The Daily Sabbatical

This seems to have been an especially strong year in fiction.  It seems as though every book I have read recently has merited enthusiastic jigs.  Perhaps I’ve simply become better at choosing what I read.  Who cares.  The result is that I’m a happy reader.

Atmospheric Disturbances is a wow book.  It is a gift.  I had heard Rivka Galchen’s name, and I had seen the book’s striking cover, but I was not ready for such an excellent work.  I was, in fact, poised to hate this book.  It has an epigram from Gilles Deleuze, one of the great intellectal pretenders, and an epigram drawn from The Journal of Atmospheric Sciences that suggests all sorts of trying metaphors.  The last thing we need is another fiction that flirts with quantum profundities and chaos-theoretical butterflies.  That mess barely worked for Pynchon in Entropy, and it doesn’t need revisiting.

Then Rivka Galchen kicked my ass.

Galchen is apparently smart enough to avoid such intellectual muddling, but she is also clever enough to see that it still has comedic and, surprisingly, dramatic potential.  Her narrator is a psychotherapist who, in the process of treating a patient who believes he has the power and the duty to affect the weather, gets caught up in the delusion. He believes, to begin with, that his wife Rema has been replaced with a doppleganger, and the book follows his quest to find the real Rema.  A sort of post-modern Quixote, Leo finds clues everywhere he looks, particularly in the writings of one Tzvi Gal-Chen, a meteorologist who, incidentally, may or may not be the author’s husband.  Since the reader’s world is filtered through Leo’s confused perceptions, his disorientation is infectious–which fact explains, I believe, the chaos that was my dreamlife last night–but Galchen allows just enough reality to peek around the corners of his consciousness to make the whole adventure a very humorous farce.

I suspect some will compare this book to The Crying of Lot 49, but it doesn’t really read like Pynchon at all.  It reads more like a mix of Barthelme, Borges and Sebald.  That, my friends, is a good mix.

I’ve read some excellent stuff this year, and I don’t feel I can really name a favorite of 2008.  But there is no book I had more fun reading than Atmospheric Disturbances and there is no author I am more excited about than Rivka Galchen.

It’s finally out, and it is a lovely little book if I do say so myself.  And boy, it seems so much cleverer now that it is bound and formatted.  It’s too late for Christmas, but all of your philosophical friends and relatives would no doubt appreciate A Dialogue on Consciousness as a New Year’s present.  Great for birthdays, holidays, and hell, even Fridays.  Amazon has it listed as a pre-order, but it should ship now if you order it.

I know I’m being presumptuous to think anyone reading my blog will order the book, but in any case, I’d advise against buying the hardback.  It doesn’t have the cover art and is bound for libraries only.  The paperback is much prettier.

Salvatore Scibona is an extraordinary writer.  His first book, The End, was nominated this year for The National Book award, and I’d say there is a very good chance he would have won it had the staggeringly good trilogy by Matthiesson not been allowed in the race.  What’s even more impressive, I suspect this author will only get better.  Scibona is a crafter of sentences in the DeLillo tradition–and in fact his dialogue, at times, feels like that of the Don.  His love of language comes through both in form and content, but he’s no pedantic formalist.  His craft is still the telling of tales, and he does it splendidly.

The End is an immigrant tale, of sorts, but like any good book it transcends the moldy stereotypes.  Scibona’s Italian-Americans reside in Cleveland, and though the city isn’t actually identified until later in the book, one is led to feel as if one spent the early part of the century in the neighborhood surrounding Elephant Creek.   As present as the city itself is, however, one reads this book for the people.  One character in particular, Constanza Marini, is so finely wrought that she becomes ones own neighbor.  Costanza, who is an old widow for most of the novel, is a whip-smart pragmatist who provides that axis around which the book’s events revolve.  And without spoiling, the book does have events–it has a sort of mystery at its core that had me combing back through earlier pages looking for clues.

There are not many debut novels that i plan to reread.  The End is one of them.  Before I do, I’m going to search out some of Scibona’s short stories–this is a writer to follow.

Looks as though the RIAA has decided that spending more money on prosecution than it received in eventual settlement was not a good idea after all. Apparently suing housewives for hundreds of thousands isn’t good for their image either. File swappers should wait before celebrating, however. I suspect the RIAA is just getting smarter. They claim their new policy is to work with ISPs to discontinue, charge more for, or otherwise screw with the service of those found sharing.
We’ll see how it goes. There is a Turkish proverb about a mouse that, when unable to get through his hole ties a pumpkin to his ass and gives it another try. This sounds like the RIAA to me.

Simply one of the best Christmas songs–hell, one of the best songs–ever written.

Several years ago I was so excited about these guys.  Liela Moss has such a cool, through the cigarette fog voice, and the band seemed to have the Velvet Undergroung drive down pat.  They never really lived up to the potential their first two eps showed, however, and the new(ish) album only disappoints further.  I mean, all the pieces are there, and some of the songs still have the right energy, but most of the time The DS just comes off sounding like a poor man’s Metric.

Without a doubt these guys sound best when the songs follow a steady, building beat a la Heroin and let the somewhat simple mix of guitars wash with Moss’s voice into something insisting.  Somehow, they just can’t make the jump to anything faster without sounding just poppy.  So, again for The Duke Spirit, not a bad album, but not the one they should be making either.

Sovereign.mp3

This is for Torin.

Drawerb is posting top tens, including the one listed here a few days ago.  So far there are excellent lists from Patrick Wall and Eric Greenwood.  Good stuff all around. 

According to The USA Today:

A new study finds that certain brain functions of some low-income 9- and 10-year-olds pale in comparison with those of wealthy children and that the difference is almost equivalent to the damage from a stroke.

This from a study to be published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience this year.  This raises some important questions in political philosophy, and should cause us to seriously question certain free market conceptions of justice that presume a level playing field.  It’s too early to know what these results really mean, but this is an area that certainly deserves some attention.

No comment on the song…but very cool video!