Reading log, no. 5

I should be writing about the California Bike Trip, but the end of the
month has arrived, and that means it's time for all of you to read or
pretend to read about the books I finished reading this month. My
apologies.

* * *

There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it.

Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid's Tale

I first read The Handmaid's Tale during my first semester in college nearly twelve years ago. This is notable for two reasons: the first being that this is the first reread job I've blogged about here on Just Enough Craig. The second reason is that it seems impossible that it's been nearly twelve years since I sat in that First-Year Seminar class. Please forgive me for writing this under an emotional combination of something like reverie and panic.

For those of you who aren't Trinity alumni, First-Year Seminar was a mandatory class for all incoming freshmen that was open-ended but, to whatever degree imposed by the prof, ended up being essentially a book club with the addition of a strong writing requirement. Each class was to have some sort of theme, picked by the prof. My class's theme was law and justice, I believe, but I can't remember for sure; it wasn't a strongly held together theme. Rumors abounded how one FYS class's theme was baseball. I never verified that, but it could easily be true. FYS was a luck-of-the-draw class with a wide range of possibilities -- especially for those of us who took the class during the fall semester and had not a clue for what we were registering. I lucked my way into a really good one.

We read the following: First Man in Rome by Colleen McCullough, The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr., and a short story whose name I can't remember but that involved desperate, live-saving cannibalism and a resulting court case with the possibility of the death penalty. It's difficult to imagine a more Craigarian lineup: classical Rome historical fiction, two science-fiction greats, and a short story about ethics and political theory.

Each week we read at a furious pace -- about 200-300 pages -- with the composition of a short paper to boot. It was like Book Club on steroids. And twice each week the dozen or so of us -- the students, the student aide, and the prof -- would sit around a conference table and spend an hour discussing ... whatever, though both the prof and the aide were poly-sci kinds of guys, and so they largely shepherded our discussions around abstract idealogical topics related to the reading material. How could I not have loved that class?

Handmaid's Tale was the selected reading for March for my current book club. We had a wonderfully open discussion about sexual equality, or the lack thereof, and that night I was pleasantly reminded of that very first college class of mine.

* * *

Again something in the card drew Trude's attention. Many other recipients of Prendergast's cards also took note, despite the crush of mail each received from his true peers, this being a time when everyone who knew how to write did so and at length. In that glacier of words grinding toward the twentieth century, Prendergast's card was a single fragment of mica glinting with lunacy, pleading to be picked up and pocketed.

Erik Larson
The Devil in the White City

World's fairs are something I knew little about before reading Devil in the White City, and I suppose after reading it they continue to be something I know little about. But I now have a taste of the whirlwind of rushed design and frantic construction behind the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and of the life of the intriguing mass murderer, Henry H. Holmes, who lived and killed in Chicago during the time of the Fair.

I enjoyed this book. It wasn't about the things I wished it to be about -- I learned more in thirty minutes reading the Wikipedia article on the Chicago World's Fair than I did reading this book -- but Devil in the White City spun an interesting narrative and was excellently written.

Before the California Bike Trip

Tax Day

Cullen Hightower once said, "There's always somebody who is paid too much, and taxed too little -- and it's always somebody else."

Here's a chart that I made that graphs tax rates as a percentage of income versus income (up to $500k).
The red line is the federal income tax rate. The blue line is the rate for the sum of the federal income tax plus the Social Security tax (6.2% of up to $102k in income) plus the Medicare tax (1.45% of up to $102k in income) plus the employer's half of SS and FICA (7.65% of up to $102k in income). In other words, the red line is the tax rate for what is officially called the "income tax," and the blue line is the tax rate for actual tax based on income, excluding capital gains. Neither line takes into account deductions, loopholes, and cheats.

What are the odds?

Take a full bag of Scrabble tiles and draw seven. There's a 1 in 1,736,031 chance that you'll be able to play BICYCLE.

There's a 1 in 281,496 chance that you'll be able to play VEHICLE.

And a 1 in 138,064 chance for COLLIDE.

Some days you get all three.

My no-crash streak ended early this morning at a whopping two days. Though I wasn't thinking of this fact as I was flipped onto the hood of a truck -- or was it an SUV? -- that had veered onto my side of the road this morning as I was coasting down one of those mini-switchbacks on the south side of Camelback Mountain. Instead I was thinking something along the lines of whether my front wheel would be shaped like a taco after suffering a direct impact into a bumper.

Short answer: no.

Miraculously I got up without a scratch.

There's a 1 in 179,452 chance for NOTHURT.

Not so miraculously my bike was fine too.

There's a 1 in 282,883 chance for I♡STEEL, though you must have a blank for that last one.

Goodbye, friend

Today I say goodbye to a dear friend, my favorite bicycle jersey, a bright yellow Pearl Izumi long-sleeve jersey. Although our relationship was a short one, it was an endearing one. And today I killed it.

