Twelve Black Code Monkeys

First let me say that this 21 Dog Years made me laugh harder than any other book I’ve read since Me Talk Pretty One Day. It’s kind of Office Space meets Tetherballs of Bogainville meets Andy Richter and probably was especially funny to me because I lived through the exact same time and had experiences that while not as outlandish as the author’s, still felt very familiar.

Mike Daisy, who wrote this book which describes his experiences after college first in the temping world and then in the world of a .com company (actually the .com company, Amazon.com) describes himself as a slacker, a dilettante, and a geek, but not a particularly “high-level” geek. I could describe myself in the same terms, but not quite as flamboyantly. In high school I was an introverted science-oriented student, but lacked the savant capabilities one often sees portrayed in the movies where the resident geed can get in front of his computer, start typing really fast, squint, strains as if a bit constipated, and then shout “I’m in!” as he’s just hacked into a national defense supercomputer. I did, however, participate in things that either amazed or confused my family since at that time the Internet was something only a small group of academicians knew much of anything about. This was, after all, back in the early 1980’s.

Daisy is a few years younger than me, and while I somehow lucked into my first job as a programming assistant in a student travel/exchange company, it appears he roamed his way around Europe in true bohemian style, at least for a bit before coming back and continuing a pseudo-bohemian existence in Seattle, where it seems it is very easy to be bohemian, or at least it was in the 1990’s. Instead of going on to grad school as I did, Daisy just temped for a while and eventually lucked into a job with Amazon.com in 1998 when they were just starting to fly.

What ensues is a tale of an Amazon.com insider, or at least an Amazon.com Customer Support insider. Being a telemarketer in high school for a summer and after college being a technical support drone for a software company, I know first hand that one can become cynical very quickly. Daisy describes how this became, at least for him, an opportunity to ship scandalous books to clergy or others who were nasty to him, or to alternately refund or send free stuff to people who were nice. In order to decrease his long call resolution average, he would simply hang up on customers within a few seconds of picking up their call.

As with other blindingly successful .coms of this era, Amazon.com was (and still is) headed by a charismatic leader, Jeff Bezos, whom all the Amazon.com employees seemingly looked up to as a “geek Mesiah.” Daisy intersperses his prose with emails that he wrote (but never sent) to Bezos. These emails are so intimate because they were never meant to be sent, more of an exercise in soul searching and Daisy trying to understand his very conflicting feelings toward Bezos and Amazon.com. On the one hand, Daisy was overtaken with the “coolness” of the ideas that Amazon.com pitched and it’s divine Jeff. On the other hand, Daisy is slowly having his soul sucked out of his body by answering the same questions, request, or complaints every day all day long. He finally is able to maneuver out of phone support to a more coveted “Business Development” department by making up a study he has concocted, but this just serves to show him how random and meaningless things are.

In fact, the whole book is really Daisy’s search for meaning in a seemingly meaningless universe. From his college days where he attained the superfluous degree in Aesthetics, to his wanderings in Europe and Seattle, he, along with many of us from his generation, were convinced that some monumental event in the future (something similar to the incredible events we watched happening in the late 80’s and early 90’s in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union) would somehow wipe the playing board in some way that would make whatever we were doing at the moment irrelevant. So what was the point in working hard, saving money, and generally being miserable?

Amazon.com, as Daisy portrays it, and really the whole internet, became something to “believe in” for all those non-believers. It was the revolution and the revelation rolled into one. But when it became obvious that while the rules were turned on their heads, this was not necessarily better than the old rules. They were just less comprehensible and more based on random fate. This, the final reckoning that all .com’s went through when the investors all of sudden realized that they had actually needed to turn profits, and his own conscience, finally broke Daisy down to a point where something had to give.

Daisy actually performs pieces of this book (I can’t imagine him performing the whole things as it would be over 7 hours), as well as other monologues at various venues. He currently seems to be in NYC. He also maintains his own blog. Daisy did amateur theater before Amazon.com and so the monologues are I suppose an extension of that. If you can, I would highly recommend getting this book in Audio format. I listened to it via Audible.com where it is narrated by Daisy. Daisy has an incredibly expressive voice that can have you laughing your head off at one moment and then make you depressed the next. His writing is, for someone of his own generation, anyway, brilliant. He goes off on pop-culture-induced rants, parodies coworkers, customers, and supervisors, and generally makes the book enormously enjoyable to listen to. Daisy looks a bit like Andy Richter, and his humor is not too far from Richter’s, perhaps just infused with a bit more literary and historical references that he feels obligated to throw in as compensation for his otherwise seemingly impractical college degree.

