The Baroque Cycle

Guess what? You’re not normal.

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You're not normal, Seattle, WA

Not a bad day at all today. Woke up at about 8am, looked outside, and realized that we were in for a gorgeous spring day — mostly clear skies, bright sun, and just a hint of breeze. Perfect for going out wandering…so wander I did.

I started by heading up the hill and heading down Broadway, keeping an eye out for more stickers to add to my sticker graffiti collection on Flickr. I found a ton of stuff to add — Broadway being something of a center point for much of the city’s “freak” population, it’s got a wide collection of graffiti (stickered and otherwise) to choose from. While I found a lot of good stuff, I think my favorite from the day was this one Chickens ate my Baby Sticker Graffiti, Broadway, Seattle, WA — a ‘dollar bill’ emblazoned with the text, “Yo, chickens ate my baby!!!” Other favorites include a plea to boycott certain Safeway employees, a reason for the stickers and these teapots.

A couple weeks ago, Prairie and I noticed that a gorgeous old church on Broadway right across from the Seattle Central Community College was due to be demolished. This was kind of a bummer to find out — while neither of us had ever gone there, it was a nice building, and it was a shame to see that it was to be torn down rather than renovated. When I passed it today, the work crews were in the midst of the demolition process. I’ve got to admit — while I hate to see the building go, it was kind of neat to get to watch some of the work (must be my inner six year old).

I managed to find a couple conversations as I continued down the street, too. First was a gent who I saw debarking from a bus wearing a khaki Sport Kilt, which led to a conversation about kilts and cameras that lasted for a couple blocks. Later on, one of the many street kids that prowl Broadway for spare change asked me about the kilt, and I ended up chatting with her and a friend of hers for a few minutes — Leah and Shy were their names, I think, though I could easily be wrong about that, as I’m absolutely horrid with names.

Bailey/Coy Books, one of the bookshops along Broadway, always has a sign out front Bailey/Coy Books, Broadway, Seattle, WA with the first line from a book. If you know the book that they’re quoting from, you get 20% off — and today, for the first time, I was actually able to identify the quote! Determined not to let this opportunity go to waste I headed in and picked up The System of the World, the last book in Neal Stephenson‘s Baroque Cycle, which I’d been wanting to get since it came out last year. I’ll get around to reading it as soon as I’m done re-reading the Harry Potter series, which I decided to do after Prairie and I had a “Harry Potter Weekend” a couple weekends ago and watched all three films over the course of the weekend.

Once I hit the end of Broadway, I decided to continue on and head up to Volunteer Park, which I’ve never wandered through on a “normal” day (I usually end up there for the Pride Day festivities). After a wander around I started heading back out when I was called over by a small group of kids hanging out at the amphitheatre. “We’re having a parade,” they said, “come and join us!” I wasn’t entirely sure about joining in a parade, but I headed over to chat and see what was going on.

Pre-parade gathering, Volunteer Park, Seattle, WA As it turns out, this is something they’ve been doing for the past few weeks, and intend to keep doing — get a bunch of friends together, dress up, find some noisemakers, and go wandering around Capitol Hill in their own little festive parade. Why? Why not? “Everybody gets out to march in protest, pissing and moaning about things — but nobody ever just celebrates a good day,” said the guy who seemed to be more or less in charge. “It’s a warm spring day, we’re here, nobody’s dropping bombs on us…why not have some fun?”

Seemed like good enough rationale to me, so I decided to wander along with them as photographer (not generally being one for random prancing, hootin’ and hollerin’, but still a great supporter or random silliness and fun). After a few more people showed up, it was declared time to go — and we were off.

Join the Parade! Volunteer Park, Seattle, WA This little motley group of assorted oddballs (and yes, I most definitely include myself in that) headed up and out of Volunteer Park, down 15th Avenue to John St., down John to Broadway, and up and then back down Broadway, prancing, dancing, twirling, shouting, chanting, singing, banging on gongs, bowls, and other noisemakers the entire way. “We’re having a parade! Join the parade!” they shouted at passers by and into windows of stores and open doors of shops. Some people weren’t quite sure what to make of the spectacle, but overall, I saw lots of amusement on the faces of the people we passed — they might not want to join in (though a few did eventually), but the sheer absurdity of the event was enough to bring a smile to quite a few people.

And in the end, what more excuse do you need to do something silly?

Once the group made it to SCCC they camped out on the lawn for a few moments to decide where to go next, and I took my leave of them. By this point I’d been out wandering around for about five hours, and it was time to head home and rest for a bit. I came home, napped for about an hour, then after a quick chat with Prairie before she headed out to a night at the opera (Central Washington University just got a new music building, and this was their inaugural performance), showered and headed up to the Vogue for a night of bouncing.

Bouncing accomplished, I’m home again, and now that this mini-opus is done, it’s long past bedtime for Bonzo.

iTunes “Power in the Blood (Acoustic)” by Alabama 3 from the album Acoustic Power: Underground Acoustic Sessions From the Steam Room (2003, 2:31).

