I finished Bruce Schneier's Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World today. Despite the fact that it's getting a little dated (2000) for a book dealing largely with computer and network security, it was a fun and clear introduction to the fundamentals of topics to which I needed a fun and clear introduction.

I'm much more familiar with basic security concepts and buzzwords — cryptography primitives, entropy, unicity distance, one-way hash functions — for having read the book. Readers get a moderate dose of Alice and Bob, and plenty of funny anecdotes to explain different concepts, like observing from outside the Pentagon a massive spike in late-night pizza deliveries shortly before the United States began bombing Iraq as an example of traffic analysis.

Schneier is very quotable, and there were plenty of gems in this one. Two of my favorites were, "In its defense Microsoft has claimed that it spent 500 people-years to make Windows 2000 reliable. I only reprint this number because it serves to illustrate how inadequate 500 people-years are." and in reference to stupid laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) that try to prohibit reverse engineering, "It's certainly easier to implement bad security and make it illegal for anyone to notice than it is to implement good security."

Secrets and Lies is a very readable book, but I think a few more rounds of editing would have improved it a great deal. Admittedly, being an editor I pretty much always think this, but there are some particular clues in this one. Schneier seems to be a strong proponent of something my music teacher used to always tell me, "make your mistakes in time":

I have never before missed a publication deadline: books, articles, or essays. I pride myself on timelines: A piece of writing is finished when it's due, not when it's done.

The lack of editing shows mainly in the amount of repetition — and I read this book slowly over the course of almost two years, so I'm sure there was quite a bit more than what I noticed. I wouldn't be surprised if he emphasized at least a dozen times that 128-bit keys are big enough for everyone and that with larger than that, the user's passphrase and other attack vectors make larger keys pointless.

There is also an unfortunate amount of self-promotion in the book (and possibly promotion of some friends/colleagues) — at times it reads like a very high-level marketing brochure. But at least Schneier is up front about it:

So, if this book seems a little self-serving, that's why. Both the book and the new company grew from the same epiphany, that expert human detection and response provides the best possible security. The book tracks my thinking in reforming my company, and explains the service that we offer.

You can learn more about us at www.counterpane.com.

I'm not familiar enough with security to know whether he's right or wrong about much of anything, but there were some statements that seem obviously wrong, or at least unclear. For example, in discussing the importance of detection and response, he says, "There's no way to detect the eavesdropping, so no response is possible." Huh? He's talking about encrypted digital communications so things like hearing clicks on the phone or locating bugging devices in a room don't apply here, but even then, there are ways to detect eavesdropping — such as watching out for leaks; people who were not supposed to be a party to the encrypted communication knowing information that was not shared anywhere outside that communication. It's like what police do, when they deliberately don't share certain details about a crime, so that when they interrogate a suspect they can ask questions about those hidden details to know if the suspect was actually present at the scene.

I appreciate Schneier's defense of free and open source software as more likely to be secure, and more consistent with the principles of how science should be done. But I'm also a little disturbed by his eager defense of the idea of warranties being applied to software, so that companies who write programs with security holes that are exploited in the wild can be held accountable. These two positions seem inconsistent to me. When it comes down to it, I'm a terrible programmer, and if I have to be financially liable for damages caused by bugs in my software, well, I'm just not going to share it with anyone. Mandatory warranties would encourage more corporate proprietary software development, and discourage grassroots development.

I'd recommend the book for anyone wanting an overview of the principles that underlie security and insecurity on the internet. It's whet my appetite for reading more about the security systems that I use on a regular basis, primarily public-key encryption. It's even made me wish I knew anything at all about math. I look forward to reading his next book, Beyond Fear.

From Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez (p. 167):

In any case, the German was correct in regard to what he thought about least, which was that Florentino Ariza wrote everything with so much passion that even official documents seemed to be about love. His bills of lading were rhymed no matter how he tried to avoid it, and routine business letters had a lyrical spirit that diminished their authority. His uncle himself came to his office one day with a packet of correspondence that he had not dared put his name to, and gave him his last chance to save his soul.

