Steal Judge this book!

Jen had her birthday on Monday and it went quite well. I wanted to make a nice dinner for her, but she wanted to cook dinner together, and she's the birthday girl, so that's what we did. We made up some perch with fresh squeezed lemon juice and herbs from her garden, some couscous and some cupcakes.

Lily read the cupcake box, and she was actually kind of helpful, and not even in the little kid way where you tell a kid that she was helpful because she was trying to help, but in an actual, legitimate fashion, where she gave us the ingredients, which were pictured on the box, (two eggs, three tablespoons of oil and half a cup of water) and then she told us what temperature the oven should be at. "Turn oven to three five oh." Go Lily!

I bought Jen a membership to the Lehigh Valley Arts Council, and a pair of headphones. We're hoping to go to Florida this fall, so we're mostly asking for money to put towards that, so that's mostly what she got from everyone else. Lily signed the card. She can write her name in these big block letters, and that's what she did.

I told Lily that we'd hopefully see Mister Tim again at the Pumpkinfest up in New Hamster. She told me she hoped that he'd have a Halloween Wedding with Grammy Kathy.

Work is okay. I walk past our three summer interns on my way back from the kitchen, and as I approach each computer, I see the screen flick away from Facebook/gmail/a fantasy football site.

Lily came out of the bathroom the other day holding a paperback that had been sitting on a shelf. "Daddy, don't judge this book."

I blinked and said, "Um, what?"

"You don't judge a book by its cover." (Actually, the book in question was Zelazny's "The Dead Man's Brother," and it would have been fine to judge that particular book by its cover, because the image is a pretty accurate depiction of what you can expect.) "Oh, okay."

She learned the phrase from her Strawberry Shortcake video, and she's taking it very literally. She doesn't yet understand that it has meaning beyond books. She said "Don't judge a book by its cover. Don't judge a person by the way she looks," but she's saying that like they're distinctly separate things. Ah, well, she's young. We'll soon have her crafting clever similes just like the fat girl waving her trophy at the smell fair!

While I was checking the proper spelling of "kōan" yesterday, I came across this an awesome website and a passage from the wikipedia entry and it struck me how it mirrors what I feel about Lily's education.

Appropriate responses to a kōan vary, since different teachers may demand different responses to a given kōan, and the answers may vary by circumstance. One of the most common recorded comments by a teacher on a disciple's answer is: "Even though that is true, if you do not know it yourself, it does you no good." The master is not looking for a specific answer but for evidence that the disciple has grasped the state of mind expressed by the kōan itself.

Yeah, yeah, it's a cliche to say that it's the journey and not the destination that matters, but I'm not even sure that what she does the journey itself matters either. The important thing is that she takes it.

Roger Zelazny Book Review: Roadmarks -The miles ticked inside me like years

For what's ostensibly a Roger Zelazny blog, I don't really do a whole lot of actual writing about his works. Just the occasional allusion to his something he wrote, every so often. (Typical post: "Lily is cute, Lily is smart, Roger Zelazny shout out!") So, I'm going to review Roadmarks today.

I can't remember if Roger Zelazny's Roadmarks was the first or second book of his that I read. My father's girlfriend lived down the street from us when I was about fourteen or so. I was at her house one day in the summer, looking for something to read, and she gave me her ex-husband's shoebox full of sci-fi paperbacks. I grabbed two that looked nifty, Roadmarks (aka Last Exit to Babylon) and Creatures of Light and Darkness. Here's the cover to Roadmarks. (Zelazny wanted to call it Last Exit to Babylon, but his publishers vetoed that, so he just asked the artist to put it on the sign on the cover as a compromise.)

I'm sure I started reading Roadmarks first, but it was just confusing. There were two alternating chapters, "One" and "Two", and the book opens with "Two". So I may have put it down and finished Creatures first instead. I've read them both so many times, and it was so long ago that I first picked them up that I really don't recall. But the strange format actually makes sense. It's a book about a certain type of idiosyncratic time travel and the "One" chapters follow the main character, Red Dorakeen, in a linear progression and the "Two" chapters are scrambled up events that happened in Red's past or future.

