The ridiculous squalor that was everyday life

His real talent, what people went crazy for, was his knack for writing song lyrics. There was a song about a mechanic who builds a snowbmobile that can go faster than the speed of light. There was one about a grandpapa who had gas. There was song abut a tiger that escapes from le Zoo de Granby to go eat poutine. He had a song about a man who finds a magical cigarette that doesn't end, and he never has to come back from his cigarette break. He made the ridiculous squalor that was everyday life sublime. There was no subject that was beneath Etienne Tremblay.

— from The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, by Heather O'Neill.

I've only just started reading this novel, and this is the first description of the famous Quebec folksinger character. I'm kind of wishing he were real (he's not, though "He’s in a tradition of Robert Charlebois and Paul Piché and those wonderful guys.") so I could really listen to him instead of making up songs based on the ideas of these songs in my head.

End of story

In New York City last month, I treated myself to some shoes. We hadn't set foot in a single bookstore (gasp!), so it's the least I could come away with. But it's only this past week that the Montreal streets were finally entirely snow-free and I could wear them out. So I've been wearing them. They're my new editing shoes.

The brand is Poetic Licence, and this particular model of shoe is called "End of Story." Complete strangers have complimented me on my shoes. They're my best foot forward, my final word, my stamp of approval. My end of story.

The future of knowledge

I'm only on page 51 of Tom McCarthy's Satin Island, and I think it's extraordinary.

5.7 His most famous riff, perhaps, was about knowledge. Not knowledge of anything in particular; just knowledge in and of itself. Who was the last person, he would ask, to enjoy a full command of the intellectual activity of their day? The last individual, I mean? It was, he'd answer, Leibniz. He was on top of it all: physics and chemistry, geology, philosophy, maths, engineering, medicine, theology, aesthetics. Politics too. I mean, the guy was on it. Like some universal joint in the giant Rubik's Cube of culture, he could bring it all together, make the arts and sciences dance to the same tune. He died three hundred years ago. Since Leibniz's time (Peyman would go on), the discipline have separated out again. They're now on totally different pages: each in its own stall, shut off from all the others. Our own era, perhaps more than any other, seems to call out for a single intellect, a universal joint to bring them all together once again — seems to demand, in other words, a Leibniz. Yet there will be no Leibniz 2.0. What there will be is an endless set of migrations: the process. No one individual will conduct this operation; it will be performed collectively, with input from practitioners of a range of crafts, possessors of a range of expertise. Migration, mutation and what I (Peyman affirmed) call "supercession": the ability of each and every practice to surpass itself, break its own boundaries, even to the point of sacrificing its own terms and tenets in the breaching; and, in the no-man's-land between its territory and the next, the blank stretches of the map, those interstitial zones where light, bending and kinking round impossible topographies, produces mirages, fata morganas, apparitions, spectres, to combine in new, fantastic and explosive ways. That, he'd say is the future of knowledge.

I'm reading slowly, fully considering every paragraph, smiling over how these ideas dance. It's meditative, but in a cerebral way, not emotionally. It makes me feel smart.

The devastation of abandoment

The Days of Abandonment, by Elena Ferrante, was an absolutely devastating book. It made me thoroughly miserable and I wallowed in it.

I recommend it for its honesty and its anguish. There is nothing beautiful about it, but it describes in unflinching detail the workings of the mind of an abandoned woman. I know because I am one.

The absurdity of his uttering, "Don't think it's easy for me"!

For thirty-eight-year-old Olga, her fifteen-year marriage dissolved one April afternoon, right after lunch. She spends the summer disintegrating, withering under the imagined gaze of others — the sense that everybody knows, and they judge you for it. She's turned the magnifying glass on herself, searing into her soul, as if to etch the pain there, to feel it more deeply, to make it mean something more than it is.

[On Christmas evening, our eighteenth together, I told him, "I love you," and was greeted with silence. I've spent these three months reading about all manner of marriage gone wrong. In this way I think I've stopped myself from being completely consumed by rage and from committing countless desperate and petty acts of spite.]

Olga has two small children to care for, and a dog. And she totally loses it.

It is an exhausting, unpleasant read.

