The Smartening and The Artening

I just wanted to quickly point out that in Japan, the best-selling video game for the last two weeks running has been the latest in the series of Professor Layton games. In the UK, a recent release of an older Professor Layton game has also apparently been a great success.

I am cheered by this news because these games are little more than compilations of old math and logic questions, spruced up with beautiful hand-drawn backgrounds and old-fashioned animated characters.
When you play a Professor Layton game, the experience typically goes as follows: you wander through a lovingly drawn area reminiscent of the LucasArts-heyday backgrounds on Curse of Monkey Island, click on a quirky character who looks like a reject from The Triplets of Belleville, and he or she says something like “I will give you this shiny gold coin if you can help me, young man. I have a rowboat, a fox, a chicken, and a bag of feed...”

Each game has over a hundred hard-core logic puzzles, disguised by an atmospheric point-and-click adventure interface. I’m usually turned off by games that lean heavily on reheated old puzzles, like the infuriating “Tower of Bozbar” and “Peggleboz” from Zork Zero, but Layton’s design somehow makes the old logic chestnuts addictive and charming.

The fact that these adorable games are so popular shows that there’s an enormous audience out there for creative video games which are both highly artistic and educational. Of course, people have been similarly excited about the success of Brain Age for a couple of years because it’s educational, but to me the Professor Layton games are much more interesting because I have to assume that they appeal to a younger crowd than Brain Age. Some of those nearly half-million Japanese people who’re already playing the newest game must be children, and it’s nice to think of their little brains stretching to figure out how to row that fox and chicken across the river. (hm - note how that phrase I just wrote, “how to row that fox” is like a tongue twister or something. Four different vowel sounds from “o” as the second letter in a word. English spelling must be so annoying for learners).

Also, nothing against 3D backgrounds or animation, but the fact that these are hand-drawn 2D is a tiding of great joy to me, both for nostalgic reasons and because I think it’s an eye-pleasing use of the small DS screen, where 3D environments can look like a blocky mess. There’s clearly still a place in the gaming industry for people who can draw and paint old-fashioned backgrounds, and that’s a nice thought.

In conclusion, everyone who has ever complained about how video games are violent or detrimental to children should please, please just shut up forever. This possibly includes, with all due respect, our next president.

We Did It!

photo source

The impact will blow trees back and crack statues

My favorite era in rap music was roughly ’94 to ’98, when East Coast hardcore was at its height. I loved the gritty, verbose, cryptic, violent sound of the Wu Tang Clan, Gravediggaz, Mobb Deep, the Boot Camp Clik and related groups. It was dense, paranoid and clanking music best suited for headphones on the subway.

Hip hop didn’t get any more anti-commercial than the GZA, who epitomized the cold world of the mid-’90s’ stern, Biblical-prophet wordplay, while his groupmate ODB rapped like a street-corner drunk a few seconds from toppling over, crooning and ranting at passing cars. Somewhere between those two poles, between sesquipedalian urban Jeremiads and raving homicidal lunacy, lay the essence of the Wu era’s greatness, and it was all set to great beats from the likes of the RZA, DJ Premier, Havoc, 4th Disciple and Da Beatminerz.

For a few years, it seemed as if everyone was weaving dense lyrical webs of comic-book, kung-fu, Scarface and militant Five Percenter references over ominous beats. It all came to an end sometime before the turn of the century, when, to make a long story short, a shrewd buffoon named Puff Daddy dominated an era of dumber, openly superficial, radio-friendly rap which increasingly incorporated baleful R&B caterwauling (the kiss of death as far as I was concerned).

Things got even worse as Nelly-style silly sing-song cadences and lyrically vacant Southern rap started to catch on in the ensuing years. Instead of lyrics like Deck’s superb alliterative/assonant “Poisonous paragraphs smash ya phonograph in half / It be the Inspectah Deck on the warpath / First class leavin mics with a cast / Causin ruckus like the aftermath when guns blast / Run fast, here comes the verbal assaulta / Rhymes runnin wild like a child in a walker”, we had “It’s getting hot in here, so take off all your clothes”. Mo’ money, mo’ problems, indeed.

I thought for a few years there that hardcore hip hop was dead. As usual, I just wasn’t looking in the right places. People like Jedi Mind Tricks and M.F. DOOM were keeping the torch lit, and the web made it possible to find those few groups who were still putting out quality music. But for the past few years it’s usually been a depressing trickle rather than a steady stream of new stuff, and my old favorites seemed to have run out of steam.

Then, over the last couple of months, two albums from old favorites dropped which together have resuscitated my faith in hip hop. Heltah Skeltah, always the standouts in the Boot Camp roster, had been absent for almost ten years. Half of the duo, the hilarious Sean Price, had been putting out solid stuff, but it just wasn’t the same. Now there’s a new Heltah Skeltah album out, and it’s great. Don’t judge the following track by its slightly comical intro - things really get rolling around 0:30.



In addition, a great collaboration album between two of my favorite artists, one which plays to both of their strengths, recently came out. While they usually outshine anyone they share a track with, on their own solo albums, Killah Priest and Chief Kamachi can both be monotonous (Priest’s problem being a sometimes low-energy delivery and Kamachi’s Achilles heel being repetitive spoken hooks). The perfect solution was to have them combine forces on a tag-team album, and the result is electrifying. These elder statesmen of mythological-themed hip hop rap with infectious urgency, as if someone’s just slapped new batteries in their backs.



That’s all I wanted to say - I was worried there for a few years but clearly hardcore hip hop is back from the dead, and if you liked any earlier works from these artists, check out the new albums today.

Late Bloomers and Slow Burners

Two things coincided today which had me thinking about Yeats’s ferociously powerful late-period poetry, and about one of the greatest fruits of that elderly incandescence, his “Among School Children” with its memorable chestnut tree (not pictured), the great-rooted blossomer which is leaf, blossom and bole at once.

The first was a touching article in the New Yorker which dwells on the work of an economist at the University of Chicago named David Galenson, who has been trying to study whether artistic genius and precocity are really as linked as we think. It turns out, to my great personal relief, that there are artists who try to “find”, and artists who try to “search”, and that the searching kind of art can take decades and decades before coming to fruition. The article’s story about the author Ben Fountain, and the years it took for him to gain success as a writer, and the support he got from his family, actually had me kvelling at work.

