"Well look at that, Senator LooGAR. You reckon you ever seen one that big before? I doubt it."

I'm reading "The Fifties" by David Halbestam. Fucking amazing book so far. Mixes in all of the political and mainstream historical happenings with these vignettes about say, the guy who started Holiday Inn, or the research team that developed the birth control pill.

Very well written. Halberstam is easy enough on the eyes were you chew up a couple of hours without even realizing it.

Just finished John Armstrong's Guilty Of Everything, a short and entertaining memoir of the early days of the Vancouver punk scene. The author is (only slightly) better known as Buck Cherry, leader of the Modernettes, writer of "Barbra" and "The Rebel Kind" (covered by Alejandro Escovedo while in the True Believers). Overall, not much there other than a bunch of funny/gross/sad anecdotes mixed in with a small amount of punk philosophizing - took about an hour to read.

This is really funny - I'm reading "1421: The Year China Discovered America." The book has absolutely got me in a headlock. The point of it is that every european explorer, especially the portugese and spanish, who went out and "discovered" North America, the Caribbean, South America, etc., had chinese maps to go by, because the chinese launched 800 fucking enormous ships in 1420 and went absoutely everywhere, including both poles.

Excerpts from the ships' logs, where Columbus talks about knowing what to expect before they get there, copies of the maps they had, etc... fucking crazy what the chinese accomplished. At the time Henry the 5th(?) "invaded" France, he did it by crossing the channel in 2 fishing boats, sending a total of 800 men with bows and arrows, etc. That same year the chinese had a standing army of over 1 million men, with guns. It's nuts.

That too has also amazed me. It's crazy how these modern sophisticated countries and cultures can regress.

The whole thing was just fucked up... Emperor sends out a ginormous fleet, says "map everything, meet people, collect tribute, give out some plates, come back." Two years later, they make it back, and there's a new emperor, and travel is out of fashion. They fucking burned the records of it, and left all the boats in the harbor to rot.

People are still finding wrecked teak wood chinese junks in harbors... san francisco, australia, bahamas, greenland. Fucking crazy what they could do before we could.

I did and I will thank you again. I had to put it down for a week when I had the brother-in-law hanging out, but am into again with much vigour. Fantastic read.

When the character Pete Bondurant is described I immediately thought it sounded like Loogar.

I wanna read this.

He's british, former sailor. It helps explain a lot of the gross distortions on the older maps... latitude was correct, longitude wasn't, etc. Just nerdy enough to have some meat to it, but still doesn't belabor the point. Can't put it down.

that looks great! now i feel like i should read that one before i continue with the magellan one. it sounds like a very similar format, with the well-crafted nerdiness and explanations, etc. this one also really examines magellan's personality, and it's just an insane story to begin with.

does it mention ever how largely misinterpreted the size of the pacific ocean was? that is a kind of a big deal with magellan's (and other's) story.

shipping. exploration. sigh.

Yep, and he poses a theory about it. The deal was thus, sorta:

1. Sailing for the crown meant a LOT of potential money / fame. Columbus (and his brother) as well as Magellan, etc., knew this and lived by it.
2. The chinese maps (they came to europe via traders from india, then italy, then portugal, being re-drawn and copied each time) showed that the fastest trade routes to the lucrative Indain Ocean cities were, of course, to the east. Down around africa and over. And other countries began to be able to make the trip, so no glory / $ there.
3. (Theory) Columbus's brother redraws the new maps they were getting, and suddenly the pacific is HUGE and the atlantic goes for about 4,000 miles and *bam* there's china... right where north america is. There's really no good explanation for how the maps (and you can follow the succession of them, one to the next, over about 80 years) suddenly go from getting more and more accurate to Holy Fucked Up.
4. They convince the crown to fund their trip to the "scary" west, where the fastest trade route to china / india is to be found, knowing full-well that it's not the fastest route. But they also know that there are uncolonized lands there, so they'll come back with something, just not what the king asked for.