I was an unpleasant person for days while reading it, full of rage and frustration and confusion and despair. Yet I needed to read it. It was wholly cathartic. I think I'm done now, reading this kind of book, at least for a little while.

Jean Hanff Korelitz in the New York Times:
"Olga's close self-scrutiny and utter lack of resulting self-awareness is particularly striking."

James Woods in The New Yorker:
"It assails bourgeois niceties and domestic proprieties; it rips the skin off the habitual."

I have more Ferrante on deck, but I need to pause first. Readers will be discussing Ferrante's work over brunch at the 17th Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival.

Photography has no language

I was chatting with some colleagues about god knows what, when one fellow said, it's like those people who shop around for a doctor to amputate a perfectly good body part — people do that, you know; it's a condition. And I said, someone should write a novel about that, that would make for some great doctor and patient characters; maybe I should write that novel. And I proceeded to look it up and find that it's called "body integrity identity disorder." Several months later I would discover that David Cronenberg had in fact written that novel; it's called Consumed.

I should've recognized the Cronenbergian appeal of this theme straight away, and he does touch on the issue in Crash and in the short film The Nest, both of which I'd seen. While Consumed is not consumed by this theme, it does flesh it out.

Just how many senses of the word does the title capture?

transitive verb
1 : to do away with completely : destroy
2 a : to spend wastefully : squander ; b : use up
3 a : to eat or drink especially in great quantity ; b : to enjoy avidly : devour
4 : to engage fully : engross
5 : to utilize as a customer

intransitive verb
1 : to waste or burn away : perish
2 : to utilize economic goods

It starts off as an investigation into a murder. Photojournalist Naomi flies off to Paris to delve into the lives of the Arosteguys, famed philosopher couple. But Aristide appears to have fled the country, while Celestine's remains are scattered around their apartment. It appears that parts of her had been prepared, cooked, and eaten.

Naomi's partner Nathan meanwhile is in Eastern Europe photographing the work of a shady doctor who performs operations for the truly desperate. Nathan's dream is to be published in The New Yorker's Annals of Medicine section.

There's a lot of technogeekery in this novel, mostly cameras and lenses, but also hearing aids, 3D printers, and some run-of-the-mill gadgetry.

There's also a peculiarly warped penis. And the sense that everybody is sleeping with everybody else, although they don't; but I guess, you know, the French and the medically perverse, they cast that aura.

Nathan contracts a rare STD and heads to Toronto to talk to the elusive has-been of a doctor after whom the disease was named. Naomi meanwhile follows Aristide's trail to Japan.

"I only smoke Japanese now. I want to become Japanese. I'll never speak French again. Never. They say that Tolstoy learned classical Greek very quickly once he put his mind to it. I'm learning Japanese very quickly. Until then, I speak English or German. For philosophy, at least, you have to speak German. Perhaps I will make Japanese essential for contemporary Western philosophy. If I live long enough."

Naomi was groping. "Photography has no language. Is that why you're so interested in it?"

Cronenberg's expression of journalism puzzles me. Here are these photojournalists following these really complex stories — stories that, in my view, demand more (much more) than pictures to tell them — but for them, the words are an afterthought, easily dashed off, filled in later. It's the picture that makes the story. I can't tell if Cronenberg is saying this is how it is, or how it ought to be. Of all the perversities in this novel, this is the one I can't get past, the one that feels wrong. I guess it's natural for a filmmaker to fetishize the view through the lens; but why then is he writing a novel?

Believe it or not, Naomi's and Nathan's stories do intersect, quite satisfactorily. These characters' narratives are wholly intertwined, even though they barely share any screen time.

Oh, and there's also a North Korean conspiracy, that's involved even in the politicking at Cannes.

I hope Cronenberg writes another book.

Revisiting Ravenscrag

The other week I attended the launch of Alain Farah's Ravenscrag at Drawn & Quarterly (although the term "launch" seems to be used rather loosely by the store, as the book has been available since January).

The conversation with author Alain Farah (left) and his translator, Lazer Lederhendler (right), was moderated by Catherine Leclerc. Interestingly, it's Lederhendler who held the floor for most of the evening, probably because 1. his command of English is superior to that of the other parties, and 2. as translator, he's had to read and interpret the text particularly closely. He could've carried the evening on his own with his insight into the problems of translation.

