Category Archives: Books

Books, Literary Curiosities, Vikings

Grettir and the UFO

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Outlaws. Horse Stealing. Rounding up a posse. Vigilante Justice. Feuds. Anti-heroes who walk tall, take no shit, give no fucks, and get into fights at the slightest insult. 

The Wild West right?

Nope.

Meet Grettir, the 10th century “hero” of the Icelandic Grettir’s Saga. Outlawed, twice, first for killing the man in a fight over a perhaps-stolen food bag, second accidentally burning down a house with 12 people in it. Along the way, he tears the arm off of a troll invading a hall, and dives to a cave under a waterfall and kills another one (Beowulf, anyone?). His biggest battle is killing Glam, an Icelandic zombie (draugr, in Old Norse) who is haunting a farm. Grettir is larger than life, both in reputation as well as physical size. His life ends when (spoiler alert) he’s living on the Island fortress of Drangey, gets a witchcraft-infected wound, and is then overcome by his enemies and killed. 

I’ve been reading Grettir in advance of an upcoming trip to Iceland. I was curious about Grettir as the hero of the saga, as he’s not an entirely sympathetic character (that’s Icelandic understatement). As a child he kills the geese his father make him take care of, partially flayed the horse his father made him take care of, and badly scratched his father’s back with a rake when his father made him scratch his back. Yet, he is somewhat of a national hero in Iceland, it’s said that more place names in Iceland are named after him than any other saga character. 

Looking around for analogs, I was thinking about the outlaws of the Wild West, like, say, Billy the Kid. His first arrest at age 16 was for stealing food, an odd parallel to Grettir’s first killing over a food bag.  Before the Kid had turned 21, he’d killed eight people. In contrast to Grettir, the Kid traveled in a pack, joining a posse called the Regulators nominally tasked with a executing a kind of “civilian” justice (oh the irony). (By the way, the word regulated in those days meant something more like well-functioning, in good working order or well-managed, rather than “controlled by government regulations”, 2nd Amendment students take note). Caught and convicted for murder by Sheriff Pat Garrett, the Kid escaped jail, and went on the run. Tracked down by Garrett, the Kid was killed near Fort Sumner, NM. 

Here’s where it gets weird. I’ve been experimenting with a location-based history app – one that will tell you the history of a particular location and places of interest near you. Randomly, looking for historical data, this page popped up: https://www.historynet.com/the-man-who-invented-billy-the-kid-book-review.htm. It’s an article about (this is gonna get a little meta), the man who wrote the biography of the person who was the ghost-writer for Pat Garrett’s biography of Billy the Kid. That person was Ash Upson. From the article:

Ash wrote that Garrett, “in addition to being long-headed…is likewise long-legged, his full height being somewhat under 10 feet.” In the previous decade Upson claimed to have met young Henry Antrim (the future William H. Bonney, alias Billy the Kid) at the Silver City boardinghouse run by the boy’s mother, Catherine Antrim. That might not be true, but the author confirms Upson “did meet Bonney in Roswell, the small hamlet which Ash had a hand in protecting during the Lincoln County War.”

OK, so Garrett was apparently also Grettir-sized, but that’s not the fun part. Roswell? Roswell NM? Where a UFO crashed in 1947? Yep. 66 years almost to the day after the Kid’s death, a weather balloon UFO will crash in Roswell[1]. The aliens came for Billy the Kid, we just never knew. Henry McCarty, aka Billy the Kid, is buried in Old Fort Sumner Cemetery. 

Grettir? Well, after his death his killers cut off his head for proof (to get the reward), and took it back to the Althing ( the Icelandic parliament ) to claim their reward. Incensed at the disrespect of cutting off Grettir’s head, and the use of witchcraft to kill him, the Althing in turn outlawed Hook, Grettir’s killer (Grettir would eventually be avenged by his kinsman Thorstein Galleon, who killed Hook in Constantinople).

Grettir was buried twice, once in Reykjastrang, then when the church was moved, he was buried in his hometown of Bjarg (legendary location here).

 

Books, Bookship, Favorites, The Hawaii Project

My book projects

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No secret to anyone that knows me, that I love books.

What might be a secret are the number of books-related projects I’ve made over the years. I thought it would be fun to collect them all.

The Hawaii Project

The one that started it all. After I left Telenav, after the goby acquisition, I wanted to work on books. So I built The Hawaii Project, a personalized Book Recommendation engine.

