Mstation mmmm books

Mystics

Fr. Murray Bodo, Mystics: Ten who show us the way of God,
St. Anthony Messenger Press

Mystics are rather a hot topic in some circles, especially pagan ones. People looking for meaning or even a new life, or style of life, look back to see what might be found, look back for clues.

Needless to say, Fr. Murray Bodo is not looking at pagan mystics at all. He is a Franciscan priest, has written many books related to religion, as well as three books of poetry. In addition to that he has, for some years, organised summer pilgrimages to Assisi, where St. Francis was from.

And, of course, St. Francis gets a mention here, along with the likes of Jacopone da Todi, Julian of Norwich, Therese of Lisieux, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Simone Weil, and Robert Lax. Quite often these lives are not happy at all, beset as they are with all manner of visions, and being who they were, and humans being what they are, some degree of persecution - at least amongst the earlier of these people.

In the end though, it is a picture of goodness, both of the people surveyed and the author himself.

LA: Heart of Darkness

Mike Davis, City of Quartz, Vintage

This is not a new book but such has been its popularity that there have been reprints as well as a new edition coming up soon or out now. What the book is about, is a history of LA told mostly from the losers point of view ... which is to say, vast swathes of the population who happen to be Black or Hispanic, or even white and from the wrong suburb or county.

The book isn't a mere fulmination: it has a lot of fairly dazzling scholarship even if some of the long lists of names can make one's eyes glaze over. Davis starts with the early Spanish and then goes on to the days of Colonel Otis and his "Open Shop" - meaning, no unions here on pain of death. And it continues in much that way. The cast of venal, corrupt, and extremely nasty people is virtually unending - from Otis himself to the execrable Chief Parker, and onwards.

Two striking aspects of the book are the bottom lines that Ayn Rand style capitalism doesn't work very well (aside from any moral considerations, or even the Constitution of the US) and that its revival, first under Reagan and then the Bushes worked equally badly. The second aspect is the role of fear in creating something close to a police state. The activities of the gangs were used to both terrify ordinary folk in the suburbs, and justify certain lapses in civil liberties as well as huge budget increases for the police.

The results of this social unwillingness to give people a hand-up resulted in desperate hard-core groups of people who hated their oppressors with a passion and who were and are willing to do virtually anything to escape their situation, including the dealing and taking of very nasty substances as well as the taking of people's lives who get in their way. The road away from this complete brutalisation will be a long one.

Davis finishes the book with a history of a place called Fontana in the San Bernardino valley. The story starts out with one of those larger than life characters with big ideas and big gumption who transforms a near-dessert region into a happy bunch of small scale farmers who feed into an enormous and clever agribusiness. His reign is succeeded by none other than Henry J. Kaiser who had some utopian ideas himself, insisted on unions in his workplaces, and set up a giant steel making facility there. Uh-oh, you say. It actually went quite well for some years - into the 1980's in fact. But then the tides of globalisation came in and the mill was washed away... but not its great polluted slag heaps. A further cast of villains then appears who try their best to pick the last meat off the bones. Dystopic is the word.

Of course all this doesn't explain why so many people have chosen to go to live in LA. Even now they are going despite a White flight to places like Nevada and New Mexico where their presence has been largely unwelcomed. If you're a poor Salvadorean or Mexican, it could be like buying a lottery ticket... long odds, but you could win big. If you're more affluent there's the climate, the sea and the mountains, a rich cultural scene ("high" or "low") and maybe, from time to time, a little magic in the air.

Tokyo

Crowell, Morimura, Tokyo: city on the edge, Asia 2000

Possibly not in print anymore but an interesting wander through various aspects of Tokyo and the Japanese from a slightly jaded viewpoint.

The book actually starts out by discussing disasters - great fires and earthquakes and the subway terrorist attack and then goes on to look at everything from super-organised dating, to eating and art. Well, that will be that 'edge' thing.

It's quite a slim book so sometimes it feels a bit like a list but there are, nevertheless, quite a few interesting snippets that you won't find elsewhere, for those interested in Tokyo.

Make: the book

Various, The Best of Make, O'Reilly

In the past we've looked at a few issues of Make magazine. They're always fun and usually there's one or two projects we wouldn't mind having a try at.

