→ September 22, 2010
→ By

Boardwalk Empire and The Constant Gardener.

Two topics in one post, just because. You probably saw my post on why the pitcher win stat must die. Klawchat on Thursday.

—

Finally got around to the first episode of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire last night , and I think my expectations were so high that I was bound to be a little disappointed, even though there’s a lot to like. The Prohibition Era/Roaring Twenties is my favorite period in U.S. history, in literature, film, or even non-fiction, so this series is tailor-made for me. Everything looks spectacular (outside of a couple of weak special effects), both the sets and the costumes, and Steve Buscemi really grew into the role as Atlantic City boss Nucky Thompson over the course of that one episode after a weak beginning with his speech to the Temperance League. Jimmy Darmody, (played by Michael Pitt), Nucky’s driver, has a chance to be an even more compelling character as a bright, young, ambitious kid whose moral compass has been warped or smashed by his experiences in Germany in World War I. Eddie, Nucky’s butler, was excellent as a sort of anti-Jeeves, although the role doesn’t offer much substance. And Paz de la Huerta … well, her character (Lucy) is mostly just comic relief, but if she’s naked a lot I won’t complain.

That first episode had plenty of cliches, though, starting with de la Huerta’s dim-witted showgirl/gangster moll. The other major female character, the abused, immigrant wife Margaret Schroder, comes with a back story we’ve seen a million times – beaten and subjugated by a jealous, alcoholic husband, who eventually gets his compuppance at Nucky’s hands, satisfying the viewer’s desire for vengeance but avoiding the harsh reality that domestic violence wasn’t seen the way we view it today. I can’t speak to the historical accuracy of the portrayals, but did notice that they made the Italian guy (Luciano) the loose cannon with the bad temper and the Jewish guy (Rothstein) the money-obsessed guy who cheats in his business dealings, both of which felt like unfortunate stereotyping. The editing style, particularly the montage sequence at the end, involved so many jump cuts that I had a hard time following the multiple strands, and the final murder in the episode lacked any context whatsoever. The main antagonist to Johnson, other than Rothstein, is Agent Van Alden, rocking a Dick Tracy jaw line but lacking any kind of back story to explain his zeal for stamping out alcohol (there are hints at a religious objection, but religious faith alone isn’t much of an explanation for Van Alden’s determination or steely expressions).

Buscemi and Pitt alone are reasons enough to continue watching, and the series is one of the only ones I’ve ever seen where the visual appeal would make me tune in anyway, but I am hopeful that this episode is the one where they worked out the kinks, setting up some stronger storylines and better characterizations for the rest of the season.

–

If you’ve set your mind on hiding the truth, then the first thing you’ve got to do is give people a different truth to keep them quiet.

I’ve been slacking on my reading during the moving/unpacking process but did knock out John Le Carré’s The Constant Gardener last week. A suspense novel involving spies that is less a spy novel than an angry novel of social criticism, it elevates a straightforward story of a widower’s quest to identify his wife’s murderers into a morally important work that is seldom preachy or strident without cause.

The superficial plot is that of the murder of Tessa Quayle and her research/activist partner Arnold Bluhm; their bodies are discovered in the first chapter, and the next hundred pages or so deal with the mundane nature of the death of the wife of a foreign service official – from the funeral to the investigation to the “handling” of the widower. It’s a slow beginning, but gradually builds enough of the case to set Justin off on the track that leads to the ultimate plot, the role in those murders of the multinational pharmaceutical corporations behind a supposed miracle TB drug called Dypraxa, whose side effects have apparently been ignored as it’s being given to poor Kenyans dying of the disease.

Le Carré still plays to his strengths as a spy novelist by sending Justin off on a run around the world, three continents and at least five countries, fleeing both his former employers and whoever killed his wife. Justin’s titular interest in gardening only plays a small role in defining his character, but le Carré does add some complexity through hints that Justin’s mind may be either going or playing tricks on him, a point of view pushed hard by the British foreign service, who appear to be operating in the pay of those same pharmaceutical companies who may have killed Kenyans through their drug trials and hushed it up. Through Justin’s investigation, which brings him into contact with all of the remaining major players in the drug’s development and early trials, le Carré offers the pharmaceutical companies’ points of view – particularly that they gave the drug to people who were likely to die of the disease anyway – but clearly has little sympathy for it; there’s a righteous anger bubbling just under the surface of The Constant Gardener that wouldn’t work if he was advocating a more controversial point of view, but given the existence of a similar incident that may have inspired this book, it’s hard to take the contrary position. The novel doesn’t have the same tension or psychological emphasis as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy or The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but the author’s obvious rage at what he views as abuses of supra-national corporations takes their place to drive the book forward towards its inevitable, tragic conclusion.

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→ September 21, 2010
→ By

Top Chef, season 7.

Sorry for the long delay between posts, but the move, which went reasonably smoothly*, has still been a colossal ass-kicking. Not only are we unpacking, but we have all our stuff in one place for the first time in … well, maybe ever, since we had a fairly full basement back in Massachusetts and a storage space with some boxes that had been there for five years. Since we started the unpacking process, we’ve donated at least six bankers’ boxes full of books, a lot of clothes and fabric, and an old laser printer to Savers, and we’re not done yet – so clearly, we had way too much stuff.

*I define “smoothly” as “the pizza stone, espresso machine, and rum collection all made it intact.” My wife may view it differently. Anyway having DirecTV come the day of the move to get us set up turned out great, since by that night we had the HD-DVR already recording shows.

I did catch the Top Chef finale last week as well as the first episode of Top Chef: Desserts. I’ve seen a fair amount of hand-wringing over Kevin’s upset win in Top Chef, and on some level I can sympathize – in effect, the team with the third-best record (of the three finalists) won the World Series. But as I argued loudly in 2006, the best team doesn’t always win the World Series, and winning the World Series does not make that team the best. Kevin may or may not have been the best chef of the final three, but he clearly finished ahead of Ed and had a good case to finish ahead of Angelo, and under the rules of the competition, that makes him Top Chef.

