davidfan.net

Category: Literature

  • Villiam’s Lapvona

    Lapvona was an entertaining read.

    Lapvona is a medieval village with rich dynamics. I’d even go so far as to say that the setting is a character in the story. This is illustrated through the actions of a lord and his priest. Yet the main character in the story is a deformed boy named Marek.

    Villiam, lord of Lapvona, and Father Barnabas, the priest, rule over the serfs. There isn’t anything that makes Villiam a natural ruler in his appearance. The rule of his family goes back several generations. Villiam is defined by his greed; a body that consumes many times over a normal person. How does Villiam stay in power? He is completely amoral. He employs bandits to steal harvests, kill. This happens a lot in Lapvona. The serfs only see a powerful lord. They listen to Father Barnabas.

    Why don’t the serfs rise up against Villiam? Villiam is able to defend himself. To the North is a strong military power. The Northerners are natural guards, tall and strong, yet subservient. Villiam employs them. Villiam is married to Dibra, a Northerner. It is a political marriage. Lapvonians are producers, they cultivate land, animals. Lapvona is a land of good soil. Northerners are muscle. There is trade.

    The bandits are not developed quite as much as a people, but they are significant to Villiam’s line. Marek is the bastard of incestuous bandits and through a bizarre set of circumstances he becomes Villiam’s adopted son. I suspect abnormal family lines, secret children, drive other medieval or village narratives. I’ve read and seen other stories with unclear paternity in different village contexts. Sometimes it’s just a phrase or a suggestion of paternity. Other times it is the crux of the whole story. In Lapvona, paternity seems less important to the story. Villiam is more interested in having a line as a kind of possession, blood or not. In his house, he sees people more as playthings: a son is a role in a skit. A kind of seriousness about family lines is completely lacking in Villiam.

    Just to clarify, children and animals, like baby lambs, are important to the story. There are patterns of care and neglect, and these are often shocking and barbarous to a modern sensibility. More normal characters are concerned about their kin, continuing a family line, like Jude, a shepherd.

    Long ago, Jude loves Agata, but she is already pregnant and she bears a deformed son, Marek. Jude takes Marek as his adoptive son, but he resents him. Later, Marek becomes Villiam’s son.

    Again through some rather bizarre circumstances, Jude becomes a father, but he is unable to be a normal father. It is about a decade since Jude and Agata were together and the baby is Agata’s and Jude’s this time around. Yet since Agata was a nun that fled to Villiam’s residence (and on the way is raped by Jude whose hut lies below the manor), Villiam claims that it is a divine birth in order to create religious tourism.

    From this event also, like random raids from bandits discussed earlier, we see that secrecy and credulity are glue keeping the narrative of Lapvona together.

  • Tell the Machine Goodnight

    Tell the Machine Goodnight by Katie Williams is about a device that gives accurate recommendations to obtain happiness. The device, called Apricity, creates some unusual scenarios.

    Although Apricity does what it is marketed to do, it is not a complete solution. First, users must follow these recommendations. Apricity is a black box, so users are not able to understand why these recommendations are made. Following recommendations is a leap of faith. The average user needs to apply the recommendations and sense within themselves any changes.

    Yet, many people question the premise of Apricity, its benefits. Some believe that taking advice from a machine is a fool’s errand. Others believe change is not possible in themselves.

    Apricity is also expensive. The Apricity Corporation has a monopoly: The procedure is expensive, but the procedure itself is not costly.

    In our current society, we are faced with many pieces of advice that promote happiness, yet they are not followed, for example:

    • Do not use your phone in bed.
    • Smile (as in smiling makes you happy)
    • Eat well
    • Exercise

    Williams gives an interesting example of this phenomenon. A manager of the Apricity Corporation has taken his Apricity reading multiple times. It is always the same and he never follows the advice. He rejects advice because as a self-identified self-made man, the act of rejection makes him feel powerful. Thus, for him, power is a stronger reason than happiness.

  • The Memory Police

    The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa is about people living under a dictatorship called the Memory Police whose goal is to rid the world of unnecessary things.

    The Memory Police are able to reach into people’s hearts and take away memories of objects. These objects are then destroyed and the people do not care because those objects do not have meaning. These events are called disappearances.

    Each disappearance is a total shift in society. If a person’s livelihood is disappeared, they have something left that remains useful to society.

    The Memory Police do not face strong resistance as their disappearances begin with specialized professions and luxury objects.

    At the time of a disappearance is a sense of loss generally, but also a natural acceptance as if the changes in society are normal or habitual.

  • Decoded, Mai Jia: Allegories of Genius

    One of the chief difficulties of writing a book about mathematical genius is that the average person views mathematics as calculation or opaque. (Aside: calculation has lost its luster since the advent of the pocket calculator.) After a certain point, in Decoded there is no longer any detail about mathematics. The reason is probably that it is classified, but also that the writer could not probably do it justice or if he tried he would just confuse his audience, although some of us would like to understand the cryptography referenced. Maybe his approach here is the reproduction of a conversational technique that people dealing with difficult matters adopt: he is reporting only what his interviewees can report to him, a non-expert.

    A lot of wild cardinal rules are made about cryptography that seem ridiculous on the face. For example, that a person is either a decoder or encoder. Or that once a person makes a cipher he is used up as a cipher is characteristic and must be unique. All of this is fascinating. The idea behind this might be that the nature of a task, not merely the native abilities of the practitioner, is what determines the result. Once one door is open another is shut.

    Perhaps, making statements of impossibility is mostly a literary device in order to make the character of Rong Jinzhen, a practitioner of two worlds, unbelievable or one-of-a-kind.

    There are many such allegories in the book and other devices used to indicate his genius. Here is his evolution of problem solving at different stages of life:

    • Spelunking into a cave without proper light
    • Performing tasks in darkness
    • Constructing a dark room yet not finding ones way out

    Danger, traps. But due to his daring, he is recognized as a genius.