ServerWatch has an article that details how the UltraSPARC T1 based SF T2000 powers the Real Time Matrix's ability to process millions of items a day and generate matches against millions of preferences.

Real Time Matrix provides technology to find what is relevant to a user from the flow of live Web content and sends it to a connected device of your choice. The iJ.am website is an example of how the technology works.

Quotes from the article :

We need a stable, robust infrastructure to process millions of items a day, match against millions of preferences and run 24/7. For high-speed, high-performance, 100 percent raw computing, we are finding it is cheaper and better on Sun and Solaris

When Real Time Matrix replaced a dual socket dual core system running Fedora Core with the SF T2000 running Solaris, they found that their matching throughput went up from hundreds per second to 10000 per second.

Although (the UltraSPARC T1) has up to 32 threads, Whitehead said it currently uses only up to 20 threads to achieve the 10,000 match per second rate

Tags : SPARC Solaris CoolThreads Niagara

As Venkatesh Hariharan reports, the committee formed by the Bureau of Indian Standards to discuss India's vote on OOXML has concluded that India will vote No with comments. The committee has been deliberating over the past few months on the issue.

Avi Alkalay writes that Brazil has also voted No.

Update : The Economic Times reports on the unanimous Indian committee decision.

Tags : OOXML ODF India

Raghunath and Manoharan announced Google Labs for India in the wake of Independence Day. The technology playground has begun by unveiling a couple of nifty tools : an iGoogle Gadget that provides an on-screen keyboard to compose search queries in various Indian languages, and an Indic script Transliteration tool that converts Hindi words written in the English script into Devanagari.

The blog post illustrates the transliteration through the opening lines of a popular Indian song Ek Sur. An inspired choice, the line

Mile sur mera tumhara to sur bane hamaara

in Hindi approximately translates into

When my harmony/music combines with yours, it becomes our (a new) harmony/music.

It loses something in my translation, but you get the idea. The song was composed for Independence Day 1988 and is the perfect anthem for the Participation Age.

Tags : India Google

In the movie It's A Wonderful Life, George Bailey tells Uncle Billy that the three most exciting sounds are of anchor chains, plane motors, and train whistles. To me, one is that of a page being turned. Books transport you into periods and worlds that you can never hope to visit, most existing in either the past or the heads of their authors.

Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould focuses on two periods. One spans roughly 70 years since 1909 when C D Walcott discovered the Burgess Shale fossils in the Canadian Rockies. Walcott, in Gould's memorable words, shoe-horned every last Burgess animal into a modern group, viewing the fauna collection as a set of primitive or ancestral versions of later, improved forms. The view remained largely unchallenged until the 1970s and '80s, during which time H B Whittington, D Briggs, and S C Morris published painstakingly researched papers that significantly revised the fossil groupings. Some fossils have still not found a place in known existing or extinct groups.

The other period is the Middle Cambrian epoch on the geological timescale. The Cambrian period is well known for the Cambrian Explosion, the relatively accelerated evolution of more complex forms of life over a timeline of just 10-80 million years. The Burgess Shale fossils date from around 505 million years ago, placing them squarely in the Middle Cambrian epoch and just after the Explosion. The value of the Walcott discovery is the astonishing range of fossils found in the shale, and their near complete preservation. In an ecological study of the find described by Gould, Morris cites the following statistics

- 73300 specimens collected
- Nearly 88% animals
- 86% soft bodied, 14% with shells
- 119 genera in 140 species

Gould uses the two events to illustrate some of his controversial ideas. He argues that an important lesson from Burgess Shale is that chance plays a major role in evolution. In his own words, current patterns were not slowly evolved by continuous proliferation and advance, but set by a pronounced decimation (after a rapid initial diversification of anatomical designs), probably accomplished with a strong, perhaps controlling, component of lottery. Richard Dawkins, in a review of the book, praises the form (and some content - he says Gould makes worm anatomy descriptions unputdownable) but tears into the themes that Gould weaves - that much larger diversity prevailed in "Burgess Shale times" than exists today, that this contradicts current thinking and that evolutionists should be shocked by Gould's conclusion.