Ed’s final offerings were extremely disappointing. I’m unclear whether he completely farmed out dessert or had some input into what his sous (Ilan) was making, but that was as complete a whiff as you should ever see in a final challenge – he served sticky toffee pudding, an outstanding dessert that (for me) transcends ordinary cake, but there’s a recipe for the thing in the back of Baking Illustrated, and most Whole Foods sell a very solid microwavable version from the Sticky Toffee Pudding Company. I know he used fleur de sel, but salt and caramel isn’t exactly an inventive combination. I didn’t really see a chilled corn soup as the sort of cutting-edge cooking I’d want to see in a Top Chef finale, and I just have to take the judges’ word for it that his fish dish was too complicated and that he overcooked his duck. I will say that duck can move from perfectly cooked to inedible in a short period of time.

Angelo getting sick provided the drama the producers seemed desperate to inject into this season (coughpeapureecough), but also raised a question for me of whether he completed enough of the work to win the title. It was a lose/lose situation – if he’d won, there would be legitimate complaints that he skipped a day of work the other chefs put in, and if he lost, there’s the question of whether he lost because he got sick. The tart cherry “palate cleanser” was incredibly bizarre – palate cleansers usually aren’t sweet, and certainly not sweet and acidic – but the way he flubbed the first dish shocked me, since a pork belly char siu bao should be right in his wheelhouse. The meringue was also just weird; it was as if Angelo couldn’t taste how sweet some of these items were, so he wasn’t bothered by the high sugar content.

From episode one, Angelo came off poorly on camera between the steady arrogance (doesn’t bother me if the man can really cook) and the increasingly emotional, even erratic, behavior, but he was the closest thing this season had to a high-quality chef who pushed the envelope with many of his dishes. He’s no Voltaggio brother, but in a thinner pool, he stood out to me all season.

Whatever the reason for Angelo’s mediocre performance in the finale, it does seem like Kevin out-cooked him, and his quartet of dishes had its weakest link up front (the vegetable terrine … seriously? A terrine? What’s next, Kevin – a fondue pot? You can take that terrine and shove it up your aspic) and finished very strongly, with a dessert that the judges treated as revolutionary but looked to me like it was slightly clever but just well-executed. He didn’t botch anything major and left the judges with strong impressions of the dishes they had most recently from him, which doesn’t match our general impressions of what should make a Top Chef … but it’s not like we tasted the food, either, so I’m really hesitant to call them out the way I’m going to call the voters out when Felix Hernandez finishes 4th in the AL Cy Young voting.

Overall, a disappointing season, one where I felt like I didn’t learn as much about food as I did the previous year. Great cooking shows should either teach you fundamentals or get you to think about ingredients differently, and both Voltaggio brothers did that, while no one this season did. Kenny was our best hope, as he went for crazy flavor combinations, but when the judges told him repeatedly to edit his dishes and he didn’t do it, he was destined for an early exit.* I thought the judges had really fallen for Tiffany’s cooking, and she seemed to execute at a very high level until her last episode, but did she ever push the envelope with anything she produced? In hindsight, I think the answer is “no.”

*Also worth noting: The stronger teams on paper in this year’s Top Chef Restaurant Wars episode and the two-team episode of the current season of Project Runway both got smoked by the underdogs.

As for Top Chef: Desserts, as someone who likes cooking desserts even more than I like cooking savory foods, I’m glad to see the sequestering of desserts into their own show, and we already have seen some Voltaggio-like offerings from Seth, who works with a complex, full flavor palate and is pretty clearly unafraid to use it.

Gail Simmons gets her chance to look more beautiful without Padma Laskhmi next to her, and so far they haven’t sabotaged her with ridiculous clothing. Her delivery as a host didn’t work for me in the first episode, though; when she walked in to announce the twist to the quickfire, her “did you really think it would be that easy” came off as obnoxious, even taunting, when they were throwing a pretty nasty wrench into the works for the chefs. Picture Tom Colicchio delivering the same line as a throwaway – “Come on, did you think it would that easy?” – making it seem like a joke that the chefs are in on, a sort of, “Yeah, you know, it’s Top Chef, we like screwing with you” way. I don’t think Gail was trying to taunt anyone, but her delivery was that of a host who’s focused on seeming host-like instead of being charismatic.

I commented on Twitter that the preview of the rest of the season made it look like the show would be a cross between Top Chef and Project Runway, which wasn’t meant as a comment on how, er, fabulous the cast is but on how much more inter-chef drama they showed in the previews. Not to steal a line from Alton, but I’m just here for the food, and I hope they don’t edit in too much of the personality stuff at a cost of showing and talking about the dishes and the techniques at work.

Obligatory ESPN note: I’ll resume regular writing this week, with one piece scheduled for Tuesday and blog items probably five of the next six days, after which I’ll start some instructional league coverage. I will be doing playoff preview pieces for the eight teams that qualify, but they’ll be a little shorter this year so I don’t have to miss instructs while I’m living in the area. I’m also scheduled for a chat on Thursday.

As for the dish, I finished John Le Carre’s The Constant Gardener last week – short review to come in a day or two, I hope – and just started Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier.

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→ August 31, 2010
→ By

Puerto Rico (game).

Hat tip to Matthew Leach, who covers the Cardinals for mlb.com, for pointing out that The Roots’ new album, How I Got Over, is just $5 as an mp3 download on amazon.com (through that link). No idea how long it will last – the Arcade Fire sale was supposed to last one day but amazon extended it at least through the end of that week.

