He existed now in a liminal zone

"Such a shame that a tough fellow like him could pass away in the blink of an eye," Sister Zhou said, and sighed. "I can't help but to think that sometimes a man can be as frail as a mosquito! One swat might not kill a mosquito, but it can surely kill a man."

This novel is grim, but not quite in the way the title might imply. The Morgue Keeper, by Ruyan Meng, does not delve into the tedium or unpleasantness of the occupation per se. Rather Qing Yuan, framed by his proletarian and somewhat absurd experience, bears witness to all manner of death, physical and spiritual. 

Set amid Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, Qing Yuan's existence is indeed meager, but he seems to hold no resentment against the regime that executed his father for hiding some gold. He is kind and compassionate with his coworkers, his neighbours, the local beggars.

When an identified female corpse, mutilated beyond recognition, comes into the morgue — "a heap of gore and waste" — and no one claims her, he starts asking questions, looking to restore her dignity. This clinging to humanity allows Qing Yuan to rise above his day to day, and even harbour hopes of having a family one day (a neighbouring widow becomes a romantic interest).

One day, Qing Yuan is arrested. He is carted away along with several other employees of the hospital and imprisoned. Then the torture begins.

The charges relate to his family's capitalist past. But it's clear that anyone disgruntled or overzealous might've played a role. This is a state where neighbours denounce neighbours, children denounce their own parents. Struggle sessions, akin to Two Minutes Hate, punish transgressors and strike fear in everyone. This is an intense read, a dystopia that's a direct descendent of 1984, only it's real. It's 1960s China, the squalor and desperation of Worker Villages.

Qing Yuan is ultimately released by the authorities but he is shunned. His actions are scrutinized, his home repeatedly vandalized. He seems broken beyond repair.

He had long since given up on the city. Nothing stirred any connection to his past. In fact, he realized, he was wrong to say he had given up on the city. The city had given up on him, discarded like a dead baby from the hospital the moment he’d been conscripted to the morgue. He existed now in a liminal zone, between a past to which he could never return and a future that would never come. The eternal present, what many a sage declared the one true refuge, had seized him like a spider in its web. He had become a shadow whose life had been bent to a single purpose, the cleaning of humans, dead, on their way to becoming shadows themselves.

But then there's a kitten.

Excerpts 
Chapter 1 
Chapter 9 

Review 
Metropolitan Review: The Exilic Style 
Interviews
Bookish: Quiet Tragedies and Small Acts of Kindness 
Zona Motel: It's Terrible to Be Yourself  

Perspective gave us depth

Michelangelo Buonarroti to Giorgio Vasari; Rome, 21 June 1557:

Brunelleschi's discovery of the laws of perspective was like Prometheus stealing fire and giving it to mankind. Thanks to him, we have been able not only illuminate our walls as Giotto once did with his golden fingers, but to reproduce the world as it is, identical in every detail. And so it was the the painter could imagine himself God's equal: because now, we too could create reality. And that was how we came to try, poor fishermen that we are, to surpass Our Lord. We  could copy the world as faithfully as if we had made it ourselves, but that was not enough to quench our thirst for creation, because our ambition as artists, intoxicated by this new power, now knew no limits. We wanted to paint the world in our own style. We didn't merely wish to rival God, but to alter His work by redrawing it to suit our desires. We distorted perspective, we abandoned it. We erased the chequerboard floors of our predecessors and let our figures float in the ether. We played with perspective the way a dog plays with a ball, or a cat with the corpse of a sparrow it has killed. We turned away from it. We scorned it. But we never forgot it.

How could we? Perspective gave us depth. And depth opened the gates of infinity to us. A terrible spectacle. I can never recall without shivering the first time I saw Masaccio's frescoes at the Brancassi Chapel. The wonder of his foreshortened figures! There stood man, life-sized at last, having found his place in space, his substance given weight, cast out of paradise but standing on his own two feet, in all his mortal truth. Far from constricting the imagination of artists, perspective gave us the image of infinity on Earth. The image only ... yes, of course. In reality, we could not claim to equal the Creator of all things, but we could, better than any priest, proclaim His word through mute images or stone statues. Painters, sculptors, architects: the artist is a prophet because, more than any other man, his mind contains the idea of God, which is infinity itself, that unthinkable, inconceivable thing.

Perspective(s), by Laurent Binet, is a historical epistolary novel, some 176 letters involving some twenty correspondents, including the likes of Michelangelo, Catherine de' Medici, Benvenuto Cellini,

I had high hopes for this mystery (artist stabbed dead with a chisel! scandalous painting gone missing!) but mostly it's boring and confusing.

Sadly, with a few exceptions, the voices don't vary. I had trouble keeping the characters straight (it's probably easier to read this on paper vs digitally, to be able to flip back a page or two to identify who is writing to whom and reference the list of characters). There were times it didn't seem worth the effort.

I'm betting Binet is a gamer (hmm, a quick google search confirms the influence of video games on his previous novels), and specifically a fan of Assassin's Creed (and why not? indeed, Ezio's adventures constitute the basis of my knowledge of Borgia-era Italy). In one (rare) action-packed sequence, Cellini's parkour efforts to elude the palace guards seem lifted out of the Brotherhood's playbook:

As I descended from the ramparts, I heard some guards climbing the stairs. Since I had no business being up there, I would have had no excuse to justify my presence if they had seen me. So I hurried back to the roof. But you know the palace better then I, so you know that there are no hiding places up there. I ran to the wall; a leap from that height could be fatal, even to me. But God rewards the brave: at the foot of the wall was a cart loaded with hay, left there by some groom. It all happened in a flash: the decision, then the execution. I climbed onto the parapet, arms outspread like Christ on the cross. I closed my eyes and I dived. During my fall I heard the cry of an eagle. My landing was as soft as on a feather bed, and in a second I was up on my feet again, completely unscathed.

The video game immersion affords a suspension of disbelief; here it feels laughably out of place. (But yeah, I kinda loved this bit.) On the whole, this novel of art theory and politics comes off as dry. 

The novel did make me consider how trends in art are formed by outside forces (it's simply not as obvious me in work predating the twentieth century) and artists throughout history use their work to voice their agreement or dissent. Of course a change in the papacy would dictate whether or not nudes were held in disgrace. "We other Florentines still understand and appreciate the beauty of the human body rather than considering it a diabolical obscenity." 

As Vincenzo Borghini notes to Giorgio Vasari, "You know as well as I that it is not men who change their tastes, but politics that change men." And Michelangelo recognizes, "These are cruel times, my friend, for the defenders of art and beauty." Another action sequence plays out through a Calvinoesque slo-mo lens, the intersection of math and art overlaying reality.

I saw the lines being drawn through space, forming a geometric grid, and I recognised Alberti's diagram, his pyramid of spokes converging on a single point. It was the laws of perspective taking shape before me, as clearly as if I had traced them myself with a ruler; I touched the surface of things, because it was no longer the real world that I could see in all its depth. Or rather, it was the real world, but I saw it as if through the camera obscura devised by Master Brunelleschi — may his name be honoured until the end of time! — and in the space of a second the world appeared to me as a flat surface, adroitly squared, in all the dazzling clarity of the theory that was revealed to us by those supreme geniuses: Brunelleschi, Alberti, Masaccio ... may you all be crowned in glory, you eternal Tuscan heroes! And so, as the killer was about to fire at me, because the fuse, as I told you, had almost completely burnt down (this too, I could perceive with perfect lucidity), I saw — yes, I saw! — the vanishing point drawn on his forehead as if by Alberti himself and (recalling those words of the great master that gave me heart: "It is in vain that you bend your bow, if you do not yet know where to aim your arrow!" — and I knew; in that instant, I knew exactly!) I pulled the trigger, and the bold shot from my crossbow, following the perfect trajectory that my mind had calculated and that an invisible hand had traced through the air, embedding itself exactly midway between his eyes. He fell backwards, his shot missed, and — hearing the detonation — I felt as if I had been woken from a long dream that had lasted no more than a second.