Try it out, here.

Bookship

Bookship is a social reading app. A virtual book club app. Read a book with your friends, family or book club, and keep in touch while you do it.

Get it here.

What Should I Read Next?

Using the recommendations engine from The Hawaii Project, I built an Alexa skill you can talk to, and get book recommendations. (Three years later, Amazon copied me and released their own What Should I Read Next … grr….). Get mine here.

BookTrap

BookTrap is a trapper / keeper for books you find on the web. It’s a Chrome extension. When you’re on a page and an interesting book is mentioned, hit the BookTrap button. We’ll scan the page and find the books mentioned, which you can then add to your account to remember them.

Get it here.

Book Roulette

Book Roulette shows you an interesting new book each time you open a new tab in Chrome (or Brave!). Another Chrome extension. Get it here.

Codexmap

It’s defunct, but it plotted book locations on a google map.

Book Playlist

Build Spotify playlists for books. Featured on Product Hunt! (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/book-playlist). Since subsumed into The Hawaii Project.

Books, Literary Curiosities, Ruminations

The paths of discovery

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I am always fascinated by the paths to discovery, the chance happening onto something you didn’t know existed yet always wanted. It’s been a thread, without my really realizing it, of much of my career, from leading the team building the Endeca discovery engine, to the goby “things to do” discovery app, to The Hawaii Project, a book discovery engine, and to an as-yet-unnamed music discovery system I have been building in my head.

Yesterday’s discovery path was sufficiently amusing I thought I’d write it down.

I have a thing for cocktails. And books. And cocktail books :). I have a cocktail book running around in my head I want to write some day, so I’m periodically surfing the web looking at or for interesting cocktail recipes. I was looking for a recipe for homemade Grenadine (pomegranate juice and sugar, basically) and stumbled upon the following article.

Want to drink like the immortal author Ernest Hemingway?

Drink like Hemmingway with his most intriguing cocktail invention: the Death in the Afternoon Cocktail.

Amongst other interesting tidbits, I found this interesting cocktail:

Journalist, explorer, occultist, and infrequent cannibal William Seabrook created the Asylum, consisting of one part gin, one part Pernod, and a dash of grenadine (poured over ice, but not shaken). He said it would “look like rosy dawn, taste like the milk of Paradise, and make you plenty crazy.”

Wait what? sometime-cannibal? WTF? I had to go read more about this person. (yes, I made this Homeric-sounding cocktail, and…one ounce of Pernod is A LOT. VERY anise flavored. The things we do in the name of science….Interesting cocktail, not an everyday drink, but interesting. )

So, a quick glimpse at Seabrook on Wikipedia yields a very intriguing character. Turns out he was a writer and occultist, a friend of the well-known Aleister Crowley. And yes, a sometime-cannibal. With an apparent penchant for bondage.

William Buehler Seabrook (February 22, 1884 — September 20, 1945) was an American occultist, explorer, traveler, cannibal, and journalist, born in Westminster, Maryland. 

and

…In the 1920s, Seabrook traveled to West Africa and came across a tribe who partook in the eating of human meat. Seabrook writes about his experience of cannibalism in his novel Jungle Ways; however, later on Seabrook admits the tribe did not allow him to join in on the ritualistic cannibalism. Instead, he obtained samples of human flesh from a hospital and cooked it himself.

His book The Magic Island, based on his travels in Haiti, is credited with the introduction of the “zombie” to popular culture (the undead creature, not the cocktail!).

Later in life, he committed himself to an institution for the treatment of severe alcoholism, and wrote a book about his experience called (you guessed it) Asylum, whence the name of his cocktail. 

And then I found the real nugget: “In Air Adventure he describes a trip on board a Farman with captain Renè Wauthier, a famed pilot, and Marjorie Muir Worthington, from Paris to Timbuktu, where he went to collect a mass of documents from Father Yacouba, a defrocked monk who had an extensive collection of rare documents about the obscure city at that time administered by the French as part of French Sudan. The book is replete with information about French colonial life in the Sahara and pilots in particular.”

Now, one of the best books I’ve ever read is Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, simultaneously a philosophical exploration as well as an exciting adventure story, describing his flight through the Sahara, his eventual crash and escape. So Air Adventure is ringing some bells…I track down a copy of Air Adventure. Here’s the opening paragraph:

It was only when the sandstorm rose up from the Great Sahara, ripped us down out of the pretty sky, and taught us that it could make skeletons out of airplanes as easily as camels, that we really began to get acquainted with the desert, or to take it or ourselves seriously.

