→ September 25, 2024
→ By

The Unstoppable trilogy.

Charlie Jane Anders won the Nebula Award for her first novel, All the Birds in the Sky, which revolved around two teenaged protagonists who grew up together, saw their lives diverge, and then came back together in a soaring conclusion. Over the past few years, she published a young adult trilogy, Unstoppable, that was also largely built around two teenaged protagonists, although here the story is more madcap, the threats much larger, and the relationships between characters more front and center. I won’t pretend to be objective here, as I’ve met Anders and I read these books because she sent me an autographed set of the trilogy, but I thought the books were a blast.

The first book of the series, Victories Greater than Death, starts out pretty normally, both playing into and gently satirizing some of the tropes of the form, with its main character, Tina, a teenager who happens to be the Chosen One to save the galaxy and lead its Royal Fleet against its enemies, although in this case she knows the first part because her mom told her. She’s just waiting for the call, literally, as she has a beacon in her torso that will light up at some point when the aliens come to take her home. Of course, even that doesn’t go off without a hitch, as her best friend Rachael, who is a talented artist and was bullied badly enough that she’s now home schooled, ends up along for the ride into space. Unfortunately for, well, everyone, the forces attacking the Royal Fleet are very determined to make sure Tina doesn’t get back to space, and they don’t seem to care if they blow up Earth in the process. Tina does get to her ship, and not long after – with a brush with death included – she ends up part of a motley crew of teenaged humans on board who help avert the catastrophe, after which they head off into the heavens to fight crime, or, well, the bad guys, of which there turn out to be more than one. By the time we get to the second book, the stakes are much higher than they first appeared, as this is no longer just one tyrant’s power play, but an unseen and unknown force threatening to put out every sun in the universe.

Because this is a young adult series, and the main characters are all teenagers, there’s a lot of interpersonal drama amidst the intergalactic drama, both the romantic and friend varieties. Tina becomes involved with Ella, a trans girl from Brazil who ends up in the pipeline to become one of the Princesses atop the sprawling intergalactic monarchy, although the job is a lot less glamorous than the name implies. Rachael falls for another crew member, Damiani ends up with a non-human partner, and so on. Life on board a spaceship, or multiple spaceships, gets complicated.

The story itself absolutely flies, with a pace that’s almost manic at times, with very short chapters and rarely more than two or three pages without some sort of action, whether it’s a battle between starships or between people. The initial villain has an origin story that involves Tina’s alter ego, and it’s quite intricate and plausible at the same time, with Anders integrating it well into the main story through flashbacks and through the residue it leaves in the contemporary plot. Tina and Rachael share the lead roles by book two, and both are well developed, showing growth over the trilogy, with Tina reckoning with a past she didn’t know she had and Rachael learning to find her voice in multiple ways as the situations demand more of her.

The most notable part of the prose is Anders’ decision to have all characters introduce themselves with their pronouns, which is only notable the first few times before you become habituated to it and stop noticing – which, as someone who uses he/him pronouns and lists them in his bios and on name tags, is kind of how it should be. The only time it threw me was the character whose pronouns were fire/fire; I know about neopronouns but I just can’t get my brain to read them as such, so every single time Anders referred to that character by pronouns I’d have to stop and re-read the sentence. I’m guessing my kids would have less of an issue with this, but my brain isn’t as plastic as it used to be.

Dr. Katherine Mack, better known by her social media handle of @astrokatie, advised Anders on the mysterious forces threatening to end all life in the universe, and I won’t pretend I really followed it. I did sort of feel like it was the Marvel movie problem, where the stakes are just always so high that you can’t really adjust your thinking – I ended up way more invested in the individuals’ storylines than any part about saving planets or the universe as a whole. That, of course, may have been Anders’s entire intent; science fiction that leans too much on the science and doesn’t give enough time to its characters is pretty dreadful. I was good just spending more time with Tina and Rachael, and to a lesser extent their other friends, although some of the alien characters on the ship still felt, well, a bit alien to me. (The Grattna race, by the way, are my favorite creation of Anders’s here, as she gets to delve into philosophy and linguistic relativity in a wholly organic way that ends up affecting how Tina and her friends interact with them.) My only reservation about the books is that there’s a lot of death, not out of violence but out of spaceships blowing things up, even the occasional inhabited planet, and that’s at least out of the ordinary for YA fiction in my experience, so I might recommend this for slightly older readers, but Anders does have Tina et al grapple with the consequences of their actions as they become increasingly pacifistic over the course of the last two books; even the death of a dangerous nemesis has moral repercussions. It’s just a joy to read, even in its most morbid parts, and even as Anders tackles broader themes like discrimination, gender theory, utilitarianism, cultural sensitivity, and much more. And I hope I would say the same even if I had come by the books some other way.

Next up: I’m about to finish Dr. Cassie Holmes’s Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ September 9, 2024
→ By

Evergreen.

I loved the game Photosynthesis when it first came out in 2017, as it brought something quite new in its sunlight mechanic and also was striking on the table with its three-dimensional trees of varying sizes. I didn’t think it held up as well on repeated plays, and the cardboard trees took a beating rather quickly.