It should also be said that columbus was... not a very skilled navigator. But a lot of these guys Were very good leaders, and fascinating people.

so he's saying that they KNEW the pacific was big? i was under the impression that they had no idea how vast the pacific was, mostly because of incompetence and inability to read the charts, and that was why magellan's voyage was so fucked.

btw, magellan was basically a total loser his whole life. you should read this book too.

Actually, I'm game for some book-swappage if you wanna. I'm almost done with this one.

They knew that india/china were closer that way than west, but they hadn't figured out how to account for longitude yet, so they didn't have a good way to say "the earth is ___ miles around." They just things were "bout that far from here."

The chinese, however, had a fucking frightening way to figure it out. Get this shit...

Let's say they wanna figure out the exact longitude for the indian ocean, from the coast of africa to australia and up indonesia back to china. They send out 8 or 10 ships to known cities on those continents at the same time. The ships arrive, then the crews build these big, square pyramids, facing exactly the right ways, with perfectly aligned slits in the walls / ceilings. Then, everyone sets up for the next lunar eclipse. They knew when these were coming, by the way - and they show up somewhere on earth roughly every 6 months.

So when the next full lunar eclipse comes, the chinese crews document the exact moment that the moon begins to get shadowed, then the instant it hits the beginning of the full shadow, then the instant it begins to exit full shadow, and lastly when it begins to exit the lighter shadow. They had solar clocks built into the design of these towers, btw. Accurate to within seconds, adjusted for latitude. So everyone writes down what second each of the 4 events happened at their longitude, and sails home. They compare notes, do the trigonometry, and come up with figures that place the coasts of africa, australia, north america, etc., to within something like half a fucking mile of their accurate positions.


...in 1421.

jesus. that's just... wow.

yes, i'm definitely up for some swapping. it will give me the motivation to finish this one.

Just finished Jorge Louis Borges Ficciones. His short stories should be required reading. I just picked up Andrew Lang's translation of The Arabian Nights. I've never even looked at the original Aladdin so it should be awesome.

Who are some good metaphysical fiction writers?

Currently reading the two current issues of Spin and Under The Radar.

As well, I'm working on F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side Of Paradise which is much better than I had expected.

haruki murakami - after the quake

short stories set during the '95 earthquake in japan. this is like the fifth murakami book i've read, excellent author. has some very strange ideas. a good description is this new york times quote:

"ushers the reader into a hallucinatory world where the real and surreal merge and overlap, where dreams and real-life nightmares are impossible to tell apart"

that describes most of his work actually.

He's one of my favorite authors. I've tackled IJ in high school and didn't understand half of it, should read it again. I love his short stories though. Loog highly rec this whole book, though Lyndon is amusing as hell.

Right now I'm reading the "Real Frank Zappa Book". Its dragging right now due to his ramblings about composition.

I literally bumped into Jay Mcinerney last night after a reading he did in Brookline, but that still didn't convince me to pick up his latest book, The Good Life. The Jayster, btw, looked *old* in person, but quite polished. His crowd was extremely well-dressed.

So I instead bought this book. I heard an interview with the author on a local NPR show and was quite impressed with his thoughts about subjective taste and stuff. Sure seemed relevant, given our "problems" with distinguishing the good from the bad from the mainstream from the anti, etc.

Also picked up Jared Diamond's Collapse and a used copy of the Tipping Point, which I'd always meant to actually read all the way through. Epidemics, yo.

And a copy of Harper's. I really need to get a subscription to that.

Has anyone read The Assassin's Gate, btw? I've heard good things about it, but I'm concerned that it's a little too "gotcha"/liberal for my tastes.

Flashman at the Charge - George MacDonald Fraser
One Stick Song - Sherman Alexie

the five dysfunctions of a team
performance scorecards

weird, me too! I loved The Great Gatsby so I figured i'd like this.

I just finished Wuthering Heights last Thursday. It was the best book i've read in the past 17 years.
That beats Goodnight Moon, and this book:

God it was my favorite when I was a child.