Reason interview with Neal Stephenson

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There’s a great interview with Neal Stephenson at Reason right now. Every time I read something by Neal, whether a book or an interview, it amazes me how unassumingly intelligent this man is.

My favorite question and answer from the interview:

Reason: The Baroque Cycle suggests that there are sometimes great explosions of creativity, followed by that creative energy’s recombining and eventual crystallization into new forms—social, technological, political. Are we seeing a similar degree of explosive progress in the modern U.S.?

Stephenson: The success of the U.S. has not come from one consistent cause, as far as I can make out. Instead the U.S. will find a way to succeed for a few decades based on one thing, then, when that peters out, move on to another. Sometimes there is trouble during the transitions. So, in the early-to-mid-19th century, it was all about expansion westward and a colossal growth in population. After the Civil War, it was about exploitation of the world’s richest resource base: iron, steel, coal, the railways, and later oil.

For much of the 20th century it was about science and technology. The heyday was the Second World War, when we had not just the Manhattan Project but also the Radiation Lab at MIT and a large cryptology industry all cooking along at the same time. The war led into the nuclear arms race and the space race, which led in turn to the revolution in electronics, computers, the Internet, etc. If the emblematic figures of earlier eras were the pioneer with his Kentucky rifle, or the Gilded Age plutocrat, then for the era from, say, 1940 to 2000 it was the engineer, the geek, the scientist. It’s no coincidence that this era is also when science fiction has flourished, and in which the whole idea of the Future became current. After all, if you’re living in a technocratic society, it seems perfectly reasonable to try to predict the future by extrapolating trends in science and engineering.

It is quite obvious to me that the U.S. is turning away from all of this. It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn’t care for some of what scientists have to say. So the technical class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called culture war. Of course the broad mass of people don’t belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture.

Since our prosperity and our military security for the last three or four generations have been rooted in science and technology, it would therefore seem that we’re coming to the end of one era and about to move into another. Whether it’s going to be better or worse is difficult for me to say. The obvious guess would be “worse.” If I really wanted to turn this into a jeremiad, I could hold forth on that for a while. But as mentioned before, this country has always found a new way to move forward and be prosperous. So maybe we’ll get lucky again. In the meantime, efforts to predict the future by extrapolating trends in the world of science and technology are apt to feel a lot less compelling than they might have in 1955.

I have got to pick up the last book in the Baroque Cycle soon.

iTunes “Thunder Kiss ’65 (The Remix That Wouldn’t Die)” by White Zombie from the album Nightcrawlers: The K.M.F.D.M. Remixes (1992, 6:10).

Neal Stephenson: Confusion

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I so need to get to the bookstore soon — Confusion, the second book in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle (which began with Quicksilver) is out. Salon has an interview with Stephenson and a review of Confusion up which both look good, though I don’t have time to read them right now. Argh! :)

(via Boing Boing and /.)

iTunes: “.^.^.^%^%\^%” by The User from the album Symphony #2 for Dot Matrix Printers (2002, 6:38).

Words, words, words

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I’m so set for reading material for the next few weeks — it’s great!

Prairie just got me started reading an old series from Marion Zimmer Bradley, and I just finished the first book — The Inheritor — this morning. Unfortunately, I won’t have anything else in the series until this weekend.

No worries, though. Amazon just delivered Neil Gaiman’s newest work, Endless Nights, his return to the Sandman series.

And, on top of that, I picked up the latest book from Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver, the first book of a planned trilogy called The Baroque Cycle.

So if my posts are a little less frequent than they sometimes are for a bit…at least you know why. ;)

Neal Stephenson: Quicksilver

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The newest book from one of my favorite modern authors, Neal Stephenson, is now available for pre-order at Amazon: Quicksilver: Volume One of the Baroque Cycle.

In this wonderfully inventive follow-up to his bestseller Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson brings to life a cast of unforgettable characters in a time of breathtaking genius and discovery, men and women whose exploits defined an age known as the Baroque.

Daniel Waterhouse possesses a brilliant scientific mind — and yet knows that his genius is dwarfed by that of his friends Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Robert Hooke. He rejects the arcane tradition of alchemy, even as it is giving birth to new ways of understanding the world.

Jack Shaftoe began his life as a London street urchin and is now a reckless wanderer in search of great fortune. The intrepid exploits of Half-Cocked Jack, King of the Vagabonds, are quickly becoming the stuff of legend throughout Europe.

Eliza is a young woman whose ingenuity is all that keeps her alive after being set adrift from the Turkish harem in which she has been imprisoned since she was a child.

Daniel, Jack, and Eliza will traverse a landscape populated by mad alchemists, Barbary pirates, and bawdy courtiers, as well as historical figures including Samuel Pepys, Ben Franklin, and other great minds of the age. Traveling from the infant American colonies to the Tower of London to the glittering courts of Louis XIV, and all manner of places in between, this magnificent historical epic brings to vivid life a time like no other, and establishes its author as one of the preeminent talents of our own age.

(via Atrios)