Even if you missed out on the whole “internet revolution” and find much of the book to be unfamiliar ground, I would still recommend it on the basis of it being a fascinating look at an interesting subculture or subcultures during the heady days when people were deluding themselves completely about how all the rules had changed and they no longer really had to pay any heed to common sense anymore. Plus it is a somewhat moving story about a guy who is struggling with the nihilism of today’s culture and somehow trying to stay sane, even if he seems completely insane half of the time.

National Public Radio has been derided by conservatives as being an example of a liberal slant in the media. Maybe this is true, maybe not. But to me more than being slanted towards one side or another, NPR distinguishes itself as being thoughtful and in-depth rather than based on fluff and stereotypes. They don’t base what stories they do on the old adage “if it bleed it leads” because they are not out to gain the highest ratings in order to maintain funding via advertising. They have been ridiculed as being elitist, snooty, pretentious, etc. There are definitely times where I get this feeling too, and I’m probably less likely to get it because I’ve been listening to them for so long. Despite its flaws, NPR is an incredible resource of information. You may not trust everything that you hear, but neither should you from any one source of media, be it NPR, Howard Stern, or CNN. There are inherent biases no matter how much someone puts on a show of being “objective.” Fox’s whole “fair and balanced” mantra is nonsense. What they are is a network that has a very definite slant towards the right. I know some may say it just seems that way because most of the media is so far to the left that Fox seems like it’s to the right even though it’s really in the middle, but that doesn’t ring true to me. It has many obviously conservative commentators and only one admittedly liberal one. I admit I haven’t watched it since we got rid of cable a year or so ago, so I can’t speak to it’s current state, but somehow I don’t think it’s changed much.

I first stumbled onto NPR in college. When I was growing up, I simply never heard it in our house. It would have fit in, since my mom is a news junky, but we were too fixated on TV and I don’t think there was a 24-hour NPR station in NYC in the 70’s and 80’s, although I could be wrong. In high school I was listening to K-Rock in NYC, which played classic rock. Then towards the end of high school, or perhaps the beginning of college, I started listening to a shortwave radio I had bought. It was a whole new world. Shortwave broadcasts are generally government run stations from around the world without commercials and with very in-depth coverage in addition to a wide array of different programming. I was particularly interested in listening to Radio Moscow at the time as I had started to study Russian and was very interested in the country and it’s struggles in trying to open itself after 70 years of tyranny. As it turned out, I actually transferred into the school of communications at Boston University in my Sophomore year, this after realizing that Astronomy was 90% math and 10% physics or thereabouts, and that I had a foundation in neither. My thought was that I would study journalism and potentially become a foreign correspondent, hopefully in Russia. I eventually learned that one normally didn’t have one’s choice in where one went on assignment, and moreover the journalism classes I took did not leave me particularly enthralled. However, the school of communications at BU also housed an NPR studio, WBUR, and at the time I recall the Car Talk guys broadcasted from this building, although I never actually saw them. Being such a fan of NPR now, I wish I had taken more advantage of being at this school and gotten more involved in radio.

Naked in Baghdad is a book written by a veteran foreign correspondent from NPR, Anne Garrels. In it she recounts her time in Baghdad both leading up to, during, and after the U.S.-led invasion of last year. If you listen to NPR, Garrels’ voice is immediately recognizable. She rattles off insightful details in a way that rivets you, and you can tell she is intimately in tune with her surroundings. She tells her story matter-of-factly, and although she laces it with personal experiences that exposes her vulnerabilities and not-so-pretty side, she keeps her reporter’s steady tone, as if she is reporting on someone else’s story and not necessarily her own.