—

I’ve been promising a writeup of the game Puerto Rico for about six months now, but up until a few days ago didn’t feel like I’d played it enough to offer an informed take. The significance of the last few days is that I discovered the site Tropic Euro (two points to anyone who gets the reason for that name), a very slick Java-based application that allows you to play Puerto Rico against bots or live opponents. With a three-person game involving two bots running about 11-12 minutes for me, it’s been a nice way to take a quick break from packing as well as a way to get more familiar with why BoardGameGeek users rate Puerto Rico as the #1 board game of all time.

The goal in Puerto Rico is to amass Victory Points* by producing and shipping goods from your “island” back the mother country and/or by constructing buildings, especially one of the five large buildings that provide bonus points at the end of the game based on what else you’ve accomplished. Your island is a board with spaces for twelve plantations and twelve buildings; the plantations, which are free, can grow one of five crop or house a quarry that reduces the cost of any building by one doubloon. Corn is the least valuable crop, with a trade value of zero, but doesn’t require a processing building; coffee is the most valuable crop for trading but you can’t produce more than two units per turn.

*One thing you have to get used to when playing German-Style board games is that even a fairly concrete game concept, the goal is nearly always the abstract victory points. Completing certain tasks, building specific buildings, or shipping goods earns you points, but the assignment of points to deeds can feel a little arbitrary. I’ve just learned to accept it for each game and move on.

Buildings come in three types: Production buildings, for processing any of the four crops beyond corn; small buildings, each of which grants you a few victory points and some special privilege on every turn; and large buildings, which offer no in-game benefits but can provide significant bonuses after the game ends. Every building and plantation must be manned by a colonist, but their supply is limited, especially early in the game.

In each round, each player chooses a role, with options including the mayor (obtaining colonists), the settler (choosing plantations), the builder (obvious), the craftsman (producing goods), the trader (each player can put one good on the trading ship, as long as another good of that type isn’t already there), the captain (shipping goods for points), and, in larger games, the prospector (take a doubloon). Every player gets to utilize the roles chosen by other players, but the player who chooses a specific role gets an extra privilege, such as producing one additional good of his choice. Roles that go unselected are worth an extra doubloon in the next round.

The complex and slightly crazy part of Puerto Rico is that shipping round. There are five goods that players can produce, but there are only three ships available to take goods to the mainland, and a ship can only hold goods of one type. When a player chooses the shipper, all players must ship all of their goods; if there’s no room, most of their goods spoil and are lost with no compensation. (There are large and small warehouses that a player can buy and man to protect some of his goods.) The ships empty at the end of a round and only when they’re full.

Every good shipped is worth a victory point, and in the later rounds a player could easily ship five goods or more in a single shipping phase, especially if he’s the shipper and can place his goods first. Since points from shipping can easily be around 40% of a winning score, possibly more, there are a host of considerations behind the set of decisions of what goods to produce, how much to produce, and when to ship them, and those decisions also include considering what your opponents plan to produce and what they have on hand. A well-timed decision to choose the shipper role can grab you six points while spoiling goods for several of your opponents.

That’s what makes Puerto Rico a great game, and I’m going to assume it’s why the geeks over at BoardGameGeek have it at the top of their rankings: The decisions each player has to make are rich and complex and depend on potential future moves from both the player and his opponents. Just choosing a role means weighing four or five variables – money, colonist supply, the shipping situation, production potential, and what your opponents will do with this role if you choose it … or what someone else will do with the role if you don’t. Given the game’s complexity, it’s surprising that it works as smoothly as it does, and I think the only truly difficult part of Puerto Rico is setting the game up and putting it away.

It is, however, the most complex game I’ve reviewed on the dish so far, so I can’t just tell you that, say, if you love Settlers of Catan or Stone Age, you should try Puerto Rico. It would be more fair to say that if you’re looking for a more involved game than those two – both among our favorites – you should try Puerto Rico, not just because I recommend it but because the consensus of the boardgaming world is that it’s the best game out there.

Back to Tropic Euro, I’ve found that the software works very well; I’ve had occasional trouble logging on, where the main window was blacked out, but closing and restarting the app solved it. It offers PR expansions, swaps the prices of the Factory and University buildings (per the original boardgame’s designer’s suggestion), and the AI moves quickly and pretty logically, enough to punish me for making rookie mistakes. The app’s author, Chris Gibbs, says on the site that there will be a “hard” AI option available in the next week or so.

I’ve previously reviewed San Juan, the card game variant of Puerto Rico; while it’s consistent with the theme, it is a massively simplified game. I enjoy San Juan in its own right, but it’s just a different experience.

–

Posting here will be sporadic over at least the next seven days as we pack and await the moving vans. I should have at least one ESPN chat either this week or next, and both ESPN and dish blogging will become more frequent by the week of September 20th. If you’ve emailed me or asked me a question in any forum without receiving a response, I apologize, and I hope you understand.

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→ August 26, 2010
→ By

Charity & relocation.

I wrote last month about running a single sponsored tweet on my Twitter feed, asking for your feedback, which came back overwhelmingly in favor. The $244.53 payment arrived earlier this week, and I rounded up to $250 and donated it to Childrens Hospital Boston with my gratitude for the great care they’ve given my daughter over the last three years.

–

Speaking of charitable donations, Amiel Sawdaye, the scouting director for the Red Sox, is participating in the New England Parkinson’s Ride this year, with proceeds going to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s research. I know many of you are Red Sox fans and I offered to pass along the link where you can make a donation to help Amiel reach his goal of $10,000. He’s already halfway there and I gave $100 myself just before writing this.

–

So I mentioned in passing today that my family and I are leaving Massachusetts next month after eleven years year, nine in the same house, to relocate to Arizona. I’ll probably have more to say about it later on, but for now, I wanted to answer the two main questions that came up in the chat.

