The wonders of the Grand Canyon cannot be adequately represented in symbols of speech, nor by speech itself. The resources of the graphic art are taxed beyond their powers in attempting to portray its features. Language and illustration combined must fail.

John Wesley Powell

I spent a surreal Memorial Day Weekend with three wonderful people at the Grand Canyon, and came away smitten by its austere beauty. This picture is taken from the North Rim, where the sun and the clouds conspired to reveal liquid vistas on its ancient walls. It was like being in a geological time machine.

I read Albert Camus for the first time last month, after buying The Fall from Porter Square Books, a fine independent bookstore not far from where I live. I marveled at the economy of Camus, at his ability to chart in very few pages the erosion of a man’s conscience from the first glimpses of corruption to the full realization and acceptance that he is a monster through and through. The experience of following Jean-Baptiste Clamence and his mysterious acquaintance through the seedier parts of Amsterdam is not a pleasant one, but there is something very precise about it: Unlike any other author I can think off, Camus appears simultaneously to be dissecting his protagonist and to be peering into his reader’s soul with a magnifying glass and a question, “Aren’t you just like my Clamence?”

Whether it is a reflection of my own thoughts at the time, or an effect that Camus has on most readers, I cannot say, but most of my thinking about the book centered on examining the exact juncture at which Clamence changed from merely mistaken to “morally depraved. For Clamence, as for everyone else, the test would start with a binary option, followed by a thought process, followed in turn by the action in response to the choice. When faced with subsequent criticism, it is quite common for a person to rationalize his choice. It is less common, though, to take a step further back and ask the question, “Why did I rationalize this choice in the way that I did?” To his credit, Clamence has the mental wherewithal to ask this question of himself, not verbatim, but via a discussion of his actions with his unnamed companion. He talks of initial pangs of conscience, symbolized beautifully by a disembodied laugh in the dark. He admits that he has, above all, wanted to dominate his fellowmen and his actions have followed from that. Until this point, Clamence is a flawed human being with whom many may identify. Thereupon, he proceeds to worsen his case by declaring that there is no going back to the old ways, that he is now finally comfortable with his depravity.

I could not decide, when I finished the book, whether to view Clamence with contempt or to empathize with him. In retrospect, I lean toward the latter, for the end of Clamence’s account reads a little bit like capitulation. At his age, in his situation, it seemed like he could not muster the strength to return to an honest life. Maybe, the emotional baggage from his moral regression would have been too heavy to bear. At the end of the confession, it does not appear that Clamence is still greedy for power and recognition. Instead, he appears resigned to leading a corrupt life in a corrupt world. In that other great story of sensual debauchery, Dorian Gray finally cultivated a rage fatal enough to cause him to plunge a knife through his conscience thereby ending his horrible existence. Clamence, on the other hand, has completely insulated himself from repentance. He will thus continue on this spiral, becoming comfortable with sinning, and not feeling too guilty about it.

Any discussion of this book would be incomplete without a mention of its connection to the Bible, in which a punitive God casts Adam and Eve out of Eden, from where they fall as sinners onto the Earth. Here, in the biblical context, they have been ever since, smothered in the middle of a ghastly embrace between guilt and disobedience - compulsively guilty but unable to abstain from disobedience, compulsively disobedient but unable to cast guilt aside. It is in this context that the story of Jean-Baptiste Clamence makes the most sense, but was there a message, if any? Can Clamence’s final decision to accept his depravity be construed as an attempt to break away from the stifling constraints of the Judeo-Christian canon and subsequently as the existentialist crisis of the urban everyman? Or, is it merely an indictment of the protagonist’s (and our) failed conscience as my initial reaction to the book would have me believe?

1. Tom Gobbles doesn’t live here anymore. In mid-February, Kendall Square’s Mr. Gobbles was injured by a passing car while he was roaming on Broadway Street. I only found out over lunch last week in Cambridge, when Mr. Gobbles was mentioned by a friend who works in a building facing Tom’s daily route. According to this article, he has since been taken to the Animal Rescue League’s Dedham Refuge. Sadly for us morning pedestrians, his 5-year stay in Cambridge, which consisted of ponderous walks, chasing squirrels and contemplating his own reflection in tinted glass windows, has come to an end. Hopefully, he will recover completely and have a good time in his new surroundings, with other turkeys and away from barbaric rush-hour drivers.

