Books Completed in December 2006

Kilrone. by Louis L'Amour (Bantam Books, 2002)

Didn't get much reading done this month. In December I moved back to Texas after 10 years, most recently from San Francisco, and with that and Christmas, and everything else, I've been pretty busy. Still haven't even gotten my books from the movers. Probably the only reason I finished this one is that it is only 152 pages long.

However it was a diverting 152 pages, a pretty decent story that could have been more fleshed out. The rough dialogue fit it. After my recent trip up to Modoc Country, the Northern Nevada setting was pretty vivid. I've only recently starting learning about the American Indians in the Northern Great Basin, and this only makes me want to read a general history.

Kilrone is about a cavalry battalion in Northern Nevada that gets in trouble during the Bannock War, there seems to be a fair amount of research involved, a character seemingly based on Sarah Winnemucca and a few other details, but there is certainly a sort of generic quality to the story, which is mostly a revenge tale about the title character and a corrupt and criminal villain who runs a camp outside the fort. My basic review is that it is as I said earlier: diverting.

Pictures of Mesa Verde

I was reading this post on NewMexiKen's blog, and since my books are already packed up, I ended up looking up Mesa Verde before Richard Wetherill on Google, and I found these great pictures of Cliff Dwellings from the 1870s. There are quite a few William Henry Jackson pictures on the same site, the index is here.

Area Codes and Population

I was looking at an area code map this morning, and I noticed that New Mexico (pop 1.9 million) had only one area code, I think I actually knew that before, but I was really surpised that so many states had more than one, even Utah (pop. 2.5 million) and Nevada (pop 2.4 million) had 2 area codes. I noticed that only one other state, West Virginia (pop. 1.8 million), had three congressional representatives and only one area code.

When I first looked at this my first thought was the density of phones, it is interesting that the two highest population states are states that one suspects might have a lower number of telephones, and the lowest population state (Nevada) that has two area codes is one that might easily be suspected of having a higher density of telephone numbers, but the population difference is so great, half a million, between the the 35th and 36th largest states by population that I don't think this really means anything. Other than it is an amazing world we live in when there are more than 2 million Nevadans.

On that note here is a picture of Pueblo Bonito, begun about a thousand years bbefore anyone ever imagined an area code, from atop the Mesa on the North side of Chaco Canyon.

200605292320Chaco 077, originally uploaded by moheroy.

Depressing

Michael Barone posted a link to this Washington Post story story on Dairy subsidies. It is a really fascinating and extremely depressing read about the nightmare that is farm policy in the United States today. Anyway, I highly recommend reading it.

Rebuilding Cities

One of the good things about reading policy magazines more than a year after they are published is that one can much more easily separate the wheat from the chaff.

In the September 19, 2006 issue of the New Republic there was a pretty good article about rebuilding cities, what struck me was this portion:

The impulse to rebuild a radically new city is especially pointed in New Orleans, punctuated as it is by a degraded infrastructure, corrupt politics, massive wealth disparities, and, in many neighborhoods, near-Third World living conditions. After a disaster like Katrina, "for the first time, adequate resources become available for thorough physical and design studies," wrote the authors of a 1977 National Science Foundation-funded study on post-disaster reconstruction. "The impossible seems possible ... the opportunity for comprehensive study and major change is at hand."

In fact, the idea of rebuilding a city "bigger and better" has a long - and disheartening - history. After the Great London Fire of 1666, the architect Sir Christopher Wren pushed city leaders to adopt his plans for an orderly city grid, with wide streets that would help slow a future fire. But even the man who built St. Paul's Cathedral had little impact on London's reconstruction. A similar story unfolded after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, which destroyed over 50 percent of the city's housing stock and wiped out its commercial and industrial sectors. By coincidence, the year before the earthquake, the great architect and urban planner Daniel Burnham had drawn up a master plan for the San Francisco of the twentieth century. But, when the earthquake provided the perfect opportunity to put his plan into effect, it was completely overlooked. Even Chicago, which supposedly rebuilt itself according to exacting new construction codes after a fire wiped out much of its downtown in 1871, was actually first rebuilt in the same shoddy manner as before; it was only after a prolonged political battle that planners put tougher codes in place.

The crux of the problem, planners admit, is that no city, even one as thoroughly devastated as New Orleans, emerges as a tabula rasa. "There is already a plan for reconstruction, indelible stamped in the perception of each resident - the plan of the pre-disaster city," wrote the authors of the NSF study. Not only does the will of the residents to "make it like it was" render an thought of relocation void, but it also makes it difficult to conceive of any urban design that varies too far from the old model - no matter how socially unjust that model may have been.

