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Cuisinart really, really isn't kidding when they warn you not to put their stainless steel cookware on high heat. My old tactic of pouring in some water and waiting for it to come to a boil didn't work because it boiled dry in a few minutes. I just hope I haven't messed it up in some subtle way.
I can only observe the horrible mess that tea spills progressively make of the counter so many times before it occurs to me to put a plate or something under the teapot. Fortunately I have one that I never use for anything.
I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter, Perseus:
This is a reprise of the Gödel part of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, and then an extended riff on the hard-core materialist interpretation of consciousness, in which self-awareness emerges when a system can represent itself. If the self is a strange loop, is there anything sensibly definable as a soul? What's left after I die, if my thoughts and actions in the here and now are all there is?
Instead of the full-on classroom workup that GEB gave the topic of formal incompleteness, this book just describes the process by which Kurt Gödel came up with a way to make self-referential statements in a mathematical system which had been engineered from the ground up to make self-reference impossible. There are several illustrations of the phenomenon of "downward causality", where a higher-level interpretation of a physical system can be interpreted as determining what the system does, even though it's ultimately determined by the laws of physics. You can try to use the laws of physics to determine if a computer chip running a program searching for a counterexample to Fermat's Last Theorem will ever halt, but if you succeed it will be by realizing that the QED that matters is not quantum electrodynamics.
The rest of the book follows through on the implications of the idea that consciousness itself is the result of a "strange loop", where the activity of billions of nerve cells represents an arbitrarily extensible symbolic system that can represent pretty much anything, including the question of what a given arbtrarily extensible symbolic system might do. In Hofstadter's view, consciousness is the inevitable result of a sufficiently versatile system (anything we'd call a computer is quite flexible enough) with enough capacity (nothing we'd call a computer even comes close.)
Later chapters explore the rift between the notion of the self as "its own hallucination" as one dialogue puts it, and the conventional notion of identity. I've spent long enough pondering the subject that I have trouble understanding what the idea of a concrete, unitary, indivisible soul is even supposed to mean, but for anyone who has had better things to occupy their thoughts, Hofstadter goes over it in detail and attempts to explain how the soul is a useful concept, and (for our purposes) a real phenomenon, even if a unique and individual soul doesn't exist.
The Dragons of Babel, Michael Swanwick, Tom Doherty Associates:
This novel is set in the same industrial fantasy world as The Iron Dragon's Daughter, except that the main character Will is only half-mortal and somewhat less utterly doomed. This starts out as a mostly straightforward fantasy, ringing a lot of elements that remind me of Jack Vance's Lyonesse, my most favourite example of the form. Will escapes a nasty magic-technological dragon, this world's equivalent of a fighter-bomber, and then escapes the equivalent of an asteroid strike.
This leads to the next section of the novel, when Will arrives in Babel, in the company of a con artist and a creepy ageless child. There is a bravura spooky interlude with an army of hoboes in the sewers, subway tunnels, and empty basements under the city. Once that session of freakiness runs out of tape, the story takes on a distinct noir atmosphere as Will meets up again with the con man Nat and they embark on the scam of all time, leading right to the throne of the absent king, which rather reminds me of the throne in Swanwick's collaboration with Gardner Dozois, "The City of God".
Oh, and a romance starts up, that's actually crucial to the plot, so I really oughtn't ignore it. Suffice to say that Will takes a liking to an elven woman with a hippogriff and an interest in shiny objects, and one shiny object in particular.
The "asteroid strike" I mentioned is actually a magical battle, and the description conveys the experience of seeing everything you've known getting wiped out in one event. After Will gets properly teamed up with Nat, there's a nice set-piece where they work a game of three-card monte. Towards the end there's a re-enactment of the terrorist attack on the world trade centre that I could have done without, but thankfully it doesn't really matter to the dénouement.