The only change you’ll see in my work at ESPN is more coverage. I’ll get more games while cutting my travel, which has been a major goal of mine for the last year and a half or so. I’ll get to more Fall League games and more spring training games, as well as seeing instructional league action for the first time and having better access to the Pac 10 and to all the great high school prospects in southern California.

The second question I was asked today was why the move, and the simple answer is that everything pointed the same way. We’ve spent the month of March in Arizona the last three years and have grown to like the area. Neither my wife nor I is actually from Boston – although the frequency with which I’m “accused” of being a Bostonian/Masshole/Red Sox fan is absolutely hilarious – and we are here largely because of a career I abandoned nine years ago. I have never liked winter or the cold one bit, even as a kid in New York, and the climate here hasn’t been great for my daughter, who has inherited my seasonal allergies and is prone to croup and even a little asthma. We’ll get more house for our money in Arizona, of course, and it’s one of the few places in the country where there’s a major league club, minor league activity, and access to good college and high school baseball. Most importantly, though, you never have to shovel sunshine.

Of course, it’s an enormous change for us, and we’re leaving our comfort zone here in Boston, as none of our friends or shops or routines will fit in the moving van. If you live in the East Valley and have a shop, a restaurant, a farmstand, a local product or service, anything you want to recommend, please send it my way.

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→ August 24, 2010
→ By

Unaccustomed Earth.

Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London, and her writing revolves around Bengali families in the United States who retain at least some of their non-American identity, but her writing is more American than most fiction by contemporary authors born in this country. Lahiri’s stories are richly textured, written in intelligent yet easy prose, showcasing her incredible skill at encapsulating human emotions through plot events large and small, and her overarching theme of Bengalis feeling adrift in a foreign country and culture seems central to the American experience regardless of the characters’ nation of origin. Her first published work, the short story collection Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and if anything, her second story collection, 2008’s Unaccustomed Earth is even better, more assured with stronger characterization.

The title story, which leads off the collection, is one of the most subtle stories in the book, dealing with Ruma, an Indian mother married to a non-Indian man, whose widowed father comes to visit her in her new home in Seattle. She is still grieving from the sudden loss of her mother, and now must deal with the question of whether to invite her father to stay with her, per Indian (or perhaps Bengali) custom, even though she has never had a close relationship with him and believes her husband is less than thrilled with the idea of having his father-in-law living in their spacious house. Ruma’s father, meanwhile, has begun a quiet affair – so quiet it barely merits the term – with another Bengali woman, also widowed, and does not wish to reveal it to his daughter or to give up his peripatetic new lifestyle. Lahiri allows both characters to narrate the story, creating two distinct voices, moving the story along by magnifying tiny events in their lives during the father’s visit and establishment of a new relationship with his grandson, surpassing anything he ever developed with Ruma. The story’s conclusion is extremely un-Hollywood, yet more effective for its realism.

Unaccustomed Earth closes with a three-part novella titled “Hema and Kaushik,” which returns to the twin perspectives of the collection’s title story by tracking two young Bengalis through three stages of their lives – a brief period in their teen years when Hema’s family housed Kaushik’s on the latter’s return from India to Massachusetts; Kaushik’s difficulty in adjusting to a major change in his family situation while he’s in college; and an unlikely reunion between the two in Rome with the two in their late 30s. The novella is more about Kaushik (the boy) than Hema, with the latter serving more as a lens to examine Kaushik’s character, and how a few major events in his life shape his choices in adulthood, including his inability to grieve and his difficulties in forming lasting relationships with women.

As much as I may praise “Hema and Kaushik,” it wasn’t the star of this particular show. I don’t read many short stories because I often find it hard to get emotionally invested in a character or a plot in ten or twenty thousand words, but “Only Goodness” was easily the most affecting short story I’ve ever read, for personal reasons. The story opens by telling us that “It was Sudha who’d introduced Rahul to alcohol,” a clue to the guilt the sister would later carry for her brother’s alcoholism, even though the addiction and downward spiral was almost certainly inevitable. An uncle with whom I always felt close was a lifelong alcoholic, something I didn’t know until late in my teens, and his periods of recovery never lasted and were punctuated by disappointment and frustration on the part of the rest of his immediate family. I remember too well the phone calls I’d get from him at odd hours in the late 1990s, about some get-rich-quick scheme he’d found or a penny stock on which he wanted my opinion, and the fact that I was not equipped to handle him in those states, or even fully aware of what the calls truly signified. Eventually, I drifted out of contact with him, talking maybe once or twice a year, hearing of him through my parents, until the day in spring training of 2005 when I got another call that he had taken his own life the night before. Rahul lives to see the end of “Only Goodness,” but Lahiri paints an accurate portrait of the devastation a grown child’s alcohol problem can cause and the false hopes and crushing disappointments it can cause, while still giving the reader enough insight into Rahul to feel some empathy, until the climactic event that caps the story.

“A Choice of Accommodation” chronicles the gradual decline of a “mixed” marriage (between an Indian man and a non-Indian woman) by watching the couple over the course of a single day and night at someone else’s wedding; I’ve criticized many writers here for badly-written sex scenes that feel like they were written by teenaged boys, but Lahiri wrote one of the few I’ve ever read that didn’t make me cringe – perhaps it simply needed a woman’s pen – although as the conclusion to this story the device felt a little hackneyed. “Nobody’s Business” is actually told from the perspective of the shy American roommate of an Indian woman on whom he probably has a small crush; he finds out her mysterious boyfriend is having an affair and is left trying to decide whether and how to tell her about it. The story itself works, with a technologically quaint solution, but the constant parade of suitors that the girl, Sang, faces – all men seeking an arranged marriage through her parents – provided a level of exasperating comic relief. The weakest story for me – still above-average if you’re looking for grades – was “Heaven-Hell,” told by an Indian girl about her mother who, trapped in a loveless arranged marriage, develops a crush on a Bengali graduate student who rooms with the family for several months, and even thatt story features a classic Lahiri oh-by-the-way twist at its end.