2. Robin Song: On a (still bare) tree near the Kendall Square Cinema bus stop, a robin sings its heart out every evening around 6:30 pm. It’s always on the same tree and in roughly the same place, which is why I think it is the same bird, though I might be mistaken. The song sounds somewhat like this recording from Nature Songs. It is quite sweet, and clearly audible above the din of traffic, though you might miss it if there is an Ipod plugged into your ears.

3. Radio Program: A young birder I met at Mount Auburn Cemetery last week gushed about a radio program called Birds to Listen and Look for in Your Backyard. It aired two weeks ago in an episode of ScienceFriday on Talk of the Nation on NPR (where else?). Audio is 42 minutes long and well worth listening to, whether you have a backyard or not. It discusses the huge spring migration and the opportunities that it provides for casual and fun bird observation, and touches on conservation issues. There are some beautiful clips of bird song. Ira Flatow’s questions are pertinent and well-framed and yields useful answers from his interviewees. I hadn’t realized, for instance, that there could be hummingbirds in Manhattan, or that city lights can sometimes play havoc with a bird’s migratory journey, or that the experience of observing large sandhill crane flocks in Nebraska can get “football-stadium-loud!” I liked it a lot and felt it was really cool of ScienceFriday to prepare a radio program where enthusiastic callers from across the country could share their experiences of birdwatching.

Three months ago, I spotted a solitary robin somewhere in the bare branches around Spy Pond. Ever since Stefanie confirmed in one of her comments that the American Robin is considered a harbinger of spring, I have been keeping an eye out for robins while walking to work. I take a short cut across a small lawn everyday, counting robins as I pass. In the past week alone, the number increased from 4 to 12 and then to 16. Today morning however, while birding at the Mount Auburn Cemetery, I found out just how paltry these numbers were.

There were robins everywhere, on the tombstones, near the (frozen) vernal pool, beside the lakes, in the trees and on the lawns. I didn’t count, but I think I might have seen 200 to 300 of them in two hours of walking there. Our Mass Audubon guide didn’t turn up, so the seven people who had assembled just started birding by themselves. Luckily for me, all the others had been to the cemetery before and came forth with all sorts of useful information - Where to look for warblers, where the hawks are likely to nest, which trees do the sapsuckers prefer, what to find in the vernal pools (fairy shrimp), how to distinguish a red oak from a white oak (red oak has more spiky leaves, white oak has rounded leaf edges) and so on.

There are tombstones of all shapes and sizes in Mt. Auburn, some with elaborate sculptures built over the prestigious dead. Some simply say “Mother” or “Father” or “Husband” or “Wife”, others are housed in little ornate stone rooms with stained glass windows. Even at 9:00 am, there were fresh flowers at some graves. I have never looked for birds in a cemetery before, and was advised to go there by J. H. of Newburyport, one of the most amazing birders I have met. Mt. Auburn is very large, and if it didn’t contain graves, it could have been an arboretum. There are willows and oaks and pines and sugar maples and empress trees and many other trees whose names I wish I knew.

The lack of foliage at this time of the year tells some stories; nests made by birds, which would otherwise be hidden in leaves, are now visible in plain sight. In the swaying, flimsy branches of the willows, there are intricately woven oriole nests from last year. It is a wonder, and a testament to the highly evolved weaving capabilities of the birds that the nests don’t topple or fall off altogether. Even the birds, now developing their striking spring plumages, are easier to see when they perch on the bare branches. Near the grave of Oliver Wendell Holmes, a cardinal sat in a bush posing for the prospective missus, apparently unafraid of seven binoculars trained at it from not very far away. Elsewhere, there were chickadees, blackbirds, titmice, woodpeckers and blue jays, their voices all joining in a disorderly symphony. There were nuthatches doing their weird upside-down descending acts on tree trunks. It was wonderful to see cedar waxwings again, brown and yellow, with their handsome hairdos and red accents. They are apparently extremely common here, though the last time I saw one was from my dorm apartment in California four years ago.