But I hadn't dreamed it. I had remembered perspective. And this is what I want to tell you, Master Michelangelo, my dear Master. In our thirst to find a new style of painting so that we can surpass (or, rather, circumvent) the perfection achieved by our forefathers [...] have we not forgotten what underlay the very essence of that perfection? It is not that we are unaware of it; we all studied Alberti's theory. But, little by little, all of us, [...] we have attempted to free ourselves from it, we have left it behind, we have disdained it. And we have begun to elongate our bodies, to make them float through space, to stretch out where we should foreshorten, to turn our landscapes into dreamscapes, and rather than cutting them up in accordance with mathematical principles that we consider too severe, to twist reality. Order and symmetry have become anathema to us. 

The resolution, if I understand who dun it correctly, is a ridiculous bit of fiction squeezed between verifiable historical facts — it remains historically plausible, but kinda pointlessly so. (And I'm relieved — not for the sake of any historical personage's reputation, but for Truth — that Binet's readership is relatively limited in number and generally smarter than the average bear so that the none of this gets mistaken for historical fact. I fear for humanity not having sufficient general knowledge to accurately recognize dramatizations and artistic license.)

See also 
The French Exception: On Laurent Binet and French Literature. 
For a substantial excerpt of the novel, see the US publisher's publicity page.

What happens to a person in solitude?

I want to shake off a day full of words and meanings. Not that they're superfluous, just that I don't need them anymore.

The Cut Line, by Carolina Pihelgas, follows a young Estonian woman's reclamation of self during the long hot summer after she leaves a fourteen-years-long relationship. Liine was 18 when she met Tarmo; when it's revealed that he is fifteen years older than her, the toxic control he held over her becomes apparent.

What if he's right that no one else would have a use for me. Doubt is like a cobweb — very delicate, but when you touch it, it clings to your fingers. Gray and sticky.

I can picture cut lines: wounds from the knife the narrator brandishes in her imagination, against herself or her ex (the epigraph is a line from Ariana Harwicz; for more knives and toxicity see Die, My Love). Or the cut line is how she mows the grass as short as possible. Metaphorically, it's a line between past and future. It's the line Liine draws that delineates her self from others.

We feel the tone shift from despondency toward occasional langour and back again.

The sheet metal that covers the woodpile is rattling the wind. The hooded crow sways on the oak tree and caws. The quiet murmur of the clover and golden silence of the mayweed. They sing inside me as if my innermost being is the center of everything, both living and dead.

Liine is staying at the family cottage farm. She works the garden, the land. She becomes attuned to the insects. The sound of helicopters and gunshots at the nearby military base is a constant reminder that there's a world outside, that there's a war in Ukraine. Her feed relays extreme heat, water shortages, famine, hurricanes. She scrolls articles about climate anxiety. While a relationship breakup may be a universal experience, a timeless story even (one remarkable if negative effect of this book is how it managed to permeate my mood, stirring up bad relationship memories of my own.), the backdrop is very today.

The language is beautiful. This is not a plot-driven novel. Liine's mother and sister provide counterpoints, in their living situations, how they process the past, what they value. But Liine is determined to find her own way. She comes across a stash of letters belonging to her great-aunt, which open her eyes to the possibility of other, affirmative ways of being. Liine's evolution over the summer is subtle and authentic. 

And then I'm in a place where nothing moves forward anymore, everything only goes backward, turns back on itself, tells me about the meaninglessness of my existence. Reality is a snake coiling up, but there's no room for me here. I'm excluded from all living things, from all breathing things. Without other people, do I even exist? What happens to a person deep down, right at the bottom, in solitude?

I breathe. I breathe. Is it possible that here in this old house, far from everything, I could turn into something else, into a plant, say? Doesn't that make me like something that's poked its head out of the ground; something pale green that's stretched out, caught some sun, maybe even managed to grow some flowers, but not borne fruit? And is then cut down and trampled to pieces. Don't I have roots, then, somewhere deeper still? I should just go back to bed, curl up under the blanket and cry a bit. I need to stay beneath the soil, in the ground, here in a safe remote place until I find the strength within me to sprout new shoots.

I will have no part of this

What will always flummox the state is the prospect of the individual — of many individuals — employing negation as a political tactic. What to do with someone who doesn't rush the podium, doesn't spit on the flag, doesn't do anything to ease the state's transition into the comfortable arena of violence? What to do with someone who says: I will have no part of this, when the entire functionality of the system is dependent on active participation? Forced into this kind of space, power becomes enraged, and behaves accordingly. Legislators rush to pass bills outlawing boycotts, not only in obvious violation of the same freedoms those legislators are sworn to protect, but also a practical impossibility, this quest to stop people from not buying something. Terms like "economic terrorism" are tossed around by the same people who are quite happy to pull their donations from universities and literary festivals and anywhere that doesn't sufficiently silence whatever voices they want silenced. University administrators express shock at the utter inappropriateness of students' demands to cut ties with weapons makers and institutes complicity with occupation, and punish those students by withholding their degrees.

The idea that walking away is childish and unproductive is predicated on the inability to imagine anything but a walking away from, never a walking toward — never that there might exist another destination. The walking away is not nihilism, it's not cynicism, it's not doing nothing — it's a form of engagement more honest, more soul-affirming, than anything the system was ever prepared to offer.

(But how does one walk away from capitalism?)

I don't know what to do with this book. Sit with it, I guess. Sit with the guilt of my general inaction and inadequacy. 

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, by Omar El Akkad, is a takedown of the West, its hypocrisy and faulty foundations. It's less about Gaza than I thought it would be, more about the inability of anybody (westerners) to do anything about it.

A central privilege of being of this place becomes, then, the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts simultaneously. The first being the belief that one's nation behaves in keeping with the scrappy righteousness of the underdog. The second being an unspoken understanding that, in reality, the most powerful nation in human history is no underdog, cannot possibly be one, but at least the immense violence implicit in the contradiction will always be inflicted on someone else. [...] It's the person who in self-image professes to be a rule-breaker, untamable, wile — and in the next breath sides unquestioningly with every facet of state power. [...] My first impulse is to mock the contradiction, but there's no contradiction, not really, because the bedrock of this particular identity isn't conformity or nonconformity — it's self-interest. Anyone who buys into both the narrative of American rebelliousness and the reality of American authority understands that both have been created to serve them.

Of course, we're against genocide, it's morally deplorable. Of course, we're against apartheid, and Nazism, and racial inequality. Of course, we're against cruelty to animals. Of course, women should have the vote, and we should protect our planet. So why the fuck does it take us so long to do anything about it? (And when we do, it's only because it's become advantageous to do so.)

I expected it to be a difficult book — depressing in its chronicle of the genocide of Palestinians. In fact, it was unputdownable, and not nearly as grim as the barrage of bad news I compulsively seek out daily. I'm not sure who this book is for — it preaches to a choir of leftists. This book it will not convince the fascists who walk among us of the error of their ways; they may hold it up to us as proof, "See what hypocrites you are!" 

The very act of praising this book could be seen as merely performative — that I'm on the right side of history, or so it will be seen some day.

I feel scolded for not doing anything about the state of world. That is, I feel that what I do doesn't make a difference (and I sense that this sentiment is shared by the author). But I do what I can. I read, I educate myself. I engage in discussion with others, even if it's just the girls over drinks on Friday night — it helps me hone my own opinion, occasionally it shifts someone else's. I march, I protest, I show up — at least sometimes, and even if it's only when it's convenient, my being there still counts (numbers matter, optics matter). I don't buy Israeli products. I don't buy US products. Etc. I try. This week I joined the New Democratic Party of Canada, because I want to do more than just vote (radical democracy! "public" shouldn't be a dirty word!). 

Francine Prose says, "There is one story: our country is on the brink of an authoritarian takeover." Everything else is a distraction. Is it? The Epstein files are a distraction from Venezuela. Venezuela is a distraction from Gaza. The weather is a distraction from Ukraine. Tariffs are a distraction from changes to immigration policies. Do you even know what's going on in Cuba? Why is it not bigger news that the NRA is breaking from the GOP? News stories I read one day are buried the next. Two plus two equals five. I long thought I knew which issues should take priority. Today I am surprised to find myself thinking that maybe it's the lasciviously scandalous one that's most important after all — the one where the men in power protect the men in power.

And they just keep killing more Palestinians.

