — when the “love the sinner, hate the sin” talk from our college days will seem well-meaning but deluded, like the white moderates who asked Martin Luther King to wait. It’ll come. I’m sorry Alan won’t be there to see it.

More content here (what a novelty!) in the next few days. In the meantime, the blog you _should_ be reading is Sara Zuiderveen’s “A Little More Life”:http://www.alittlemorelife.net/weblog/. New York life, music, waterbugs. She’s a gem.