The book, as Dawkins found, is captivating. The story of the fossil discovery, its misinterpretation and the subsequent research that corrected it all read as close as one can get to a paleontological thriller. Gould is often eloquent, and always interesting, even as he goes into the anatomical details of the curious creatures -

A five eyed, long proboscis-bearing, 3-4 inch creature called Opabinia regalis that evoked general hilarity when Whittington first showed it to the Paleontological Association of Oxford;
Anomalocaris canadensis named before Walcott discovered parts of it in Burgess Shale (the name didn't prevent Walcott mistaking the different parts as either entire animals in themselves or parts of other animals);
Hallucigenia sparsa, a bizarre creature with seven pairs of stilts on one side of the trunk and seven tentacles on the other (portrayed in the book according to prevailing convention as walking on the stilts, while newer finds in China indicate that there might be a second set of tentacles with claws which are the legs. The stilts are on top acting as defence mechanisms!).

The Smithsonian has a gallery of specimens from the Burgess Shale.

It has been a long while since I got into this much biological detail, and Gould doesn't shy away from technical descriptions. I am glad I stuck with it though, and recommend the book to anyone who wants to know what kind of shenanigans life was up to 500 million years ago. Needless to say, the Darwin Wars are just one illustration of what shenanigans life is up to now. Long may we shenanigate.

Gould named the book after the movie, to emphasize how chance and contingency influence evolution.

Tags : Evolution Gould Books

Tilera has announced availability of the TILE64, a chip with 64 cores (tiles) interconnected by a mesh-like on-chip network. Targeted at advanced networking and multimedia processing, the chip features 64 tiles each with a 3 VLIW pipeline processor, L1 and L2 caches, as well as a non-blocking switch that meshes the tile with the others on the chip. The chip provides the option of running an independent OS on each tile or an OS spanning multiple tiles.

A c|net News article has more details on the chip. The Tilera website also has an architecture brief.

Dr. Agarwal, CTO and co-founder of Tilera, has earlier worked on the MIPS processor used notably by SGI, and is leading the RAW project at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT.

Tags : multicore embedded cpu tilera

Applications have always striven for parallelism to take advantage of multiple CPUs. One of the things a program has to take care of in such an environment is data that is concurrently read or written by different threads or jobs. Traditionally this is done through Locks. A variety of locking techniques are used to synchronize data access, but generally problems encountered by programmers include complexity and overheads if the locks are too fine-grained, bottlenecks and lack of scaling if they are too coarse-grained, and concurrency issues introduced by the locks themselves. The problem will escalate as even single sockets now contain multiple cores, each of which can handle multiple threads.

Enter Transactional Memory. The concept is similar to transactions conducted on a database. Database transactions usually have ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability) properties that ensure correct processing and data integrity. Transferring money from your account to another, for instance, might involve several database operations but the latter are treated as one atomic transaction and either succeed altogether or fail altogether, thus ensuring no intermediate state. The same concept is being adapted for data operations in memory, in an effort to obviate the need for a programmer to worry about interactions between concurrent threads or operations.

Transactional Memory can be implemented in software or in hardware or as a hybrid of the two. In a Spotlight Article at Sun Labs, the research being carried out at the labs on transactional memory is detailed. Apart from research details, the article make note of the support in Rock for hardware transactional memory, the first ever implementation in a general purpose processor.

InternetNews.Com has an article discussing the announcement. Marc Tremblay discussed transactional memory support in his keynote at PODC last week.

Tags : Rock SPARC Concurrent Programming

The technical debate around whether OOXML (ECMA 376) should be approved as an ISO standard (fast track or otherwise) has been raging for a while. Numerous organizations and individuals have expressed technical and legal concerns. The latest summary of the objections I noticed is from the New Zealand Open Source Society. Vikram weighed in with his objections to an Indian approval of OOXML.

The last two months however have seen reports from various countries questioning the basis on which their votes are being decided. The constitution of the committees and the manner in which the national position is decided seem to me to be flawed.

