Hsin-Hao Yu's Personal Blog

1 Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote is my favorite story by Jorge Luis Borges. Every time I read it I find something new to think about. The premise of this story is sheer absurdity: the narrator claims that his writer friend Pierre Menard had accomplished an unparalleled feat in literature, but this magnum opus was invisible to most people, because it was identical to selected chapters of Don Quixote by Cervantes. Despite being identical to Don Quixote, Pierre Menard’s Don Quixote was not merely a copy of Don Quixote, according to the narrator. It was more subtle and deeper than the original, because the same words, written by a contemporary writer, were “infinity richer” in meaning, drawing on new ideas accumulated from 300 years of cultural and historical development following the days of Cervantes.

SPOILERS WARNING! In Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges, there is a story titled The Secret Miracle which I find particularly stimulating. The plot is centered on a writer who was sentenced to death. At the night before his execution, he begged God to grant him one more year of life so that he could finish writing an important piece of work. The next day, at the moment just before the bullet hit him, time suddenly stopped. From the writer’s point of view, all activities in the physical world had been frozen - the bullet remained stationary in the air, his body unmovable.

I’ve been reading two books about hacking. Interestingly, both books make references to the novel The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. The first book is Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell by Phil Lapsley. In an interview of Ron Rosenbaum, whose article Secrets of the Little Blue Box (published in Esquire Magazine in 1971) brought phone phreaking into the awareness of the public, Rosenbaum said that his vision of the phone phreaks of the 60’s and the 70’s was influenced by the underground communication networks described in the novel.

Many years ago, I got myself Bill Frisell: An Anthology - a collection of music written by guitarist Bill Frisell. I can’t really read music, so to me, it had been a coded book, which I keep in my collection as an object of curiosity. But there is something fascinating about it that even a non-musician can feel. It just seems … profound. What amazes me about Bill Frisell’s written music is that each piece is just a couple of pages of simple notes and chords. Many of them are so basic that they look like they belong in a children’s piano book.

I had a surreal experience reading Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing by Randall Stross, published in 1993 (I found a copy for free). Stross argued convincingly that NeXT was hopeless. Had I read it in 1993, I would have thought that the analysis was spot on. Who would have thought that in 2023, people would be still using essentially NEXTSTEP? Also, the entire workstation market has been wiped out, but IBM is still selling mainframes!

In Chapter 64 of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Mason & Dixon, there is a humorous telling of a story about ancient Chinese astronomy. In this story, two imperial astronomers, Hsi and Ho, embarrassed the Emperor by failing to predict a solar eclipse. For this neglience, they almost got themselves executed. A quick Google search found several western references to this story. The Pynchon wiki, for example, cites a French source. So Pynchon didn’t make it up. But I was still not satisfied. Where can I find this pair of unfortunate astronomers in a Chinese document? I am not sufficiently knowledgeable about

During the lockdown, I finally found the time to read the first volume of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories. In general, I can’t say I like them as detective stories, because what I am looking for in this genre is brilliant deduction, and Father Brown doesn’t do that kind of thing. However, I was very impressed by a story titled The Sign of the Broken Sword. It’s a very unusual detective story, in which Father Brown analyzed the accepted narrative of a (fictional) historical event, and concluded that the overlooked inconsistencies could only mean one thing: the narrative was manufactured to cover up a deeper, tragic truth.

Thomas Pynchon likes to talk about Godzilla in his novels. In Inherent Vice, there is a funny scene where the main character Doc told his girlfriend Penny that the 1964 Japanese movie Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster was a remake of the 1953 romantic comedy Roman Holiday. Later that night, Doc caught Penny sobbing at the TV, because she watched the Japanese monster movie as a romance. Pynchon is good at writing this type of plot that is ridiculous but oddly touching. I watched the Ghidora movie after reading Inherent Vice. It is obviously nowhere near a remake of Roman Holiday (we are talking about a movie that is mostly about actors in rubber suits fighting other actors in rubber suits), but the writers must have lifted some plot elements from Roman Holiday.

I have been reading Italo Calvino’s If on a winters night a traveller. One chapter is particularly interesting because it draws heavily on the imagery of optics (one of Calvino’s obsessions). It makes a reference to the 19th century British scientist David Brewster for his invention of the kaleidoscope. I hadn’t read about Brewster before so I had to look him up. He was so much more than the inventor of kaleidoscope. He was a major figure in 19th century optics, and made important discoveries about the polarisation of light. This part of If on a winter’s night a traveller reminded me of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, which also uses optics as a central metaphor.

I finished reading Thomas Pynchon’s novel V. about a month ago. I was thinking about writing a review, but what’s the point? Given its classic status, it has been analyzed to death. So just a couple of thoughts. This was Pynchon’s first novel, so we have to ask if it compares well to his later masterpieces. I think a novel worthy of Pynchon’s name must do two things: 1. It must induce a mindfuck. At some point, you must feel that this novel is 10x denser than what your brain can process. 2. There must be a couple of magic moments of sublime beauty.