June 2006 Archives

This is from Trey's Blog, he tagged me.

1) I belonged to a secret ancient spiritual society for about ten years of my life. Yes, I was a Rosicrucian. Read 'Faucault's Pendulum'? Perhaps 'The Divinci Code'? Well then, you've heard of us :). Of course it was not nearly as sensational as made out, but there were some very interesting things learned and an entirely private history of the world.

2) In fact, I was brought up fundamentalist Christian (I was sooooo born again, it was ridiculous. Watch out, sit still for too long and I would convert you!), and have been in my spiritual journey - pagan, Buddhist, atheist, agnostic, philosophical existentialist, Wiccan, and have contemplated conversion to Judaism. These days, I'm not even certain if I have a belief structure - I sorta just take it as it comes.

3) When I was in kindergarten, because I didn't engage with my classmates and didn't participate socially with the class activities (and because I couldn't tie my shoes), my teachers suspected I was mentally deficient and wanted to place me into the special education track. In reality, I was completely bored by kindergarten as I already could read and could count to several hundred more than they required in the class. My parents fought my categorization and eventually got my IQ tested which ended up being somewhere high enough for the school to immediately move me into the gifted classes. If I hadn't had activist parents, I could have ended up in a completely different reality.

4) While I enjoy the film, I personally think that Ferris Bueller is a pussy and a lightweight, as I skipped 69 days my Junior year of high school, and 94 days of my senior year. All that, and not only did I pass high school, but I was ranked sixth in my class academically, and was a nominee for the equivalent of homecoming king ('Mr. Viking'). Of course, this sort of 'dilligence' didn't fly at UC Berkeley, where I did very poorily in my classes my first semester and had to drastically change my approach.

5) When I was ten, I ran my own BBS out of my room on my apple IIe and six floppy drives. It was over a 300 baud modem, and I heavily modified the BBS which was written in basic. It's amazing what you can eke out of 48k of memory. I took all sorts of computer programming classes from the community college, and became quite proficient in programming. I wanted very much to be a computer game designer as a kid, but because of a singular comment from my grandparents that discouraged me ('Programmers don't make any money -- you should be a professor' -- laughable today, but back in the 70's and 80's, it was kinda true), I reoriented my entire interests towards the physical sciences. It's ironic that now I make my living writing software.

6) In high school I was on the JV football team as a left guard. I did all the practices, and even went to football training camp. I never played a single game, however, because 1) I just didn't have the necessary killer instinct, 2) I severely disliked the way they handled an injury I got while in practice (ice and heat and back in the game), and 3) because of a singular conversation I had one evening over dinner with other members of the team. They were all concerned about their GPA not being high enough to continue to play on the team (you needed a 2.0), and when I was suspiciously silent, someone asked me what my GPA was. When I told them I was getting a 4.35 cumulative GPA (love those honors classes), they asked me 'what am I doing in football?'. I took that question seriously, and quit as soon as I got back home.

7) I've never seen E.T. all the way through. My family went to see it without me when it came out in the theaters while I was away at summer camp, and ever since I just have never been in the right place at the right time to make it happen. I've even rented it explicitly to watch it, and only got through 20 mins before I got distracted by whatever it was.

8) Because of a number of factors from childhood until adulthood, I don't know much about sports and just can't wrap my mind around it. I enjoy watching sporting events w/ friends who know a lot about them, but I would never elect to watch a game of anything by myself. I never played any sports (other than almost being on the football team, and even then I didn't really like the game as much as I was trying to get something on my transcript for college), and while I enjoy the casual game of just about anything, I'm a complete novice at every single sport. Instead of playing sports as a kid, I played Dungeons and Dragons during recess (starting in the 2nd grade and playing all the way up, off and on, until the present day).

Rebecca, Matt and Julie, I tag you.

(Or otherwise known as when your editors are afraid of you)

Okay, it took me several years of starts and stops and starts again, but FINALLY as of this morning, I finished Neil Stephenson's Baroque Cycle trilogy (Quicksilver, The Confusion, The System of the World), and while I was often entertained and dazzled by not only Stephenson's writing style and wit, and his attention to detail and his historical research shine through the pages, I was left with the same general feeling I get whenever I finish any of his fiction, which is specifically he doesn't know how to end a story. Perhaps because this 3,000 page three-tome work was so long and ponderous, the lack of a real ending was less pronounced than in other works. I almost feel as if Neil should be a writer of long-term serial fiction instead of books, as a magazine could live for years on 20-page installments of his work, and perhaps it would also force him to be more concise in his prose. I often felt ambiguous about his lengthy passages describing the historical workings of the stock market or the detailed discourses on calculus and physics. Beyond letting us know that Stephenson is very smart and very well read, I'm not sure how much exactly it contributed to the story. Given that I am personally into the same esoteric concerns that Stephenson writes about, I don't mind all the detail all that much, and often enjoy it, but I know a great deal of others who have tried and failed at this opus precisely because he spends too much time teaching us information not germane to the main story.

All that being said, I felt that the story for the most part was excellent, and some passages shine very brightly, as fans of Stephenson have come to expect. Of the three books, the second (The Confusion) is definitely the best, and the last half of the third (The System of the World) seemed positively rushed and tepid in comparison. My advice to the prospective reader is to skim through the first 400 pages and the last 200 pages of the trilogy, and do not concern yourself too much with the myriad details of names, places, ideas, etc. that he lays before you -- it's in the end relatively unimportant, and he always catches you up. Spend your time focusing on Jack Shaftoe's story, as that is the more engaging. Daniel Waterhouse's tale, while important to the overall themes of the narrative, is far less impressive except as an academic exercise.

Also, if you're a history fan, especially of the mid seventeenth to early eighteenth century, this is a very fun read. I think Stephenson captures the conflict between the medieval and the modern worlds very well.

I hope the next book he decides to write is less of a workout, because I honestly really enjoy his writing but i don't think I have the stamina for anything of this size again any time soon.

Addendum: If you're interested in hearing an interview w/ Neil about the trilogy, this is an interesting one.