The chair-person of the sub-committee deciding on the Swiss vote ruled that objections raised by participants were not enough to justify a Disapprove with comments option, presenting the body with only Approve with Comments or Abstain with Comments choices. The Swiss Internet User Group has outlined its objections to OOXML as an ISO standard, added that the majority wanted to vote Disapprove with Comments and alleges conflict of interest in the choice of chair-person (nominated by the committee chairman who is the Secretary General of ECMA).

In the Netherlands, a No with Comments got near unanimous support, but that was insufficient : since the local Microsoft entity was against it, the decision was that Netherlands would abstain.

In Portugal, the committee was presided over by a Microsoft representative who apparently denied entry to Sun and IBM because, hold your breath, there weren't enough chairs in the room. In a subsequent meeting, the committee has decided to vote Yes with Comments, by the narrowest of margins.

Italy will abstain following the narrow failure of the Approval choice when it was put to vote in a committee that began with only 5 members but ended up with 83 in an astonishing rush to join. The US committee deciding on the issue also seems subject to a spike in organizations joining as members.

Spain will abstain, after the Approval vote did not obtain the required majority. But the disquieting allegation from there is that Microsoft distributed a document selectively quoting from a Government of Andalusia letter to distort the latter's support for ODF as support for OOXML.

Roy Schestowitz summarizes attempts in South Africa and Ghana to influence the votes of those countries.

The Bureau of Indian Standards will have to decide soon which way India will vote (Update : India has voted). The constitution of the committee deciding on the Indian position and minutes of its meetings are available at the website of the Indian ODF Alliance chapter (of which Sun is a member). The debate in India has begun to feature in mainstream newspapers.

Meanwhile the Sun OpenOffice.org development team has begun work on Open Office import filters for OOXML documents as explained by Michael Brauer.

Tags : OOXML ODF India

I have to admit that I am not much of a Paul Scholes fan : I throw up my arms in frustration as he gets caught in possession or makes a lazy pass that is intercepted, too many times in my opinion. However, I stop breathing every time he gets the ball just outside the box. The sublimity of his shots from around that area, and the consistency with which he scores from there are unsurpassed in modern day football.

Opening day was a huge disappointment for Manchester United - a draw against Reading (who amazingly seem to have scored against Chelsea as I write) at home and an injury that will keep Rooney out of the team for some time meant that the club stumbled. Adding to their relative woes were the wins by Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool, not to mention that their next fixture (today) was to be at Fratton Park, unhappy hunting grounds that Portsmouth has been for them recently.

Scholes though has scored yet another blistering goal from the D. Nani looks bright. Tevez does not look any more handsome in red than he did in claret, but that is neither here nor there : he isn't in a beauty contest. I just hope he reproduces the scintillating form he displayed at West Ham. ManU of late appear to stutter every now and then before getting into full gear. The Scholes goal should do them a world of good.

Update : As is often the case with Football, I spoke 45 minutes too soon. Portsmouth came back strongly in the second half and earned a draw, Ronaldo faces a possible suspension and Chelsea beat Reading. Cup of woe and all that.

Tags : football Man United Scholes

As the network has become a medium that facilitates business and social interaction as well as a significant purveyor of identity, it was inevitable that the virtual and real planets are blurring into one, mashed-up if you will, brave new world. It is not exactly an insight to conclude that actions on the Internet have real consequences just like on any other medium, but recent developments are bringing the spotlight back on the collision of the two worlds.

The problems that Ginko Financial is facing on Second Life mean that a considerable amount of real money is at risk. The crisis must also have prompted Linden Labs to post this entry on the Second Life blog. One wonders why an explicit warning about money for nothing = pie in the sky is necessary at all, given that Second Lifers, avatars not withstanding, are all human beings in at least peripheral touch with real life shenanigans. A comment on that entry implies that Second Life is fairly casual about preserving the in-world money that users own. That is astonishing, but then, I haven't spent much time on the site (having decided that I'll give my first life a second chance), and don't know much about the economy there.

