Notes

Miscellaneous
- Milorad Pavić died this week. Go read Dictionary of the Khazars. It remains one of the most original books I've ever read. The "story" is told via encyclopedia entries, with many of the same entries being reworked in each of the 3 major sections — Christianity, Islam, and Judaism — the mystery being to which of the religions did the Khazar people convert. There was a time when the problem of translation greatly fascinated me, and I worried over whether it would be better to change an entry heading and risk deviating from the very right word in order to preserve the alphabetical order of the original or to change the order of the entries in compliance with the target language but thereby tainting the impact of the proper unfolding of the narrative. In Krakow I came across a Polish version, which I treasure for its binding. I spent some time comparing translations, but I arrived at no conclusions.

- Which quite interesting dead person are you?

- Fabulous video of printing and bookbinding.

- International science fiction this month at Words without Borders. Includes work by Stanisław Lem and about Stanisław Lem. I've scheduled this issue as next week's lunchtime reading.

- The Doctor Who 2009 Christmas Adventure Calendar! Although, sadly, some treats are not available in my area.

Books I haven't said much about
- The Geographer's Library, by Jon Fasman. Don't bother. This review says it all.

- Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn. Weird and wonderful and really touching, provided you have a weird sense of humour and can get past all the freakshow stuff.

- Generosity, by Richard Powers. It's ages since I read this already, and I still don't know what to say about it. Wonderful premise, and worth talking about. But as to the question of happiness, its essence, other recent reads have handled this with more passion and guts (namely The Museum of Innocence, by Orhan Pamuk).

- The Confessions of Max Tivoli, by Andrew Sean Greer. I read this back in the spring and loved it. Very poignant. Much like the movie of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, in plot and mood.

- Platform, Michel Houellebecq. Houellebecq is very provocative and challenges my comfort zone. I quite liked Platform (I read it in March) and found the characters more mature (read: morally acceptable) than in the other couple novels of his I'd read. I think I have more to say on this book yet. I find myself rather hoping that Houellebecq has something new out soon.

Books I plan to read soon
- The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann. Under way; stay tuned.

- The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami. Because one day I was in a bookstore and I felt like buying a book, and I've been meaning for a couple years to look this one up, so I took a look and it just felt right, really right.

- The Glass Room, by Simon Mawer. Review copy.

- The Last Supper, by Paweł Huelle. I'd read about 100 pages when I realized I had no idea what was going on. A little too frenetic for the headspace I've been living in of late. But I'll come back to it in short order.

- The Book of Fathers, by Miklós Vámos. Review copy.

- The Invention of Morel, by Adolfo Bioy Casares. Because it was cited by Roberto Bolaño as a book that marked his life. Plus I had trouble stopping after reading the first paragraph. (You can read the introduction for yourself.)

- Shades of Grey, by Jasper Fforde. Advance reading copy, of the US colorized version (ie, edited for spelling and I know not what else). Can't wait actually. I could use a little levity.

Lem's magnitude

Stanislaw Lem, it turns out, is very funny.

Imaginary Magnitude is a collection of introductions to nonexistent books.

One of my favourite segements is a promotional pamphlet for an encyclopedia that works on finely tuned prognostication, the wanted volume opening to the desired page as the reader stands in front of the shelf. The "extelopedia" predates Douglas Adams' infinite improbability drive by several years and books of J.K. Rowling's devising by a few decades, but it sounds to me like a hybrid of their magic technology.

This program subsequently underwent a thousandfold intensification and Extrapolational adaptation, thanks to which not only can it FORESEE WHAT WILL HAPPEN, if ANYTHING does happen, but also forsee [sic] precisely what will happen if It doesn't happen even a little, i.e., if It doesn't occur at all.

It's over the top, screaming with all its might in that most mysterious of all allegedly successful marketing ploys: Random CAPS!

Naturally, knowing MERELY THE LANGUAGE in which people will be communicating with one another and with machines ten, twenty, or thirty years hence does not mean knowing WHAT THEY WILL THEN most readily and most often be saying. And it is precisely THAT which we shall know, because as a rule people speak FIRST, and think and act LATER. The fundamental defect in all previous attempts at constructing a LINGUISTIC FUTUROLOGY, or PROGNOLINGUA, resulted from a FALSE RATIONALITY of procedure. Scholars have tacitly assumed that people will say ONLY REASONABLE THINGS in the Future and thus will have progressed.

Meanwhile, studies have shown that people LARGELY say SILLY THINGS.

Among the instantaneous updates are those to the price, "which — as you will appreciate, considering the state of the world economy — cannot be prognosticated more than twenty-four minutes beforehand."

The latter half of the book, "Golem XIV," an account of a supercomputer, is a little over my head (particularly in my lately stressed and flu-addled state), but the bonafide introductions, in their wit and interconnectedness, were highly entertaining.

