Mountebank Blog

I’ve been a fan of Ricky Jay since I saw him perform in San Diego when I was a kid. He was on tour throwing cards (and other magic and sleight of hand) when his book Cards as Weapons was published. Of course I bought a copy of that book, which of course is now gone, and of course the book now goes for about $200 if you can find a copy! Of course, I have his other books.

I didn’t get to see his recent Town Hall one-man show (damn!), but I’ve been catching him in the movies and on Deadwood, where he’s just about perfect.

Now I find through his website (thanks to BoingBoing for the link!) that he has a radio show in LA, and it’s available online. I’m going to try to put it on my Palm!

About a month ago I finished up Peter Hamilton’s enormous “Night’s Dawn” trilogy (The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist and The Naked God). Enormous is certainly accurate–but it’s also, in this case, wonderful. He creates an entire, coherent, universe–a future history–with confidence and talent that I haven’t seen in a long time. This is space opera as it should be, on the grandest scale, but with real characters and believable technology. Just excellent, and long enough to really sink my teeth and mind into. And, luckily, I bought all three two-volume works at the same time, and bought them in e-book format, so on my little Tungsten T I could read them comfortably on the train, plane or in bed. I was sorry, actually, that it all had to end, even after thousands and thousands of pages.

Now I’ve discovered that he’s started a new trilogy (maybe not quite so long, this time) and I’m ecstatically starting out on Pandora’s Star. It’s just as good, but here’s the problem…it’s only the first book, and the next isn’t due out until next year! That’s a long time to wait, and from reading the first trilogy, I can really see that none of the single volumes provide any kind of ending at all. So I’m going to finish this and then have a long, long, wait…

It’s going to be a repeat of the George R.R. Martin “Song of Fire and Ice” fiasco…still waiting for A Feast for Crows, George! Just about the only fantasy I’ve liked in such a long time…and months and months go by without that promised next installment. Amazon is now promising June 24…but do I believe it? Does anybody? I should hope not!

Well, maybe I’m the last person to read it–it’s been on my list for a long time–but I finally finished James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews. I was expecting perceptive analysis and a comprehensive historical survey of the subject. But what I wasn’t expecting, and was very happy to get, was such a powerful personal narrative. Carroll’s voice and humanity let him tie together the narrative and invest it with a real urgency–a need for change in his own faith and in the world at large.

His repeated visits to core symbols and motifs (the German town of Trier, the cross at Auschwitz, Marx and Constantine, the seamless robe) get rediscovered with a kind of synchronicity that could have seemed contrived–but which never crosses that line.

I was unfamiliar with a lot of the history, so I learned a lot from that, but what I most enjoyed learning was the connection to the faith and caring of James Carroll.

I would have liked to see more exploration of “the Church and the Jews” in America, rather than exclusively Europe. I think there’s certainly a story to be told there in the later parts of Carroll’s historical analysis, but he kept his focus strictly European. I also felt that, at the end, when he presents his agenda for a Vatican III, the proposals seemed completely unrealistic (although absolutely valuable and required if the kind of transformation he’s proposing is ever going to happen). I just can’t imagine that re-envisioning the New Testament, the structure of power in the Catholic church, and a complete revision of the emphasis on Jesus’ death which has been so central to Christianity is even distantly possible in my lifetime.

Overall, though, I’m thoroughly impressed. I’m glad I finally got a chance to read this–and I know that I’ll be referring to it again.

I watched a truly terrifying Frontline report, The Jesus Factor, the other night.

We have a president (and most Americans still say they would vote to reelect him), who absolutely does not agree with the idea of America as a secular democracy. It’s not just that some of his policies threaten the separation of Church and State–he doesn’t, in his heart, believe that the separation of Church and State is a good idea.

He sees this as a Christian country, and his mission as a God-given Christian mission.

But perhaps the most terrifying statistic was that 40% of Americans identify themselves as “evangelical” or “born again,” and that, as Bush proved, it’s possible to be elected president with the fundamentalist Christian vote…and nothing else.

How close is theocracy? Closer than I want to imagine.

Frontline, as usual, provides an excellent web resource, too–with tons of great additional information, and the opportunity to watch the whole show online.

Cory Doctorow has an interesting piece about the Spanish translation of his (excellent) talk, “Ebooks: Neither E nor Books.” That led me to read the talk (which I liked very much, and will read again), and then to this great chart (funny) of the “geek hierarchy.” It’s a wonderful idea–and rings all too true. It seems the original credit for the chart should go to The Brunching Shuttlecocks (although they’ve “moved on”).