Category Archives: Reading

Girlfriend in a Coma

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Girlfriend in a Coma, by Douglas Coupland, is a strange story, haunting and thought-provoking, that somehow fell short in the end. It is the story of a group of friends stumbling through life, each searching for something but none sure exactly what.

Although, that’s not quite true; of the seven friends, only five are stumbling. Karen is in a coma and has been for many years. Jared is dead. Karen has seen something she’s not supposed to have seen: the end of the world. Jared knows more than he is telling.

Years pass. Richard is pretty much absent from life, waiting for Karen’s return. The other four friends are adrift as the world accelerates around them. One night twenty years later Richard manages to spend an evening thinking about someone other than Karen. The next morning he is alone and knows with absolute certainty the moment she awakes. At first, not even Karen knows that her awakening is the final trumpet that marks the apocalypse.

One of the parts of the book that resonated best with me was how people were eager to show her the advances of the last twenty years, and her reaction to them. Cell phones, the Internet, and so forth. She comments that everyone seems so proud that things have become so much more efficient, as if that were the goal that humanity had set out for itself. She senses that what little soul was left in humanity when she went into the coma is lost.

I coined a phrase for that a while back, while mulling world politics at a Killing Joke concert. Jazz Coleman was discussing the fall of the American Empire. “Sure,” I thought to myself. “America will someday collapse (not nearly as soon as Mr. Coleman thinks), and it will collapse bigger, better, faster, and louder than any empire has ever collapsed before. It’s the American way.”

BiggerBetterFasterLouder. It’s a fairly easy trend to spot. But is BiggerBetterFasterLouder by definition also emptier? Ultimately, what’s wrong with BiggerBetterFasterLouder? I think there’s an answer to that, but there’s such an entrenched assumption that BBFL is bad that it’s difficult to discuss why. Our pursuit of BBFL has us racking up massive deficits — financial, environmental, and human — and that has to mean something, but is that an indictment on BBFL, or our shortsighted way of pursuing it? Is it possible to imagine a society that pursues BiggerBetterFasterLouder in a far-sighted, responsible way? Maybe, but I suspect not a society composed of humans. That’s more about humans than BBFL, though.

It’s not a spoiler for me to tell you that the world ends in the course of the story; Jared tells you so right there in chapter one. Since he’s dead, he’s a pretty credible witness. What would you do if you were one of less than ten people left on the planet? Would you focus on survival, on forgetting the world, or would you wonder why me? Probably all of those, from time to time. What happens later when the teacher comes back to collect the test and you’ve just been doodling in the margins?

All good questions. I wrote in the opening sentence that the story fell short in the end. It’s an intangible thing; by the numbers it’s just the sort of story I like — character driven, thought-provoking, an ending that decisively concludes an episode but leaves a lot of open questions — but the numbers only go so far. If i had to put my finger on one thing, it’s that there are a couple of people who experience staggeringly painful situations at the end, and I just didn’t feel it. When you’re writing about humanity’s loss of an emotional foundation, that’s no time to hold back.

Still and all, though, it was a good read. I went through it pretty fast, and there was never any doubt that I was going to finish the book. Lots of mystery, and a nice look at Modern Life through twenty-year-long binoculars. (Thirty-year-long binoculars, now.) You could do a lot worse.

Note: if you use the above link to buy this book (or a Kindle, or a new car), I get a kickback.

Thanks!

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

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I don’t want to give too much away, but one of the things I like about Japanese storytelling is that there is a difference between an end and a conclusion. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami is an excellent example of that approach. There is an end. Things have changed, what was will never be again. The universe has moved on. Those who are left, however, are still living in a mysterious world where the only thing you can trust is your own love for others.

This story is populated with interesting people, people capable of causing great harm or bringing great joy. Toru finds himself at the center of a world of people who are damaged somehow, injured by some sort of taint on the world, and he has somehow become their champion against a darkness that defies definition. The darkness has a name, though — Noboru Wataya, the name of Toru’s cat and of his brother-in-law.

Fundamentally, the story is a simple one, Toru’s struggle to bring his wife back into his world, to rescue her from the world of her older brother. The struggle itself is anything but simple, however, as mystical forces swirl around Toru and gradually draw him in.

Meanwhile the past is looking over Toru’s shoulder, looming over everything, a sense that something was set in motion a generation ago that is now twisting events for its own purposes. There is an old army officer, who was on a covert mission in Mongolia in the 1930’s. Things were looking bad when another member of his team said, with absolute certainty, that he would die in Japan, and in fact he would outlive the prophet. In that moment the soldier knew the prophesy to be true, but while he survived incredible trials for decades afterward, the knowledge that he would survive, the knowledge of the moment he should have died, renders him a hollow shell, walking dead. It is something of a relief to him, I think, when the prophet finally dies, and death is once more a possibility for him. Under that shadow he is finally able to care for others once more.

There’s a lot of that stuff. Many people are in search of redemption, and each has to find their own path to it. In the center, unwittingly, unwillingly, is Mr. Wind-Up Bird, a quiet man who would rather let troubles blow over than meet them head-on. A guy who likes his routine but doesn’t really know where he fits in the world, yet he carries a quiet conviction that we all wish we had. In a world that is progressively more confusing, he knows just one thing. He wants his wife back, and he’ll do anything to save her from the darkness. Even kill.

Layers, textures, characters, this is some darn good storytelling. Read this book.

Note: if you use the above link to buy this book (or a Kindle, or a new car), I get a kickback.

Thanks!

Lost in the Cosmos: Are you tired of this yet?

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So you’ve all read Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book
 by now, right? No? You should. Seriously. It pissed me off but it changed the way I thought of the Kafka story I just read. You can’t do much better than that. It opened to me a whole school of thought about thought, (I would prefer not to confuse this with philosophy) with language as a key element. I’m a big fan of language.

