The wonders of love

Poor Ella!

'It's wonderful, isn't it,' said Mr Eccles. 'Just to be strolling arm-in-arm like this.'

They were walking briskly now by the lake in the direction of Clarence Gate, whence they were to emerge for their supper into London, whose lights were now seen glittering, and whose buses and trains could be heard roaring, an entirely furious and disparaging welcome to the surface to divers in its dark parks.

So soon as they had started walking Mr Eccles had become a different creature — experiencing an influx of all that cheerful sense of manhood and resilience known to overtake gentlemen who have just been kissing young ladies a great deal and for the first time, and holding her arm and becoming loquacious. Ella, having got cold sitting out all that time, was also glad to be moving, and inclined for this reason to reflect his mood in some measure, however doubtful her inner frame of mind.

'Yes — it is,' she said, not finding it in her heart to damp his spirits, but her heart sank. It sank firstly because his remark, together with some which had preceded it, were all manifesting a growing air of jubilant proprietorship which, in spite of her late tacit agreement, frightened her more and more every moment; and secondly because, if she did sincerely consent, and if walking thus with him was 'wonderful,' as he had assured her it was, then she must have a blind spot about wonder in general, and would never know the wonders of love. For all she felt was a feeling of being no more and no less puzzled and ordinary than she was at any other moment of the day.

'It changes everything, doesn't it,' said Mr Eccles. 'Love.'

— from The Plains of Cement, in Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, by Patrick Hamilton.

Woman's work

We know how Jenny ends up: a prostitute. The tension in her story — her backstory — The Siege of Pleasure, the second volume in the threesome that makes up Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, is in watching her fall and not being able to stop her.

It mattered not to Jenny, who had weighty work on hand — that is not to say weighty in the figurative sense of the term — but work which involved hauling out mighty bedsteads so as to get round and make the bed, dragging out monstrous furniture so as to dust behind it, emptying vast Edwardian basins of their brimming soap-grey lakes, lifting enormous and replenished jugs and lowering them at arm's length slowly lest they smashed the massive crockery, transporting wabbling pails, as heavy as children but not so tractable, down stairs and along passages, and carrying piled trays about in a world wherein practically everything was breakable, and only terrific muscular exertion and an agonized striving after balance could avert the impending crash — in brief, 'woman's work.'

— from The Siege of Pleasure, in Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, by Patrick Hamilton.

"The susceptibility of mankind to poetic precedents"

There are few motives so dangerous as theatricality and no wildness is so futile as deliberate wildness. Bob conceived it his duty to get wildly drunk and do mad things. He had no authentic craving to do so: he merely objectivized himself as an abused and terrible character, and surrendered to the explicit demands of drama. The motivation of popular fiction in behaviour — the susceptibility of mankind to poetic precedents — are subjects which will one day be treated with the gravity they deserve. In deciding to get wildly drunk and do mad things, Bob believed he was achieving something of vague magnificence and import, redeeming and magnifying himself — cutting a figure before himself and the world. The fact that, in deliberately attempting to get wildly drunk and do mad things, he might actually get wildly drunk, and actually do mad things, completely eluded him.

— from The Midnight Bell, in Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, by Patrick Hamilton.

Drunk with Patrick Hamilton

Men! They thrust their hats back on their heads; they put their feet firmly on the rail; they looked you straight in the eye; they beat their palms with their fists, and they swilled largely and cried for more. Their arguments were top-heavy with the swagger of altruism. They appealed passionately to the laws of logic and honesty. Life, just for to-night, was miraculously clarified into simple and dramatic issues. It was the last five minutes of the evening, and they were drunk.

And they were in every phase of drunkenness conceivable. They were talking drunk, and confidential drunk, and laughing drunk, and beautifully drunk, and leering drunk, and secretive drunk, and dignified drunk, and admittedly drunk, and fighting drunk, and even rolling drunk. One gentleman, Bob observed, was patently blind drunk. Only one stage off dead drunk, that is — in which event he would not be able to leave the place unassisted.

And over all this ranting scene Ella, bright and pert and neat and industrious, held her barmaid's sway.

— from The Midnight Bell, in Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, by Patrick Hamilton.

Dalek-building in times of plague

(In which Helena discovers the wondrous glory that is duct tape.)

We'd been suffering a kind of cabin fever that spilled all over our weekend, the 3 of us variously having our sinuses infected (me), throats strepped (Helena, suspected — with possible symptoms, and a memo from the daycare that scarlet fever is making its rounds — but in the end not; but home for a few days all the same), and lungs phlegmed (J-F), although it was better than the more literal cabin fever we'd been anticipating having to endure (in a shack in the woods in the snow with in-laws).

I'd been looking forward to starting book #3 of my Chunkster Challenge — Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace — and a shack in the woods in the snow with in-laws for the weekend seemed just the right time and place for it. The change in weekend plans heralded a change in reading material; the tingling behind my eyes and general heaviness of head put me in no mood for jesting but was rather more suited to an appropriately pseudoephedrine-enhanced reading of The Exquisite, by Laird Hunt, which, I neglected to say, reminded me of both The Street of Crocodiles (Bruno Schulz) and The Dodecahedron (Paul Glennon), in ways I care not to elaborate (because, really, I'm still not thinking all that clearly) beyond noting the problem (for the reader, as well as for the characters) common to all of trying to decipher objective reality from how the subjective mind creates its own narrative of it.