The Wired Threat Level blog has a vote going on spin jobs at the Wikipedia, after Virgil Griffith unveiled his Wikiscanner tool. The tool allows listing of anonymous edits at the Wikipedia for a range of IP addresses. Since the tool went online, people are having a field day correlating organizational IP addresses with edits to pages related to those organizations. I hesitate to make automatic conclusions on formal organizational involvement in such attempts at spin. Again, it is not news that some employees will attempt to tailor information about their employers, but the Wikiscanner makes identifying such goings-on far easier. Next stop : a tool that somehow identifies ex-employees editing information about their ex-employers.

These events and actions are, of course, commented on extensively. Surprisingly some commentators still think that the medium in use here being the Internet is in itself news, that virtual implies virtue and/or no influence on the "real".

Tags : Second Life Wikipedia

When August 15 comes around as it, strangely enough, does every year, some images inevitably flash past : sepia toned but indelible. Images of a flag being unfurled and scratchy footage that has Jawaharlal Nehru speaking words burnt into the consciousness of Indians who weren't even born in 1947. Somehow though, we don't get past the first two lines of that speech : Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.

He did say more though, and the sentences that remain with me are The future beckons to us. Whither do we go and what shall be our endeavour? To bring freedom and opportunity to the common man, to the peasants and workers of India; to fight and end poverty and ignorance and disease; to build up a prosperous, democratic and progressive nation, and to create social, economic and political institutions which will ensure justice and fullness of life to every man and woman.

It will take a while before we can declare freedom, if we were to measure ourselves against this set of objectives. I believe that our generation has an opportunity not granted the ones before to progress significantly toward achieving these goals. The past decade has seen us making economic and infrastructural strides that possibly exceed those of the previous fifty years. Every one of us can leverage that for meaningful social change that we can individually make. This Independence Day for me will not only be a commemoration of what was achieved sixty years ago, but also a day of anticipation for what will be sixty years hence. Happy Independence Day!

Tags : India

I took this photograph on our way to Amby Valley, for the Sun India Kickoff, struck by the (unintentional) relevance of the phrase N2 Pressure. The UltraSPARC T2 (codenamed Niagara 2) launch was just a couple of weeks away at the time, and it reminded me of how Throughput Computing applied enormous pressure on other general purpose processor manufacturers to basically change their design approaches.

The UltraSPARC T2 is set to further turn the screws on rivals. The specifications of the 342 square millimetre chip are mind boggling :

Full hardware support for 64 strands or threads
16 integer execution pipelines
08 floating point execution pipelines (with full support for the UltraSPARC VIS extensions)
08 memory pipelines
128KB Instruction Cache (16KB/Core)
64KB Data Cache (8KB/Core)
A Core x L2 Cache crossbar (180GB/s read and 90GB/s write, meaning we would make iTunes load claims too, if we didn't blush when making them)
04 MB L2 Cache
04 memory controllers
08 cryptographic co-processing units
An 8 Lane PCI-Ex Controller
02 1/10 Gigabit Ethernet Controllers

Like the French are wont to say, Le microprocesseur est mort, Vive le microsystem! All of this consumes less than 95 Watts at peak when operating at 1.4GHz. Less than 1.5 Watts per thread.

The combination of a system with the chip, Logical Domains and Solaris Containers make for a compelling virtualization platform to run application workloads that are thread rich. We are told, by IBM and by HP (surprise! surprise!), that this will be applicable only in some niche markets. I expect to hear soon that they will be exiting the transactional processing niche market and the network computing niche market and the ERP niche market and the ...

HP also puzzlingly called the Niagara platform a proprietary architecture. On second thoughts, since they feel that the Internet market is a niche, the maker of industry standard platforms might not have come across the OpenSPARC website. Jokes apart, the UltraSPARC T1 based systems were the fastest ramping products in Sun's history, and that might be only the first step for Niagara-kind.

Small wonder that when John Hennessy and David Patterson were putting together the fourth edition of the classic Computer Architecture : A Quantitative Approach, the UltraSPARC T1 was one of two contemporary processors (The AMD Opteron was the other) to feature in the case studies.

Tags : SPARC Niagara2

Your Brain is Purple

Of all the brain types, yours is the most idealistic. You tend to think wild, amazing thoughts. Your dreams and fantasies are intense. Your thoughts are creative, inventive, and without boundaries. You tend to spend a lot of time thinking of fictional people and places - or a very different life for yourself.