Zelazny himself on the structure of the book:

"And since the Twos were non-linear, anyway, I clipped each Two chapter into a discrete packet, stacked them and then shuffled them before reinserting them between the Ones. It shouldn’t have made any difference, though I wouldn’t have had the guts to try doing that without my experience with my other experimental books and the faith it had given me in the feelings I’d developed toward narrative."

'
And on how he had the idea for time as a highway:

I got the idea for [Roadmarks] during an automobile drive. I was coming up l-25, which is a nice modern highway in New Mexico, and just on a whim, I turned off at random on a turn off I'd never taken before. I drove along it for awhile, and I saw a road which was much less kept up. I turned onto that one, and later on I hit a dirt road and I tried it, and pretty soon I came to a place that wasn't on the map. It was just a little settlement. There were log cabins there, and horses pulling carts, and it looked physically as if I'd driven back into the l9th century. I started to think about the way the road kept changing, and I said, 'Gee, that would be neat, to consider time as a superhighway with different turnoffs.' I went back and started writing Roadmarks that same afternoon.

The gist of the story is that a Black Decade, ten legal attempts at assassination, has been declared against the protagonist, Red Dorakeen. He travels along "The Road", which is a superhighway that spans time rather than space.

The deal with the Road is that the more a path is traveled, the stronger it becomes. Red is trying to recreate a set of circumstances that he only half-remembers, in order to return to a byway that has fallen into disuse. We first meet Red when he's stopped by the local authorities while trying to smuggle modern weapons back to the Greeks in order to change history so they can win the battle of Marathon. (I thought this was kind of clever, because as you may know, the Greeks were the victors at the battle of Marathon.) An example from the book:

"Supposing you'd run over Stonewall Jackson?"

"Okay, I'm supposing."

"...And then you had turned around and come back. You would have noticed a fork in the Road where there had been none before--off there somewhere in the hinterlands--another way merging with your own, to form the route back here. Thereafter, on returning this way, you could take the branch to the place where that accident had occurred, or the other, to the place where it did not. The former would be a very bad road, however, and would probably disappear through disuse before too long. On the other hand, if it became sufficiently well-traveled, then the other might fade. This is unlikely, but if it were to occur, you would find it increasingly difficult to locate various later routes--Cs back up the Road--and there would be new ones, somewhat different from those you had known. It would be possible to lose yourself down some byway and never get back to your point of departure."

It's amazing how literate his books are, and how many levels on which they can be enjoyed. My education was appallingly incomplete when I first read the book, (it's not all that great now, but I'm continually trying to rectify that) An inn-keeper says of John Sunlight "Hands such as Modigliani might have painted somewhere or other..." a reference whose meaning I could divine from context, but which I never really fully appreciated until I saw several Modigliani paintings at the Barnes Foundation just this past weekend. The book may be the first place I ever heard the koan "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" It's certainly the first place I ever encountered Baudelaire.

Red is Zelazny's characteristic laid-back, easy-going, wise-cracking, homicidal protagonist. (Something I observe with great affection.) His foil in his travels is a sophisticated computer disguised as a copy of "Flowers of Evil".

Flowers is just one member of an excellent supporting cast. Some of my favorites are:

Mondamay was a fantastically sophisticated death machine, designed to destroy anything from a single virus to an entire planet, but he suffered a massive systems failures. He couldn't be repaired, and his creators felt a little sorry for him since he was sentient, so they left him with his hobbies and his disguises. He felt like making pots, so that's what he did.

Timyin Tin: "Timyin Tin worked in the monastery garden, apologizing to the weeds as he removed them. A small man, whose shaven head made his age even more difficult to determine, he hoed with great enthusiasm, his movements sharp and supple." I really like that description. Timyin Tin was an assassin who was captured, brainwiped and sent back in time to live as a monk in 14th century China. His memory is restored, but it does not overwrite his experiences as a monk and he carries with him a strange sort of conscience.

Sundoc and Toba: I think of them as the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the work. They have the unenviable task of going out and recruiting the assassins. Sundoc is described as a "very tall, copper-haired man, whose skin was pale, whose eyes were blue." Toba is a dark-skinned ("dark as the departing night") man with the beard.

My cast:

• Red Dorakeen: Kurt Russell (or possibly Morgan Freeman if I'm feeling whimsical. "Because I'm Irish")
• Timyin Tin: Jet Li or Collin Chou (Seraph from the later Matrix Movies). My friend Tim asked me once if it was ever stated that he's Asian. I don't think it is, but since he's blending in in 14th century China, that was the impression that I got.
  
