Category: Books & Learning

Jupiter has been taunting, bright in middle of the southern sky for—what? months now?—from our latitude. Only the moon and Venus can hold a candle to its magnitude, and Venus is off being coy somewhere below the horizon. So there is a bold Jovian dot up there, and we’ve been pointing David’s telescope at it. And trying to attach cameras to it. With mixed success.

In honor of our feeble attempts, here is Jupiter week! Each day a little snippet of astronomical wonder about the biggest planet we’ve got.

Jupiter has been taunting, bright in middle of the southern sky for—what? months now?—from our latitude. Only the moon and Venus can hold a candle to its magnitude, and Venus is off being coy somewhere below the horizon. So there is a bold Jovian dot up there, and we’ve been pointing David’s telescope at it. And trying to attach cameras to it. With mixed success.

In honor of our feeble attempts, here is Jupiter week! Each day a little snippet of astronomical wonder about the biggest planet we’ve got.

This book is too good for me and I think I’m okay with that. I’m going through a phase of admitting, even flaunting personal weakness, such that I can, with any luck, recognize patterns of things in myself that aren’t lame. To that effect, yeah, Tom McCarthy is probably a little bit more smarty pants than I am capable of internalizing, at least in terms of post-modernist literature that reads like a light delirium.

I don’t exactly know what happened.

Jacobsen’s American Terroir is a book that extols the concept of terroir, the specific complexities of edibles produced in a very specific place. Historically the term has been associated with winemaking, but Jacobsen urges Americans to wrest it from the hoity-toity grasp of wine snobs. It applies, he argues, vastly beyond vines and oenophiles.

Part travelogue, part wine journal, part economic-environmental manifesto, American Terroir delivers vignettes, little episodes in Jacobsen’s vision of North American terroirism.

This past weekend, we attended the season-opening concert of the Portland Youth Philharmonic at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall downtown. It had been a few years since I’d been inside the Schnitz, and I realized that there were a few things—traditions and hierarchies—about orchestral performances that I either took for granted or didn’t really understand fully (when pressed).

Chicago Symphony Orchestra by jordanfischer

Techniques of imaging the sky with some sort of camera progress from common sense to PhD within a single sentence. I know because I’ve spent weeks trying to find a conceptual, somewhat layman’s explanation of the basics, and keep getting mired in gearhead, Byzantine Web forums and scientific publications. I lament the absence of any sort of glossy, entry-level book explaining how to take photos of things in space at night, but I’ve come to realize that the reason that no such thing exists is that perhaps it cannot.

You know what the best thing about this book is?

The editors and publishers left it alone. Instead of a neutered, American English variant (ahem, Harry Potter, ugh), the bucolic Britishness of Blood Harvest’s weird (fictional) town of Heptonclough, Lancashire, has been left intact, and it is that very slight cultural shift that makes S.J. Bolton’s novel stand out in a crowded genre of quasi-paranormal suspense stories.

There’s a problem. Or perhaps not a problem so much as an absence of anything actively useful. I read a lot. I pursue a lot of interests. I see a lot, I go to a lot of places (more now than before). So much that I have become overawed, and, in turn, passive where I should really be active. I’ve transformed into an absorptive entity. This cannot stand.

What good is pummeling my way through Plato, learning the art of frankincense distillation, taking weak little steps towards astrophotography, sampling weird Austrian wines made from the Zweigelt grape or solving confounding problems in the world of mobile Web development if I keep everything entirely to myself?

Squirreled around the bedside and my library desk, scraps of paper—some crumpled upon subsequent realization of their inaccuracies—are covered with lines and arrows, webs and dates, as I attempted to flowchart the real, temporal lives of the emotionally-related characters in Krauss’ new novel, Great House. Krauss gives her psychological all here, with characters so resonating with loneliness, misery and guilt that reading it almost hurts the reader back. It leaves one with a residual psychical hangover not unlike that groggy confusion after waking from a lossful dream. She leaves it to you—a compelling task, if you are caught up in the aura of the book—to search for clues, to unwind the complexity of the ways these sad lives touch each other: reality is your job, meaning is hers.

Lucy Bergmann has a problem. Her astrophysicist husband has just been killed, crushed to death by a grand piano while walking around in Amsterdam. His Wile E Coyote-inspired exit leaves Lucy in possession of of his just-clinched proof of extraterrestrial life (as evidenced by pulsing red dots in a computer program, naturally) on a flash drive (no backups, but of course). Lucy adopts the weird obsession of wearing this ‘memory stick’ like a talismanic necklace. Ah. And this is just the first chapter.