Galaxy Dimwatch

Galaxy SmartwatchMy Galaxy 42mm black “smartwatch” was a fun toy, but I took it back after two weeks. Best Buy made the refund easy, no questions asked. That’s one reason I bought it there. Also they had the best extended warranty, which you need on a product this new and complicated. Theirs was a simple “replace” warranty, vs. “repair” and “best effort” warranties at other dealers. The price was about the same as everywhere, maybe $25 lower, but that was not a factor. These “smartwatch” gizmos are way expensive. You just have to get past that if you want one.

So why did I take it back? Two reasons. 1. It didn’t do what I wanted. 2. It did do what I didn’t want.

The main reason I wanted a smartwatch was to give me notifications on my wrist when I receive phone, email, or text messages on my phone, which is usually in my pocket. Half the time I miss the notifications from the phone even with the volume turned up, and sometimes I’m in a meeting or in a class and I have the ringer volume low.  Getting a “bzzzt!” on my wrist is a perfect, unobtrusive way to stay connected. (This says something about how clunky phones are).

My Galaxy watch didn’t reliably give me the notifications I wanted. Sometimes it just didn’t do it at all.That was especially true for text messages. I pored over the settings and experimented endlessly. The watch did pick up all phone calls and most of time, email. Samsung privileges its proprietary messaging and email apps, which I don’t use. I use Google for both. I have to wonder if that was part of the problem. I tried turning all notifications off then going back in and selectively turning on the key ones. I also tried the reverse procedure. Nothing worked reliably. “Sometimes” is not good enough.

Also, when I did get a notification on the wrist, I did not know what it was for.  I’d check the notices screen by clicking the very cool bezel interface, and would find a message that said something like “Check your settings on your phone.” Which I did, finding nothing.  The watch correctly reported phone calls, but not always text or email. It was possible to go into the Google mail app and scroll through those, but that’s not what I wanted. I wanted notification when something came in.

The second major problem with the watch was a blizzard of notifications. The thing was buzzing with irrelevant notifications all day, nearly all of them from Samsung’s built-in “health” apps. For example, I got a “notice” whenever I sat at my computer for an hour without getting up to walk around. Who asked for that?  I was unable to turn it off.  Likewise for all the dozens of other health apps, like heart rate, calories burned, steps walked, stairs climbed, kilometers run. Buzz, buzz, buzz, all day. I learned how to turn off most of those but not all. The app names often had little relation to what they measure, and there were literally dozens of them, combinations and extensions of data from basic sensors such as heart rate monitor, pedometer, and altimeter.

If I wanted a basic health watch I could have bought a Fitbit for a fraction of the price. Since I recently was discharged from a hospital event, I confess I have not been climbing a lot of stairs or running a lot of kilometers. I’m happy to be breathing. My watch became a relentless nag annoying the heck out of me. I could not control the notification settings. One notification, for example, is simply called “Samsung Health” I couldn’t guess what that entails.  (Documentation is useless).

Finally, there was the stupidity factor. I could not use the “sleep monitoring” app because I had to put the watch on its charger overnight. Each day the battery would run down to about 35% by bedtime, not enough left to get through the night, and even if it did, it would be dead in the morning. The charging cradle is very easy to use.

The much-advertised four-day battery life should be taken with a large grain of salt. That figure is advertised for the 46mm watch, which has a larger battery. I could find no specific claim for battery longevity for the 42mm version but my experience was that it comfortably lasts a full day, but not 24 hours.

In any event, each morning when I put the watch back on, it would immediately report on my “sleep efficiency” whatever that might be (What is inefficient sleep?). I’m proud to report that my sleep efficiency was always in the high nineties, even though the watch was in its charging cradle all night. Maybe it meant its own sleep efficiency?

Another stupidity occurred in trying to download and use additional apps. Apps must run on Samsung’s proprietary Tizen operating system and they are few and primitive and generally not free, and overpriced. For example, I wanted a simple countdown timer with an alarm I could control, for timing meetings and movies. The free offering from Samsung was flawed and had terrible reviews. Others in the store were exorbitantly priced. I found a competent free third-party offering, downloaded it, and never saw it again. It had no widget and did not appear on any Samsung display of apps. I had no idea where it had gone or how to get to it. I had the same experience with several small utility apps, such as for a compass, a flashlight, and a calculator.

I should note that an enthusiastic user of this watch could do more with it than I did. It will, for example, allegedly send and receive phone calls in “Dick Tracy” mode, provided you sign up for a separate phone account with Verizon or other wireless provider. I had no need.

