Here's a great octopus of a poem I discovered this week:
Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy
I’m reviewing a left ventriculography
from a man with chest pain, MI ruled out,
his wife dead for a post-crash hour.
The scan shows his cardiac apex
bulging with each beat, shaped
like a takotsubo, an octopus trap
a Japanese cardiologist recalled
from his childhood fishing village,
the scan just another broken heart’s
beaten down story of futility and resilience.
And I will say, “I am sorry for your loss,”
explain the image, reassure him
his heart muscle will recover in a week,
all the time wishing I could hug him
with eight strong arms instead of two.
Week 1 was a lot of poetry, and the instructors' taste in poetry is rather old and very English, quite unlike my preferred variety. Poetry as stress management, as a means to access stillness. Slowing down.
Some great video interviews, including with Ben Okri, who made a great observation about how we reach for old favourites in times of emotional need — it's not just a comfort blanket, it's the way we know how to access an interior life.
Week 2 covered that classic mental illness, heartbreak (hence the poem above). And Jane Austen (ugh).
We left off with the question: Can literature be harmful?
(Of course! It can send people to prison, incite revolution. It can inspire wives to leave their husbands. They had to stage an intervention for Don Quixote.)
As the old Narcons put it: "There is not space in the universe to tell the universe to the universe. Therein lies the peculiar beauty and sadness of stories: to tell it all without all at all."
The Familiar, Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May, by Mark Z. Danielewski. Yeah. I don't know how to talk about this book. I don't even know what this book is about.
I can tell you:
This book is beautiful as an object.
The experience of reading this book is somewhat otherworldly.
I fucking love this book.
I wish there were more books like this in the world.
Book as object
This book is heavy. It's printed on art-catalogue-quality glossy paper, 880 pages of it. The binding is such (with pink thread) that if you open the book to any page, it will lay open.
There are full-colour plates between chapters, with epigraphs quoting the likes of Emily Dickinson, Lady Gaga, and Norm Schryer, or featuring lines from movies like Moonrise Kingdom, Blade Runner, and Chinatown.
The top corners are dipped in colour, each chapter colour-coded according to the character perspective (of which there are 9). The beginning and end of each chapter also include a timestamp, place, and date to help orient the reader.
Each chapter picks up at the second the previous one left off — the story covers 08:03:05 to 23:32:09 on May 10, 2014. It spans Los Angeles, Singapore, and towns in Texas and Mexico.
Each character perspective also has its own font (these are detailed in the credits). The text includes Russian, Chinese, and Arabic script, and lines in a few other languages.
There is a design element along the centre seam, which varies from character to character. These are fractal-like, and many forum pages are devoted to theorizing about them: they likely indicate static or frequency, functioning as a narrative ECG.
There is a lot of white space. Some pages have just a single word. On some pages, the text seems to fall away. One chapter has extremely wide margins; the text is focused in a tight block. In another chapter, the text wraps around a circular whitespace; if these pages were flippable, the orb might appear to move across the page.
On other pages, text scatters and runs sideways. This happens consistently with one character, indicating a cognitive break, or sensory overload, or the onset of one of her seizures.
So none of these design elements is arbitrary. Form reflects content.
Pages 563-578 are whiter than white, blank of many of the elements mentioned above. They are distinct from the creamy pages of the rest of the story. These are the pages of a Narrative Construct, or Narcon for short.
Book as story
This is the first volume of a planned 27-volume series. I've heard this book described as the story of a 12-year-old girl who finds a kitten. That's mostly accurate. Even though for the first several hundred pages, she's on her way to pick up a dog.
Xanther has her own thread, and her mother and stepfather each have one too, so it's easy to feel that the story centres on her. As for the other character threads, I have no idea what they have to do with anything.
There was this moment in writing when I realized that every character was in the rain. If Kubrick was the patron saint of House of Leaves, Akira Kurasawa was sort of the patron saint of The Familiar.
The Narcon chapter helps explain things. It describes some of the formulas used to create narrative and develop character, and defines its parameters. It is self-aware but only so far as it's been programmed to be. Well, this chapter may or may not explain things.
Book as experience
This is a puzzle of a book. I love puzzles.
The discovery of all those elements noted above is a pure joy. It makes this a very visual and tactile read.
The Familiar is also full of nested parentheticals, so reading is a bit like diagramming sentences, but on a more psychosemantic level than a mere grammatical one.
Danielewski has spoken about how The Familiar is conceptualized like a ("quality," modern) TV series, like The Wire or Mad Men, in how it develops character over long-form narrative. The way it shifts character focus, the way individual character stories intersect; how small events play into a season-long story arc.
This volume includes season previews (which don't (yet) appear to be linked to the novel proper), and pages of credits at the end.
It's highly conducive to binge reading. Just one more chapter.
The formatting helps pull the reader along. It feels a little like a graphic novel in this way, like where text spans frames and physically leads you where you're supposed to go.
If the text of this novel were conventionally laid out, it would be a standard 300-page novel. I believe I read it at a slightly faster rate than my usual, because the design factors were so compelling. The only hindrance was the weight, making it a bitch to commute with, which led me to plan my reading time a little more carefully.
The future of publishing
As soon as I finished reading volume 1, I rushed out to buy volume 2. I have a couple other things to read first, but I needed to ensure that I have it, for whenever I'm ready. I need to do a little catch-up, but I expect I'll be lined up to get volume 4 the day it's released.
It would be easy to dismiss this book as gimmicky if it weren't so goddamn beautiful and narratively compelling. It must be very expensive to produce; someone must have a lot of faith in this project.
I've showed off this book to a lot of people. This book is coveted. It has been fondled.