I wouldn't characterize Evolution, History, India, Science, Society, Technology and other such subjects as wild, though the word amazing does occur to me now and then. Idealistic, Inventiveness, Fantasizing - Hmmm, this site must know something about me I don't.

Joerg's result sounds like his brain and mine influence each other :).

Tags : yapt personal

Sun India started off the Sun Financial Year with a kickoff at Amby (or Aamby) Valley, a township that aims to become one of the top five cities in the world, presumably sometime soon. The setting is perfect for that ambition - it spreads across 10000 acres amidst the Sahyadri mountain range, 150 kilometres south of Bombay. The Sahyadris are themselves testament to a spectacular event in the Indian peninsula - they and the Deccan Traps were apparently formed some 65 million years ago by volcanic uplifts following a huge eruption soon (relatively in geological time) after the Madagascar broke away from the Indian plate. The eruption laid "down" stepped layers of basalt lava - up to a 1000 metres in height.

I love mountains much more than, say, coasts or beaches. Since the kickoff was in late July and the rains had set in, the countryside sported a magnificent mantle of green. Our timing was perfect since quite a few of the mountains are bereft of vegetation in the summer.

I hitched a ride with colleagues driving from Bombay and we were bid farewell just outside the office by a rather imperious cat. It seemed like all the hustle and bustle that humans impose on ourselves was beneath its attention, but it did pose obligingly for a photograph.

The drive was uneventful, most of it on the Bombay-Pune Expressway. The entrance to the township is framed by 45m wide arches. Over 90% of it is open space with several natural and artificial water bodies, a profusion of gardens and, nocturnal golfers hold your breath, an 18 hole floodlit course. Drummers welcomed us at the Kickoff reception.

The Sun India office has grown dramatically over the last few years, in terms of every possible metric. We do meet most of our colleagues over the course of a year, but the kickoff is obviously the one opportunity to see them all in one location.

The event was themed on Formula 1, a subject pretty close to the hearts of several of us. We even had a Panasonic Toyota F1 car (a full scale replica I suspect; I didn't have the heart to examine it closely and make suspicion certainty) in our midst. True to the theme, a treasure hunt culminated in a race that had drivers sitting in dummy cars propelled by the drivers' legs. Judging by the hilarity occasioned by the running (quite literally) of the race, it was a case of the engines being willing but the legs treacherously weak.

The three regions in Sun India band together to assiduously kick butt through the year, but try to outdo each other when it comes to having fun at the Kickoff. We had amusing skits performed by the regional offices, and some of the wordplay should have warmed the cockles of the compere Cyrus Broacha's heart (his brand of humour is best sampled at The Asian Age column he writes). They (and the actress Simone Singh who participated on the second day) were all upstaged by an entertaining sequence of dance put together by women - colleagues and the wives of colleagues. The kids must have had the most fun - do not be deceived by the photograph alongside, Tejas was boogieing the night away and only interrupted it for forty winks.

We also had a booze and brains quiz conducted by Mitesh Agarwal. My team squeaked in second, with Rajesh Rege and Seetal Iyer providing the brains "half" (which explains why the team was called Jack, Jill and The Pail of Water), and yours truly answering a few thanks to the liberal consumption of beer. One of the languages used in The Great Dictator was Esperanto; I cannot explain my knowledge of this other than through a feeling in the gut induced by the presence of ale.

The Marathas are known for having contributed significantly to the religious, artistic and cultural make-up of modern India, but they were no slouches when it came to military stratagem. Exploiting the mountainous terrain, they built near impregnable citadels across the region, more than 300 of them, one of which is the Korigad (or Koraigad or Korigarh) fort that forms the backdrop to Amby Valley. The fortification on the plateau-like mountain top is still largely intact, and we saw several trekkers making their way up the 900 metre high mountain. The origins of the fort are shrouded in the mist that frequently envelopes the area, but it was taken by Shivaji in 1657, and remained in Maratha hands until it fell to the British in 1818.