It would be nice to go back to caring about the moon. So many of my favorite authors care about the moon. So much of my favorite literature orients in the direction of beauty. But surely any true appreciation of beauty would admit, exclaim even, that no descriptions of the moon, no matter how stunning, how true, reflects as much beauty back into the world as a missile obliterating a family in their home takes out of it.

[...]

What is this work we do? What are we good for?

The literary critic Northrop Frye once said all art is metaphor, and a metaphor is the grammatical definition of insanity. What art does is meet us at the site of our insanity, our derangement, the plainly irrational mechanics of what it means to be human. There comes from this, then, at least a working definition of a soul: one's capacity to sit with the mysteries of a thing that cannot in any rational way be understood — only felt, only moved through. And sometimes that thing is so grotesque — what we do to one another so grotesque — that sitting with it feels an affront to the notion of art as a conduit of beauty.

Still, sit. Sit.

And then maybe walk away. Use your imagination, and be better.

A vague miasma of misery

Jackson was surprised that more women hadn't simply killed their husbands. Maybe they had, maybe women were better at covering up murder than people knew.

What a joy to spend a recent sunny, snowbound day ensconced in my chair with a coffee and my cat, devouring Death at the Sign of the Rook, by Kate Atkinson. Coincidence abounds ("A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen"). From "the maw of oblivion" and through "a vague miasma of misery," there is warmth and kindness, and also snow.

Jackson Brodie continues to age, but then, so do I. Thankfully, he has a chorus (jury) of women in his head to keep him in check.

Set in modern day, Atkinson pays homage to Agatha Christie and the detective novels of that era and ilk (fittingly, I spend the evening watching The Seven Dials, which is charming and light while alluding to larger things than our small lives).

You went to bed one night, in a happy daze because you had waltzed all night with eligible young men, and you woke up the next day and found yourself living on a bleak planet inhabited by alien creatures.

The novel's central mystery involves a stolen work of art. Art is not something Brodie knows a lot about, but he won't turn away from a bit of research if it means catching his crook, or at least uncovering the truth.

Brodie's reading leads him to the story of Jerry and Rita Alter, who stole a de Kooning and hung it on the back of their bedroom door. Admirable, no? Crazy. Through Brodie, I learn about Montreal's own 1972 Skylight Caper.

I love me a good art heist as much as the next person. A couple years ago I read Michael Finkel's The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession; for months afterwards I would "case" every museum and gallery I walked into, checking for cameras, exits, sightlines, security guard routines. (I want to steal the art, get away with it, and have it.) Who steals art, anyway? How do you unload a stolen Rembrandt? Who buys it? (I recall reading Trevanian when I was 16, an assassin gazing upon his treasured canvasses in his private quarters.) I recently watched The Mastermind, a unique art heist film that provides a dismal reality check (and an extraordinary soundtrack). I'm thinking I may be better suited to a career in art forgery.

"Without faith, there is no refuge," she repeated, and rang her small bell several times. The Full Auras saw the signs in the sky. The Diaphanous Spirits heard them in the buzzing of the insects, in the slightest shift of the clouds, in the plants' growth. The Minor Saints warned us with celestial song, and the Enlightened, the emissaries of the light, declared it to be acid rain.

The House of the Sacred Sisterhood was founded by Him (who only the Chosen and the Enlightened have the privilege of seeing) and the Superior Sister (they say she fought in the water wars).

A climate catastrophe has left the outside unlivable: contaminated water, toxins carried by the wind, extreme temperatures, the thick haze that lasts for days on end. Occasionally a hare is trapped but it's often a deformed abomination. The relentless chirp of crickets betrays their main source of protein.

There are three orders of the Chosen (mutilated).

The Minor Saints have ethereal voices:

After a dramatic silence, the Minor Saints resumed their song. I saw thousands of white petals leave their mouths, filling the air, lily petals that glimmered until they disappeared. Their voices can reach the universal notes, vibrate with the light of the stars. (That's why their eyes are sewn shut, so they're not distracted by the mundane, so they capture the reverberations of our God.)

The Diaphanous Spirits have perfect pitch. Their tongues are cut out when they are chosen, so they communicate in writing to the Superior Sister. 

They can perceive the bitter, lurking sound of sickness, the slow absorption of bone tissue; they've heard the soft swell of the dark where our organs reside; they can tell by our pulse whether our heart seeks only possession or wants to redeem itself, whether it seeks to wound or to dissolve into another heartbeat; they can discern the damp movement of the bacteria that inhabit us, the microcosm we carry around without feeling it. Sometimes they spend long hours in the field trying to detect human words in the wind, messages from God. It's common to see them turning in circles, the palms of their right hands open to the sky and the left to the earth. But no one knows why they do this.

With perforated eardrums, the Full Auras can orate purely. "God's messages leave traces on their bodies"; they have the gift of prophetic vision.

The Enlightened embody all the virtues of the three orders of Chosen. They are the mediators with the ancestral, hidden God, the one before those that men created.  

The rest are unworthy. Their continuous sacrifices are necessary for God to protect their small world. It is forbidden to invoke "the erroneous God, the false son, the negative mother."

There is a lower class still, the nameless servants:

They whisper poison because their bodies carry the marks, the signs, of contamination, and though they can no longer infect us, they have to work to clean our filth and the filth that runs through their veins. They hate us because they have to serve us. The marks are the remnants of the pustules, wounds, infections. The rashes are the filth of evil, the filth of collapse, the filth of failure. This filth absorbed from the sick earth has blighted them permanently, lest we forget that corruption lurks and the Enlightened are the only ones who can quell it. This filth, nesting in the servants' skin, in their cells, is the anger of the sea, the fury of the air, the violence of the mountains, the outrage of the trees. It's the sadness of the world.

The Unworthy, by Agustina Bazterrica, is an unsettling account of a sheltered postapocalyptic community. The unnamed, unworthy narrator secretly keeps a journal of the goings on while struggling to recall the path that brought her to this (un?)holy place.

One day, a new wanderer happens upon the Sisterhood. Her presence, her very being, seems miraculous, and she is instrumental in helping the narrator tap into her past (including a poignant, tear-inducing relationship with the enchantress Circe).

The beauty of the language masks something sinister (I'm reminded of Piranesi). The Sisterhood is built atop the destruction of the world and the violence of men. 

While Bazterrica's previous novel, Tender Is the Flesh, verged on the ridiculous, The Unworthy creeps toward the sublime.

Something nearly nothing

The empty house had the floor of one of its rooms strewn with flowers and a smell of earth and greenness all through its downstairs all night. Each morning for the next few days I scraped them up together, carried them into the garden and left them on the paving in the corner where they dried away to something nearly nothing and blew nothingly around in the paved yard for the rest of our time in that house.

Two teen siblings live off-grid, navigating difficult circumstances, with a slow reveal of the nature of the society they’re on the fringes of — a near-future dystopian surveillance state.

They don’t see the world the same way, and they come to exercise resistance very differently. 

Gliff, by Ali Smith, depicts a tender sibling relationship. It's also a love letter to language. (Because. Words are knowledge. And knowledge is power.) "It was always exciting to me the number of things a single word could mean." Very Alice in Wonderland. Naïve, to surreal effect. "You are bullying me with words longer than the length of my life, she said."

One of the epigraphs (from Valeria Luiselli) appears to apply less to the characters than to Smith's motivation: "it is never inspiration that drives you to tell a story, but rather a combination of anger and clarity." Smith demonstrates a lot of clarity regarding the state of the world today — surveillance, data collection, real estate economics, manufacturing and warehouse practices, consumerization of education (and the devaluing of knowledge) — and there's good reason to be angry about it, as the gap widens between the haves and the have-nots. The privileged "were smoothed as if airbrushed, as if you really could digitally alter real people."

But Gliff clearly takes some inspiration from Aldous Huxley. Beyond the permutations of the words "Brave new world" heading the later chapters, there are nods to that dystopia's indoctrination methods and soma. 

She's still speaking: all took stuff. We had to, we all had body shit and we loved Patchay, best of the painkillers, just zapped it, blanked it out, blanked us out too. We all took it except her and she had this word for us, for it. She'd sit against the wall and watch out for us while we were on it, and she'd always say what we were was gliffed. We reckoned she was riffing on the old word spliff. So we all started calling it, whatever we took after that, gliff.