What if publishers made books beautiful? Good book design can be more than just a pretty cover. It's the paper, it's judicious use of colour, it's white space (white space is so underrated).
So 27 volumes of 800 pages may be a bit ambitious. Books don't have to be oversized to capture attention. But there are shorter stories. There are short stories, for example. Many texts could lend themselves not just to illustration but to design-sensitive interpretation. Or serialization. Graphic novels do this to a degree, but as mainstream as they are, they're not for everybody.
I happen to love ebooks, and in general I believe that the content of a book is more important than its form(at). But there is a market for beautiful books. People appreciate fine detail.
Make people want to turn pages.
One thing I admire about The Familiar is that it never becomes a graphic novel, can never be a television show. It does not resort to incorporating artefacts or referring to complementary online material; there are no fussy envelopes or reproduced postcards; there is no CD included. This is not amultimedia production, but it is fully immersive.
It's stretching our idea of a novel, but remains contained, remains very definitely a book.
"Haven't you ever noticed, Mr. Glebsky, how much more interesting the unknown is than the known? The unknown makes us think — it makes our blood run a little quicker and gives rise to various delightful trains of thought. It beckons, it promises. It's like a fire flickering in the depths of the night. But as soon as the unknown becomes known, it's just as flat, gray and uninteresting as everything else."
Another strange little book from the Strugatsky brothers: The Dead Mountaineer's Inn. All the books of theirs I've read so far are completely different from one another. You never know what you're going to get.
For the most part, this is a detective novel. Unexplained goings-on in an isolated setting, hints of a ghost, a petty theft, and a police detective on holiday casually investigating these things. Then there's a dead body.
But I thought Boris and Arkady Strugatsky wrote sci-fi. Maybe there's a sci-fi element that picks up on the unidentified flying objects alluded to in the opening pages.
And there's the fact that this book is pretty funny. In a Shot-in-the-Dark ridiculous kind of way, only our investigator is more of a Columbo than a Clouseau.
I looked and I snooped. I clambered around in the basement, peeked into the shower, examined the garage, the boiler room, the generator room — I even took a look at the underground oil tank. Nothing. Naturally, I hadn't expected to discover anything, that would have been too simple, but my damned bureaucratic integrity wouldn't let me leave any stone unturned. Twenty years of impeccable service are twenty years of impeccable service; anyway, it's always better to look like a scrupulous blockhead rather the the slapdash man of talent in the eyes of one's superiors, not to mention subordinates. So I groped, crawled, wallowed, breathing in dust and trash, pitying myself and cursing my stupid fate.
When I made my way out of the underground tanks, upset and filthy, it was already dawn. The pale moon was leaning to the west. The huge grey cliffs were covered in a purple mist. And what fresh, sweet, frosty air had filled the valley! Damn it all!...
I would read whole series featuring Inspector Peter Glebsky.
His stay at the inn is peopled by a bunch of weirdos, and I'd happily read the novels (that don't exist) that tell their back stories, in particular that of the famous physicist, who's unbeatable at pool and literally climbs the walls.
(One "comedic" element gave me pause. It seems nobody can tell whether one particular teenage character is a boy or girl, and it's played for laughs ad nauseam, our intrepid detective performing awkward linguistic gymnastics to avoid wrongly gendering the youth. And that's just, I dunno — is that funny? This novel was published in 1970; a product of its times, maybe its humour doesn't play as well today. Or maybe it's just me. But I recall reading that the Strugatsky brothers don't write women well, if they bother at all; that they are misogynistic, both in real life and in their fiction. Which colours the humour somewhat; I can't help but feel mean-spiritedness in this circumstance more than comedic ambiguity. But what do I know? Maybe it's funny.)
Everything is mostly resolved in the end. It's not exactly straightforward, though; in fact, it's outrageously over the top, in the best possible way.
There are thoughts of freedom and imminent escape. I could throw away almost everything, she thinks, and begin all over again.
Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel, begins with a production of King Lear; the lead seemingly has a heart attack and dies on stage. Meanwhile there's a flu outbreak across the city. The pandemic ultimately wipes out most of the human population. Traffic grinds to a halt and the lights go out. This is the story of what happens 20 years later. This is the story of what survives.
Despite expecting to dislike this book, I really enjoyed it. While reading it, I talked about it all the time, recommended it to everyone I knew. A week on, however, I'm pretty hazy on the details, so I'm not convinced of its staying power. But I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone looking for a good apocalypse story.
For all its subject matter, it is a gentle, quiet book. And Mandel has an optimistic view of humanity. Senselessness is limited. Her survivors mostly choose civility. They have a sense of wonder and respect toward the accomplishments of the past. The wandering troupe of performers, the Symphony, has as its motto, "Survival is insufficient." They preserve Shakespeare. So while survivors may not be overly concerned with restoring electricity, they cultivate grace and patience, a certitude that they will regain all of any relevance that had been lost.
"Station Eleven" refers to a space station named for Dr Eleven, who features in a comic book created pre-apocalypse by the first wife of the actor who played Lear (Arthur). Although the space station is the last outpost of humanity and under threat, it is also a safe haven, in particular for its author — she retreats from her marriage into its creation. Of course, it's a metaphor for the burgeoning community of survivors the Symphony finally reaches. It is a utopia, amid dystopian circumstances.
All the characters in Station Eleven are linked to Arthur. I almost wonder if this book couldn't be read metaphorically as a judgement of him. The plague was his doing, his egotism. I see him dying as Lear, seeing his past flash across his consciousness and the extrapolation of its consequences on everyone whose life he touched. They are all stronger for having survived him. Arthur took Miranda for granted, but she threw that life away, began again, and created a Station Eleven. He feels remorse and is redeemed.