"If you cannot write a business letter you will pick up the trash on the dock," he said.

Florentino Ariza accepted the challenge. He made a supreme effort to learn the mundane simplicity of mercantile prose, imitating models from notarial files with the same diligence he had once used for popular poets. This was the period when he spent his free time in the Arcade of the Scribes, helping unlettered lovers to write their scented love notes, in order to unburden his heart of all the words of love that he could not use in customs reports. But at the end of six months, no matter how hard he twisted, he could not wring the neck of his diehard swan. So that when Uncle Leo XII reproached him a second time, he admitted defeat, but with a certain haughtiness.

"Love is the only thing that interests me," he said.

"The trouble," his uncle said to him, "is that without river navigation there is no love."

I finally finished One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez tonight; apparently I started it in August of last year. The fact that I took so long to read it means I'll have to go back and read it again someday, as it was very hard to be attentive to the relationship of events happening at the end of the book to what happened at the beginning of the book, since the beginning was so far away.

It was mostly as much of a pleasure to read as it's supposed to be, but I did find it unpleasantly difficult for a while. There are so many characters, and so many characters with the same names, that it is hard to keep track of who is who to who. Couple that with an expectation implied in the text that the reader should be able to retain these details.

I was taking notes for a while, but I can't be expected to keep that up—I already have my degrees. Also, I lost one of the notebooks in a bar. There is a familial relations chart in the front of the book, to give you an idea of the scale we are talking about here.

That kind of complicated, epic fiction is generally not for me. I don't enjoy trying to keep track of so many plot-oriented details while I read. I prefer to focus on the language and happenings within smaller chunks of text.

But Márquez's writing is also dense and beautiful. He wrote it in 18 months while his life was basically collapsing around him, with debt piling up and possessions being sold off to take care of his family's needs. We had a word for this kind of writing in school, but now I can't remember what it is, so I'll just go with “badass”. It was something about writing when your survival depends on it. It's a good thing that this book was a quick success.

I posted one quote the other day; here is another I had in some notes that I did not lose:

They became indignant over the living images that the preposterous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears of affliction had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many felt that they had been the victims of some new and showy gypsy business and they decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings. (223)

My cousin gave me Love in the Time of Cholera as a gift over the holidays, so I'll be starting that sometime soon. But for now I need to finish Copyrights and Copywrongs and Secrets and Lies, and approximately 1,000 back issues of The Nation, and then I think it will be time for some poetry before starting another novel. Reed Bye's Join the Planets or The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan are good candidates for next up. Both are already on my bookshelf, staring at me.

I know I'm late on this story, but Citigroup bought naming rights to the Wang. That's a theater in Boston. I saw Alvin Ailey there.

It happened a while ago, but it didn't hit home until I passed it on a bus route I don't usually take this morning. Granted I hadn't had my coffee yet, but I'm pretty certain that the sign in front of the place now says "CitiWang". Nice going guys.

On the same bus ride, I finished Notes for Echo Lake by Michael Palmer. Unfortunately I have nothing intelligent to say about the poems. I liked them. If there was anything I didn't like about them, it was that there was a little too much about light and senses, like in Notes for Echo Lake 6, "A tree's streaming imitates light. Water gathers light behind the arm. The arm is 'held' there. Water bodies light to divide. Light measures by resemblance."

On the other hand I like, from Notes for Echo Lake 5:

The tree's green explains what a light means, an idea, the bomb or Donald Duck, a box of marbles in a marble box, the amber jewel behind the toad's eyes reminds us that it's night. The interpreter of the text examines the traffic light, coughs and lays the book aside. The dead mayor sits behind his desk, overcome with wonderment.

I'm sure Palmer, being active in the theater, would appreciate CitiWang.

Can I start calling greeting card poems CitiPoems?