Yet here I am picking at the assumptions in the book again. You don’t have to thank me, it’s what I do.

The question for today is “where did consciousness come from?” An interesting idea in the book is that self-consciousness was more or less an event – almost overnight we went from being animals reacting to the environment to humans building worlds in our heads. That’s about when we started drawing pictures on cave walls and making up stories. And look at us now.

Walker Percy, the author of Lost, points out that natural selection really isn’t so good at explaining this event. He points out that most people in the world don’t actually need, and have never needed, as much brain as they have. His position is (I think) that at some point the bigger brain would not have had an advantage, natural-selection-wise, unless there was another force at work.

Pf. Chicks dig poets. Enough said about that, except that I really need to work on my poetry skills.

So here we are, carrying big brains around on our skinny necks, brains so big we sometimes kill our mothers during childbirth, and even then we are helpless for a couple of years because there’s no way our full-grown brain is going to make it out of there. These big brains of ours are nothing but trouble. How did any species evolve where the child killed the mother so regularly? How did it all happen so fast?

The sober among you have probably noticed that I have subtly switched “self-conscious” for “big brain”. I’ll defend that later, unless I forget to.

But even so, how does natural selection, a patient and steady process, explain the sudden and dramatic arrival of something completely new? Being completely ignorant of modern biological theory and even more ignorant of the alternatives, I feel I am the man to answer that question. Challenged by Percy, I turned the question upside-down; where he states evolutionary theory can’t explain this enormous departure from anything that happened before, I asked myself, “what would you have to do to evolution to make it work in this case?”

My answer: the Totally Kick-Ass Mutation. In geekly terms, it’s a mutation that is not an event, but a vector. Once the ball starts rolling, it’s such a great idea that even the slightest variation provides a huge advantage.

I imagine that with genetic inheritance there is ‘noise’, a statistical variation in inherited traits that normally doesn’t mean much. But when there is a new thing going on, that noise can dramatically accelerate change. Let’s say, for a moment, that a flying reptile had a little extra fiber on the trailing edges of his wings, that measurably improved his flying. In the following generations, the ones with the more pronounced wing-fibers simply kicked ass. The tiny variations introduced by genetic noise turned out to be a big deal, the slight variations themselves dramatic improvements, and overnight we had feathers. It all happened so fast that intermediate fossils don’t exist.

So are brains like feathers? I’ve met a few folks where the comparison is obvious. The brain explosion seems to have followed a seemingly innocuous skeletal development. “Idle hands do the devil’s work,” the saying goes, and the fossil record seems to bear this out. With the locking knee, which allowed a fairly typical primate to stand upright, freeing the hands, the brain started to grow dramatically. Causal? Hard to prove, but when you compare a Greg Maddux slider with a monkey throwing poo, you can begin to understand. Free up the hands and you have power, as long as you have the brain to use it. There are physiological differences, but making a good throw requires a lot of brain. Hitting a rabbit with a rock is a massive ballistic calculation, and there’s no time to work out the angles. But if you succeed, you eat.

Introduce also that the larger brain facilitates larger social groups (enter language), and you have a Totally Kick-Ass Mutation, one in which only slight variations can prove to be a huge advantage. I imagine this big-brain trend continued right up to the invention of distilled spirits.

‘Enter language’, I said up there, casually, but that’s the point, isn’t it? It’s the moment that Percy cites that separates man from the beasts. A singularity. Language is synonymous with self-awareness because the symbolic distillation of the world requires an interpreter: the self. We are unique in the universe (as far as we know) in our ability to completely misunderstand everything.

My use of the word ‘singularity’ is not casual, there is a school of thought that mankind is approaching another singularity in which, either through genetic manipulation or cybernetics or both, we bypass evolution and design our own replacement. The moment when we lose control of this process and become truly obsolete, the moment the new intelligence leaps so far beyond us that we are quaint but clever animals, that’s the singularity. After reading Percy, though, I see that this would be the second singularity.

Interestingly, Percy (with my help) set the definition of the next singularity. The first: self-awareness. The second: self-knowledge. Something will happen, something as unfathomable to us as introspection is to a bunny rabbit, and a new sort of intelligence will be born.

Unless the liquor brings us down first.

Note: if you use the above link to buy this book (or a Kindle, or a new car), I get a kickback.

Thanks!

Lost in the Cosmos: A few more thoughts.

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Some of this stuff falls outside the normal subjects covered in this blog (whatever that means), but it’s my Media Empire and I’ll do what I want. Actually, I’m not sure just what I’m going to put here yet, but just in case it’s ponderous, long-winded, and nonsensical (a distinct possibility), here’s a link I found by googling “potato eye rutabaga”. It’s almost certain to be more interesting that what follows.

First off, a couple of people commented on my first post about this book to point out that the author would probably be happy to discover that his book annoyed me. I said as much myself in the original post. It’s hard to imagine that he would be displeased to have provoked a thoughtful (if badly uninformed) response from a reader of his work. While the latter parts of the book annoyed me less, there were still assumptions I found problematic.

I was almost to the end of the book when I put my finger on one of the things that was troubling me. There is a stated assumption in the book that the world is a mad, ugly, brutal place, and that people are having a hard time dealing with it should come as no surprise. Part of his premise is that this is a new development, that the rise of technology and the decline of traditional ways for an individual to place himself in the world (specifically, religion) have led to historically desperate times for a species that is aware of itself, but is thoroughly unable to grasp itself the way it can any other thing in the cosmos.

Saying that things are different now is a tricky thing. In high school one of my favorite teachers pointed out that the historically large body of poetry and literature produced by soldiers during World War I was a reflection of a new level of horror that technology had brought to war. She might be right, I’m sure as hell glad I’ll never know those hardships, but I raised my hand. Might it just be that this was the first war where most of the foot soldiers were literate?