The story Garrels tells is a fascinating one. She first came to Baghdad months before the invasion and witnessed a regime trying to hold onto it’s grip while also trying to avoid war with the least amount of concessions. What I found most insightful was her reports on Iraqis and their opinions about America and the Iraqi regime. Much of this, especially before the war really got under way, was something Garrels has to interpret from indirect statements. Once the war has started and especially after the U.S. has successfully taken Baghdad, she gets to voice much more open opinion from the Iraqi people and it is a contradictory and diverse opinion. Iraqis, she reports, are grateful that Americans have ended Sadam’s hated regime, but also feel humiliated that a foreign power had to do this for them. They are a proud people in other words. They were also fearful not so much about the war itself as they had faith in the accuracy of the U.S.’s bombs, but about what might ensue after the actual invasion had concluded, and here it seems they have not been proven totally incorrect. There is still, one year later, a great deal of uncertainty about what will happen in Iraq. Will the disparate groups, many of which carry great animosity for one another based on sides taken during all the power plays over the last 30 years, ever be able to live together peacefully? No one knows.
I listened to an unabridged version of this book via Audible.com, and recommend this as the most natural way to ingest the book, since it is written by a radio correspondent. Interspersed between different sections of the book are “Brenda Bulletins” which are letters that Garrels’ husband Vint Lawrence wrote to an email list of Garrels’ friends to update them on her travails. So we hear Garrels’ own reporting, then we here Vint’s, which reworks it, by both putting it in the third person, but ironically making it more personal in some ways. I had mixed feelings about this device. In some ways, it might actually help in that it gives two different voices to the story, making it more heterogeneous and thus more interesting. On the other hand, there’s a lot of information that is simply repeated, and some of Vint’s letters are so stylized, especially after Garrels’ directness, it sometimes seems a bit flakey or pretentious. This may also have to do with Vint’s voice, which sometimes seems a bit affected compared to Garrels. Vint’s letters do seem to get more poignant and less playful and punny towards the end, thankfully, but then again perhaps I was just getting more used to them by that point. Of course this is only my opinion and I’m sure that others might actually have the view that these letters add to the overall experience. In any case, the book, especially the audio version of it is an extremely interesting, exciting, and poignant portrayal of what it was like for one reporter who actually stayed in Baghdad from before the war started to after the U.S. had secured the city, one of only a handful of journalists who did so.

Not having studies early American history since briefly in high school, my familiarity with Benjamin Franklin consisted mainly of a couple of facts. One is that Franklin is on the $100 bill, and the second was his “discovery” of electricity via the famous experiment with a kite and a key. I wonder how many other Americans have a similarly superficial knowledge. I would contend all of us would benefit from getting a clear picture of this very influential founding father.

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, by Walter Isaacson has generally had very favorable reviews from readers and critics alike and I would not disagree with them, although I don’t presume to be expert enough in historical matters of early America to comment on its accuracy. But it does seem like a fairly detailed account of Franklin’s life from the time he was 16 till his death at the age of 84.

Isaacson describes a man whose characteristics are not only likeable by most of us, but so familiar that one could easily imagine this man in today’s world. That’s not to say that Franklin would not be considered extraordinary even by today’s standards. His skill in diplomacy, rational thought, science, statesmanship, management, and many other areas would characterize him as a dynamic and multifaceted person by most. Among the items that impressed me greatly were the following:

Although Franklin initially looked down on blacks or rather black slaves as thieves, he very quickly changed his opinion upon seeing a classroom where black children were learning and started aided these schools monetarily. His opinion became that slavery itself made the individual (whoever they were) into less of a person, and became one of the most strident early abolitionists. Unlike those who wrote theoretically about slavery being an evil but who still maintained their own (Jefferson is one quick example), Franklin put his money where his mouth was.

Franklin never belonged to a specific faith, but especially late in life would sometimes evoke god as the creator of things in trying to promote humility. His view of the divine however, was pragmatic and rational, and he took the opinion that it was useless to bother his mind with questions about the details of scripture – even such a major one as to whether Jesus was divine – when there was no way to prove this. Instead he boiled all religions into the common denominator of “do good to others.”

His scientific thoughts and experiments were of course very impressive, and all of this was amazing for a man who was self-taught, of humble beginnings. He was indeed, the first Heratio Alger story, and assuredly Alger used the example of Franklin to model his stories.

Since Franklin’s death, his image has increased and decreased in status as those who were his antithesis gained stature and influence. David Brook’s Bobos in Paradise explains this long struggle between Franklin’s rational, practical Bourgeois, and the romantic Bohemian characterized by Keats and so many others. Admittedly Franklin does seem to embody the bourgeois stereotypes almost to an extreme, and yet I come away from this book with nothing but admiration. Perhaps because I’m not overtly passionate about most issues myself. Some people prefer a polite and rational argument to passionate entreaties, screaming, or other dramatics. Not everyone has to embody both rationalism and passion, and few can pull that off, so why not have prime examples of the most effective in both of these?

I actually listened to this as an audio book download from Audible.com. It was an abridged version, but even so was over 7 hours. I’m sure the book or unabridged version would go into a great deal more detail but it’s hard to know how helpful that added detail is, especially as an introduction to a topic that one has little knowledge of to begin with..

Salt, by Mark Kurlansky, is a fascinating book about the history of, you guessed it, Salt. It’s amazing how something we take for granted because it is so cheap and on every table, whether at someone’s home or at a restaurant. It is given away for free at fast food restaurants, and is in copious supply in our vast oceans that take up most of the surface area of the planet. Yet Salt was not always taken for granted. Kurlansky talks about how for thousands of years it was a vital resource that played into economics, politics, wars, technological progress, and culture in general.