The second thing which set me thinking today was my absurdly delayed appreciation of most recent album by my favorite band, Sigur Rós. Without exaggeration, I’d say the first fifteen or twenty times I listened to the album, it left me cold. True, the first time I heard the new album was unfortunately in an airplane, and I missed half of what was going on because of the ambient engine noise, but still, I felt like my favorite group had let me down. It seemed like a barren, repetitive album.

Then, about two weeks ago, something clicked, and I swayed to music with brightening glance. I was listening listlessly to Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust or, as I think of it because my bad German is better than my atrocious Icelandic, Mit (einen) Summen in (unsren) Ohren spielen wir endlos on my way to work, and the October sun lined up perfectly with the east-west grid of my neighborhood in Bangkok, and shone pinkly through the mist between the skyscrapers, and the entire world seemed to be singing out to me in joyful harmony through my iPod. I suddenly realized that the album was f*cking brilliant from start to finish, that it was one of the best albums I’d ever heard bar none, and for the third time in my life my daily commute made my day. (The first time involved a hot summer day, Weezer’s Pinkerton, a malfunctioning Honda Accord, and Route 6 in Connecticut, the second time involved Sigur Rós’s “Vaka”, a snowy winter morning, and Munich’s Tram 17.) Here is a picture of me this morning striding sweatfully yet manfully down Soi 51 on my way to work, in silent awe at the musical genius of Iceland’s finest.

I’ve listened to the album almost nonstop, over and over again, every chance I’ve gotten since. And not just certain tracks - I’m talking front to back. But - and here’s the point - it took me at least twenty listens before I had the “damn dawg this is a great album” epiphany. This is my favorite band we’re talking about here, and it still took months for their album to grow on me.

What happened to cause me to suddenly appreciate this music so deeply? Was it because the album is more subtle than their previous work? Is it just something that takes a while to become comfortable with? Or had I changed in the interim? Or was it the setting in which I heard it, riding the BTS above Bangkok at dawn, which caused everything to come together? How can we know, as Yeats asked, the dancer from the dance (or in this case, the music from the listener from the surroundings)?

Whatever happened, I wonder about the other things in life which I’ve been exposed to and been left cold by 19 times... just waiting for that magic number 20 to click. Imagine the authors whose work I would love if I read one or two more books. I can only hope I am lucky enough to have enough time on this planet to appreciate more of the masterpieces which I’ve overlooked in the past.

Anastasius of Sinai

Rembrandt is one of those painters who (whom?) I normally admire, but don’t love. Perhaps it’s just because his name comes up so often that I have tuned him out, or perhaps it’s because some of his paintings in the museums I’ve frequented, like his creepy self-portrait in Munich’s Alte Pinakothek, seemed somehow unpleasant to me. But I just stumbled across a painting of his which I haven’t seen before, of the learned Anastasius of Sinai, which captures what, to me, was great about Rembrandt. The murky light, the weight of the sage’s body, the strangely comfortable solitude. It’s a picture that distills old-school learnedness to its essence: a man, a book, a desk, a window. I could have done without the elaborate Turkish carpet/tablecloth, but nobody’s perfect.

Use Your Allusion

This painting is of Dante and Virgil, strolling through Hell’s lobby, bumping into Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan. This sort of pow-wow, I understand, used to happen all the time.

There is an entire category of enjoyment which has recently all but vanished from my life.

I refer to the belatedly recognized allusion.

A slow-fuze ticking time bomb in the brain that explodes into kaleidoscopic bunga-bunga api of awareness and delight. The independent discovery of something in one artwork which was inspired by another, and which in turn transforms one’s appreciation of both works. The countless matryoschka-embedded Fabergé “Easter eggs” squatting complacently behind the trompe-l’œil Potemkin-village façade of every great work of art. Note that France and Russia appear to be the birthplaces of all artistic deception or concealment.

Anyway, in other words, I miss the nice feeling you get when you hear or read something and then later find out that it was a quote from somewhere else.

Why is this feeling scarce of late? Wikipedia. Google. Etc. Whenever I get that mental twinge which tells me I’ve heard something before, within seconds I can now find out exactly where I’ve heard it before. My mom used to tell me that instant gratification was a bad thing. I still don’t see her point of view at all, but I’m closer to it than before.


What am I blathering about? Well, one of my very favorite albums of the past several years, and of all time, really, is White Chalk by PJ Harvey. One of its best tracks is “When Under Ether”, a mesmerizing, haunting song sung by someone etherized on a table, watching the ceiling move, with hints that some disturbing medical procedure has just taken place. Here is the song.



Here are the lyrics (emphasis mine).

The ceiling is moving
Moving in time
Like a conveyor belt
Above my eyes

When under ether
The mind comes alive
But conscious of nothing
But the will to survive

I lay on the bed
Waist down undressed
Look up at the ceiling
Feeling happiness
Human kindness

The woman beside me
Is holding my hand
I point at the ceiling
She smiles so kind

Something’s inside me
Unborn and unblessed
Disappears in the ether
One world to the next
Human kindness

On first hearing, the song instantly made me think of “The Yellow Wallpaper” (I wasn’t born yesterday, after all) and of a couple of Harvey’s previous songs which seemed to deal with abortion or the death of a child (come back here, man, gimme my daughter, etc.). But there was something else about the song’s lyrics which sparked a fire within my head, and my dull, slow brain was unsatisfied for about a year. Until a rainy Sunday afternoon last week, when I happened to be re-reading Eliot’s Four Quartets, and in particular “East Coker”. What did I see but some lines I’d read 15 years ago in high school or college, but half-forgotten (emphasis mine):

Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

Harvey’s customary brilliance at visceral allusion, which started with the brutal Biblical tales of her first album Dry, and only got more complex from there, should have prepared me, as this was not her first exercise in dredging up a great English(-language) poet in an odd place - there was, for example, her unexpected Yeats homage B-side “The Northwood” - but I nevertheless, as I scanned Eliot’s lines, felt a quick cold satisfaction of awareness. Art had spoken to art across the decades, and my brain had traced the thread between the two without recourse to any crude series of tubes. I had found and enjoyed an allusion, and its path from my ears (when I heard the song) to my eyes (when, a year later, I re-read the poem) didn’t involve anyone but the artists and me, and for an instant I felt as if we three, the great poet, the great musician, and the listener/reader, were one. A Hermetic trinity, as it were, of artistic appreciation.