Lededhendler notes that the novel may seem crazy — or better, "madcap" — but it's not insane. It holds to an internal logic.

The novel in French is titled Pourquoi Bologne, which I would think makes the thing as a whole something other than Montreal-centric, whereas the English takes for its title the name of a city landmark, grounding it very firmly. I can't help but think the title, and the impression it creates, affects the reception of the novel. Is it a different novel in English than it is in French? In fact, Farah occasionally refers to the translation as "Lazer's novel."

What I hadn't considered is how much the schizoid experience of the book is meant to reflect a francophone's experience in English Montreal — I can't tell if I didn't recognize this because I'm still so much an outsider to this city that I can't see some of its essential paradoxes, or that I'm so much of here already that the issues appear commonplace and don't strike me the way they would if I were reading about some foreign place.

The underground geography of the McTavish reservoir, its pipes and tubes, Farah says was inspired by Terry Gilliam.

This novel is not a linear narrative because that's not Farah's experience of the world.

[I had several issues with the event: it started late (about 30 minutes or so, though I'd stopped checking the time); the way chairs were set up severely restricted movement, particularly access to the author (for a subsequent event I attended, someone had the sense to stack chairs to clear floorspace once the formal portion of the event was through); in fact, the author appeared to be at a cocktail party rather than a book-signing (I had every intention of buying a copy of the book for a friend, but I didn't, because it was difficult to interrupt his small talk and more awkward to ask that he bestow the favour of his signature (at the subsequent event, the author sat at a table and there was a clear lineup for signings). Keeping it casual can be cool, but I'd bet it's detrimental to book sales.]

Things I would've liked to ask the author (but didn't, because the question period was cut short because it was weirdly silent and I'd already asked a question, and because I failed to schmooze my way into conversation with him):

• What exactly is retro scifi? Is it a thing your marketing department came up with, just because you mention Philip K. Dick?
• What is the relationship between insanity and time travel? You seem to be deeply influenced by Philip K. Dick; to what extent is the relationship between insanity and time travel in your novel inspired by or modeled after Dick's depictions?
• Although he has a cult following, Dick has never really been accepted by the literary establishment (to the extent even that none of the reviews of your novel I've read appear to recognize his influence): Does that hold true among French readers? (To what extent is genre an English problem?) How do you feel about the genre-ification of literature, that Dick should be ghetto-ized? How would you feel if your book were shelved in SF?

Disillusionment

Mad Men has returned, and it got literary again.

While only one novel was clearly in view, and shown to be actively read — The 42nd Parallel, by John Dos Passos — there's another literary reference straining through Peggy Lee's rendition of "Is That All There Is?" which opens and closes last night's episode. The song's lyrics were inspired by Thomas Mann's short story "Disillusionment."

I zealously fed my magnificent expectations of life with the matter of a thousand books and the works of all the poets. Ah, how I have learned to hate them, those poets who chalked up their large words on all the walls of life — because they had no power to write them on the sky with pencils dipped in Vesuvius! I came to think of every large word as a lie or a mockery.

Ecstatic poets have said that speech is poor: "Ah, how poor are words," so they sing. But no, sir. Speech, it seems to me, is rich, is extravagantly rich compared with the poverty and limitations of life. Pain has its limits: physical pain in unconsciousness and mental in torpor; it is not different with joy. Our human need for communication has found itself a way to create sounds which lie beyond these limits.

Is the fault mine? Is it down my spine alone that certain words can run so as to awaken in me intuitions of sensations which do not exist?

You can read it in its entirety, or listen to it here.

It's not hard to imagine that the story was written with Don Draper in mind. Ennui in extremis.

Nest

David Cronenberg's short film The Nest documents a medical consultation with a woman who wants her left breast removed because she believes it to be full of insects.



I love how it's set in a garage.

I was lucky enough to see The Nest during the Christmas holidays of 2013 at a TIFF exhibition exploring Cronenberg's work.

Cronenberg's novel, Consumed, explores the same subject matter further. It's just one of several weird and typically Cronenbegian narrative threads in the book, but having watched this film gave the novel another dimension — it's become a kind of multimedia experience.

