When the songbird sings

“I blame Pride and Prejudice for the fact that the hero of every romance novel is rotten to the heroine the first time he meets her. In my heart, I also blame it for our persistent and anachronistic tendency to regard a man as an embodiment of personal destiny. Well, not Pride and Prejudice alone. But we carry stories around in our bones, and among novels about the sexes, it’s the best there is: Elizabeth snagging Mr. Darcy is romantic heroin for the discriminating reader.”

–“The archetypal heroine” on Globe and Mail

Circle search by Shahram Sharif

“The sensation that defines the search is the sweet, painful feeling that you get when you can’t think of a word that feels as if it’s right on the tip of your tongue. For most people, the relief they experience upon finding it is almost physical. They sink back in their chairs and try not to stumble upon any more difficult words. The person who makes his living searching for the new new thing is not like most people, however. He does not seriously want to sink back into any chair. He needs to keep on groping. He chooses to live perpetually with that sweet tingling discomfort of not quite knowing what it is he wants to say.”

–Michael Lewis, “The New New Thing”

“No man, proclaimed Donne, is an island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other’s tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life…

Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, ‘casualties may rise to a million.’ With individual stories, the statistics become people–but even that is a lie, for people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child’s swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears?…

We draw our lines around these moments of pain, remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearllike, from our souls without real pain.

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.

And life that is, like any others, unlike any other.”

–Neil Gaiman, American Gods

Photo: From no man is an island by murplej@ne

I am an impulsive book buyer, and my weekend is not complete without a foray into Powerbooks, NBS, or the bargain book stores. That explains the number of books that have accumulate on my desk, overflowed to my bed, and added an extra weight to my already heavy bag. This month, I bought more than my share of books as if I didn’t have a long backlog to deal with already. And then there are the bookmarked chapters book24x7.com, thanks to the (step-)mothership, for domain knowledge and tech blogging stuff. (Yes, Allan and Yuliya, I am reading up on loads of stuff.)

I want to read at least 25 books/year or about one book every two weeks. The 25-book goal may not be possible at all for this year, but the one-book-per-week objective may (may!) still be salvaged. I’m in the middle of reading Neil Gaiman’s American Gods while a bookmark has been stuck for over a month now in Stephenie Meyer’s The Host. I just lost interest halfway through The Host because it’s too convoluted in so many parts, and there are too many soliloquys that should have been cut off. I think that Breaking Dawn is the last young adult title that I’m reading in a long time.

There are more titles in my “to-read” list that I still have to buy and make the time for. For August, and maybe September, I have the following books to finish, and the backlog does not even include those that I bought in the early part of the year. Thank God for Book Sale because I can get my hands on titles that NBS or Powerbooks had ran out of, or are priced too steeply for my budget. Fully Booked has a decent collection, but every thing is more expensive by P20 to P80. I’m going to give the swanky branch on Bonifacio High Street a visit one of these days, though.