We hosted members of the Sun APAC leadership - Denis Heraud, Ken Buchanan, Jerry Ashford and Andy Srinivasan - and they and Bhaskar Pramanik spoke of how the region as a whole, and India in particular, is poised for a shift in the use of network computing infrastructure to fundamentally alter society. Some parts of the APAC ail from divides that are deep rooted and anything but digital in nature. In fact, one of the promises of the products and technologies that Sun develops is the subversion of these divides, and the Sun India management consciously continues to look at ways in which we can further our cause. As we headed back from the Kickoff, and stopped at a restaurant for brunch, I saw this kid at another table whose demeanour was begging to be photographed. I cannot speculate on the life he will be experiencing twenty years hence, but I am willing to bet that the people at Sun Microsystems will continue contributing to it in essential ways.

The five red lights are out, and this year's race has begun.

PS : For what it is worth, the photographs I took of the event are at Flickr.

Tags : Sun India Amby Valley

The weekend heralded the onset of the monsoons in Mumbai. Most of the city has received 10% of its average annual rainfall (it pours in excess of 2300 mm every year).

The news reminded me again of Sun's participation in the SAP Summit a couple of weeks ago. Priyadarshi Mohapatra and Jaijit Bhattacharya, who manage our Retail Business and Government Strategy, discussed trends in their respective segments, and how Sun builds a secure and flexible computing environment for SAP solutions. Vasudev Nagaraj delivered an excellent presentation on Sun's Storagetek portfolio - disk and tape products that are complemented by a broad variety of solutions aimed at ensuring optimal performance, management and business continuity.

I spoke on the phenomenon we see of applications Redshifting, and the brave new multi-threaded and virtualized platform that Sun is building to address both traditional workloads and those that demand massive scale and brutal efficiency. Starting from CMT processors and an Operating System that demonstrated huge scaling a decade ago, the Neptune and Crossbow network layer projects, the ZFS filesystem, to virtualization through Solaris Containers and Logical Domains, our intent is to parallelize and virtualize at every level.

The biggest draw however seemed to be our stall at the Exhibition adjacent to the venue. A large number of the visitors were at the stall to enquire about our presence (our advertising lined the road leading up to the hotel, and hovered above it too!), our presentations and solutions. However some of them were also happy to see us thoughtfully distributing umbrellas. Two weeks ago, there wasn't a practical need for any, but several of our visitors must now be appreciative of Sun Marketing's prescience.

Umbrellas are of no avail though when the rain turns into a killer. If only we could do something about the needless loss of lives. When calamities strike, Sun contributes to relief efforts as does all of corporate India. However the administration should take the lead in ensuring safety during predictable natural phenomena. It is not like the monsoons snuck up on us, after all.

Tags : mumbai monsoons sun microsystems

What can you say about a seventy four year old author who has been interviewed by the media just thrice? That his work is dark and luminous? That he brings to life the contemplation of death? That he loves Dostoevsky, Faulkner and Melville, in alphabetical order?

I knew very little about Cormac McCarthy until I heard that he had won the Pulitzer Prize for The Road. Last Monday, a two hour wait for a delayed flight at the Chennai airport sent me into a bookstore. Going in to check for Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, I ended up purchasing The Road, Peter Carey's Theft and John Updike's Terrorist. Cormac came first, since I hadn't read any of his work. I finished The Road in a couple of flights, and cab rides in Delhi and Bangalore.

The back of the book says "A father and his young son walk alone through burned America, heading slowly for the coast. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. They have nothing but a pistol to defend themselves against the men who stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food - and each other." That is one more hyphen than I found anywhere in the novel itself. The pistol is to ensure that the two can kill themselves before being taken by others who will ensure a slow, horrible death. The world is disintegrating, even "the names of things slowly following those things into oblivion". What is left of humanity reverts to barbaric practices.

Warning : Plot details follow -

The first thing that strikes you about the book is the form rather than the content - Spare prose that somehow is denser than the richest writing possible. An eschewal of punctuation that doesn't seem contrived. Words like rimstone, slutlamp, gryke, riprap, gambreled, and these in just the first 16 pages of the paperback, unfamiliar but evocative.