Kurlansky is incredibly thorough in his accounting of the story of Salt. However, at points the level of detail gets a bit too deep for me. Like other nonfiction books that treat a subject with lots of history, sometimes the relentless listing of people and places, and events get overwhelming. Salt also seems to jump around relentlessly both geographically and chronologically. I still found it very
interesting, just a bit bewildering at points! One thing that Kurlansky recounts which I think could have been left out is his recounting of recipes that somehow involve salt as an ingredient. These recipes go back thousands of years and they are sometimes fascinating, but they are all quoted from their original sources and thus use somewhat archaic language and ingredients that most would be unfamiliar with today. A few of these might have been good to spice things up, but Kurlansky probably includes a couple dozen or so of these!

All in all, it was a decent read, but one that I fear many may put down after a while or at least have to skim through. I actually listened to this book on Audible.com. The narration, by Scott Brick, was affective and kept my attention throughout most of the reading despite some of the problems with the subject matter as expressed above.

Bill Bryson is a favorite of mine, having written a bunch of books that are in the genre “travel narrative.” Bryson’s wit and insight not just about travel but life in general, is amazing. But just as wonderful is his voice. Luckily, most of his books he narrates himself with his half Midwestern half Brittish accent. This description doesn’t do it justice; of course, you really have to hear it. It’s not like an affected Brittish accent taken on by some (the head of my high school comes to mind), but just an odd intonation that alerts one to the fact that Bryson probably hasn’t spend his whole life in the U.S. In fact, he moved the U.K. when he was in his early 20’s and settled down there. Back in the mid-1990’s, I believe, he decided to come back to his native country and settled in a small town in New Hampshire with his family. Unfortunately it looks like we’ve lost him again as he has moved back to his adopted homeland.

Recently when I was on Audible.com’s site, looking through new books, I noticed “A Short History of Nearly Everything” in non-abridged format! I was ecstatic. The length was a full 19 hours. Back in July when I saw Bill Bryson had a new book out and it was available for download on Audible, I jumped at it, despite the fact that it was an abridged version. At over 6 hours, it was still a decent length. Now with a non-abridged version available, I felt compelled to snatch it up. Silly me I assumed that Bryson narrated this unabridged version; after all, he’s narrated all of his other books available on Audible. The narrator, Richard Matthews is British, but doesn’t have nearly the pacing and intonation that make Bryson such a pleasure to listen to. Nevertheless, you can still hear Bryson’s voice sometimes through the words if you try. At over 19 hours, there’s of course a lot more detail – mainly a bit fuller explanations and technical details of the science, which can be helpful if there are areas that are hard to grasp without examples, etc.

I would have to say that “History” is one of those books where I find the abridged version slightly better than the unabridged. One could probably say this about many poorly written books that drone on and on and could be actually improved by an abridgement. But this isn’t the reason that I prefer the abridged version, of course, it’s the narration! Matthews narration is by no means bad, but it is the difference between good narration and wonderful. It’s hard to explain, but Bryson’s voice, pacing, intonation, etc. is just so distinct and of course his actual voice reflects that which actually wrote the words down to begin with. Somehow I felt like I learned and remembered more from the abridged version than from the unabridged. Part of this may have to do with the content and that the unabridged version simply fills in some of the details that the abridged version leaves out but still purveys in a general sense that can be understood.

I have also come to the conclusion that in some cases for non-fiction books, less is actually more. When a certain historical event is covered, that’s one thing, but a broad accounting of events throughout history begins to get overwhelming after a while and even with the best of authors can start to feel like a mere log of events and persons. I’m sure the more one is already familiar with the events and people the less this is the case. I have read a lot of science history, so much of this was familiar, but Bryson’s book is tour de force of science, including almost all sciences you can imagine. Kind of a Cosmos of the 21st Century. A nice thing about the unabridged version that I didn’t notice in the abridged (although perhaps I just overlooked it) was that Bryson quotes a lot of other science writers, which gives one recommendations for further reading in most areas of science.

For those who like reading about science or even who just like Bryson, I would still recommend the unabridged version, but I think it should be read in addition to the abridged version, not instead.

The first I actually heard the name Philip K. Dick, it was from a radio host on WBAI, Jim Freund, a true Dick fanatic. He was a member of a local bulletin board system in New York City called Magpie, created by Steve Manes. A bunch of us were invited over to WBAI to watch him do his show, The Hour of the Wolf, which was unfortunately 5am to 7am. But this was back in the 80’s and I was still young and all-nighters were not a rare occurance for me back then. A few years later Jim Freund actually got us tickets for a theatrical performance of Dick’s Close My Eyes The Policeman Said put on by a theater group from NYU.