As I said above, this is a particular type of joyous recognition which I experience less and less frequently lately, and which I feel future generations will probably not be able to experience at all, because any snippet of text is now able to be checked against all of humankind’s previous snippets of text, and every allusion can be instantly deciphered via online search. I’m sure future generations will develop ever-more-subtle and relevant and intricate types of artistic expression and reference, so there’s really nothing to worry about in the grand scheme of things, but I’d like to take a moment of silent mourning for the loss of my dear, old friend, the belatedly recognized allusion, and for the demotion of our human brains, which were once our primary means of remembrance, to second fiddle after the omnipresent, pan-memorious Spiritus Mundi of the Internet.

Ache Superior

For some reason, I’d never heard of the online comic Achewood before about two weeks ago, although I realize in retrospect that I’ve seen bits of it used as avatars or posted on message boards for years. The website has like eight years’ worth of comics on it.

In few words: I have just spent something like five straight evenings reading Achewood every spare minute I had. I have been getting home from work and reading Achewood like my life depended on it. I have been poring over Achewood like it was a Ptolemaic stele and I was Jean-François Champollion. It is funny, obscene, melancholy and somehow comforting in its depiction of friendship, although I suspect that it would appeal more to males than females. Check it out. Note: the two things I’m putting on here are not representative - the strip usually isn’t about hitting broad targets like bad grammar or Comic Sans, and is usually more strange and subtle. But I thought these items stand well on their own without any knowledge of the characters.

Goodbye, David Foster Wallace

One of my favorite authors is dead, by his own hand, at the age of 46.

It’s hard to think of another stranger whose death could have been more upsetting to me. David Foster Wallace was not only incredibly talented and funny, but his writing always had a humane and optimistic streak which I always respected, although I couldn’t share it. I read with bemused cynicism his article about how inspiring John McCain was and his monumental review of a dictionary which turned into a meditation on democracy, but at the same time I felt comforted that he was out there, being idealistic when it would have been easier to be nihilistic. I envied him his apparently sincere and principled search as much as I enjoyed his winningly, self-deprecatingly complex writing style.

The fact that he seems to have given up that search in suicidal despair only adds to the ache I feel at his death. I had several paragraphs more written, but I don’t want this to seem like a ripoff of Wallace’s sesquipedalian style, so I’ll just stop. I will miss him.

In almost every picture I’ve ever seen of him, Wallace was wearing a colossally silly-looking do-rag (à la Prison Mike), so I’ll just reproduce the cover of his best-known book, a cover which I feel represents both his refreshing style and the wide-open breadth of his unfortunately-curtailed literary ambition.

Constant Dreams that I’m Constantine

Telekinesis, I see through dreams
A conqueror of all the world like the Hebrew kings
I’m David, reincarnated over again
A gladiator of the universe, a soldier of men
A warlord across the field, returnin from battle
With blood upon my shield with an arm full of arrows
I’m a warrior, elephants kneel as I pass
Holdin skeletons of the soldiers that I killed in my path
With the heads of their leaders still in my hands
Hold it up, lightning strikes, brightens the night
Turns my hair white like Christ, then flash out of sight
Head back to the cemetery, my job is done
Volume One, Priest, Part Two is when God will come

-Killah Priest, from “The Law”, off the album Priesthood

Killah Priest has been pretty much my favorite rapper (hip hop artist, whatever) for about ten years now. He started off with some unremarkable verses on early Wu-Tang albums, then emerged as the most talented lyricist in the Wu-affiliated Sunz of Man, then finally dropped the amazing, instant-classic album Heavy Mental in 1998.

No other rapper (or recording artist of any kind, really) has ever combined mythological references, vivid description and flat-out weirdness like Priest. He’s like a Brundel/Fly combination of John of Patmos, William S. Burroughs and Erich von Daeniken. His most impressive moments on the first album include ... well, never mind. I just spent about 20 minutes looking for lyrics to quote, but the problem is that the people who have nothing better to do than type in rap lyrics are not the sharpest pencils in the box. I haven’t listened to some of those tracks for years but I can tell that the online lyrics are horribly garbled, game-of-telephone style. “The Iron Sheik” becomes “dying sheep” and so on.

Anyway, K.P. has a dense, dazzling, versatile-yet-consistent style whereby standard rap subjects like the plight of ghetto dwellers or battling one’s enemies are elaborated upon with blizzards of mind-blowing apocalyptic, hellish and messianic allusions. The unrelenting paranoia, horror and madness are balanced out by stunning poetic descriptions and occasional moments of humor or optimism. However, it’s usually pretty grim, heavy stuff. Sometimes Priest’s sanity itself is in doubt - Does he really think he’s “The One”? A magnificent yet disturbingly megalomaniacal verse about his own birth, from Black August:

They knew the time and the date of my arrival
Doctors and preachers opening bibles
Philosophers stood wondering
The sky thundering
Inhaling, old widows wailing
Windows open
Wind blowing, curtains across my head forming a turban
Do not disturb him, a stranger said
Standing at the side of my bed, placed a crown upon my head
My eyes were black pearls staring at the map of the world
Born to conquer, the angel then handed me my armor
Kneeled in my honor, revealed to me where I should wander
Until time to take over
Y’all reigns, been great but now it’s over
Now I lounge in castles surrounded by Greek statues

As a listener this sort of thing sets up a strange tension for me: Is this just a cinematically-described messianic spin on the standard rap boasting, or is this guy genuinely deranged? All I know is, either way he’s great at describing whatever he sets his mind to describe, however outlandish it may be.

Priest’s second album, A View from Masada, disappointed me both in terms of production and lyrical content, but after that slight misstep he’s been getting steadily better and better or, as I think I read on an interview with him somewhere, he feels he’s growing “younger and wiser”. He’s consistently honed his flow, broadened and deepened his themes, and gotten more judicious in his choice of tracks and collaborators. In fact, he has gone from being a neglected offshoot of the Wu-Tang empire who seemed doomed to wander in the wilderness of the deeply weird to a consistent and prolific veteran who can confidently mastermind cohesive group albums, including the stellar Black Market Militia.