I started reading Murakami's collection The Elephant Vanishes yesterday. I've been in the mood for a good book. This doesn't seem to be it, but that's OK.

From, "On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning":

Heaven be praised, they became truly upstanding citizens who knew how to transfer from one subway line to another, who were fully capable of sending a special-delivery letter at the post office.

I finished The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami yesterday. It's a wonderful novel. This is not a new thought; lots of other people have already come to this conclusion (for example, a couple hundred people at MIT last year).

I gave up reading fiction (especially novels) for a while because I was bored with it. Stories regularly bore me. I devote more time to reading poetry because there is more to language than telling stories. I don't like the work of authors who see the point of their craft as the chiseling of a single exclusive storyline from their loaded vocabulary. I inevitably feel like something more valuable is being chipped away. Sometimes I feel like it's me.

These feelings are only stronger when reading books written in the first person, as this one is. Too often the author doesn't actually encounter the story as the narrator might encounter it. Instead it's presented artificially and in the order most convenient for the author. Details have to line up, regardless of perspective. The end result is the constant nagging sensation that the one person narrating the story is really two, one of them with a deadline and a confidence problem.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle has stories, but they are stories told more as we might actually experience or dream them. There are always reasons to doubt reality. The details come through letters, newspaper articles, interactions with computer terminals, thoughts, conversations, observations, memories, dreams. The level to which any of these forms are privileged is itself a function of the narrator's personality and mood. In writing through them Murakami uses appropriately different modes of language. The apparent attention to the shape of the language reminds me why I'm reading a book and not watching a movie. Repetitions of particular objects, people, animals and events throughout the book encourage me to develop my own theories and interpretations. Coincidences are neither necessarily planned nor necessarily unplanned. Flipping through the book now, I see repeated lines that could form threads I may decide to follow next time.

It's not a book that's big on cliffhangers. There aren't many moments of anticipation or acceleration, until near the end, which is double-coupon day for anticipation and acceleration. It's not because everything is suddenly barreling toward resolution. It's more like the Descent of Alette. It's a dream and the rush is palpable, for reasons outside the story.

---

Here are a few tidbits I noticed. They are mainly instances of reaching, and maybe they won't sound that good out of context, but I think they are good examples of taking little chances. Individually they are not profound but as a bundle of sticks they are unbreakable. They are reminders to me to be brave as a writer because it's the quirks that I remember as a reader.

I already posted one bit here, about Ushikawa's clothing.

"I saw lots of men my age, but not one of them wore a Van Halen T-shirt."

"I had no more plans for the afternoon than a migrating bird has collateral assets."

"She looked ready to belt out "Johnny Angel" if you put a mike in her hand."

She dressed far more simply than she made herself up. Practical and businesslike, her outfit had nothing idiosyncratic about it: a white blouse, a green tight skirt, and no accessories to speak of. She had a white patent-leather bag tucked under her arm and wore sharp-pointed white pumps. The shoes were tiny. Their heels thin and sharp as a pencil lead, they looked like a doll's shoes. I almost wanted to congratulate her on having made it this far on them.

The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount are two novellas by Italo Calvino, packaged together as one book. Both novellas incorporate stories we've heard before, told featuring impossible characters.

The titles correspond literally to their novella's main characters. The Nonexistent Knight stars a knight who, inside of his armor, does not exist, though he takes meals and otherwise behaves as if he does. This knight is assigned a squire who behaves as if he does not exist, even though he does. The story is set in a world where these conditions are apparently common. Though we hear only the story featuring Sir Agilulf Emo Bertrandin of the Guildivern and his squire Gurduloo (also known as Omoboo, Martinzoo, etc..), apparently there are others like them.