The watch also supports making payments as long as you use “Samsung Pay” (it won’t do Google Pay or Apple Pay), and you don’t mind having your credit card information loaded into your phone/watch, and you have some kind of a problem with cash or plastic payments. It was not for me.

Fooling around with the various watch faces was kind of fun, I admit. I enjoyed the sheer creativity of the various designs, from analog to digital, to purely verbal, animated, graphic, artistic, and much else. The range of offerings made me reconsider “What is a clock, anyway?”

Most of them however were not readable at a glance, my main requirement, and 99% of the free ones were not customizable, so in reality, the list of practical choices was quite limited.  But I did find a half-dozen that I liked.  They all behaved differently, and I wondered how one’s choice of watch face interacts with the notification systems I struggled with. You would think those two things would be independent, but there is no way to know.

Incidentally, I ended up keeping my watch face “on” all the time because it was extremely annoying to glance at the watch and stare stupidly at a black screen until the watch face came “on” – admittedly after a second or less, but in psychological time, that was forever. So I selected “always on” mode, sacrificing a little battery performance to the spirit of Bishop Berkeley (“To be is to be perceived.”).

It turns out, though, that “always on” really means that when you’re not looking, the watch face is in a reduced power mode, dim and minimized, but not fully on. Nevertheless the result was that when I rotated my wrist up to get the time, it came on much faster, with a delay that was merely annoying rather than infuriating.

After two weeks and many hours of fussing and learning, I decided that my not-so-smart watch was more trouble than it was worth and took it back. I think this is a technology before its time. In three to five years I’ll look again. For now I’m again wearing my $75, analog “Swiss Army” watch from Costco.  It doesn’t report my heart rate, but it’s always on when I look at it, day or night.

Reluctant Android Becomes Sentient

Reluctant Android CoverReluctant Android is now available for pre-order as an ebook from Amazon and Smashwords.

Pre-order means you can order it now for $3.99 and it will be delivered to you on September 1, 2018, the official launch date. Meanwhile you can read free samples on the retail sites:

Smashwords: www.smashwords.com/books/view/874448
Amazon: www.amazon.com/dp/B07FBQTM9M?ref_=pe_3052080_276849420

Why have a launch date a month away?  That gives me time to get my act together, with last-minute changes and updates, set up my marketing plan, and to try to find some early reviewers.

Reluctant Android looks good!  I’m very happy to have it as my first published psi-fi novel. See the official web site, www.psifibooks.com.

Lessons from His Greatness, The Gatsby

The GreatGatsby_1925 Book CoverCareers have been built on mining the depths of The Great Gatsby, that most iconic of American novels. I recently read it for the third time to see what I could learn about the craft of writing.

I decided to stay close to the data of the text, so I sorted some of my reading notes into categories to see what emerged.

  1. I am not as fond of the pathetic fallacy as Fitzgerald was. (Pathetic fallacy = attribution of animate qualities to inanimate objects). I use it once in a while to spice up a description, but it’s rarely convincing and I think it usually sticks out as a manufactured, “writerly”  technique.  So lesson: Use it sparingly.

“The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sundials…” (p 11)

About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad… (27)

:…the dust-covered wreck of a ford which crouched in a dim corner.” (29)

“…spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs…” (44)  (Also: isn’t this an error? The hams would have the harlequin designs, not the salads.)

“…the red, white and blue banners in front of all the houses stretched out stiff and said tut-tut-tut-tut in a disapproving way.” (79)

“Tom’s arrogant eyes roamed the crowd.” (111)

“[the automobiles]…drove sulkily away” (119)

“…the giant eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg kept their vigil…” (131)

  1. One of the reasons the book is dense is that Fitzgerald shorthands character descriptions with adjectives. A good adjective can border on metaphor and can cast an interesting light on a noun phrase, but piling up plain adjectives can seem hasty. Today’s narrator doesn’t have the authority he/she once had, so if you say “Tom was sturdy,” I think, “Oh yeah? Show me.” It is no longer possible to describe things by fiat.  Lesson: Don’t try to cram descriptions into adjectives.

Of Tom Buchanan (p. 11):  he’s “sturdy,” with a “hard” mouth, a “supercilious” manner, “arrogant” eyes. He leans “aggressively” forward, with “enormous power” of his body, a “great pack of muscle”, capable of “enormous leverage,” a “cruel body,” and has a “gruff husky” voice.

  1. Incomprehensible descriptions. Fitzgerald’s descriptions usually capture the imagination, but surprisingly often, I couldn’t visualize what he wrote. Possibly the surrounding context was edited out. Perhaps I expect overly concrete descriptions rather than more poetic ones, but my lesson learned here is to make sure my descriptions are clear and not cryptic.  