Here's a passage that struck me for reasons quite apart from the story at hand:
Viola had a harrowing story about riding a bicycle west out of the burnt-out ruins of a Connecticut suburb, aged fifteen, harbouring vague notions of California but set upon by passersby long before she got there, grievously harmed, joining up with other half-feral teenagers in a marauding gang and then slipping away from them, walking alone for a hundred miles, whispering French to herself because all the horror in her life had transpired in English and she thought switching languages might save her, wandering into a town through which the Symphony passed five years later.
It's a rainy day in Montreal and I'm glad to be reading this. This book is L.A., and here's a bit of noir amid the chaos.
Özgür should get out of the rain. He doesn't even have an umbrella. Balascoe sure as hell isn't sharing his. Men a lot younger than him, soaked through like this, can get horrible things in their lungs and die on a respirator days later. But Oz loves rain. Almost as much as he loves this city.
Oz has lived and worked her streets for over twenty-seven years. And one thing stays true: he never gets sick of the way she rises up at dawn, the way she grows smokier come dusk, and the way during a big storm like this she falls down and her mascara runs.
"Do not apply gendered language to urban zones," Elaine warns whenever Oz acts like some sailor talking about his ship, letting slip a feminine reference to this place where they both live. He can't say she's wrong. After all, what kind of woman contains this scene?
Because if this was mascara it was red. A seep of blood still washed over the sidewalk. The Korean woman still agape at a sky streaking indifferently down upon her.
— from The Familiar, Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May, by Mark Z. Danielewski.
It's hard to say what it's about just yet. I believe the novel covers one rainy day, and I've been given to understand that it's about a girl who finds a kitten. But on page 267 at 12:33 that day, the family is planning on bringing home a dog.
In many ways it brings to mind Infinite Jest. The many characters playing out in separate chapters in different registers. I'm feeling parallels between Xanther and Hal, Astair and Avril. Xanther's considering whether a particular book can trigger a seizure, or reverse its effects. It feels like an addictive entertainment. If Wallace is footnotes, then Danielewski is all nested parentheticals.
It's a commitment, to carry this behemoth with me on my commute, but I have fallen deep into this book.
Her parents were too middle-aged and dull to suffer accidents or die before their time, like mountaineers or poets.
For some reason I was under the impression that this book was a comedy. It is not a comedy. It is excruciatingly beautiful and filled with great sadness.
I read Jim Crace's Being Dead in one sitting. It starts with two middle-aged zoologists, husband and wife, Joseph and Celice, on a beach, undressed and very dead.
When their daughter, Syl, arrives at their house days later, she learns that Celice has been reading Calvino's Antonyms. (I can't find any trace of such a book. Anyone?) One strand of the novella details the process of death and the decay of the bodies, over the 6 days till they were found, and this strikes me as a very Calvino-esque element, in a t-zero kind of way, so minutely microcosmically physical as to become cosmically metaphysical, the flesh of a life lived falling away.
So this decomposition is interwoven with the story of their meeting; it's quite musical really, the backwards telling and the forward, their coming together and the falling apart, and then you start to hear the hum, the drone of their current life. The murder itself is percussive, and so is the daughter's anger and resentment.
It's sad how much the daughter is like the mother, but doesn't know it, and will never know it.
How should the dying spend their time when life's short portion shrinks with every waking day? She'd walked to see mortality that Sunday afternoon and found her parents irredeemable. Her gene suppliers had closed shop. Their daughter was the next in line. She could not duck out of the queue. So she should not waste her time in this black universe. The world's small, breathing denizens, its quaking congregations and its stargazers, were fools to sacrifice the flaring briefness of their lives in hopes of paradise or fears of hell. No one transcends. There is no future and no past. There is no remedy for death — or birth — except to hug the spaces in between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall.
It's sad that Joseph and Celice spent their lives together, but not really together, and that they don't love each other the way they should. It's kind of sad that they ended up together, they were good for each other for a while, for that summer, but a forever should not have grown out of it. It's so sad they should die like this.
They say that hearing is the last of our proficiencies to die, that corpses hear the rustling of bed sheets being pulled across their faces, the early weeping and the window being closed, the footsteps on the wooden stairs, the ruffian departing, the doctor's scratchy pen. This is why our generation talks so quietly in the dying room. And that is why the quiverings of old were not a waste. The body hears the widow and the child, the rattle of the chimney-pot, the quiver sticks, the life unravelled backwards through the night.
(For the record, I loved Crace's The Pesthouse. On the basis of that book, I have a couple other of his works lined up on my shelf. On the basis of Being Dead, I'll be getting to them sooner rather than later.)
"Making logical assumptions and coming to a conclusion will not help you get your memory back. No, I just want to stimulate your brain. The aim of the treatment is for your memories to come back to you — naturally.
"It seems rather tedious."
"There's no other way to do this. Let's imagine that I was able to tell you what sort of person you were, what your history was, and the sort of lifestyle you led. You'd probably believe me. You'd know your name, your address, and your age. That sort of thing. But that wouldn't mean you'd have your memory back. You'd only know those particular facts — you wouldn't have remembered them. You don't need to know what actually happened in this crime for the treatment to be effective. Don't think about it that way. Your job is to remember, and that's what you need to concentrate on."
I wanted to tell him not to mess with me. I didn't want to be manipulated. The doctors and the treatment specialist must know that people with amnesia feel this way. They wanted me to remember, but I was terrified of the prospect. I trembled in fear imagining what I might see when I was able to see into my past. I wanted to run away and hide. I didn't want my memory back.