First, a photo. This was the day I and the jersey were first introduced to each other in person. Here's me and my Mom, Christmas day, 2008. I just opened the package I had had shipped to my parents' house. Surprise! It's a yellow jersey, some tights and other bike stuff I ordered on-line.
(Team Brandenburg-Means exchanged no gifts this year for Christmas -- a notable achievement. Well, almost. Team Brandenburg exchanged no gifts; Team Means succumbed to consumer temptation. I suppose you could say I succumbed and exchanged a gift with myself by ordering the bike stuff. Forgive me, oh gods of cynicism.)

From the start I knew this jersey was better than any other I had. It fit snugly. It breathed well, and yet it stayed warm on cooler days. It was really amazingly super bright yellow and couldn't be ignored except by the most inattentive of motorists.

I wore the jersey in Houston while cross-training for the half marathon. I wore it on the Casa Grande century ride. I wore it on several Tuesday and/or Thursday morning rides. I wore it on Saturday or Sunday if it was still clean enough. And I rode it one last time today in El Tour de Phoenix.

My sweat you wick
Through air, so quick.
You ate asphalt --
My sudden halt.

In loving memory, Pearl Izumi jersey,
2008-2009.

No. 61

Open arriving to work this morning I had waiting for me in my personal email in-box an email composed entirely in Italian. How else could it go?

In the restroom stall while changing from my commuting Lycra and polyester to my office job denim and cotton, I got to thinking about Italiana. Being in the cycling frame of mind, I got to thinking of the movie Breaking Away and how the main character, in his Italian persona, once says farewell to his love interest: "buenanotte". In Spanish good night is "buenas noches". Spanish and Italian are very similar languages, and phonetically the two farewells differ mainly by the soft "t" of the Italian being replaced with the hard "ch" of the Spanish. And this got me thinking.

I thought of how a slangy pronunciation of "you" has become CHOO or JOO. Once again the difference in pronunciation being a soft consonant, this time a "y" changed to the harder "ch" or "j". And this got me thinking.

We English speakers pronounce it "JOO-lee-uss" as in Julius Caesar. But the more accurate Latin is "YOO-lee-oose" as in "YOO-lee-oose KEE-sar". Again, the same difference from soft "y" to hard "j". Or "YAY-soose" as in Jesus Christ. Some people, of course, say "HEY-soose" or "HEY-zoose".

I didn't have anywhere in particular I was going with these thoughts. I suppose it's worth wondering if the transition from soft to hard is a common one, but by this time I had finished changing into my jeans and T-shirt and was on my way to disengaging my brain by way of sitting in a morning meeting.

Adiós mofos.

Reading log, no. 4

Jimmy's father spent more and more time at his work, but talked about it less and less. There were pigoons at NooSkins, just as at OrganInc Farms, but these were smaller and were being used to develop skin-related biotechnologies. The main idea was to find a method of replacing the older epidermis with a fresh one, not a laser-thinned or dermabraded short-term resurfacing but a genuine start-over skin that would be wrinkle- and blemish-free. For that, it would be useful to grow a young, plump skin cell that would eat up the worn cells in the skins of those on whom it was planted and replace them with replicas of itself, like algae growing on a pond.

The rewards in the case of success would be enormous, Jimmy's father explained, doing the straight-talking man-to-man act he had recently adopted with Jimmy. What well-to-do and once-young, once-beautiful woman or man, cranked up on hormonal supplements and shot full of vitamins but hampered by the unforgiving mirror, wouldn't sell their house, their gated retirement villa, their kids, and their soul to get a second kick at the sexual can? NooSkins for Olds, said the snappy logo. Not that a totally effective method had been found yet: the dozen or so ravaged hopefuls who had volunteered themselves as subjects, paying no fees but signing away their rights to sue, had come out looking like the Mould Creature from Outer Space -- uneven in tone, greenish brown, and peeling in ragged strips.

Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake

Oryx and Crake was Book Club's monthly reading selection for March -- for five minutes -- before we switched to the other dystopic Margaret Atwood novel, Handmaid's Tale. I previously read Handmaid in college, and I decided to go ahead and read Oryx instead. Actually, I decided to read both, but I didn't finish Handmaid in time, and so you'll be reading my thoughts on it in next month's reading log. Which comes out this month because this reading log is late.

Whew. I'm glad we got that all straightened out.

So Oryx and Crake. It depicts a very bleak Malthusian doomer scenario come to fruition. Whereas Handmaid is all about breakdown of sexual equality, Oryx is all about the failure of humanity to exercise self-restraint. The planet is wrecked, the corporations are running what's left of the show, but the well-to-do are going on about their decadent and superficial lives in all the same ways as we always do -- only humanity is frantically employing ever more sophisticated technology to patch the problems stemming from its upkeep. The solutions make for more problems, of course. And, of course, the outcome is the extinction of homo sapiens and the proliferation of a tribe of genetically modified people free from religion who spend their time munching on grass, creating lines of defense out of urine, and having some serious sex orgies. How else could it go?

