Second Breakfast

Another enjoyable read in the “metaphysical thrillers” genre by Charles Williams, whose book “War in Heaven” I also wrote about (”reviewed” seems like an overstatement, since I don’t give enough though to these most of the time to call them proper reviews).

This book has a much more science-fictional tone and structure, and revolves around the appearance of a Persian artifact called variously the “Stone of Suleimann” (Solomon) or just “The Stone” in 1930s London (Williams’ novels all seem to be set in his then present day, but aren’t explicitly located in a particular time) which has some rather fantastic powers, including teleportation (in space as well as time, although the effects of time travel are found to be rather problematic), healing, clairvoyance, and a certain extension of the user’s will. The Stone is also found to be interestingly indestructible, or at least indivisible — an attempt to carve off a piece if it leaves the original (embedded in a gold crown reportedly worn by King Solomon) unharmed and an identical duplicate, which can be also duplicated in the same manner, all copies having the same properties. On the surface of the stone are embedded the letters of the Tetragrammaton, the four Hebrew letters for the holy name of God (YHVH).

The instigator of all of this is Sir Giles Tumulty, who also makes an appearance in “War in Heaven”, a sometimes academic and expert on the occult and arcane, who buys the Stone and attempts to use it to serve his own ends. On the other side is Chief Justice Lord Christopher Arglay and his secretary (or amanuensis, what a fabulous word) Chloe Burnett, who sense the higher purpose involved in the stone, and through it reawaken their own faiths and sense of calling. The reactions to those who come into contact with the Stone are various: some want a copy for themselves, some want to sell it, some want to hoard it (for example the head of the Transportation Labor Board, who fears a collapse in the transport business if everyone can teleport themselves), some demand access to it for its healing powers, and some are uncomfortable using such an obviously holy thing to serve their own ends. As word spreads, conflicts and debates become riots.

A big theme in the book is that of “the Law” — human law, divine law, natural law. The Stone has its own laws, which those who attempt to use it for their own ends find to their dismay and destruction. The novel feels like sci-fi in the sense that there is a central “what if” question or technology that carries the conflict of the novel. The Stone has obvious parallels in Tolkien’s One Ring and the Ring of the Niebelung (although Tolkien and Williams were not close friends and didn’t influence each other at least directly) and the book ponders somewhat the influence and impact of divine or supernatural powers on human minds.

The novel ultimately concludes with a somewhat distressing sacrifice that seems required to set things right, and the destruction of many of the more violent and villianous of the characters. I’m not sure if justice was really served, and Williams is asking a lot of questions of his reader as a result. This is definitely a satisfying and interesting book, and I’m looking forward to reading more of Williams’ writing.

We saw the Nova special by Greene based on his book on PBS recently, and I found his approach to communicating the complex and subtle ideas behind contemporary physics to non-scientists pretty effective (and he’s got a great, menschy-queer demeanor about him), so I thought it would be a worthwhile read. Greene is at least one million times smarter than anyone I know (although not as smart as Umberto Eco), but he comes across best as a passionate advocate of the science that he loves and advances as part of his work at Columbia University.

The book does a very good job communicating the essential ideas behind general and special relativity and quantum mechanics, the basic conflict between them, and how the development of string theory addresses these fundamental questions. Along the way he gives some great visualizations and metaphors that were for me novel and very helpful, and I’ve read a fair bit of popular science. For example, he uses this metaphor for talking about why time slows time for two observers as their relative velocity increases towards the speed of light — basically we can envision that, all other things being equal, that an observer “at rest” is moving through time at the speed of light. As one increases one’s velocity, one is robbing one’s momentum in time, and thus slowing down. For me that’s a really brilliant explanation that I’ve never heard before when talking about special relativity. Actually I think the earlier parts of the book are probably more accessible and effective: quantum mechanics and relativity have been around for a while and are relatively well-understood (as much as one can apparently really understand quantum mechanics), and the explanations are more straighforward. The string theory explanations get pretty subtle at times (although Greene of course makes his case well), and what worked best for me were the tools he provides about how to visualize multidimensional concepts using simplifying metaphors.

I always feel a little strange reading books about science — perhaps because I’m married to someone who practices science for a living, and I feel like “I’m just pretending to know about this stuff, its not like I understand the math”. However I think science literacy is in general an important thing to pursue, and the questions that string theory attempts to answer are as fundamental as you can imagine: what is the universe made of, why does it have the properties that we observe, and are there unifying underlying principles from which all of the variety that we experience emerges? That seems like something we should all be curious about.

If nothing else, I’m sure this stuff makes really good dinner party conversation.