I love that Patchay is also a play on pace, Latin for "peace." 

[I hate that I can't google a confirmation that Smith intended this, as the AI that generates overviews is clueless, and Google expects me to articulate searches in natural language, and I resent that our natural language has changed to be something that machines can recognize, why in my job search do I need to build a machine-readable CV shouldn't you build a machine that reads what I actually need to say. I remember when I first searched terms on internet and they were boolean and unnatural in a different way, often my queries were simplified, broadened, but it was mostly using an artificial system of operators to frame my natural thought, I don't know what my natural thought is anymore, maybe I modified my search practices to conform to the principles of the technology in play, but before the internet I could walk into a library and would have to consider how my question, if I had one, might be categorized, what subjects it encompassed, what ideas intersected, and if I had a specific question, I could ask a librarian, or an expert, they might know, but more likely I would engage them in a discussion about the subject, and new information might come to light, and new associations would spawn, facts may be confirmed but ideas could be explored and pursued rather than shut down, our current "natural language" machine searches anticipate a certain kind of answer, the answer is already contained in the question. I wonder how our grammar is changing, you'd think it would be more careful, to formulate searches with more precision, how sensitive is AI to our grammar, surely it knows the rules of grammar but does it understand how sloppy we are and under what circumstances we tend to get it wrong, we're so dumb we won't even notice when AI misreads our question to answer something else entirely. When I'm searching for something, it does not necessarily mean I have a specific question in mind, I have what Edward de Bono termed a "fuzzy situation," a kind of (pre-?)word cloud in my brain, and I'm looking for associations more than answers, even if problem-solving strategies typically involve distilling a specific question from all the fuzziness. I guess my issue is that I don't have a problem to solve, a question to answer, I'm interested in exploring, and it occurs to me that this is, broadly speaking, a male-female divide (or it used to be, in an earlier version of studies on gender dynamics, fuck, how old am I, oh how angry am I, how much clarity do I have now), men fix things, women want to talk about them, and this is what happens when men fix the internet. For the sake of this rant, I reformulated my search as "is the naming of patchay in Ali Smith's gliff a play on the latin word pace and what evidence is there for this" and AI returned: There is no evidence in the provided literary analyses or reviews of Ali Smith's novel Gliff to suggest that the naming of "patchay" is a play on the Latin word pace. In fact, the name "patchay" does not appear in any of the search results, which extensively discuss the wordplay surrounding the novel's title, "gliff." I wonder if the search result will have evolved after this post is published to acknowledge my original thought, I wonder also about the comprehensiveness of the "provided literary analyses or reviews," who provided them, what do you know anyway.]

A lot is left unanswered. Was the siblings' abandonment deliberate or accidental? What's the other sibling's story when they part ways? Who's running this world? How did we let this happen?

Why would people do that? she said.

People are people, Leif said, people are mysterious, why does anybody do anything?

Excerpt. 

The size of our capacious ignorance

"You know why I love games? For the same reason I love literature. In a game... in a good poem or story? Death is the mother of beauty. He stopped and twisted to face me. "Know what I'm sayin'?"

I'd given up on Richard Powers. I loved The Gold Bug Variations. Everything else was lesser. The couple Powers novels I read after that masterpiece didn't hold up; maybe they were the wrong ones. 

But the promise of Playground tickled a few synapses I couldn't resist. The game of Go, a sculptor, generative AI, a Montrealer, a stolen library book.

Three main threads. Todd, recently diagnosed with Lewy bodies dementia, reminiscing about his early life. The tale of Rafi and Ina living idyllically in Polynesia, until political environmental concerns threaten their way of life. And an old oceanographer who broke all sorts of barriers for women.

I loved reading this book because it reminded me of how I used to read books. It reminds me that I used to read old white men, and that that's not necessarily a terrible thing. It took me out of my present when I needed to step out of it. Less interiority, more in the world. Despite being set in a near future with extrapolated technological advancements, the novel revels in good old-fashioned storytelling.

I love that Todd does jigsaw puzzles with his mother. 

My mother and I were building a time tunnel, not just back to the childhood I never had, not just to Constable's 1821, but back several millennia, to the first magic picture puzzles from history's beginning. That's how my brain works.

[A jigsaw puzzle figures in The Gold Bug Variations as well, defining two types of puzzlers: one who looks for the spot that fits a piece, and one who seeks the piece that fits a spot. I think of this every time I puzzle.]

In high school, Todd discovers Godel, Escher Bach. His best friend Rafi steals a library book (The Philosophy of the Common Task, by Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov), obsessed with its premise that evolution intends to defeat the design flaw of death, that humanity would someday learn to resurrect every person who ever lived. Rafi introduces Todd to Go. College begins with underground movies and poetry slams and being "schooled in the size of our capacious ignorance."

In the fall of our senior year, when the sweet gums turned burgundy, the maples went lemon and orange, and the oaks all over campus settled into shades of scarlet, when the daylight hours shrank and the air thickened with that sere, weird scent of anticipation, Rafi came back to our dorm room late one afternoon with an announcement. He smiled his most serene and philosophical smile, with his tongue in the slight gap between his two front teeth. "I've just met the woman I am going to marry."

Enter Ina, the artist, who keeps them together and tears them apart. Todd is on the path to super-rich tech bro-dom, while Rafi struggles to complete his thesis. 

He pulled passages from Johan Huizinga's classic, Homo Ludens: "At the root of this sacred rite we recognize unmistakably the imperishable need of man to live in beauty. There is no satisfying this need save in play...." Judging from the lines he's sent, a stranger would have thought that Rafi was writing a thesis about games.

When Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov, humanists took heart that a computer could never master Go. But in 2015, AlphaGo beat a human professional player.

If you want to make something smarter, teach it to play.

Children. Mammals, pets, dolphins. Machines. The machines are undeniably getting smarter.

The games industry surpassed the movie industry in terms of revenue decades ago. In terms of cultural reach and influence, it grows stronger every day. By Todd's account, "Games now ruled humanity."

AI's next turn would be the greatest game of all: Wittgenstein's Sprachspiel. Powers is definitely onto something here. (And Wittgenstein just won't shut up this year.)

The novel is ultimately about the power of play, the power of storytelling, and how similar these two are. Playground filled me with joy and wonder, and reminded me of my past and future selves.

Bliss was so simple. Just hold still and look.

Excerpts  
Chapters 1 & 2 
Chapter 4 

The heartbreaking direction of nonexistence

...so the story essentially is in its form, the mode of its construction, the way it's laid out, its structural arrangement, from light to darkness, from hope to, you guessed it, hopelessness, like (hasty, sloppy, hurried writing, reader, granted, I recognize, but... no time, no time), OK, comrade, listen, the story is too beautifully conceived and, like, imaginatively narrated for me to be able to do it justice retelling it for you right now, but anyway, that's the gist of it, [from "Life Happened"] 

Sentence, by Mikhail Iossel, is a collection of stories whose conceit is that they are each one sentence long. Some are shorter than the really long ones, in fact, they're not even full grammatical sentences, they're fragments, but I guess they all tell a story in their way. Each story sentences the reader to being in the narrator's 4-year-old head, or his 8-year-old head, being a Soviet-born and Jewish, native Russian speaker but English writer, or being in the old professor's seminar, or a train carriage, I think they're all the same narrator, a singular narrator (not multiple narrators each with their own tale to tell and coincidentally all having the same voice, and sharing the same essential biographical characteristics with the author).

Our narrator takes the bus down Sherbrooke Street, or comments on it being an unseasonably warm day in Montreal, and so on, I love that, I love reading about places I know, and I do love Montreal. Oh, this is autofiction, but I have to think for a minute, what other men write autofiction, I am so used to hearing the term applied somewhat derogatorily to women's writing (oh but of course Knausgård, he of all the accolades, I don't know if they're deserved or not). 

The text is laden with parentheticals and editorial comments (like something something, needs a word here for rhythm) while he searches for the right adjective, verbal tics, and fresh phrasings ("a shoulder-shrug of a question in my eyes").

Some quirks are language-based, of course he has a Russian accent when he writes "an insane some of money" (and I google this expression as written only to discover how disturbingly common it is, and I question my knowledge of English now, surely we talk about "a sum of money" or "some money").

