Tag Archives: book

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

 

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

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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.

 

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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Don’t mess with me, man, I’ve read The Art of War.

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About five hundred years before some guy named Jesus said maybe we should be nice to each other for a change, another guy over in China set out to codify the methods of not being nice, and doing it really well. Sun Tzŭ had a lot of thoughts about war and its purpose. In his mind, war was a means to ensure the safety and prosperity of the people of a nation, and if that was at the expense of the people of another nation, well, so it goes.

In fact, throughout his writing, he comes up with argument after argument to support one of his primary tenets: fight the war in the other guy’s country.

For all that, Sun Tzŭ was not a big fan of fighting battles at all. In his opinion, the greatest generals would never become famous because they would rarely have to fight, and when they did they would already have manipulated conditions through espionage, subtlety, and misdirection, so that the battle was already decided before it was fought. The greatest general of all would never fight a single battle.

He also pointed out that war was expensive. He was a proponent of swift, decisive action, and advised that laying siege to a walled city was folly, and would only empty the coffers of your nation and cause undue suffering among the people, which in turn would undermine the security of your homeland. Instead, he advised swift and subtle action, finding something of value to the enemy that was less well defended, and attacking that instead, forcing your opponent to come out from behind his walls. If the enemy does not know where you will show up next, he will have to spread his forces thin, trying to protect everything. Sun Tzŭ advises not even trying to defend less valuable assets.

Are there lessons for the modern age here? The four years of carnage that was World War One run counter to everything The Art of War teaches. Today’s war on terrorism is less clear-cut. Certainly we are the larger force spread thin as we try to defend everything, yielding initiative. But even spread out, we are massive and can carry big hurt just about anywhere very quickly.

There are two other things in the book that stick out, however. The first is adaptability. The author (and subsequent commentators) lay out the principles of carrying out a successful military campaign, and getting the most from soldiers. Time and again, however, we are reminded that flexibility and creativity are critical assets. Sun Tzŭ also pointed out that direct confrontation is one of the last resorts for achieving your objective.

The second thing that sticks out is haunting, considering our current situation in Iraq. “In times of peace, plan for war. In times of war, plan for peace.” When the US military exceeded all expectations and swept into Baghdad, only to stand to the side as the city descended into civil disorder, setting the tone for all that has followed, undermining our authority and credibility, demonstrating an apathy toward law that has yet to be repaired, we saw what happens when you fail to plan for peace during a time of war. There was a period of two days when we had a (not guaranteed) shot at forestalling much of what has happened since. We could have been the undisputed good guys. We failed.

Some of the details in the book are not relevant anymore, and quite a few other people have done some thinking on the subject since. This work has the advantage of being brief, simple, and to the point. He did not say war was bad, he said it was expensive, and that it was best waged swiftly, or, better yet, without using armies at all. But once you have your army on, ou must know exactly what you want and where it is, understand the enemy and all his plans, and take the fight to him. If you are not certain, stay home until you are.

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Birthday Plunder

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One of my birthday gifts this year was a box of stuff called “Genius Tea”. The ingredients are listed in Czech and Slovak, but I did recognize the ever-popular ginko. “I don’t know if it’s for geniuses or it will make you one,” said Big D when he handed it to me. Hopefully the latter; while my water boiled last night I struggled with the box. Finally I got past the tape and the glue to realize I had opened the bottom. Genius.

One of the cool things about being a writer is that you are very easy to buy gifts for. Food, alcoholic beverages, and books are all slam dunks. I got some good books this year, so today I’m going to finish my limerick about a cat with hat hair, step away from the computer, and do some reading.

The books I got:

  • The Art of War by Sun Tzu. — much-discussed, but, I suspect, little-read.
  • Something Grand by John Flynn (autographed) — short stories in a modern style, most about the working poor in America.
  • The 776 Stupidest Things Ever Said — luckily, this book came out before I started Muddled Ramblings. I might start with this one until the Genuis Tea kicks in.
  • Into The Forest by Jean Hegland — one of those where you read the first paragraph and know you’re in good hands.
  • More Booze Than Blood by Sean Meagher (autographed) — he didn’t know it was a birthday gift, but that doesn’t make it not one.

What a grand thing to wake in the morning and know all these words await.