Designer Hjalmar Hach apparently thought he could improve on the original as well, reimagining the game as Evergreen, which doesn’t have quite the visual impact of Photosynthesis but which makes the game play itself simpler while it makes the strategic aspect more complex. And there’s something clean about the new board and the cards that make the game easier to look at, even if you lose the coolness of the 3-D part.

In Evergreen, players will plant sprouts in six biomes on their own boards and then grow them to small and then large trees, all of which is done by drafting cards in each round. Players choose their sprout locations to build the longest possible chain of trees while also maximizing the sunlight they’ll take in from each of the four directions as the sun rotates around the board. Trees cast shadows behind them, though, so they block trees directly behind them from collecting sunlight (and points).

In each round, players will draft cards that dictate where and what they’ll be able to play. Each card shows a specific biome (or a white background that can stand in for any biome) and an action, the two of which are unrelated. For the biome, you can plant three sprouts, grow two plants to the next level, plant one sprout and grow one plant, or ignore the biome on the card and just do one of those two things in a biome of your choice. For the action on the card, it gets a little more interesting, because actions become more powerful the more often you take them. These include planting more sprouts, growing plants from sprout to small tree or small tree to large, adding a lake that immediately grows two adjacent plants, adding a bush that extends your chain of contiguous trees but won’t collect light, or taking immediate points from the rose action while adding nothing to the board.

The card that isn’t selected by any player goes to the fertility area of its matching biome, which matters significantly for end-game scoring. Each card can have one to three fertility symbol at its top, or a skull showing aridity, or no symbol at all. You discard the cards with no symbols on top, and you place cards with fertility symbols face-up on the matching pile. Aridity cards cancel out the last fertility card played to that biome – when an aridity card is left over after the draft for that round, you flip over the face-up card on that biome’s pile and play the aridity card on top.

The number of rounds in each season varies, decreasing by one for each season, from five rounds in season one (spring) to just two in season four (winter). At the end of each season, you score points for sunlight hitting your trees, getting 1 point for each small tree and 2 for each large one, but a tree only gets sunlight if it isn’t in the shadow of another tree between it and the sun. Small trees cast a shadow of one space and can block a small tree behind them; large trees cast shadows of two spaces and can block small or large trees behind them. This gets tricky as a large tree that receives no light because it’s blocked by a large tree in front of it can still cast a shadow and block large trees behind it, so, for example, four large trees all in a line would score just two points for the first tree and nothing for the next three. (The rule book depicts this way more clearly than I can explain without diagrams.) Then you count every tree in your biggest Forest (chain) of connected trees and bushes, taking 1 point for each in the cluster.

After you do the end of season scoring for winter, each player scores points for every biome by multiplying the number of large trees they have in that biome by the number of visible fertility symbols in the card pile for that biome. This can get pretty large, since that’s how multiplication tends to work, and can inform your strategy throughout the game both in what cards to try to push to the fertility zone and where to focus your construction of large trees. That’s the only additional scoring at the end of the game.

For whatever reason, Evergreen hasn’t quite caught on like Photosynthesis did, and I think that’s part of why it is now available in digital form on Board Game Arena and now as a standalone app for $4.99 on iOS, Android, and Steam. I think it’s a great game and have now played it on the table, on BGA, and on the iOS app (the last one vs AI), so I can vouch for all platforms. It deserves a wider audience than it’s gotten, and I would definitely choose to play it over Photosynthesis thanks to the greater player interaction and simpler components so I’m not always knocking over trees. It came out in 2022, so it won’t be on my best-of-2024 list, but it would have made my top 10 for its actual release year.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ May 29, 2024
→ By

Seven Games.

The title of Oliver Roeder’s book Seven Games: A Human History is a misnomer in two ways: It’s not really a book about games, and it’s far more a history of computers than of humans. It is, instead, a history of attempts to use what is now unfortunately referred to as “AI” to tackle the myriad problems posed by seven popular board and card games from human history, from chess to bridge. Each of these games presents the programmers with specific, novel issues, and while machine-learning techniques have succeeded in solving some games (like checkers), others have and may forever prove inscrutable (like bridge).

Roeder is a journalist for the Financial Times and clearly a gamer, and someone who loves the games for what they are beyond their competitive aspect (although it becomes clear he is a fierce competitor as well). He writes as an experienced player of all seven games in the book, even though he must have varying skill levels in each – I’d be shocked if he were much of a checkers player, because who on earth in the year of our lord 2024 is a great checkers player? His experience with the games helps infuse a book that could be a rather dry and grim affair with more than a touch of life, especially as he enters tournaments or otherwise competes against experts in games like poker, Scrabble, and backgammon.

What Roeder is really getting at here, however, is the symbiotic relationship between games and machine learning, which is what everyone now calls AI. (AI is itself a misnomer, and there are many philosophers who argue that there can be no intelligence, artificial or otherwise, without culture.) Games are perfect fodder for training AI modules because they tend to present short sets of rules and clear goals, thus giving the code and its coder targets for whatever optimization algorithm(s) they choose. In the case of checkers, this proved simple once the computing power was available; checkers is considered “weakly solved,” with a draw inevitable if both players play perfectly. (Connect 4 is strongly solved; the first player can always win with perfect play.) In the case of bridge, on the other hand, the game may never be solved, both because of its computational complexity and because of the substantial human element involved in its play.