Interpreter of Maladies was brilliant and worthy of the recognition it received, but I can’t say I was as moved or involved in its stories as I was in those of Unaccustomed Earth, and her ability to create tension in short stories that revolve around emotions rather than action is astounding, reminiscent of the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the novels of Marilynne Robinson, two of the best American writers of the last hundred years. And I think it’s fitting that someone of a non-traditional background should emerge as one of the brightest voices in 21st century American literature, one who speaks to the experiences of an entirely new wave of immigrants who spend much of their lives living in one country while trying to maintain the cultures and traditions of others.

–

Before Unaccustomed Earth, I read John Dos Passos’ The 42nd Parallel, the first part of his U.S.A. trilogy. However, it’s not a complete, standalone novel; it weaves together the stories of five people in the U.S. in the late 1910s, but their paths just start to cross near the book’s end and nothing is resolved enough to merit a real review. I’ll write them up when I finish all three parts, which appear as a single entry on a few of the greatest-books lists I follow.

Next up: Dawn Powell’s final novel, The Golden Spur.

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→ August 16, 2010
→ By

Prime Obsession.

I admit it: I am not afraid of math.

And if you’re not afraid of math either – in this case, some fairly heavy math – you might enjoy Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics as much as I did. It’s a book about an obscure question in the field of number theory, one that remains unsolved after 150 years and probably has little to no practical application, but John Derbyshire manages to give the subject some real personality while doing his best to make it accessible to readers who haven’t taken a lot of advanced math classes or who, like me, are a good 13 years removed from their last one.

The subject of Prime Obsession is the Riemann Hypothesis, which states that the non-trivial zeros of Riemann’s zeta function are half part real. “Non-trivial zeros,” in this case at least, are complex numbers (a + bi, where i is the imaginary number defined as the square root of negative 1 and b is nonzero) that give the result of 0 when plugged into the zeta function. “Half part real” means that a in that complex number is equal to ½.

The zeta function is the crux of the matter, the sum of the following infinite series:

That is:

Riemann posed his hypothesis when studying the Prime Number Theorem, which states that for any random number N, the probability of N being prime (and thus the frequency of primes around N) is roughly equal to the reciprocal of the natural logarithm of N, that is, 1/ln(N). In his one paper on the subject, he hypothesized that the frequency of primes and the differences between the actual frequency and the predicted frequency in the Prime Number Theorem was connected to the zeros of this zeta function. He couldn’t prove it at the time, and even though David Hilbert declared it one of the great mathematical problems of the 20th century in 1900, one of a list that has seen all but two of its number* solved, and in 2000 the Riemann Hypothesis was named one of the Millennium Prize Problems by the Clay Mathematics Institute, it remains unsolved. Prove or disprove it and you’ll get a cool million bucks for your trouble.

As you might imagine, solving the problem isn’t easy; indeed, it stands unsolved more than a decade after Sir Andrew Wiles’ solution of the equally perplexing problem of Fermat’s Last Theorem, one that required the development of an entire new field of mathematics (topology) unknown to Fermat at the time that he wrote that he had a “truly marvelous proof” to the problem. (Current thought is that whatever proof he had was incomplete.) The difficulty of proving or disproving the Riemann Hypothesis has led many of the major figures in mathematics, particularly in number theory, to attempt to tackle all or part of the problem or to work on further theorems and conjectures that build on the assumption that the “RH” is true. (And it has at least held true so far for very large numbers, which is not a proof but is weak evidence in its favor.)

Derbyshire’s main difficulty, beyond the lack of a clear resolution to the story, is making the solution of a potentially useless mathematical conundrum interesting; Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem was momentous and newsworthy, but the practical applications have been nil – it’s merely interesting to people who like numbers. Proving the Riemann Hypothesis would likely have a similar lack of real-world effects, and the hypothesis itself is a lot harder to grasp than Fermat’s Last Theorem was; the latter problem had an incredibly complex solution, but the question itself was easy for anyone who’d taken algebra to understand. Derbyshire does a masterful job of walking through the history of the Riemann Hypothesis, from earlier work on prime numbers, including the PNT, through Riemann’s brief life and career in mathematics to the major developments in the 151 years since his seminal paper appeared.

The book alternates between chapters walking through the math and chapters on the history and personalities involved in the hypothesis’ history. Carl Friedrich Gauss has a starring role early, while G.H. Hardy, Leonhard Euler, J.E. Littlewood, Jacques Hadamard, and Hilbert appear at some length later on. Derbyshire sprinkles stories of their peculiarities, senses of humor, and non-mathematical interests to keep the text lighter while also highlighting the chance occurrences that made some of the progress on the proof possible and regularly pointing out the remarkable longevity of most of the major mathematicians he mentions.

His math writing, while clearly geared to a lay audience, still got fuzzy for me when he got deeper into the zeta function as he tried to map it to the complex plane. Derbyshire relies on these “visual” interpretations that don’t correspond to any sort of plane or graphs that I’ve seen elsewhere, and I felt it was the one time he presupposed some familiarity with higher math on the part of the reader. But to his credit, he relies largely on algebra and gives a brief (re-)introduction to differentiation and integration for the short periods where calculus is necessary to move the math story forward. He also hits many major touchstones that will unlock memories for those of you who took and enjoyed lots of math classes, from the Sieve of Eratosthenes to the amazing Euler’s Identity, the latter of which states that

And if you look at that formula and are amused, fascinated, or just generally intrigued, Prime Obsession is a book for you.