The visceral symphony

Stanislaw Lem, in the introduction to his Imaginary Magnitudes, a collection of fictitious introductions to nonexistent books, covers a lot of ground. A lot.

He speaks to the glut of information and entertainment at our disposal and the need to have this knowledge or art mediated. This necessity is tempered by the recognition that an introduction to any work is often merely the babble of "some authority's sham commitment to a book." Art has lost its authenticity, and we need a new priest-intermediary to find our way back to it, viscerally, naturally. Lem promises to return art/knowledge to the people, to an unmediated purity, while acknowledging the Introduction as a genre of literature in itself.

Lem justifies himself:

[...] I am right to present an Introduction to this short Anthology of Introductions, for I am proposing prefaces that lead nowhere, introductions that go nowhere, and forewords followed by no words at all.

But with each of these initial moves I shall reveal to you an emptiness of a different kind and a different semantic color, changing according to a typical Heidegger spectral line. With enthusiasm, hope, and much to-do I shall open the altar and triptych doors, and announce the inconostasis with its holy gates; I shall kneel on stairs breaking off at the threshold of a void — a void not so much abandoned as one in which nothing has ever been or ever shall be. This gravest possible amusement, this simply tragic amusement, is a parable of our destiny, since there is no device so human, nor such a property and mainstay of humanity, as a full-sounding, responsibility-devoid, utterly soul-absorbing Introduction to Nothingness.

This is the third book of Lem's that I tackle this year. I continue to be drawn to his work even while it's immensely taxing on my poor little brain.

What do I gain from this? According to Lem, "Supreme liberty [...] for eternal enjoyment."

He may be right.

The bottomless ocean

I've been meaning to read Solaris forever.

I saw the Tarkovsky film adaptation at a rep cinema half a lifetime ago. I fell asleep. I insist that this was no comment on the film per se; I was studying hard, and working strange hours. Yet the film made an impression on me, some visuals burned on my retina.

Then there was the remake. Which I had to see, because the premise is brilliant, the idea of a remake intrigued me, and because George Clooney is hot. But I fell asleep.

This year I read Stanislaw Lem for the first time. It blew me away.

And I arrive at Solaris by chance. I didn't plan on it, not yet. I'd meant to wait awhile, acquaint myself with some other of Lem's work. Find a French edition, from which the English was translated; a Polish edition, by which to judge and improve the English result.

As fate would have it, I found Solaris at the end of a shelf of English-language young adult fiction, just off the music listening stations, in the children's section of the Bibliothèque Nationale, where Helena and I spend an evening every three weeks or so, no doubt misshelved on account of its cover (shown). It was waiting for me.

"You poor innocent!"

I looked up with a start. But Snow was not making fun of me. It seemed to me that I was seeing him now for the first time. His face was grey, and the deep lines between cheek and nose were evidence of an unutterable exhaustion: he looked a sick man.

Curiously awed, I asked him:

"Why did you say that?"

"Because it's a tragic story." Seeing that I was upset, he added, hastily: "No, no you still don't understand. Of course it's a terrible burden to carry around, and you must feel like a murderer, but . . . there are worse things."

"Oh, really?"

"Yes, really. And I'm almost glad that you refuse to believe me. Certain events, which have actually happened, are horrible, but what is more horrible still is what hasn't happened, what has never existed."

"What are you saying? I asked, my voice faltering.

He shook his head from side to side.

"A normal man," he said. "What is a normal man? A man who has never committed a disgraceful act? Maybe, but has he never had uncontrollable thoughts? Perhaps he hasn't. But perhaps something, a phantasm, rose up from somewhere within him, ten or thirty years ago, something which he suppressed and then forgot about, which he doesn't fear since he knows he will never allow it to develop and so lead to any action on his part. And now, suddenly, in broad daylight, he comes across this thing . . . this thought, embodied, riveted to him, indestructible. He wonders where he is . . . Do you know where he is?"

"Where?"

"Here," whispered Snow, "on Solaris."

Having now read two of Lem's novels, I can already clearly identify two central themes to his work:

1. The problem of alien-ness, and the ill-reasoned human tendency to anthropomorphize that alien-ness.

2. The problem of human-ness: how can we hope to know anything alien if we do not truly know ourselves?

(What we see is a reflection of what we ourselves project.)

The book is not as philosophical as His Master's Voice, but still very thoughtful. It has a plot. It's short, but it bogs down a bit in the middle, for just a few pages, in describing the physical nature, the geological formations, the molecular structure, of the planet Solaris, which is essentially a sentient ocean, tapping into explorers' consciousnesses to confront them with their own memories, performing its own brand of experiment on the scientists.