To study myself with precision and cruelty

I spent the warm months of early autmumn sitting on a bench in the rocky garden, writing. In appearance they were notes for a possible book, at least that's what I called them. I wanted to cut myself to pieces — I said to myself — I wanted to study myself with precision and cruelty, recount the evil of these terrible months completely. In reality the thoughts revolved around the question that Carrano had suggested to me: was I like Mario? But what did that mean? That we had chose each other because of affinities and that those affinities had ramified over the years? In what ways did I feel similar to him when I was in love with him? What had I recognized of him in myself, at the beginning of our relationship? How many thoughts, gestures, tones, tastes, sexual habits had he transmitted to me over the years?

In that period I filled pages and pages with questions of this type. Now that Mario had left me, if he no longer loved me, if I in fact no longer loved him, why should I continue to carry in my flesh so many of his attributes? What I had deposited in him had surely been eliminated now by Carla in the secret years of their relationship. But as for me, if all the features that I had assimilated from him had once seemed to be lovable, how, now that they no longer seemed lovable, was I going to tear them out of me? How could I scrape them definitively off of my body, my mind, without finding that I had in the process scraped away myself?

— from The Days of Abandonment, by Elena Ferrante.

The hard part is telling us apart. And what of the ossified bits? How do I scrape him off without marring any bit of my real self? What is my real self, anyway?

Skin deep

"You know," he said, almost dreamily, "I sometimes think that the only things really worth talking about are the things people absolutely refuse to discuss."

"Yes," snapped Isserley, "like why some people are born into a life of lazing around and philosophizing, and others are shoved into a hole and told to fucking get busy."

I read Michel Faber's Under the Skin over a month ago, but I put off writing about it, wanting to see the film adaptation. Now I'm at a loss — they are so completely different, yet also compelling and weird. They're both also nigh impossible to talk about without giving anything away.

The weight, weightiness, of them comes out of the title. We're immediately invited to question: What's under Isserley's skin? What's under Scarlet Johansson's skin? The character in both the novel and the film is somehow off, out of place, other.

The only thing seemingly clear from the outset is that we're dealing with a female predator. In the film this is highly sexualized, because ScarJo; in the novel, Isserley is weird-looking, but men are distracted by her massive breasts, because men. But she's a very good predator; she studies her prey, their habits, and their environment intensely.

The film does a great job of focusing on the predation. The novel goes far beyond female-male relations (not that the film does just that) to cover a lot more territory, a whole other culture, in fact.

Under the Skin is also very much about the relationship between hunter and hunted. What's under the skin of her victims, anyway? What constitutes our humanity?

The thing about vodsels was, people who knew nothing whatsoever about them were apt to misunderstand them terribly. There was always the tendency to anthropomorphize. A vodsel might do something which resembled a human action; it might make a sound analogous with human distress, or make a gesture analogous with human supplication, and that made the ignorant observer jump to conclusions.

In the end, though, vodsels couldn't do any of the things that really defined a human being. They couldn't siuwil, they couldn't mesnishtil, they had no concept of slan. In their brutishness, they'd never evolved to use hunshur; their communities were so rudimentary that hississins did not exist; nor did these creatures seem to see any need for chail, or even chailsinn.

And, when you looked into their glazed little eyes, you could understand why.

If you were looking clearly, that is.

So, that's why it was better that Amlis Vess didn't know that the vodsels had a language.

It's the sort of talk that could turn you vegetarian. The novel might also be read as a warning about the dangers of disturbing an ecosystem ("A few drops of chemical soap into such a vast reservoir of natural purity wouldn't have much effect, surely?"). The problems of overhunting. How economics factors into our moral choices.

Most reviews of the novel give away the story, and that's okay in the sense that that's not really what the book is about. However, I really loved the discovery of the story as the novel unfolded. It changed tack several times; it started off as a thriller, turned scifi, took a romantic twist, and mused on socioeconomic structures, before finally settling into an existential introspection — the problem of otherness and the impossibility of genuine communication.

That's what lying had done to the world. All the lying that people had been doing since the dawn of time, all the lying they were doing still. The price everyone paid for it was the death of trust. It meant that no two humans, however innocent they might be, could ever approach one another like two animals. Civilization!

Reviews (with spoilers)
LitMed
New York Times

Excerpt.

Bookclub, anyone?

