Journey to the Center

This is the first of a series of short book reviews. The goal is to get through 50 books this year, each with a review. It’s only appropriate that the first review of the year should be of a book by a first time novelist, Warren Ellis. Ellis is a prolific writer of comics, but this is his first foray into novelization.

Crooked Little Vein is the story of a private investigator that has the worst luck a PI can have - he attracts simple-seeming cases that turn out to be loaded guns. In this instance, Mike McGill attracts a lost property cases with high stakes - a book of Invisible Amendments that the Chief of Staff as his client intends to use on the country. These Amendments are said to be able to reset the country’s morality to the Golden Age when they were written, namely 1776. Following the trail of this book across the country forces the McGill to interact with people with varying degrees of kinks and quirks and face the morality of returning a book with the power this one contains.

The story uses McGills improbable luck to assist with moving the plot along, taking advantage of conventions frequently seen in the comic world but rarely used in mainstream novels. This cavalier attitude toward conventions of reality and coincidence is part of the novels charm. That and cleverly crafted prose, which manages to avoid pushing characters into improbable and awkward conversation while still providing vivid imagery. Even ordinary situations become extraordinary, as exemplified by a red eye flight which becomes a conversation with a serial killer.

Ellis makes good use of his comic background, bringing his scripting skills to the purely written medium. This book reads like a storyboard, the words generating pictures of their own accord. I hope that this first foray into the realm of novels is followed by others. Ellis’ growth as a cross-medium writer is only bounded by his willingness to leave the visual behind.

I am a feminist. This occasionally colors my perception of classical works, making it difficult for me to enjoy some of the pieces that are overtly misogynist or racist. Some pieces are presented in a way that makes it possible to put them back into context and remember they were written hundreds of years ago when sexism and racism were more accepted and overt than they are today. However, I still have problems with The Taming of the Shrew and I was fully expecting Pagliacci to be of its ilk; namely that it would infuriate me with its abuse of women and I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the musical impact of the work.

The Seattle Opera took a novel approach to performing this piece, removing the traditional showing of Cavalleria Rusticana from the bill and filling the time with a flashback of Canio and Nedda and a piece of music pulled from other Leoncavalla works. The 11 minute interlude traveled through Canios memory from the time when he and Nedda met (she was very young and he was an adult clown) through to the present day. The music and accompanying circus acts were fascinating in their own right, but they also showed a tenderness between the two that wasn’t displayed in the first act. The growth of the relationship between Canio and Nedda and their happiness together was shown in a way that made it possible to understand Canio better.
My concerns about not enjoying this piece were entirely unfounded. I was absolutely blown away by the opera. I have never been moved by music or performance like I was by Antonello Palombis performance as Pagliacci. I would have thought that I wouldn’t have any sympathy for such a jealous jerk, but the passion and energy Palombi brought to the performance made me cry. It just broke my heart to see him in so much pain. After seeing the way he lavished attention on Nedda in the interlude, it was impossible not to feel for a man whose heartbreak snapped his mind, and Palombis performance brought this state of being home. I think with a lesser actor, it wouldn’t have been as easy to feel that sympathy.

The curtain call showed exactly how much effort Palombi hadput into the final scene. He came out for his bows sobbing with exhaustion. It was a truly beautiful performance, the only one where I felt the need to give a standing ovation. I was privileged to be there.

I am a fool. Sometimes I forget that being a techie doesn’t make me uber-technical; it just makes me able to troubleshoot.

Over the holidays, I had several days off from work. I figured that this would be the perfect time to do some upgrading on my web server, especially since I hadn’t really worked on it since I’d installed Fedora Core 2. Yeah, it’s really been that long. They’re up to FC8 now, so I had some serious upgrading to do. And you can’t really skip versions with the way it’s set up. Far more likely to cause problems that way. So I made what backups I could and set to it.
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I now know that my neighbors use clumping clay cat litter. The kind that’s grey with little blue flecks in it. I also happen to know that this stuff stains beige carpet.

It all started out innocently enough. Wednesday, I stopped at the end of the driveway on my way home from work to pick up the mail. This time of year it’s dark when I leave for work and dark when I come home, so pulling into the driveway and walking along the semi-slimy side of the gravel driveway is always a challenge. There’s no sidewalk and the grassy/muddy edge along the driveway is full of potholes and giant rocks. Normally I don’t drive far enough down the driveway for this to be a problem; pop out of the car, walk 10 steps, grab the mail, and jump back in. A minute tops.

However, this Wednesday was special. I was stomping around in the dark, trying to avoid the puddles and the big ankle-twisting rocks when I stepped in something squishy. At the time I assumed I’d hit a nasty mud puddle, but since I didn’t slide too much or twist any ankles, I didn’t worry about it. I just grabbed the mail and got back in the car. I arrived at the house in the dark and climbed the stairs to take off my shoes and crash for a bit. I paid no attention to the weird sticking of my right foot on the carpeted stairs, I saw nothing unusual. Not until the next morning.

On my way out Thursday morning, my husband noted that there was a weird stain on the carpet. I vaguely remembered stepping in something odd and figured that I should check my shoes. Why yes, the arch under my foot had trapped some foreign substance that required removing. And man was there a lot of it. I cleaned off my shoe with about a dozen tissues, washed my hands and trundled off to work.

When I got home that night, my husband told me that he’d discovered the cause of the problem. He was cleaning up the stains on the stairs and the smell got him thinking. So he went down to the street and discovered that his hunch was right. The trash collectors had managed to drop a bag of one of the neighbors cat litter cleaning out of their trash can, and just left it where it fell. This sat in the rain for a day before I stepped in it, thus the slimy texture. So I’d been tracking some other cats pee around the house.

At this point, I’m just thankful that our cats haven’t decided that this is cause for a pee-war on the stairs.

You gotta love converting from one posting system to another. This process will hopefully be less painful than I’m expecting, but only because I’m expecting it to be purely manual. Time to start looking for conversion software, I guess.

From a practical, and readership, standpoint this means that the archives will slowly be rebuilt. But all new posts from here on out will be in the new system. Any suggestions on plugins for WordPress gratefully accepted.