The burning question Solaris poses to this reader is one of psychological horror: What dark, suppressed shame of mine would Solaris find to test me with?

**********

Gallery of book covers (select Solaris in the sidebar), from which all movie tie-ins are tastefully omitted.

Plethora of Solaris-related tidbits.

Solaris throws into question my safe-phrase, my mantra, the knowledge that keeps me sane when all else is chaos: "There is water at the bottom of the ocean."

The Master's Voice Project: More quotable Lem

"Although he was a Renaissance homo animatus and homo sciens, he took pleasure in contacts with people whom I would rank among the least interesting, though they present the greatest threat to our species; I mean politicians."

"Nye represented a very real power, and neither his manners nor his love of Husserl made him likable."

"Our ability to adapt and therefore to accept everything is one of our greatest dangers. Creatures that are completely flexible, changeable, can have no fixed morality."

"In another age, another era, he would have been, I am certain, a stern mystic, a builder of systems; in our era made sober by a n overabundance of discoveries, which tore apart like shrapnel every systemic coherence, an era which both accelerated progress as never before and was sick to death of progress, he was only a commentator and an analyst."

"I confess that he made me uneasy, because I do not believe in human perfection, and people who have no quirks, tics, obsessions, the touch of some minor mania, or points on which they turn rabid — I suspect such people of systematic imposture (we judge others by ourselves) or of totally lacking character. Certainly, much depends on the side from which we get to know a man. If, as usually happened to me, I first became acquainted with someone through his work — which in my profession is extremely abstract — and therefore, as it were, from the most spiritual side, the impact of meeting that entirely physical organism, which I had pictured instinctively as a kind of Platonic emanation, was always a shock."

— from His Master's Voice, by Stanislaw Lem.

This little gem of a book (just under 200 pages) gripped me from the start. I've quoted from it extensively, previously as well as above; Lem makes sweeping yet pithy statements on both the nature of Man and the natures of specific men.

The observations become wordier as the book progresses and the thoughts are more complex, constantly moving further away from black and white and the knowable.

Thus the means of civilizations replace its ends, and human conveniences substitute for human values. The rule whereby corks in bottles give way to metal caps, and metal caps to little plastic lids that snap on and off, is innocent enough' it is a series of improvements to make it easier for us to open containers of liquid. But the same rule, when applied to the perfecting of the human brain, becomes sheer madness; every conflict, every difficult problem is compared to a stubborn cork that one should discard and replace with an appropriate labor-saving device. Baloyne named the Project 'His Mater's Voice,' because the motto is ambiguous: to which master are we to listen, the one from the stars or the one in Washington? The truth is, this is Operation Squeeze — the squeeze being not on our poor brains but on the cosmic message, and God help the powerful and their servants if it succeeds.

Lem attacks the science fiction establishment:

One day I found him amid large packages from which spilled attractive, glossy paperbacks with mythical covers. He had tried to use, as a "generator of ideas" — for we were running out of them — those works of fantastic literature, that popular genre (especially in the States), called, by a persistent misconception, "science fiction." He had not read such books before; he was annoyed — indignant, even — expecting variety, finding monotony. "They have everything except fantasy," he said. Indeed, a mistake. The authors of these pseudo-scientific fairy tales supply the public with what it wants: truisms, clichés, stereotypes, all sufficiently costumed and made "wonderful" so that the reader may sink into a safe state of surprise and at the same time not be jostled out of his philosophy of life. If there is progress in a culture, the progress is above all conceptual, but literature, the science-fiction variety in particular, has nothing to do with that.

And he talks about the politics of the Cold War.

For all the questions it poses regarding first contact, alien societies, and the paradigms through which we attribute such concepts as intelligence, civilization, communication, progress — nothing much happens in this book — it's mostly an exploration of humankind itself, here and now, for it's only through others that we can come to know ourselves.

It ends like this:

I was never able to conquer the distance between persons. An animal is fixed to its here-and-now by the senses, but man manages to detach himself, to remember, to sympathize with others, to visualize their states of mind and feelings: this, fortunately, is not true. In such attempts at pseudo merging and transferral we are only able, imperfectly, darkly, to visualize ourselves. What would happen to us if we could truly sympathize with others, feel with them, suffer for them? The fact that human anguish, fear, and suffering melt away with the death of the individual, that nothing remains of the ascents, the declines, the orgasms, and agonies, is a praiseworthy gift of evolution, which made us like the animals. If from every unfortunate, from every victim, there remained even a single atom of his feelings, if thus grew the inheritance of the generations, if even a spark could pass from man to man, the world would be full of raw, bowel-torn howling.

Which a brings a tear to my eye. Because no matter what we find out there, we are alone.