I got to see owl pellets for the first time, under a pine tree. From the looks of it, a great-horned owl had swallowed a vertebrate (most likely a mouse), and the bones were almost completely intact in the neat, dry pellet. We couldn’t locate the skull, but there were parts of a spine and intact femur bones tightly embedded in the hairy pellet, which was slightly larger than a flattened ping-pong ball. The bones were thin, white and not much longer than my thumbnail, and remarkably clean for something that had emerged from somebody’s posterior. It is no surprise that pellets are considered useful diagnostic tools to determine the food habits of owls and estimate the population of prey in the owl’s habitat.

One of the birders had a small thermometer that indicated 28 F. Cold weather, wind chill, and freezing rain returned this last week, but the sight of so many robins is encouraging, as is the appearance of extremely tiny buds on some branches. It is not much use complaining about the weather, but I find myself wanting to leave this winter behind.

“You en’t afraid, are you“

“Not yet. When I am, I shall master the fear.”

- Lyra and Iorek, The Golden Compass.

Fantasy stories, especially of the long, serialized variety often throw up characters with whom one cannot help being captivated. Not all of these are protagonists. Among the plethora of amazing - but predominantly male - characters in Tolkien’s The Lord of The Rings, there was Eowyn, shieldmaiden of Rohan. In the delicate Earthsea books from Ursula Le Guin, there was the enigmatic dragon Kalessin. Now, in reading The Golden Compass - known in Europe as Northern Lights - I have become awestruck by the barely restrained force of nature that is Iorek Byrnison.

[In singing the praises of Iorek Byrnison, I am apt to reveal minor spoilers. However, you may rest assured, dear reader, that after reading this post, you won't have the faintest idea about what a golden compass is (Obviously, it is not a compass in the common sense), and what it is supposed to do ]

I am mildly surprised that I like Iorek so much, even though he is such a violent character, as I am a wimp in the action hero department. Generally, I cannot stomach the “action” sequences in action films, and tolerate them with difficulty in novels. I dislike simulated violence in computer games such as Halo, where the general idea seems to involve butchering all and sundry with great music to boot. Yet, when Iorek Byrnison slices open a poor seal, skins it and uses the blubber to lubricate his armor, I marveled as if it was an act of tenderness. A warrior-bear’s tenderness, but tenderness nevertheless.

There is nothing soothing about Iorek Byrnison, the armored bear of Svalbard; like the dragons of EarthSea, a human being would probably have two choices when faced with this filthy, smelly mountain of power: To talk to him, or to have one’s skull crushed like an egg between his jaws. From watching the trailer of the Golden Compass, one gets the slightly sanitized impression that Iorek Byrnison is a fearsome hulk with a heart of gold, but such is not the picture I gleaned from the novel. Pullman’s Iorek is a Pansebjorne to the core - an armored ice-bear who is fierce but neither good nor evil, silent but never sulky, solitary but never lonely, so bear-like that it is impossible not to love him for what he is. He takes no quarter and gives none. He will either repay a debt or die in the process. There are no half measures for Iorek Byrnison.

I was disappointed that the great ice-bear does not make an appearance in The Subtle Knife, the sequel to The Golden Compass, and is only referred to in conversation. Without a doubt, he will have a part to play before the trilogy concludes in The Amber Spyglass. I found the first book fascinating, the second only marginally less so. Pullman has weaved an eccentric but thoroughly captivating story that takes place in a fictional multiverse and presents several difficult and tantalizing questions, “What does it mean when someone refers to his or her soul?”, “Is belief in God tenable or is it a self-perpetrating illusion?”, “If we lived in a multiverse, would we be left with no choice other than moral relativism, or would it mean anything to have a morality?” I’m eager to read the last book but I feel exhausted this month and am inclined to wait until my workload eases somewhat before picking up this story again. When I am done, I hope to write a post that deals more with the books’ premise than with an isolated rave such as this.

Every winter the liquid and trembling surface of the pond, which was so sensitive to every breath, and reflected every light and shadow, becomes solid to the depth of a foot or a foot and a half, so that it will support the heaviest teams, and perchance the snow covers it to an equal depth, and it is not to be distinguished from any level field. Like the marmots in the surrounding hills, it closes its eyelids and becomes dormant for three months or more. - Henry David Thoreau, Walden

On a recent visit to Walden Pond, my little sister and I had the opportunity to experience first-hand some of the descriptions in The Pond in Winter, a small essay in his Walden collection. The pond, situated about a half-hour’s drive west of Cambridge, is still quite remote and peaceful and alive with intermittent birdsong and there are a number of short hiking trails in the surroundings. It also has one of the best visitor centers I have been to, where, in addition to pond memorabilia, they sell books by Thoreau, Emerson and other transcendentalists. In a small photo gallery adjacent to the visitor center, there are pictures of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, both of whom were strongly influenced by Thoreau’s essay on Civil Disobedience. There is also a poster about the historian Howard Zinn, who wrote A People’s History of the United States and who, despite his advancing years, gives energetic and interesting speeches about the state of current American politics.