I happen to be reading the one-sentence story "Crying," a kind of staunchly political (anti-Trumpian) — the narrator, or writer behind the anti-Nabokovian narrator, dollop-bombs politics all over the story (can it be anything but a political story?) — dream fugue with a Roy Orbison soundtrack superimposed over it, when I remember I wanted to watch Trump's address to the UN General Assembly, it's already underway when I turn it on, he's droning on about the evils of migration, blurring the line between legal immigration and other forms and he tells the UN "your countries are being ruined" and I wonder to whom is he addressing this remark, surely not to all 193 member countries, all being ruined by migration, so who exactly does Trump mean? He boasts about cleaning up Washington DC, "Your wife can walk down the middle of the street with or without you, nothing’s going to happen." Is he addressing the secretary-general? It's clear he doesn't mean women are safe, he means your property is safe.

This story occurs on November 7, 2024, in the aftermath of the US election of Trump, but also being the anniversary of the Russian revolution, and it's a little bit that was then, this is now, how different but the same, but so very different, do we ever find a better life.

Unimaginable

Imaginable is real, we know as much, but unimaginable is even more so, since most people end up living the lives they could not have predicted for themselves when they were little.

Why did I choose the Al Jazeera live feed over that of, say, CNN (OK, I rarely bother with CNN online anymore because it's too taxing to find real news amid puff pieces and sponsored links, so many pop-ups, and everything is video, not text, I can't find what I'm looking for, maybe it's changed lately, I dunno)? But after Trump's speech the broadcasters review some highlights and then move to other news in the world and I am struck to hear them talk about Israel's continuing genocide in Gaza, as opposed to its continuing strikes, or continuing war, and this heartens me a little, that some people are not afraid to speak the truth, it's a fucking genocide. The narrator remarks that "now the tsunami wave of antisemitism is rolling across the world again," and that's true but that doesn't tell the whole story, how can he tell the whole story in just one sentence?

Anyway, some great stuff in here, I can't decide if it's all a little too much in the end, like an old man rambling on a park bench and at some point you need to make your excuses and go sit on a different bench on the other side of the park.

for as long as your aching heart remembers and holds on to the pain of this rejection, the pulsating red-hot flower of a wound in your soul won't heal, and there is no greater desire than that of a wounded person for another wound, to quote Bataille, so perhaps you should maybe, like, you know, just a suggestion, fall in love with someone else, [from "How to Write  Russian Sentence in English"]

I will pursue this reference, further investigate Bataille, it's relevant to my love story, all my love stories.

There's a story about leaving Soviet airspace, and one about living in a language other than your native tongue. Really all the stories are about those things, and "striving to express the inexpressible," which is a recurring theme these days (my living, breathing days), somehow Wittgenstein has seeped up to the surface, I never studied Wittgenstein, despite my area of academic interest. Wittgenstein was often invoked as a curiosity but never taken seriously, both in the philosophy seminars and in the linguistics lectures, but oh there was that Greek god in so many of my classes, he with the tousled hair and the sweaters, maybe it was always the same sweater (I see him now in my mind's eye, looking like a cross between my grade-school crush, who was actually Greek, and Derek, a designer I worked with decades later, in a confrontational stance with the metaphysics prof, his complete antithesis, who also wore sweaters, very likely the same sweater repeatedly, a cardigan misbuttoned, and while it may not have been stained, it gave off the air of being so — stained with his own effluences, magnified by his lecherous gaze upon the glorious youth of his audience — and with hair like Layton or Richler, but matted with grease, he was the size of both those men put together, I wonder where my fellow student is now, what has he grown into), he always brought up Wittgenstein, as if it were the one thing he'd ever read and understood and around which the whole world revolved, and all of us, even the profs would roll our eyes, but oh he was beautiful, years later I went to see the movie Wittgenstein at the Bytowne and I remember thinking it was kinda mind-blowing but also it didn't help me understand Wittgenstein at all. My sister gifted me a copy of Wittgenstein's Poker the year it came out (I think I made it halfway through, maybe I'll try again), but that didn't help either.

...yet toward the end, especially in the last few months preceding his abrupt fall into final stillness, some actually found it rather fascinating, in a limited way, to listen to his, uh, vocalizations, with their sheer whimsical meaninglessness, his fancifully and haphazardly esoteric verbal emissions, as ungraspable as the illusory fleeting shadow of some imaginary giant non-vulturous tropical bird's splendid multicoloured wing's passage, o life o life, google Gulag, google Gulag, a mixture of incomprehensible metaphors, striving to express the inexpressible, forever leaving the shore of the basic shared human understanding and transforming itself into a hermetic hermitic verbal cipher, wholly impenetrable first and foremost to his own disordered mind, a singular matter of extravagant guesswork and elaborate leisurely interpretations, vague surmises, groundless inferences, meaningless metonymies, all grading unmistakably in the heartbreaking direction of nonexistence, just a distant episode of a life thwarted and discontinued, full of senseless symbols and uninterpretable signs, sighs and silence. [from "Google Gulag"]

My fractured, menopausal insides

This week I cited a passage from a book I was reading (not this book) to a friend, and they commented how dark it was, with the implication that, these days, stressful as they are for me, perhaps I should try leaning into more positivity. But how do you know how optimistic or not a book is until you've read it? And just because I read dark things, it doesn't mean I wallow in them, invite them to drown me, I can still interpret them with wisdom and lightness, I won't let a book tell me what to do or how to understand the world (the book in question, which I have not yet finished reading, being precisely about ceasing to do so). Besides which, I like dark. (Why?) Despairing interests me, it feels real, I don't know if it's harder or easier to express than joy, maybe I still think of it as other people's pain, by comparison it makes me feel better about myself, but I'm drawn to it (as if I have something to learn from it, I dunno), I'm drawn into it, the cyclone of emotion, the eye of the storm, with the belief that I will reemerge, transformed on the other side.

The thesis is that literature cures the common cold, brain fog, and schizophrenia. It's an amiable undertaking about the possible benefit of reading literature. Novels are a warm poultice, a mustard plaster on your chest, a cup of herbal tea, my grandmother Rufi's chicken soup. Myself, I prefer books that give you styes. That carve stigmata on your palms. That catch in your throat and take your breath away.

I suspect Marta Sanz and I may have overlapping reading lists.

Sanz's My Clavicle and Other Massive Misalignments is a short, crisp, funny novel with, in my view, a brilliant title. Arguably it's more essay than novel, but it's very readable and relatable. It's so... of the body. Funny and direct, the protagonist's voice carries the reader along her journey to establish what is wrong with her, the source of interruption in her life as a menopausal freelance writer.

What I didn't realize is that menopause is not exclusively about a mutation that leaves you feeling less attractive. It's something much more intimate, something that's intimate and at the same time physical, that I would call "interior." The Change is something interior and explicit. It's not just a question of how you look: dry skin, gradual capillary poverty, spidery veins on the cheeks, bags under the eyes, grids of wrinkles like the netting on a fascinator. [...] The worst part is that menopause provokes a sense of vulnerability, which in turn makes you actually vulnerable. As if all the fibers in your rib cage tensed up and that constant tightening was keeping you from breathing. You don't sleep well, you don't defecate well, things don't smell the same, and food doesn't taste the same. [...] At night I get cramps in my toes that are nothing like those former involuntary movements, during orgasm, when that other, younger foot used to tense, then stretch, and bend and grow with pleasure until it broke the glass slipper.

Menopause is a problem. Currently it feels (to me) more problematic than periods, than managing contraception, pregnancy, childbirth, postnatal care (with or without depression), breast cancer screening, general sexual health — all with their related physical and mental pains, and their physical, mental, and social costs. And then let's not wash over the social, political, and economic frameworks in which we experience these problems (and yes, we experience them as problems). Unequal pay, childcare, division of household labour, the emotional labour of relationships, navigating the feminine hygiene aisle at the drugstore.

The female experience is a problem. And then we somatize it. But we go on.

I carry on reading my book, and as always when you read, you start to think of other things, and maybe that's the beauty of reading. Parallel thinking. Three-dimensional musing. Geometric shapes hidden inside snowflakes.