Empowered vol. 1, Adam Warren, Dark Horse:
I first heard of Adam Warren when he did the Dirty Pair re-imaginings that he's still probably best known for. They looked entertaining, but titles like Sim Hell inclined me to believe that they were too extreme for me. A great deal of time passed. Then on Apt. 209 I heard about a series about a superheroine whose skin-tight power armour is always coming to bits. It sounded kind of cheesy. Later mentions elsewhere made it clear that it was by the same guy as did those maniac Dirty Pair graphic novels, and I got interested enough to track it down.
Believe it or not, being an American comics artist whose work was manga-influenced when people were just starting to mispronounce "anime", and drawing a comic that doesn't follow any of the usual manga conventions, actually is kind of a problem for maximum market penetration. I wound up getting this volume at Borders because it never occurred to me to look in the manga section at Lee's (mostly because it's closer to TPB than digest size.)
I haven't seen his anime-inspired comics, so I don't really know if they're different, but Empowered really doesn't look like any manga I'm familiar with. There is no sign of the fine, draftsman-quality inking that I tend to associate with the form. It's all lavishly shaded pencils, I guess is what it is, which would normally put me right off it, except that the main character's coat-of-paint style "hyper-membrane" is always coming to bits.
I guess you could call this soft-core porn, or hard-core if you consider bondage to be super-kinky, but it doesn't seem to be, which is really weird considering the several sex scenes. I guess all the swear words are scrupulously blacked out. And I guess "Emp" is realisitically embarrassed by running around in an outfit that leaves nothing to the imagination, and continually terrified at how it quits working as a super-suit when it gets the least bit damaged. I don't know what kept her going in the superheroing business before meeting the former "Witless Minion" boyfriend, who is frankly a big teddy bear despite his enthusiasm for sniper rifles.
If you believe the exegesis in the chapter breaks, this started out as a bondage series, but Adam Warren could not leave continuity alone. The process of filling the gaps between the inital scenes with Emp gagged and tied to a chair appears to have led, almost by accident, to an exploration of how messed-up the usual conception of female comics superheroes is. It might come across as heavy-handed, if it wasn't funny and really cute.
Mushishi vol. 2, Yuki Urushibara, Random House:
It seems like I've read more than just the one volume before this, which I guess indicates that this is some meaty stuff, or maybe the volumes are just thicker. Anyway, my ham-fisted attempt at characterizing the series this time will be to compare it to Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea stories, except that there's no fair-and-balanced magic like what the wizards of Roke island practice, just the Old Powers. This, anyway, is my impression of the mushi in "The Mountain Sleeps".
In "The Sea of Brushstrokes" the travelling Ginko meets another mushishi who is painstakingly working off a generations-long curse in the form of a crippling ink stain-like birthmark, using it bit by bit to write an immense trove of books. Being written with mushi ink, they're a bit livelier than the usual variety, and they periodically have to be corralled and penned up again. The exchange between the young Tanyū and Ginko at the end of the chapter reminds me of the end of one of Rumiko Takahashi's Mermaid books, except more wistful, since Ginko has to be moving on.
"They That Breathe Ephemeral Life" involves a species of mushi that causes people to live life one day at a time, but in the manner of the R.A. Lafferty story of the same name, in so far as they grow old and die in the evening, and then come back to life in the morning. The bit about how people are unnerved by the prospect of an expanse of linear time reminds me of the speculation about the demise of the cyclic conception of time with the rise of Christianity in Hamlet's Mill, but since no sane person has read that thing why on earth am I mentioning it?
Skipping over "Rain Comes and a Rainbow Is Born", which struck me as an overly-deliberate exercise in parallelism, the last story, "The Veil Spore", is just all-out creepy. An especially nasty mushi takes on human form as the child, and then the children, of a newlywed couple. Since all of these children are the outgrowths of a single fungus under the floorboards, they each know everything the others know, leading to a scene straight out of The Midwich Cuckoos, where one learns to shell chestnuts and suddenly all of them can do it. Ginko would be in dead trouble if the mushi's natural life span wasn't limited, and full well it knows it.