So, it’s hard to compare previous times to our own. Walker Percy cites many statistics of increasing behaviors that would be indicative of a growing dislocation of selves in a world that is increasingly mad, but I wonder. Perhaps there is a hierarchy of problems people face: eating, staying warm, reproducing, understanding your place in the universe. That does place us in a historic period; most people on this planet are going to eat dinner tonight, most are going to sleep under a roof, and some have even decided not to bother with reproduction. That leaves a historically staggering segment of the population with the luxury of feeling Lost in the Cosmos.

An aside: the author regularly characterizes a modern view of sex as just another need, like eating and breathing. If that were true, I’d be dead. Sex is a want, not a need. Sometimes it is a very strong want that make us just as aggressive and stupid as the need to eat, but the cost of failure is not the same. There is a rather large section of the book devoted to society’s idea that sex is a need — he uses hypothetical space voyages to create small groups of people forced to live together for many years. He does a good job demonstrating that the assumption of sex as a need can lead to major trouble, but then leaves it at that, not considering it might be possible to construct a crew where there is simply no expectation that this “need” will be met. Captain Cook or Magellan might be able to give some hints on the subject.

(Although twice — twice! — in the latter parts of the book he added “other” at the end of his multiple-choice questions. Maybe he thought we were ready for it by then.)

Back to luxury: the fundamental schism between Walker Percy and myself. In his view, being lost is a bad thing, leading to man’s ability to cooly, intellectually commit genocide (genocides of passion or of ideals are, apparently, better genocides)…

Um, let me jump back to the sex for a second. He echoes Kierkegaard as saying that the Christianity is responsible for eroticising sex. Before Christianity, he maintains, sex did not have the magical quality it did after. It’s odd, because the non-idealized sex before Christianity seems to be benign, while the casual sex in the wake of Christianity’s decline is a root cause of the increasing violence of our society. I think I might have to read that part again.

So, right. Luxury. I think we live in a time when needs are so completely and invisibly fulfilled that we’ve forgotten what a need really is. Five hundred years ago, people might have wanted to understand their place in the cosmos; some guy might have had periods at night wondering “why did I say that?”, revealing a fundamental desire to understand his self and his place in the world, but then his belly growled and the youngest (of nine) kids woke up crying with a really scary-sounding cough, and he was too busy surviving to stop and ask why.

Why do we feel lost? Because we can.

Percy’s not here to argue with me, so on occasion I will have to do it for him. I promise I’ll do my level best not to make him a straw man, but to present his rebuttal as honestly as I can. Let’s not fool ourselves, however; his responses would be much more complete (and interesting) than the ones I’m putting in his mouth.

Percy: But by any empirical measure — drug use, war deaths, suicide — there’s something wrong here.

[Mmm.. that’s actually pretty close to a straw man. But my heart’s in the right place, I promise.]

Escalating war deaths are a large theme later in the book. I wonder, though, what you would find if you normalized against population. Certainly I’ll agree that war is much more dangerous for civilians these days, but Hannibal broke a record for one-day battlefield slaughter that was only surpassed in the last one hundred years. And now that I think of it, the civilians in Carthage were eventually completely wiped out. War sucks, and it has always sucked. There is one enormous difference, now, I’ll agree… the weapons we don’t use.

Drug use and suicide I put in the “luxury” column. People don’t kill themselves very often if it means their children will starve (of course I have nothing to substantiate that claim with). You want to prevent a suicide? Make that person responsible for someone else’s life. That does make Suicide an artifact of the technological age, and even traceable to individuals being trapped in world they can’t place themselves in. So there is some level of agreement between Percy and me.

Dang, how many paragraphs was that without talking about Christianity and sex? Too many! I think it is historically accurate to say that with the rise of the Judeo-Christian tradition (and don’t forget Islam!) sexual mores changed. It would be easy to conclude causality, but there was a more fundamental revolution going on, something that gave rise to centrally-controlled religions and a complex code of sexual behavior. Cities.

I must admit now that I have no evidence to back this statement up, and I have read nothing that supports it. It just sounds right to me. This is not scholarship; it’s some guy talking.

Cities (and increasing population in general) created an unprecedented social challenge; there was a need for a whole new, externally applied and enforced code of conduct to allow so many people to live in such a small space. Those rules also allowed for an economy to exist that made services possible.

Percy: But mysticism isn’t necessary to accomplish that.

Jerry: You’re right, but it doesn’t hurt. It’s harder to question a mystery.

So, cities. People living packed together. Religion changes, sexual mores change. Religion was the embodiment of the new set of rules, and rules governing sex were naturally included. They’re tied together, but ultimately they’re just two parts of the answer to the question “how can we all live together?” Two effects of the same cause.

Now, thousands of years later, life is changing again, and what has broken religion are democracy and prosperity. Central authority still exists, but it must suffer questioning, and react to the arbitrary fiats of the consensus. You can’t do that and maintain an aura of absolute moral clarity.

For “Christian Era”, I would substitute “Urban Era”. The Urban Era is ending. Cities will still be here, bigger than ever, but I think there is a fundamental change going on nonetheless, one tied to cities finally doing what they are supposed to do: ensure the prosperity and health of its inhabitants. Even the most awful of US cities is doing a good job of this, on a historical scale. (If the Nitrogen levels in the biosphere gets any worse, we’ll be back to stonings, but for now let’s enjoy it.)