In one of those later chapters, Roeder mentions P=NP in a footnote, which put an entirely different spin on the book for me. P=NP is one of the six unsolved Millennium Prize Problems* in mathematics, also called the P versus NP problem, which asks if a problem’s correct solution can be verified in polynomial time, does that also mean that the problem can be solved in polynomial time? The answer would have enormous ramifications for computational theory, and could indeed impact human life in substantial ways, but the odds seem to be that P does not equal NP – that the time required to solve these problems is orders of magnitude higher than the time required to verify their solutions. (For more on this subject, I recommend Lance Fortnow’s book The Golden Ticket, which I reviewed here in 2015.)

*A seventh, the Poincaré Conjecture, is the only one that has been solved to date.

You can see a thread through the seven chapters where the machine-learning techniques adjust and improve as the games become more complex. From there, it isn’t hard to see this as a narrow retelling of the ongoing history of machine learning itself. The early efforts to solve games like checkers employed brute-force methods – examining all possible outcomes and valuing them to guide optimal choices. More complex games that present larger decision trees and more possible outcomes would require more processing power and time than we have, often more time than remains in the expected life of the universe (and certainly more than remains in the expected life of our suicidal species), and thus required new approaches. Some of the attacks on games later in the book allow the algorithm to prune the tree itself and avoid less-promising branches to reduce processing time and power, thus leading to a less complete but more efficient search method.

Roeder does acknowledge in brief that these endeavors also have a hidden cost in energy. His anecdotes include Deep Blue versus Kasparov and similar matches in poker and go, some of which gained wide press coverage for their results … but not for the energy consumed by the computers that competed in these contests. We’re overdue for a reckoning on the actual costs of ChatGPT and OpenAI and their myriad brethren in silicon, because as far as I can tell, they’re just the new crypto when it comes to accelerating climate change. That’s nice that you can get a machine to write your English 102 final paper for you or lay off a bunch of actual humans to let AI do some things, but I’d like to see you pay the full cost of the electricity you’re using to do it.

I’ve focused primarily on one aspect of Seven Games because that’s what resonated with me, but I may have undersold the book a little in the process. It’s a fun read in many ways because Roeder tells good stories for just about all seven of the games in the book – I might have done without the checkers chapter, because that’s just a terrible game, but it is an important rung in the ladder he’s constructing – and puts himself in the action in several of them, notably in poker tournaments in Vegas. There’s also a warning within the book about the power of so-called AI, and I think inherent in that is a call for caution, although Roeder doesn’t make this explicit. It seemed a very timely read even though I picked it up on a friend’s recommendation because it’s about games. Games, as it turns out, explain quite a bit of life. We wouldn’t be human without them.

Next up: Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious, a book by Daniel Everett, a former evangelical Christian missionary who became an atheist and turned to linguistics after his time trying to convert the Amazonian Pirahã tribe. He appeared at length in last year’s outstanding documentary The Mission.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ April 25, 2024
→ By

Trio.

If the card game Trio were brand-new, I’d call it the game of the year. It is out in a brand-new English edition, though, and I can’t recommend it any more highly. It’s right up there with Scout, Love Letter, Coup, and Super Mega Lucky Box as smaller games you can play any time with any mix of people, kids included, or throw in a bag or suitcase for when you travel. I just played it with my niece (nearly 12) and nephew (8) the other day, and after six plays, when I had to leave for a game, they roped my parents into playing several more times.

Trio was originally published in Japan as nana (??), one of the Japanese words for 7, and both names ultimately make sense given how you win the game. The full deck contains 36 cards numbered 1 through 12, three of each, with the actual cards used varying by player count – for four or five players, you use the whole deck, but you’ll remove the 12s for three players, for example. All cards in the game are either dealt to players or placed face-down on the table.

You win Trio by doing one of three things: collecting three sets of cards of the same numbers; collecting two sets of cards where the sum or difference is 7 (so, 11s and 4s, or 2s and 5s); or collecting the set of three 7s. The catch is how you reveal cards – you can only ask another player to reveal their lowest card or their highest card, or do the same for yourself, or reveal one card from the table. You take two such actions, and if the two revealed cards match, you may take a third as well. If not, all cards return to their players’ hands or to the table, face-down. If you complete a set, you take those cards and your turn ends. The game continues until one player achieves one of the three winning conditions.

Thus Trio is a game of memory: you need to pay attention every turn to what’s revealed, and also to what’s not revealed. If a player shows their lowest card is a 4, they’re also telling you that they don’t have any 1s, 2s, or 3s, thus limiting where those cards can be. Other players may reveal the cards you need to complete a set over several turns, so if you can remember where those cards are, you can ‘steal’ a set without doing the work. I’ve been dealt all three of a number, which I was only able to play once it was the lowest rank in my hand. (That is, if my hand was 2-3-4-4-4-10-12, I couldn’t play the 4s until I’d either lost the 2 and 3 or the 10 and 12.) If you’ve got an eidetic memory, well, Trio might be a little too easy for you.