• American Gods, Neil Gaiman (currently reading) - Ex-prisoner Shadow meets an old man during a flight to his wife’s funeral. The old man, Wednesday, hires Shadow to be his bodyguard and since then, nothing has been normal in former prisoner’s life. The story works on the premise that gods also joined the thousands of people who migrated to the America, and these gods still live among the populace to this day.
• Geek Love, Katherine Dunne - Not necessarily about geeks as the cool kids in the hyperconnected world, but about freaks who were genetically designed be born with physical defects in order to star in the circus.
• The Other Side of the Story, Marian Keyes - Mostly about another circle of friends who have reached a fork in the road. Keyes’ books are difficult find here, which is too bad because she comes up with pretty decent chick lit, i.e., not the typical girl-meets-dashing-boy story. The other Keyes book I read, Last Chance Saloon, is a choc-ful of laughs about a group of friends in their 30s who are confronted with their respective last chances at love and happiness. The best part of the story is that the gay couple is the happiest of them all.
• In the Company of the Courtesan, Sarah Dunant - From the New Yorker: “The novel, narrated by Fiammetta’s servant, a dwarf, chronicles the pair’s horrific scrapes and their dizzying triumphs, which include Fiammetta’s becoming Titian’s model for his “Venus of Urbino.” Along the way, Dunant presents a lively and detailed acccount of the glimmering palaces and murky alleys of Renaissance Venice, and examines the way the city’s clerics and prostitutes alike are bound by its peculiar dynamic of opulence and restraint.” Courtesan is Dunant’s follow-up to her outstanding debut set in Renaissance Florence, The Birth of Venus. This is the Renaissance in its artistic splendor, grimy alleys, religious conflicts, and power struggles.
• The Dante Club, Matthew Pearl - As a group of young men from Boston, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, translate an Italian poem, they find themselves on the trail of a serial killer who tortures his victims in ways that are similar to passages from Dante’s Inferno.
• The Thirteenth Tale, Dianne Setterfield - From Publishers Weekly: “Margaret Lea…is contacted by renowned aging author Vida Winter, who finally wishes to tell her own, long-hidden, life story. Margaret travels to Yorkshire, where she interviews the dying writer, walks the remains of her estate at Angelfield and tries to verify the old woman’s tale of a governess, a ghost and more than one abandoned baby. With the aid of colorful Aurelius Love, Margaret puzzles out generations of Angelfield: destructive Uncle Charlie; his elusive sister, Isabelle; their unhappy parents; Isabelle’s twin daughters, Adeline and Emmeline; and the children’s caretakers. Contending with ghosts and with a (mostly) scary bunch of living people, Setterfield’s sensible heroine is, like Jane Eyre, full of repressed feeling—and is unprepared for both heartache and romance. And like Jane, she’s a real reader and makes a terrific narrator.”
• The Biographer’s Tale, AS Byatt - There is no other way to describe the gist of this book other than that it’s a multi-layered swipe at “poststructural literary criticism, to introduce arch observations about the current fad of psychoanalytic biography (Publishers Weekly).” Read: an intellectual masturbation on how a biographer profiles his subjects.
• The Physician’s Tale, Ann Benson - A bioterror attack nearly decimates the population of the U.S. and leaves Doctor Janie Crowe and her husband, together with a small band of survivors, to struggle with their lives. Seven centuries earlier in Europe, a physician, Alejandro Canches, deals with a similar situation at the height of the black death and must make an ethical–but possibly dangerous–choice in order to survive, as well as save the king’s illegitimate daughter.
• Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, John Berendt - There is murder and its subsequent high-profile trial; there is the circus of Savannah, Georgia’s interesting characters, which include a voodoo lady, a transsexual, and the town’s aristocracy. Berendt’s travelogue and eventual murder mystery investigation was turned into the 1997 film, starring John Cusack and Kevin Spacey. And let’s face it–the book has one of the most intriguing titles in many years.
• Crooked Little Heart, Anne Lamott - This is as much about tennis as it is about an unspoken competition between Rosie, who has to confront her awkward adolescent years, angst, and fear of being stuck in second place, and Simone, Rosie’s attractive, popular and skilled former doubles partner. This looks like a young adult read, but at least it’s about tennis and not mythical creatures.

“The ‘Peter Principle’ states that ‘in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence; the cream rises until it sours.’ People who show competence are promoted whether or not they are qualified to perform competently at the next level. Eventually they go beyond their limits, become incompetent, and stop getting promoted. Macbeth, a success as a military commander, rose to become an incompetent king. Which is to say, ‘nothing fails like success.’

“Final Placement Syndrome is what the ordinary sociologist calls ’success’ …frustration occurs as a result of promotion, because most people who are promoted genuinely wish to be productive.”