Killah Priest’s work has in itself matured and gained substance over the years, but it’s also fair to say that since 2001 his strange preoccupations have been granted a great deal of legitimacy and urgency by outside events. Back in the mid-90s a rapper obsessed with Biblical warfare seemed merely quirky. But in many people’s eyes the real world has actually morphed into the sort of paranoid nightmare Priest has been describing all along, with Americans actually engaging in ghastly warfare in the Holy Land and Bush looking more and more like a many-headed Beast of Babylon. In other words, the vivid imagination that made him seem so odd in 1998 seems much more like prophecies of daily life in 2008. Of course, he wasn’t the only 90s rapper with pre-millenium tension and conspiracy theories, by far, but he was certainly the best at it, and he’s only gotten better.

While he is probably my favorite rapper of all time (or maybe tied with MF DOOM, although they’re like apples and oranges), I find I have to be in the right mood to really sit down and listen to Killah Priest’s albums, because they’re so dense and paranoid. Luckily, I now have an hour-long bus commute twice a day, which is perfect for catching up on the hip hop I’ve missed in recent years. I hate to admit it but, because I didn’t have a morning commute for three years I really hadn’t been sitting down and listening to new music as often as I used to. I actually hadn’t heard Priest’s most recent album, The Offering, all the way through, and I can’t believe what I was missing out on. He’s got a new album coming out next week called Behind the Stained Glass, and I will unhesitatingly get it (and I mean buy it, using real money, not... er, acquire it elsewise) the instant it drops.

Two highly recommended artists on a similar vibe are Priest’s long-time groupmate Hell Razah, who has really elevated himself to a powerful and intelligent solo artist over the past couple of years, and Chief Kamachi, whose excellent posse album Black Candles is probably tied with Priest’s Black Market Militia for my favorite hip hop album of 2005.

By the way, the post title is one of my favorite Priest couplets, from a track called “Think Market”. I would guess that the Constantine referred to is the exorcist character from the Keanu Reeves movie and not the Roman emperor, although with Killah Priest they’d both be equally possible, which frankly is why I like his work so much. I don’t have the track with me to check that these lyrics are absolutely accurate, but it’s something like:

I’m having constant dreams that I’m Constantine
Surrounded by demons, angels with armored wings

Atlas Hugged

I’ve always found something about atlases slightly depressing. I think it’s the way they reduce the entire world to something you can manage, catalog and scientifically measure. It’s kind of a letdown to see someplace as grand and exotic-sounding as “Urumqi”, “Hammerfest” or “New Canaan” pinned down as a boring little dot at exact coordinates. I would rather see maps with blank spaces on them, or maps of imaginary places.

Historical timelines, another popular visual aid, aren’t that great either. They usually end up being just lists of kings’ names, or else they’re sprinkled with entries like “1704 - Descartes publishes De Flatulentia” which always leave you wondering how they chose what to put in and what to leave out.

I just got a terrific book, however, that more or less fuses the concepts of map and timeline, resulting in a simmering stew of utter freaking awesomeness. That book is called, quite misleadingly, “The New Penguin Atlas of Ancient History”, by my new hero, the late Colin McEvedy. The title is misleading for two reasons:

1) The atlas is clearly not really that new. The book’s maps are pretty low-tech, monochromatic affairs, something like what you’d expect to see in a middle school history textbook from the 1950s. Also, the author’s views are a bit Eurocentric and refreshingly old-fashioned.

For example, he seems strangely reluctant to admit that the Chinese invented anything. I’m not sure I agree with McEvedy’s claims that the Chinese stole the ideas of writing, the Iron Age, horse riding and the chariot from wandering Middle Easterners. Just reading those claims was like a breath of fresh air, however, since for the past several years we’ve all been beaten over the head with theories that the Chinese discovered not just the stuff they really did discover, but everything else in the entire world too, from soccer to America to chess.

2) The book’s title is also misleading because it’s not really an atlas. It’s more like a timeline sliced up and superimposed on a series of identical maps. Which, as I mentioned above, is awesome. Since the underlying physical map stays the same throughout the book, the focus is on what’s changed since the last map, so the reader doesn’t have the problem which often crops up with zoomed-in historical maps (at least for me) of trying to make sense of the historical information presented on the map while also trying to figure out where the heck the action is in relation to everything else in the world.

So this book doesn’t specify, for example, where every town in ancient Greece was - again, it’s not really an atlas - but it does have dozens of nice maps that show the general movements of the people who settled Greece, the major battles they fought against Persia, etc. Since so much of history is a series of confusing back-and-forth movements where the same countries can mutate and swell and vanish over and over again, reading something which is almost a visual flip book of those mutations is really neat (by the way, the maps here are not actually from the book I have, but from the next one in the series, medieval history, but that’s all I found online).

I’ve seen this book lying around before, but because of the misleading title and cheap-looking (at first glance) maps, I never gave it a chance. Man, I didn’t know what I was missing.

Because - and here’s the strangest thing about this supposed atlas - the writing is very good, and frequently hilarious. The author has the rare skill of being boldly judgmental where people usually bend over backwards to project a facade of objectivity. In the little essays which accompany each map, McEvedy speaks in a deft, iconoclastic voice which advertises that he alone is both intelligent enough to have absorbed the mountains of historical sources and current research and clever enough to cut through all the nonsense with a simple, clear pronouncement. This could seem obnoxious or unprofessional, if his writing weren’t so winning.

Here’s one of my favorite examples so far of McEvedy’s writing, where he gets snippy about the population of ancient Rome:

This brings us to the second blind spot in current thinking. Classical scholars are absolutely wedded to the idea that ancient Rome had a population of a million or more. Historical demographers have told them that this cannot be so, it flies in the face of what the Romans themselves said, and, given what we know of the size of cities in the ancient world, it makes no sense at all, but the academic consensus remains rock solid. It is almost as though admitting to a lower figure would somehow diminish the standing of classical studies. This is not sensible and we will have none of it: the atlas uses a ballpark figure of 250,000.

This sort of thing puts a big smile on my face, and in spite of the density of the maps and the tiny, tiny text I read the atlas cover to cover in one day. I plan to get the other books in the series on different time periods as soon as I can, but unfortunately I think the book I just finished was the one which had been revised most recently, with the others being decades old. I don’t really care, though.

The great writing and refreshing concept of superimposing different information on the same map throughout the book may have just pushed this book into the lofty category occupied by my previous favorite book which graphically represents history, A Street through Time. This is not a compliment I bestow lightly. A Street through Time is a very special book indeed.

The best Zelda level ever

Meet Yeto. He is a yeti who wears a horse’s saddle for a hat. I don’t know why he thinks that is an appropriate hat, but that’s Yeto for you. He lives in the mountainous northern province of Hyrule, and when he’s not foraging for reekfish, he’s hanging out inside my favorite Zelda level ever, so far: Snowpeak Ruins from Twilight Princess.