I call myself a PKD (Philip K. Dick) fan, but I’m ashamed to say that I really have not read considerable amounts of his prose. The novels I’ve read are Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The Man in the High Castle, Martian Time Slip, and Radio Free Albemuth. Up until reading this collection of short stories, I’d never read any of his short fiction.

For those unfamiliar with Dick, his stories are generally dark and paranoid, and reality is shaky. Dick deals with issues of sanity, alternate realities, drug-distorted realities, religious-distorted realities, and the different perspectives of reality between artificial life (or artificial intelligence as it’s known to us today) and natural life. Dick himself had a somewhat tenuous grasp on reality during some of his life and eventually drank himself to death. Nonetheless, his copious works carry his name forward and this book is an example of how it has influenced film makers.

As a science fiction author I find he was often off the mark when it comes to some of the finer details in his portrayal of future worlds. It’s a common complaint that when imagining the future, authors often underestimate the changes in the farther future (say of 50 or more years), but overestimate the changes in the nearer future (say under 25 years). In addition, the vast majority of what Dick wrote was before the age of the personal computer, and since few authors envisioned such an enormously influential device on society, a great deal of what came before the mid 1970’s seems very dated. Nonetheless, Dick does get a few ideas eerily right. Reality may not be as dark and devastated as the ones he painted, but some of the fears he had play themselves out in the more questionable actions that government has taken since his death. Whether or not his books accurately predict our future is not of the utmost relevence, however. Appropriately enough, his work, to me anyway, is more about alternate futures; futures that could have been possible but have turned out not to be - at least mostly - or at least not yet.

As mentioned, many of Dick’s works have been cinematized. The first of these was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (although his story Imposter was apparently dramatized for TV in the 60’s), which was made into the Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. This was one of my favorite movies as a kid, and even watching it today, over twenty years after it came out, it still does not seem “dated” to me the way so many older (and even some more recent)Sci-Fi movies do. The book, although containing the same characters and also being about replicants, was turned on it’s head. In the movie, the whole point of it is that the replicants are given expiration dates because it’s found that after a certain point they develop real emotions. Whereas in the book, the reason they are being hunted is because they cannot have real emotions, like compassion, and so have no qualms about killing.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is one of the few of Dick’s full-length novels that’s been made into a movie. Most of the other movies based on his work have adapted short stories, and the collection reviewed here contains most of these screen-adapted stories. Unfortunately the cinematic versions of these stories pale in comparison to Blade Runner. Like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, most of these stories have to some degree been turned on their heads.

In Paycheck, the alternate future is more fleshed out in the book and it is one where the government is more oppressive and companies are the only entities that hold significant power outside the government. The individual has few rights. This is a common theme in Dick’s works. The political/military/economic dynamics play into the story in a central way, very different from the somewhat personal story of a lone freelancer pitted against a shady company in the movie.

In Minority Report, Dick’s view of a post WWIII future where world governments battle with military forces and industry for power changes a great deal of how the story works out. Again, much of the plot remains the same. John Anderton is a police commissioner in charge of “Pre-Crime,” a division that predicts murders before they happen, by way of idiots who babble incoherently and then their words are processed by a computer into coherent thoughts. Murder has basically been eliminated until he finds his own name being predicted by the idiots. The movie is more about Anderton clearing his name and finding the true murderer, but the book diverts from this in a very “P.K. Dickian” way, which although certainly interesting is not exactly standard movie fare!

We Can Remember It For You Wholesale was made into the 1990 film Total Recall, with Arnold Schwartzenigger. This might have been the most alterned in some ways as any of his stories. This was a fairly short story about uncovering memories that had supposedly been deleted. It ends in a fairly bizarre and abrupt way that you will never expect. Never do we see the main character, Quail, go to Mars. He simply retells a few scant details about being on the planet as an undercover agent. Whereas the movie only hints at this, in the orginal story you get hit much more up front by the question of how real memory is and what memory is real and what is fantasy.

The final story in the collection that was converted to the screen was Second Variety, which was made into the movie Screamers. This is the one film that I did not see, so I can’t really speak to the difference between it and the original story. I will say that the story is very typical of Dick, about a soldier on an Earth that has been ravaged by nuclear war. Intelligent machines have become a major element of the battle. As with other works by Dick, what we initially assume about the identity of a person starts to come into doubt. I thought this was a good, albeit pretty dark tale.

The one movie that I’ve seen based on a story by Dick which was not included in this collection was Imposter. The movie was quite terrible, so I can’t imagine the story being worse, and assume it must have been a whole lot better, but then I’m sure Dick has some duds in his collection as many prolific writers do.