Tea Berryonce made an observation along these lines: What if you are good at something but you don’t want to be promoted because then you will be distracted with managing people instead of actually being productive? There are people who are very smart and very skilled, but they don’t enjoy being “stage moms”. And then there are those who only bullshit their way through. The problem is, the PTBs only see the value of the bullshitter and not the talented, productive one. And so you accept the promotion because that’s the only way that you can get more perks.

My Zen master says: Practice still makes perfect. Patience is a virtue. Make frequent trips to the coffee dispenser.

From Time’s Nerd World blog:

“…Marriage? Bang, they’re married by page 50. Sex? Page 85. Nothing coy about that. Where do you go from there? The answer, of course, is a half-vampire baby — which could have been lame, but I thought she gave it a real high-stakes horror feel, with its impenetrable uterine sac and its breakneck, almost tumorous growth, devouring Bella from within, bruising her belly and cracking her ribs and her pelvis. And Bella gulping blood to keep it alive! This is a kind of mature, shocking writing I don’t think I’ve seen Meyer do before, even in Host. You can see she’s been through childbirth, and she’s seen the ugly side of it.

“[But I must pause at this point to say: Renesmee. Worst…name…ever. And some sick Twilight fan somewhere is going to name their child that, I just know it.]”

I’m sure some “sick” Twilight fan somewhere will eventually name her child Renesmee, but as it’s already the age of Google, I hope the poor sap gets the spelling right. (I was lining up at a Meralco counter a few weeks ago and saw the worst possible misspelling of a name from 60s pop culture: Edelvise. Correct: Edelweiss.)

So there is sex in Breaking Dawn. Lots of it. Bella is so frisky, she can hardly keep her claws from Edward. It’s too convenient that they have the stamina to satisfy each other, thanks to their super vampire strength. Funny how Edward was nearly reduced to just a sex object in many parts of the book, it’s almost unromantic. While Twilight (and the entire saga, except for a few chapters) is told from Bella’s point of view, Edward is the selling point of the first book for being unnaturally good-looking, smart, rich, and overall perfect; this installment has put the boy vampire on the sidelines because it’s already established that he’s unnaturally good-looking, smart, rich, and overall perfect. And so we shift our attention to his rival, Jacob.

As much as he’s annoying to Team Edward members, Jacob effectively moves the story forward. It’s him one feels for, his pain and anguish that Meyer explores more effectively. That’s his prize for having his flaws, for being different in an otherworldly dis-likable manner.

Bella becomes too perfect herself. Flawed characters make for more interesting fiction and her being an all-too-controlled newborn, not to mention that she now looks like a supermodel, is also a cop-out. That’s probably the problem with perfect characters–they get too old too soon.

There is a bit of fang action during a hunting trip, and that is all that can be expected. A fang-fest between Irina and Bella would have been better.

Jacob “imprinting” on Renesmee is just too funny. It settles the love triangle issue in the most convenient way, and I would have hated all the convenience it afforded the story if it weren’t funny and weird, it has “cradle snatcher” written all over it.

That order has to be established in the vampire world is a dead giveaway that the Volturi will walk away from Forks unscathed. That baby Cullen is too cute to be killed is a dead giveaway that the Italian vampires will leave her in one piece, unburned.

And while female vampires cannot conceive, the same cannot be said for the male members of the species, which is unfair. Why does Meyer have to spring up, though indirectly, the biological clock thing?

(How did I get suckered into this book?)

Meyer mentions the Danag, a Filipino vampire sub-species, in both Twilight and Breaking Dawn.

Yes, would you like to buy a book? by Oolong

Do you want to be a leader in the tech industry? Then better read these books, according to Bob Rouse, head of Society for Information Management’s Regional Leadership Forum. Top of the book pile is Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book, while the more interesting entries, not because of the subjects discussed, but because the list is for future tech industry leaders, include Steinbeck’s The Pearl (read in college), Machiavelli’s The Prince (required in Social Science II - Political Theories or some such thing), and Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.

So true.