I didn't have any choice, though. We patients had no say in our treatment.
Labyrinth, by Yoshinori Shimizu, was an unexpectedly engrossing read. I came cross it quite by chance, and thought, why not? I've liked a few Japanese mysteries in the past, it's been a while since I read anything of that sort, and this novella was short enough that I figured I had nothing to lose. I did, in fact, lose a little bit of sleep over it, both staying up late to read but also puzzling over some of the novel's intentions and implications.
The first mystery posed by the novel is that of its narrator. Who is the patient? Further, what is the nature of this treatment and why must it be undergone? Who is the therapist?
The patient, as part of the treatment, is made to read various accounts of a murder, including the official police record, some newspaper articles, interviews, and a novelistic treatment of the crime.
The crime itself is a bit gruesome, but the facts of it, including the identity of the murderer, are established early on. A young professional woman is found (by her boyfriend) dead in her apartment, her genitals removed (and later found to have been preserved by the murderer). The murderer later explains that this was not a sexual act, but one of ultimate love, which he quite confuses with ownership and control. This bit of Manamis's flesh represented the core of her, of her being a woman and why he loved her, and now he could own her, love her, forever.
The real mystery is to do with the identity of the patient and his relationship to the therapist. It's not difficult to guess, but one traverses a philosophical labyrinth before arriving at any answers. "I might have just gone too far into the labyrinth of the human heart."
This labyrinth may turn off a lot of readers. There is not a lot of action or even suspense here — just questions, at every turn. Whose version of events is to be believed. What makes one source more credible than another? To what extent is motive essential to establishing a crime, or to understanding it? What constitutes legal insanity? Does identity exist without memory? Can there be culpability if there is no memory? Is the essence of a woman really her genitals? (Of course not!) Should artists be held responsible (culpable?) for inspiring crime?
My fascination with Labyrinth lies at its intersection with the works of Simenon. What makes normal people walk away from that normalcy — whether forever or just for an instant?
Can you really say that you knew a guy who committed a crime, and that he always seemed capable of doing it? Do murderers act like potential murderers from the time they are children? I really don't think so. They're probably not much different from anybody else.
And then something happens. Something that pushes them over the edge and they do it. At that point they become a different person from who they had been. I don't believe you can pinpoint a type of person as a future criminal. When he was in high school, he was nothing but . . . a gloomy introvert. Then something happened and he went nuts.
Who knows? I might be a criminal ten years from now. We don't know what causes people to go crazy. But whatever happens, criminals aren't living lives that take them directly to crime. It doesn't work that way.
"I know it's temporary." But this is her secret: she doesn't want it to end. What she can never tell Pablo, because he disdains all things corporate, is that she likes being at Neptune Logistics more than she likes being at home. Home is a small dark apartment with an ever-growing population of dust bunnies, the hallway narrowed by Pablo's canvases propped up against the walls, an easel blocking the lower half of the living room window. Her workspace at Neptune Logistics is all clean lines and recessed lighting. She works on her never-ending project for hours at a time. In art school they talked about day jobs in tones of horror. She never would have imagined the her day job would be calmest and least cluttered part of her life.
I've only ever had one workspace that was actual clean lines and recessed lighting, but several that felt at one time or another preferable to home, so I get it. But that's changed for me in recent times; most days there's no place I'd rather be than home. (Well, except maybe Venice.)
And I think I may start referring to my job as a day job, with all that implies. Life is elsewhere, but a day job finances it.
I'm not sure what made me turn to this novel this week, and I was quite prepared to hate it as an overhyped, unmeritedly trendy, pale shadow of a proper dystopia, but I'm digging it. It's got a very Atwood vibe, with the Shakespeare and the sci-fi comic, but somehow warmer, less cynical, more naive.
It's early pages yet, and this may turn out to be the great lesson of the novel, but it seems to me that the pre-apocalyptic days are in many ways sadder than what comes later. Maybe the epidemic serves as a reset. Maybe this is wishful thinking on my part.
My mother's a news junkie. It started a few years after my father died. About the time we moved into our new house; we got cable and CNN was new. It took that long, I think, for her to come to terms, identify herself as an individual, and direct her energies for once to the external world. It made her feel alive to know what was happening all around her.
I stopped watching the news when my daughter was born. It was too terrible to bear. Not like I was an addict going cold turkey or anything. But The News was suddenly unimportant yet painfully threatening. It impinged on the internal world I was trying to nurture.
[I'm cured now, more or less. The kid is older, I have other survival mechanisms in play. I follow the news at a distance, and sometimes a bit closer, out of a sense of civic duty.]
The Transcriptionist, by Amy Rowland, reminds me how fragile we are in this world where unspeakable horrors happen 24/7. Lena is the only transcriptionist, the last one, at a major New York newspaper.
The room is the color of old opossum or new pumice, the color of newspaper without ink. Gray.It is the room where the transcriptionist, or, in the perplexing vocabulary of the corporate world, Recording Room operator, sits alone all day with a headset and a Dictaphone and transcribes all the words that have been recorded for the Record.
She survived the news frenzy that was 9/11; what undid her was the story of a woman she recognized as having met in passing, a blind woman who deliberately, knowingly, swam to her death, swam the moat at the zoo to be devoured by lions.
is about one lowly worker questioning the role of the newspaper as an institution, and about how newspapers are facing the challenges and the new reality of the time we’re living in. If we tell ourselves stories about ourselves in order to know who we are, then for more than a century newspapers have been the backbone of a collective sense of community. In this new world of virtual living, what will bind us together?