"Plus Ca Change, Rebuilding a beautiful mess" by Clay Risen, The New Republic, September 19, 2005. pp. 17-19

I think this piece more than anything I have read captures the hubris of the urban planner. While I am no fan of New Orleans, personally I find it only rivalled among major American cities by Las Vegas in its ability to make me feel uncomfortable, the idea of treating any city as a tabula rasa for planners to build a perfect city upon is the sort of idea that should fill one with horror. I know it is received wisdom that the failure to rebuild London along Wren's lines was a tragedy, but am I the only person who is less than enthusiastic for a London along the lines of Dublin, Bath or Edinburgh's "admittedly beautiful" New Town? And of course this wold be an Edinburgh without its magnificent setting or the Old Town and Castle. But the most important part of this is that London's windy traditional streets and cramped conditions are 300+ years later a minor part of the great city that is modern London. Wren's planning may not have been followed, but in the West End and Westminster it is quite clear that this is what modern London has. And the East End would be the same regardless of any of Wren's plans. Cities grow organically, and what may appear desirable in one century is anathema in only a few decades. For example all of the great plans for rebuilding San Francisco were premised on the "removal" of the city's Chinatown, Burnham's famously. This in the same spirit as the author's dreams of building to correct social injustice. One can never recapture what has been destroyed completely, or even in part, but cities are living and organic, even if unfeeling, and there is a reason grand schemes so often come to either nothing or, even worse, sterility.

Devil's Postpile

200610014 Mammoth Long Valley 053
Originally uploaded by moheroy.

Devil's Postpile National Monument is near Mammoth Lakes, just East of Yosemite in California. It is a really great example of columnar jointing in basalt. Unlike the famous Giant's Causeway in County Antrim, the perspective here is from below so when you look up it is really impressive. And since you can climb up to the top you also get the really neat hexagonal pavement effect as well.

Sadly these days the National Park Service requires you to take a shuttle bus out to see it, and while it is kind of neat it is probably not worth the hassle, since there are so many other interesting things to see in the area. Especially if you have already seen similar formations and are pressed for time. Luckily for me I was there in October just before the park closed and they pretty much left you to your own devices and I was able to drive to the trailhead myself.

Books completed in November 2006

Soldier of Sidon. by Gene Wolfe (Tor, 2006)

Ines of My Soul. by Isabel Allende (Harper Collins, 2006)

Paragaea: A Planetary Romance. by Chris Roberson (PYR [Prometheus Books], 2006)

I was planning to do better this month, but in the end I didn't get much done, the more interesting books I was reading didn't get finished this month and since I was traveling for Thanksgiving all I managed was some not particularly awesome fantastical fiction.

The Gene Wolfe novel, Soldier of Sidon, was not bad, actually it was pretty good, but it was not especially engaging either. The character of Latro, who forgets everyday the events of the day before has never been very profound and the other characters were always more important. In Soldier of the Mist, and Soldier of Arête, the subsidiary characters are the real emotional focus, especially Latro's young slave, whose name I can't remember, they gave the story emotional resonance that the hero because of his lack of memory lacked. In this book the "river wife" who accompanies Latro is not very well seen, we are told of Latro's affection toward her, but she is never really fleshed out, and in the end I hardly cared. On the whole it was a disappointment.

Ines of My Soul was no disappointment. It was so singularly bad and unoriginal, with such a distracted and slapdash character it was of constant interest. I have never read a less competently constructed and self indulgent book. I hate to mention Georgette Heyer here, especially since she is a far better writer, but at several points I stopped reading Ines of My Soul and began contemplating her. No one has yet managed to write like the inimitable Miss Heyer, and while her magnificent use of adverbs is unique to say the least, it is still magnificent. Isabel Allende however reads like a 14 year old girl who has read One Hundred Years of Solitude, and then attempted to rewrite a Kathleen Woodiwiss novel in that image. It truly has to be experienced to recognize how bad it is. But life is short so I would not recommend it.

Paragaea was interesting but I really didn't care all that much about any of its characters, its world, or its plot, and it seemed too eager to be a classic and too knowing to be what it claimed to be. Edgar Rice Burroughs was certainly not unaware of his pulp qualities but he hardly reveled in the sort of self referential qualities this book exhibits. The afterward was something else altogether and quite shameless.

Hopefully December will be a better month for reading, even with everything else I have going on, so I better get to it.