Currently, my tear ducts are misaligned and the associated usual emotional regulators are malfunctioning. That is, I want to cry all the time. Sometimes I actually cry, but it's the always wanting to — I sense it right now, this tensing around my eyes, a pillow of pressure on my sinuses, the sensation of welling up, brimming over — that feels uncomfortable. I object to saying that I'm feeling "emotional." I feel "hormonal." There is no sadness, grief, disappointment, anger, frustration. But yes, I occasionally feel panic and overwhelm. (When did "overwhelm" start being used as a noun?) Because life, my life. But I don't feel emotional, per se. (Not that I'm unemotional, that would be problematic in a different way.) It feels physical, a little like onions, but more deeply biologically seated. It feels, "emotionally," a lot like pregnancy, a kind of surge, gasping for life but from opposite directions.

The triggers are unexpected. I'm fine with formulaic movies, the tear-jerkers with their manipulative soundtracks, I don't flinch. It's when my friends casually launch the hard-hitting questions, like "how are you?," they really don't beat around the bush, that's when I crumble.

I feel tired, mostly mentally tired. But it is a reasonable response to my circumstances to feel this way. What puzzles me is that I should break now, the stresses have persisted for years, at least as many as since my last period. All of a sudden I can no longer store emotion in my body, there is no more room inside me, I have to release it.  

My family doctor is on maternity leave. Her replacement is young, male. I'd anticipated not being taken seriously, but he's kind. I sense I have the power to make him scared of me. 

We talk about ruling out physical causes, possible thyroid dysfunction. He proceeds to ask me the standard questions for diagnosing depression or anxiety. He asks if I feel guilt, and I respond reflexively, without thinking, without blinking, no, and I am surprised to realize that it’s true, that since my mother died — or maybe simply because I've achieved some milestone of maturity, satisfaction with my life, fulfillment of certain responsibilities — I am free of guilt (except for the general guilt of white western privilege). 

When I write — when we write — we can't forget our material condition. That's why I think every text is autobiographical and that sometimes our disguises — the sinuous, translucent fabrics that cover our bodies — are less modest than naked declarations. I'm not interested in photoshopped selfies. I care more about the unedited facial expression, before language cleans it up, whitening each tooth and smoothing each wrinkle. I'm more interested in the pipe than une pipe that's not a pipe. An autobiography is the consecration of reality and of spring, not the number of stiches required to suture it into a story. My style reflects my fractured, menopausal insides. And this discomfort in certain regions of my body — flatulence, hemorrhoids, fibroids — may be clouding my intelligence. Or maybe not. What I can say is that I still care a lot about how much I'm going to be paid for my work.

I love that Sanz tries to tease apart the physical and the psychological and the results are inconclusive. I relate to the narrator, who has lost confidence in her own strength, although I am faltering not because of pain but of general craziness. I read My Clavicle at the beginning of the summer, before my difficulties began, but I'm struck now by several passages anew. It crosses my mind that reading it in fact may have subconsciously tapped into my concerns regarding my worth (financial, sexual, creative) and precipitated the late manifestation of menopausal symptoms I truly thought I'd managed to escape, or perhaps more cruelly my psyche decided not to call them up but create them out of nothing, to demonstrate my susceptibility to suggestion and distract me from all my other worries, giving me a tangible (if ill-defined) focus for my frustration, yet deliberately less urgently worrisome and more ephemeral than, for example, last year's biopsy-necessitating post-menopausal vaginal bleeding.

And somehow amid all of this, I proclaim I love my life. I feel more like a maker than ever, whether I use words as my material or clay. I look upon all I've made — my home, my family, my work, my art, my self — with satisfaction.

My writing is an uninterrupted assault. In a conspiracy of pleasingly blasphemous words and anatomical language, my writing strips us bare, both me and others, young and old. I tear off our clothes, exposing our blemishes in a search for our immense beauty. And I find it.

Review: Chicago Review of Books

Can fragility feel as hot as bravado?

In bonsai you often plant the tree off-center in the pot to make space for the divine.

This concept is new to me. It makes me reevaluate space, white space. I reconsider my aesthetic tendency toward asymmetry. What am I leaving space for? What am I making space for? Meanwhile, all those situations where I require the fullness of symmetry, do they have no need for the divine? Are they already divine in themselves or are they shutting it out?

I've come to The Argonauts, by Maggie Nelson, too late in life, my life. It might've affected me more impactfully a couple dozen years ago, when I was pregnant and grappling with my body, motherhood, and relationship dynamics, all in constant flux, but it hadn't been published yet. It might've served me a decade ago, upon its release, as I processed my life to that point, and prepared for my rebirth as a single woman, single mother, singular entity. 

Is there something inherently queer about pregnancy itself, insofar as it profoundly alters one's "normal" state, and occasions a radical intimacy with — and radical alienation from — one's body? How can an experience so profoundly strange and wild and transformative also symbolize or enact the ultimate conformity? Or is this just another disqualification of anything tied too closely to the female animal from the privileged term (in this case, nonconformity, or radicality)?

As it is, I found this book frustrating; it made me feel both very smart (I have the wisdom of lived experience, of birth and death; I have known seven or seven thousand types of love, my heart has shriveled, grown, burst, reconstituted, softened, hardened, shattered, scarred, mutated, evolved; I have lived in my body across time and space; what can this book tell me about love, grief, identity, adaptability, responsibility, joy, that is new?) and very dumb (I don't know this academic language, these references or frameworks; I don't know what Deleuze said, I know Lorde the jaded pop star, not Lorde the intersectional feminist and civil rights activist. I understand my experience and express it in a way limited to myself and my own experience).

Once we name something, you said, we can never see it the same way again. All that is unnameable falls away, gets lost, is murdered. You called this the cookie-cutter function of our minds. You said that you knew this not from shunning language but from immersion in it.

I was listening to a radio show, writers discussing favourite books, or major influences or recommended reading, and what now brought me to The Argonauts and hooked me on reading it was mention of "Wittgenstein's idea that the inexpressible is contained — inexpressibly! — in the expressed," so here I am again, still, forever unable to articulate what's in my head, heart, soul, yet somehow assured that it doesn't matter; whatever I need to say is seeping out of my pores, obvious to anyone who cares to listen to my silence. Read me, I scream, without having written a word.

I had always presumed that giving birth would make me feel invincible and ample, like fisting. But even now — two years out — my insides feel more quivery than lush. I've begun to give myself over to the idea that the sensation might be forever changed, that this sensitivity is now mine, ours, to work with. Can fragility feel as hot as bravado?

(The answer is yes. This is something I absolutely know to be true.)

Meanwhile this summer, my daughter went on vacation for over a month. It's the longest we've ever been apart. The emptiness is a strange feeling, a bookend to the fullness of pregnancy. A sneak peek at the empty nest syndrome I will someday soon endure, and I begin to understand how biological mothers may experience it with a certain intensity. An evolution in one's physical space, and the new emotional states that introduces. Although partnerless now for about a decade, I haven't lived alone since 1996; I am mostly very good at being alone — for an evening, for a few days, on vacation for a couple of weeks — I crave it, and am almost never lonely. Except sometimes. But solitude done right, strength at its core, is indeed a gift.

I feel I can give you everything without giving myself away, I whispered in your basement bed. If one does one's solitude right, this is the prize.

The balance of self and other, when both are shape-shifting and changing direction.

But whatever I am, or have since become, I know now that slipperiness isn't all of it. I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependence. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one's work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again — not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.

The gradual loss of hope

There's no continuity and the world I have come from is utterly foreign to me. I haven't heard its music, I haven't seen its painting, I haven't read its books... I know only the stony plain, wandering, and the gradual loss of hope. I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct. Perhaps, somewhere, humanity is flourishing under the stars, unaware that a daughter of its blood is ending her days in silence. There is nothing we can do about it.

I first came across I Who Have Never Known Men, by Belgian writer Jacqueline Harpman, in a review I read about three years ago. I noted the title (a terrific title, the English title having been updated to more closely reflect the original French upon its republication in 2019), and moved on. Suddenly this summer I see it everywhere — bookstore clerk favourites, best books read this year, recommended reading. It's not a special order; it's in stock. Even my library has it. Its resurfacing is a sign of the times.