The last piece in this collection, The Eyes Have It, is a spoof, very short and undoubtedly something that will make you laugh

This particular collection of stories is actually not found in a book, but rather an audio presentation by Harper Colins Audio, available on Audible.com. The stories are narrated by Keir Dullea, who does an decent job at reproducing the somewhat noirish, paranoid tone of these stories.

We were given Time and Again, by Jack Finnie, as our first summer reading assignment in the summer between 9^th and 10^th grade, I believe. As was typical, I got about ¼ through the book before putting it down. At the time, my attention span was much more suited to comic books or stuff of similar length. I held onto the book, though, and it is still on my bookshelf over 20 years later. Of course it remained one of those books that simply sat there waiting to be read all this time, along with the hundreds of others! I am not only easily distracted, but a slow reader. I like to buy books that sound fascinating, but often don’t read them or if I do, I will start them but never finish.

This is why Audible.com has saved me in many ways. The company manages downloadable audio books via a subscription setup that is very reasonable compared to how much it costs to actually buy tapes or CD’s of these items. Of course borrowing it from the library would be far cheaper, but not nearly as convenient, and one would only have temporary access to them. With Audible I can download my books, play them on my computer at home, or transfer them to my iPod and listen to them on my commute to work, while out walking, etc. Because I can listen to them at other times, I feel like I am getting in extra time to read things when I normally would not be able to. Over the last several years by doing this I’ve been able to read over 100 books I think.

So, I was delighted when I found out that Audible had replaced their previous abridged version of Time and Again with a new unabridged one. Audible has tons of unabridged titles, but some of the publishers it deals with I suppose only put out abridged versions of their titles. Yet, as unabridged titles become available, Audible often replaces the abridged versions and even sometimes arranges for audio versions to be made of books that otherwise don’t have them.

Time and Again is one of those books that innately appeals to me because of my background and interests. So it seems odd that I would have waited so long to read it, but there you have it. First off, it takes place in New York City, Manhattan, where I grew up. Second of all, it deals with time travel, a subject that fascinates me endlessly (my favorite movie is 12 Monkeys). Thirdly, it deals with the New York City of the 1800’s, and illustrates these at least partly through old sepia photographs that have always fascinated me, especially considering my love of photography. And finally, of course, the fact that this was a book I was supposed to have read 20 odd years ago.

The book, as I’ve mentioned is about time travel. Simon Morley is a 28-year-old art director in an advertising agency (another link since my father was both an art director as well as a photographer) not very happy with his life or career. He’s been seeing a woman and thinks one day they may get married but doesn’t seem very excited about the prospect. His job of drawing insipid adds for soap and other products does not exactly fill him with excitement. He is then seemingly randomly approached by a stranger. This amiable man convinces Simon to come to a meeting where he is given some tests and let in on a secret government project involving time travel. Simon, in the beginning anyway, sees himself agree to joining the project almost as if he’s watching someone else and not actively making the decision himself.

What ensues is Simon’s adventures in the past and the common theme of whether one can affect the past (and thus the present), and more to the point whether one should. These themes always get me thinking and continue to occupy my mind way after seeing a movie or reading a book that uses them. Like I’m sure almost everyone else, I sometimes imagine how life would be different for me if I could go back in time and tell myself or my parents something that would affect the way they raised me or what I did with my life early on. Actually, the fantasy of simply waking up one morning in my childhood bed a the age of, say, 7, but with my current memories, is sometimes even more compelling, but I suppose not as often shared by others as simply going back in time to give forewarnings. Of course what I always come to realize about these things is that while alleviating some issues, they would also mean that most of my current friends, even my wife, would not know me. Sure I could somehow look these people up and try to establish relationships with them, but it would be artificial. They would be wholly different relationships if I could even establish them at all. Knowing that I would be losing those current valued relationships is enough to stop me and decide that maybe the devil I know is much better than the devil I don’t!

Getting back to the book, I had a curious experience with it. The book deals with Simon’s own “cultural immersion” but into a different time rather than place. He was constantly having to adjust his thinking about what he previously took for granted, let go of some stereotypes of the past, etc. In an ironic way, though, I had the same difficulty adjusting to the cultural differences simply between my current time in the 21^st century, and the time that Finnie wrote this book, around 1970, or almost 35 years ago! While many of the modernisms that Simon goes on about in his comparisons between his current day and the past that he is visiting are still here today, many are long gone. The most noticeable difference is his attitude towards women. Apparently all the government people heading the project have “girls” and Simon often speaks of them in a way that while not blatently condescending, certainly indicates that he is still of a time where women are seen as having predefined roles different from men and can be neatly all pigeonholed in this way and others. The appearance of women is also a main focal point of their characters, although he certainly does finally break through that to explore the innerworkings of some of the more central female characters. The other very noticeable difference is that instead of using the term “Blacks” or “African Americans” he uses the pretty antiquated term of “Negroes” which really makes him sound from another time! There are other issues like this, but in all, it almost seemed like I was looking back on an old recounting of someone who was then recounting something from a yet more distant time. Did this double filter distort things? Perhaps. It was at least to some extent distracting. But the overall story was entriguing enough that I was able to get past this issue.

