CBR III 7: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz - Frank L. Baum

This was another short one, so although Le Wiz has nothing to do with Cruel Shoes, aside from their inherent absurdity, I'm adding them up to one full book and review.

We all know the story of Dorothy and her little dog too. You may even know that the famous shoes weren't ruby but silver in the book. What I didn't know was that the book is stupid. I am much too old for its target audience, so take this with a salt lick, but ugh. Lame. The story felt choppy and discontinuous, and the writing was childish. Plus, Dorothy never makes out with the Tin Man! What kind of world do we live in?

I never should've read the book, especially since I don't have kids and I didn't even really like the movie, except when paired up with Dark Side of the Moon, but it was free in some app, and I once portrayed Hunk (black and white farmhand) in a living mural competition, so, you know, memories, nostalgia, blah blah blah.

CBR III 6.5: Cruel Shoes - Steve Martin

Cruel Shoes is a 1977 compilation of poems and page-long stories that have such surreal topics as dancing buffalo, renegade cows, vengeful curtain rods, and the Diarrhea Gardens of El Camino Real. Everything is written in an overly serious tone, to emphasize the absurdity of the topic. It's slight but entertaining to browse on a warm spring day after kayaking around a lake. (I'm outdoorsy!)

This was my favorite bit:

Some Anti-Gloom Insurance: Comedy Events You Can Do

4) Put an atom bomb in your nose, go to a party and take out your handkerchief. Then pretend to blow your nose, simultaneously triggering the bomb.

"The Bohemians" was also pretty good.

There's not much else to say about this one. Do you like either Steve Martin's stand-up or the paintings of Dali? Then read this book, if you ever happen to run into it.

CBR III 6: This Is Your Brain On Music - Daniel Levitin

I remember from high school reading about how bats use SONAR to see, I think in a Richard Dawkins book, and it described the really involved biological processes that go on. The signal gets sent out with various wavelengths, bounces back, the brain analyzes the different wavelengths that return, sees how long they take to return and from which direction they're coming, and all of these different inputs are analyzed instantly to create a constantly changing map of the landscape in front of the bat. It was impressive. Then Dawkins (or whoever) reminded me that this doesn't mean that bats are "smart," in the sense that we would use the word. This is all going on in the background, and the bat isn't exactly sitting down and taking a calculus test, but it's still fascinating.

The same thing that Dawkins did for me with bat SONAR, This Is Your Brain On Music did for human hearing. I had never studied in any kind of detail how the ear and brain work together to interpret signals from the outside world and morph them into what we hear as sound. It's crazy if you think about it. The only thing that our bodies have to work with is a bunch of atoms slamming against our eardrums, causing it to vibrate at differing frequencies. From this, we are able to determine the intensity of a sound, the up-down, side-side, and back-front directions, the unique timbre of different voices, pitch, etc. All from the equivalent of being a stretched-out sheet with a bunch of ping-pong balls thrown at it, only able to feel each impact, not see the path of the incoming balls. AMAZING.

Levitin discusses the possible evolutionary advantages of music (as a precursor to true speech, for example, or as a demonstration of overall fitness when combined with highly athletic and rhythmic dancing), as well as more straight-forward explanations of musical terms and how instruments utilize construction materials and string lengths/chambers to produce vastly different timbres and pitches. I'm a musical novice when it comes to technical knowledge (like the names of notes) and being able to create music, so those parts were helpful to me, although he does warn musicians to skip certain instructionary parts.

And speaking of novices, one of the points Levitin makes is that most people dramatically underestimate their own musical prowess simply because they only listen to music and don't produce it. Yet human brains are so well-attuned to musical aspects that we are remarkably talented at complex tasks like melody identification, categorization, and overtone series recognition and completion (where our brains automatically fill in the "base" frequency of notes that have had them surgically removed).

Most of us have a lifetime of listening to music, judging music, picking out genres that we like, and can instantly recognize jarring notes and unpleasant melodies or instruments, and reproduce our favorite songs with remarkable accuracy, even if we "can't sing." That is nothing to sneeze at. We're in a relatively new era of music being something that is only performed by "experts," as opposed to being a group activity in the background of many daily tasks. Everybody can make music, and enjoy it, and while this is not Levitin's main point, it's one of the aspects I really identified with, and I don't have time to get into the many issues he covers.

If you're interested in neuroscience or music, expert or not, if you can find a copy of this book, it will be worth your time.

CBR III 5: I Was Told There'd Be Cake - Sloane Crosley

Single girl has wacky misadventures in NYC, and instead of having a blog popular among Brooklyners, artsy young Manhattanites, and people who aspire to live in Brooklyn or Manhattan and have cupcake parties after museum-hopping with their gay besties, she gets paid to write books about said misadventures. Goddamn lucky bitch.