So it has been over six weeks since my last post, and even that wasn’t my own. As with most bloggers, there are things that are better left said through other people’s (dead or alive) words or music or poems…whatever. I wanted to put lots of reviews or regurgitate some nice finds other than the Youtube videos, songs, or poems, but it has not been easy to put my thoughts together and turn them even into quasi-intelligent compositions. The juicy bits are in my Multiply which allows for posting of FYEO blog entries. At this point, feel free to run shrieking for your sanity as I make a run-down of what has been done/have happened in the past two months, and it could take you two months to finish reading the long and winding entry.

A post-Philippine summer of sometimes great and oft-times overhyped movies.

Thanks to the Hollywood summer extravaganza of big films and the not-so-unfounded paranoia that movie pirates will spread illegal copies via torrent networks and dibidi bazaars, major films are released on this part of the globe almost always nearly two days head of US weekend showings. When our schedules allowed, one would easily find my sister and I at Greenbelt cinemas on Wednesday or Thursday nights catching late screenings of whatever is a must-see movie of the week.

Iron Man was cool, and half the reason for its success was Robert Downey Jr. Indy IV was so-so. Sex and the City was, just as expected, a blown-up version of the series. It didn’t provide fresh content or ideas even as the story took off from where the series ended four years ago, and for all that it was worth, fashion was the only thing that…sort of…saved the flick if only one could actually wear the clothes. I didn’t notice anyone in NYC wearing anything that resembled the ensemble that the cast strutted in in the movie. Ponders. I love Ed Norton, so no matter how lame the CGI and the fight scenes were whenever he turned into the green giant in Incredible Hulk, I liked the movie. I liked hims so that I always wished he wouldn’t lose it at all.

Hancock was ok. It offers a different twist on the superhero genre, but in the end still fell flat on its backside because no one has an idea of what he really is (okay, an alien, but seriously!), what the we-can’t-be-together-although-we’re-meant-for-each-other complication is about, or the flimsy excuse for the bad ‘tude and poor hygiene. But maybe because it’s just difficult to hate Will Smith and Charlize Theron did better as superhero in this flick than in that MTV-produced flop she starred in a few years ago, so the film’s got some saving grace. Still, thanks to Keiichi, for the movie treat, and I’m still embarrassed about the popcorn-flavored butter.

I missed Narnia-2, so that means I’ll have to wait until the DVD or a decent dibidi copy comes out. I still have to catch Mama Mia and The Dark Knight this week. It’s quite difficult to pass on the chance to see Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan exchange musical notes. Did Colin Firth sing too? That would be like Mr. Darcy serenading…well, Lizzie Bennet’s mom. And don’t start about Heath Ledger’s creepy Joker. I know. He could be creepy with or without Joker’s mask. And Wanted? I don’t want it.

Books!

Good Lord, there’s just no end to my love affair with books, that I kept buying titles even when I have half a dozen others waiting to be read. I’ve read the first three of Twilight saga, and have to say that the first one is the best if you hate the complications of lost love and found again, or of love triangles and feisty suitors who don’t understand the meaning of the word NO. And contrary to what others say, Twilight, the first book, is more Pride and Prejudice than Rome and Juliet. The third one channels parts of Wuthering Heights, and Bella actually read a passage from the book to explain her actions to Edward. If only things would always be solved by quoting from books, maybe this world would be a better place. (But then, there are some books that just do.not.solve.problems.) The fourth title, Breaking Dawn, is coming out on August 2, and at this stage, I don’t care much anymore about what other powers the unconventional vampires in Meyer’s universe have, but what I want to know is whether Bella ends up being “turned” or walks down the aisle with Edward. I’m on Team Edward, by the way.

Sometimes, that’s the beauty of YA fiction–you could just skip to the end. Or wait for the last installment and skip to the last chapter before bothering with the rest of the story.