“Miss Baker’s lips fluttered…” (p. 13)

“…her low, thrilling voice.” (p. 13)

“We ought to plan something,” yawned Miss Baker…” (16)

“[The evening] was sharply different from the West where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward its close in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself.” (17)

“Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart. (25)

“… she held my hand impersonally…” (47)

“‘You’ve dyed your hair since then’ remarked Jordan and I started but the girls had moved casually on and her remark was addressed to the premature moon, produced like the supper, no doubt, out of a caterer’s basket.” (47)

“… he dropped my hand and covered Gatsby with his expressive nose.” (74)

“…[he] began to eat with ferocious delicacy.” (75)

“I tried to go then, but they wouldn’t hear of it; perhaps my presence made them feel more satisfactorily alone.” (99)

“…he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable vision to her perishable breath.” (117)

“So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star.” (117)

“…just as Tom came back, preceding four gin rickeys that clicked full of ice.” (124).

“Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly. (127).

“…Daisy began to move again with the season; suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men…” (158)

[Nick, of Jordan:]”Probably it had been tactful to leave Daisy’s house but the act annoyed me and her next remark made me rigid.” (163)

  1. Related to the preceding point, sometimes Fitzgerald’s descriptions couldn’t be visualized (by me), not because they were cryptic, but because they were abstract, empty generalizations that conveyed nothing. I am guilty of this in my writing, so the lesson learned is: always push descriptions down to the five senses.

“… a wan, charming, discontented face.” (p. 15).

By midnight the hilarity had increased. (51)

“It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it…” (52)

“She had drunk a quantity of champagne and…” (55)

“The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.” (90)

“Daisy looked at Tom frowning and an indefinable expression, at once definitely unfamiliar and vaguely recognizable…” (127)

  1. I noticed that sometimes Fitzgerald’s descriptions used concrete nouns and verbs, but I would come away from the sentences without having registered anything. On closer examination, I’d realize that even when there were sensory details, the description overall was stating vague things, even though the individual words were clear. I also do this in my writing. Lesson learned: Say something definite and specific; don’t traffic in generalizations.

Of a typical party at Gatsby’s:  “a pit full of oboes and trombones…”, The air is “alive with chatter and laughter and casual innuendo,” and “the lights grow brighter,” and “the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music,” and “laughter is easier.” (44)

“[I wandered] among swirls and eddies of people I didn’t know… all well dressed, all looking a little hungry and all talking in low earnest voices to solid and prosperous Americans.” (46)

“Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.” (93)

“Jay Gatsby” had broken up like glass against Tom’s hard malice and the long secret extravaganza was played out.” (155

“She was the first “nice” girl he had ever known. In various unrevealed capacities he had come in contact with such people but always with indiscernible barbed wire between.” (155)

“… and for a moment I thought I loved her.”  (63)

  1. Adverbial dialog tags. Apparently, they were not so out of favor a century ago.  I am sometimes tempted to use them, but even the AI editor I use flags them as questionable.  Why are they considered evil?  They are an authoritarian attempt to shorthand a description that should be spelled out. Lesson: Don’t tag adverbially.

“Do they miss me? She cried ecstatically?  (p. 14)

“You live in West Egg,” she remarked contemptuously. (15)

“Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. (17)

“No, he doesn’t,” said Tom coldly. (29)

“What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon,” cried Daisy… (125)

“I never loved him,” she said with perceptible reluctance. (139)

“I ejaculated an unrestrained “Huh!”” (177)

  1. Questionable omniscience by the first-person narrator. Nick is the 1PN and much of the genius of the book depends on that narrative choice. I have discovered that 1PN is difficult to sustain. Nobody is so interesting that the reader won’t soon tire of the voice (unless you write like Nabokov). Fitzgerald lets Nick drift into omniscience from time to time. For example, Nick wasn’t even there at the Cody yacht incident, but then he hastily adds “Gatsby told me all this,” (p. 107) to salvage his 1PN POV. I think that technique works, more or less.  Lesson learned: Don’t be so rigid about 1PN. If you have a good, believable narrator, he/she can slip into omniscience from time to time without the reader getting too upset.

“I saw that turbulent emotions possessed her…” (21)

‘Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once.’ A thrill passed over all of us. (48)

A stout, middle-aged man with enormous owl-eyed spectacles was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table…” (49)

“I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others…” (62)

Jordan tells Nick: “Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay.” (83) This news is a huge revelation to Nick. He says, “He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor.” But how did Jordan know that?