• Leila: Julianne Moore (though I'm tempted to cast Katie Sagal just for giggles)
• John Sunlight: Cillian Murphy
• Doc Savage: Gotta go with the Rock.
  
• Mondamay: Dileep Rao (Yusuf the chemist from Inception)
• Archie Shellman: My first instict was to go with some big huge wrestler. (There's never any shortage of them for this kind of role.) But he's described as "A hundred kilos and tall enough to be slim." so I don't know.
  
• Strangulena: Angelina Jolie. She's just skanky enough to pull it off.
• Sundoc and Toba: Since they are the closest the book has to comic relief, I think I'll try some stunt casting and go with Conan O'Brian and Luis Guzmán.

I always thought Zelazny's Roadmarks was the most cinematic of all his books. It lends itself to such great visuals. I'd love to see Hitler driving around in his black VW looking for the place where he won, the fight between Archie and Timyin Tin, Mondamay the potter raising his hand and setting the sky ablaze, Doc Savage throwing John Sunlight over his shoulder and ripping his shirt in the process and of course, "The death of Chadwick! By Tyrannosaurus rex! Under the direction of the Marquis de Sade!"

I would watch the hell out of this movie.

Happy Birthday, Robot!

If you've been following the My Friends are Awesome series at my blog, you'll notice the common thread that most of my friends are gamers of one stripe or another. I'd be happy if Lily enjoyed some of the same the things that I do. I don't want to be the jerk dad who forces my kid into activities I enjoy, but I do want to share with her things I like and why I like them.

I hope she'll try role-playing games with me when she's old enough. I think gaming can promote any number of positive traits in kids, among them imagination, math skills and literacy.

I was thinking about all this when I came across a game called "Happy Birthday Robot!" How can you not love a game with that name?! I want to play Happy Birthday Robot and I'm a grown up! It's not a traditional RPG, but I think the gist of it is that every game begins with the phrase Happy Birthday Robot and then the players roll for how many words they get for their turn and they get to tell part of a story. You then randomly determine a conjunction and then the next player continues the story where the other player left off.

I came across a thread on rpg.net that had some other suggestions. It linked to this this website which lists a ton of kiddie friendly RPGs.

Firefly games had some stuff that looked cute, and despite the name, the studio has no relation to a certain overrated Space Western. (Or Western in Space, if you prefer)

I especially liked Lady Blackbird, which was compared favorably to Kiki's Delivery Service, which is one of our favorites.

Broomstix looked neat too. It's designed to emulate the Harry Potter books.

So, it looks like there are plenty of excellent games out there to chose from when she's old enough to play them. I think that day is a couple years off and we're content with telling cooperative stories and playing pretend right now, but role-playing has been important in shaping the person I've become.

My Friends are Awesome: Eric

My mom calls him the nice blond boy from my wedding.I knew who he was before we starting hanging out, but we didn't really become friends until I went on a beach trip with Dave and two friends of his. "Wait, Corrina's dating who?" I actually first knew of him as "That guy from the hippie store", because he managed a little kiosk in the mall, with its Bob Marley shirts and rainbow knit caps.

Shortly after we became friends, he had an interview at the Babbage's in the mall. "If I get it, I'll just stick around long enough to show I can hold down a job."

He held it down for more than a decade until moving on to other things. Eric has the skills needed to be a really good manager. He's much less tolerant of bullshit than I am. I'll hem and haw endlessly, but Eric will act decisively when the situation requires it.

He has an incredibly broad range of knowledge and boundless enthusiasm for everything he does. He's a really smart guy, but his mind works in such a profoundly different way than mine that I find him an endless source of fascination. One time, I was at his room in a house he shared with a couple other people, babbling on about Marvin Minsky, in whom I had recently taken an interest, and gushing in particular about his book Society of Mind, which I had been unable to find. Without missing a beat, Eric crossed to his bookshelf and produced a copy of Society of Mind. How awesome is that?!

One of my fondest memories is Eric showing up with a copy of the newly released Tekken 2 at our apartment one day, and playing it all night and sitting out on the rooftop. (This memory reminds me of a line from a Kimya Dawson song ("Maybe I'll play Tekken 2 all alone again hold down select and then laugh at big heads.") He used to show up with the leftover pretzels that Auntie Ann's was going to throw out when they closed up for the night.

