Neal Stephenson present Anathem - Live webcast
Alexander Rose, executive director of The Long Now Foundation says: "Tonight Neal Stephenson presents his latest novel Anathem. We will have a live web cast of the evening starting at 7pm."
If you are reading Neal Stephenson's Anathem, you may be curious about its relationship to the Clock of the Long Now, a.k.a. the Millennium Clock, or the 10,000-year clock.Neal Stephenson present Anathem - Live webcastWhile the clock described in the book is not the Clock of the Long Now, it is not entirely unrelated.
You may wish to look at an early description of the Long Now Clock and then at some of Neal Stephenson's early contributions to the project. Or read Stewart Brand's book. Neal Stephenson is a Charter Member of The Long Now Foundation.
The Clock of the Long Now is actually being built. If you are interested in seeing the current state of progress of the project you may wish to look at some images of the Orrery or Chime Generator, or the proposed construction site in Nevada. Or come see them at Long Now's headquarters next time you are in San Francisco.
You may also want to check out the Long Now Seminar series, which is available as downloadable video, audio and Podcast.
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If you mention times, please add timezones or make sure it is understood that all times are UT (or whatever). The internet isn't on the US east coast, believe it or not. ;)
And it isn't on the US west coast, either, so there!
(Now get off my lawn!)
I saw on a blog-post this morning that this book was coming out today, and having powered through Crytonomicon and The Baroque Cycle a while ago, I rushed out to get it.
I'm about 50 pages in, and let me tell you: this is one of the weirdest freaking books I've ever read. I'm up to my ears in avouts, theors, mathics, aperts, millenials, concets, fraas, fids and a gazillion other strange things (thank god for the glossary!)
After a while though, you kinda get a feel for the language and the world, how it's constructed. I'm not totally there yet (I reckon that's going to take 200 more pages at least), but it does almost become oddly readable. I'm reminded of my high-school English teacher who made us read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English, which is nigh incomprehensible without a glossary, and the same thing happened there: after a while you got into the groove of the thing, and it became strangely compelling. Like reading a foreign language, Google-translated into English, but with a whole lot of poetry in it (I should point out that I'm not a native English-speaker, so Chaucer was doubly-foreign).
I'm generally a pretty unfocused reader, jumping from book to book without necessarily finishing them, but I'm going to try to better myself with this one. I'm totally intrigued.
I mostly read the librarian comic strip Unshelved because as a member of the super secret club of librarians, I might be lynched if I didn't... not that it's not funny... sometimes...
But relevantly enough, it recently featured a nice little book-talk/annotation comic of Anathem.
I just have one question about this Millennium Clock thingy: does it start counting from the birth of Christ? Cause if it does, that's pretty short-sighted.
So, when the advance reader copies came out, the came out with a little companion CD that had some music to accompany the book. I was looking forward to that CD, and now that I have this not insubstantial tome sitting on my desk, it does not appear to have the CD, nor can I find mention of it anywhere else... except BB. Does anyone have a source/more information on the disk?
Uh... apparently I was imagining things. Carry on.
@ Scuba - CD available at CDbaby and Long Now Foundation