“Her throat, full of aching, grieving beauty, told only of her unexpected joy.” (94)

“He hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes.” (97)

Of Gatsby’s (unseen) emotions: “He had passed visibly through two states and was entering upon a third.” (97)

And again: “…Daisy tumbled short of his dreams, not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.” (101)

“Myrtle Wilson was peering down at the car. So engrossed was she that she had no consciousness of being observed and one emotion after another crept into her face…” (131)

“Some dim impulse moved the policeman to look suspiciously at Tom. (148)

  1. Zooming Out. Once in a while Fitzgerald suddenly zooms out of a scene to consider it as if it were seen by an omniscient observer. When that technique works, I think it’s brilliant, and it’s something I hope to copy. 

“It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to extract a contributory emotion from me.” (22)

“…they came to the door with me and stood side by side in a cheerful square of light. (24)

“Most of the remaining women were now having fights with men said to be their husbands.” (56)

“…her brown hand waved a jaunty salute as she melted into her party at the door.” (57)

“Gatsby, his hands till in his pockets, was reclining against the mantelpiece in a strained counterfeit of perfect ease, even of boredom.” (91)

“Amid the confusion of cups and cakes a certain physical decency established itself.” (92)

“She was appalled by West Egg… by its vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short cut from nothing to nothing.” (114)

[Of Gatsby meeting Daisy’s child:] “Afterward he kept looking at the child with surprise. I don’t think he had ever really believed in its existence before.” (123)

  1. Backstory. Readers hate backstory for good reason. It stops dead the momentum of the story and generally adds little or nothing. I struggle with this. One reason I write backstory is because I want the reader to know and understand my character. But backstory is not the answer. The reader wants to understand the character by watching him/her save the cat, not through recitation of biography. 

Another reason writers use backstory is that it’s shortcut for the difficult work of setting up a cat that needs to be saved.  In TGG, Fitzgerald uses some superfluous backstory that adds nothing and should have been cut (in my humble opinion) or expanded and shown as real-time character development.  Myrtle’s story on Page 40+ for example. Does it help us to know all that?  I say no.

On the other hand, the novel depends on Gatsby’s backstory, particularly the ambiguity of it.  Who is he really?  That’s a central motif and that’s why we get, not one, but multiple backstories on him. 

Gatsby’s story in his own words seems important, even though we are not sure whether to believe him (69+), but at least it reveals what he wants Nick to believe.

A different biography of Gatsby is presented by suddenly-omniscient Nick  on 103-104, which includes the Cody yacht incident. Why does that incident matter?  Does it illuminate the character of Jay, the man?

Another, different backstory on Gatsby is told by Tom who “made a little investigation.” (141).

Yet another tale of Gatsby’s past comes from some blend of Nick and the invisible but ever-lurking third-person omniscient narrator, on pp. 157-58.

Daisy’s backstory (p. 79+), seems particularly important.  Like the way the Paris romance between Rick and Ilsa motivates  Casablanca, the Daisy and Jay early romance is the main event that gives meaning to Gatsby’s actions, so it is necessary to the structure of the story.  

I don’t think I’d ever care to write a story where the main character’s backstory substitutes for his real-time character description, but I do think good characters often live in the past, like Rick and Ilsa, Jay and (less so) Daisy, so my lesson learned is to use backstory only when it is a structural element of the main story.

  1. I saw only a few examples of symbols in TGG, none of them compelling. Ever since the great white whale, I think modern readers may have symbol fatigue. I’m keen on allegory and allusion, but straight-ahead symbols often come over as either clichés or failed attempts that stand out for their obscurity.

Whose are The Eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg?  Are they related to The Hands of Orlac?  Was this just a goofy device to insert humor or was there supposed to be some symbolic suggestion of an omniscient observer? A divine one?  Too much.

What is up with The Valley of Ashes? Garbage separates East and West Egg.  Didn’t we already “get” the difference between the two communities without this obscure symbol?  Was the Wilson garage in the Valley?  Hence Myrtle and her husband were “between two worlds?”   I wonder if we really need a symbol for that rather simple idea.

On pp 58-59, a guest leaving a Gatsby party wrecks his car and a wheel breaks off.

The car was “violently shorn of one wheel…” and horns sounded and “added to the already violent confusion of the scene.” (58. ) Not only that, “there was another man in the car.” (59)

But nobody is hurt and there are no consequences to any of it, and despite the “caterwauling” that had “reached a crescendo” (60), Nick just walks away and the scene ends. The point?

On p 82 Nick notes that “Tom ran into a wagon on the Ventura road one night and ripped a front wheel off his car.”   The wheel-off-the-car thing must be some kind of cryptic symbol, too subtle for me to grasp.