Also, I'm diving back into Patrick Hamilton (Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky), my way of celebrating his upcoming birthday. It's not right that he should sit there so long unread, and it's not right that I should deny myself the pleasure. It's a very different reading experience from, say, The Gold Bug Variations, which I readily proclaim to love (it's as if I've never really loved a book before). Hamilton makes me turn pages, I crave it, every knowing glance and every second guess, even though I know it's going to end badly; Hamilton is a drug.

Helena, still with a low fever, after a single day of feeling tired and resting was no longer acting sick at all. I ran out of energy long before she ran out of suggestions for games I should play with her. Even when she's engaged in solitary activities, she prefers that I'm by her side, colouring my own sheet of paper or drawing my own letters (and not with my nose in a book and a coffee at hand, although some days she's more accepting of this tendency of mine than others). I was tired of the options Helena offered me.

"Why don't you build a Dalek?" I flippantly suggested (having recently read about a contest).

And away she went.



I am proud to say that this Dalek is entirely of her own invention. I offered Helena an array of materials to choose from. I stepped in when she neared tears over trouble affixing its... hmm... appendage, and brought some duct tape to the rescue (ah, duct tape!), after which I stood by and cut pieces according to her specifications. Helena saw fit to dress the Dalek in duct tape almost entirely; she really likes the colour, and it's shiny besides.

(The Dalek Song.)

A second Dalek is in the works, but Helena's interest has waned, which is just as well. There's already a Dalek among the elephants; the last thing I want is a whole army of Daleks in the house when our defenses are down.

Thinking

Thanks to both Mental Multivitamin and So Many Books for nominating me for a thinking blogger award.

While it is a very simple meme, it says quite a lot more than meets the eye. What makes people think?

I've already spent far too much time trying to trace the meme in both directions, backward from me and forward from its source. While it is currently traveling in book blog circles, it seems to have originated among science-oriented blogs — I haven’t yet been able to make those 2 meme ends meet (and would love to see them come full circle).

(The instructions ask me to list 5 blogs that make me think; it's a near impossible task to choose from among the dozens I visit regularly, all of which spark my brain in different ways. I'd like to pay it forward as best as I can and, I hope, introduce readers to places they may be less familiar with; but in the interest of keeping my list meaningful, as well as preventing duplication of those nominated elsewhere, I limit myself to 3.)

Here are my thinking blogger award nominations (listed alphabetically), for blogs that stretch me to think, albeit in vastly different directions:
Collision Detection
Counterbalance
Speed of Life

The horror and the herring

This weekend I finished reading The Exquisite, by Laird Hunt. Trippy. That's pretty much all I can say. Trippy.

Here's a little (not-particularly-trippy) taste:

Mr Kindt loved a good cigar, and he would always, with impeccable courtesy, offer me one. Dutch Masters was the brand he preferred, and he didn't mind if I chuckled about it like it was a joke. In fact, as we have seen, not only did he like for me to laugh about things, he insisted I do so. You have such a very pleasant laugh, it's so rich and hearty, I find it invigorating, he would say. He was just about as quick with a compliment as he was with a cigar. Apparently I had nice manners and nice features and "fine, strong shoulders" and a nice way of holding a plastic-tipped Premium. Generally, if I was smoking alone, I smoked Merits, but in Mr Kindt's company it was cigars. Mr Kindt thought very little indeed of cigarettes, "those miniature albino cigar," "those blatant disease-carrying delivery systems for brand names." There was no reason whatsoever, he said, to suck smoke all the way down into the lungs, which was the custom with cigarettes. The mouth, which held the tongue and the mechanisms of taste, was the appropriate receptacle. Its highly permeable membranes eagerly invited tobacco's active compounds to enter the "inward-leading complex" of blood vessels they played hos to. And of course, he added, cigars tasted much better. I wasn't at all sure about this last point, especially when it came to Dutch Masters, but I didn't argue. I didn't argue either when Mr Kindt would talk, with a funny little smile on his lips, about how pleasant it would be to die, if one had to, by having one's throat annihilated by cancer, or lungs filled with fragrant tar. When one is in the early, enthusiastic throes of a friendship, one lets a great deal slide.

The whole book feels like a David Lynch movie (but only Dune, with its spice-blue eyes, is referenced explicitly). I like the vagueness of the reference to the horrors downtown (9/11), how it helps impart a sense of (and a sense behind) the danse macabre nihilistic decadence that takes hold of this odd assemblage of characters.

The review that made me pick up The Exquisite, followed by an interview.

From China with best wishes

A dedication for Helena, from China Miéville, whose handwriting is eerily like my brother's. Come to think of it, their minds are rather similarly monstered too. I document the inscription here with these background thoughts as evidence to my future self that the cryptic-sounding message is authentic and not my brother's idea of a prank.

More on Un Lun Dun:
My original verdict (so-so; full of unrealized potential) of the book, and my sister's verdict of a reading from the book.
Favourable review.
Interview, lengthy (scroll to bottom), but giving me a fresh appreciation for what Miéville is trying to do with this book.

"What could be simpler?"

"Nothing deserved wonder so much as our capacity to feel it."

I've been bowled over.

The book:
The Gold Bug Variations, by Richard Powers.

The plot:
Summary.

Of further interest:
Richard Powers as part of a panel discussion on the cultural gap between literature and science.

My initial impressions:
Resonance.