Henry David Thoreau lived in the woods near Walden Pond in 1845-46 on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Here, he wrote two books: Walden and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. He lived quietly in a small cabin (which he had built himself) with few possessions, desiring to be as close to Nature as he could. There is a small memorial now where Thoreau’s little cabin used to sit. A path leads from the cabin site to a cove in the Pond which, in 1846, might have served as a decent place for mooring boats. Walking in the opposite direction, one is greeted by the bizarre sight of railway tracks - the Boston Commuter Rail roars by Walden Pond every now and then, and the water and the adjoining meadows must present a spectacular sight to passengers.

Having walked along the Northern rim of the Pond, we debated the possibility of taking a short cut back, by walking eastward across the icy surface of the Pond. There weren’t too many people about - it being at least ten degrees below freezing - but we did see two men in overalls take something resembling a sledge and making some markings at various places on the frozen surface, so we figured it wasn’t too dangerous a thing to attempt. The ice seemed very thick beneath our feet and the windswept surface was utterly smooth - our shoes left no marks, and we were walking softly anyway. At many places on the opaque white surface, someone had cut holes in the ice, which had then filled up with water and frozen over. The ice in these holes, apparently sheltered from the wind, was translucent and looking down into them, one would guess that the icy sheet on which we were walking was definitely more than 8 inches thick.

I wonder if the holes were made by people who wanted to measure the thickness of the ice, or for the purpose of ice fishing. In the winter of 1846, Thoreau dug such a hole through the ice sheet and tied a weight to a line to measure the depth of the Pond. Interestingly enough, he found that the deepest point was at the center i.e., at the intersection of its major and minor axes of the roughly elliptical pond.

Standing on the snow-covered plain, as if in a pasture amid the hills, I cut my way first through a foot of snow, and then a foot of ice, and open a window under my feet, where, kneeling to drink, I look down into the quiet parlor of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window of ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same as in summer; there a perennial waveless serenity reigns as in the amber twilight sky, corresponding to the cool and even temperament of the inhabitants. Heaven is under our feet is well as over our heads. [...]

As I was desirous to recover the long lost bottom of Walden Pond, I surveyed it carefully, before the ice broke up, early in ‘46, with compass and chain and sounding line. [...]

Having noticed that the number indicating the greatest depth was apparently in the centre of the map, I laid a rule on the map lengthwise, and then breadthwise, and found, to my surprise, that the line of greatest length intersected the line of greatest breadth exactly at the point of greatest depth…

In a couple of these dug-and-frozen-over holes, we found something that Thoreau might have loved. The wind had blown oak leaves into these holes before the water froze. So the leaves have been encased in ice.

Here it is, in close up:

Sam Keen’s lovely book of autobiographical essays on birding was released in September last year. The full title is Sightings: Extraordinary Encounters with Ordinary Birds. Accompanied by delicate watercolor-like illustrations by Mary Woodin, Keen talks of birding as a religious experience. According to him, modern birders, though they do not worship birds, resemble a “neo-pagan cult, practitioners of a theology of nature.” He begins by writing about his childhood experiences when, dissatisfied and puzzled by the church that he attended as a child, he began to look to birding as his spiritual refuge.

Keen’s musings on birding and spirituality are very charming and it is clear that he has visited the matter frequently, having been a professor of philosophy and religion. I think that they will resonate with readers who do not have a scientific background, but to someone with more than a passing interest in biology, they might leave a tiny bit to be desired. I do not mean to say this as a knock on the book, because I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and believe that a writer must not be asked to tailor his output for anyone. I am concerned however, that with all the essays extolling the spiritual relevance of the birding experience, it might seem that this is the definitive purpose, if not the only purpose of birding and that the more technical aspects of ornithology are not sufficiently charming except to the specialist.