You can play a whole game inside of ten minutes, probably more like five once you’re rolling, and it plays well with anywhere from three to five people. Two players can play, but it’s not as fun for strategic reasons – you only have to remember your opponent’s high/low cards and the table cards – and social ones. And the box is tiny, so it is highly portable. I’m all in on this one – I played it a few times in person at Gen Con, a few times online, and then a whole slew of times this week. It’s fun, like board games are supposed to be.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ April 19, 2024
→ By

All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade.

I was lukewarm on the Libertines in their brief, drug-addled heyday, and largely oblivious to the drama around their self-titled second album, which looked for a decade like it might be their last, as the band broke up and Pete Doherty was in and out of rehab (and legal trouble). The likely lads returned in 2015 with a third album, Anthem for Doomed Youth, which had one great song (“Gunga Din”) but a lot of tepid material that couldn’t come close to the energy of their first two records. Even if you didn’t love their songs, those albums crackled with the thrill of a band that always felt like it was teetering on the edge of disaster – much like Oasis did at its peak, and in both cases it seemed to fuel greater creativity as well.

Over the last twenty years I’ve come to appreciate the Libertines even more. “Time for Heroes” has long been my favorite of their songs, and “Can’t Stand Me Now” is another banger that also has one of the best album intro passages I can remember hearing, but, taken together, their 2003-04 output feels like they captured a specific moment in British music history. They came along just a few years after the implosion of Britpop, owing something to that genre’s melodic instincts, but their playing was messier, almost dirtier, and they paired it with wry, witty lyrics, bringing some obvious Stones influence along with elements of punk and even …

The Libertines returned just this month with their fourth album, their first in nine years, All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade, and I think it’s the best thing they’ve ever done. It’s certainly the most interesting new album I’ve heard this year, mixing in styles and sounds we haven’t heard from Carl Barât and Doherty before with that same reckless energy that made their first two LPs so exciting. (I’m not ignoring Cowboy Carter, which was nothing if not interesting, but I was shocked by how un-catchy much of that album is.) All Quiet is the album that they should have come back with in 2015. It’s a statement record, and just happens to be full of incredible hooks.

The album opens with one of the lead singles, the incredibly catchy “Run Run Run,” with its winking earworm chorus: “You’d better run, run, run/Faster than the past” might just refer to the band’s own sordid history, one would think. It’s a strong choice to start the record, setting the stage for the mostly uptempo songs to come while still sounding very much like the Libertines right from the introductory drum line. It’s one of four tracks on the record that connect this album to the first two, along with “Oh Shit, “I Have a Friend,” and “Be Young,” all of which are, to use the technical term, bangers.

Those tracks buy some goodwill for the lads to experiment a little, and fortunately this time around the experiments mostly land. “The Night of the Hunter” interpolates a bit of “Swan Lake,” of all things, while managing to sound like it came from the soundtrack to The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. “Oh Shit” starts with a guitar lick that sounds so familiar – an inverted version of the main riff from “Boys Don’t Cry?” – and never takes its foot off the gas. “Shiver” is not a cover of the Coldplay song, but instead is a swirling, psychedelic track that’s unique in their catalog for its melding of that ‘70s psychedelia with some of the 1990s Britpop that paved the way for their initial success, and hearing the lads sing about “Reasons to stay alive/Not to die at 25” should certainly bring to mind the unlikeliness of this band still being intact twenty years on.

I couldn’t totally get on board with the closer, “Songs They Never Play on the Radio,” although the fact that the Libertines utilized a backing chorus on several tracks also marks some of the band’s progression into this older, wiser status. “Man With the Melody” is just a miss, one where I can’t even see the vision in what feels like a throwaway track in both music and lyrics, and “Baron’s Claw” also kills some of the momentum built up by the prior two tracks. “Merry Old England,” however, shows the Libertines slowing down the tempo while still managing to incorporate a strong hook, with some of their best lyrics ever, appropriating the language of the xenophobic right – even stealing a headline from The Sun about “illegals” – to cover the plight of migrants coming to England in search of a better life, only to receive “a B&B and vouchers for three square.”

The Libertines have now scored their second #1 album in the UK with All Quiet…, after their self-titled sophomore album did the same in 2004, but their commercial success has been limited to Britain and they’ve barely made a dent in the U.S. It contributes to an underrating of the band’s importance in music history, as they were critical in the resurgence of rock music after the death of Britpop in the late 1990s ushered in an era of more commercial pop and less rock-oriented indie pop acts like Coldplay and Travis. Without the Libertines, do we get the Arctic Monkeys, who have a very similar sound but cleaner production and playing, and take Doherty & Barât’s witty lyrical style to another level? Or Franz Ferdinand, the Wombats, Jamie T, the Rills, or Sports Team? The Libertines’ original two albums were part of a brief revival of garage-rock – often mislabeled as post-punk because they kind of played fast – that opened the doors for multiple waves of Brit-rock after their initial breakup. Let’s hope that this album gets them their due beyond the shores of merry old England.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ April 5, 2024
→ By

This is the Story of a Happy Marriage.