The impact:
I am in awe not only of this book and the ideas expressed therein, but of the effect of it's had on me. I love books, I do, but I'm always skeptical of people who readily proclaim favourites, or top 10s — so many books, and so many good ones, how can one choose? Today's favourites, for many, are often forgotten tomorrow. I understand the relative, and embrace it, but only insofar as it's an indicator of the definite. I want certainty. If I say "favourite," I mean forever; I won't say anything if I think I might be wrong.

I roll my eyes at people saying they did not want a book to end. But suddenly, for the first time, I know this feeling; I deliberately dragged out the reading of the Variations because I did not want it to end. I roll my eyes at people saying they hesitate to read more of an author because they fear it cannot live up to the precedent of a beloved book. But suddenly, for the first time, I know this feeling too; for all its accolades, I cannot imagine The Echo Maker affecting me so profoundly.

(This was book 2 of my (6 600+-page books in 6 months) Chunkster Challenge.)

A note on the style:
I found the cadence of the wording odd at first. The omission of articles, definite and indefinite. Which reminds me of science writing. So often those articles are redundant — they're understood and obvious. Doing away with them has the weird effect of being both more concise and precise and more ambiguous at the same time.

An example and point:
"For a brief moment, he achieved a synthesis between scientist's certainty in underlying particulars and the cleric's awe at the unmappable whole."

Also:
Curiously, Glenn Gould is never named by name, but there's no question as to the identity of the pianist whose recording of The Goldberg Variations permeates this book. Curious because there's a big deal made of naming things, classification — the arbitrariness of it, but the rightness of it, the impossibility of it, but the necessity of it. Where all meaning begins.

"A flat-out fascination with the threat, soberly maintaining that the only thing to do when the world begins to end is to stand aside and paint it. Uncover it. Name it."

There's something — something I can't quite articulate — being said about art here — painting (which figures in the book), literature (by extrapolation), but especially music. It's beyond science, beyond knowing, yet it's key to one's ability to know anything else. Indeed, art and love, those inarticulate things, the only things to really mean anything.

The trick to it:
Zooming in close on the trees, scratching the bark under a microscope, drilling deep inside; and zooming out quick for the forest, a macroscopic blur of colour and movement from far overhead. Seeing both views at the same time. It's something I think I do well in work and in life.

In a minute, he recovered. "The trick to listening," he said, lifting me by the hand, "is to hear the pieces speaking to one another. To treat each one as part of an enormous anatomy still carrying the traces of everything that ever worked, seemed beautiful awhile, became too obvious, and had to be replaced. Music can only mean anything through other music. You have to be able to hear in Stockhausen that homage to the second Viennese school, in Schonberg the rearrangement of sweet Uncle Claude. And every new sleeper that Glass welds together gives new breath to that rococo clockmaker Haydn, as if only now, in 1980, can we at last hear what pleasing the Esterhazys is all about."

Some lessons:
"There are really only two careers that might be of any help. One can either be a surgeon or a musician." Which merits a discussion that leaves me tongue-tied.

"...he is struck by how much repetitive maintenance it takes just to exist. Existence is the cycle extraordinaire; everything tangent, constantly spinning just to stay in place." The everyday we try so hard to rise above is our purpose in life, the whole fucking point.

"One cannot step into the same theme twice."

A puzzle:
In sitting down to write this I thumbed through my copy for asterisked passages. Right at the front is something I meant to come back to.

RLS CMW DJP RFP J?O CEP JJN PRG
ZTS MCJ JEH BLM CRR PLC JCM MEP
JNH JDM RBS J?H BJP PJP SCB TLC
KES REP RCP DTH I?H CRB JSB SDG

I assumed it was a coded epigraph, but it seems it's a dedication, "which, according to Powers, remains unsolved but can be broken using a codex found in the final third of the book." Perhaps I'll crack it before I die. Perhaps it's meant for me.

The effect in toto:
I'll spend weeks to come listening to Bach like I've never listened to him before, and slipping in and out of infinite regress, resampling Godel, Escher, Bach. I will read Poe's The Gold Bug.

The Gold Bug Variations moves me the way Wings of Desire moves me (a favourite film). (I don't mean to draw nonexistent parallels here; the only obvious similarities are in their effect on me.)

(Hmm. Todd as an angel? A muse and a catalyst, outside of time. Who finally falls to earth.)

Variations on a theme, my theme.

He sits wedged in the inseam between wall and floor, listening, thinking that he can hear distant song straining the contour of a variation beyond the variation. He's lost it; accumulated stress pushes him into the realm of imaginary acoustics. But the trace is real, waving the air molecules however faintly. Then he figures it: the pianist singing, caught on record, humming his insufficient heart out. Transcribing the notes from printed page to keypress is not enough. Some ineffable ideal is trapped in the sequence, some further Platonic aria trail beyond the literal fingers to express. Sound that can only approximated, petitioned by this compulsory, angelic, off-key, parallel attempt at running articulation, the thirty-third Goldberg.

There's a thematic resonance: a contemplation of the human experience. How characters refer to each other: in Variations, "Friend"; in Wings, "Compañero." How we assign meaning to meaninglessness. How I hear these works speaking to each other. How we are pure potential.

When the child was a child,
It threw a stick like a lance against a tree,
And it quivers there still today.

The sense of interconnectedness. The awe.

For years, for ever, I was skeptical, but I'm coming round: maybe, in the end, just maybe, love really does conquer all. (What could be simpler?)

Nous sommes embarqués...