I was afraid of this. I’m deep in and almost ready to get back to the first point I wanted to make. Maybe if I repeat the sentence it will be like the previous ramble never happened…

I was almost to the end of the book when I put my finger on one of the things that was troubling me. Percy said (once again), that the world sucks. Then I remembered a point he had made earlier, possibly in the optional reading. A “world” is something we each create, a crazy network of signs and associated memories. A world is inside your head. (Saying that, Percy’s statement that the only thing we can’t put into our world is ourselves becomes obvious; it would be recursive. The world is a subset of our selves.) So when he says the world is insane, that has nothing to do with me.

Granted, there is a substantial overlap between people’s worlds, or civilization could not exist. But differences, especially in interpretation, are not just good, but I suspect in the grand scheme (a machine Percy and I could argue about at length) those differences are necessary.

I’ll try to be faster with the second point. Sorry, but there has to be a second point.

Percy discusses at length coping strategies for souls trapped in this place. It boils down to, live with it, transcend it, or kill yourself.

Obviously the most interesting option is to transcend it. (Borrowing from my off-the-cuff statement above that I’m liking more an more, the transcendent state is when you can see that the world is a part of you, rather than the other way around.) Percy lists two and exactly two paths to transcendence: Science and Art. I think there are those capable of finding other paths.

The problem with this transcendent life is that except in a few rare cases it is temporary. A scientist cannot remain in the realm of his field forever; sooner or later he has to go to the grocery store. Percy claims, and I believe, that ‘re-entry’ is much more difficult for an artist. He lists eleven modes (still the numbering!) that an artist can use to come back to Earth after living in that place where art comes from.

Seeger: what the hell is this reentry stuff? From where? To where?

Percy: What do you do?

Seeger: I’m a writer.

Percy: I see. [Writers are an especially messed-up breed, by Percy’s reckoning. I just find them annoying.] Do you drink?

Seeger: Well, yes.

Percy: [checks off item two of eleven — item one is still hanging] Where do you live?

Seeger: Prague.

Percy: You don’t say. Where before that?

Seeger: Well, kind of nowhere. The road.

Percy: [Checks off item three. He looks me over. Number four is sex. He doesn’t bother to ask. Likewise he skips over returning home, living a lie, mysticism, and suicide. Skipping ahead he rules out numbers ten and eleven, being ‘saved’ and frontal assault. He’s got a feeling about number nine, however…] Tell me about your day.

Seeger: I work on my software and I write.

Percy: All the time?

Seeger: Pretty much. I hang with my brother sometimes.

Percy: So… this whole nasty world you accuse me of creating… It could be there and you’d never know it.

Seeger: Umm….

Percy: You are one lucky man. And yet, the characters you create, the best ones, live in a world of terrifying ambiguity, a place where there is no truth, no right, no wrong, just an individual alone and adrift, knowing his actions ultimately mean nothing.

Seeger: Exactly! Now don’t you see?

Percy: …

I think that’s what Percy would say. (Option nine is to never come down, to barricade yourself against the pesky real world and not come out. Optimistically, that’s been my mode. It’s either that or I’ve never left the ground. It sure feels like I’ve been up there.) Two of the options on how an artist can deal with the real world don’t require dealing at all. Suicide and monkhood. (I think Percy had a more elegant name for it.) Option one, the one skipped over, is actually the option of last resort — a well-adjusted artist performing at a high level without showing any unusual signs of social discomfort.

Which, finally, brings me to the very heart of the difference between Percy and myself. We agree that the human is newcomer to a landscape unlike any terrain Scopes’ monkeys had to deal with. Man is self-conscious, a monumental, catastrophic and very recent development. We’re together on all that. The crazy thing about mankind, the frightful thing, is that [Jerry hesitates in his writing, thinking there might be two things, but one is more frightful] is that he can ask why. Dogs don’t ask why. I bet whales don’t ask why. Even the most ardent gorilla-language people have backed off on our primate cousins asking the Big Question.

The Question fascinates me, particularly because I don’t think there’s an absolute answer. 42? It’s as good as any. Maybe that’s why people with Answers bother me; I don’t even understand the question, but I’m pretty sure there is no answer. Absolutes are all false.

King Arthur: Go find the grail!

Sir Jerry: But it doesn’t exist.

King Arthur: And…?

Sir Jerry: I’ll find it or die trying.

In the above scene, King Arthur is another part of my head that I understand even more poorly than most parts.

Man is a creature of contradictions, able to believe contradictory things, to hold them in his head at the same time. This is perhaps the triumph of symbolic thought, that complex systems can be reduced to an idea, and fundamentally conflicting ideas, in their reduced states, can be entertained simultaneously. Thus people who can read can vote to not teach evolution in their schools. It makes no sense whatsoever, but here we find the most fundamental trait of humanity. We don’t make sense.

Above, when Percy cited the characters in my stories, he pointed out that they were lost, searching for meaning where none existed, islands in an ocean they didn’t understand. (Maybe I’m embellishing on the words I previously put in his mouth.) It’s true. But…

The difference between Percy and me is that, ultimately, whatever words you want to wrap it in, he sees man as having a terrible dark side. I see man as having a terrible dark side that makes him interesting enough to justify his existence.

Not included in this episode: Consciousness and Evolution and Language and the Unnameable Self. Seriously, if you like thinking, you can do a hell of a lot worse than Lost in the Cosmos. I have mentioned more than once that this book pissed me off, but what some folks don’t catch is that that’s high praise. I said somewhere that I’d like to argue with Walker Percy over beers sometime, and if he wants to throw down I’ll be there. The thing is that jargon exists for a reason; in any given field it’s important for a word to mean a particular thing. The first half of the discussion would be a tutorial. After that poor Walker would discover that nothing I have to say is actually new.

Note: if you use the above link to buy this book (or a Kindle, or a new car), I get a kickback.

Thanks!