I also got myself suckered into buying The Host, which is Meyer’s attempt at sci-fi romance. I’m halfway through the book, and I can say that there’s a lot of Pavlovian and Skinner(ian?) conditioning going on in the story which mostly happens in a jazzed up cave somewhere in the middle of an Arizona desert. I’m starting to think that religion also has something to do with the story, although the concept of God is not mentioned anywhere…yet? On the outset, it’s as if humans should be thankful for getting its entire population used as hosts by aliens (as souls) because they’re bad anyway.

Others on the shelf: A Biographer’s Tale by AS Bayatt, Microtrends by Mark J. Penn, The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl, The Thirteenth Tale by Dianne Setterfield, The Physician’s Tale by Ann Benson, and Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. I’m still halfway through Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Sussanna Clarke’s one-thousand-plus pager Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norris, Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, and Jeffrey Euginides’ Middlesex. And then there are other tomes on project management, writing, communication, and how to navigate the corporate jungle which I am too embarrassed to say I’m reading, but because I have to take some refresher.

By the way, I chanced upon a Star Movies showing of the film based on Patrick Suskind’s Perfume some three weeks ago. I remember having major creeps when I read the most “interesting” novel way back in college, and the film wasn’t any different. Ben Whishaw’s Jean Baptiste Grenuouille should be up there with Andy Serkis’ Gollum, and possibly, Heath Ledger’s Joker in the creepiest movie psychos Hall of Fame.

Series and great digital finds

Thanks to the networked world, I have watched the 2008 remake of Sense and Sensibility and the 2006 Jane Eyre miniseries. After watching the 2005 Pride and Prejudice movie, the 1995 miniseries was a bit of a disappointment, except for Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy. If you’re a fangirl of historical romance genre like me, then I highly recommend that you get copies of these series. The orig DVDs are pricey, so be creative in getting copies.

Badminton

I didn’t play badminton for over 8 weeks, thanks to the sudden downpours in the last weeks of May. Instead of hitting birds, I took much comfort instead in flipping through pages of the books I mentioned above. Surprisingly, I enjoyed the break from this sport and even considered hanging up my rackets for good. Maybe tennis would be a better alternative because at least on TV it’s so posh. Or get into some other physical activities, like yoga, boxing, or just sweating out at a gym (eww..dullsville!) But now that the rains had so far abated, I figured it was time to get busy again, pick up my racket and push myself to just try running around the courts like I was pretending to catch a flying something. I joined the BR queueing since the venue was the most convenient place to go to right after work.

What can I say, on the day I started playing, the BR organizers invited me to a dual meet with Prima, and like most not-so-smart decisions I made, I agreed to wear their jersey. I used to join Prima back in summer, but for some reason I just couldn’t warm up to the idea of playing with them regularly. They’re ok, of course, and the people are mostly nice. Also, if you have joined their games for 40 times, you’d get a free badminton bag, and if I remember correctly, a shirt; both have the team’s logo.

As luck would have it, I busted my already creaky shoulder on the first day of practice. I was sluggish, gasping for breath, and had only met my partner on the last practice day before the meet, so predictably, we were slaughtered.

Retail therapy

Geek glasses, shoes, jeans, shirts, bags, grocery…

Tennis

Holy mother of anything grassy! I nearly had a heart attack watching the epic Fed-Rafa showdown. Too bad, Rafa outmuscled and outplayed the Fed. Shit.

So, is the problem that’s been plaguing Fed this year mental? Is he truly human after all? What is mononucleosis? Should I watch Fed’s exhibition games with Borg, JMac, and a yet to be identified but hopefully not Rafa fourth party in Kuala Lumpur in November? (And can I afford it? Why isn’t there a link from the ruddy Axcess home page for the event?) And what’s with Rafa’s tugging at his trousers pedal pushers anyway?

Tennis v. stressful.

(I try not to write about work specifics. Most employers past, present and future have non-disclosure clauses, and I’d rather not ruin my chances. )