I’m about as big a fan of Ann Patchett as you’ll find – I’ve read every one of her novels, including the Pulitzer Prize contender Tom Lake, made a pilgrimage to her bookstore Parnassus Books before the pandemic, and was even scheduled to do a talk and signing there in May 2020 that obviously never happened. Somehow in all my fandom, I’d never read any of her nonfiction, even though that’s where she got her start; I just loved her fiction so much that I couldn’t imagine reading her voice in a different milieu.

My wife recently got me a copy of Patchett’s 2013 essay collection This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, and, yeah, of course it’s great, because Patchett could write about a ham sandwich and make it interesting. It’s her first essay collection and includes works published from 1996 through 2012, including her essay “The Getaway Car,” which was also published as a separate book. That essay alone was worth the time spent reading the whole book, as it’s one of the best pieces I’ve ever read on writing as a craft and a career, although the book has many, many other highlights across a range of subjects.

One of the most frequent topics is her marriages – the current one, yes, which in her telling is a happy marriage, but also her first, brief marriage, which ended barely a year in and which turned her off the institution for some time. She married young and unwisely (I can relate), but to her credit, realized it early and got out, a history she describes in “The Sacrament of Divorce,” which makes what was probably a painful period in her life wryly funny. Karl, her current husband of many years (and partner of 11 years prior to that), comes up often in the book, both directly as in the title essay and “The Paris Match” (the story of a fight), but also in the two stories about their dog Rose, “This Dog’s Life” and “Dog Without End,” the latter about Rose’s death. Karl certainly comes off far better than husband #1, at the very least. Also, the stories of women throwing themselves at him after his own divorce are hilarious, as if they came from a bad made-for-Netflix film.

“The Wall,” one of the longest essays in the collection, tells of her abortive plan to go through the Los Angeles Police Academy and write a book about it. Patchett’s father was an LA cop for a long time, and derisive of the people who led the department during the aftermath of the assault on Rodney King and subsequent acquittal of the four cops who beat him. Patchett took and passed the test, but didn’t go into the academy, in part for fear of taking up a spot that would have gone to someone who really wanted to become a police officer, but the essay itself also shows us quite a bit about her relationship with her father without her ever addressing the topic head on. It’s a masterful piece of writing, with a bit of a humblebrag mixed in.

Two essays deal with Truth & Beauty, Patchett’s memoir of her friendship with the late author Lucy Grealy, whom she met when they were both 21. Grealy had cancer of the jaw as a child and was left disfigured by surgery to remove part of her jawbone; her own memoir, Autobiography of a Face, told of her life with the emotional and physical consequences of the cancer and surgery, and was met with wide critical acclaim. One of those essays here is about an attack on the book by religious zealots in/around Clemson, South Carolina, when that university assigned the book to its incoming first-year class. An alum named Ken Wingate, who was a lawyer, a member of the state’s Commission on Higher Education, and a Presbyterian Bible teacher, said the book was pornographic and launched a campaign to get the requirement removed. Ain’t a damn thing changed, folks: Orange County, Florida, banned two of her books, including her greatest novel Bel Canto, from its schools.

There’s some filler in here, like her intro to the edition of Best American Short Stories that she oversaw, and an essay from Gourmet called “Do Not Disturb” about what amounted to a staycation in the Bel Air hotel in Los Angeles, but they’re short and unobtrusive amongst the gems that litter the collection, not least of which is “The Getaway Car.” If someone told me right now they wanted to be a writer of any stripe, I would tell them to go read this essay. I don’t think it tells you how to write or how to be a better writer, nor does it try to dissuade the reader from writing (a cynical response I hear too often from journalists – our industry is a mess, but the world needs journalists, period). And, not to put words in Patchett’s mouth, she doesn’t seem to have that sort of concrete advice. She offers no dictums like “write every day” or “write what you know” or any of the other bromides that you hear from writers; if anything, she writes for the reason that I write – because she has to. She does describe a more arduous writing and editing process than I imagined for her, given how beautiful and lyrical her writing is; I just figured this was how she wrote, and how she speaks (which we get an example of in “Fact vs. Fiction,” a convocation address she gave at Miami of Ohio). It’s an essay about her life in writing, how she saw herself as a future writer, how her career unfolded, how she had to work at a lot of things unrelated to writing – including building her relationships in the writing world – to get to be a writer as a full-time profession. It’s a marvelous piece of storytelling that, if you have a writing bone in your body, will make you want to grab a notebook and start. What more could you want from an essay about writing? This is the Story of a Happy Marriage does indeed have that story in it, but more than that, it is the story of a brilliant writer over the first forty-odd years of her life, and it is beautifully told even in its disparate pieces.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ March 27, 2024
→ By

Prophet Song.

Taking his cues from the devastating civil war in Syria, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the rise of populist authoritarian movements in the West, Paul Lynch has crafted a terrifyingly personal dystopian vision in his newest novel, Prophet Song. Winner of the 2023 Booker Prize, the book follows the decline into tyranny and civil war of the Republic of Ireland through the eyes of Eilish, a mother of four who tries desperately to hold her family and herself together even as the world around her crumbles.