World conditions were still confused in the era when this took place. It was not rare then to find names and thoughts and forms and institutions that corresponded to nothing in existence. But at the same time the world was polluted with objects and capacities and persons who lacked any name or distinguishing mark. It was a period when the will and determination to exist, to leave a trace, to rub up against all that existed, was not wholly used since there were many who did nothing about it --- from poverty or ignorance or simply from finding things bearable as they were --- and so a certain amount was lost into the void. (33)

The Cloven Viscount features a viscount who has literally been cloven in two. His two halves wander about the world. "Every meeting between two creatures in this world is a mutual rending," says the bitter and evil half, who is continually cleaving in half everything he finds, inflicting his own fate on all the squirrels, trees, etc.

There's plenty that's familiar in these stories --- the knight has to quest to prove his worth, the poor peasants are constantly terrorized by their evil ruler --- but the main characters are utterly unbelievable. Armor cannot walk around with nothing inside it (despite the persuasiveness of the simple statement, "for in times when armor was necessary even for a man who existed, how much more was it for one who didn't"), and a man chopped in half lengthwise cannot continue to hop around and rule a kingdom.

But the unfamiliar runs in both directions from expectations. Knights are supposed to be off slaying dragons and having magical adventures, but the nonexistent knight and his fellows fight in silly, prearranged wars where extensive paperwork must be completed to arrange a duel with a member of the other army. Their primary duties consist of things like inspecting the kitchen. Outside of the biological independence of the viscount's two halves, there is nothing fantastic about his kingdom either.

The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount are two great stories. You'll laugh with the lepers (did I mention there's a leper colony?) and cry with all God's cloven creatures. If you don't understand the insults being hurled at each other by the opposing armies, don't worry --- translators are provided. Just lay back, let your disbelief nap in the hammock, and enjoy these twists on the traditional tales of sword and sorcery.

When I think of amnesia fiction, I think of movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Memento, and books by W. G. Sebald and Laird Hunt. The amnesia themes range from those that feature total forgetting to those that feature some kind of partial forgetting or just general forgetful untrustworthiness on the part of the narrator --- where the reader may, for example, actually recognize things that the narrator has forgotten.

Gun, with Occasional Music is a ridiculous book. Who can read about a fistfight between a kangaroo and a private investigator and not be a little perplexed? Not to mention the bar full of overgrown babies with big heads, in more ways than one.

The characters in the book take drugs. They take drugs largely in order to forget things. So, like in Eternal Sunshine, erasing memories is a service of which people happily avail themselves. A more apt comparison is to the characters in Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, who take take drugs in order to enhance their ability to play with dolls, and to escape the inhospitableness of their space colony environment.

Fans of The Big Lebowski, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and all of the many other plays on detective fiction --- I'd even throw in The Impossibly --- should check this one out as well. They way the plot is driven is closest to Lebowski. The detective kind of stumbles around through the various mysteries he takes on, and the book culminates in a nice, "She kidnapped herself, Dude!" kind of moment.

Lethem's quirky one-liners and outrageous metaphor (ala Tom Robbins) provide an independent source of entertainment.

He reached into his jacket and a little black gun appeared in his paw. He held it casually, the way you hold a candy bar or a cake of soap. Only this gun wasn't going to make anyone clean.

So bad it's good, you know? How about this one, regarding withdrawal from the aforementioned drugs.

I could feel my bloodstream panhandling my fat reserves for whatever last traces of the vital addictol they had stored away, and I could feel my fat cells turning out their pockets and saying sorry pal, there's nothing left.

One more, for the road.

What's more, there was rain in my collar and I needed a sandwich. The clouds were still bunched up in the sky like a gang on a street corner, and it looked to me like they had the sun pretty effectively intimidated.

In keeping with a primary theme, I've already forgotten the plot. It's complicated, with "a lot of ins, a lot of outs". You don't really have to keep track to enjoy the book. It's the descriptive riffs and the dialog that make this a worthwhile read.

I have read the first section of this book, which includes the six "Russian Letter" poems, enough times that the pages are falling out of the book. Fortunately, some of them are online, so after the pages fall out on the train and blow away, I will still be able to study them.