And the week passed

So, where were we? The kid was home for a couple days. My hands ached and my feet swelled beyond being able to put on my boots, and I slept fitfully, waking with excruciatingly itchy extremities, blah, blah, blah. The week was ssssoooo dreadfully long, and I was tired the way only aches and pains exacerbated by a small child can hurt, and I read, quite possibly the best book I've ever read, and I wept — it made me weep! — so I didn't get much of anything done, blah, blah, blah. But then my sister visited! and we did nothing (much)! There was big snow and 1500 jigsaw puzzle pieces, plus a few of the kid's puzzles, and a solid half dozen bottles of wine and a crappy movie rental. The kid feverish with cold (again), but finally I could make my hands into fists and my shoes fit. We ate well, and we wandered out to get fresh bagels. The kid sang and danced, and my sister laughed and then she went home. I finished reading my book. And here we are. Everything is normal again.

Doctored answers

After 2 weeks of a 4-year-old's questions:
Is there Doctor Who tonight?
Is there Doctor Who tomorrow?
Will we ever see Rose again?
Will we ever see Doctor Who again?
Where'd the daleks go?
What's a "void"?
Remember how the daleks squished that man's head? Why'd they do that?
Who's the girl in the white dress?
Can we watch Doctor Who?

Finally, some answers: CBC will air Series 3 of Doctor Who beginning June 2007. Presumably it will be preceded by "The Runaway Bride." Torchwood will air in the fall.

Peggy in blue

Margaret Atwood is to receive the Grand Prix at the 9th edition of the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, which will be held April 25 to 29, 2007.

The Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix is awarded annually to a writer of international stature and accomplishment as a celebration of a lifetime of literary achievement.

The program for this year's festival will be available April 12.

The 50-year-old cat

Fifty years ago today, one of the great masterpieces of American literature was published: The Cat in the Hat, by Dr Seuss (Theodore Geisel), written in response to the problem of Dick and Jane and "why Johnny can't read" (and specifically, John Hersey's suggestion in a 1954 Life magazine article that Dr Seuss write a reading primer), revolutionized how children learn to read.

Happy birthday, Cat in the Hat!

The sun did not shine
Till the letter carrier came
Bearing a package.
Look! My name!

I sat with Helena.
We sat there, we two.
With a brand new book
We know just what to do.

We looked!
On either side of this big book we sat.
We looked!
And we loved it!
The Annotated Cat!
And we wondered,
"Why, I didn't know that!"

I know it is cold
And the sun is not sunny.
But we can read
This great book that is funny!

Philip Nel introduces and annotates the Cat in The Annotated Cat: Under the Hats of Seuss and His Cats. The original pages are reproduced of both The Cat in the Hat and The Cat in the Hat Comes Back (a great bonus for me, because I've never read it!), often alongside Seuss's original sketches, colour prototype pages, or author's proofs with Seuss's notes. The annotations also incorporate cartoons that influenced or were influenced by the Cat, illustrations from other Seuss works, and frames from the animated Cat.

The book is brimming with anecdotes and historical tidbits, regarding both Seuss (biographical details) and the times he was writing in (for example, statistics regarding the average household and the book's reception internationally).

Dr Seuss on where he gets his ideas:

This is the most asked question of any successful author. Most authors will not disclose their source for fear that other, less successful authors will chisel in on their territory. However, I am willing to take that chance. I get all my ideas in Switzerland near the Forka Pass. There is a little town called Gletch, and two thousand feet up above Gletch there is a smaller hamlet called Uber Gletch. I go there on the fourth of August every summer to get my cuckoo clock repaired. While the cuckoo is in the hospital, I wander around and talk to the people in the streets. They are very strange people, and I get my ideas from them.

This is a be-yoo-tiful book! There's remarkable insight into how a writer works, revises, perfects, as well as into the editorial process as a whole: why the rhymes and rhythms work, how they work in tandem with the layout to compel the reader to turn the page, how pages were combined or broken up to enhance the flow, how the illustrations were tweaked for colour and repetition of line or shape to contribute to emotional effect. Also, the differences between the book and the animated television special (a household favourite) are spelled out, showing how they serve different but complementary interpretations suited to their respective media.

Helena can't read quite yet, but we're working on it!

Tomorrow is Dr Seuss's birthday. Celebrating both the Cat and the good Doctor is Project 236, a (US) nationwide read-aloud of The Cat in the Hat on March 2 at 2:36 (there are only 236 different words in the book).

Send the Cat a birthday card! Random House will donate one children’s book to First Book, an organization that gives books to disadvantaged kids, for every online birthday card received on its website.

Handpuppet backstory

Over the last month, Poilly, Helena's lion puppet with the weird hair, has resumed a position of favour, attending daycare with her regularly and sharing her bed at night. Suddenly he is 3 years old. His mother is Kicia, a regular orange house cat (a toy) with a red bow; she is 5 years old now.

Whenever Helena picks up Poilly to take him anywhere — to daycare, shopping, for a walk — he cries for his mother, doesn't want to leave her, but Helena takes him anyway.

Over breakfast, Helena talks to me about Poilly. "Did you know his father's dead?" Umm, no, I didn't know.

Poilly's father went into the forest one day, and a witch lives there, with a pointy nose, and she took her broom and poked him with it, over and over, till he fell into the street and a car ran over him. And he died.