I’ve been playing Zelda games for something like 23 years now, and slogging through standard dungeons like, for example, the water dungeon where you pull levers to turn on the water to different levels to make things happen, or the fire dungeon where you leap from rock to rock above a pool of lava, has gotten quite tedious. Even playing from inside a giant fish or tree doesn’t quite do it for me any more. A level I recently played involving magnetic boots and enormous swivelling electromagnetic cranes, which probably would have made my jaw drop as a kid, scarcely evoked an arched eyebrow of mild interest. I mean, that’s not even the first time that Link has walked on the ceiling, for Pete’s sake. I felt like I’d seen it all.

Then the other day I played this level, and my heart surged with game-playing joy.
I’ve always been partial to snowy levels, but what I particularly like about this one is that unlike most Zelda dungeons, it’s a “real” building: an above-ground building on a recognizably human scale, i.e., with furniture and walls, rather than a collection of vast polyhedral underground caverns. This real-building feel was also more or less the case with my previous favorite level, the Forest Temple from Ocarina of Time.

Snowpeak Ruins is a European-style chateau that’s fallen into disrepair, inhabited by two friendly abominable snowpeople who hang out making tasty soup in the kitchen and warming themselves on a divan in the foyer.
While Mario for some reason visits haunted houses, hotels and asteroids all the time, I don’t think there’s been a major level of a Zelda game before that was just a haunted house rather than an abandoned temple/dungeon/cave, and it’s quite charming to see the two yetis hanging out in their dilapidated home.

The atmospheric details of the level are terrific - almost every room’s rafters have holes in them that snow’s drifting through, and the snowy stone courtyard reminded me of being in the Festung Hohensalzburg. I also like the way that you approach it, which is after a fun but not too difficult snowboarding ride across a snowy mountain.
The whole thing - the restrainedly realistic (for a Zelda game) architectural design of the chateau, the fact that the level is not an evil ancient ruin but a friendly couple’s house, the snowy setting, the very cool weapon you get halfway through - I love it all.

I’m not done with the game yet, but I doubt that the upcoming levels will be as charming or memorable. I’m already kind of ticked off by the Temple of Time level, which combines three of the most tedious and frustrating Zelda level design chestnuts: The remote-controlled stone statue, the escort mission, and the time-worn technique of “backtracking through the exact same rooms all over again only with a new item so that some things are slightly different”. Bah. Snowpeak Ruins has very little cliché about it, except for an icy sliding-block puzzle and the fact that the enormous swivelling cannons you see mounted at several points throughout the castle are not, as it turns out, entirely decorative.

While I have great warmth in my heart for Yeto, I should mention that his beloved matryoshka-shaped wife, Yeta, is also a congenial host, although she has some issues with memory loss and susceptibility to evil magic. But I forgive her.

Back To the Future

Futurama’s back! I can finally emerge from the Angry Dome.

After several years spent sitting out in the cold like the late, lamented Seymour, we now have a new DVD. It’s not quite as flawlessly comic or surreally original as many of my favorite episodes (the DVD in question is essentially a full-length movie, and the switch from fresh 20-minute TV show to resuscitated zombie movie seems to have hurt the comedy timing and originality a little), but how many shows could be shockingly resurrected two years after being cancelled and still rock?

The four-year run of this show was as good as The Simpsons during any of its peak years, if with nerdier and blacker comedy, and any continuing incarnation of it, even as straight-to-DVD movies, is something about which to rejoice. It’s like if there were suddenly a brand-new Monty Python film or Hitchhiker’s Guide book. I hope it makes several thousand times as much money as that similarly-resurrected-but-colossally-less-good show The Family Guy.

WHOOooooooooo! WHOOOOOOOOoooooooo! Whoooooooo.


What smells like freaking porpoise hork?

1998 all over again

I have only ever liked three musical groups enough to consistently buy their CD singles when I come across them (a measure of high respect if there ever was one): PJ Harvey, Radiohead, and Sigur Rós. Two of these groups released my favorite albums from them in 1997-98: Radiohead’s OK Computer and Harvey’s Is This Desire? Along with other, similarly haunting albums like the second Portishead album, 1998 was probably my best year in terms of atmospheric music for fall. As October arrived, I had plenty of melancholy, stirring music to listen to as I drove through the bleak Connecticut countryside.

In fact, the years around this time were probably my best falls per se overall, by which I mean that I was old enough to appreciate the beauty of the New England foliage, had a car in which to zip past the pumpkin patches and whatnot, and a good stock of music and literature to form the gloomy mental backdrop to how I saw everything. You’d think that being in Munich for five falls would have topped that, what with the Oktoberfest and it being the home of Rilke and Orff and everything, but in retrospect, Connecticut was the most autumnally satisfying place I’ve lived. As I discovered to my dismay, in Germany, the leaves don’t really all turn colors and fall, like they do in New England. They sort of individually rot and gradually surrender over the course of several months. It’s not particularly picturesque.

Anyway, my pleasant seasonal moods have taken a serious hit in the last few years, because I live in the frigging tropical rain forest. It’s hard to work up a real “halloweeny” feeling when you’re sweating like a pig in a Thai swamp. But luckily, two albums have just arrived that have saved my season: PJ Harvey’s White Chalk and Radiohead’s In Rainbows. To be honest I could have illegally downloaded both of them, but seeing that these are two of my very favorite artists, whose singles I’ve even gone to the trouble of buying, I paid to download the albums. They are both good, but the Harvey in particular is incredible.

It’s one of those old-fashioned, cohesive vinyl-LP sort of albums that barely goes over the 30-minute mark, but when it’s done, you can’t help pressing play again. Like a Beatles album or whatever. I have no words to describe how good White Chalk is. It’s precisely what the cover photo suggests: PJ Harvey channeling Emily Dickenson, or the protagonist of “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Most of the songs have rather quiet piano or dulcimer or whatever backing, and sound as if they were recorded on wax cylinders by some Victorian madwoman. There’s one particular line on the album that gives me chills every time I hear it. I won’t demean it by telling you which one it is. And so - and this is the point I’ve been laboriously leading up to - thanks to the ineffably great talents of the unfathomably great PJ Harvey, I have for the last two days sat here in sultry Bangkok feeling perfectly, exquisitely, joyfully “halloweeny”. The depth of my gratitude is inexpressible.