Originally published in 1995, the novel feels older than that, like an unearthed artefact. The writing/translation is not exactly dated, but it somehow feels not of now. A bit ponderous and expository to start. I was slow to buy into the narrator's recollection of her prepubescent self. She is the youngest captive; she alone has no memory of life as it once was. Then the questions start to bubble up.

Like: Why are they imprisoned? Where are they? Who are their captors? Why are there no signs of civilization? Is it an alien planet? Where did everyone go?

And: How would we really live without men? How do we preserve and pass on knowledge, or acquire it from scratch, when technology is gone, when people are gone? To what end, that knowledge? How and why do we keep time? What makes a lived life? How do you keep going when all hope is gone?

Forty women find release from their subterranean cage and then ... nothing. They find other bunker cages filled with corpses. Sometimes it's men in the cage.

Not so much classic dystopia as existential mystery with a feminist slant. Competent-enough writing and characterization for a novel of ideas.

I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering, and that I was human after all.

The eighteen ways of calculating the volume of a three-dimensional object

You can't understand something you haven't observed for years. She nodded. You understood some words only hearing it many times. You saw some things only after looking at it many times. Most things were like that. Especially things that remained for a long time in her heart. It was the same when she was looking for materials. Blowfish were alien to her, something she's never handled. Observing something for a long time was the first step toward comprehension. She'd learned that at the beginning of her art career.

Melancholy, introspective, and thoughtful, but also confusing and painfully slow reading. It's a mysterious force that pulled me through to the end of Blowfish, by Kyung-Ran Jo. Quite possibly I need to observe it for a much longer time to comprehend it. Kind of a love story, as two (nameless) lonely, haunted people connect.

She wasn't used to feeling the need to buy something; it made her uncomfortable. A bamboo cutting board, a tea set, leather shoes and a bag, a dinosaur robot with sensors, a hefty notebook she picked up and put down sever times, a feather pen. An object's initial power was in the way it drew out possessiveness. A feeling that began with ordinary desire. She had been thinking about the power inherent in objects, and a part of her thoughts had been devoted to the special objects at the center of her work. "Not now," she murmured, then realized that everything was hurtling toward the end, despite what she told herself.

The main protagonist is planning her own death, by poisonous blowfish. While her intention is clear, her motivation is less so — maybe fate or art. Although she is a celebrated sculptor, death is more central to her character than art, and philosophical reflections on art are reserved for her friends and colleagues.

Most of the works explored daily life and personal emotions, avoiding the question of What is sculpture? and What roles do objets d'art have? Some works were dramatic, others were lighthearted. At this moment in time, an artist's inspiration and philosophy seemed more relevant than grappling with the essence of sculpture. These works interrogated the boundary between what was sculpture and what was not. Saim had long been interested in the boundary between painting and sculpture, in how the divide between three-dimensionality and two-dimensionality was becoming fuzzier, and how that gave rise to experimentation and exploration. 

The supporting protagonist's story is told in alternating chapters. (This format was initially confusing for me, as the characters do not have distinct voices.) He is an architect.

Forget about perfectly straight red bricks; when morning light fell on buildings built with warped or damaged bricks, it was almost overwhelming to witness their powerful beauty and dynamic character. A house whose bent, cracked, missing, twisted, and protruding parts looked all the more striking and glorious in the sun. Standing there in his brother's suit, he stacked red bricks in his mind, one by one.

Sculptors and architects have a special relationship with space, and what transpires within or moves through any given space has its own volume, density. I wanted more from this book than it offered. Neither character carries much weight (maybe that's the point? learning to occupy space?). I did not care if the sculptor lived or died; I did not care if the architect found meaning, or love.

Still, he needed to say what he felt. He needed to tell her that love was three-dimensional, that the volume of this three-dimensional thing was difficult to figure out. He heard creaking at the bottom of the stairs. Why did he only now feel the need to tell Sinae these things? Quiet footsteps crossed the hallway. He remembered her silhouette, the woman who had seemed to limp with every step. He heard his door open. He squeezed his eyes shut. He began thinking about the eighteen ways of calculating the volume of a three-dimensional object.

Kyung-Ran Jo in conversation (The Korea Society)
Review (Korean Literature Now)

It is — what it is

He sighed. Sighing is the worst form of breathing and I try not to do it myself but I admit it's hard. Sighing is something we struggle to unlearn. (from "The Air as Air")

The stories in An Oral History of Atlantis are funny and weird. I laughed and nodded along. I was so looking forward to a new book from Ed Park; the only disappointment is that it's not a novel. 

The star of the collection, in my view, is "Well-Moistened With Cheap Wine, the Sailor and the Wayfarer Sing of Their Absent Sweethearts." (And I would love for this story to be a full novel.) An archeological dig, funded by a mysterious foundation, consisting of 18 women all named Tina, on a nameless and drifting island, with a mission to collect samples and translate "oracle bone script" — they wanted never to leave.

We contemplated sending him some saucy photos, the Syllabic sybarites draped languorously over pottery shards and lexicons, feeding one another thumb-sized grapes, but that plan could backfire: it wouldn't do to waste a resource as precious as film. So we pecked out letters on the rusty old Remington, asking the Foundation to consider the value of establishing permanent scholars on the island. A final draft was produced. Then we realized there was no mail service. I volunteered to type out five more copies. These were sealed and tied to the legs of birds we'd befriended. We showed them a picture of our benefactor and hoped for the best, releasing them into the giant Rothko painting that was the sky at twilight, salmon over slate.

As for the language of symbols they were intent on deciphering, "everything could mean anything, as well as its opposite. You had to pick which side of the contradiction to embrace, or else record the whole unholy snarl itself." One day a Tina falls ill and leaves, and a replacement is sent, the Anti-Tina. "All poetry is accuracy," she said.

In "Eat Pray Click," a writer of "pure Sensibilism, with a shot of Mood Writing," devises a Kindle hack (or virus) whereby a book is revised on every reading.

Basically, he longed for a text that wasn't set in stone, something more akin to a living organism — a story with free will. He didn't like that books started on the first page and ended on the last.

"Where's the freedom in that?" he'd say, in letter after letter.

"The Gift" describes a charismatic prof's Fundamentals of Aphorism lectures at a community college and recounts the occasion on which the now heavily overused tautology "It is — what it is" was uttered for the first time in recorded history.

Not a weak story among them.

The Stories 
A Note to My Translator  (at 0:56 of audiobook preview) 
The Wife on Ambien (in The New Yorker)
Machine City 
Seven Women 
Two Laptops (more or less)
Thought and Memory
Eat Pray Click (or Easter Promenade)
Slide to Unlock 

Review

A fucking tyranny of fast-held shapes

Yet once they halted in their relentless cataloguing, recording, reporting … wasn't there so much to give them pause? Hadn't one, in the wet slurp and roll of a glinting dark body glimpsed for just a moment in a natural canal, had to impose a species name on what could not, could never, be intuited from such a glimpse? Wasn't the prickle of unease crawling up the back of their necks tied to some actual shadow in the night? Some distant muttering while they slept?

Drunk Boat called it, roughly in the same month, in a different context, "the null effect — to create a something from the nothing in the darkness, the mind betraying you every time." This directed with a nudge at Man Boy Slim, of "the way the human imagination fills in the gaps."

The "sample" material, however, is actively defying the idea that it might to be catalogued — whether it is the evolutionary result of environmental or artificial factors on indigenous species, or something invasive from somewhere that will not stand for our paltry human attempts at identification, let alone understanding. "Manifestation of the foreign entity."

[I have been wanting to catalogue the plant life in the ruelle, the vegetation beyond the fence of my terrace, under my bedroom window. I feel compelled to document it, preserve it, nurture it. The grape vine is choking out the wild flowers. The raspberry bushes have little fruit this year, perhaps because of the dust and trauma of the construction next door, or maybe the workers are eating them all. So many leafy stalks I'd like to identify, I want them all to thrive. I want to replicate them in clay and display them so that the interior wall reflects the exterior and preserves the record of its evolution.]