There's a quirky cast of journalists and other newsroom workers. Lena also befriends a pigeon on the ledge outside her window, but even that has a seamy underbelly.
One man is devoted to preserving the files of obituaries, not mere death notices, but the paeans to the news makers, most written years in advance, in anticipation of death, as if only death gives life newsworthy meaning. Recognize it when its gone.
"Obits mark the lives that define us as a nation; they embody the moral imperative of the newspaper, one that is slipping away."
You learn things about humanity from a newspaper, but very little about individuals. Thanks to social media we now know everything about individuals but this data rarely coalesces into anything bigger than itself. The Transcriptionist gently reminds the reader to see the forest, see the trees. Seize the day, do the right thing, follow your gut, live a little.
This is a loving and tender novel, that evokes the sepia tones of a bygone era, even while it's set in this century.
Lena is always disappointed anew at the room, where instead of bald, bespectacled men typing with one heavy hand and reaching into the drawer for the bourbon bottle with the other, it is the usual corporate subdivision: well-medicated activity, soundless keypads, and clusters of low-partitioned cubicles in a rectangle that spans the entire floor.
[Where does that cliche come from, Editorial with its hands on the bourbon, surely it predates Lou Grant. I've done my best to perpetuate it in the department I work in, you never know when bourbon might come in handy. Of course, we're not dealing with the heart-crushing news of the outside world, just fighting the relatively minor but daily soul-sucking battles for editorial integrity in a company that has lost sight of its raison d'être and is quickly spiralling down the existential vortex that portends financial, not only moral, bankruptcy. Ah, bourbon.]
I was waiting at the bus stop, for the bus, when it started to rain,
not a downpour but it had more vehemence than a drizzle. It didn't last long;
in fact, by the time I looked up, trying to decide whether or not
to put away my electronic device, and saw people still rummaging
in their bags for forgotten umbrellas, it was over.
Only, I know it had actually rained. I know this because a small
but not insubstantial drop had fallen on the touchscreen of my ereader
with sufficient force to select a word and call up its definition: "right."
/rīt/ adj. 1 Morally good, justified, or acceptable: I hope we’re doing the right thing | [WITH INFINITIVE]: you were quite right to criticize him 2 true or correct as a fact
That's all I read before I closed the cover. Right as rain.
Later, in the bus, I wiped away the stains of raindrops
left on my screen. They might have been tears.
Multiple Choice, by Alejandro Zambra, is fiction, nonfiction, poetry, something more, and something else entirely. It consists of 90 thought experiments, creating one big meta thought experiment about narrative. It is structured in the form of a standardized test (complete with a sheet on which you can mark your responses), 5 sections that cover skills like word choice, sentence order, and reading comprehension.
For example, for the following exercise, mark the answer that puts the sentences in the best possible order to form a coherent text.
31. Relatives
1. You group them into two lists: the ones you love and the ones you don't.
2. You group them into two lists: the ones who shouldn't be alive and the ones who shouldn't be dead.
3. You group them according to the degree of trust they inspired in you as a child.
4. For a moment you think you discover something important, something that has been hanging over you for years.
5. You group them into two lists: the living and the dead.
A) 1-3-4-5-2
B) 5-2-1-3-4
C) 1-3-5-2-4
D) 3-4-5-2-1
E) 1-2-3-4-5
(I answered B. Or maybe A.) Wouldn't you love to discuss this question with your family? The conversational tangents it inspires!
I'd like to present some of these exercises to my team of editors, so we could debate the subtleties in meaning between, for example, "but," "yet," and "notwithstanding," what order of facts and opinions conveys the most effective emphasis, which sentences aren't essential to moving the narrative forward.
It was a perfect read for me, the perfect time and place, serving to slow me down. In this way the book was much like poetry. Read a page, think about it, let it sink in, reconsider it. It's a short book, but it demands a lot of breathing space. It has served to make me feel really smart, and also really stupid. That's a good thing.
I rather wish that more books would not merely invite but forcibly ask me to pause and reflect on what I read.
Multiple Choice failed completely to make an impression upon people I know, some off whom are actual readers. It's as if by physically pressing the book upon them, forcing them to cast their eyes across a sample "question," was like making them sit an actual exam. One person was outraged that there was no answer key. What do you mean there are no answers!
I think that this story and the book as a whole argue against the illusion of a single right answer. But it’s also a book about the wish for that answer, the naïve or visceral desire for there to be a truth. In “Multiple Choice,” I was interested in the question of how those structures mark you: the rhetoric of options, distractor questions, the true and the false—that whole complex and crude game, deeply ideological, of exclusions and inclusions.
All highlighted the significance of context: how context predominantly figures in shaping an experience for a "reader." For example:
Experiencing the last 4 minutes of JFK's life through sound and smell ("Famous Deaths") only becomes art because we know how it ends, and we're aware of its historical significance. I mean, on its own, in isolation of context, it stands as an aesthetic juxtaposition of audio and olfactory cues — but I could guess at the smells only because I could line up the accompanying sounds with footage I've previously seen. What a person brings to the experience in terms of their knowledge and expectations is what makes it a meaningful narrative. The mortuary fridge you're rolled into enhances the anticipation of death.
A video game that consists of a police database which the user can query ("Her Story") has no structure; it's driven entirely by the user's interests. When I first sat down at the terminal, I was at a loss; it felt a little bit like work. If this is a police database, I've been cast in the role of investigating officer. Where to start? I reasoned, a police database must have something about murder in it, so that was my first keyword search, which delivered some video footage, which soon had me asking, who's Hannah? and, what baby? Every session will yield a different story.