If you're in the Montreal area and interested in meeting downtown (in person) every 2 months or so (starting at the end of May) to discuss a book of note (probably fiction), please contact me for more details.

The bookclub I'd been attending quasiregularly for about a year and a half recently had to disband (it was associated with a bookstore, and there weren't the resources to maintain it any longer).

A couple of the readers, along with myself, are interested in continuing the club, but we're looking for fresh reader blood.

The previous club had focused on books published under the NYRB Classics imprint, but had begun to branch out. Selections spanned centuries and cultures.

Future bookclub choices will very much depend on the dynamics of the group, but if your reading tastes at all jive with mine, consider joining us. Email me at ikratynski@gmail.com.

Bug music

With dusk begins to cry
the male of the Waiting-insect; —
I, too, await my beloved,
and, hearing, my longing grows.

— from Kokinshu, by Tsurayuki (~900 AD)

Graeme Revell (once best known for fronting industrial band SPK, now probably more readily recognized for his soundtracks) produced The Insect Musicians in 1987. (I listened to a lot of experimental music in the mid 80s.)

This orchestral wall of sound consists entirely of modulated insect sounds.



I owned and loved that album, and shared it and it was lost. (All praise the Internet, restorer of lost treasures!)

The liner notes summarize Revell's concept and describe the techniques used in transforming insect "noise" into "music."

To me this album signified a world of (alien) beauty at our feet, if only we cared to look, listen.

Insects feature in Consumed, by David Cronenberg, inhabiting the left breast of the woman who as the novel opens is found apparently to have been murdered and cannibalized. The book embraces entomologists and state-of-the-art hearing technology. So this music formed the soundtrack for my weekend reading.

Word neutrality is destabilizing

We were enclosed in Audio Booth 4, basically an audio recording cabinet floating on foam and designed to be sound-neutral. Words spoken in Booth 4 sounded unnaturally deadened, like inanimate objects. The walls of the booth, the floor, the ceiling, none of it added any energy or shape by reflectance or geometry to the sounds that came out of our mouths, and this had a mysterious effect on the meaning and the impact of the words themselves that was hard to calculate. It made me realize that word neutrality in human communication is destabilizing; there is a paper to be written there.

— from Consumed, by David Cronenberg.

Things my 12-year-old says

"Can it be storytime? I'll read you the story. Only, I warn you: it's more descriptive than narrative."

Apparently also she's scouring the Internet for tips on doing homework.

Two kinds of readers

Sometimes I think there are two kinds of readers: readers for whom books are bread and coffee, and readers for whom books are magic mushrooms. The bread-and-coffee people prefer to read about real life (marriage and parenthood, vocations and vacations, adultery and war), while the magic mushroom readers live for the shadow in the corner, the mysterious figure on the train, and the eerie music floating over the darkened lake.

This comes from a review of The Uncanny Reader: Stories from the Shadows, an anthology edited by Marjorie Sandor. The book sounds wonderful — thirty-one stories that cover two centuries and sample the world, including a couple authors I particularly admire, China Miéville and Bruno Schulz. (You can read Sandor's introduction to her anthology here.) I'm very likely to pick up a copy to have on hand in the event of a dark and stormy night.

But it's the dichotomy of book readers that my mind keeps wandering back to. Hands down I'm a magic mushroom kind of reader. But I've noticed a disturbing trend in my reading choices of late — easily half of the year's reading to date is books directly about love gone wrong, marriages gone bad, and almost all of them tangentially so.

It was purely coincidental at first, reading I'd lined up before Christmas, before everything soured. Then it was a subconscious draw. And now I'm realizing the full value of bibliotherapy, of living lives other than mine, of living variations of my life, of examining marriage (all marriages, not just mine) from all angles. Now I'm seeking these books out. It's been somewhat cathartic, it's kept me remarkably steady, but it's becoming obsessive, like picking at a scab.

As much as I love the magic mushrooms, I think sometimes my body and mind are telling me I need bread and coffee, just for a little while, for grounding. (But not too much; I'll have to fly again sometime.)

What kind of reader are you? Are your books bread and coffee, or magic mushrooms?

Like versions of truth, like versions of love

"Is that not always the case? Given any two people in a relationship, one will always love more, the other less. Right?"