I also recommend a book about one of the mathematicians who makes a cameo appearance in Derbyshire’s book, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erd?s and the Search for Mathematical Truth. Erd?s was a Hungarian-born savant who lived most of his life out of a suitcase, traveling the world, arriving at the doors of mathematicians he knew and announcing that “my brain is open,” after which he’d settle in for a few days or weeks and embark with his host on a streak of problem-solving and paper-writing. He had his own peculiar vocabulary, consumed large quantities of caffeine and later amphetamines, and combined brilliance and prolificacy (that’s peak and longevity for you Hall of Fame watchers) to the point where other mathematicians are referred to by their “Erd?s number,” where a person who co-authored a paper with Erd?s has an Erd?s number of one, while others are marked by how many papers you must go through to create the shortest possible chain back to Erd?s.

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→ August 12, 2010
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Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs.

I wouldn’t have characterized myself as a huge Arcade Fire fan before last week – I’d heard several singles, liked most of them, but never ran out to download one of their albums or thought of them as one of my favorite artists. When Amazon.com ran a $3.99 promotion on mp3 downloads of their new album, The Suburbs (now $7.99), I bought it just on the assumption that there would be four or five songs worth having, more than justifying the cost. As it turns out, the album blew away my modest expectations, even with some unevenness, a 64-minute story of regret and frustrated hopes set to a pastiche of references and nods to new wave, post-punk, and alternative music from the 1980s.

After an introductory track that sent me for the fast-forward button, “Ready to Start” showed the Arcade Fire I know from their best prior singles, such as “Keep the Car Running” or “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out),” a foot-stomper with a driving bass line behind an understated vocal that mixes the yearning for an independent artistic life in a culture that seems (in Win Butler’s eyes) to reward the corporate life instead. “Empty Room” starts with a crazy violin intro – which continues behind the wave of guitars, creating an effect that reminded me of My Bloody Valentine, but without the latter’s excessive distortion; both that song and “Month of May” give the album its highest-energy moments to sustain the listener through the more subtle (and occasionally soporific) songs that dig more deeply into the decline of culture in the suburban sprawl.

The slower-tempo tricks are more of a mixed bag, but offer the album’s best overall songwriting. “Half Light II (No Celebration)” calls to mind New Order, or even Joy Division, with an anthemic lament with a lush arrangement behind dark, defeated vocals about the loss of nature and open space, while “Modern Man” channels Roxy Music, although the latter’s cliched moaning about the people in line behind him “can’t understand” typifies the song’s lack of concrete imagery.

“Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” is the final full track (there’s a 90-second reprise of the opening song after it), and one of the most devastatingly complete songs on the record, building to a crescendo that never quite arrives while growing into a sprawling (pun intended) homage to the classic new wave/synth-pop songs of the mid-1980s. I don’t care for Regine Chassagne’s voice, but her delivery of the song’s critique of the sprawl of the song’s title, that uniquely American creation of suburbs that go on forever, with “dead shopping malls” that “rise like mountains beyond mountains,” bringing excesses of light (I keep picturing car dealerships at night, sucking down energy to light up football fields of metal boxes) but lacking the edginess or openness of urban culture.

But the song I keep coming back to again and again is the spare, slightly uptempo yet haunting “City with No Children,” the title line itself (“Feel like I’ve been living in/a city with no children in it”) evoking images of deathly quiet, or even destruction – it brought to my mind the scene from The Road where they see “the little boy” in the window of a building in an otherwise abandoned city. The hand-claps stand in place of almost all typical percussion, while the predominant guitar riff is dampened, as if it was played through a pillow, creating a stunning contrast between the song’s pace and its melancholy production.

The Suburbs is far from a perfect album – there are too many “skip” tracks for me to slap an 80 on it, including the dirge-like “Wasted Hours,” “The Suburbs,” and “Sprawl I (Flatland),” and the slow rocker “Rococo,” with a staccato vocal line I just found irritating – but it’s far more than the standard three-singles-and-some-filler album template, a style that should be long dead in an era where the album is finally unbundled for consumers to purchase individual tracks. It’s the kind of album that would earn Grammy nominations if the Grammy Awards weren’t still based on wins, saves, and RBI.

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Amazon.com has another 1000 albums available for $5 apiece as mp3 downloads through the end of the month. Two I’ll recommend: Mumford and Sons’ Sigh No More, which I reviewed (glowingly) back in April; and Radiohead’s OK Computer, one of the five or ten best albums in the history of rock.

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→ August 6, 2010
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Burger Joint & the small Dominion expansions.

I received a review copy of the two-player game Burger Joint from Rio Grande a few weeks back, but wanted to play it a few more times before offering my thoughts. The game is extremely simple and the mechanics work well, but my wife and I didn’t find it engaging and thought the number of usable strategies was limited; however, it might be an ideal game for younger players because it’s so clean and simple to pick up and involves (mostly) things with which they’re already familiar.

The game’s concept is that two restaurateurs are competing to be the first to build a chain worth 12 total victory points, achieved by upgrading burger or pizza joints to diners and diners to bistros. He builds or upgrades these restaurants by taking resources – cubes in six different colors which loosely parallel ingredients you might find in burger or pizza joints – which are placed in the center of the game at the start of each turn, allowing players to select the cubes by alternating selections one by one. A player may store a maximum of seven of these cubes at the end of each turn, and since the requirements for a diner (four cubes of four specific colors, differing slightly for each player) differ greatly from those for a bistro (three cubes of each of two specific colors), there’s some resource management involved from turn to turn, possibly the most important part of the game.

Bistros are potentially worth the most points but the player can sacrifice some of those points to acquire a bistro with a special skill, such as the ability to exchange one or two cubes for a random cube from the bag, or for a cube of a specific color; one bistro is worth 0 points, one is worth 3 and has no special ability, and several are worth 2. Diners are worth one point apiece. A player’s third, fifth, and sixth burger/pizza joints are each worth one point, although a player may lose those points by upgrading some of those buildings to diners.