Slapped cheeks

Sunday. I wake up and can't feel my fingers. This is unusual, I think. The house is cold, and I've always had poor circulation — I can't remember my hands and feet ever not being cold in winter — but this is extreme. I must have coffee, warm up. Nothing to do but start the day. I move to swing my legs over the side of the bed, but my knees are less than cooperative. This is strange, I think. Something's not right.

I have a hard time moving my fingers. I'm walking slow, cuz I hurt. There are things to do around the house, some groceries to pick up, the kid to hang out with. Finding a clinic open on Sunday is more trouble than grinning and bearing it and waiting till morning. I have a hot soak in the middle of the day. I know something's not right.

Monday. I wake up with swollen hands and stiff knees. And stiff elbows and swollen ankles. I get the family out the door and determine to arm myself with a little internet research before hying myself to a clinic.

"Research" (that is, googling symptom key words) doesn't get me beyond rheumatoid arthritis. I'm unable to determine whether one can succumb to the affliction overnight. I'm certain I'm going to die. I will gradually lose all mobility, and one morning later this week I'll wake up petrified, stone-still, dead.

Research into my death grinds to a halt when the phone rings. J-F is bringing Helena home. The daycare called him to pick her up. She's got a bit of a rash. They think it might be la cinquième maladie.

Never heard of it. It couldn't possibly go by that name in English, could it? I google in French and English. There it is. Fifth disease, erythema infectiosum, parvovirus B19, slapped-cheek disease.

A respiratory virus. I scan for symptoms. Low-grade fever, runny nose, fatigue; general flu-like symptoms. I suppose Helena may have it, or she may have a cold or flu. Cheeks that look like they've been slapped — Helena and I are generally red-cheeked all winter.

Then suddenly I see the damning evidence on all sides.

"Adults usually get a more severe case, with fever and painful joints." Adults can develop "joint pain or swelling... The joints most frequently affected are the hands, wrists, and knees." "Self-limited arthritis." "Acute polyarthropathy... usually involving finger joints."

Now I'm certain Helena has it, because I'm certain I have it too.

I call the pediatrician's office. Another doctor at the clinic has walk-in hours that afternoon. We arrive early so that we can wait 2 hours. I made the mistake of grabbing a sudoku book instead of my novel on the way out the house — it's damn near impossible for me to grip a pencil. But after 2 hours, Helena pretty much has the basic premise down and can write numbers in for me. She's bored and impatient, but remarkably sweet and good. She befriends a young toddler whom she helps to toddle.

The daycare will not allow Helena to return without a doctor's note. I'm miffed by the daycare's alarmist attitude, the implied judgement on my negligent mothering. But after 2 hours of sitting and overthinking, I realize they don't need a diagnosis, they just need a doctor's confirmation. They already know that the disease is self-limiting, and that Helena is well enough to participate in usual daycare activities. They already know that Helena's rash is a late stage of the disease, well past infectious. But they do need to advise employees and the parents of all attendees that there's been a confirmed case and that it poses a risk to pregnant women.

The doctor takes one look at Helena's forearms and confirms the diagnosis. While she obliges us with a note for daycare, I fish for information about my own condition, I say I think I have it too. She taps her own cheeks to indicate the bright red splotches across mine and nods slightly. She flexes her own hands, advising, in a word, "Tylenol." You don't need to see a doctor (unless you're pregnant); there's nothing a doctor can do.

I wake up today with the same hands that don't quite work and still-slow knees. This may go on all week, possibly for many weeks. "Unlike rheumatoid arthritis, joint pain worsens over the day, and no joint destruction occurs." Movement doesn't exactly get any easier throughout the day, but after a couple hours I get used to it.

Helena wants desperately to stay home today and I let her, though this is contrary to the advice for me to rest and restrict my activity. Everyday chores previously merely distasteful are now fully painful: unloading the dishwasher (without dropping anything); gripping the scoop to clean the cat litter; gripping heavy, wet laundry to whip it into the dryer; gripping a knife to chop vegetables. (Never mind uncorking a wine bottle.) For some things, I breathe deep and force it: doing up her buttons when she asks for help, cutting up her meat, colouring pictures with her.

I've never known anyone who's been struck by this kind of temporary, severe arthritis. I'm mystified that a virus and a body can come together to yield this kind of result. It's a strange thing, a unique experience I don't quite know what to make of yet. I have a window onto other people's pain-filled lives. It may be a glimpse of my own future, a decade or 2 or more from now.

I've been slapped hard.

Resonance

res·o·nance
n.
1. The quality or condition of being resonant: words that had resonance throughout his life.
2. Richness or significance, especially in evoking an association or strong emotion: "It is home and family that give resonance . . . to life" George Gilder. "Israel, gateway to Mecca, is of course a land of religious resonance and geopolitical significance" James Wolcott.
3. Physics The increase in amplitude of oscillation of an electric or mechanical system exposed to a periodic force whose frequency is equal or very close to the natural undamped frequency of the system.
4. Physics A subatomic particle lasting too short a time to be observed directly. The existence of such particles is usually inferred from a peak in the energy distribution of its decay products.
5. Acoustics Intensification and prolongation of sound, especially of a musical tone, produced by sympathetic vibration.
6. Linguistics Intensification of vocal tones during articulation, as by the air cavities of the mouth and nasal passages.
7. Medicine The sound produced by diagnostic percussion of the normal chest.
8. Chemistry The property of a compound having simultaneously the characteristics of two or more structural forms that differ only in the distribution of electrons. Such compounds are highly stable and cannot be properly represented by a single structural formula.