Lost in the Cosmos

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Warning: Whoo, boy, this episode is long, and pretty heavy. It might even be boring; it’s hard for me to tell. It’s got philosophy and shit like that in it. If you want to give it a pass, that’s cool (there is one funny bit but it’s a ways down there). I don’t want to let you down, though; you came here to read a blog episode and by dammit you should read a blog episode. Here’s a link to a another blog, which at first glance might even be fun. I found it by Googling “cat fluffy poop”.

This is not the sort of book you gobble up in one sitting. It is steak rather than soup; you have to chew each bite or you risk choking. Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book explores man as the language-using animal, how that fundamentally alters his relationship with the cosmos by creating a means to name, and therefore redefine, everything. Other organisms have an environment which they act upon and acts upon them. The language-user has a world, a giant network of signs and the things they represent, some concrete, some abstract, and some provably wrong. We have replaced our environment with something entirely in our heads.

Before we go any further, know that the ideas from the book and the ideas the book inspired in my own head are quite entangled here. I’ve made some attempt to separate them, but in the end this is a muddled rambling. It’s what I do.

Not long ago I exchanged messages with a friend of mine who has a child who has recently crossed a magical threshold. The biggest reward for learning to talk is the ability to ask questions. The world expands from the room the child is in to encompass everything, through the proxy of other people who share the same language. I think you would be hard-pressed to find a child that age who was not ravenously curious about the world, and kids like that are fun. Why? What’s fun about responding to an inexhaustible barrage of questions? I’m not sure, but I think maybe it’s in part an echo of that hunger still in everyone, a recognition of the joy that living in a world that is growing at a dizzying rate.

A common question for kids that age is “What is this?” In Lost in the Cosmos, there is the example of a child holding a balloon, and asking the father, “What is this?” The reply is simply, “That’s a balloon.”

To me, thinking about it, that hardly seems like it should be a satisfying answer. Here I hold a mysterious object, it behaves oddly, falling slowly when dropped, making odd noises and POPPING! Holy crap! That scared the shit out of me! Yet when I ask my father “What is this?” and he responds with a sound I’ve never heard before, I am satisfied. No, more than that, I’m excited. That thing is a balloon. I move my lips as I repeat the word to myself. Balloon. Now I know what it is; I can put it in my world. (it was already there, I suppose, but now its handle is simpler and my world is better integrated with Dad’s world.)

There is a difference between “That thing is called a balloon” and “That thing is a balloon.”

OK, let’s take a break from all that and talk about the book. It starts with a short quiz, to prepare you for a longer quiz, to allow yourself to measure your response to the ideas he presents. My first response: Multiple choice questions about subtle and nuanced issues piss me off. Every single damn question I wanted to write my own response. None of his options fit. I think he would be happy to hear I felt that way.

On the preliminary quiz, however, was question 6, which I particularly liked: Consider the following short descriptions of different kinds of consciousness of self. Which of the selves, if any, do you identify with?

Option 6g demonstrates what is good and what is bad about the book (you can skip to the last sentence if you want, I took the liberty of italicizing it.): The Lost Self. With the passing of the cosmological myths and the fading of Christianity as a guarantor of the identity of the self, the self becomes dislocated, Jefferson or no Jefferson, is both cut loose and imprisoned by its own freedom, yet imprisoned by a curious and paradoxical bondage like a Chinese handcuff, so that the very attempts to free itself, e.g., by ever more refined techniques for the pursuit of happiness, only tighten the bondage and distance the self ever farther from the very world it wishes to inhabit as its homeland. The rational Jeffersonian pursuit of happiness embarked upon in the American Revolution translates into the flaky euphoria of the late twentieth century. Every advance in an objective understanding of the Cosmos and in its technological control further distances the self from the Cosmos precisely in the degree of the advance—so that in the end the self becomes a space-bound ghost which roams the very Cosmos it understands perfectly.

Like pretty much every other choice in the the quiz, the damn thing is weighed down with so many presuppositions and conditions that it crumbles under its own weight. Much of the preamble is to establish his assumption that people didn’t feel this way before. He cites lots of statistics (some patently ridiculous, others based on Donahue) to support this assumption.

Yet at the core is a really interesting comment. The last sentence could be the blurb under the title of more than half the things I’ve written. (Home Burn, the second of the Tin Can stories, has the protagonist ready to blow the airlock and become exactly such a ghost.)

Reading this book has been a lot like playing golf. Just when I’m about ready to chuck my clubs in the pond, I hit a really good shot. Just when I’m about ready to put this book down, he says something that really resonates.

Still, the multiple-choice format was getting on my nerves and Percy was tossing the word “self” around in a fashion that seemed to assume mutual understanding where there was none. Then I hit a section about halfway through, an intermezzo as the author called it. He introduced the section by saying it was optional reading, and that it would probably piss off just about everyone; it would be too technical for the average Joe and much too oversimplified for the well-versed in the field. Keeping in mind that learning semiotics from Walker Percy is probably a lot like learning Physics from a Carl Sagan television show, I dove in.

That’s when everything changed. I liked that part of the book. I really, really liked it. I had to stop every couple of pages because it made me think of so many different things. Finally we get to the definition at the crux of the human condition: a sign (a word, for instance), gains its significance in a three-legged interaction. There is the word, the thing it represents, and an interpreter. (I think that’s the wrong word, but it will do. In fact, between us it’s the right word.) That leaves exactly one thing in the whole damn universe that can’t be represented: the interpreter itself. There’s no third leg. In your world, you are the interpreter, and you are the only thing you can’t interpret.

I was talking to a buddy a few years ago, and I said that I didn’t understand someone. His response was, “I don’t even understand me.” I can’t tell you how liberating it was to hear someone say that. Since then, I’ve not bothered trying to understand anyone, least of all myself.