The stories are cute and funny, don't get me wrong. Not laugh-out-loud funny, but funny. Am I glad I borrowed the book from a friend instead of buying it? Yes. Am I going to exert any kind of energy to find her other book(s)? No. Would I read another book of hers if I ran across it and had some time to burn and no other book with me? Sure, I guess. Would I read her blog, if she had/has one? Probably. Will I follow her on Twitter? The premise of this question is invalid, since I don't have a Twitter account. Did she create dioramas of some of her essays? Yes, she did. ("Naturally, Sloane decided to turn three essays from her first book into three-dimensional plexiglass dioramas." Well, naturally.) Also, "Obviously... I purchased a vintage paper doll and matching wardrobe off Ebay." Do I really need to elaborate on the types of stories she relays? I hope not, because I won't.

If you're considering buying one of her books, check out some of the links to her website. Your reaction would be a great indicator as to whether or not you'll enjoy it, and her.

CBR III 4: Thud! - Terry Pratchett

Discworld novels that focus on the Watch (police "force" of Ankh-Morpork) have been solid for me. I love Sam Vimes and the ragged band of characters that make up the force, like Nobby Nobbs, who's technically human, Carrot, the tallest dwarf ever, and Cheery Littlebottom, a dwarf with the best name ever.

Thud! involves a thousands-year old feud between trolls and dwarves. The original battle was at Koom Valley, and there's a famous, wall-sized painting of it that is supposed to contain clues about... something. (It was painted by an insane guy paranoid about the Chicken getting him.) Coming up is the anniversary of Koom Valley, and the painting has been stolen, a dwarf has been found dead next to a troll club, a Black Ribboner (reformed vampire) wants to join the Watch, angry trolls are lumbering around hopped up on drugs, and it's up to Vimes to figure out who really killed the dwarf, what this goddam vampire wants from him, how to prevent a full-blown inter-species war, and how to avoid eating the lettuce in his healthy BLT sandwiches.

Everything gets worked out in typical Pratchett fashion, and a good time is had by all.

A new word! Coprolite: fossilized animal dung.

An out-of-context dirty phrase! "C'mon if you think you're hard enough!" he screamed wildly.

Various other brief excerpts and amusing phrases!

• "hell went for a stroll with its sleeves rolled up."
  
• About a VIMP (Very Important Museum Person): "not so much speech as modulated yawning."
• "point the finger of scoff"
  
• Thoughts on how the only thing religion does is "put a gloss on slaughter."
  
• "War, Nobby. Huh! What is it good for?" he said.
  "Dunno, sarge. Freeing slaves, maybe?"
  "Absol- Well, okay."
  "Defending yourself from a totalitarian aggressor?"
  "All right, I’ll grant you that, but-"
  "Saving civilisation against a horde of-"
  "It doesn’t do any good in the long run is what I’m saying, Nobby, if you’d listen for five seconds together," Fred Colon sharply.
  "Yeah, but in the long run what does, sarge?"
  

CBR III 3: Amusing Ourselves to Death - Neil Postman

You guys! I've been reading, I swear! I'm up to 20-something if you count the head start books. I'm now on vacation in Santa Barbara, which is where I pounded out a ton of overdue reviews last year (see: October), so I was planning on repeating that. Ten days to catch up.

I go home tomorrow.

What, I've been buuuusy! Lying outside being too hot to read, and learning how to play bridge, and getting drunk. Which brings me to now: at a friend's house, part hungover, part hopped up on coffee, with a dash of still drunk, not ready to drive back, and not able to focus on The Great Shark Hunt, which Hunter Thompson would probably appreciate. Perfect time to write some well-reasoned and eloquent reviews.

Looking at my completed list, I see Amusing Ourselves to Death. I then think: I read this? Oh yeah... I look for notes. This is everything I took from the book, apparently:

"118: Billy Graham is more popular than Jesus!

119: hey, maybe it's a good thing if televised preachers are less effective than in-person. Fewer religious people... Yay?"

What I've been leading up to: I'm writing a lot about events that may seem to be unconnected to the book because I don't remember the contents all that well, but that's correct. Here's what I do remember:

Postman rings more than once (zing!) on the idea that the medium of learning is more important than the content of the learning. The culture of teaching children in "fun" ways, like videos of kiddie explorers discovering facts about blue whales, just teaches them that they will never need to put any effort into learning things, like doing boring research or reading boring textbooks. Great, the kids now know a few things about whales, but who gives a shit? They should know a few things about serious study. Also, putting political or any other kind of serious news on TV inherently devalues the news, because a visual format always trends toward short, splashy segments. Serious analysis always needs to be written, and in long-form.

OK, time to go watch Man v Wild and learn about how to survive if I get dropped on a deserted island surrounded by sharks! (Update: the process seems to be to first run across a body of water in which there are sharks, keeping away from the sharks. Then you should run towards the sharks and try to catch them by the tail so you can eat them. I'm gonna stick with my original plan of not going near deserted islands.)