In Pursuit of Mysteries

Remodeling and House Work

This is a boring homeowner post. Be warned!

R and I have some money right now that we’re wanting to do useful things with, investment-wise. Our home has, at a guess, lost 10% in value since we bought it a year and a half ago.

While I still have the rebuilding of our brick porch to consider (yowza!), I’ve thought about having our bathroom or kitchen remodeled/redone. Both were partially done by previous owners, who did a kind of craptastic job with parts of it. For example, the tile floors are cracked in places because the subflooring had more flex than the large tiles could accommodate.

Then there is the back room, which is a separate addition off of the back deck. It is where the washer and dryer live but most of the space is used as a meditation/ritual space. The flooring is nasty, cheap vinyl (with a rug over it right now) and the subflooring isn’t the greatest. Since one of the main crawlspace access points is underneath the room, I’ve seen it from below often enough.

So, it wouldn’t hurt to invest some money into redoing or improving parts of the house. I have two general questions though, and they are both Bay Area related:

1) Where does one find reliable people to work on these things in the area? - As we all know, contractors are a dime a dozen but, as we learned with our old house, they often mostly suck. I’d like to find some reliable in the East Bay to do work for me on this stuff, like a kitchen remodel.

2) What are ecologically sound resources for this work? - There is an “EcoHome” place nearby that focused on ecological building materials. Before I had any work done, I’d want to talk to these people.

In the short term, I think I’d like to see our kitchen redone to be actually nice and the floor and walls ripped up in the back room and replaced with a nice wood floor, clean walls, etc. and a real partition for the laundry machines so they aren’t simply behind the curtain that we put up.

We also have two tiny windows (roughly two feet by two feet) on either side of our fireplace in the living room. We’ve thought of having these replaced with nice glasswork or something but we have no idea of where to find people for that sort of work.

Any thoughts or suggestions from people?

Neal Stephenson’s Anathem and Music

My advanced reader’s copy of Neal Stephenson’s new novel, “Anathem,” arrived this afternoon. I was selected on LibraryThing to receive it in order to do a review of it on my blog and on that site. LibraryThing makes ARCs available all the time but this was the first time I’ve been selected to receive a book through their unknown process (probably looking at our libraries and seeing how well they match). Since Stephenson has been a favorite author of mine since I met him in Seattle when Snowcrash came out, this is quite a treat.

Anathem is a hefty tome, I must say. It is 935 pages long, in true Mt. Stephenson fashion. The man must be paid by the word! Many have said this before (including me). I expect that I’ll enjoy every minute of reading it though.

According to leaked information (from the catalog), the synopsis of the novel is:

Since childhood, Raz has lived behind the walls of a 3,400-year-old monastery, a sanctuary for scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians—sealed off from the illiterate, irrational, unpredictable “saecular” world that is plagued by recurring cycles of booms and busts, world wars and climate change. Until the day that a higher power, driven by fear, decides that only these cloistered scholars have the abilities to avert an impending catastrophe. And, one by one, Raz and his cohorts are summoned forth without warning into the Unknown.

Neither Amazon, Harper Collins’ own site, nor the back of the book confirm or deny this but it would seem to be true based on information below. This Livejournal entry by Gretta Cook from last September contains some information from when she met him as well. Concerning the book, it states:

“He’s writing a science fiction novel unrelated to Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle. It’s set on another planet and has aliens and so on. It’s really about Platonic mathematics, but he needed the aliens and space opera-ish elements to spice it up a little bit, just like the pirates kept people engaged in the Baroque books.”

The book came with a CD of music, which I must say was surprising. It says it is “IOLET: Music from the World of Anathem.” There are seven tracks:

1. Aproximating Pi
2. Thousander Chant
3. Proof Using Finite Projective Geometry
4. Cellular Automata
5. Quantum Spin Network
6. Sixteen Color Prime Generating Automation
7. Deriving the Quadratic Equation

Each of these is between four and eleven and a half minutes long. There is a note with it stating that “In order to conform to the practices of the avout, this disc contains music composed for and performed by voices alone.”

I’ve just listened to several of the songs on this CD and, frankly, this is some weird shit. I say this without reservation. The musical styles are all over the map except that they all only use human voices (and occasionally hands). Some of it is similar to Western, Christian, styles of chanting. Other tracks are more Classical vocal arrangements with singing. The rest of the tracks seem to be heavily influenced by Eastern, Buddhist, styles of chanting, especially Tibetan Buddhism with its use of harmonics and overlaying voices. It varies quite a bit from song to song. Additionally, when there are recognizable words, they are not in English (nor in any language that I recognize). “Celluar Automata” is the weirdest track of this sort with multiple voices weaving in and out, along with some clapping and exclamations in an unknown language. “Thousander Chant” would be at home on some of the collections of Tibetan chanting that I have and whoever is performing it is obviously trained in the throat chanting used by Tibetans and others in Asia.