Add the green chile, several packages of my favorite cookies, and a squirrel, and you’ve got yourself one fine pile o’ birthday loot indeed. My sincere thanks to one and all.

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Mail Call!

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I got four things in the mail today. Two were good, two, well, not so much. Goodness was proportional to size.

Mail arrives on the first step of the flight up from the landlord’s place to mine. Today I was heading out to meet fuego to watch some hokej (rhymes with hockey) when I discovered a stack of stuff waiting for me. On top, two envelopes. Two rejection letters, one from an agent and one from a magazine. Neither came as a surprise, but of course I would never have sent them anything if I didn’t think I had a chance. The magazine is a forcefully independent one-man show with a good reputation. I like the way Brutarian thinks, and when I raise my game, he will be hearing from me again. I can run with those dogs. (My submission had been previously published over at Piker Press, which couldn’t have helped its chances. Brutarian will consider previously published stuff, but not with the same enthusiasm. Or something like that. Although I consider it a paying market, I would not have received any money for this submission.)

A bigger disappointment was the agency. These guys are big time, and they don’t take many new writers, but dang I wanted to be one of the few.

Of course, these folks send out thousands of rejections every year, and they have no time to give me a clue how to make my pitch more attractive to their competitor down the street. Forward, ever forward, is all I can do. Hone the message, sharpen the pitch, and try again. This is not a business for the fragile, as much as we want it to be. (Show us your inner heart, we ask of the artist. Lay bare your soul. Artist complies. Never mind. You suck. People wonder why Van Gogh cut his ear off.)

Next in the mail pile was a package from a Muddled friend. I now have in my paws More Booze Than Blood, by Sean Meagher. He posted here a while back that he would send people his book and I was not slow to take him up on the offer. I haven’t read past the cover yet, but the story is calling to me in a language that I don’t know, but understand. I’ll let you know. Perhaps it was some subtle way with words he showed when he posted here, perhaps it’s just that he paid the postage, perhaps it’s the striking cover, but I’ve got a good feeling about this.

At the bottom of the stack was the birthday box. Cans of green chile, a nice card, and a squirrel. Alas, the squirrel took some damage on his trip across the deep blue sea — the tail, which almost but not quite can be used as a beer holder, was forcefully and brutally separated from his butt. A team of mocrosurgeons is standing by to attempt what before has only appeared in science fiction: a squirrel retail. While they’re at it, they’ll see about beer-sizing the little guy.

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Books ‘n’ Stuff

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How many books do you own?
Maybe 40 or so, only about fifteen here in the Czech Republic. I gave away hundreds of books before heading out. Very few of them will I miss.

What was the last book you bought?
I bought five books at once: Communicative Czech, Winter Warriors by David Gemmell, Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, Women In Love by D. H. Lawrence, and No Saints or Angels by Ivan Klima

The first in the list is a textbook, the second is a fantasy novel with some pretty good characters. It says its number eight in a series but this writer does what I wish more fantasy writers would do: put an entire story between the covers of the book. This is something I’m going to have to deal with soon – I hope.

The next two I got because I had heard that these guys knew how to use language and I haven’t read much that was written in that era. So they’re kind of like school to me. Tess was a pretty good read – talk about your “Life’s a bitch and then you die” story. The language is flowery but not too overdone, and I did become a better writer for having read it. I also learned far more than I wanted to about farming techniques in rural England.

I have been meaning to read something by Lawrence for a long time, and Women in Love was one of his more controversial works, so I chose that one. I haven’t finished it, but I still pick it up from time to time. The language is rambling and repetitious when not contradictory, but what gets me most is that people say and do things that just make no sense to me at all. That the characters are also confused isn’t much consolation to me.

The last one is by a popular Czech writer, and it was fun reading as people visited places that I know know, like the crematorium near where I live, and the big graveyard nearby. I also learned more about recent Czech history, throwing off the communists and dealing with the aftermath. Yes, it’s very Czech. It’s a good read, though.

What was the last book you read?
72 Essays on the Czech language or something like that. I have it in the bathroom.

Name five books that mean a lot to you, and that you’ve read more than three times.