On 97-98, Gatsby throws a pile of shirts on to the bed so Daisy can inspect them, which she does and almost swoons. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such – such beautiful shirts before. ” (98)  the word “shirts” appears five times in as many lines. What is this scene about? What do the shirts symbolize?  Too subtle for me.

I’m sure plentiful ore yet awaits mining in this novel, but there are a few things I learned.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott (1925/1995).The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 189 pp.

Psi Fi Books Site Launched

PsifibooksHeaderFinally, my new site featuring my psi-fi books is up. (www.psifibooks.com).  That’s one brick in place for my nascent publishing empire.

“Psi-fi” is pronounced the same as “sci-fi” but psi-fi focuses on psychological fiction in a technological world.  How is human psychology changing with the advent of AI and other technologies?  More definition of psi-fi is at www.psi-fi.net, where I review sci-fi books and blog on psi-fi topics.  The new site, www.psifibooks.com is strictly for announcing my books as they are published. Right now, I’m getting my ducks in a row with the new site.

Reluctant Android Blurb

I list just one forthcoming title for now, Reluctant Android. It will be the first-published in a group of three or four novels featuring AI androids. These “Newcomers,” as they call themselves, are more than mere machine parts, yet not quite human. They are something in-between, something new.

Andy, the first and most Reluctant Android, is out for final line-editing now, but he’ll be ready to face the public by fall of 2018.

King – Euphoria

euphoria-King book coverYou don’t expect much drama from anthropologists in the jungle, but the members of this trio divide their angst between their simmering and barely acknowledged love triangle and their understanding of pre-industrial river people of New Guinea in the 1930’s.

The story balances those two themes well, with plenty of interesting and well-researched anthropological observations, and lots of tense sideways glances among the mosquito-bitten scientists. In the last quarter of the book a mildly dramatic event erupts and is quickly drawn to a close, a hasty attempt, I believe, to add some story tension before the pages ran out.

Instead of a strong plot, the excellent writing keeps the pages turning. Descriptions of the environment, the native people, and the scientists’ activities are extremely deft: evocative yet economical, like poetry. Alternating first-person narrators include intense yet subtle Virginia Woolfian introspection. For example, Nell, the female of the triangle, writes in her diary about the two men:

“B is intuitive about F’s possessive nature so that I haven’t had to say a word, like last night when we were talking about sex roles in the West and G and I fell perfectly in step and I could sense how much further we could take our thoughts but B rerouted it back to Fen’s Dobu at just the right moment.” (p. 142).

In fact the story opens with B’s account of having tried unsuccessfully to commit suicide by walking into a river with his jacket pockets filled with stones (as Woolf actually did).

The tale is loosely based on Margaret Mead’s life and work with Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson, but unlike many historical novels, it wears its research lightly and never loses sight of the fact that it is a novel, not a biography. It also gives a good portrait of cultural anthropology at a certain moment, before full development of thought about structuralism, colonialism, otherness, and related ideas.

Sense of place and character is palpable in this book. Absence of a compelling plot must be tolerated in literary work. Nevertheless, you close the covers with a clinging impression that you have your own memories of having been there.

King, Lily (204). Euphoria. New York: Grove/Publishers Group West (257 pp).

Kertesz – Fatelessness

Fatelessness book coverThis is the autobiographical story of a holocaust survivor, Hungarian writer and Nobel Prize-winner, Imre Kertesz.  To me, it is reminiscent of Primo Levi and even Victor Frankl.

A boy of fourteen is snatched from Budapest by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz, then Birkenau, and then on to other concentration camps.  His descriptions of the places and of what happened, in calm, reasoned prose, are chilling.

Throughout, the boy maintains his steadfast insistence that the world must make sense. The idea of “fate” is inconceivable (thus the awkward title). That’s the main angle of the account. Nothing like this could happen just because you’re a Jew. That would be arbitrary. There had to be rational reasons for everything.

Throughout his long ordeal, he mentally explains everything away, with adverbs like “naturally,” and “of course.”  The prisoners were starved to skeletons, several dying every day, but “naturally” you had to expect food shortages during a war.

The effect is like the example of a frog being boiled alive as the water temperature rises very slowly. The reader is lulled by the narrator’s calm explanations and yet alarmed by the awful suffering and by awareness the enormity of that historical moment.

When the boy is saved by the allies and returns home, nobody can understand his experience. But the reader can. And for his part, the boy cannot understand why they did nothing about the labor camps, to which they protest that he doesn’t realize that making a living was very tough during those years.

I was quickly drawn into the story by the author’s detailed description of life in Budapest among working-class Jews during the war, and the sense of the adults’ willful blindness to the Nazi extermination program, their insistence that it was merely “difficult times,” and the men would be back soon from the labor camps.  I found it hard to believe that everyone could be so unaware of politics, international relations and history, but that’s how the situation is presented.