Quotable Lem

"A specialist is a barbarian whose ignorance is not well-rounded."

"Evolution is, as an engineer, an opportunist, not a perfectionist."

"The satisfaction with which you parade your proof of the lottery origin of human nature is not pure. It is, besides the joy of knowledge, a pleasure in befouling that which others consider lovely and hold dear."

"I could respect philosophers only as people driven by curiosity, never as propounders of truth."

— from His Master's Voice, by Stanislaw Lem.

The Master's Voice Project: Reading Lem

Holy crap!

Have you read Lem?!

Thus far, I've read 18 pages of His Master's Voice, by Stanislaw Lem, written in 1968, consisting of Editor's Note and Preface, and I'm blown away. This front matter is in fact part of Lem's novel proper, written by a fictitious editor (the note) and compiled from unfinished scraps (preface) by the genius mathematician diarist whose quasi-scholarly chronicle of an investigation comprises the main story. In just a few short pages we go through postmodern metafiction and back.

The adventure itself, Peter Hogarth summarizes, "boils down to this: humanity came upon a thing that beings belonging to another race had sent out into the darkness of the stars." And it would bear poison fruit.

I feel I owe it to myself, to Lem, and to my Polish heritage to give his work a careful reading. It will be slow going. It is dense with Idea.

Every single paragraph could yield essays of great thought: the morality of science, that art and science and their criticism hold to different standards, psychoanalysis of the physicist, ego, the problem of subjectivity, good and evil and the "Manichean embrace," the absurdity of determinism, the laughter of betrayal, the mathematics of everything, the imperfection of humanity, the cracks in the foundation. To name a few. Holy crap. I mean: wow.

With sufficient imagination, a man could write a whole series of versions of his life; it would form a union of sets in which the facts would be the only elements in common. People, even intelligent people, who are young, and therefore inexperienced and naive, see only cynicism in such a possibility. They are mistaken, because the problem is not moral but cognitive. The number of metaphysical beliefs is no greater or less than the number of different beliefs a man may entertain on the subject of himself — sequentially, at various periods of his life, and occasionally even at the same time.

I keep returning to this paragraph (above), I think because I'm in a state of metamorphosis myself, and, having overcome the cynicism of youth, am embarking on rewriting my life from a different standpoint, to discern what is its fact and what possible stories it could tell.

Each of us is, from childhood, fastened to some publicly allowed piece of himself, the part that was selected and schooled, and that has gained the consensus omnium; and now he cultivates that fragment, polishes it, perfects it, breathes on it alone, that it may develop as well as possible; and each of us, being a part, pretends to be a whole — like a stump that claims it is a limb.

(I want to cultivate my other fragments.)

Right book, right time. I am ready to be swept away.

An abundance of riches

Received last week, a box, a long time coming. Weeks went into considering what should go into it, weeks more into waiting.

Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens. An audio CD, wherein the story is read by Hugh Laurie. When I opened the box and pulled this one out, I was devastated to see that it's abridged. I immediately searched out my original order — there must be some mistake; I clearly remember investigating this edition and never in a million years would I have opted for abridged. But clearly I did; I am unable to duplicate my research efforts — nowhere is it shown to be a 15-hour recording (and surely not abridged) except in my imagination, and everywhere labeled as the product I received. I only hope my frustration with abridgements is offset by having Hugh Laurie read this one to me. Although, currently Hugh Laurie succeeds only in reminding me of work, since at our New York meetings I met the company's chief medical director, who has cultivated and completely mastered a House-like persona — the look, the mannerisms, the gruffness. Also, this is my first audio book, not counting various radio-broadcast readings and in particular The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio series, but I look forward to loading it onto the MP3 player — a technology I own but haven't really got a feel for — and forming a new habit, on those days when the metro is too crowded to open a physical book. I don't know how great my expectations are.

Captain Pamphile, by Alexandre Dumas. Because it's Dumas! Père Pamphile ran the establishment where Edmond Dantès celebrated his betrothal. I assume it to be the same Pamphile and this the book of his earlier adventures.

Ice, by Anna Kavan. On my list since I read Doris Lessing's endorsement of this phantasmagoria.

His Master's Voice, Stanislaw Lem. A project I'd like to undertake is to read Lem's opus. This on the basis of having read no Lem ever. My secret ambition, given enough drive, time, and smarts (or at least dictionaries), is to translate Solaris directly from Polish into English (the only English translation available came via French, and this is shameful), or set up a communal wiki-type effort to do so. But I'm thinking I should actually read some Lem first and see if I have an affinity for it before embarking on a project beyond my abilities.

The Sinbad Collection. Because it's Sinbad! Amazingly, the special effects are not nearly so laughable as I expected them to be. And with a 5-year-old at your side, the adventures are pure magic, again.