There’s one other way to obtain points – buying “publicity,” which utilizes cubes that the player doesn’t need for buildings (but that the other player does). Each level of publicity purchased allows the player to steal one cube from his opponent, but it takes several levels of publicity to get just one victory point and twelve to get to four victory points.

The cube requirements to build each building type and to obtain publicity are extremely well-balanced, and even with the randomness of drawing eight cubes from the bag each turn to split between the two of us, we didn’t finish any game with a score more lopsided than 12-10. The rules are well-written and very straightforward, and other than one quirk in how cubes are distributed to the central board from the bag – each player has exclusivity over certain colors depending on which diners each player owns at that moment – there’s no forced complexity to balance the game or make it harder for one player to pull ahead.

That extreme balance may be part of why we didn’t fall in love with the game, though. There seemed to be one basic strategy, and by the third game we noticed we’d converged on the same set of decisions. We both felt publicity wasn’t worth the heavy resource expenditure, which would probably mean eschewing the 2-point plays available in the bistro column. Each level of publicity requires three cubes, and on average it’s nine cubes per publicity point, while a bistro that might be worth 2-3 points only requires six cubes, and a one-point diner requires four. Because the colors required for publicity differ so heavily from those required for diners or bistros, it’s largely one or the other, and we didn’t feel like the publicity track was a good investment.

As a result, we just played for bistros, and the only real decisions there were when to go for the higher-point ones as opposed to the lower-value ones with better cube-exchange abilities. There’s some strategizing involved in cube selection, but again, we both figured it out fairly quickly…

…which makes me think this game might be ideal for younger players, for whom the level of strategic thinking required is just right. I can’t imagine that it would take an eight- to ten-year-old more than a few minutes to grasp the basic concepts here, and the short game time (under a half hour) is perfect for the attention span of a child*. It’s also very portable, with three small game boards (one per player plus the central board for cubes) and a bag of wooden cubes, and simple to set up and put away. For adults, however, I just think it’s a little light and ended up feeling repetitive after a few plays.

*Admission: I have a short attention span, which is why my blog posts are roughly 1/3 to 1/2 a posnanski in length.

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One of you commented on my Small World review that the BoardGameGeek store – which looks like they hired a bunch of Geocities customers to do their web design – sells some limited-edition expansions for that game and for Dominion. I ordered them all and we’ve used the Dominion expansions, comprising three new cards, several times already.

The best of them by far is Black Market, a Kingdom card where you create a separate “black market” deck that includes some selection of Kingdom cards not in use in the current game – so if you decided to leave out Market in the ten cards you’re using, you could stick a market or two in the black market deck and still have them available. When you play a Black Market card, you draw the top three cards from the black market deck and may choose to purchase one of them; whether you purchase it or not, you get +2 coins for that particular turn, so the downside is still solid.

The Stash card is a new treasure card with value 2 and cost 5; when you reshuffle your deck, you can place the Stash card wherever you want. I could see someone buying a few of these and loading the top of the deck with them to ensure they come up in the next draw, but buying just one or two didn’t make much of a difference because you never know the order of the rest of the cards in the deck.

The Envoy card was our least favorite. You draw the next five cards and one of your opponents gets to select one for you to discard, after which you take the remaining four. How this is preferable to Council Room or even Smithy is lost on me, and the fact that Envoy doesn’t give additional actions isn’t helpful.

It looks like at the moment you have to order the Dominion expansions through some eBay listsings accessible through the BGG Store link above. If you’re a regular Dominion player as we are, the Black Market card is worth trying (and it comes with Envoy), but I’d probably give Stash a pass.

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→ August 4, 2010
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Scout, Atticus, & Boo.

New post on the draft blog for Insiders: Cape Cod League top 30 prospects for 2010. Also, no Klawchat this week due to the start of the Area Code Games.

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I’m a big fan of To Kill a Mockingbird, placing it at #4 on the Klaw 100, but unlike most readers I came to the book relatively late in life, reading the book for the first (and only, for now) time at the age of 29. It was never assigned in school – when I think back on the garbage we had to read for some English classes in lieu of important classics of American and British literature, I wonder what the hell my parents paid property taxes for – and I actually wasn’t an avid reader of fiction between graduation from college and the turn of the century*. When I shifted from non-fiction – and just not reading that many books to begin with – back over to novels, I decided to fill in the gaps in my cultural literacy by reading as many of those “name” books as possible. They didn’t all measure up to their reputations, but Mockingbird exceeded them, and was one of a handful of books that accelerated the renewal of my interest in reading non-comic fiction.

*The book that turned me back on to fiction, putting me on a decade-long tear that saw me read roughly 400 novels across ten years? Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone, of course.

Documentary writer and producer Mary Murphy seems to feel much the same about the only literary output of one Nelle Harper Lee and assembled a book called Scout, Atticus, and Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of To Kill a Mockingbird that comprises interviews with 26 writers, celebrities, a politican, and a few people connected with Lee herself on the book, its legacy and the enduring mystery of Lee’s silence, both in her lack of output and her four-decade-plus refusal to give interviews. (Needless to say, she’s not one of the 26.)

Richard Russo, one of my favorite writers, had for me the most interesting essay because of how he talks about the art of writing, not just in how Mockingbird influenced him, but in how a technical analysis of the book misses its greatness – “Great books are not flawless books” – and what aspect of the book hit him the hardest. James McBride, an African-American novelist and musician, offers a passionate defense of the book as great literature, one of the questions Murphy must have posted to every interview subject, while also drawing parallels to John Coltrane when answering the question of why Lee might have chosen to stop writing after one book.