That minor quibble apart, the essays and their well-placed illustrations make for quiet, pleasurable reading and are excellent companions over a cup of hot afternoon tea (to those who have the luxury of enjoying a cup of hot afternoon tea away from work. I happen to have devoured it in three readings, mostly in the dead of night. Now, I read some of the essays again at my leisure.). One of my favorite essays is the piece about the northern cardinal. Keen writes about Miss Beach, a young art teacher in his school who accompanied the teenage author on his birding jaunts and shared a beautiful secret relationship with him. He says he was never very good at art, and a misshapen cardinal that he had drawn in her class became a token of their shared love of birdwatching. For many years after the boy left his small town, Miss Beach would write lavishly illustrated letters about her bird sightings, sometimes drawing a cardinal in the place of a return address on the envelope. It is impossible to remain unmoved while reading The Everlasting Cardinal.

Most of the essays concern experiences with fairly common birds of the backyard, the shore and the city such as turkeys, sparrows, thrushes, hawks and Keen revels in the enjoyment and amusement of observing and being observed. He writes that his love affair with birds was ignited by a sighting of the indigo bunting:

The bunting was the first of many slant revelations and incarnate metaphors that spoke to me of the primal sacredness of life. They form the basis of my creed as expressed by D.H. Lawrence: “There is a sixth sense, the natural religious sense, the sense of wonder”.

Many of us have this recollection of the one bird we have seen that first piqued our interest in birding as an activity. I would love to think that my subconscious mind was entranced by the peacocks who roamed the parks where the young parents took a stroll with a two-year-old inside a pram, but this is too good to be true. I remember nothing of the peacocks though I recall the blue-white pram quite vividly. What I do remember is that, as an eleven-year-old member of the school’s World Wide Fund for Nature, I went to a lake out of town. There by the lakeshore, shortly before we camped, we saw a solitary pink flamingo in the failing light.

More than a month ago, BlogLily tagged me to write about how I plan, and that is what I intend to do today. While I was eager to respond to the very first tagging request I have received in twenty months of blogging, I was also scared of sounding preachy about the subject of planning, because I find myself planning-challenged so many times. But, now that I have more or less conquered my fears, I shall step on the sandbox that has been offered me, leaving the reader to blame BL for making me write about this!

On planning under duress:

Rather too often, I am reminded of the importance of planning only when there are so many things to be done that spending more time and effort to plan is barely an option. But, I convince myself that having the to-do list in front of me is better than trusting my brain to retain everything, and that it is much much better than “firefighting” and living my days on a perpetually short fuse. As the cliché goes, an unprioritized to-do list is not much better than no list at all, so I try to have a rudimentary prioritization based on importance and urgency. When one is planning under pressure, there is seldom time to worship at the altar of Stephen Covey and rhapsodize about weekly goals, yearly goals, life goals and such-like in a pretty Moleskine book, and all that one hankers after is a back-of-the-envelope calculation that offers a little peace of mind and tells one where to begin.

My method - if I can dignify the barely conscious taking stock of activities by the word “method”- has been to assign to every activity x, an importance score I(x) and an urgency score U(x). A score of 1 indicates higher importance (or urgency) than a score of 2, and so on. Then, I find a priority, P(x)=I(x)+U(x). Activities with lower P(x) must then be performed before activities with a higher P(x). An example, literally on the back of an envelope, would look like this:

Clearly, there is one big problem with this simplistic approach, and all time management books are suspiciously silent on the issue. How in blazes does one resolve ties? What if I(x) + U(x) = I(y) + U(y) ? Does one perform x and y simultaneously? Does one choose a more complicated function than addition of I(x) and U(x)? Or does one choose according to whim? I try to resolve ties by asking myself “If there was only one thing I had to be doing, what would it be?”. I believe that the method or tools with which one makes a plan is less important than actually making a plan, because by making a plan, one makes a commitment to finish, at the very least, the most important and the most urgent things on one’s plate. Making that commitment is much more important than drawing tables, marking quadrants, drafting mindmaps, though there can be a lot of pleasure in these things as well. Now, I have to urgently shut up about planning under duress, because I find myself becoming preachy.