Most people could probably sum me up pretty easily. I can’t. Apparently that’s normal, and leads to a host of problems which can be called the human condition. We can define everything, fit it into our world, live with the contradictions, and everything fits, except one thing. There is only thing we can’t put a label on and fit into the structure of the world as we have encoded it: Ourselves. Thus we are lost in the cosmos.

Personally, I think the triangle bit works well, right up until it crashes against something too complicated. Fundamentally the system we use to describe the world, this language of ours, just plain can’t handle something as massively messed up as the first-hand, inside-the-head knowledge of a human being. Maybe we’ll develop that language some day. It will probably look a lot like math, with a layer of fertilizer and a sprinkling of fairy dust.

Speaking of math, the author cites a time about 100,000 years ago when our organism crossed a threshold, and language was born, and it catapulted humanity in a very short time to ruler of the planet. I wonder if more recently another language was born, more abstract but therefore less limited. I’m sure that mathematics as a language has been discussed, but I don’t know the arguments.

I can certainly agree that man has the ability to apply meaning to events, where any other organism would simply react. (Woman, in my experience, takes this to a level that leaves me baffled. “What did you mean by that?” I try, but can’t come up with any words better than the ones I already used. “I’m tired,” I might say. “What do you mean?” After some thought I respond, “I mean I’m tired.” It goes the other way as well, when she says “I’m tired” I’m supposed to know that means I shouldn’t have ordered the shrimp cocktail.) 

So man has this world that exists entirely in his head, and the only thing that doesn’t fit is his own self. This world is composed not just of what is and what was, but also what might have been and what might be. That’s what turned out to be so cool about the story “First Day” (a tale readers of this blog rescued), the uniquely human ability to ruin a perfectly good time with the knowledge that it will end. The Curse of Imagination, I call it somewhere.

Actually, let me take that back, and in so doing subvert the message of Lost. The day is not ruined by the immanence of night. Not necessarily. In “First Day” it is the certainty of night that makes the day so delicious. We live in an insane world, filled with people doing insane things. There is pain and suffering and death everywhere, and somewhere in the backs of our heads lies the possibility of the extinction of our species. But it was fun getting caught in the rain today. 

Also in that magical middle section of the book Percy discusses the omniscience modern society ascribes to science; that while in almost any field the practitioners of science feel they know almost nothing, the world at large sees Science as a mighty power, and the only reason the world hasn’t been fixed is because… well, the scientists working on my problem are either underfunded or lazy, greedy bastards.

The intermezzo is still disturbingly filled with absolutes (Science and Art are the only remaining ways to transcend the predicaments of the human condition), and there is an assumption that what we are feeling is new to this age. That’s too bad, because the fundamental message of the book doesn’t depend on that. We are lost in the Cosmos, and what really sucks is that we invented the Cosmos we’re lost in.

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The Golem of Prague

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I’ve fallen behind on my resolution to write a brief bit about the books I read. Not a review, really, as much as things I thought of as a result of reading the book. Recently I read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon, and I have just finished Some Danger Involved, by Will Thomas.

The latter of those two follows a template you might find familiar: A man in victorian London becomesan assistant to an almost legendary yet enigmatic private detective. Detective Barker has assembled around himself an odd menagerie and the newcomer, Thomas, gradually discovers that each of them, even the little dog, has hidden abilities. As the story progresses, he even discovers some hidden potential in himself.

The story takes place at a time when Jews were being purged from large parts of Europe (see “Fiddler on the Roof”). The Jews have been moving west, but when they reach England there’s no more west to go. As always happens when there is a large influx of refugees into a country, the people that are already there resent the newcomers, accuse them of taking jobs, and so forth. So far, London has been reasonably tolerant, but things start to come unglued in the face of a rather horrible murder — a young Jew has been crucified. Things are heating up, but none of the usual suspects seems to be the one behind the trouble.

It’s a good story, with twists and turns, and while the prose reflects the mannered speech of Victorian England it does not weigh down the modern ear. There is humor and intrigue, but not so much suspense. The whodunnit element was pretty easy to untangle early on, when the bad guy makes a mistake that is glossed over at the time, but was pretty much a giveaway. There are a few distractor suspects, but none of them are developed that much.

The good news is that I don’t think the author really intended for the story to hinge on the dramatic revelation at the end. It is more of an adventure story than a mystery, and a quite enjoyable one.

As the Jews are discussing how to defend themselves, the subject of the Golem of Prague comes up. The Golem was, legend has it, a creature of animated clay, created by a rabbi to protect the Jews there during some long-ago pogrom.

Clay. Reading that, I realized something about another book I read, something that should probably have been obvious. In Kavalier and Clay, Joe Kavalier is a Czech Jew who is a talented artist and a passable escape artist as well. His greatest escape was getting out of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia and reaching New York, with a bit of help from the Golem of Prague.

In New York he shares a room with Sam Clay, his fast-talking fast-thinking cousin. Almost instantly Sam sweeps up the newcomer in grand plans, and they embark on a career making comic books. With Joe’s ground-breaking art and Sam’s ability to spew a compelling story out in minutes, their character, The Escapist, is a runaway hit. Joe never gives up trying to get at least some of his family out of Europe, and finds that as his comic books become more popular that he might even have the money to make something happen. He grows increasingly desperate, as it is clear that things are getting very bad for Jews in Prague.

As a side note, the first place I ever saw the word ‘golem’ was in a comic book. Like the Escapist, his job was beating up Nazis.

Stuff happens, lots of stuff, some good, some not. People change. Superheroes who wear their underwear outside their tights aren’t popular anymore. The golem reappears, but it has changed also, the magical spirit is no longer there, it is just a mass of clay. Where did that spirit go?

That’s what I figured out last night. I’m a little slow, sometimes.

This was a darn fine read, with the whole mixture of joy and sorrow and anger and uncertainty and just a bit of magic that adds up to life.