He's a gamer, and though our tastes differ somewhat, he's always made an effort to show his friends what they might enjoy about the games that he likes. (And likewise, he's willing to sample games that fall outside his range of experience.) He organized our outing to I-con, which was one of my best weekends ever. He's a dad with cool tattoos for each of his kids. He popularized my "autistic robot" phrase. Other than Greg, he's my only friend who will talk Shakespeare with me. His favorite movie is The Lion in Winter, which is just all kinds of awesome.

The thing I like most about him is that he's always thinking of his friends. Whenever I see Eric, he's always got something cool to show me or tell me. He's just a fun guy to be around.

Josh and Tim go Barnes-storming

My buddy Tim came down for the weekend. He and I went to see the Barnes Foundation collection on Friday. I'm pleased that we managed to see it before they moved it to the new location.

The Barnes Foundation, as you may recall from my previous posts, is probably the most expansive private art collection in the world.

Here are some helpful links:

http://www.barnesfoundation.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnes_Foundation

Admission is strictly regulated. Only a certain number of people are allowed in every day. We were running late and missed our initial exit and we were slow to find the actual location. Our tickets were for 12:30. We pulled in to the lot at 12:29:49. Score! (We later learned that the times on the tickets were only loosely followed guidelines put in place just to ensure that everyone doesn't show up at the same time.)

I dressed up kind of nicely and guilted Tim into dressing up likewise because I'd be embarrassed walking around a museum in shorts and a t-shirt. On arriving, I saw that that if anything, shorts and a t-shirt would be overdressing compared to the flip flops and wife beaters everyone else was wearing. Gaw!

I enjoy nice art. I don't really have the background to appreciate it with anything approaching sophistication, but I like it. Three paintings I especially liked are featured below

Camille Monet at her tapestry loom

Apparently Monet had several paintings of his wife. He gets a lot of shit for prints of his watercolors appearing on the walls of every dentist office and temp agency in the world, but I'm told by people more knowledgeable about art than I am that the real genius is in his brush strokes, and this just doesn't come across in the reproductions. Anyway, I like the fact that he made his wife part of his world.

The Spring

I like this one because she seems so hopeful. It's like she's listening to someone outside the frame, and she doesn't know what he's going to say specifically, but she's just sure it's going to be something that will make her happy.

I had never heard of Corot, but I wrote down his name because I liked his work.His full name is Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, which is fantastically French.

Wikipedia says: "In his final 10 years he became the "Père (Father) Corot" of Parisian artistic circles, where he was regarded with personal affection, and acknowledged as one of the five or six greatest landscape painters the world has seen." So that's neat. I didn't see any of his landscapes at the Barnes, but the portraits were all beautiful. I liked them because his models all seemed unsettled, somehow. (Google image search Cobot and pensive and you'll get about a zilllion hits)

Pensive Young Woman

Tim pointed out that Renior sure liked painting nudes.

(We were in a room with a couple Renoirs)

Me: Which painting are you looking at?

Tim: The one with all the naked fat ladies.

Me: You're going to have to be more specific.

I mentioned to Tim that it reminded me of something the artist Masamune Shirow was quoted as saying in an issue of Intron Depot. That's all I had to say and Tim started chuckling, because he knew the quote too. That's why we're best buds! Anyways, the quote was something along the lines of "I drew a naked girl here because I didn't feel like drawing some guy's hairy ass. God, this is getting crass." Renoir was probably thinking along similar lines, in that he had a preference for depicting the elegance of the female form.

I noticed that there Fire extinguishers in a couple rooms of the Barnes Foundation, but that was probably just to comply with fire codes. I wondered what they would do if a fire did break out. I didn't see any sprinklers on the ceiling. I doubted that they would have traditional meltable fuse water sprinklers anyway. Perhaps some of the things that looked like alarms actually dispensed some kind of chemical retardant.

We were pretty beat when we left the museum, so we didn't linger too long in Philly. We listened to Jake Adelstein reading his book Tokyo Vice. He was one of the very first Americans to work at a Japanese newspaper and the book chronicled some of his time at the crime desk. It was interesting material, but he should have had someone else handle the reading. I mean, God knows I speak with a flat affect, but he made me sound like Tony Jay.