The story begins in the not-too-distant future, where an unidentified party has taken control in Ireland and turned the national police (the gardai) into state security, choosing labor unions – especially the teachers’ union – as their first targets. Larry, Eilish’s husband, is a leader in the teacher’s union himself and after one interrogation finds himself arrested by the national government, disappearing into the state’s growing apparatus for political prisoners and leaving Eilish alone with four kids, ranging from the teenager Mark to the still-nursing Ben. The state gradually increases its authority and rounds up more and more dissidents, even firing on protestors, leading to a near-total breakdown in the social order, food and water shortages along with bread lines, neighbors denouncing neighbors, and the inevitable rise of a ragtag rebel army. All the while, Eilish is trying to keep her family safe, including her father, who is in the early stages of dementia and only half understands what’s happening. Eilish can access some foreign news sources, such as the BBC, to get an outside view of the conflict, and the ubiquity of cell phones changes some of the dynamics of survival, but none of this changes the more fundamental needs to get food, shelter, and medical care, all of which become critical as Eilish has to decide whether to stay or make a dangerous bid to cross the border with Great Britain and join her sister Aine in Canada.

There’s something very It Can’t Happen Here about Prophet Song; this is the kind of collapse we associate with countries where the populace is mostly non-white – Syria, Somalia, Yemen, the D.R. Congo, and now Haiti. Lynch’s Ireland goes from an affluent, stable democracy to a police state that resembles the early U.S.S.R. but with the weaponry and technology of modern conflicts. A staid middle-class life sits on a shaky foundation of civil society that, as we’ve seen in the U.S., depends in large part on people not losing their minds and voting for would-be fascists. (Lynch never identifies the party in power by name or ideology, but they are at the least anti-labor; their specific policies aren’t relevant to Eilish’s story and he doesn’t waste time on them.) Hungary had a functioning democracy for a short while, but its people voted in an irredentist autocrat who has gone after two of the most common targets for authoritarian regimes – Jews and LGBTQ+ people. Venezuela and El Salvador have slid from democracy to dictatorship, with the former’s economy collapsing after its first strongman died. It can happen, but we never dream that it will until it’s too late, often by our own hand.

The real power of Lynch’s work is that he focuses exclusively on one family, and one person, rather than telling the story of the collapse of a country. In that way it’s more in the vein of survivalist or post-apocalyptic fiction, like Testament, In a Perfect World, and The Road than the standard dystopian novel. The leaders of the country are never named; in fact, no one in any position of authority, not even a police officer, gets a name in Prophet Song. Names are reserved for the ordinary people – Eilish, her family, a few neighbors. This choice makes the book more intensely personal, and becomes its own form of psychological horror – will Eilish’s family survive another day, and what calamity might lurk around the corner? You can experience the terrors of the police state from the most granular level, where the lights don’t stay on and food is scarce, where you can’t get across town to see your ailing father and you have to worry one of your kids will be arrested or shot for being out past curfew.

Lynch doesn’t shy away from the inevitable tragedies of his setting; Eilish is fighting a losing battle but refuses to admit it. Even the ending leaves some questions unanswered, and Eilish still isn’t certain if she’s made the right choices for her family, because in that situation you will never have that certainty. Instead, Lynch makes the smart choice to lean into the crises, but move us quickly in and out of them, so the story is never lurid, never ogling Eilish’s misery for the reader’s pleasure. It’s a masterful blending of the dystopian novel, the political thriller, and an exaltation of the power of one person – of one mother – to carry the weight of two different generations and somehow make it through.

Next up: Ann Patchett’s essay collection This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ March 12, 2024
→ By

Amerikatsi.

Michael Goorjian’s Amerikatsi is a dramatic farce that explores two dark periods in Armenia’s history through the eyes of one man who manages to maintain a sense of hope even when his fellow man is cruel to him and fate is crueler. It’s a testament to our humanity and our ability to survive even in awful conditions, and an indictment of the systems and the people that make these conditions possible. It’s a beautiful, funny, heartfelt movie that deserves a much wider audience. (You can rent it on amazon, iTunes, etc.)

Charlie (played by Goorjian, who also wrote and directed the film) escapes the Armenian genocide of 1918 when his grandmother hides him in a cart, allowing him to escape execution at the hands of the Turks. Then just four years old, he ends up in the United States, but after World War II, when Josef Stalin called for Armenian expatriates to return home to held rebuild the country, Charlie does so, only to end up wrongly accused of being either an American spy or a capitalist pig or both, after which he’s sentenced to hard labor. From his cold prison cell, he can see into a nearby apartment, and he watches their lives as if it’s his daily soap opera, becoming invested in their relationship and in the man’s secret passion for art, leading Charlie to reach out and try to make a connection across an impossible boundary.