I'm reading something... important.

It happens occasionally that a book comes along. A book comes along at the right time in the right place. It seems to be happening more frequently these days. Maybe I'm reading better books. Maybe I've become a better reader. Maybe I'm simply paying better attention. Some books come with personal baggage before I ever open them, an overwhelming sense of having a specific import to me as an individual (Middlemarch); some books are a suitcase of global, historical significance, though the world may not know it yet and I can only guess (Snow).

I'm reading Richard Powers' The Gold Bug Variations and I am in love.

It feels important.

From the very first pages I knew I was reading something big. Every page resonates with me, on different levels, for sometimes trivial reasons, essential ones too. It's clear at this point (a couple hundred pages in) that it is important to me personally, but I sense that it's bigger than that.

"And I learn again, in my nerve endings, that information is never the same as knowledge."

"...when I still believed in the potential of democratically available facts..."

"Recognition, learning a thing by heart: life will be nothing after these go."

Even this insignificant scene:

Tooney Blake, dark, mid-height, a youthful forty, is at the piano doing a terrifyingly down-tempo version of "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off." Only he's missed the point of the song: "Potato, potato, tomato, tomato," all pronounced exactly the same.

It resonates, as I recall the very funniest Saturday Night Live bit, with Christopher Walken, that I've ever seen. (Why do I think it's so funny? It's hilarious, missing the point is.)

A coincidence: I turned on the radio last weekend and, for my benefit alone, there was Francis Collins, who headed the Human Genome Project, in interview.

There is a message in this book for me.

Half of what I made out about the twenty-five-year-old scientist was pure projection. I began to feel I had not lived up to my own intellect, that I'd been born too late, had taken a wrong turn, had lost my own chance to turn up the edge of the real, discover something, something hard. This child scientist, desperate with ability, somehow reduced to full-scale adult withdrawal, night shift labor, by something not explained in the literature: here was my own irreversible missed hour.

[...]

But something else motivates the euphoric articles, something more than self-aggrandizement, more than the desire to cap the ancient monument and book passage to Stockholm, that freezing, pristine Valhalla. The compulsion to find the pattern of living translation — the way a simple, self-duplicating string of four letters inscribes an entire living being — is built into every infant who has ever learned a word, put a phrase together, discovered that phonemes might speak.

As the journal evidence accumulated, it sucked me into the craze of crosswords, pull of punch lines, addiction to anagrams, nudge of numerology, suspense of magic squares. I felt the fresh PhD's suspicion that beneath the congenital complexity of human affairs runs a generating formula so simple and elegant that redemption depended on uncovering it. Once lifting the veil and glimpsing the underlying plan, Ressler would never again surrender its attempted recovery. The desire surpassed that for food, sex, even bedtime stories, worth pursuing with convert's zeal, with the singleness of a monastic, a lost substance abuser, a true habitué: the siege of concealed meaning.

Then a reference to the Pythagoreans: "They say that things themselves are Numbers." I've always had a certain fondness for the Pythagoreans.

The search for a starting point begins to resemble that painful process of elimination from freshman year, spent in the university clinic, a knot across my abdomen from having to choose which million disciplines I would exclude myself from forever.

I feel my own knot tighten again.

I remember Mr Veenstra with the crazy accent, grade 9 science, who made you do push-ups if you broke the rules of the lab. He sent me to the principal's office when I refused my sentence, on principle, after I'd baited him, deliberately dawdling while leaving my safety goggles on my desk. I remember the frustration of skipping from chemistry to biology when I still felt gaps in my understanding, and I stayed after class to puzzle out the difference between molecules in animate and inanimate object. "That, Ms Kratynski," — his eyes were on fire, mine were all water — "is the $64,000 question."

On page 88 I find the joke I always used to make, that we need a map, ideally scaled 1:1, only to discover Lewis Carroll had cracked it before me.

Everything resonates.

Science is not about control. That is technology, another urge altogether. The pursuit of living pattern that possessed Ressler has nothing to do with this year's apotheosis of bioengineering. He once remarked that mistaking science for technology deprived the nonscientist of one of the greatest sources of awe, replacing it with diet as filling as Tantalus's fruit. I had only to hear the man talk for fifteen minutes to realize that science had no purpose. The purpose of science, if one must, was the purpose of being alive: not efficiency or mastery, but the revival of appropriate surprise.

There is awe on every page, reminding me of the awe I feel, on good days, in real life, regarding those two most awe-inspiring things: science and music. (There is love, too, but it a mechanism, not the message — the grammar through which all awe is known.) And when I close the book before closing my eyes at night, I am in awe of the pages I've just read.

I find my theory of everything in these pages: "Motion is not forward but concentric."

Ressler asks, "Can you look at a score and tell . . . simply by the pattern of notes, whether the composer has uncovered something correct?"

In the back of my mind hovers the question, is there a novel that is "something correct," mathematically necessary, or obvious.

Coincidentally I'd been listening to Glenn Gould's 1955 Goldberg Variations — the same recording referred to in the text. Maybe it was a subconscious preparation for immersion in this novel. I've been listening to it ever since. Nonstop for weeks now. It's breathtaking.