Blindness experienced through a VR headset ("Notes on Blindness") might seem like a contradiction in terms, but the flashes of light begin to take shape according to sound prompts. The experience is inspired by and complemented with the audio recordings of John Hull, a theologian who with a scientist's precision documented his experience of going blind. (The associated film, by contrast, I have no interest in seeing — the trailer leads me to expect an overly sentimental drama that emotionally manipulates its audience, playing on themes of loneliness vs connection rather than on the cognitive aspects of blindness that are so much more interesting to me.) The most poetic of the chapters in this VR experience dealt with rain and with wind. He describes the rain as a blanket that gives things shape and dimension (think: the sound of rain on metal vs glass, on the roof vs the window, in tight alleys vs open fields). Wind is the equivalent of a sighted person's clear and sunny day, bringing one's surroundings to life.
A short film unfolds according to decisions the audience makes via mobile devices ("Late Shift"). A choose-your-own-adventure movie, only you're not watching alone; the direction of the narrative is based on majority votes. Some of the decisions are straightforward yes-no scenarios, but others ask you to take a more philosophical perspective (selfish or selfless?), thereby defining character and moral context. And some questions frustratingly don't offer as an option your preferred course of action. One unsettling aspect is that the story doesn't always go the way you want it to go. You wonder who your neighbour is, do they believe what you believe, what is their motivation.
Of these examples, I feel that Death and Blindness don't entirely fit the storytelling mould — they don't tell a story so much as share an experience. Zambra's book would be a perfect conceptual fit for this exhibition, but perhaps, being print-based, it would be considered too traditional.
In Vancouver a little while ago we peeked in on the exhibit Becoming Animal/Becoming Landscape at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at UBC, which explores works "through the lens of recent philosophical ideas, questioning and breaking down old borders between the human and the non-human."
For me it expressed some ideas about our relationship to nature, and how strong a force our environment is in shaping us and our technology, but it also coalesced some ideas that were germinating in me after having travelled from Montreal to Vancouver by train, and venturing north by car and by ferry to the gateway to the Great Bear Rainforest. (Curator's talk: "...based on mapping... travelling through the landscape, and when you do that, the landscape begins to saturate you and you become the landscape." (We are becoming landscape.))
Notably, the exhibit included works by Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, to whose work I'm glad to be introduced, and Emily Carr, for whom I have fresh appreciation now that I've seen the northwest landscape she strove to express.
(I must admit, I was a bit horrified to be confronting some sexual/erotic pieces in the company of both my daughter and my mother. To her credit, my mother was able to take away some insight into and appreciation of technique within the context of my brother's artwork, the whole purpose of our journey west being to scatter his ashes. (He is becoming landscape.))
One overtly bookish component of the exhibit was Marina Roy's "Thumb Sketches."
The work consists of a series of paperbacks of literary classics from the Western cannon, flayed to show Roy's ink paintings on the edges. They are scatological and lightly pornographic, but quite funny — visual responses to or subtexts of the particular novel.
In a statement on her website, Roy writes:
In the pile-up of language and spectacle which constitutes our amnesiac present, one role for art is to create a clearing within our petrified landscape, and, through a reordering all this new and obsolete stuff, through bricolage and play, construct new meanings, new conceptions of reality, shot through with historical memory, utopian aspirations, and pleasure.
Cross-disciplinary in scope, my artwork investigates the intersection between materials, history, language, and ideology. It is my hope that the work addresses the need for a post-humanist perspective, counter to the dictates of humanistic hubris and its entrapment within binary power dynamics. Art can act as a bridge between culture and nature, ethics and drive.
I'm a big fan of this intersection of language and art, and will be hunting down her book about the letter X.
I understood only later that I can be quietly unhappy, because I'm incapable of violent reactions, I fear them, I prefer to be still, cultivating resentment.
Indeed Elena (Lena) cultivates much resentment toward Lila in this second of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels, The Story of a New Name.
This novel focuses on Lila, the grocer's wife. It's the story of her marriage, its dissolution, a marriage that was over before it began, as book one had ended with the realization that her husband had essentially sold her out, trading her ideals and ideas, dreams and designs, for some thug's cash and empty promises, a man who'd once wooed her and who she'd sworn would never own her. And it's all downhill from there. This is the story of her miserable married life, with her wretched husband's name.
Elena spends these years preoccupied with the idea of escaping her fate.
Did Alfonso also conceal Don Achille, his father, in his breast, despite his delicate appearance? Is it possible that our parents never die, that every child inevitably conceals them in himself? Would my mother truly emerge from me, with limping gait, as my destiny?
Elena holds on to the belief that education is her key to leaving the neighbourhood. For someone who pursues the life of the mind, she is very much trapped by her body.
Suddenly it seemed to me that I had lived with a sort of limited gaze: as if my focus had been only on us girls, Ada, Gigliola, Carmela, Marisa, Pinuccia, Lila, me, my schoolmates, and I had never really paid attention to Melina's body, Giuseppina Pelusi's, Nunzia Cerullo's, Maria Carracci's. The only woman's body I had studied, with ever-increasing apprehension, was the lame body of my mother, and I had felt pressed, threatened by that image, and still feared that it would suddenly impose itself on mine. That day, instead, I saw clearly the mothers of the old neighborhood. They were nervous, they were acquiescent. They were silent, with tight lips and stooping shoulders, or they yelled terrible insults at the children who harassed them. Extremely thin, with hollow eyes and cheeks, or with broad behinds, swollen ankles, heavy chests, they lugged shopping bags and small children who clung to their skirts and wanted to be picked up. And, good God, they were ten, at most twenty years older than me. Yet they appeared to have lost those feminine qualities that were so important to us girls and that we accentuated with clothes, with makeup. They had been consumed by the bodies of husbands, fathers, brothers, whom they ultimately came to resemble, because of their labors or the arrival of old age, of illness. When did that transformation begin? With housework? With pregnancies? With beatings? Would Lila be misshapen like Nunzia? Would Fernando leap from her delicate face, would her elegant walk become Rino's, legs wide, arms pushed out by his chest? And would my body, too, one day be ruined by the emergence of not only my other's body but my father's? And would all that I was learning at school dissolve, would the neighborhood prevail again, the cadences, the manners, everything be confounded in a black mire, Anaximander and my father, Folgóre and Don Achille, valences and the ponds, aorists, Hesiod, and the insolent vulgar language of the Solaras, as over the millenniums, had happened to the chaotic, debased city itself?