On planning under less pressure:

It is relatively rare for me to plan without pressure. Some instances that I can think of are preparing for a paper and planning the visit of a dear friend or relative. I’ll write a little bit about the former, though it applies equally to the latter. (There are other much more important things which call for planning without pressure, such as having a family, and buying a house but I do not feel remotely competent to comment on these since I have had too little experience. Besides, these things are a little too private to blog about. They are probably best reserved for the lovely Moleskine journal that you spent a fortune to buy.). When there is less time pressure, I do what I consider to be the obvious thing, which is to work backwards. For example, if the submission deadline for a paper is T then my back-of-the-envelope scribbling would run thus:

• T - 0 days: Submit
• T - 1 day: Have final draft ready
• T - 2 days: Have a second draft for co-authors if they want to review it again
• T - 4 days: Make corrections to first draft based on comments from co-authors
• T - 7 days: Give draft to co-authors for proof-reading
• T - 8 days: Have one ready draft with text and experiments
• T - 9 days: Finish experimental simulations
• T - 20 days: Start simulations and start writing while simulations are in progress
• T - 35 days: Start computer programming required for experiments
• T - 40 days: Decide whether publication in said conference is a good idea, decide rough content of the paper
• T - 60 days: Theoretical foundations and toy experiments

Almost always, the above is too ambitious. But it gives a sort of template to follow, and enables me to estimate what can or cannot be done in the available time frame, makes me think about whether it is worth doing at all, and indicates what other activities I can allow myself in the days leading up to T. If things become too crazy near time T, the above template gives me a very good idea about what the I(x) and U(x) for the paper ought to be.

I don’t know if this is useful, BL. Now that I have written it down, it seems to me pretty run-of-the-mill stuff. I cannot, in my right mind, affect the self-help writer’s tone and say that “This has worked for me” or “This always works.” Because I know too well that it doesn’t always work. It is just a quick fix. However, it has something going for it: It’s at least a start, and isn’t that what we need when we are stumped?

As I descend into the deep shaft of Porter Square station, I become conscious of the mournful tune of a violin or the contemplative twang of a guitar. At the foot of the weird escalator of vertigo, by the map of the subway, someone in ruffled corduroys is playing a song. A shapeless black bag sits in front of the artist. There are anywhere between zero and five minutes until the next train.

The singer is different every day and so are the tunes, but the corduroys seem constant. It is just my imagination - there was a woman in jeans the other day. The violin song seems to be Scottish or Irish, and the guitar tune is probably South American. Once, there was also a man with a dog and a banjo on which he played a brisk Mediterranean strain. The music makes me think of loved ones far away just getting out of bed or preparing to retire at the end of a long day. It makes me think of the friends I have lost through neglect and of the few I have regained through fortunate circumstance. Sometimes I think of older folks whom death will soon snatch away. Sometimes I think of a stairwell, an open door, the sound of running water, sunbeams on the linoleum, home. Sometimes I think of characters in novels - even the extravagant ones now seem austere. Today, the tune forces me to stop, trembling slightly in a corner, daring me to weep. I don’t expect this - I, a musical philistine who can no longer manage so much as a miserable chord with my left hand. The flowing throng of crunching boots and clicking heels slowly comes to a pause on the platform. Nobody is looking at anybody; they are in their own private Valhalla. I look down at my overcoat and something resembling a smile escapes through clenched lips.

I reach for my wallet, not out of happiness, not out of admiration, but out of gratitude.

It is a computer such as no human factory has ever turned out. If we ever do succeed in making a computer with the performance of the human brain, I would guess that the research and development costs would be in the region of thousands of millions of pounds. Yet heads like yours and hands like yours are manufactured daily, millions of times over. A woman can do it with no research and only nine months development and only a little bit of help from a friend. [Richard Dawkins, Growing up in the Universe, Lecture 1: Waking up in the Universe.]

Continuing in the tradition established by Michael Faraday, Richard Dawkins gave a set of Royal Institution Christmas Lectures called Growing up in the Universe in 1991. I had watched snatches of these some months ago on youtube and loved every minute. Now, they are available in their entirety through Dawkins’ Foundation for Reason and Science. I will go over the whole set, eventually. If you have the time and the internet bandwidth to view these, I recommend them highly.

The late great Douglas Adams makes an appearance in lecture 4, titled The Ultraviolet Garden and reads from his glorious The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.