If the book has Phineas as its object, its subject is Gene. Gene is everyman, but not nearly so generic. Gene is the kind of man that can look at a Phineas and love him, but in the way that one loves a life that he can’t replicate – perhaps always a jealous, hungry kind of love. It’s a book about the perils of friendship. Phineas is the saint. He lives what, to characters like Gene, is the unlivable life. Except, Phineas lives it. Every moment of it, he lives. Every moment, his life is the impossible but actual and present that one cannot help but hold in amazement. And amazement so often precludes genuine love, the kind of love that needs a thing to continue to exist more than it needs the world to make sense.

The author will wound you, if you have ever loved like this. But like one of the characters in the books learns, or should learn – it’s hard to be sure if he ever got it – it’s better to be wounded, if it means having the truth out, than to live a blissful, mad life of selective honesty. It’s a book that seethes with honesty. If you’re a person who seethes with guile, you won’t like this novel, not unless you intend to change. And self-delusion, that’s guile too, even if you’re getting away with it.

Available from Amazon.

This is also, as a whole, one of the books I love. I don’t say “I love this book”; everyone says that, of course, about books they enjoyed, the way they say it of a confection they have just finished. But that’s not what I mean, and this book is not merely this month’s confection. I love some stories, whether film or books, the way a man loves a woman, and yes I know what that is. This is one of those books. There are some really painful things in here. But it’s like having a friend and the friendship being busted up into a pile of debris – I think, along with a lot of readers who don’t need happy endings as much as we do a sense of life, that something goes on – that more than closure, we get persistence, that the friendship, like the book,  is worth it. Friendship is so rare and precious, that even if it’s like a pile of broken glass, I want it, all of it – shards and all. I want books like this in that same way.

This is also one of those books I think you can read after you’ve watched the film, with it not being spoiled. Not because the film story – Low Men – doesn’t end the same way, but because the richness the author creates in the text embellishes the film experience in such a way that, if you’re capable of experiencing art this way, lets you sort of live the film differently in the past. It lets you time travel, rather than feeling like you’re re-watching the same film. At least that’s how I experience a lot of books, including this one. But I think you have to love a story, really love it, in the unspoken place of the heart, or you don’t get that.

Some people have been deprived of such an experience, as I had been for a number of years growing up, and think of the “heart” as a Hallmark card sentiment or Disney movie “message”. The heart doesn’t exist, or we can’t know what it is – it’s make believe. I know you – I was once one of you. All I can tell you is that they took it from you, took it from you when you were young, and you can get it back again. And it’s nothing like Disney or Hallmark – it’s nothing like when they say a movie “will touch your heart”. That still makes me want to vomit. But there is a heart, and it is an organ of the soul, given the metaphorical name of the beating organ that pumps your blood, and even connected to it, overlapping it, if you prefer, and connected to your will and your mind, which overlaps your brain and the rest of your body.

I don’t mean to condescend and say, “if you don’t like this book, you’re not enlightened, you have an impoverished soul, you have no heart”. All hearts are unique. I’m just saying that, this book operates in my heart, and the title doesn’t reflect saccharine sentimentality, but a kind of connection that’s possible with others, real or imagined, who also have hearts, even if some of them aren’t tromping around the world we consider visible, flattening the same turf. Take that how you like. Anyway, I like this book.

Available from Amazon.

But if you upgrade to Windows 7, you may run into a number of permissions issues that you’re not used to in previous editions of Windows: “access denied”, needing “administrator rights”, etc. It’ll seem crazy at first – you’re logged in as you, there’s only one you, and you’re not allowed to copy, delete, or modify your own files.

There seems to be a lot of confusion in all the tutorials and forums I’ve looked at on fixing this. I usually only share tech tips when searching the forums yields no acceptable solution. I had to create my own method, and it works for me. So here’s what I did:

0. Activate the administrator account, but don’t use it as your main account – keep using the user you created during install. Windows 7 picks up a security feature from Linux of keeping the Administrator account for serious maintenance. Your main user that you created during installation is an administrator too, but just with a more limited subset of admin privileges. The actual Administrator account in Windows 7 is the superuser, and should only be used for doing serious things like partitioning drives. [instructions]

1. For any files you’re getting messages about copying, select all files on the drive, right click, and make sure Read-Only is unchecked.

2. Test each drive/partition by right clicking in it and selecting New > Text Document. If all you can create is a folder, not a text document, then proceed with steps below. If you *can* create a text document on the drive, then make sure you can edit and save the document without permissions issues.

3. If you created new drives/partitions, and they are *empty*, then format them in Windows 7 (right click and format), *before* putting your files on them.

4. If you’ve already stored files on them, or they are not new drives/partitions, and you cannot create a text document on them, right click the drive, go to Security > Edit and eliminate “Everyone” and “CREATOR OWNER”, then click “Add” and put in Authenticated Users (under Enter the object names to select). Click Check Names to be sure you got it right. Then OK. Then give Authenticated Users permission to “Modify”. Then OK/OK.