Life goes on. Lena applies herself to her studies. Lila is her opposite, in every way, in everything.
And then Lena is crushed by love.
I made the dark descent. Now the moon was visible amid scattered pale-edged clouds; the evening was very fragrant, and you could hear the hypnotic rhythm of the waves. On the beach I took off my shoes, the sand was cold, a gray-blue light extended as far as the sea and then spread over its tremulous expanse. I thought: yes, Lila is right, the beauty of things is a trick, the sky is the throne of fear; I'm alive, now, here, ten steps from the water, and it is not at all beautiful, it's terrifying; along with this beach, the sea, the swarm of animal forms, I am part of the universal terror; at this moment I'm the infinitesimal particle through which the fear of every thing becomes conscious of itself; I; I who listen to the sound of the sea, who feel the dampness and the cold sand; I who imagine all Ischia, the entwined bodies of Nino and Lila, Stefano sleeping by himself in the new house that is increasingly not so new, the furies who indulge the happiness of today to feed the violence of tomorrow. Ah, it's true, my fear is too great and so I hope that everything will end soon, that the figures of the nightmares will consume my soul. I hope that from this darkness packs of mad dogs will emerge, vipers, scorpions, enormous sea serpents. I hope that while I'm sitting here, on the edge of the sea, assassins will arrive out of the night and torture my body. Yes, yes, let me be punished for my insufficiency, let the worst happen, something so devastating that it will prevent me from facing tonight, tomorrow, the hours and days to come, reminding me with always more crushing evidence of my unsuitable constitution. Thoughts like that I had, the frenzied thoughts of girlish discouragement.
It's a heartbreaking scene; Lena is betrayed by her childhood friend and by her childhood crush. She doesn't see it that way then; she lets is wash over her, and she betrays herself that night.
But ultimately, this is the experience that leads her to write, which solidifies for her a life outside of Naples.
As emotional as the romantic revelations are, what led me to tears was the possibility that Lena's education might be over, "I cried and cried, as if I had carelessly lost somewhere the most promising part of myself," that she might resign herself to a life in the civil service, in Naples.
The title of this book also might apply to Lena as well as it does to Lila. At the end of this volume, Lena's family is examining a copy of her newly published book. Her father recognizes his own name on the cover, but Lena claims it as her own. And even while she is anticipating taking her fiance's name,she intends to keep this name on her future books.
She has found some success, but she's not done measuring it.
I understood that I had arrived there full of pride and realized that — in good faith, certainly, with affection — I had made that whole journey mainly to show her what she had lost and what I had won. But she had known from the moment I appeared, and now, risking tensions with her workmates, and fines, she was explaining to me that I had won nothing, that in the world there is nothing to win, that her life was full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other every so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other.
Train travel is an exercise in suspension, of both time and space; the days blur, we are carried suspended across the land, just above it. After travelling four days by train, we arrived in Vancouver.
The garden was built just a few decades ago, but in honour of ancient principles. Somewhat surprisingly, plants are not the main element of a Chinese garden; they rank lower in importance than the foundational element of architecture, and the elements of rock (textured and weathered) and water (deliberately clouded, for better reflection).
It is less controlled than a Japanese garden, but no less careful. It is walled, contained. Vancouver skyscrapers are visible above the pagodas, in perfect balance; this garden belongs here.
There are couplets on the walls.
Courtyard ever green
all four seasons with
blossoming trees
Perfect right here
one fine volume
of poetic inspiration
We said nothing concrete, I still have those letters [...]. We focused, let's say, on a book he had read, on an article of interest for our studies, on some reflection of his or mine, on unrest among certain university students, on the neo-avant-garde, which I didn't know anything about but which he was surprisingly well acquainted with, and which amused him to the point of inspiring him to write: "I would like to make a book out of crumpled-up pieces of paper: you start a sentence, it doesn't work, and throw the page away. I'm collecting a few, I would have the pages printed just as they are, crumpled, so the random pattern of the creases is interwoven with the tentative, broken-off sentences. Maybe this is, in fact, the only literature possible today."
For a cross-country train journey, people bring a lot of books. But I saw more people carrying them than actually reading them. It's too easy to be distracted by scenery, or sleep. I certainly read far less than I had hoped to.
Although it boasts an activity car, a dining car, and a panorama car, The Canadian clearly lacks a library car.
But I was heartened to see this book exchange basket at the train station in Jasper, Alberta, full of good intentions.
It was like crossing a border. I remember a dense crowd and a sort of humiliating difference. I looked not at the boys but at the girls, the women: they were absolutely different from us. They seemed to have breathed another air, to have eaten other food, to have dressed on some other planet, to have learned to walk on wisps of wind. I was astonished. All the more so that, while I would have paused to examine at leisure dresses, shoes, the style of glasses if they wore glasses, they passed by without seeming to see me. They didn't see any of the five of us. We were not perceptible. Or not interesting. And in fact if at times their gaze fell on us, they immediately turned in another direction, as if irritated. They looked only at each other.