Pretty promising. And such a strange path to discovery, of a book I should have known existed! Air Adventure was published in 1933; Wind Sand and Stars in 1939, so Seabrook pre-dates Saint-Exupéry, but cannot find any evidence they knew of each other.

In 1945, Seabrook died by suicide — an overdose of sleeping pills. Maybe I won’t be making more of those Asylums after all. 

Books, Ruminations

What lasts?

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So, my sister was digging through the archives and discovered that our 6th great grandfather, Evan Watkins, built and owned Watkins Ferry which crosses the Potomac River where it divides Maryland and West Virginia (which I did not even know were adjacent). We have been up and down the east coast with family stuff, and yesterday we decided to detour over and take a look.

There’s no ferry any more obviously – there is a bridge which crosses from Williamsport, MD, into West Virginia. On the (now) West Virginia side, there’s an historical marker, which you can see in the photo, as well as what’s left of the house, known as Maidstone-on-the-Potomac.

It was raining pretty hard, and so after a few quick pictures we sat in the car at the side of the road looking around. I was startled out of my reverie by someone tapping on my window. It was a local woman who stopped to see if we needed any help – a reasonable guess, why else would anyone be sitting here?!). And isn’t it nice to know there are people like that still around! I explained why we were there, and she said “oh my goodness, I can’t believe it!” and launched into short speech, she was really into the history of the area and really seemed impressed that we had come.

I felt briefly and absurdly famous.

It got me thinking about what lasts. In philosophical approach I’m a Stoic – “memento mori“, Marcus Aurelius, and all that. So, I do think about death, and recent events have me thinking about it more. What will people remember about me? about you? If you have a family, you live on through your family, and they remember. But that usually only lasts a few generations. I remember my grandfather, but I expect nobody alive remembers much of my great grandfather. That Ferry, well, people remember. It was there. It’s marked. It’s a piece of history.

I write software. I look at it as a creative act, not unlike writing a novel. But software is ephemeral. Rarely does a piece of software matter for more than, say, a decade. The writer James Salter (whose work I admire very much) said:

There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.

James Salter, Don’t Save Anything.

I suppose I need to get started on that book that’s been running around in my head.

Books, Bookship

My year in reading, 2020

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Well, 2020 was weird for all the reasons you know. But in spite of having a lot of time on my hands, I read about the same number of books as last year (45 vs 41 in 2019). Guess I spent that extra time working.

Still, it was a great reading year, I’m happy with the quality of what I read. A lot of classic works, and only a small smattering of “comfort food”, thrillers and such. If you want see the complete list, it is here.

If I had to point to one book this year, it would be 1984, which I read on Bookship with my good friend Thomas. I’d not read it since high school 40 years ago, so for all intents I might as well not have read it. It’s devastating. It is a truly disturbing polemic wrapped inside a heartbreaking love story. Given the insanity of our election year, and the simultaneity of our truth-challenged President together with the frank and unrepentant censorship by his opponents, our high tech / media overlords, 1984 really hit home. Orwell nailed it, although he failed to see the rise of big media and that censorship might not (only) come from the State, but might also come from the private sector. (yes, yes, I know, technically only the government can “censor” – but Facebook and Twitter are the closest thing we have to a public square now – they must be held to a different standard than random/small private enterprises).

I love this quote from Orwell: “The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.”

I read deeply in the Homeric world this year, reading The Odyssey for the first time (in the new Emily Miller translation which is wonderful, and again reading socially with Thomas), and followed that An Odyssey by Daniel Mendelsohn. Mendelsohn is an Homeric scholar who took a history-based Homer sailing tour with his late father. What a wonderful story. I then moved to Ransom by David Malouf, a short, poetic retelling of the encounter of Achilles and Priam from The Iliad. The Odyssey was such great fun. And lastly, I read The Lost Books of The Odyssey by Zachary Mason, which is a series of “outtakes” – short stories – fake episodes from The Odyssey. These are often laugh out loud funny, and a real treat after finishing these other works.