The atmosphere of much of The Road is laden with futility. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Yet the father and son carry within them a fire that smoulders on against the nothingness that surrounds. A blushing Cormac admits that the novel can be seen as a love story for his son. He describes an incident in his relatively recent fatherhood as the spark that created the story. The love blazes through the novel and culminates in a climax that appropriately has been described as redemptive.

Apocalpyse and its aftermath have been imagined for centuries. Yeats' The Second Coming has always been a favourite verse of mine. I can't help noticing some connections between his poem and Cormac's prose -

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, ...
... twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

... a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow .. It .. gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.

Yet the connection could be more due to the lyricism of The Road, rather than any allegory the two have in common.

The book has been received with acclaim, and Cormac talks of it in a rare interview. He says it is just about the boy and the man on the road, but obviously you can draw conclusions about all sorts of things. License having been given, I speculate about the Biblical themes in the novel. The Man and the Son of Man. In this case, it is not the Son who (though he loves the world entire) gives his life up, but the Father. In so doing, he provides the only light in a dark story - salvation for his only beloved Son who is then enfolded by the rest of good humanity.

A cataclysm that sounds like the casting out of Man from Eden. The Woman who succumbs to temptation - this time taking Death for a lover as she cannot face continued existence. A house that the Man enters after they have run out of food - there is seemingly nothing in it, but the Man stops on the grass half-faint. He looks back to see the Son watching him. Suddenly he seems to find the ground beneath him special. It is - a bunker with a huge cache of food lies beneath. Food that is like the multiplying of loaves and fish. A prophetic voice in the wilderness that does not see any sense in prophesying - People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there.

The pivot in the book seems to be the discovery of a stranded sailboat by the man and the boy. Named Pajaro de Esperanza, or the Bird of Hope, it evokes the Trinity completed by the Holy Ghost, who is usually depicted as a dove. It also brings to mind an Emily Dickinson poem, Hope is the Thing with Feathers

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Dickinson of course lived a hermetic life, much as Cormac McCarthy seems to. To return to the novel, it gathers pace after the man and the boy retrieve as much as they can from the boat (leaving behind a sextant - a beautiful object but of no use in a world in which precise navigation is pointless). The boy sickens with fever and recovers, only for them to find that all their belongings are stolen. When they catch up with the thief and repossess their cart, something changes. The boy has always had compassion for the stray humans and animals they come across in their wanderings. The man ignores them as much as he can in his desire to keep the boy safe. After the latest encounter, the father says to the boy, You are not the one who has to worry about everything. Yes I am the boy replies, I am the one.

After this pronouncement, there seems to be very little left to do, except for them to reach the south and the Father to hand over the flame to humans. Yet those undertones seem to come to nothing. The religious symbolism does not resolve into anything explicit, which is just as well. Like a reviewer says, if we do destroy the planet it will be [perfectly plausible that it is] because of religious faith and not in spite of it.

In a 1992 interview, Cormac comments "There's no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous." The realization that I can be eaten by my neighbour when the planet immolates and the local grocery store stops delivering food is one that will clarify the priorities in my life, I think. I do not jest. The casual cannibalism in the book is shocking. The immediacy of portents on our planet that can result in the world of The Road lets me know how powerless I am, and a vast majority of humanity is, in shaping our future. A few men and women often deluded by the trappings of their office will dictate our legacy to our children.

There are very few words strung together of late with the power to bring tears to our eyes. Ten thousand years of history seem to render every generation a little more immune to the power of the written word. The Road reminds me how it was for a writer to take ahold of my mind and make it imagine. In the Oprah interview, Cormac talks of his life and how just when things were truly truly bleak, something totally unforeseen always happened. His novel is full of unforeseen events that allow the man and the boy to carry on, and the end must be the most unforeseen of them all, for a Cormac novel.

Oprah also asks him if he is passionate about writing and as he hesitates, describes how she goes around telling students to follow their passion. Cormac sets her down gently, calling passion a fancy word but says he likes what he does. I hope he continues to like writing and writes more than ever.

Update : The Cormac McCarthy Society has some great resources on the author and his work.

Tags : cormac mccarthy the road books