During the boy’s concentration camp ordeal, I became impatient with the repetitive scenes of horror.  I am not a frog and not to diminish anyone’s suffering, but  I thought the middle of the novel had pacing issues.  I loved the ending, with the boy a stranger in his own land. Who has not felt that alienation when describing an extraordinary, life-changing experience to others who have never lifted their eyes from their quotidian worries.

The holocaust story needs to be retold often because it is a recurring tale of power, politics, and inhumanity. We can only hope that someday the lesson will be learned. This telling of the drama is artistically worthy of that formidable challenge.

Kertesz, Imre (1975/2004). Fatelessness (previously published as Fateless). (Tim Wilkinson, trans.). New York; Vintage, 262 pp.

Blues Guitar

This book is a good value at under $30 because it is actually three books. The first is for beginners, the second, for “intermediate” students of the blues, and the third for “mastering” blues guitar. I mean, it is literally three books, each by a different author, with three separate tables of contents. There’s enough material to keep anyone busy for a very long time. But for me, it didn’t.

As a rank beginner (one year of experience), I only made it halfway through the first book until I got stalled and had to put it aside. I paged through the entire book to survey what else was going on there.

What happened? Well, maybe I’m a no-talent stupido, but by the fourth chapter I was struggling to understand. There’s a lot of unexplained information thrown up like roadblocks. No beginner’s book should do that. When I say beginner, this book starts by naming the six strings and showing the notes on the frets, and the difference between a whole note and a half note, so we’re talking beginner-beginner.

And yet quite often the book springs a mystery on you, such as in Lesson 48, which shows a TAB diagram but with black dots that are not musical notes spread over five frets and there are 12 of them. Alas, I only have five fingers on my left hand and the thumb is back where it should be, so what am I supposed to do with a TAB showing 12 notes? Even if one of them is a weird notation for a barre, that still leaves six others.  I had to skip that lesson.

And that wasn’t the only stumbling block. In lesson 42 I am instructed to “Use left hand muting on the first of each pair of eighth notes in the following lesson.”  I would have, but some of the chords used open strings. How would that work?

In Lesson 16 there is a well-labeled explanation of scale diagrams, with frets, tones, strings and fingers. Very helpful, except it’s not accurate. On the very next page, Lesson 18 shows a scale with numbers up to 12 right on the TAB lines where you were told to expect finger numbers. Obviously they have to be fret numbers. Finger numbers are absent, and below, where fret numbers are supposed to appear, nothing. So you don’t really know what to expect after that.

In Lesson 40 there is a line drawing of a left hand to show a two-fret stretch between fingers three and four while finger one is on a barre 4 frets away. Cool, except I couldn’t do it, my bad, but the diagram didn’t help by not labeling any of the frets, and the drawing did not show clearly which strings were fretted. By fooling around I found I could get a G7 out of it with a barre on the third fret but what the hell? Why were there no labels?

I realize that if I had a teacher, all would be revealed. But I don’t have a teacher, which is why I bought the book.

I checked out the DVD and found it to be not helpful. There are videos of a guy (only men) playing the lesson exercises, which he calls out by number (no on-screen staff or TABs), and describing what he’s doing, but there is no actual instruction. He doesn’t say things like “Put this finger there, and do this and then that, for these reasons.”  Maybe some people learn better by watching.  It didn’t help me any.

Still, I enjoyed what I did learn, and I’ll probably go back to the book someday when I am no longer a beginner.

The second, intermediate book, has more on rhythm, bending, vibrato, and a nice list of licks, from B.B. King to Joe Bonamassa. And yet, oddly, it starts out with “What is an Interval?” “What is a chord?”  Why would you start with that on page 100, the beginning of the “intermediate level?” The answer is that the three “levels” were just thrown together into one book for marketing purposes. The whole is not greater than the sum of its parts and there’s a lot of redundancy.

The final “master’s” book does start out at a more advanced level, with instruction on shuffles, turnarounds, improvisational techniques, nice fills, and lots of good chord charts. It’s very interesting, but again, not the least integrated with the other two books.

I had hoped that the book + the DVD would substitute for a live teacher. That may have been a foolish idea. This book is a very detailed presentation, but it is not an instruction.

