corporate entertainment: Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing

SOME REMARKS is a hardback collection of short pieces by Neal Stephenson. Join me and raise your hand if you forgot that Stephenson could write short!

Most of the celebrated novelist?s output are issued first in editions thicker than my arm. Sometimes, I think the length is justified, as with CRYPTONOMICON; occasionally, I think he could benefit from a little pruning, as with QUICKSILVER; and other times, I?m aggravated at the tangential padding that I flat out give up, as with ANATHEM.

Thus, this collection arrives as comparative relief.

Readers will find musing on the films 300 (and its geek audience?s nonchalance toward its political leanings) and STAR WARS (and the franchise?s transformation from simple to senselessness).

They?ll find reprinted interviews with sites Slashdot (taking random questions from visitors, some downright loony) and Salon (about the Baroque Cycle specifically).

They?ll find a really lengthy piece from WIRED magazine that?s roughly a third of the 336-page book, and a three-page article from TIME on ANATHEM that is in desperate needs of context.

So, too, does the foreword to EVERYTHING AND MORE. Wait, what is EVERYTHING AND MORE? Turns out it?s a book on the concept of infinity that David Foster Wallace published in 2003, but nowhere is this mentioned. I had to Google it.

So, too, does his lecture at Gresham College. Among other things, it?s about genres in literature and film, which made me wonder what that has to do with inspiring that year?s crop of graduates. Another trip to the Google machine later, I learn that Gresham is a London spot for free public lectures.

Those kind of things should be pointed out. It?s possible his die-hard, hardcore readers won?t require such explanations. And it?s for them I can recommend SOME REMARKS. It?s even likelier they need no review to tell them that.

In his introduction, Stephenson admits short fiction is not his strong point, and he may be correct. None of the three stories here gripped me, and that includes the ?new? one which runs all of one sentence long. It?s a rare time where I wanted to see more words from the man. ?Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.