I haven't yet figured out how I feel about Hausfrau, by Jill Alexander Essbaum. It's complicated. I don't like Anna. I don't like her at all. I don't feel a bit of sympathy for her. I'm also slightly troubled by the fact that I don't feel for her. I don't thinks she's sad; I think she's stupid. I want to slap her. Yet. There's something compelling about the inner drama Anna creates (and she does create it, all by herself).

The titular housewife is Anna, an American ex-pat married to a Swiss banker, living just outside of Zurich with their three children. Anna is bored or possibly depressed — although to me she seems affectless — so she goes to therapy and has affairs.

A little of this, a little of that
According to some booksellers, Hausfrau is for readers of Claire Messud and Mary Gaitskill. I've never read Gaitskill, but I can see the comparisons to Messud's Woman Upstairs, though I don't quite agree with them. Messud's novel was famously about an unlikeable character, though I liked her quite a bit, certainly more that I like Anna (whom I don't like at all). Messud's character also had my respect, for trying, for engaging, for being an interesting, deep, thoughtful, and honest person. Essbaum's Anna has none of that; she's just boring, and I can't decide if that's a novelistic flaw or if that's the bloody point.

It's "Madame Bovary meets Fifty Shades of Grey." I can't speak to Fifty Shades per se, but I can say Hausfrau offers some steamy scenes. Part of me thinks they're entirely gratuitous, but hell, sex is part of life, why shouldn't those scenes be included? Do these scenes contribute to the development of Anna's character? No, they don't let me know her any better. But again, maybe that's the point. The influence of Madame Bovary, however, is obvious. But Emma has gained my sympathy over the years; Anna, to whom I should be able to relate on some level (marriage, child, mother-in-law, transplanted residence, living in a second language), leaves me cold.

It "recalls Marguerite Duras's The Lover and Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac." I haven't read either, but it seems like a bit of a stretch, particularly as Duras experimented with form. Hausfrau gives us scenes from psychotherapy. Anna is completely inside herself; other people barely register on her.

"For readers of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train." Maybe. I dunno.

And don't forget Anna Karenina. Hausfrau Anna arguably shares more similarities with Tolstoy's Anna than with Flaubert's Emma.

According to Book Riot, "the novel itself feels more like the heir apparent to Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill." But Offill's character is highly sympathetic and observant; the novel is meditative. Anna on the other hand is merely flat.

The rest of it
The language is lovely.

That morning's German lesson left Anna pensive. The German language, like a woman, has moods. On occasion they are conditional, imperative, indicative, subjunctive. Hypothetical, demanding, factual, wishful. Wistful, bossy, of blunted affect, solicitous. Longing, officious, anhedonic, pleading. Anna tried to make a list of every mood she's ever been in but ran out of words before even half of her feelings were named.

The ending is inevitable. There's no other way for it to end. It's easy to see it coming. In principal, it is the perfect ending. In practice, the lead-up is a little over-wrought, and even in all Anna's emotionlessness it's too emotional, somehow out of step with the rest of the novel.

Reviews
The Frisky:
"What I enjoyed the most about the first two-thirds of the novel was that Anna was a fairly ordinary woman with some serious emotional complications, but who wasn’t a mustachioed supervillain or an anti-hero – just a woman with lower-than-average ethics in a life situation that would be genuinely difficult for almost anyone."

The Guardian:
"I liked the fact that Essbaum gives us no sweeteners in the matter of Anna’s character. She is difficult. She is boring. She is narcissistic. She is so very sad."

The Independent:
"That, in the end, is the subversive thing about Anna: not her libido or her secret affairs, but her refusal to feel quite as copiously as women are expected to, her refusal to make herself likeable."

Excerpt.

Make no mistake: everything has a variant. Like versions of truth, like versions of love, there are versions of sleep. The deepest sleep is meant only for children and perfect fools. Everyone else must pay each night her restless due.

Space opera

Solaris, the opera, has just premiered in Paris, music by Dai Fujikura (sung in English), based on the classic science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem.



However, it seems to have been not particularly well received (verdict: boring).

Interestingly, it seems this isn't the first time the story has been set to music. Detlev Glanert's version was staged in Germany in 2012 (and I'd go see that, given the chance).