It might be that if I did not already trust him as a poet, I would not proceed after dramatic lines like, in Russian Letter, "It is said, the past // sticks to the present // like glue, // that we are flies //". But I do and I did, and the rewards are many, because his directions are not limited by the philosophical ramblings to which most might let those elegant yet angsty lines drag them. Instead, he takes them to art, and he takes art and its color to its thing, and context is again everything:

Nor am I Rembrandt,
master of the black

and green darkness,
the hawk's plumes

as it shrieks
down from the sky

Robert Creeley says on the back of the book,

'Swift perception of the relation between things is the hallmark of genius,' said Aristotle --- or so Pound remarked. In these singular poems, that relation becomes a complexly articulate play between all such things and the names our common habit gives them.

Yes. I feel better ignoring John Ruskin, who says, "He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas." Yau is fortunately not too worried about tackling the greatest ideas directly.

I read Russian Letter(3) as addressing this directly:

Dear Painter of Clouds
What proof will there be

after the shopkeeper
sweeps our dust into the gutter

And yet these moments are not
anyone's banner, not something

to be waved in the wind

It's hard to stop quoting. As with other successful practitioners of sparseness, chopping pieces into bits makes a mess of things. Yau's "Painter of Clouds" could be Gary Snyder's Air Poet in "As for Poets" before reading "Why I am Not a Painter".

There is a wide variety of styles in this book. People who have not read much of Yau would be hard-pressed to identify any of the above poems and "Boris Karloff in 'The Mummy Meets Dr. Fu Manchu'" as being penned by the same hand, not to mention the series of Mac Low-like sestinas.

The variety of styles and techniques used brings the craft and method to the foreground. Some of this poetry will likely frustrate those who seek to get some sense of the poet as person peeking through the lines, but for readers interested in the further possibilities of the art, that frustration will be a source of interest and entertainment.

From "A Flock of Fools: Ancient Buddhist Tales of Wisdom and Laughter from the One Hundred Parable Sutra", translated and retold by Kazuaki Tanahashi and Peter Levitt

ASKING FOR NOTHING A long time ago, two men were traveling together on the open road. They came upon a man who was trying to pull a cart filled with sesame seeds up a steep hill, but the poor man wasn't able to budge the cart even one inch. When the man saw the travelers, he called, "Help! Give me a hand pushing this cart up the hill." But before either of the travelers would move a muscle, they demanded, "What will you give us if we help?" The man with the cart replied, "I will give you nothing."

So the two men bent their shoulders to the task and helped push the cart to the top of the hill where it could stand on level ground. After catching their breath, the two men said, "Now give us what is ours, " but, of course, the man replied, "I promised to give you nothing, and that is what I have to give."

Hearing this, one of the travelers said, "Well, come on, then, give us our nothing."

The other traveler smiled at his companions and said, "He hasn't agreed to give us anything. Why are you complaining?"

The other man stood his ground and answered, "Because I want my nothing, that's why. There must be something called nothing."

At this the other man just laughed. Then he said, "Nothing is just two words together to make another word. No more than that."

Those with little understanding become attached to the idea of emptiness and, as a result, they mistake the true meaning of the statement that "nothing exists." A wise person knows that emptiness means there is no separate self, no seeking, and no attachment. The difference in understanding between these two kinds of people is vast indeed.

It is not the objects, not the objects at all. It is not the words either, although often they are lovely and the contrasts are surprising when you have one in your head shaped like a rectangle and then you have another in your head shaped like a square, for example. That is lovely, as is the sound of your voice saying them, when you say them, but it is not the fact of the objects or the fact of the words, really, it is the fact of establishing the correct establishments on which to place them, that is all.

Each uncombined expression can mean one of these, she said, i.e., what, how large, what kind, related to what, where, when, how placed, in what state, acting, or suffering. See? For example, a woman may be five-foot six and a writer, a student of philosophy at her desk at midnight, sitting down and writing, and suffering from the cold.

Substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action, and affection, she said.

--- from The Impossibly, by Laird Hunt, p. 36.