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Carlucci’s Edge

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Carlucci’s Edge by Richard Paul Russo is a detective story set in a grim, futuristic San Francisco. Modern society is collapsing, yet at the same time technology has continued to advance. Against that backdrop Lieutenant Carlucci must find the connection between a series of seemingly unrelated murders. Along the way he meets a handful of interesting characters who are also caught up in the events.

The prose is concise and very readable, tight and to the point, making it easy to keep turning the pages. The characters are generally believable (but not universally), and the author does a good job at times portraying their emotions. He uses “business” a lot (fiddling with coffee cups is a favorite) to control the pacing of conversations, and that works pretty well, but sometimes I found it overdone. (Note to self…)

Overall, I enjoyed the book quite a lot. I found myself, however, glancing at how much of the book was left and wondering how the story was going to fit in the remaining pages. It wasn’t that the characters weren’t making progress, it was that there was no increase in tension as they got closer to the truth. The bad guys who were willing to kill to protect their secrets at the start don’t seem to be very active as the good guys close in. The ending itself, while far more realistic that most things you will find in this genre, lacked the punch I expect in a novel of this sort. Perhaps the problem was in my own expectations.

 

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Last Places: A Journey in the North

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It is easy to compare Millman to Bill Bryson; both writers travel the back roads and write with humor and grace about what they find there. Although, that’s not entirely accurate, as Millman prefers places with no roads at all. He is drawn to the remote, almost uninhabitable outposts at the rim of the human sphere, the last places. In Last Places he is following (roughly) the migration of the Vikings from Europe, hopping from island to island across the North Sea.

As he travels he meets people. He observes early on that when travelers meet people they know it is only a temporary thing, that they will soon part ways and never meet again. This allows an easy camaraderie, a sharing of intimate knowledge that one would never tell a person you will meet again. I wrote somewhere that when travelers meet they become episodes in the other’s life, chapters in a story with no clear beginning or end. Perhaps those chapters will eventually build into something larger, a structure strong enough to bear themes or (heavier yet) a story.

Millman has many such encounters as he tramps between fjords across lichen-covered rocks. The people he meets have stories and myths to tell, and Millman peppers his accounts with retellings of local legends and folklore. The stories are retold with humor (for they are funny), but with no trace of new-world condescension. When one man points out a rock formation that used to be his grandmother’s older sister, the story is true to Millman in a deeper sense than that of verifiable fact. The stories are an integral part of the last places and the people who live there.

Of course, the noise and clutter of technological life reaches even up there, and the result, to Millman’s mind, is not pretty. Many small towns were depopulated in the 1960’s, their residents relocated by government fiat into larger towns where they could provide labor for the growing commercial fishing fleets and where government provision of social services would be simpler. Lost was the point that the people being relocated weren’t terribly interested in receiving those services. In his travels he meets families who live entirely off the meat of seals; they can no longer sell the pelts because of boycotts, and so they feed them to their dogs. (One such man wrote to a famous movie star explaining the situation, but never got a response. He figured she probably was illiterate.) Millman is watching the death of not one but many remote cultures, and he doesn’t much like what is replacing it. Nuug, Greenland sounds like a really awful place.

Millman is a very good writer. His descriptions often use words that are unconventional but surprisingly apt. It took me a while to put my finger on it, but it is similar at times to the serendipitous word choices made by my Czech friends when speaking English, unconventional connections that reveal unexpected images. Millman speaks Icelandic and Greenlandic and perhaps other languages as well, and I wonder if knowing those tongues has expanded his use of English as well. That’s not to say that Millman’s word use is accidental — there are times that same unusual word or image will come back later, an echo of its previous use, connecting distant parts of the story. I wanna do that.

Traveling, he says at one point, is about delaying getting to your destination as long as possible. (I’d like to quote exactly, but there’s no way I’ll find that remark now.) When you reach your destination there is no mystery left, no anticipation. In this I think we are kindred spirits, he and I, although he is not a big fan of travel by automobile. Each of us is looking for something, though. It’s not a place, yet it can be found by traveling. It is a moment that we seek, a brief tranquility when the noise is gone and the clutter and jumble are forgotten, when something resembling clarity takes its place. It is the time when it would be OK if a Polar Bear rose up from the misty lake and ate you.

 

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The Bookseller of Kabul

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The Bookseller of Kabul
 is a work of nonfiction written by Asne Seierstad, written in a literary style. The author lived with the family of a fairly successful merchant in the months immediately following the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan. For four months in the spring of 2002 the author was squeezed into the small, decaying, soviet-area apartment along with eleven family members. There was almost no furniture – if I understand correctly the Prophet Muhammad had no furnishings.

That spring was a time of optimism in Afghanistan, although as yet there was nothing concrete to justify hopes that the country would once again be a peaceful and prosperous nation. The merchant, Sultan, no longer has to fear for his beloved books being burned (those with pictures were most at risk; the soldiers who came to remove contraband material from his shop were themselves illiterate), and he no longer needs fear being labeled ‘capitalist’ as he was during Soviet times. There is still the threat of violence, however, and the city has been ground into poverty by war and drought.

Things were bad under the Taliban, but in 2002 they weren’t much better. Especially for women.

As a woman the author was able to learn of the life of the women in the apartment they shared. Had the author been male, he never would not even have been able to look at the unmarried women of the house, let alone talk to them. Sultan, for all his political modernity (he is very pleased that there are women in the government), maintains an iron rule over his family. It is he who negotiates a price for his daughters, marrying them to husbands they have never met. His youngest daughter is suffering from Vitamin D deficiency because the sunshine never touches her skin – in one of the sunniest places on Earth. His sons work long hours in his shops, so they do not have a chance to go to school or study.