Let me share a creepy excerpt from the “real” Odyssey, where Odysseus conjures the dead (Miller translation):

I drew my sword and dug a hole, a cubit
widthways and lengthways, and I poured libations
for all the dead: first honey-mix, sweet wine,
and lastly, water. On the top, I sprinkled
barley, and made a solemn vow that if
I reached my homeland, I would sacrifice
my best young heifer, still uncalved, and pile
the altar high with offerings for the dead.
I promised for Tiresias as well
a pure black sheep, the best in all my flock.
So with these vows, I called upon the dead.
I took the sheep and slit their throats above
the pit. Black blood flowed out. The spirits came
up out of Erebus and gathered round.

As you may know I live in Hawaii, and I read a number of great books about, or set in, Hawaii. In the Time Before Light by Ian MacMillan is excellent. It is historical fiction set around the time of first contact in Hawaii, and follows the life of Pono, a kanaka maoli, a native Hawaiian. It is by turns riveting, brutal, romantic and educational, especially about old Hawaii. Wonderful storytelling that doesn’t sugar-coat anything. The book club I am in also read a modern sci-fi novel called Bones of Time, by Kathleen Ann Goonan, which is mostly set in Hawaii, and we read Reclaiming Kalakaua, a reconsideration of the life and reputation of David Kalakaua, the last king of Hawaii, based on contemporary accounts from Hawaiian sources.

During our time back east, we did a lot of road-tripping around the country. During one trip we visited Michelle’s folks, who live near Mt. Vernon, and I’d never been, so off we went. It was fascinating, and that together with it being an election year caused me to want to read more about our country’s founding, and Washington in particular. This led me to David McCullough’s 1776, which was equally fascinating and highly recommended. Then we went on a road trip to Chicago to see my son. During that trip Michelle and I listened to the audiobook for 1776, and followed it with John Adams. Boy were our founders interesting people! We combined all of this into some fun visits to Revolutionary war sites, including an inspiring visit to Valley Forge (in this COVID year it was a great reminder that persistence is rewarded), and Fort Lee in New York, which factored heavily in the early days of the War. This led me to George Washington’s Secret Six by Brian Kilmeade, a recounting of Washington’s spy ring (yes, he had one). And from there, I read Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, which surprised me in how well and literately it was written, in addition to being passionate about the War cause.

Speaking of spies, sadly, we lost John Le Carré (David Cornwell) this year. While I found his politics sometimes tiresome, his writing never was, and I re-read (for the nth time), his masterpieces A Perfect Spy and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Read them if you have not.

Also as part of the book club I am in, we have been making an effort to read more works by women and by authors from under-represented communities. In the spy genre, I *loved* American Spy, I felt (in a very small way), a taste of what is like to be a minority. I loved this quote from Jennifer Wilson in her review:

As such, Wilkinson does not graft the matter of race onto the spy novel but rather asks us to think about how being a minority is, in a sense, an act of espionage, a precarious state marked by shifting identities, competing loyalties, and a constant threat of violence.

We also read Americanah, which had a similar revelatory aspect, as well as often being laugh-out-loud funny.

At the beginning of the year, I finished up one last piece of Iceland reading, from my trip to Iceland: Smile of the Wolf, by Tim Leach. The early parts of Smile of the Wolf capture the grim beauty that is both the Icelandic terrain and the pagan northern world view. It mirrors the classic Icelandic sagas in many ways, but where the saga characters are usually pretty opaque, we get inside the heads of the characters and get a detail and color the sagas don’t provide, yet the cadence and speaking voices can be suitably terse or blunt. It’s transporting. Like a time machine to 10th century Iceland. Full review here: https://www.viking2917.com/smile-of-the-wolf-review/. The Half-Drowned King by Linnea Hartsuyker, a late December read, is also one of the better Viking novels I have read, and I’ve read more than a few….

Some books I really enjoyed this year: The Last Good Kiss, a darkly funny thriller by James Crumley. The Good Shepherd (and associated Tom Hanks movie!) by C.S. Forester, which I read socially with my friends Thomas and Lynn on Bookship – which then led to reading the first book in the HornBlower saga, Mr. Midshipman Hornblower. Which then led us to read The Game of Birds and Wolves about the female sub hunters in England during WWII. Really good fun all around.

Lastly I re-read a number of science fiction classics this year: Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan (who is in our Meet the Author program on Bookship!!!), The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Leguin, and (in anticipation of the not-yet-forthcoming movie), Dune. All of them amazing books even on a 3rd or 4th re-read.

OK What’s up for this year? Really excited for the new Steven Pressfield book!