There is nothing to do except release side one, track one. He touches the needle down on the Goldberg aria. The first sound of the octave, the simplicity of unfolding triad initiates a process that will mutate his insides for life. The transparent tones, surprising his mind in precisely the right state of confusion and readiness, suggest a concealed message of immense importance. But he comes no closer to naming the finger-scrape across the keys. The pleasure of harmony — subtle, statistical sequence of expectation and release — he can as yet only dimly feel. But the first measure announces a plan of heartbreaking proportions. What he fails to learn from these notes tonight will lodge in his lungs until they stop pumping.

I need to know how it all ends.

"You've worked in a lab, you've scribbled in enough notebooks to know better. I tell you, the world in not modulations and desire. It is stuff, pure and simple."

Make 'em laugh

The grown-ups' birthdays in this household tend to go without much celebration in recent years — mine is the day after Helena's, J-F's just a few days before Christmas.

This year for J-F's birthday I bought a DVD. The movie as a whole was not intended as the gift; rather just one specific scene. Helena led him into the living room where a cappuccino and becandled day-old muffin were awaiting him. The movie already cued up, I pressed play, and we watched Donald O'Connor make 'em laugh, make us laugh.

I'd never seen Singin' in the Rain when I was growing up. My mother didn't care for Gene Kelly. If ever the movie was on TV during my childhood, it was passed over, for Bing Crosby or for the news. Of course, I knew the song — everyone knows that song. But it didn't mean anything to me.

It was a few years ago that we stumbled on some television program featuring classic movie moments or dance sequences or some such, and amid the hilarity, J-F made the bold pronouncement (shh, don't tell anyone) that Singin' in the Rain was one of the best movies, and O'Connors' Make 'Em Laugh one of the best scenes, ever. Now that I've seen it for myself, I agree. Even in my dourest moods, the finale of this number never fails to elicit deep and sincere spasms from my belly.

It seemed right this birthday to give the gift of laughter, start the new year on a laughing foot.

What I didn't foresee was the impact of this movie, this scene, on Helena.

From that first viewing on J-F's birthday morning Helena was fascinated. Interestingly, the title number resonates least of all (though it gives her some context, a cultural reference, for the Gene Kelly Muppet Show episode).

But when the mood here is musical she will take a jazz stance and proclaim "gotta dance!"

She sings Good Morning, loudly and clearly when we take the metro, putting smiles on other people's face. I cringe a little at the now less-than-innocent connotations, but I smile too, for reasons they cannot know, for the joy this film and this little girl bring to my household.

She exercises her booming low voice and squeaky high voice. "No, no, no," as she nods, and "yes, yes, yes," shaking her head emphatically. It's a bit she's found good for bringing levity to the yes/no questions I may ask her at trying times.

But it's Make 'Em Laugh that captivates her, that she requests repeatedly. She is perfecting her pinwheel, running circles round her shoulder on the floor. She is learning to rubberize her face. She is examining the possibility of running up the wall.

She's studying the humour, mining it for material.

Make 'em laugh, little girl.

(I started writing this post exactly 2 months ago today when I first noticed a little phenomenon that has since ballooned. I've been struggling all week with getting much of anything done, and for some reason this has been the biggest stumbling block of all. Though it's waited this long already, it's the thing I have to put to paper, to finish. It poses the problem of articulating very particular kinds of ineffable joy — that of one insignificant (in the grand scheme of things) movie scene, how it seems to punctuate the 3 lives intertwined in this household (and did so enthusiastically this last weekend), and that of the child, both in what she experiences and in what she brings to others. How does one write seriously about laughter without the writing itself being comedic, or slapstick? How do you capture laughter without being laughter? This is neither here nor there, really. Simply: I'm blocked. Writer's block, blogger's block. Fortunately, not laugher's block. I've never been one known to make 'em laugh, but beyond my expectations and contrary even to my own inclinations (and to any evidence in the tone you may hear here) this week I'm laughing with the best of 'em.)

The slaves of Patrick Hamilton

David Lodge sings the praises of The Slaves of Solitude, by Patrick Hamilton, calling it one of the very best English novels written about the second world war. (Link via Tom Roper). It's a great introduction to a book I now pronounce (I'm a little slow to commit to such bold statements) as one of my all-time greatest reads.

The book has just been reissued by NYRB Classics. I don't have a copy yet, but Susan does (maybe she can tell us whether this article and Lodge's print introduction to the reissue are one and the same).

The Slaves of Solitude was the first Patrick Hamilton book I read — a serendipitous library find — and it hooked me. You'll be hearing even more about him from me as I work through his two big ones over the next couple months. I intend to read everything of his I can get my hands on.

I'm pleased to learn also that The Gorse Trilogy is set to be reissued in June 2007 (Black Spring Press). Having read the first two parts and being unable to find the third, I'm, well, really excited! I can't wait!

In which my sister attends a reading at my insistence and then tells me about it

That is: author appearance, a report by proxy.

China Miéville wasn't appearing at a bookstore near me, but he was appearing at one (very many miles away from where I live) that my sister frequents (well, has been to), so I told her to go, and for some inexplicable reason she listened to me (she hasn't read any Miéville) and even braved pouring rain to go hear him read from Un Lun Dun and ask on my behalf my now trademark question (although I'm sure nobody but me knows it, about it being my trademark I mean), "So, whatcha readin'?" (although I'm fairly certain my sister ad libbed it), it being at once casual, unpretentious, and sincere and having the potential for if not great insight then at least some pleasant alternatively warm-up or wind-down discussion.