Oryx and Crake is over the top, but so is Handmaid's Tale. Both novels are great for stimulating thought and discussion.

* * *

Unrequited love was, at that period of my life, the only kind I seemed to be capable of feeling. This caused me much pain, but in retrospect I see it had advantages. It provided all the emotional jolts of the other kind without any of the risks, it did not interfere with my life, which, although meagre, was mine and predictable, and it involved no decisions.

Margaret Atwood
Hair Jewellery
Dancing Girls and Other Stories

A short-story collection is to me a lot like a jar of peanut butter. It sits on the shelf, ready-made for quick, low-commitment consumption and tantalizing with its dense nourishment. Here! Read me! You can read one story before bed each night. No bookmarking, no leftovers, I'm low upkeep! It's only after I begin reading the short stories that I realize that I rarely like collections of them as much as I do a full novel and that the lure of dense nourishment was a false promise. And the no-bookmarking thing never works out. Instead I'd have been better off taking the time to make myself a pot of oatmeal. But perhaps I'm getting mixed up in my analogy.

March ended up being Margaret Atwood Month for me. It just worked out that way. I picked up Dancing Girls at the library as an impulse checkout. For a collection of short stories it wasn't too bad. In fact, I liked a lot of the individual stories. It's just that somehow I rarely like short-story collections. I think I'd prefer it if novels included a single short story in the back, kind of like dessert, rather than reading a slew of short stories all together, like a full meal. Just like peanut butter.

* * *

But then he thought of something else, another line of thought that he well remembered Hallam himself had dealt with in one of the articles he had written for popular consumption. With some distaste, he dug out the article. It was important to see what Hallam had said before he carried the matter further.

The article said, in part, "Because of the ever-present gravitational force, we have come to associate the phrase 'downhill' with the kind of inevitable change we can use to produce energy of the sort we can change into useful work. It is the water running downhill that, in past centuries, turned wheels which in turn powered machinery such as pumps and generators. But what happens when all the water has run downhill?

"There can then be no further work possible till the water has been returned uphill -- and that takes work. In fact, it takes more work to force the water uphill than we can collect by then allowing it to flow downhill. We work at an energy-loss. Fortunately, the Sun does the work for us. It evaporates the oceans so that water vapor climbs high in the atmosphere, forms clouds, and eventually falls again as rain or snow. This soaks the ground at all levels, fills the springs and streams, and keeps the water forever running downhill.

"But not quite forever. The Sun can raise the water vapor, but only because, in a nuclear sense, it is running downhill, too. It is running downhill at a rate immensely greater than any Earthly river can manage, and when all of it has run downhill there will be nothing we know of to pull it uphill again.

"All sources of energy in our Universe run down. We can't help that. Everything is downhill in just one direction, and we can force a temporary uphill, backward, only by taking advantage of some greater downhill in the vicinity. If we want useful energy forever, we need a road that is downhill both ways. That is a paradox in our Universe; it stands to reason that whatever is downhill one way is uphill going back.

Isaac Asimov
The Gods Themselves

In I. Asimov Isaac Asimov wrote that the two chief criticisms he received about his science fiction were firstly that he rarely if ever incorporated aliens into his stories and secondly that his stories had too little sex. So in the 1970s, after he had semi-retired from writing science fiction but before he made his big comeback, he wrote The Gods Themselves, and in it he wrote not just of aliens and not just of sex but of alien sex.

Needless to say, the book immediately found itself at the top of my reading list.

The story's plot centers around a not-too-distant fantastic invention called the Electron Pump that, in short, generates seemingly limitless, seemingly consequence-free energy by pumping electrons from our universe to what is called the para-Universe. And in the para-Universe live what we call para-men who operate what must be some sort of positron pump, which pumps positrons from their universe to ours. Being in different universes and almost entirely barred from communicating with each other, men and para-men can only speculate about each other's existence, but we fortunate readers get both perspectives. Meanwhile, both universes benefit from receiving energy out of the process -- a real perpetual motion machine.

And, of course, the story's plot involves lots and lots of alien sex. Asimov went over the top with his descriptions of it. It's really rather gratuitous though entirely decent due to the sex's utterly bizarre and, well, alien mechanics. I think this was precisely Asimov's point. I won't go into details about the details, but let's just say that the sex gives a different meaning to the Modern English song lyric "I'll stop the world and melt with you."

But this is not some mere alien-orgy fiction. This is a story about the consequences of the laws of thermodynamics and how even seemingly limitless and seemingly consequence-free energy isn't so limitless or consequence-free after all. It would take a rather dense reader not to replace "Electron Pump" with "fossil fuels" and "supernova of the sun" with "climate change". Yes, The Gods Themselves was written in the 1970s and predates our current incarnation of pop-environmentalism. Great science fiction is timeless.