Mi Biblioteca Personal

The other day, I unpacked and set up my bookshelves. This was an unexpectedly emotional process for me. I hadn’t seen my precious, precious books in months during our move from the Lump to Bangkok, and I suppose I was subconsciously worried that I’d never see them again. Or that they’d all be moldy and damp and wrinkled. In fact, some of them are a tad discolored from some sort of mold, but overall they’re in tiptop shape, and since I actually took the precaution of wrapping my most expensive and treasured books (the Gothic Bible, for example), those came through just fine.

Adding to my verklemmt response to putting my books out was the fact that I’ve had these bookshelves for the past two years, but I never really got to face them in their fully-stocked glory, because they were in a closet. Seeing all my books finally on shelves out in the open, and marshalling them up and down a bit, I realized how much they mean to me. I also realized with a surge of pride that I shouldn’t have been worried at all, because since I’ve read almost every page of these books (aside from, obviously, a few bricks like “Increasing your Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary” and “Orlando Furioso Part Two”), it wouldn’t really matter if something happened to these books, because they are now, in some way, inside my head and make up who I am. I’ve been lucky enough to have money and time to read for pleasure for most of my life, which many people throughout history might not have had.

I’d ideally like to spend months and months describing to the world each book on these shelves and why I love them, in the style of Borges’ Biblioteca Personal - but at some point, reading someone else’s favorite books becomes like listening to the story of someone else’s dream. The intense personal associations that make dreams or lists of favorite things so vivid also make them dull reading. I mean, how could I possibly convey what I feel about Calvert Watkins’ How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics? Words fail me.

So I’ll content myself for now with posting this picture of a couple of the best shelves. It doesn’t do them justice. Most of the pictures I took were too blurry to read the titles well. Maybe I’ll take some with a tripod or something later. Anyway, I’ll stop going on about how happy I am to see my books. And yes, you’ll notice that I sometimes arrange my books by color and size, like Pepys. I know it’s not the best filing system, but dammit if it’s good enough for Pepys it’s good enough for me.

Text Wins

Unexpectedly and to my utter delight, a recent New York Times editorial by Daniel Radosh - in the course of a critical look at the new, super-modern game Halo 3 - claims that text games from the 1980s were the pinnacle of video games’ artistic achievement:

The formula followed by virtually all games is a steady progression toward victory: you accomplish tasks until you win. Halo 3, for all its flawless polish, does not aspire to anything more. It does not succeed as a work of art because it does not even try.
...
There is no reason that gorgeous graphics can’t play a role in this task, but the games with the deepest narratives were the text adventures that were developed for personal computers in the 1980s. Using only words, these “interactive fictions” gave players the experience of genuinely living inside a story.... Today’s game designers should study this history as a starting point for an artistic revolution of the future.

This is precisely how I feel, and it’s why I haven’t been that excited about the last few generations of extremely popular console games: first-person shooters, car racing games, and sports games. I don’t care how realistic a shooting or racing game looks. I could run through hallways and shoot people, or drive a car quickly, or play football, in the real world. I look to video games for something different.

I recently read an entire Wired cover story on Halo 3, about the psychotic lengths of ultra-monitored playtesting that Microsoft was going to to ensure that players wouldn’t be challenged too much by the game, and would be funneled through the levels one after another, never spending more than five seconds in any room.

Reading this article, it seemed to me that the designers had missed the point entirely. They weren’t making a game, they were making an interactive movie or digitized theme park ride. What’s fun about playing a game that’s had all the moments of confusion or perplexity streamlined by hundreds of hours of group-focus testing sessions? I want a person with some interesting ideas to invite me to explore an interesting world, not a group-tested simulation of what stimulates the average teenage boy. I’d much rather play Pikmin than Halo.

This is why I feel that a lot of the most exciting games of the last five years were purposefully developed for the “limitations” of handheld systems. I find that an excellent Gameboy Advance or Nintendo DS game, Advance Wars for example, is usually ten times as fun as the latest Doom-type game where you run around dark hallways in circles emptying shotgun blasts into peoples’ heads. (Not that that isn’t fun, mind you, but I got tired of it in, oh, 1995 or so.) And this is why I still return again and again to play Infocom games from the ’80s, and to their excellent successors by passionate amateur writers such as Nelson or Plotkin.

Given this huge thumbs-up for text games from no less than the Gray Lady herself, this seems as good a time as any to complete my earlier story about how I put Zork and a bunch of other old games on my new cell phone.

---

I had no earthly reason to believe that my new cell phone would play Zork, aside from a vague idea that I’d seen something somewhere online about old text games being playable on Palm Pilots. But I didn’t have a Palm Pilot, I just had a phone. This idea was a complete shot in the dark. But what’s Zork? let me back up briefly.

Zork is a text game that I first played on my friend Michael’s computer when I was about 8 or 9, so in 1983 or so. It looked more or less like this.


I played it for several hours, and all I did was read somebody’s mail, find a bird’s nest and fruitlessly yank at a grating hidden beneath a pile of leaves in a forest. Most of the things I typed were met with responses like “You can’t see that here” or “You can’t do that”. But I was hooked.

A year or two later I somehow got (I can’t remember how exactly I acquired things back then... birthday present? saved up allowance? spontaneous gift from easily hornswoggled grandparent?) my own copy of Zork I for our Mac Plus, along with, later, Hitchhiker’s, Spellbreaker, a copy of The Lurking Horror, and a couple others. These games were incredible, but they were extremely difficult to beat without carefully scanning the packaging inserts, paying for hints and/or hearing solutions from other kids, and they scarred me for life. In a good way. But around this very same time, we got our first Nintendo system, and I started to see text games as somewhat old-fashioned. The golden age of the text adventure was drawing to a close.

Several spasmic waves of roughly biennial nostalgia have since prompted me to play through these old games on every computer I’ve owned, and I have even attempted to program a couple things myself in a modern, freeware text adventure creation language called Inform. I currently play this sort of thing on my MacBook using this program, where games look like this:

So, having been playing Zork since 1983 or so, I grasped my spanking new Razr, plugged its USB cable into my computer, and set out to force it to play Zork with me. This rite of passage would take several days of arduous work, eventually shaving years off both the phone’s and my life, but it was a success. I figured out that the phone could play small Java games, and that somebody had made this program, a scaled-down version of this program, for playing old Infocom games on cell phones in Java.