  1. The Monster Within by Jerry Seeger. I’ve read this book many, many many times. I’m reading it again right now. No book means more to me than this one, and I still love to read it. Now if I can get it published…
  2. The Fool’s Progress: An Honest Novel by Edward Abbey. To be honest, I have not read this three times. There’s one part, I know it’s coming, and it hit me so hard the first time I read it, I haven’t been able to get past it again. It’s a damn good book.
  3. The Princess Bride is so much more than the movie there’s just no comparison. Ironically, it starts a little slow, just like the book he is supposedly transcribing. I have read this one out loud more than three times.
  4. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams – need I say more?

I know, I can count. My powers of recall don’t work that way; I’ve got a couple more on the tip of my brain. I’ll add one in a little while when I think of it.

Challenge five people to fill this out on their blog:
Aser, Cheryl, Jerk McSwede, Delia, and um — the people that read this aren’t really a bloggy bunch. Not the ones who leave comments, anyway. Someone else out there, step up! Jerk McSwede, you can just leave a comment with your answer.

Note that if you use the above links to buy any of the books (or anything else, for that matter) I get a kickback. They sell cars over there, you know.

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Call Me Gilligan, Part 1

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I arrive in LA surrounded by crazy cars. Everywhere is someone who wants to kill me in some innocent act of abject stupidity. I need space. I’d be crazy mad but Santa Margarita is with me, leaving her residual joy even as Jack comes crawling back from the place he’s been, shabby and mad, with his dark Word from beyond: “Wow!”

I was early to the boat, and the others weren’t there yet. I drove around the marina area for a while, stopping off at Ralph’s to buy a bunch of gatorade to quench the powerful thirst I had accumulated on the trip north. I sat in the parking lot at the grocery store, sweat and sunscreen combining to make me clammy and shiny as I give my body what it’s thirsty for. Noam Chomsky was on the radio, trying to convince people that causing change requires hard work. I opened a second bottle and spilled electrolytes and glucose down my beard onto my shirt. Then it hit me. I could be in a bar.

Minutes later I was at Edie’s, settling onto a chrome stool with red vinyl upholstery. Plan A, beer, quickly gave way to Plan B, Margarita. They had a nice big one with decent tequila and I was all over it. While I waited for the preparation I opened up the old Kerouac and found my place. I fear his joy, I fear his power even as I covet it. I fear he will swallow me, and I’ll be just another imitator. But even as I fear losing my voice to his I know I am too afraid and too tiny and too foolish to move people like that or to be moved like that. No, my demons are less exuberant and have their own vocabulary if I can find it. The margarita lived up to it’s promise. Yes, miss, I’ll have another.

Now I’m in the car again; the music is loud and I’m joining in, wondering in a joyous wonder whatever became of the singing voice I once thought I had, it’s gone now and good riddance, silly big-head thing that it was. The other drivers want to kill me and I want space. There’ll be space out at sea, I know.

We show up for dinner, the family and me, Gilligan, at a trendy little place filled with thin beautiful people eating cheesecake. I am the madman in my shaggy beard and smudged shirt and smelly feet and I can see the women look me over with distaste as I look them over. My grin is fierce and manic, and for once I am not afraid of these artificial creatures because tonight they are afraid of me in some kind of superior way. Ha! They move about and they wonder who this disheveled prophet is and my jokes are funny tonight and my eye is keen and I’m seeing everything and knowing everything and they orbit and leave me space but I am the madman and my gaze carries knowlege they are not ready to learn.

Back on the boat we all stay up far too late and drink too much beer and talk too loud, our voices echoing over the still water. It is nice out, a little cool and I’m not sleepy and my enthusiasm seems to have infected the others except Pat who proves he is the smartest of us by turning in while it is merely late instead of ridiculous. Finally I have to give up or I’m going to be watching the sunrise, and the next day is going to be a long one for sure. My berth is the forward stateroom; I lie in state with my toes in the pointy bow of the ship. I plug in the laptop, thinking I’d write a little more while the madness is upon me, but I am fooling myself and soon I’m gone.

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The books in my suitcase

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Strunk and White: The Elements of Style
Edward Gorey: The Gashleycrumb Tinies
Franz Kafka: the Metamorphosis, The Penal Colony, and other stories
Stephen King: On Writing
Harvard Lampoon: Bored of the Rings

Left in San Jose:
Sam Kashner: When I was Cool: My Life at the Jack Kerouac School
Jack Kerouac: On the Road

Didn’t mean to leave the Kerouac. Gonna have to get another copy of that one.

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