I have been passionate about John Crowley’s writing for many years now, after having found “Little, Big” at Dawn Treader Book Shop in Ann Arbor back in 1991 — his prose is absolutely beautiful, and the motifs that he explored about our notions and beliefs about the world, the relationship between the “mundane” world and deeper levels of reality, the deep truths exposed in our daily intimacies I found captivating. I also read some of his other short fiction, but couldn’t find some of his stuff in print. Ægypt is part of a tetrology of books, which continues with “Love and Sleep”and “Dæmonomania” (the last as yet unpublished). I read Love and Sleep many years ago, but didn’t really understand it, and I bought the last book, but didn’t read it because I hadn’t read the first, and figured that the triad would best be understood from the beginning. I found some used copies of this book on Amazon for a relatively small sum and decided it was time to get this one.

Like his other books, Ægypt works on a number of levels. Crowley is an adept prose stylist, and he’s a fan of 50-cent adjectives that require an occasional trip to the thesaurus. The story centers around Pierce Moffett (I wonder if there’s an anagram there), a historian who finds himself without a job, and moves to a small town in Pennsylvania to write and find a new life for himself. Central to the story is a notion that Crowley explores elsewhere in his writing: what if the world was somehow (Somehow?) different in the past than it was today, if the world changed in some way, such that the magical notions and ideas of the past were all true, but now were not. And what if the world was in the cusp of yet another change (an Age? A New Age?)…how would you know, and what would it mean?

The novel tells a number of stories at the same time, moving between the present and the past, and features historic figures such as Giordano Bruno and John Dee. The themes that Crowley is working with are quite large and complex, and the novel builds slowly. Its going to take 4 books to work through everything he’s set in motion here.

This book is great in many ways, but didn’t entirely satisfy my expectations. “Little, Big” and his shorter works all feature some element of the fantastic that provides a nice hook for the sci-fi and fantasy lover in me. This book is harder to describe, and is really just more of a contemporary novel than a work of fantasy. That said, Crowley is an adept and careful writer and definitely worth attention and praise.

Alan wrote about the importance (and relative ease) of cooking at home. Given that I cook around half the meals in our house (sometimes more) and do the menu planning every week, obviously I’m into the whole cooking thing. I love to cook — as long as I’m not in a hurry I find it enormously relaxing, and after a day of shuffling bits into new, slightly less entropic arrangements, the manual craft of preparing and cooking a meal feels very tangible and satisfying.

Most Saturday mornings at our house we have a hot breakfast — either for two, or if we have houseguests, for several. Usually I prepare a variation on a breakfast potato theme that always wins raves. Potatoes and onion make fabulous magic together, particularly when in the company of real butter, a little garlic, and paprika. I use the Simply Potatoes brand of prepared (but not pre-cooked) potatoes: they taste as good as fresh, and save a lot of time when I haven’t had a proper cup of tea. Alan loves the potatoes as home fries, so I usually make ‘em that way. If you use cubed potatoes, chop the onions instead of slice them.

Saturday Morning Potatoes
Serves 4 (or 2 hungry guys)
Time: 1 hour (10 mins prep)

Ingredients

• 1 1/2LB peeled sliced potatoes (or 1 20oz package Simply Potatoes)
• 1 medium onion, peeled and sliced thinly
• 3TB unsalted butter (or 1 1/2TB butter and 2TB olive oil)
• 1 clove garlic
• 1 tsp sweet paprika
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

Method

1. Preheat oven to 425F.
2. Spread potatoes in 9″x13″ pan. Line with foil if you want to make your cleanup easier.
3. Mix onions into potatoes.
4. Melt butter in microwave (20sec on high at least in ours).
5. Grate garlic into butter (a fine cheese-grater works well for this), and pour butter mixture over potato and onion mixture. Toss well.
6. Sprinkle paprika, salt, and pepper on top.
7. Bake for 45mins, stirring a couple of times.
8. Turn oven up to 500F and cook another 10 mins until browned on top.

We usually have this with pancakes or waffles (the Bisquick box recipe works for us), and Morningstar “sausage”. Yummy!
I keep thinking I should find something new for the breakfast potato dish, but why mess with perfection.

Yahoo! News - Prince Charles’ Wedding Postponed a Day

Its a wierd time. We spent weeks waiting for Terry Shiavo to finally pass, hoping to save the poor woman and her family a little dignity (didn’t happen, alas). Then this Pope passes, whose legacy in my mind is clearly mixed — I can’t hate the man for holding the conserative values that he did, but I can hate the fact that he saw no conflict in his rejection of LGBT persons in the church and his embrace of many other social justice elements in the Gospel. Now we have this irrelevant remnant of the useless British aristocracy getting coverage for postponing a marriage the guy would never have approved of. There is some sort of wierd meta-pattern to all of this, but I haven’t discerned it yet.