The main other thing that bugged me about this was how the actual time travel worked. I remember back in high school when first trying to read it being very excited because the method was very accessible to me. Now I just find it hokey and incredibly unscientific and improbable. Not that time travel is probable to begin with, but the way it is explained in this book, it’s almost as if a significant chunk of the population could do it in their living room if they new the “secret code.” I won’t tell you the actual method in case you want to read it yourself, but suffice it to say, it’s a bit silly.

The book was narrated by Paul Hecht, and while not terrible, I thought him pretty mediocre as a narrator. Up until the last third of the book, I thought he really only had one voice. He might sound a bit rougher for some characters, but otherwise there wasn’t much difference in intonation, accent, etc. Finally there were some characters who had irish or other ethnic accents which he simply couldn’t ignore because these accents were referenced in the text. Luckily they were only a few lines so he could not butcher them too much. There were also some words that he simply pronounced wrong. One in particular I just couldn’t understand because it’s not an uncommon word by any means: grimace. Instead of putting the accent on the first syllable and pronouncing it like “grim-iss,” he pronounced it with the accent on the second syllable as “grim-ais.” Perhaps that is an alternate pronunciation of the word, but I’d never heard it, so it sounded as if he simply didn’t know how to pronounce a fairly common word.

Middlesex, for those who’ve been living in a cave (or just watching tv and playing video games), won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction last year. Penned by Jeffery Eugenides, author of the widely acclaimed Virgin Suicides, the book covers the 80-90 years worth of family history, the family of the protagonist, Caliope Stephanides, or Cal, or Callie. And the history here is not just for history’s sake, but also due to the fact that Cal is a hermaphrodite, and this genetic disorder is traced back through his ancestors as unwitting carriers, some of whom bear a certain “guilt” for contributing to it’s likelihood, despite their not understanding such consequences.

Eugenides writing style makes for addictive reading. Cal ostensibly is narrating, but she narrates details of her grandparents past that infers omniscience. In this sense it’s almost Oracular. Of course, the Stephanides family is Greek in origin like Eugenides, and so one can draw parallels to Greek tragedy or even to epic prose of Homer. I have heard others compare his style at least in Middlesex to that of Nabokov, but I cannot vouch for this, not having read any myself yet.

They story begins with his paternal grandparents who live on the mountainside town in what is now Turkey. His grandmother, Desdemona, inherits the silkworm trade of her parents at an early age and cares for her younger brother Lefty. They eventually must flee as the Ottoman army retakes the territory from the Greeks, and end up in roaring 1920’s Detroit. The rest of the book is much of a history of post World War I America as a family saga. We get a close-up picture of Fords factories, the beginnings of the black empowerment movement, World War II, Detroit race riots of 1967, and more.

Interspersed in his family and eventually personal history, Cal’s present-day persona, at 41, is still trying to come to terms with his sexuality, which still rules him and his relationships, or lack thereof. He his living in Germany and meets a woman whom he is interested in. So while we learn about Cal’s coming of age and family history, at the same time we get a present-tense story of how his current self is developing (or not) a relationship. This allows one to piece together the motives, methods, and eccentricities of present day cal as we learn about what made him what he is. This is a very effective device.

I actually listened to this book, an unabridged version from Audible.com. The narrator, Kristoffer Tabori, was as excellent as the book itself. He manages to believably encapsulate so many different characters from the 20’s to the present day, with a myriad of accents and dialects impeccably.

Bang! Getting Your Message Heard in A Noisy World, is a book by the CEO and vie president of the New York advertising firm KTG, Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval, plus a third author, Delia Marshal, who was not identified so I assume she was a “ghost writer” of sorts. The book is billed as a manual of sorts for advertising agencies to be affective at creating memorable ads that actually increase business.

I listened to this book as audio via Audible.com, but by the language, and conversational tone, I feel like it would have been a very quick read on paper. The authors throw a lot of humorous analogies at the reader, although some of them are a bit trite and so fall a bit flat. It was a fun read, listening to all the war stories behind different famous ad campaigns (KTG did the AFLAK commercials and one of the authors worked on other very famous ones like Kodak moments, Toys are Us Kids, Herbal Essences Totally organic experience, etc.), how they got from initial ideas to the final product.