Perhaps there are two sorts of women in Sultan’s world – those who work and wear western clothes, and those who follow tradition. The first group is somehow asexual, their behavior not an issue because they will never be part of a traditional Afghan family. While he respects those women, he is never going to allow that to happen to any of his family.

It is to be remembered that Sultan is a relatively prosperous man, part of the power he holds over his extended family is because of his success. However, on issues like the traditional role of a woman, I suspect if anything he is more liberal than many of his neighbors. It is that way, because it has always been that way. (Although the burka, the all-concealing robe and head gear, was not as common in earlier times.)

Makes me glad to be who and where I am.

The book was a good read, entertaining as well as enlightening. I started slowly, but the prose steadily pulled me in, until I read the last third or so in a single sitting. I am curious how things are going there now, after at least relative calm in the city for a while. Is the family prospering? Has reliable electricity and running water been restored? Are more women daring to show their faces in public? 

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The Water Method Man

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Right now I am reading John Irving’s second published novel, The Water-Method Man. The central point of view is that of Fred ‘Bogus’ Trumper, his nickname well-earned through the countless lies he has used to pave his life. He has lied about mundane and inconsequential shit for so long that when the extraordinary happens, when defining moments occur, no one believes him. But in this self-appraisal that slides easily from first person to third, from present to past, we must admit that while Bogus is an accomplished liar, a man adept at verbal sleight of hand, a captain of obfuscation, he is honest with himself.

Bogus, it seems, works for an independent movie company in search of a project. His boss has decided that Bogus will be the subject of the next film. The name of the film: Fucking Up.

As I read about Bogus I feel the Bogus in my soul, and I wonder how I managed to go so many years without fucking up (more than I did). Recently I’ve reclaimed the Bogus, grasped my God-given ability to fuck up, clinging to what must be a basic human right the way a rodeo rider holds the rope tied around the neck of the angry bull beneath him. The beast is quivering with rage, wanting nothing more than to send me to the dirt and put a hoof between my shoulder blades. In rodeo it’s eight seconds. In not fucking up, it’s a lifetime. For a long time I was doing a good job not fucking up, except now it feels like the whole time I was fucking up.

I’ve not read anything by John Irving that I didn’t like, but I have to say that there’s something in Setting Free the Bears and The Water Method Man that resonates better with me than his later works. Bears has some rough spots that I’m sure Irving would like another go at, but the voice is there. It’s a great double-feature with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, with a lesson in Czech history on top. (I was not living here when I read the story, but it did inform my perception of the country.)

Maybe it’s Irving fighting against the pulp establishment, but in this story and in A Prayer for Owen Meany, which I also recently read, he has gone out of his way to say, during the course of the novel, that there will not be a definitive end. It may be in his other stories as well, but I wasn’t looking for it back then. Now that I’m aware of it, it seems a bit unnatural, a self-justification where one isn’t necessary. Either you understand or you don’t. Either you like questions or you like answered questions. With Irving there is no happily ever after, there’s just ‘and then we all kept on’, or, ‘and then I continued on the vector of my life, a tightrope act with despair on the right side of my balancing pole, and reckless optimism on the left. Ahead are the other acrobats, waving me on, beckoning to me, and on that narrow path true redemption and true damnation both lie.’

Irving’s gonna wish he said that.

Stories don’t end. Episodes might come to a close with a boom or a sigh, but the story continues. The brilliance of Owen Meany is not the grand convergence of Owen’s knowledge of what is to come, it is about the hinted, not ever written and perhaps periodic reclamation of the narrators soul, his return to the passion of teaching. Irving has a way with words, spare except when he isn’t.

Cells divide and sperm meets ovum. The sperm come carrying heavy suitcases, and the ova have baggage of their own. Somewhere in this convergence of crap is the magic we call life.

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The Great Gatsby

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Some time ago I read The Great Gatsby. I remember that I liked it, but it has been a long time, and I’ve learned a lot since then. I’ve also pretty much forgotten Mr. Gatsby, except for his yearning posture as he reached out across the water to the beacon on the other side. Recently the book was mentioned in the comments here, and I was thinking about that pose, about the hopelessness of it but also the sureness of it, the purity of the ambition it embodied.

Or was I just making that up? I was in the bookstore the other day and there was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, and when I saw the price, I was decided.

My impression after the first page: somewhere between Somewhere between D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (completed in 1917) and The Great Gatsby (published in 1925), the twentieth century began. It’s not right, I guess, to expect literary trends to follow the Julian calendar, and I expect someone else has already identified this moment in artistic history and come up with a name for it (modern?), but I am no art historian and I have no intention of expanding what is probably already a body of criticism so vast as to border on useless. No, I will just say this. Fitzgerald retains an elegance to his writing that I can only envy, descriptions that are organic and evolutionary, yet thrifty. In the end, however, he speaks my language.

Near the start, Nick meets two women. They are in a mansion by the sea, resting on a mighty divan in a hall with windows open at each end. The paragraph is about the wind, how it moves the curtains, the ladies’ white dresses, the nap of the carpet. The women are part of that wind, idle, undirected and free in a somehow useless way, aloof and self-contained, and the description ends with a bang when Tom slams the windows shut, and a place that had been alive dies.

I haven’t finished the book, but I think he told the whole story right there, somewhere around page five.

I know I’m not going out on a limb to say this is a pretty dang good book; many others have done so in the past. But hey, every once in a while the general consensus is right. And for all the beauty and grace of the prose, it still reads easy. It’s a well-crafted story on top of everything else. Boy am I glad I decided to give this one another go. (Except that now I have a new yardstick to measure myself against, and this one seems forty-two miles long from where I sit.) If you’ve got that old high school copy you were forced to read lying around, pick it up and chew on a few pages.

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