Much of what happens around Charlie is absurdist comedy, part Kafka, part Iannucci, and you have to just accept that he’s going to end up in prison despite the ridiculous circumstances that land him there. He barely speaks Armenian when he returns to the Caucasus and speaks no Russian, so any attempts to save himself after he’s arrested go nowhere, and he’s the butt of many jokes among the guards and even fellow prisoners, at least at first. He’s even thrown in the “icebox,” a storage room that’s especially cold in winter, yet over time he makes it his own space, at least, and jury-rigs contraptions like a clothesline or a way to sit at the high window and eat his meals while watching his neighbors, even writing down some of their customs like the order of the toasts after a big dinner. (Apparently, one of them is to Mount Ararat, a volcano in easternmost Turkey that is a symbol of Armenian culture and heritage.)

Charlie is an optimist, but not a fool, which is key to making this character work. He has hope, and it appears that nothing can truly extinguish it, but he isn’t blind to his situation; he hopes that there’s something better to come, not that someone will come save him from his current state. Goorjian plays him with such an earnestness that it’s easy to believe in the character, that Charlie could still find joy in small things, and that he’d take the risks he does take to get a message to his neighbor – who turns out to be a more important person than Charlie realizes – just to help another human. The guards call him “Charlie Chaplin,” an overt nod to the tramp-like qualities of the character, with Goorjian occasionally mimicking Chaplin’s walk in the film. The Tramp can be childlike and credulous, but his heart and his ingenuity win the day, which is a good summary of how this Charlie wins out in the end as well.

The score for Amerikatsi, by Armenian composer Andranik Berberyan,is exceptional, with folk music mixed with ambient music to provide some depth and color to what could otherwise have been very bland and grey scenes of Charlie in his prison. There’s also a familiar name in the credits, as the movie was executive produced by Serj Tankian of System of a Down, who also is listed under “additional music.”

Amerikatsi was Armenia’s entry for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, and became the first Armenian film to make the shortlist, although it didn’t make the final cut of five nominees. I can’t say it deserved a nod, as I haven’t seen any of the five yet, but if they’re all better than this one, then 2023 might have been the best year in film history. Amerikatsi tells a simple if ridiculous story, and in so doing it gives us glimpses into Armenian history and epitomizes the strength of a people who’ve been victims of their neighboring aggressors for over a hundred years.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ February 27, 2024
→ By

Stay True.

Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critic Circle award for memoir or autobiography, Hua Hsu’s Stay True begins as a coming-of-age story about growing up as a first-generation American, trying to fit in with other kids through culture and counter-culture. Hsu eventually found a strong friend group at UC Berkeley, doing normal college kid things and seeing the world as full of endless possibilities, until one of his closest friends is murdered in a random carjacking, a senseless crime that destroys so many lives and leaves Hsu in an uncertain world of grief. It’s brief yet Hsu writes so clearly and specifically that each scene feels real – and so do the emotions that come from it.

Hsu was born to Taiwanese parents who emigrated to the United States to flee the repressive government in Taipei in the 1960s and 1970s, then grew up in California as an outsider to multiple groups – he wasn’t white, yet he wasn’t a high achiever like many of the other Asian-American students he saw. He eventually gravitates to music as a way to be cool, particularly towards indie music, even starting his own zine in high school to try to get free CDs from record labels, adopting a cooler-than-thou attitude to people who listened to mainstream artists like Pearl Jam or the Dave Matthews Band, or even latecomers to Nirvana. When he graduates from high school and attends Berkeley, he meets Ken Ishida, who in many ways is all the things Hsu wants to be – effortless, charismatic, handsome, just naturally cool without trying. The two don’t exactly become fast friends; their friendship grows over time, and evolves around and through their differences rather than in spite of them. Theirs was, in Hsu’s telling, the sort of friendship that you are lucky to find a few times in your life, one that lasts for decades even as others drift apart or become nothing more than Facebook friendships.

Of course, Ken is the murder victim here, which I don’t think is spoiling anything if you’ve read any reviews or anything else about the book. It was as pointless as stupid as it gets; his killers bought a bunch of stuff with his credit cards and went to their house, with his car still on their lawn. They were caught almost immediately, and the guy who actually shot him is still in prison in California; his girlfriend, an accomplice in the crime, was just released last year. His murder was enough to shock Hsu and their whole friend group, but Hua takes it even harder because of how their last interaction went, and his guilt that perhaps Ken would still be alive if he’d said or done something different in that situation.

Hsu’s writing is delicate and evocative all at once; he eschews the big twist or shocking moment, and lets the characters – of which he is one – tell the story, with his wry observations often providing humor or some needed context. So much of Stay True asks how to measure a life, to borrow a phrase; when someone close to us dies, how do we remember them, truly remember them as they were, rather than the version we hold in our memories, which may be colored by our emotions or wishes. It becomes tangible to Hsu when he has to deliver the eulogy at Ken’s funeral, where he speaks more honestly than you might expect for the ceremony, while much of what comes afterwards, in the final third of the book, is Hsu trying to make sense less of what happened and more of how to go on. He writes letters to his late friend, sees his figurative ghost when a certain song plays or when it’s time for a cigarette. His relationship with his girlfriend stalls. He reacts as many people would in the face of such a tragedy; few could describe it in such lucid, honest terms.

