#224 Nobody’s Business-Jhumpa Lahiri

#224 Nobody’s Business-Jhumpa Lahiri

There is a delicate balance of privacy and intimacy between roommates. You share space, see each other at your worst and most vulnerable. You hear things between walls, hear one-sided phone conversations, and see the mail they get. Even if no conversations are ever had, roommates are very close. But they can also be foreign and mysterious.

How much should one get involved with a roommates personal life? What’s the protocol about answering questions from strangers over the phone? Should you find out their boyfriend is cheating on them…what do you do?

Lahiri handles delicacy well, and somehow is able to weave complicated emotions in such a short amount of space.

Rating: 10-8-9-10 Total= 37

#30 Spew- Neal Stephenson

#30 Spew- Neal Stephenson

I’ve only just stated reading Neal Stephenson this year, having just finished his impressive Speculative Fiction (SF) novel, Anathem. I found Spew in a collection of his notes, speeches, and short writings called Some Remarks.

The Spew is some version of the internet. Like many SF pieces, this deals with human interaction with machines and privacy in some undetermined future reality, or in an alternative current reality (current at least for 1994 when this story was written). In this world our protagonist is a rookie Profile Auditor 1, monitoring people’s lives through their consumptions, trying to win a promotion to Profile Auditor 2.

He ends up profiling a woman who appears to be too normal and follows her to the Hotel where she works. It appears her “normalcy” is as he expects fabricated, as she turns out to be some kind of mid-nineties hacker.

Its reads like one of those Kurt Vonnegut sketches where he delves into human’s meta-relationship with technology.  Just by talking about what we watch on TV, we are in a way studying our own psyche.  There is a fun moment when he is monitoring the front desk clerk monitoring his minibar activity.

This doesn’t really break any ground in the genre, but its still a decent read. Like a lot of Sci-Fi conceptual pieces, once real technology catches up to where the story is, half of the story is lost.  The questions over internet privacy, and some nebulous entity knowing our entertainment, and consumer trends is, of course still very much relevant…and in fact for 1994 is pretty ahead of its time (at least for the non SF community).

The story has no conclusion and doesn’t really feel completed. Like I stated earlier it feels like something from a Kurt Vonnegut notebook, which is praise enough.

Rating: 7-6-6-5 Total =24