Hamburger, David; Smith, Matt; & Riker, Wayne. (2015). Complete Blues Guitar, Second Edition. Van Nuys, CA: Alfred Music, 312 pp., with DVD and online access code.

https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Blues-Guitar-Method-Online/dp/1470632098/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1526079677&sr=1-1&keywords=hamburger+complete+blues+guitar

Middle Passage – Johnson

The title suggests a historical novel, for the Middle Passage was the sea route used by slavers going from West Africa to the Caribbean. The book does invoke important aspects of the slave trade, life at sea in the 1830’s, and the economics and politics of 19th century America, especially in the black community. There is a Melvillean aura of authenticity about it, especially an opening scene in a New Orleans tavern that could have been taken from Moby Dick.

The story is framed as the transcript of the captain’s log of the Republic, a broken-down slave ship, but that device is thin. First-person narrator Rutherford Calhoun is a freed American slave from Illinois who re-wrote and completed the logbook in his own voice after the ship’s demise because like Ishmael, “I alone am escaped to tell thee.”

The horrors of life on a slave ship are rendered in gag-reflex detail. Cruelty, torture, dismemberment, death (of course), body fluids of every conceivable type but especially of the gastro-intestinal type, seeping wounds, loose teeth, exposed bones, flayed flesh, smashed heads, horrible disease, madness, rats, vermin, rotten food, and cannibalism. Notable by its absence was rape, to count small blessings. The shock value of such scenery diminishes over time although never to zero because Johnson is such a good writer. The epistolary format looks like a polite artifice to help sensitive readers distance themselves from the horrors described.

The descriptions of suffering seem excessive. Not to be overly reductive, but the point is made early on: life on a slave ship was awful for both captives and crew. Okay, got it. Why repeat that theme in a stuck loop? The repetition may illustrate the great wheel of life, from whose cycles of suffering one escapes only by enlightenment.  Johnson’s other writings on Buddhist themes support that reading, as does Calhoun’s character arc.

I could have enjoyed a lot more explicit allegory like that. Buddhist, Hindu and Islamic allusions are faint, indeed. For a moment I wondered if the ship, Republic, represented politics and race relations in the U.S. republic during the years before the civil war, but that analogy is also very thin and wouldn’t support a term paper.  I wanted it to be there. I wanted more depth than ‘just’ the story of a black man on a slave ship – rousing sea tale though it is.

I thoroughly enjoyed Johnson’s erudition and wit. The story is offered playfully, not literally, peppered with philosophical jokes and subtle anachronisms. Postmodern self-reference is a lot of fun. When stunned Calhoun is rescued from sea, near death, he complains that his mental acuity has devolved to appreciation of haecceity but not quiddity, and I had to laugh out loud. An ex-slave become thief become seaman makes an observation like that? But intellectual joking, along with plenty of plain silliness, kept my eyes moving through the scenes of profound suffering.

How can anyone make fun of the horrors of a slave ship? Johnson had to do it, because the horrors are really too awful to contemplate. You would throw the book aside with involuntary repugnance if its tone were as dark as its mood. The goofy, humorous tone makes the horrors tolerable in a way, yet by contrast, even more horrible. The result of that skillful blend is a magnificent artistic achievement.

After I closed the novel I felt it had been a cheesy fairy tale wrapped in a sketchy but gruesomely accurate report on American history, delivered as a self-aware writing exercise. I wished it had been more, but I liked it a lot for what it was.

Johnson, Charles. (1990). Middle Passage. New York: Simon & Schuster, 209 pp.

The God of Small Things – Roy

I know I am in the minority for this much-beloved book. It just didn’t work for me.

Set in India in the 1970’s and beyond, a brother and sister, twins in an affluent family, seek love in life, as we all do. The twins’ mother has a forbidden affair with an untouchable servant who is also a communist. The tryst is discovered to great scandal and the twins are pressured into testifying it was rape. The servant is beaten to death by police. The mother dies alone, crazy, and impoverished, while the twins never get over the emotional scar caused by their lie.

The novel won the Booker Prize in 1997, mainly on the strength of its lush (I would say florid) writing, which is truly poetic, so much so that the fire hose of lyrical description overwhelms the story and all the characters, making the novel into one long slog of interesting, but ultimately pointless exercise of language.

There were so many characters in the extended family, each with multiple names and nicknames, I would have needed a kinship diagram to keep them all straight, which I didn’t, and couldn’t. I realize most people are deeply fascinated by kinship relations but I am not. Family life and its squabbles, to me, are boring as dirt.

Most characters came across as quirky but shallow without well-developed motivation. Love, supposedly the driving force of the story, is merely declared by the narrator. I never had an organic sense of it. Why did the mother have sex with the servant? Lonely, I guess, but is that sufficient motivation to ignore the big, obvious prohibition? I wouldn’t think so, but at the end of the novel the twins even throw the incest taboo to the winds. Middle finger to social mores!