Shortly after that, we hit three locations looking for an Arby's. Two were closed, but we finally struck gold at the third. So did the Arby's employee who walked past us while unselfconsciously picking her nose.

When we got back, Lily gave Tim the third degree on when he'd be marrying Grammy Kathy.

Jen went to bed and Tim and I watched Hot Tub Time Machine. It was pretty hilarious. Rob Corddry was awesome. I feel that Tim's dad would have called it "raunchy", as he did the Adventures of Ford Fairlaine. (Every time I read the word "raunchy", I imagine Tim's dad saying it.)

On Saturday morning, we walked to Farmer's Market in Easton. Lily got tired of walking pretty early on, so I carried her most of the distance. She did make it up the whole huge flight of stairs going up from South Main street on her own though. On the way back, she told me that "Mister Tim is much funnier than you are, daddy," and then, seeing she might have hurt my feelings, added, "But you're still the silliest."

We played some Candyland. Lily asked Tim if she could sit on his lap and they were very cute. Jen cleverly stacked the deck, so we had a very short game that Lily won, and everybody was happy.

Lily knows a million jokes and she was bombarding Tim with every one of them.

Lily: Knock Knock.

Tim: Who's there?

Lily: Interrupting cow.

Tim: Interrup-

Lily: Moo!

(Two seconds later)

Lily: Knock Knock.

Tim: Who's there?

Lily: Interrupting dog

Tim: Interrup-

Lily: Bark!

(One second later)

Lily: Knock Knock.

Tim: Who's there?

Lily: Interrupting pig and sheep!

Tim: Interrup-

Lily: Oink! Baa!

I eventually managed to lure here away by suggesting a walk to the local cemetery. Like any three year old girl, she loves playing in the nearby cemetery. We did that for a while. She wasn't wearing any sunglasses and the bright sunlight really started bothering her, so I took off my world's greatest dad cap, tightened it as far as it would go and then put it on her little head, and for a little while, I did feel like the world's greatest dad.

Shortly after that, we dropped Lily off at her Grammy's house and then we went to karaoke at a bar within a local bowling alley. I'm happy that Jen gets me out of the house every now and again.

We got there slightly early for karaoke, so I played video games instead. I'm actually quite good at Star Wars trilogy, so I put my quarters in and this little girl who was about eight sat down next to me on the seat and asked, "Can I watch you play?"

Err...what do you say there? I kind of mumbled "sure" and scooted over as far as I could. Tim asked if he could watch and I said no and the other little kids there chased him away every time he tried to watch.

I'm pretty good at the game and got all the way to the second Death Star assault on one set of quarters. Go me!

Karaoke there was kind of lousy, so we decided to cut our loses and head up to another place, a sports bar up in Allentown. This place wasn't that much better, but we did well in bar trivia. It would have been nicer if the guy running karaoke hadn't disappeared for 45 minutes a half hour after our arrival, but Tim got one song in, so that was kind of cool. As he was returning to his table, the DJ asked him if he was a Bangles fan. Tim said sure, then asked us why he was asking about the Bangles. I said that the guy probably said "Bengals" because we were in a sports bar. (Tim was wearing the same t-shirt you can see from the picture further up the thread. If you can't make out the image, it's a cartoon of tiger snuggling with a little doll that looked like Calvin). Tim quickly yelled out a correction ("I thought you said Bangles, not Bengals! Walk like an Egyptian!") so that we wouldn't get murdered by irate Eagles fans in the parking lot.

When we got home at two in the morning, Jen played some Playstation karaoke and did very well.

The next day was pretty quiet. I went to the Warren County Farmer's Fair with Tim and we ran into an old classmate. That was nice enough. I ate terribly. (For the entire day, all I ate was some dollar store beef jerky, some prawn crackers (made with real prawn!) a handful of candy, some fried dough and a taco.) I felt sick (for some strange reason) and spent a fair amount of our last day snoozing and catching up on all the sleep I had missed. Kind of a low key ending to such an awesome weekend, but I guess I'm too old to be staying up till 3:30 every morning. I suppose there's a lesson to be learned here, but if you need me I'll be eating my prawn puffs until 5 this morning.