The Best Of has 75 projects culled from the past and there are quite a few fun ones there. There's even a music section with projects like making a cereal box amp or a cigar box guitar. Another has you fiddling with the circuits of old battery-powered synths to create new sounds.

Our favorite of the bigger projects was a complete wind generated electricity outfit - propeller, stand, generator, circuits, as well as a lot of helpful safety and other pointers.

This brings us to the whole attitude of the thing - You Can Do It! Don't let other people convince you that you're ignorant and powerless.

Conscience of a Liberal

Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal: reclaiming America from the Right, Allen Lane

Princeton economist Paul Krugman has a few cogent words to say about the USA and the soon to be departing George W. Bush along with the anti-social members of his group. Inequality, woeful social services, cronyism, corruption, dishonesty - all these and more make up a picture comparable to the 1920's.

Krugman spends some time looking at how it all came to be, and along the way shows how the US health system came to be the way it is, and who wants to keep it that way (Southern conservatives for one, drug companies for two, and health insurance companies to make up the triad).

But it looks like America is finally waking up so perhaps there were will be a happy ending yet.

Food book!

James and Kay Salter, Life is Meals: a food lover's book of days, Knopf

A book of days for food with unrelated different entries for each day of the year and mostly with an historical reference. If you are a foodie or even a little above the level of the eating Macdonalds walking down the street people then, if you are given to use words like "lovely!" or "delightful", you will use them for this book.

The whole thing has been lovingly put together with little anecdotes, factlets, ideas, and lore. I suppose the idea is that you'd consult it on a daily basis but I gobbled it up and will keep it by my bedside for a while and dip into it randomly.

Where else, under one cover, can you simultaneously discover Duma's salad dressing recipe and which Chateau d'Yqem to order if you've just won the lottery (the 1975)? (Baron K)

Ajax

Anthony T. Holdener III, Ajax: the definitive guide, O'Reilly

If your eyes have begun to glaze over at the mention of Web 2.0 by the money, money crowd then you're in good company but that's because the money, money crowd rarely have an interesting idea of their own rather than Web 2.0 being boring. The idea is basically Web Applications - full scale programs like word processors that will run in your browser.

Java was supposed to do this kind of thing but there was the JVM to be dealt with and also the whole program needed to be downloaded before anything would happen. It was all quite slow.

Ajax is what's happening now and the key to the success of the whole thing is the asynchronous nature of its communication with the server - in other words, little segments of a webpage can be updated - the whole page doesn't have to be reloaded for every new piece of information.

This book is not only the definitive guide to Ajax, it is also a pretty good guide to web technology right now, in terms of browsers, standards, and scripting languages.

The 957 pages with index start off with this background material and proceeds into issues such as planning and accessibility, functionality, and the rest, and then gets on with various examples of how to do things. All in all, the word 'definitive' is aptly used in the title.

Through the Children's Gate

Adam Gopnik, Through the Children's Gate, Vintage

You might have heard of Adam Gopnik already. He's worked for the New Yorker and the International Herald Tribune and while the Paris correspondent for the latter, he wrote Paris to the Moon, which the publishers say is a bestseller.

The children's gate in the title refers to one of the gates into Central Park in NYC. Gopnik recently returned to NYC to live after his decade long assignment in Paris. He and his wife and two children returned with some delight and this book, a collection of stories, looks at aspects of NYC, including Gopnik's relationship to it, with great fondness and quite a lot of humour.

If the mention of the New Yorker and the IHT suggests to you lovely crafted prose in the polite idiom, that's exactly what you get here and fans of NYC will spend a nice few evenings chuckling and shaking their heads at different aspects of the place - the eternal change, the gentrification and ridiculous rents, the largely successful war on criminals, and the effective banishment of the odd to the outer boroughs - all this plus a small feature on being (not very) Jewish today in NYC. There's a hilarious tale of his understanding of what LOL means and a nice short Jack Benny joke - 'Your money or your life!' the robber says to Benny. 'I'm thinking it over' is his reply.