Only trouble is, the only game that the scaled-down program could play was a demo version of Zork 1, in the now-beyond-extremely-obsolete Z3 story file format. It took me a couple of days’ tinkering to figure out how to get multiple copies of the mini Java application uploaded onto my phone, each loading a different story file. But I did it. This is what Zork looks like on my mobile phone.

Being able to carry around in my palm a childhood treasure which, at the time I first played it, required a humming beige box and monitor which together were larger than I was, almost reduced me to tears, and I began playing it immediately. I just beat it a few hours ago.

Never mind that the applet only has one save slot, and that I have to type everything in thumb-punishing SMS style. I now love my new phone, not only because it plays Zork - but that’s a big part of it. Anything that can play Zork is my friend. Is not dirty. Is not fighting me. Is very nice.

(Those last remarks were in the Bengali-Thai-English pigin I’ve been using to communicate with one of my students this week. But that’s an whole other story.)

Shogi no Densetsu

As we all know, the most disgusting type of person on the planet is an American nerd who likes Japanese things. You might know the type. The sort of pale, basement-dwelling loser who is so socially, emotionally and aesthetically retarded that he (or she?) dreams about anime schoolgirls, and who furiously studies Japanese in the hopes of one day going there and sleeping with Asian chicks who don’t know what a slovenly dweeb he is. The type of person who collects Final Fantasy action figures, dresses up in Dragonball Z costumes, and will get into epic battles on message boards about the sexual habits of Pikachu.

I do not want to be this type of person.

However, I hereby confess that I am very interested in Japan and always have been. My only excuse is that the whole thing started at least 20 years ago, way before I knew what I was getting into. It began with the following formative experiences: 1) ca. 1983, the G.I. Joe comic books introduced me to ninjas (namely, Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes) and I learned how to make an origami throwing star, 2) ca. 1986, the Nintendo Entertainment System let me play Super Mario Brothers, Zelda and Castlevania while the Sony Walkman I got for my birthday let me blast the Back to the Future soundtrack, and 3) ca. 1987, I read James Clavell’s Shogun. It’s been all downhill since. Domo ari-frigging-gato.

Why am I publicly baring my shameful Nipponophilia this particular week? One word: Shogi.

My regular reader (hi Kim!) will recall that I have been learning that the game of chess is not just a boring European game with several fruity pieces (bishops? a queen? sentient stone towers?) but a gritty war simulator and worldwide sensation that swept the globe starting from around 700 AD. The prototypical battle game still exists in various mutated forms throughout all of Europe and Asia.

The original lineup, of the reconstructed Indian game Chaturanga, was supposed to represent an army: Foot soldiers (pawns), chariots (rooks), cavalry (knights), elephants (bishops), advisor/ bodyguard (queen), and general (king). The genius of the game was, and is, that each type of military unit moves in a different, characteristic way. All of the existing variations of chess maintain these six ancient army units, albeit with mutated names and some additions. Chinese chess enlarged the board, took the weird step of placing the pieces not inside the squares but on the board’s gridlines, added a fearsome catapult/cannon aptly called the pao, and introduced geographic features on the actual board - a river and two fortresses. European chess kept the ancient Indian board and piece count but sped up the game by greatly augmenting the powers of some of the pieces - which formerly could only move a square or two at a time - and gave them new identities in keeping with medieval European society, where queens, bishops, and castle towers were far more prevalent than viziers, elephants or chariots.

I’ve more or less discussed all this before, after I saw dozens of men on streetcorners playing Chinese chess in Vietnam, and people playing the primitive Thai chess, makruk, in Bangkok. But now I’m trying to learn what is clearly the most idiosyncratic and fiendishly complicated chess mutation of them all: Japanese chess, or Shogi.

Shogi is chess gone completely Japanese, by which I mean it is refined, complex, subtle, and damn near inscrutable to outsiders. Why haven’t you heard of it before? For one thing, you almost have to be Japanese just to distinguish the pieces. It’s played on an unpainted wooden board with unpainted wooden pieces marked on both sides with obscure characters. Why characters on both sides of the piece? All forms of chess have some type of unit promotion once certain pieces reach the far side of the board, in order to let those pieces continue moving. In European chess, the familiar promotion is when a pawn makes it across the board and becomes a queen. But Shogi takes this to the extreme, and when most of the pieces reach any of the far three rows, they power up, leap into the air and flip over, revealing their supercharged identities. A pawn turns into a gold general, a rook turns into a dragon, and so on - all with new moves. A further complication is that where Chinese chess uses a single character to identify each piece, Shogi uses at least two, and the names are odd: for example, the corner pieces are called “fragrant chariots” and the enemy king is the “jade general”.

Confused yet? I haven’t even gotten to Shogi’s most unique feature. Captured enemy pieces, apparently brainwashed or bribed to fight for your side, can be re-deployed, ninja style, almost anywhere on the board, at any time. This ronin feature is not found in any other version of chess, and turns the game’s tactics upside down. This is another reason why the pieces are all the same color - they might belong to the other side a few turns down the road.

In spite of all these obstacles and oddities, I learned how the pieces move and their various characters pretty quickly, and I just beat a Shogi Gameboy game, Minna no Shogi, on my second try, despite the fact that the pieces are too small to distinguish on the Gameboy screen. There’s probably a difficulty setting somewhere (I hope) that’s currently set on “wicked easy”, because as confidence-boosting as my Shogi victory was, if I bought a European chess game and beat it immediately, I’d want my money back. I have a second Gameboy Shogi game, Morita Shogi, and I’m hoping that’s tougher. The whole thing has also reminded me how chess-like my recent favorite games Advance Wars and Fire Emblem are.

Moving from the virtual world to the actual one, I already bought a Shogi set months ago in a toy store at the mall here in KL, a cheap Chinese production that consists of pieces that look like reject wood chips with writing on them, and a roll-up board that’s like a ’70s dinner placemat, but hopefully I will one day go to Japan and get the chance to buy a slightly fancier set. I have always been very impressed with the wood-revering Japanese aesthetic, and I like the unpainted, calligraphic look of the Shogi pieces. The tragedy is, of course, that I am not outgoing enough to play board games and will probably never play against anyone. Maybe someday I’ll have children I can force to play chess with me.

