July 2, 2009

fathomable

In the deep dark, in the thousand-fathom black waters of ancestral memory and instinctive unconscious, where old gods and primitive responses float invisible and gigantic, something moves. The dust debris on the ocean floor, sediment a million years still, lifts and swirls in its wake.

All I can think to say is that if you can imagine Samuel Beckett and Philip K. Dick collaborating to write a novelization of Jaws, you’ll have a decent idea of what you’re getting into with Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts. The world he creates is astounding; even more so is the fact that a story like this can be so damn gripping.

June 26, 2009

i never thought it was the point until he said it

The point is that although love may die, what is said on its behalf cannot be consumed by the passage of time, and forgiveness is everything.

From The Soul Thief, Charles Baxter. One of those books that in its final act gets you to rethink it, you, it and you, and you and yours.

June 21, 2009

me too, once

I felt like a wild thing, ready to mess up
the party, scarf the hors d’oeuvres.
But the dogs said, No, don’t do that,
calm down, after a while they open the door
and let you out, they pet your head, and everything
you might have held against them is gone

You have to read the whole thing. And here’s the poet, Stephen Dunn.

June 16, 2009

hoop rides again

A good bicycle, well applied, will cure most ills this flesh is heir to.

That’s Dr. K.K. Doty, of New York, providing his learned medical opinion in The Bicycle: Its Selection, Riding and Care, published by L.F. Korns in 1892. You can find this quote and a bunch of others at Quickrelease, where you can also click through to a flippable copy of the whole book. A couple people had sent me the link, but it was Ray Spooner’s latest email that got me to reread it all on a day when I was in a state to appreciate it fully.

I also especially like this selection: “As a means of pleasure, cycling stands in the foremost rank, but in common with all the great pleasures, it may easily stand in the foremost in abuse. The desire to ride at an unreasonably high speed may become morbid…The ever lasting scorcher, bent like a hoop, and with sunken cheeks, ought to be quite sufficient warning against this abuse.”

I wish, I told Ray, we were still called scorchers.

I wish we were everlasting. I’m glad we can at least feel that way, some days, some rides.

June 11, 2009

a present

“Molly Grietje”

A name scribbled in my notebook at the Giro d’Italia. Why was it that I had to come to Italy to read a novel written by an Irishman about a Dutchman whose love of the English sport of cricket helps him survive America . . . to find out that Santa Claus’s wife has a name? This is one of the reasons I could never be in a book club; I have to be free to go where the strange currents of reading by chance take me.

June 5, 2009

right

Road cycling is about three or four things, near as I can tell. It’s about riding like a lazy dog most of the time, then riding like the very hounds of hell are chasing you, and you are dripping au jus. It’s about having a basically psychotic relationship with food, saying, “Hello, Clarice…” to pizza and hating it and wanting to kill it while simultaneously having a sick nearly sexual obsession with it. It’s about acting in ways that would make bitchy supermodels recoil and think you indecent and uncivil, not to mention depressingly skinny. But most of all, it’s about upgrading your shit.

The Unholy Roleur nails it. The only thing I disagree with there, and only in my personal context, is the “most” in that last sentence.

May 30, 2009

abundant

“May I tell you about something I discovered?” I could hardly believe the words had come out of my mouth, but the Professor’s hand fell still. Overcome by the beauty of his delicate patterns, perhaps I’d wanted to take part; and I was absolutely sure he would show great respect, even for the humblest discovery.

“The sum of the divisors of 28 is 28.”

“Indeed . . . ” he said. And there, next to his outline of the Artin conjecture, he wrote 28=1+2+4+7+14. “A perfect number.”

“Perfect number?” I murmured, savoring the sound of the words.

“The smallest perfect number is 6: 6=1+2+3.”

“Oh! Then they’re not so special after all.”

“On the contrary, a number with this kind of perfection is rare indeed. After 28, the next one is 496: 496=1+2+4+8+16+31+62+124+248. After that, you have 8,128, and the next one after that is 33,550,336. The farther you go, the more difficult they are to find” — though he had easily followed the trail into the billions!

“Naturally, the sums of the divisors of numbers other than perfect numbers are either greater or less than the numbers themselves. When the sum is greater, it’s called an ‘abundant number,’ and when it’s less, it’s a ‘deficient number.’ Marvelous names, don’t you think? The divisors of 18 — 1+2+3+6+9 — equal 21, so it’s an abundant number. But 14 is deficient: 1+2+7=10.”

I tried picturing 18 and 14, but now that I’d heard the Professor’s explanation, they were no longer simply numbers. Eighteen secretly carried a heavy burden, while 14 fell mute in the face of its terrible lack.

“There are lots of deficient numbers that are just one larger than the sum of their divisors, but there are no abundant numbers that are just one smaller than the sum of theirs. Or rather, no one has ever found one.”

“Why is that?”

“The answer is written in God’s notebook,” said the Professor.

If I’d had any math teacher in my life who had lectured on any of the numerical marvels I read about in Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor (including amicable numbers and Euler’s Formula, the most beautiful equation, I think), maybe I wouldn’t regard numbers as, at best, something I must coexist with.