The big dramatic events of the story are few and overwrought. Yes, the caste system is horribly unjust, but socially forbidden love is not really a fresh topic. Since I never was engaged with the characters, the micro-dramas of everyday life that filled the pages, engineered and narrated by the omniscient God of Small Things, did not hold my attention.

I did enjoy passages of vividly rich, sensory detail, of landscape, weather, food, clothing, vehicles and buildings. Good psychological description was hard to come by. Description of body functions and products, from odors to vomit, seemed excessive and were uninteresting to me, but perhaps that’s a cultural bias. In any case, fine description is the strength of the book.

I enjoy prose poetry and read it often, but three hundred pages of over-writing left me feeling this was mainly writing for the sake of writing, to the neglect of compelling story.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle – Wroblewski

Edgar SawtelleThe Story of Edgar Sawtelle is famous for cribbing the plot of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The ‘king’ (Edgar’s father) is murdered by his brother Claude (Claudius) who then beds the father’s wife, Trudy (Gertrude). Edgar is the half-mad prince who accidentally kills ‘Polonius’ (a veterinarian named Papineau).  Edgar later befriends a fellow named Henry (Horatio), and predictably, Edgar’s father appears as a ghost to tell Edgar that he was murdered by Claude.  No Ophelia is ordered to a nunnery, but the ending is true to form, the stage littered with corpses as the curtain falls.

The language of the novel is not Shakespearean, nor is the bard’s wit or insight apparent, nor even is the story development. So a reader is left wondering what the point was of the Hamlet analogy in the first place. It certainly deflates any dramatic tension that might have resided in Wroblewski’s tale. Are plot structures so rare now that they must be imported?

I think the answer is found in the appended interview with the author. After years of working on this, his first novel, without any writing experience, he got stuck and gave it up several times, then finally enrolled in a MFA program, where it became his thesis.  It is indeed a novel that has the smell of MFA on it: writing for the sake of pointless writing.

It’s also a very slow start. I don’t mind a little backstory but when a novel set in the 1970’s begins with the main character’s grandfather in 1919, you know it’s going to be a long slog.

The descriptions of upper Wisconsin were often lovely and you’ll recognize Door County if you’ve ever been there, but how far can that carry a 600-page novel?

Edgar is mute, but otherwise a fully enabled fourteen-year-old. Why mute? What does that add to the story?  Aside from ‘writerly interest,’ it seems to be a device to make Edgar somehow ‘closer’ to the dogs his family raises, trains, and sells. He seems to understand the dog-mind intimately, and we’re supposed to believe that ‘dogs are people too, they just can’t talk.’  The anthropomorphism that saturates the novel supports that reading.

I’ve had dogs, trained a few, not to ‘Sawtelle standards’ but enough to know that while they are remarkably empathic, they do not have human cognition, not by any reach of the imagination.  Nevertheless, in this story, the main dog, Almondine, even has her own chapters with her own POV in which she is revealed to have such thoughts as,

‘She had learned, in her life, that time lived inside you. You are time, you breathe time.’

It’s always nice to know what dogs are thinking, but in this story, if they have fully reflective consciousness and interior language, why make Edgar mute? That device is not needed if the dogs are already musing problems of existential philosophy and we already knew dogs can’t talk. These dogs also learn to read ASL so they can understand Edgar.  They are special dogs, no doubt about it.

Dogs aside, the human characters in the novel march through their assigned Shakespearean roles like wooden puppets.  Claudius murdered the king to assume the throne, of course but why did Claude murder Edgar’s father, a struggling farmer and kennel owner?  No crown to be had there.  A convincing motive is never suggested, not even lust for Edgar’s mother.

Likewise, despite at least three POV chapters from Trudy, I was unable to discern a hint about her feelings for Claude.  As for Edgar himself, is he nuts or not nuts?  That is the question.  He sees ghosts and acts irrationally, but hey, he’s only fourteen and much can be forgiven.  Hamlet pretended to be crazy so he could get the goods on Claudius, and then after a while, it wasn’t clear if he really had gone mad. Edgar has no excuse for emotional behavior other than being an adolescent.

The novel did make me consider, for the umpteenth time, what I think a novel is supposed to be. Are six hundred pages of grammatically correct sentences in a well-worn plot sufficient?  Apparently, yes, but while that low bar seems to satisfy many, it’s insufficient for me. I expect, in a literary novel, to be told a story that leads me to consider what it means to be a human. What does this novel say?  ‘Being a person is not much different from being a dog.’ Fair enough. That could be an interesting answer, but this author, this novel, did not convince me of it.

Wroblewski, David (2008). The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. New York: Ecco/Harper Collins; 566 pp.