I think the song titles, at least, gives a partial sense of the thrust of the book and the monastic order within it.

Update: I did notice that the book, at the very beginning, defines the term “Anathem” as:

Anathem: (I) In Proto-Orth, a poetic or musical invocation of Our Mother Hylaea, which since the tme of Adrakhones has been the climax of the daily liturgy (hence the Fluccish word Anthem meaning a song of great emotional resonance, esp. one that inspires listeners to sing along). Note: this sense is archaic, and used only in a ritual context where it is unlikely to be confused with the much more commonly used sense 2. (2) In New Orth, an aut by which an incorrigible fraa or suur is ejected from the math and his or her work sequestered (hence the Fluccish word Anathema meaning intolerable statements or ideas). See Throw-back.

- The Dictionary, 4th edition, A.R. 3000

I would guess, given that this is the title of the book, that the music is included because of the word’s (and probably those of the themes of the book) relationship to song and also to mathematics both. After all, the book is mentioned above as being about “…3,400-year-old monastery, a sanctuary for scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians—sealed off from the illiterate, irrational, unpredictable ’saecular’ world…” I’ll know more once I read the entire tome.

Vegetarianism

A bunch of people know that I have been eating (or trying to, at least) less meat for a while. I did this as a general move towards becoming a vegetarian. This last week, I realized that I wasn’t really moving quickly in that direction and it felt a bit hypocritical, given my intentions. Because of this, I simply decided to do it and be a vegetarian. We will see how much I may wind up regretting this decision later. :-)

I’m not a vegan, before people ask. At this moment, I will happily exploit the labor of bees, for example, by eating their sweet bee vomit. I’ll also happily steal milk from cows and eat unfertilized chicken eggs. Ideally, these would all be from free ranging versions of these creatures (but I’m not sure that the bees care much). I don’t buy into the near-Marxist idea that not only should I not eat the flesh of my animal brethren but that I should not exploit their labor as well. I do recognize the conditions of the factory farms and the suffering that they cause and that is to be kept in mind.

I am doing this largely for a couple of reasons. I’d like to say that the first is my sense of ethics but what really pushed it over the edge for me is health and sustainability (the latter of which relates to ethics as well). Just about every male member of my dad’s family over the age of 45 or 46 has had a heart attack. Now, these are Wyoming working folks who eat a lot on the grease end of the food spectrum but…damn. My dad was the exception but he had angioplasty, which is related to the same problem. While he was dying from liver failure for a while, what killed him was a heart attack in the end. A vegetarian diet is, realistically, a healthier option for me, especially the absence of red meat, bacon and other things which I love but who long for my death. I don’t smoke and I only have an occasional beer socially so my main lifestyle issues are too much coffee and eating badly, which leads to my weight problem. I’m beginning to exercise more and I’m changing my diet. I think people can see where this goes…

Realistically, the amount of food we use to feed cattle and pigs is just unconscionable for me in the long run. That food should be used for other things, like humans, rather than for giving Americans our “meat with every meal” diet. This is part of proper sustainability in the future, I believe.

Along with all of this is the fact that, frankly, I’m a Buddhist. I’ve taken a vow to not kill, along with others. While it is culturally accepted in the West for Buddhists to often eat meat and this is also the case in places like Japan and Tibet, I do feel that this should be lessened or even ended as part of the vows that I have taken. I have felt a certain cognitive dissonance over time between the vows and culturally accepted practices within Buddhism. (By some measures, I shouldn’t even drink the occasional beer either but this isn’t the ten commandments but are, instead, choices that was consciously make for positive reasons, to promote life or clear-headedness, for example.) I feel that my being a vegetarian will bring me better in line with my spiritual and ethical beliefs.

Now, my friends need not worry. I’ll neither become the “angry vegan” that we all know and love nor the “preaching vegetarian.” If you wish to eat things, have at it. Any preaching in this regard will only be through example or in conversations where people ask about it. Few people like being told how they should leave (even when they may secretly and guiltily agree in their hearts). Let’s face it, we’re all hypocrites in so many ways, it makes no sense to lecture people about their conduct unless you’re staging an intervention or you are asked for your opinion.

I figured it was worth mentioning all of this on a few levels. I doubt it will come up much unless you eat with me or unless I find aspects of it difficult. I know I wasn’t 100% clear with my wife on all of this so she was surprised by the decision (which is not good when she cooks most of our dinners). I figured that no one else should be surprised either and, perhaps, others may feel inspired to eventually do the same thing.