The most fun interview of all of them is Alice Lee, Nelle Harper’s older sister who, at the time of the book’s writing, was still working in her law office every day at the age of 98. With the author herself unwilling to give interviews – she reportedly was upset that one or more interviewers misquoted her in the 1960s and put words or even thoughts into her mouth, but has also indicated that she believes the author should be more or less invisible behind her works – Alice gives some insight as to Harper Lee’s childhood and what aspects of the book are grounded in real people or places.

I was surprised to find that one of the most enjoyable interviews in the book was Oprah Winfrey, whose responses may be the most personal, from her identification with Scout to an encounter with Gregory Peck (“he will always be Atticus to me”) to her plan to persuade Harper Lee to come on the show (fail). Her quote from her lunch with Lee is too priceless for me to repeat here, but it’s quite telling about the author’s attitude towards the celebrity she has so consistently declined. If you want to bounce around Scout, Atticus, & Boo, Andrew Young, James Patterson (really), and Anna Quindlen also offered interesting or insightful comments on the novel.

The introduction, written by Murphy, includes heavy quoting of the 26 essays that follow, and I found that reading it first scooped a number of the most interesting quotes from the interviews; if you pick this book up, skip straight to the first interview, with the actress who played Scout in the film version. If you haven’t read To Kill a Mockingbird, you should do so, and then watch the film, and then read this book if you enjoyed those two works as much as I did.

Next up: John Derbyshire’s Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics, about the still-unproven (or disproven) hypothesis that bears Riemann’s name.

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→ August 4, 2010
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Legend of a Suicide.

David Vann’s story collection Legend of a Suicide has won a slew of literary awards and plaudits, including the Grace Paley Prize and appearances on 25 “best books of the year” lists, as well as becoming a critical and commercial success in, of all places, France. It’s a highly autobiographical book built around the suicide of Vann’s father when the author was just 13.

Legend is built around a central, two-part novella, “Sukkwan Island,” with three very short stories before it and two after; those five stories tie together closely, but the novella shifts two major plot details in a way that prevents reading the set as a single, linear story that would probably qualify as a novel. The five stories are well-written and useful for setting the scene, but I found the shift in “Sukkwan Island” jarring not just for its shock value but because the three stories that preceded that one had set me up for a different path.

In the early short stories, Vann’s alter ego, Roy, watches his father’s demise into depression and bad life choices from something of a distance, but in the alternate reality of “Sukkwan Island,” Roy chooses to spend a year in Alaska with his father, living survivalist-style in the woods on a remote island, only to witness Jim’s downward spiral up close. (In real life, and in the two stories that end the book, Roy/David declined to go to Alaska, after which Jim killed himself.) Roy dies in Alaska, and Jim’s depression and anxiety after his son’s death take on more corporeal form as he tries to survive, to cover up what happened, and to escape responsibility. Even Roy’s death could be a metaphor for the death of Vann’s relationship with his father – sensing that his father was headed for an inevitable tragedy and fearing the darkness and mood changes of crippling depression, perhaps David pulled away from his dad, convincing him to decline the invitation to spend a (miserable) year in the wildnerness with an unstable parent. Jim’s eventual death in “Sukkwan Island” is simultaneously a form of revenge on his father and a form of forgiveness, a glimmer of understanding that despite the inherent selfishness of suicide*, someone in the grip of that type of depression isn’t fully in control of his actions.

*Yes, I’ve lost a close relative to suicide, as has my wife. I speak from some experience, although nothing comparable to Vann’s.

Jim’s descent, fueled by despair, grief, fear, and self-doubt, is gripping and difficult to read; by putting Jim in the position of a father whose son has died and who bears at least some responsibility, Vann gives the reader more reason to empathize with the character, perhaps even to pity him, and thus makes his late father more than just a personal mess who screwed up his life and then screwed up his son’s by killing himself.

In the concluding stories, Roy – very much alive – goes to Alaska and attempts to piece together a little of his father’s legacy, only to find that the world there has changed so much during his own emotional stasis:

Memories are infinitely richer than their origins, I discovered; to travel back can only estrange one even from memory itself. And because memory is often all that a life or a self is built on, returning home can take away exactly that.

He remains emotionally paralyzed by his father’s suicide, and while that’s probably realistic, it doesn’t make for much of a story. I was looking for some kind of conclusion – not a happy ending, not even closure necessarily, but some sort of event to guide me out of the book. Roy goes to visit one of his father’s mistresses, only to find himself unable to ask her anything about his dad, a perfect vignette in a larger book but very unsatisfying as the basis for a short story.

Vann’s prose is easy and earnest, so much so that it’s uncomfortable at times to see through a window that clear, but a book about depression and suicide can’t be anything but brutally honest – if a novel or story on the subject doesn’t make the reader at least a little uncomfortable, it failed in its mission. If anything, Vann could have delved more deeply and continued any of the stories, or expanded “Sukkwan Island” into a longer novel, and found more material to mine in the complex, broken personality of his father and his own complex, even warped relationship with him, and the material would have remained compelling because he writes so well about these stark emotions. The first half of “Sukkwan” is the strongest material in Legend because that honesty is blended with the child’s view of his father breaking down, a mixture of confusion, fear, and stop-and-go sympathy from a boy in a position that would be difficult for an adult to handle. The second half of the story does suffer slightly from Roy’s absence.

If you don’t mind a bleak read, one where endings are few and never happy, but one that’s unsparing in its look at a fairly common mental illness that went untreated and ended in tragedy, Legend of a Suicide does an outstanding job of handling the subject. It’s uneven but introduces a talented writer who’s able to write about tough emotions, and I’m hopeful that in his upcoming novel, Caribou Island (due out in January), he’ll make the adjustments to tell a more complete story without compromising his emotional honesty.

Next up: Mary Murphy’s Scout, Atticus, and Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of To Kill a Mockingbird. I received complimentary review copies of both that book and Legend from the publisher.

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