In all of this he is a fond yet unsentimental observer - things change. It's almost an opposite to Plus ca la meme change, plus ca la meme chose - something that might be said often in his last hometown.

Banana Yoshimoto, Amrita

Banana Yoshimoto, Amrita, Faber and Faber

We first came across Banana Yoshimoto (great name!) in one of Foyle's shops in London and this book came, a few weeks later, from a second hand shop in Berlin. It was first published in English in 1997.

If you're familiar with a strand of Japanese writing that started in the mists of the past and progresses to now through such as Akutagawa and Murikami, you'll know about the rich worlds that include large doses of spirituality and the bizarre. Yoshimoto is more than just a "now" version of this however. For one thing, she has a delightfully positive take on the lives of her characters rather than the "shit happens" darkness that is commonplace in the works of the other two mentioned. Perhaps Banana's femininity is a factor here - we don't know.

This book traces the life of a young woman and her family, as her sister kills herself, she loses her memory and regains it, and her younger step-brother is found to have special powers. There is quite a lot of interior examination which proceeds like a trickle of clear water trying to find its resting place ... the adjective "lovely" springs to mind, and, if you're lucky, perhaps her memories will evoke something within yourself that speaks of sun, a warm breeze, and special friendships.

NYC Rock

Thunderfinger has a look at Mike Evans 2003 book NYC Rock in his column.

Hacking Vim

Kim Schulz, Hacking Vim, Packt Publishing

This is the newest book on Vim and right now the only one that deals with Vim 7. In case you were wondering, Vim is a text and code editor that is available on most every platform. It is a development of the venerable Vi editor and has featured in the Vi vs Emacs religious wars.

In fact I was a keen Emacs user myself but these days, on my tiny weird Linux machine, I use Vim because it is useful and extensible and Emacs is not. I've become quite a fan as well and this book is aimed precisely at the likes of me - someone who knows their way around but is not a guru and is interested in new tricks and better ways to get things done.

The book starts off with a history of Vi and Vi-alikes, then goes on to personalisation - changing fonts, colours, highlighting, the status line, and more. Then we're onto better navigation - moving by paragraph and sentence and the like and ways of movement in code files - which includes a key mapping for solving the long line problem. There's heaps more - dealing with tags; macro recording; folding; using vimdiff; scripting; games; and an index to make random access easier.

My only complaint about the book is that a couple of the code examples didn't work for me. The first was part of the status line code and the second had to do with folding.

Anyway, if all that sounds like fun, then this book is certainly for you and as a plus, there is a donation made to Ugandan orphans for each book sold.

Cubicle Toys

Kaden Harris, Eccentric Cubicles, O'Reilly

This book is from the Make: Projects series and really doesn't need to be related to cubicles at all: Anywhere a handy tabletop cigar guillotine will go ...

There are a number of projects in the book which mostly have a retro-futurish look and so have a visual interest alongside some kind of warped utility - like a thing that will fire objects across the room, or the gubbins that will let your desk be a bass instrument, or how about a fog machine?

These are quite complex objects too and need a fair bit of building and a few tools as well. Kaden Harris starts off by giving us some general build and materials hints and then goes through each project in a fair bit of detail and with lots of diagrams and pictures to help along. If you're already good with your hands in this sort of way, you should be quite OK. Complete novices should be OK as well but a few of the projects would be a bit of a leap.

A nice side-effect of the book might be to further ways of improvisational thinking as he's forever using things to do something that were designed to do something else. When you get to that stage you can do the fun thing of surveying a pile of junk to see what interesting and unlikely products can come of it all.

The only minus for some people will be the tone, a sort of pally, slang-ridden patois which can get on your nerves in about 20 seconds.

Devices of the Soul

Steve Talbott, Devices of the Soul:
Battling for our selves in an age of machines, 
O'Reilly

Sometimes you come across books that you think should be widely read but you know there's no chance whatsoever. The people who do read it will be the already converted who hear of it through their personal grapevines.

One reason is that this is not an easy read, not because the concepts are out there, but because the organisation of the book doesn't lead to rapid enlightenment. And there are no real answers either.