Being your whole self

The Upside of Your Dark Side: Why Being Your Whole Self — Not Just Your "Good Self — Drives Success and Fulfillment, by Todd Kashdan and Robert Biswas-Diener, is not the sort of book I usually read. I'd call it pop psychology. Its tone was such that I was ever afraid of it veering toward self-help territory, but I think that's more an artefact of how it's marketed than the intent of the actual text.

It was given to me as a gift, because I've had a lot of dark looming up in my life lately, in both my home and work lives.

Its starting point is the American obsession with positive thinking: the right to the pursuit of happiness has been confused with an obligation to be happy, all the time.

I've been obsessed with the notion of happiness since I was in grade 7. Not that I wanted a direct path to it. I just wanted the idea of it defined. (Were we reading Brave New World?) I wanted to establish the difference between thinking you're happy and really being happy. Cuz goddamit I know there's a difference. And real happiness is an elusive, if not altogether imaginary, beast. I've known all my life that it is not possible to live in a state of constant joy. Contentment is another matter. Which is where the problem of definition comes in. In fact, for some 30+ years, I've been a proponent of happiness being just one aspect of living a full life. Which is what this book is about. (Gosh, I was a smart kid.)

So the fact is: people get angry, or sad, or bored, or frustrated, all the time. When we experience physical pain, we tend to take it seriously. But we're generally pretty dismissive of emotional pain and view it simply as wrong, without ever listening to what that pain is telling us about ourselves or our environment.

The upshot: it's OK to feel angry, sad, mean, selfish, whatever, in certain contexts, and it's better for us to acknowledge those feelings, even indulge them, than to mask them because we're supposed to be happy all the time. These "negative" feelings are shown to fuel creativity, heighten awareness, and enhance performance.

But you already knew that, right?

Regarding one study conducted in a workplace setting:

The take-home lesson is simple: do not create a culture based on the assumption that positivity must reign supreme. Instead, create a culture where everyone knows that it's safe to be real, and that depending on the situation it's sometimes better to feel something other than happiness.

I worked for a company some years ago where the gung-ho, go-get-'em, go-go-go all-American attitude just didn't fly with us Canadian counterparts. So I can see how HR departments could learn from this book, to build the right corporate culture for the right skills to flourish.

In addition, the book is full of little insights on sprawling topics, like:

Love is about adopting another person's perspective of the world, and when overvaluing your happiness gets in the way, it leads to unfortunate by-products such as loneliness.

And:

Research suggests that you, like everyone else, think that you are better than other human beings. This so-called better-than-average effect shows that most people believe that they are above average, which, of course, is a mathematical impossibility.[...] The average person lives inside a narcissistic bubble, a self-serving bias that gives most of us the confidence we need to face a complex and uncertain day.

So I don't think I learned anything, but the book is full of interesting research studies, and it's nice to have my intuitive thinking validated. A pleasant-enough way to while away a train ride on a wintry afternoon.

Reviews
Huffington Post
Positive Psychology

Presentation.

Words will change nothing

Those who claim to know her, or know of her, have talked of poems whose syntax and diction twist language into new shapes, forming tiny bright daggers sharp enough to pierce the heart. Others have spoken of a novel so compendious and yet so precise it would change our thinking about the form, the last true revolutionary work, a thing that would turn lives inside out after only its first page. Some have claimed she wrote short stories, brief tales that twist and turn, things that would checkmate Chekhov, carve Carver into pieces. Stories that need but a few brief pages to reconfigure our soul.

The ephemeral, evanescent, scarcely believable career of Sara Zeelen-Levallois shows us, if nothing else, one important, terrible thing: words will change nothing. Write how we may, the arrogant and corrupt will still run the world, people will starve needlessly, your lover will still leave you.

And yet.

The power of writing is one of the greatest things we have, whether it is read or not.

— from "Sara Zeelen-Levallois" in The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure, edited by C.D. Rose.

The hotel library

Yes, my hotel has a library. And there's a fireplace in the library, but not pictured here because there are strangers sitting beside it, and I didn't want to make them uncomfortable.

Weirdly, most of the books are German, with some French and English, but nothing that grabbed me. Still, a great place to sit, read, rest.