Note: I didn’t do item#4 with my Windows and Swap drives/partitions, because I figure the system is managing those, and casually changing files on them, as long as it’s blocked, prevents macros and malware from doing it – that’s the point of the security. You might ask ‘What’s a SWAP partition?’ I won’t go into it deeply here, because there’s plenty on the web about it (use Google), but if you have two physical hard drives, you can get a significant speed boost by separating the drive occupied by Windows itself from the drive it uses for it’s page file (swap file) – the file it uses as virtual memory to swap out data. Best practice is to limit the original swap file to a small fixed size (e.g. 1gig) and have the big swap file on a second drive. I created a 10gig partition for mine. You get more performance gain from 2 swap files than 1, and because there’s only one head on a hard drive (like a needle on a record player), you get speed from having separate drives for the operating system (Windows, Linux, Mac OS) and the swap file, so they can both be going at once. Plus, Windows won’t store critical error data without at least a 400mb or so swap file on the original Windows drive. Again, all of this is well documented on the web, so no need for my further input.

I hope this solves any Windows 7 permissions issues you’re having. It’s working great for me.  Sure, I can turn off the security feature, or bypass it by running as the superuser, but I’m not going to do that, any more than I would in Linux. This is a good step forward, finally in Windows. It’s just that, as usual, Microsoft left a lot of kinks in it, because they just don’t think like you and I. Best wishes for your success.

Clearly the actors know it’s a crowd pleaser and are reveling in the applause, which is genuine. I met some of the actors today at Red Cup – they’re fun people.

[NewsOK Coverage]

See: NewsOK article & video and  Previous NewsOK article

At about the 4th number it starts to get interesting. We thought the female street urchins were talented.

Bring blanket or chair. Concessions are cheap, but it’s junk, and nothing’s open nearby at intermissions but a 7-Eleven, so bring your bananas and granola, box wine or beer, and it’s a show. If you don’t want outbursts to interrupt the play, sit away from families with children. Young couples are usually quieter. If you’re on a blanket, stake out a spot higher than stage level (or you won’t see over the chairs). Avoid the aisles, because people do use them to come and go, not waiting between numbers, unlike a theatre performance. There were no mosquitos – June bugs were plentiful but not a big deal (I liked simulating one at the back of the wife’s neck).

The performance was too familiar to the wife (me too) – that’s not their fault – we just know the story so well that there are no surprises.

One thing I’ve observed at nearly every play so far is that actors should practice more clarity doing their lines. The tendency to rush or breathe through syllables, popular in a texting culture, makes some things incomprehensible, especially for someone with an Oklahoma accent attempting a British one. We saw the same thing with Jekyl and Hyde. Enunciate the syllables, for goodness sake, or you’re throwing out half of what the writer created, and generating a lot of truly broken English.

I got this recipe from my favorite cookbook: Of These Ye May Freely Eat: A Vegetarian Cookbook by Joann Rachor

Tigana is a tale of agony, of the meaning of words, of the significance of history and story, and the compromise between love and hate, desire and purpose. All that sounds nebulous, I know, and like empty sales hype on a jacket blurb of some Harlequin romance. Not the idea I mean to convey – the failure is mine perhaps – but some things are delightfully, irreducibly complex – or if you’re one of those worshippers of simplicity, let’s say “rich”.  I’ve no intention of pursuing a full review right now, or of trying to sum up what I see as a vast expanse that can’t be conveyed by throwing a plot outline at you. That’s what jacket blurbs are for, and no jacket is going to convey this book’s significance.

I will say that if you rule out things by genre, you won’t like this. I always feel a kind of helpless pity for people that don’t read fiction, and thereafter for people who dismiss whole genres like sci-fi or fantasy (which I think takes the most eye rolls from the uninitiated – people who think fantasy is just swords, sorcery, and elves and sci-fi is shoot-em-ups with aliens in spaceships – not that I”m knocking those things – good writing is good writing, and I defy anyone to not have fun in one of Heinlein’s starship shoot-em-ups). Anyone that can read Ursula LeGuin, though, for instance (I know, I know, poster child for crossover work), and can dismiss those two genres doesn’t know beans. It’s like saying there’s never been a worthwhile mystery novel. I’m not a big fan of mystery, but the master (Doyle, you know) can have my attention any time. But you’re also writing off some of the best work ever in political philosophy (Robert Heinlein, Ayn Rand, Ray Bradbury, Orwell, Huxley, Zamyatin – and shorting yourself a liberal education – reading about political philosophy, isn’t the same as reading political philosophy – and the academics would have us think that’s specialized work – nah, the best stuff has been written for a popular audience – it has come out of the ivory tower and gotten dirty in all the right bars). And you’re missing in some authors, like Kay and C.J. Cherryh, for instance – definitely LeGuin) some stunningly insightful work in social anthropology and social theory (Orson Scott Card). You either have to dismiss whole disciplines of human endeavour, or be unaware of their presence in the genres – ignorance either way, you see. You know what they say – ignorance can be cured. Willful ignorance…

Not to beat up people who don’t routinely like sci-fi or fantasy. It’s one thing to say I don’t like squashes and zucchini. It’s another to say I don’t like vegetables. If you’re in the latter camp, get to a doctor, you’re not going to live much longer than it takes to read this entry. But you could get some really great stuff out of Umberto Ecco who usually stays out of these genres, for instance, and Rand who usually does. So yeah, I’m taking a block of space to not talk about this book in particular. Precisely because by doing so, I’m saying it’s too rich to be represented by a blurb. It’s more honest to just mention it and talk about other things around it, irritating or bewildering as it may prove.

Note: The 2nd time around, I ‘read’ it in audio format. Available from Amazon.

One of the reasons I changed my dog’s name when getting him from the rescue, is that I just couldn’t see myself yelling in public, “Come here, Cowboy! I’ve got a treat for you!” Somehow, it just doesn’t sound like me.