As he reads, his eyes graze each poem's lines like a needle over an LP's grooves, atomizing them into letters, reassembling them into uniform arcades. What he's looking for is a key: a gap in the book's mask, a loose thread to unravel its veil. He tries tricks to find new openings — reading sideways, reading upsidedown, reading whitespace instead of text — but the works always close ranks like tiles in a mosaic, like crooks in a lineup, and mock him with their blithe expressions. The usual suspects.
I've begun reading The Mirror Thief, by Martin Seay. The first page didn't feel right, maybe not my cup of tea after all. The first major section is set in Vegas. But before I knew it, I couldn't stop reading. The focus is on Stanley, everybody's looking for him, trying to discover his whereabouts. The second major section takes us to California, back in time to Stanley's youth. This didn't feel right either, the change in locale and tone, another cup of tea that isn't mine. But I am learning that all Stanley's movements centre around a book.
The Mirror Thief is a book about a book called The Mirror Thief. It is starting to feel like a booklover's book.
(This book feels overly masuline. I don't know what I mean by that. I think that's why it doesn't feel right. Maybe it's just the wrong time and place for me to be reading this book. I'm enjoying it, but something just doesn't feel right.)
It is difficult, but probably necessary, to remember that books always know more then their authors do. They are always wiser. This is strange to say, but it's true. Once they are in the world, they develop their own peculiar ideas.
On December 31st of 1958 Lila had her first episode of dissolving margins. The term isn't mine, she always used it. She said that on those occasions the outlines of people and things suddenly dissolved, disappeared. That night, on the terrace where we were celebrating the arrival of 1959, when she was abruptly struck by that sensation, she was frightened and kept it to herself, unable to name it. [...] now she felt content, watching the streaks of fire in the sky. But suddenly — she told me — in spite of the cold she had begun to sweat. It seemed to her everyone was shouting too loudly and moving too quickly. This sensation was accompanied by nausea, and she had had the impression that something absolutely material, which had been present around her and around everyone and everything forever, but imperceptible, was breaking down the outlines of persons and things and revealing itself.
[...] How poorly made we are, she had thought, how insufficient.
[...]But that New Year's Eve she had perceived for the first time unknown entities that broke down the outline of the world and demonstrated its terrifying nature.
My Brilliant Friend,by Elena Ferrante, is, I believe, everything it's cracked up to be and quite possibly more.
The dissolving margins at first are like a migraine, but then grow out of control, even into mental illness. It is a fractured view of the world, filtered through the clarity of pain. How will Lila turn out? Will she be broken? Or will she transcend the material world, become one with its terrifying nature?
My Brilliant Friend is the story of two friends, documented from the time of their childhood in 1950s Naples, both of them brilliant in their own way. They are competitive with each other, particularly in terms of academics, but this spills over into what they wear, who they associate with, and boys. They admire and inspire each other, but they are still adolescent girls with confused motivations. Since it's written from a first-person perspective, I assumed the title was Lena refering to Lila. But it's late in this book that Lila calls Lena her brilliant friend. So is Lena writing Lila's story? Or is she really more interested in putting her own story forth?
But I did it without conviction: I did many things in my life without conviction; I always felt slightly detached from my own actions. Lila, on the other hand, had, from a young age — I can't say now precisely if it was so at six or seven, or when we went together up the stairs that led to Don Achille's and were eight, almost nine — the characteristic of absolute determination.
They have different temperaments, but they grow up in the same neighbourhood, in similar circumstances. However, their paths diverge when Lila is denied the opportunity to go to high school.
She also asked me about the Aeneid, she was crazy about it. She had read it all in a few days, while I, in school, was in the middle of the second book. She talked in great detail about Dido, a figure I knew nothing about, I heard that name for the first time not at school but from her. And one afternoon she made an observation that impressed me deeply. She said, "When there is no love, not only the life of the people becomes sterile but the life of cities." I don't remember exactly how she expressed it, but that was the idea and I associated it with our dirty streets, the dusty gardens, the countryside disfigured by new buildings, the violence in every house, every family. I was afraid that she would start talking about Fascism, Nazism, Communism.
Depite claiming to lack conviciton, Lena is hard-working and ambitious. Lila's "determination," on the other hand, stems from confidence (is it feigned?) and certainty — her life is not easy, but everything seems to come naturally to her. Lena's brilliance is studied; Lila's brilliance is free-spirited and creative.
She said, in dialect, "You still waste time with those things, Lenu? We are flying over a ball of fire. The part that has cooled floats on the lava. On that part we construct the buildings, the bridges, and the streets, and every so often the lava comes out of Vesuvius or causes an earthquake that destroys everything. There are microbes everywhere that make us sick and die. There are wars. There is a poverty that makes us all cruel. Every second something might happen that will cause you such suffering that you'll never have enough tears. And what are you doing? A theology course in which you struggle to understand what the Holy Spirit is? Forget it, it was the Devil who invented the world, not the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Do you want to see the string of pearls that Stefan gave me?" That was how she talked, more or less, confusing me.
This first book of the quartet ends with Lila's wedding. She's barely 16.
But it wasn't the ordinary conflict between mother-in-law, daughter-in-law, sister-in-law. I had the impression, from the way she used me, from the way she handled Stefano, that she was struggling to find, from inside the cage in which she was enclosed, a way of being, all her own, that was still obscure to her.