I did read a review of Stay True that referred to the book as “unsentimental,” which I think depends on how you define the term. Sentimental literature and art is maudlin, weepy, turgid; Stay True is none of those. It is, however, a sad story, told plainly but with tenderness at its core. Hua Hsu lost his best friend, without warning, and without the emotional tools to cope. He’s written a beautiful tribute that speaks to the grief we all must face in some way, while also delving into the details of his life and Ken’s that made both of their stories unique.

Next up: Wise Gals: The Spies Who Built the CIA and Changed the Future of Espionage, by Nathalia Holt.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ February 25, 2024
→ By

Oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer is an achievement. It’s a biopic, a deep character study, a thriller, a heist movie, and a Shakespearean tragedy (well, except the title character doesn’t die at the end), wrapped up into a three-hour movie that never lets up its pace. It’s incredible that a major studio bankrolled this and gave it such a long theatrical release, given its subject and its three-hour run time, but I hope its runaway success encourages studios to take more risks on prestige films like it. (It’s streaming now on Peacock, or rentable on amazon, iTunes, etc.)

Based on the biography American Prometheus (which I have not read), Oppenheimer tells the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the physicist who led the United States’s effort to develop a nuclear weapon, known as the Manhattan Project. It’s framed by the events that came after the war, when Oppenheimer became an advocate for international control of the very weapons he helped to develop, leading to a sham hearing that led to the revocation of his security clearance and a subsequent public hearing that led to the downfall of his chief antagonist, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.). The movie itself runs from the 1920s, when Oppenheimer was still a student, meeting Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) and studying under Max Born (mentioned but not depicted), through his time as a professor at Berkeley, his tenure in Los Alamos leading the Manhattan Project, and the post-war attacks on his reputation. The movie focuses on his professional efforts, but his personal life, including his marriage to the biologist Katherine (Emily Blunt) and his affair with the psychologist Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), although the movie drags when the focus shifts away from the thriller at the heart of the film.

Writer and director Christopher Nolan packed Oppenheimer with dialogue, so there are very few moments of silence in the film, and any time the movie is focused on the professional arc, it flies. (If I were a more pandering sort, I might say it moves at the speed of light, but I’ll leave those jokes to the least common depunimator.) The script underscores just how massive the undertaking and how unlikely the assembled team of physicists and other scientists was. It’s easy to let hindsight make the development of the first atomic bomb seem like an inevitability, but it was a gigantic effort that required the participation of scientists from across the west, including some refugees from the Nazi regime, and coordination across multiple agencies and university laboratories. The physics behind nuclear fission was only discovered in 1938, and the plants refining the plutonium needed for the bombs didn’t even come online until 1943 and 1944. We know how the story ends, but the movie puts you into the action enough that you can feel the tension and the uncertainty among the scientists – who knew what was at stake, but had no idea if they’d succeed or when.

Oppenheimer’s marriage and infidelity make up the film’s secondary plot, and while it’s an important part of his story and is intertwined enough with his professional life – including his pre-war flirtation with the Communist Party – that it has to be in the film, but there’s so little development of Katherine’s or Jane’s characters that neither role amounts to much beyond one good scene apiece. There’s not enough screen time for either of them, since neither was involved in Los Alamos, and the result is that two Academy Award-nominated actresses are little more than props – which makes Blunt’s nomination for Best Supporting Actress more than a little surprising.

The two best performances are, unsurprisingly, the two that earned Oscar nods – Murphy for Best Actor and Downey Jr. for Best Supporting Actor. Murphy has worked with Nolan before in Inception and Dunkirk, and he gives a superb performance here as the title character, depicting the scientist as a sort of aloof genius whose determination and focus allowed him to lead the project to completion, while also showing his confusion at how his actions affect people around him, including his wife and his mistress. Downey’s career resurgence has been fun to watch, although if you’re old enough to remember his earliest work as part of the so-called “Brat Pack,” you probably saw how talented he was; I remember his supporting performance in the 1995 adaptation of Richard III, which was the first serious role I’d seen of his, and how compelling he was in every scene, often overshadowing other more accomplished actors. Downey isn’t known for dialing it down, but that’s what he does here, to great effect, so that Strauss comes across as an intense, ruthless, yet very professional politician, someone who often acts in his own self-interest but never out of emotion. As much as the movie puts Oppenheimer at its center, Strauss has his own story arc within the movie where Oppenheimer is often just a bit player, giving Downey the chance to be the lead actor in this film-within-a-film. Two outstanding performances in a gripping, wide-reaching story would put just about any film near the top of my annual rankings.

Oppenheimer was nominated for 13 Oscars this year, and I’d guess it’s going to win a slew of them, including Best Picture, Best Actor (for Murphy), Best Supporting Actor (for Downey, Jr.), and Best Director, although I haven’t finished all of the nominees in any of those categories yet and can’t offer an opinion on whether it’s deserving. Of the films I’ve seen from 2023 so far, though, it is the best, just ahead of Past Lives, which is a tighter and far more affecting film, but without as much ambition or as wide a scope. It did not receive a nomination for Best Visual Effects, however, despite the stunning scene where the first atomic test takes place in Los Alamos; perhaps that’s not enough compared to the other nominees, none of which I’ve seen.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,