Although there was some good general advice in the book, I felt a lot of it was fairly common sense. Take risks, be nice, make ads that are different enough to be noticed but not so out there as to only be understood by a small group of elitist ad connoisseurs, etc. I suppose they are good things to hear about as reminders, but it would have been interesting to learn about somewhat less obvious and more “insider” details. For example, my mother used to be an award-winning advertising copywriter, working at some large New York ad agencies in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s, including Bill Bernbach, Leber Kats, Footcone Belding, and more. However, by the mid 80’s when she was in her mid-50’s, she was pushed out of her job and could not land another one no matter where she went. The reason? She was too old. Ageism is one of those things that is rampant in advertising even more so than many other professions - at least for the creative people. It is assumed that if you are older than 35, you are not in touch with the youth culture, and we all know how companies and advertisers faun over the young. Yes, there are products geared towards older people, primarily drugs and other health remedies, and perhaps with the baby boom generation getting older this will mean more advertising firms keeping their creative staffs longer. My mother was actually lucky, looking 5 or 10 years younger than her 55 years.

Perhaps such things were beyond the scope of this book, meant as more of a general treatise on advertising for those who have little or no knowledge or experience with the field. Even with the somewhat general approach, as I mentioned, it was interesting to hear about the stories behind the ads and even stories behind ads that never came to be for one reason or another. So definitely some light, entertaining reading which might be useful to some extent for some, but not any significant resource for all but the most beginning uninitiated.

Michael Ruhlman, a journalist, decided he wanted to write about what it was like to become a chef. So he went and enrolled himself in the Culinary Institute of America (CIA). The Making of a Chef is about his experience going through the institutes classes, working at it’s restaurants, and not only learning the skills one needs to cook, but actually the mentality that is required to become a successful one.

We first go through basic skills classes with Ruhlman and learn many basics with him. What is roux? What is Béchamel? How do you make a perfect consume from scratch? We then go onto to classes on bread-making, “garde manger” and many others. We pick up a few tidbits here and there about what these classes are about, what it’s like to actually be in them, and a few of the skills and information that is actually taught. Ruhlman also does a great job simply narrating his own experience not only learning the skills, but relating to the varied teacher chefs and fellow students. We get to know some of his fellow students quite well.

Ruhlman went through these classes in 1996, so I sometimes wonder how things have changed since with the advent of the internet. Listening to the book (I bought it through Audible.com), one can’t help to get excited about the CIA. Here you can go in a complete novice cook and within weeks you should have a mastery of at least many of the basics of cooking. In less than two years, you are ready to actually be on the line in a respectable restaurant. This is definitely boot camp for cooks, and from someone who has a very uneven knowledge of cooking it is enticing to think you could just go there and become a master… or at least proficient.

As tempting as this is, you also learn in this book (as I’ve heard elsewhere) how hard a job it is to be a chef. It is long hours of very physical work, on your feet most of this time. You work every holiday – in fact holidays are the only days you can’t take off – unless you are in the rare restaurant that doesn’t serve. You also have to keep up a relentless pace in order to keep customers from leaving due to impatience, and you have to do this and still put out a product that is basically perfect or very close to it in quality. The CIA, as Ruhlman describes it, prepares its students for this by the intensity of its classes, which give time limits for preparing everything and deducts points for the smallest imperfections. To want to become a chef, Ruhlman suggests (and I would tend to agree with him), one has to have it in ones bones. A dilettante like myself who gets excited by the IDEA of being a chef would probably very quickly end up bowing out due to these overwhelming pressures involved.

One word of caution about the Audio version of this book. It originally comes from Blackstone Audio Books, so they are most likely at fault, but I have complained to Audible who provide the book to its subscribers as well. There are some pretty bad problems with the audio. Nothing that makes in unlistenable, but still distracting enough to be annoying. The main issue one notes almost immediately is that somehow there is a lot of repeating of a sentence or part of a sentence. When I say a lot I don’t mean it’s constant, but it might be enough, if edited to knock 10-20 minutes off of the 12+ hour audio book. The narrator’s voice, which is not bad, keeps getting clipped off, only to start again after a pause. It’s almost as if they took a steady tape of the guy and chopped it at various points and inserted pauses intentionally. This also ads more time to it, and while distracting, also doesn’t make it unlistenable. Finally, it almost seems as if they recorded each few chapters with different equipment. The narrators voice gets louder and then softer and then higher and the lower, and then less treble, and then more treble. It’s pretty uneven, and yet another distraction. Hopefully Blackstone and Audible will clean up this recording and make it a much more polished product. Even given these inadequacies, though, I would still recommend it to any foodie, gourmand, or gourmet out there, or just someone who likes a good story and a look into a subculture that one would normally never get to see.