What’s my point here? Just that I was fascinated to find out that there’s Japanese chess, a strange evolutionary cousin to European chess. And I think the subject of what each variety of chess might say about the society that developed it is intriguing. For example, I recently read somewhere that asymmetry is a key feature of a lot of Japanese art and design - and Shogi is the only type of chess with asymmetrical layout of the bishop and rook. Could there be a connection between Japanese military or religious philosophy and the unique Shogi rules of re-deploying captured pieces? You tell me. And my Western brethren - if you like chess and know any Chinese, Korean, or Japanese people, ask them about their version.

Note: The title of this post, “Shogi no Densetsu” is what I believe to be “The Legend of Shogi” in Japanese. If you know better, by all means disabuse me of this notion per comment posthaste.

Right Ho, Jeeves

I probably shouldn’t admit this, but certain authors, musicians etc. have names that are so annoying or colorful that I develop a judgment about them before reading or hearing their work. For example, I’ve always had trouble taking the idea of someone named “Saul Bellow” seriously, and I really haven’t read much by him. I avoided the excellent English writer Anthony Trollope for years because I thought he was French. I think I initially didn’t like Radiohead as much as I should have because their name is such a corny example of the most overused and annoying “alternative band” naming scheme ever, which is simply to make a new compound word: Candlebox, Audioslave, Stereolab, Soundgarden, Superchunk, Sparklehorse, Silverchair... This retarded band-naming scheme ravaged the countryside all throughout the ’90s, only to be replaced by the almost-equally irksome formula “The ___s” in the early oughts.

The name prejudice works the other way too, though: I’ll always have a soft spot for Rainer Maria Rilke, no matter how incomprehensible much of his poetry is to me, because of the way one of my literature professors, who was from Scotland, rolled the “r”s. You should have heard the way that guy said “Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov”. He could have charged admission.

Anyway, three British authors who(m?) I long avoided because their names sounded unbearably pretentious, and therefore I assumed their work would be too, were Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis and P.G. Wodehouse. Those names are so fine, so foppish and so prancingly fancy that I wasn’t even sure if the authors were male or female, and I wasn’t eager to find out. Just forming your mouth to say “Evelyn Waugh” makes you feel like an enormous upper-class British twit – try it, but be warned that you might want to punch yourself in the face afterwards. Astonishingly, I recently learned that Evelyn Waugh, apparently something of a sadist, gave his son the only name that could have been worse than his own: “Auberon Waugh”. Try to imagine anyone other than the Queen saying that with a straight face.

Long story short, those guys with the fancy, fancy names are three of the greatest comic novelists of the last century and I highly recommend most work by any of the three. Waugh is my least favorite because he is the least funny and the most racist, upper-class and reactionary. A lot of the Waugh books I’ve read involve poking fun at the lower classes, “modern” anything, and black people. His Decline and Fall is worth a read. Kingsley Amis is also quite mean-spirited, but less upper-crust and much funnier. Lucky Jim is the best starting point for Amis.

The most humane, funniest and by far my favorite of this little trio I’ve arbitrarily assembled is P.G. Wodehouse. He wrote light and cheerful stories which mostly take place in a sort of idealized comedy England where everyone says things like “pip pip” and “right ho” and “what what” a lot. His most famous characters are a young idiot named Bertie Wooster and his superintelligent butler, Jeeves, but all the characters in all the books are almost equally funny. The plots are usually a standard sitcom-style setup where a misunderstanding forces two young lovers apart, and getting them back together involves pretending to be someone else, stealing a valuable object from a country manor, public speaking gone horribly wrong, tricking horrible old relatives into loaning you money, mistaken identities, etc. If that all sounds like very old-fashioned, superficial comedy, to some degree it is, but the way Wodehouse writes makes every line fresh and hilarious whether you’re a fan of Edwardian England or not. Here’s a passage from The Mating Season, not one of his best works, but with the following passage (slightly edited for length) where the narrator, Bertie Wooster, describes waiting to break into a house to intercept a letter or something:

...That was why on the following morning the commodious grounds of The Larches, in addition to a lawn, a summer-house, a pond, flower-beds, bushes and an assortment of trees, contained also one Wooster, noticeably cold about the feet and inclined to rise from twelve to eighteen inches skywards every time an early bird gave a sudden ‘cheep’ over its worm. My nervous system was seriously disordered, and one of God’s less likeable creatures with about a hundred and fourteen legs had crawled down the back of my neck and was doing its daily dozen on the sensitive skin, but did Nature care? Not a hoot. The sky continued blue, and the fatheaded sun which I have mentioned shone smilingly throughout.

Beetles on the spine are admittedly bad, calling for all that a man has of fortitude and endurance, but when embarking on an enterprise which involved parking the carcass in bushes one more or less budgets for beetles. What was afflicting me much more than the activities of the undersigned was the reflection that I didn’t know what was going to happen when the postman arrived.

It was just as this morale-lowering thought came into my mind that something suddenly bumped against my leg, causing the top of my head to part from its moorings. My initial impression that I had been set upon by a powerful group of enemies lasted, though it seemed a year, for perhaps two seconds. Then, the spots clearing from before my eyes and the world ceasing to do the adagio dance into which it had broken, I was able to perceive that all that had come into my life was a medium-sized ginger cat. Breathing anew, as the expression is, I bent down and tickled it behind the ear, such being my invariable policy when closeted with cats, and was still tickling when there was a bang and a rattle and somebody threw back the windows of the dining-room.

If you thought that passage, especially the phrase “...but when embarking on an enterprise which involved parking the carcass in bushes one more or less budgets for beetles”, was good, then please keep an eye out for Wodehouse next time you’re at the bookstore. If you enjoy eyestrain and/or are a cheap bastard, many of Wodehouse’s early works are starting to appear at Project Gutenberg. On the other hand if you didn’t like the above passage, then God help you.

I think I was inspired to give Wodehouse a chance in spite of his fancy name by a recommendation from Douglas Adams in, I believe, The Salmon of Doubt, and I’m very grateful to Adams for possibly introducing a new generation to these books. I’ve probably read two dozen Wodehouse books in the last two years and there are like 75 more where that came from. For me they’re like the literary equivalent of watching Seinfeld DVDs: you’ve seen it all a million times before, you know exactly what’s going to happen, but it’s always funny and it always cheers you up. By the way, I decided to write this post when I realized, in retrospect, that my post about being a Chinese detective was written in a very Wodehouse-y style.