He read chapter 5, and his reading was strong, sensible, and entertaining enough that 1) my sister was actually sucked into buying a copy of the book, even after I'd told her she shouldn't bother cuz it's not very good — (I don't really mean that, China. It's good, I liked it; I just didn't love it, it's like you were holding back, it could've been so much better. Be political! Be scary! The kids can take it!) — which has now been personally inscribed to my daughter, "for when she's ready to turn the iron wheel," and 2) she (my sister) is inspired to finally get 'round to reading something he's written, Perdido Street Station having sat unread on her shelf for a few years already.

He fielded questions for about an hour from a fairly geeky-looking (so says my sister) audience, a lesser turnout than for other DC-area readings my sister has attended, and would not be goaded into trashing either Tolkien (his views are on the record) or Star Trek. While he mocked the accuracy of Amazon and Wikipedia regarding future publications and speculated on the life cycle of rumour, he did not unequivocally deny that he was at work on a novel called Kraken.

Also, apparently Miéville has a sexy laugh.

What China Miéville is currently reading:
The Ideology of the Aesthetic, by Terry Eagleton
Suttree, by Cormac McCarthy
Fire Sale, by Sara Paretsky

Any errors regarding what transpired at China Miéville's reading yesterday evening are likely my own, as my multitasking has on occasion proven to be deficient (and I was trying to load the dishwasher while listening on the phone) and sometimes I infer and extrapolate in accordance with my own subconscious desires and assumptions and am later unable to distinguish this from actual fact; or quite possibly my sister's, in either sloppy note-taking or her inability to read her own writing; or China Miéville's deliberate misinformation.

Un-China

I so wanted to love this book. And I so wish I were 12 — maybe then it'd be a little easier. As it is, I found it very easy to walk away from this book for hours, even days, at a time.

China Miéville wrote Un Lun Dun for young adults. The title comes from the name of a city in an alternate reality, which a couple kids slip into. Un Lun Dun. Un-London.

Miéville in a recent interview describes the book thusly:

It's a classic story of children from our world who find their way into another, odder place. The place is sort of a twisted city. It's a homage to that tradition of books like the Alice books, the Narnia books — cross-fertilised with the urban tradition of books like Michael de Larrabeiti's Borribles.

Un Lun Dun has a decidedly urban feel. The dialogue is modern and slangy (there's a glossary for the benefit of American readers); as an adult reader I find this off-putting — the story loses the sense of fabular timelessness I associate with YA lit — but the tone at least is even and consistent throughout the whole of the novel. The world is littered with clever ideas of characters, but none are fleshed out. The plot is nothing new: youngster trapped in another world in accordance with prophecy must battle a villain before finding her way home.

Miéville talks a lot about breaking the conventions of the fantasy genre, but for some reason didn't see fit to do it here. It is a classic story. The prophecies are flawed, but this is a mere joke, not an overturning of the narrative formula.

(One character spouts out Humpty Dumpty's old line, that words mean whatever he wants them to mean. I love that Deeba argues back.)

The villain is a sentient gaseous cloud: Smog. Smog was apparently previously battled and beaten in London by the Klinneract. Deeba does some research and digs up the Clean Air Act. I half hoped, half dreaded that Miéville might get political, impart on young readers some lesson regarding the environment. But no, just a little joke.

Everything about this book feels like a missed opportunity, a thin sketch. I'm not well versed in young adult literature, so I can't fairly gauge how it measures up against what the kids are reading these days (although I can with certainty say this no Narnia or Hogwarts). I'd been hoping for a scaled-down version of Bas-Lag (I really wouldn't want to take a child there, even if I do let my 4-year-old watch Doctor Who with me), something less monstrous but as richly peopled. This isn't it.

There are moments when the darker, more adult Miéville shines through, with evidence of things for which I love the Bas-Lag books, when describing, for example, architecture:

They were swaying before a huge building. It was like nothing she had ever seen.

It had no straight edges, was all long curving planes stretched like cloth or rubber. In several places it poked into steep cones, and pillars and jags like tree branches jutted from beneath its shimmering, moving surface. It looked like a load of giant tents, all stitched together at crazy random, as big as a stadium. Its entire surface was white, or gray-white, or yellow-white, and it rippled.

"Oh my gosh," whispered Deeba again. "It's a cobweb."

Tons of spider silk had been draped over an enormous irregular framework. It coated it completely, in layers, totally opaque. At its edges, strands of webbing jutted out at angles and anchored to the pavement and surrounding buildings like guyropes.

In one or two places, Deeba could see dark, immobile things smothered in the silk. It was wound around them in shrouds, suspending them in the building's substance.

"That'll be Webminster Abbey, then," said Hemi.

or monsters:

Through the Diss & Rosa's windshield, Deeba saw fingers of weed rise from the murk and stroke the underside of the metal. Deeba put her face close to the glass to watch them, then sat hurriedly back.

"It moved," she said.

The stuff floated around them. If drifted by in little islands. As Deeba watched it, one quivered, and reached out a tendril to grab a passing piece of rubbish. It hauled it in — it was a mouldy fish carcass — and the slimy clot of weed quivered more.

"That's shudderwrack," said Lectern. "Keep you hands out of the water."

But these atmospheric gems are few and far between.

Interestingly, of all the books I've handled recently, Helena is particularly attracted to this one. She loves the jacket design. She found the illustrations within, Miéville's own, to be very funny. So there's something to it, the book having an appeal to a younger crowd. (Helena insisted I start at the beginning with her, not to read, but to count the chapters.)

See Edward Champion's review.

Excerpt.