What is the question then?! It has to do with a computerised world that has people emulating machine behaviour - to some degree becoming servants of the machines that are meant to serve us. There's nothing new here: Rules-are-rules people come from the same simple-minded family and those same people now love to say things like 'I'm sorry but our system won't allow that' - in a recent personal case, the thing it wouldn't allow was a five line address - so that company couldn't send mail to it! Handwriting wasn't an option.

But Steve Talbott isn't talking about programmer and designer shortcomings: He's in a more lofty place which might be illustrated by an architect's famous dictum that form follows function. Why then do so many people find quite a few of buildings built with that dictum in mind to be not to their liking and to not possess utility? The answer is simple and it is that the functions were not properly defined - in those cases, they were too simplistic.

In other words, in a complex world, the constant seeeking for ultra-simple, one line answers (take a bow, tabloid media) is not only wrong, it's dangerous. Machine "wisdom" is a mighty danger as well. Steve Talbott is trying to warn us about this.

Efficiency is another, and allied, idea that gets a questioning. Frequently, all this means is cheapness. Solutions that are being labelled as efficient are mostly only definable in that way by severely limiting the scope of what's been examined - ie. cost! Ideas of what might be the wider affects have typically not been well examined. Is it efficient in the aggregate, for example, to export vast numbers of jobs? At what point does this become nonsense -ie. when does it become plainly obvious that a society is threatened? ST doesn't ask these questions at all, by the way, so you can relax. What he does ask is that we do ask these sorts of questions and that we do embrase complexity rather than shun it. Anti-intellectual societies won't have a bit of it of course.

Another major worry of his is disconnectedness - from each other, from moral imperatives, from humanitity, in other words. He sees the internet, the "bad" internet, as a danger here, computer games as well.

What might the solutions be? Talbott doesn't overtly supply them but it can inferred that more humanities in education might be a good thing and that more humanity in general might also be good. More education itself sounds good too. We can live in hope. Placenessness, disconnection, efficiency form follows function... mind - disabled

Ellis Lunar

Brett Easton Ellis, Lunar Park, Picador

This has been out for a while now - in hardback since 2005 apparently, but the paperback hasn't really been a presence on shelves until quite recently.

As far as we were concerned, Less than Zero was still it - a not so nice invocation of nihilistic L.A. with the appropriate soundtrack of the Bangles... appropriate because the B's really didn't have all that much to say whereas the likes of X had plenty on their mind. Or even the idea of MTV going eternally with the sound off! Nice one.

Some years later, and after four further critically acclaimed novels, comes this one, Lunar Park. It is purportedly his story, even though it is billed as a novel. His story, as a celebrity author, involves much in the way of drugs, alcohol, lost moments, emotional distances, and detailed descriptions of surrounding objects.

Not much distance at all from Less than Zero, you might say but this is different as some sort of redemption is being attempted along the thing strewn way. It is very readable in a sort of voyeuristic way but the self-referentiality of it all is a bit, well, nauseating - like a media event where all the media get together and pretend they're somehow important and introduce each other as if they represent something far beyond their actual occurence.

Pardon My French

Charles Timoney, Pardon My French, Penguin

This could be interesting for anyone with a general interest in France. It's about language, and in a series of sections to do with different aspects of life, Timoney points out words and colloqialisms that you won't have learnt at school.

The language comes in the context of the society in that rather than a list of words, we get amusing anecdotes. If you are actually using the book to learn something, this is a very good method for getting the information to stick the first time through.

We'll give you a couple of examples: The word "genial" (with an acute accent over the "e") is generally what you think it might be. Applied to a person, it is very complimentary and better than nice. It's wider use, especially among younger people, is to use for lots of things -people, music, events! Thus you have an all-purpose adjective. Genial!

"Merde" is widely known as "shit" but is slightly different in that it is in wider daily use at more elevated levels - if someone says it on TV, there won't be a zillion phone calls of complaint. Another use of the word relates to a similar situation to other places, where it's considered bad luck to wish someone good luck - like going on stage, a sporting event, or whatever. So instead of saying "Break a leg", you'd say "Merde!" or "Je te dis Merde ... pour Samedi" - I say to (familiar) you ... Merde for Saturday! Quite good, that one.