The Culturatti

The Ferryman and the Monkey

Tsai Wen-Fu

Since I’m very busy with a lot of stuff right now, I’ve decided to stay away from novels for a while; they can be somewhat time consuming (especially when they are a an eight-book cycle).  So, for the time being, it’s comic books and short stories.  Or, as they are affectionately known in popular rap music — shorties.

First up is Tsai Wen-Fu (b. 1926); since the thing to do when living abroad is to check out some of the home-grown offerings of your favourite and/or chosen entertainment medium, I went on down to Eslite one day and browsed the English Contemporary Taiwanese Fiction section to see what I could find.  It was mostly short story collections, and, after some consideration, this is the one I selected.

Am I entirely happy with this choice?  No.  Is it entirely my fault?  Maybe.

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Part I / Part II

The Baroque Cycle — Vol III: The System of the World

Neal Stephenson

***WARNING: SPOILERS ABOUNDETH***

So, now finally at the end of this eight-book series (collected in three volumes), I see it can broken down thusly:

Books 1, 2 & 3 — Introduction

Books 4, 5 & 6 — Plot/Action

Books 7 & 8 — Denouement

Which isn’t really a bad way of structuring something, in terms of simply how to tell a story in parts; but when, as indicated above, those parts are whole books unto themselves, well, it could be considered a little tedious.  In fact, is a little tedious.  Books 7 & 8 — especially Book 8 — while I’ve labelled them denouement, could also be described as ‘anti-climax.’  For, really, nothing much happens.

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Part I

The Baroque Cycle — Vol II: The Confusion

Neal Stephenson

I actually finished this one a couple of months ago, but didn’t write about it at the time for various reasons.  But I have now just started reading Vol. III, The System of the World, which has got me all excited about this series again, and there’s no way I can contain my inner Culturatti-ness any longer.  Ergo this long overdue post.

This volume is definitely the meat and potatoes of the series.  You want plot?  This is where you get it.  As I mentioned in Part I, Quicksilver is almost all set-up and introduction: to the characters, to the world of the time etc.  There’s really no actual ’story’ at all; this is fine since what Stephenson does give us is so well-written and interesting we happily follow along.  But it’s in The Confusion that we finally have all the disparate pieces flung together, and, I have to say, I was not at all expecting what came out of it.  The central, core plot device is both so simple for an expert on that time period to use, and yet so clever (to use it in the way he does) that it really provides for an enthralling yarn.

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The Baroque Cycle — Vol I: Quicksilver

Neal Stephenson

Once again, I’m so behind. This was first published in 2003 and 2004; I’m only reading it now. In terms of website-reviewing, this makes it ancient history — I might as well be writing about the Glorious Revolution. But wait . . . through good fortune, I can do both. For the events surrounding the deposition of James II of England from the throne are but one of the many intriguing story lines Stephenson entertains us with in this thick, esoteric tome (actually a collection of three separate novels).

Yes — I haven’t read something so enjoyable, and clever, in a long time. This book is what you might call ’smart fun;’ for, to really enjoy it, you should have either a fairly decent grasp of 17th c. European history, or at least be willing to hit Wikipedia every half-hour or so to look a bunch of stuff up (I admit I’m somewhere in the middle). You should also be fairly comfortable reading about geometrical proofs and cryptographic methods, most of the details of which, I’m afraid, are over my poor little artsy-boy head, even though I find the discussions within which they are framed quite interesting. Finally, you should have a zeal for adventure and an admiration of well-written descriptive verse — both of which I believe I do possess in spades. Hence my grand enjoyment.

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Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Lynne Truss

I definitely deserve credit for that post title. That was truly well done, I think.

Couple of confessions:

1) I am a punctuation fascist;

2) I had yet to read, until recently, this five year-old book written specifically for punctuation fascists, marking me, clearly, as one behind the punctuation fascist times; since it had been sitting on my bookshelf for a while (an x-mas present one year from Sarah & Graeme), I decided it was worthy of coming with me to Taipei, and lo, I have recently finished it.

See? Look at the above sentence. That thing’s punctuated up the ass, and all correctly (although some of you may quibble with a comma or two). I once had a fellow student raving about me in writing class because she felt I was the only one there — herself included — who knew how to use a semi-colon correctly. My point is: on this topic, I know of what I speak.

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Posted by Sarah P.

In 1993, around the 30th anniversary of the assassination of American President John F. Kennedy, there was a flurry of television documentaries all examining the well-worn paths of those conspiracy theorists who persistently claim that there was something conspiratorial about the killing. It was not news to most people who were actually alive at the time of the assassination, just entertaining, as the documentaries could not prove a conspiracy actually happened, just vociferously protest that one occurred. However, to a fourteen-year-old, like myself at the time, the Kennedy assassination debate was fresh fodder, especially for one keen on analytical reasoning; I figured an answer was possible, there just hadn’t yet been someone who could put all the pieces together coherently. And my fourteen-year-old brain was also quiet excited by the likelihood of a high-level, widespread, powerful conspiracy to kill one of the most popular (and handsome) American presidents ever.
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