Jeff VanderMeer's Absolution is wild. I'm not sure I understand what happens in this book, but it doesn't much matter. This is dense reading that moves from general uneasiness and a creeping eeriness to intense dread. Shades of Solaris with its doppelgangers who mimic, but also fulfill an expectation, filling in a gap in the humans' perception or understanding, and also the zone of Roadside Picnic, where different rules apply.

The first section of Absolution is a prequel occurring some 20 years before the three other Southern Reach books to date, recounting a mission to the Forgotten Coast. Skip ahead 18 years to Old Jim's cover story managing the village bar while reviewing that old mission and keeping an eye on the Séance & Science Brigade. And then a fresh perspective on the First Expedition.

[My rue plant, the one keeping the squirrels at bay, was for a day home to four black swallowtail caterpillars; one fat caterpillar cannibalized the others.]

Area X has its own physics of space and, seemingly, other dimensions — "past, present, and future collapsed into each other." Absolution casts the events of the original trilogy in a new context regarding what is or was known, and what can possibly be known.

All Old Jim could be sure of is that the biologists' sense of time and reality had been obliterated and put back together differently — and that this had harmed them beyond repair.

I had a hard time getting into this novel. I gave up on it once months ago, but now I was determined to soldier through, despite recalling next to no detail from the other books, except the feeling, the existential horror. But I have already circled back to reread Absolution, before revisiting the rest of the series.

[The hydro workers meanwhile are chopping branches of lilac and serviceberry. The birds don't visit the way they used to; I don't blame them. Yesterday a sparrow flew into the airspace of my covered terrace and hovered, homed in on a spider hanging by a thread before snatching it.]

Is anyone absolved? The biologists are absolved of their duty. Old Jim is absolved of his guilt, from living with guilt. Lowry is absolved of humanity. 

Undulating waves of wolves, but made of black liquid and slurping their way across like liquid lava fire, and no that wasn't it but the sight defeated the eye like an eye defeated an ear and a tongue because he needed to see the enemy, not taste or smell them.

By then, Lowry has snorted and swallowed a lot more drugs from Landry, thank the gods. So maybe he was shouting at the liquid things that seemed so joyous in how they could dissipate and re-form and why couldn't all in life be like that? Why did anyone have to commit to just one fucking shape. It was a fucking tyranny of fast-held shapes and what if he just wanted to be a circle or an oval with no end and no beginning?

I've been denied a destination

It gradually dawns on me that I've been denied a destination, caught in a transitional environment, a space between beginning and an end. What I see towers benedictive above my head, and is certainly not Honoré-Beaugrand terminus; I know this now.

Here stands a structure whose purpose was made for people. A space with a very clear intention. Deserted. Forgotten. It's weird, I think. I don't know. A space made for travelers, void of such motion, and I cannot dispose of its perverse emptiness.

I'm dwarfed by the scale of it. 

Every bit of it is carved into rough, angular lines. There are no curves, save for the semi-circular handrail gently churning over the newels of the escalators at their landing thresholds. Few of the ceilings are flat. They soar up, forty, fifty feet and cut at odd facets, sometimes meeting in neat triangles, other times disseminating into geometries that make no sense.

Fluorescent lights flood from everywhere, emanating a faint buzz, but still the place seems dark as though oneiric: a disturbing cast of greenish colour-temperature diffused through protruding beams and slanted balconies, their grooved ceiling lines, as though fingers dragged through the sand, but no, there is nothing natural about this place. 

This subway station, like any city structure, is a space entirely constructed by humans. Even city parks, gardens, and manufactured waterways, which seem to us wild and natural, have been girdled and domesticated by the hands of urban planning. The unpainted concrete, the entirely exposed interior, a vivisection of a body, peeled open like a fruit, its anatomy set on display — I've never seen anything like it. Brutalism is so utilitarian, so institutional. It moves directly against nostalgia. So how is this place then so nostalgic? Why is it both so familiar and so alien? And from where does this nostalgia arise for a place I've never been?

Therein lies the incongruity. There is something dissonant about this place, and it's more than just the look of it. It's the sense that this space was deliberately created to guide busy lives through it arteries and ventricles — passageways for passengers — and in this moment, they are empty. Just for me.

From the moment I came across Coup de Grâce, by Sofia Ajram, as a Kobo 2025 Emerging Writer Prize finalist, I wanted to love it. Subway platforms, stations, tunnels are excellent settings. They have a pulse all their own. Take, for example, the opening passage of Patrick Hamilton's Slaves of Solitude, which sets the urban backdrop for that very modern affliction called loneliness. Or the obvious metaphor of the underground and all that lies beneath in the more conventional gothic horror of Anne Hébert's Héloïse.

But I didn't love it. My inner grammar nerd stumbled over awkward constructions. The Montrealer in me puzzled over the bridge bisecting the rails at Charlevoix, a description that doesn't jive with the station I commuted through daily for years. I put my copyediting hat on to devise a better way than italics to indicate "point final" was to be pronounced in French (to mean, Period. Full stop. — a very anglo Montrealer expression of emphasis), when italics further along the same page were used to serve another purpose and the words themselves do not scream of foreignness. Clearly, I have peeves.

Passages like the above tend toward repetition, and would be better reined in. The journey is relayed in a confident voice, perhaps overly so (or compensatorily?), for a character grappling with depression. The narrator is mostly put off by how this unexpectedly encountered labyrinth at a terminal metro station has put a wrench in their plan to do away with themself à la Virginia Woolf. Toward the end, the format shifts toward a choose-your-own-adventure style, which, although it can be seen as evidence of the narrator's lashing out, feels disrespectful to the reader. 

There's a lot of attitude here. Some of it is "style," some of it feels like anger (but the novel never directs it at anything in particular). A good editor and a dose of humility could help make this a writer to watch.

Walking was writing

(though stillness is another kind of movement; it affects the ground, even if not the wind)

The house I grew up in used to be across the street. That is, it was originally built across the street from its current location. They built the school, and they needed a football field, so they picked up the house and moved it. Coincidentally, the man who lived in the house was the principal of that high school, its first, so presumably he took no issue with the expansion of school property, in fact, probably viewed it as a tangible evidence of his professional legacy. They named the street after him.

Today I also live across the street from a high school. They say we repeat patterns, our parents’ patterns. I repeat my house patterns. I live across the street from the school, behind which run the train tracks. I hear the train sometimes when I lie in bed at night. My dwelling before this one and the one before that were also about the same distance from these tracks that curve through the city. I wonder sometimes if my migration pattern is triangulating, or circling in on something. 

The house I grew up in also has railway tracks run through the block it sits on. They are no longer in use, but when I lived there, I heard the trains, saw them sometimes too, I don’t remember if it was morning or evening or when I came home at lunch, they must have stopped traffic, the tracks swerve across our block to straighten out on the middle of a main street, I don’t remember the traffic, I was oblivious to some things. Funny, I remember the trains but only ever moving in one direction, due east, and then southward toward the border, I wonder if they ever came back. 

The house I call the house I grew up in is the house I lived in for only about seven years, but they were big years, the years of primary and middle school. It was the house I walked to school from and then returned to. We still had a black and white tv. The house the neighbour knocked on the door of to say he thought it was our kitten that had been run over on the next street. It was the house my father died in, the house my brother and sister separately each moved out of, and each moved back in again, the house where a baby squirrel dropped into our kitchen via some duct from the attic, the house with odd creaking noises, sometimes I was scared. The house you could climb out the bedroom window and sit on the roof of the addition. It was the only house on the street with a driveway, because it had a stable in back.

The school’s parking lot was across the street from the school, that is, on the same side of the street the first principal’s house was moved to. The parking lot was irregularly shaped, it did not touch our property, but you could glimpse it through the bushes at the back of the next door neighbours’ garden. I would cut through the parking lot sometimes on the way to the grocery store, or to Cathy’s house, but because of its shape, it wasn’t really a shortcut. Every spring, I would go into the far corner of the lot to tear down some lilacs for my mother for mother’s day. The first time was with my dad, and after he died the lilacs continued to seem like a good idea, my mom loved lilacs. It was only the last year we lived there, or maybe the last two years, that I thought to bring scissors. Probably my dad had, that first time, but in the intervening years I struggled, you can neither snap nor pluck a lilac branch, and this difficulty somehow expanded the illicitness of the operation, the lilacs were not public, and were not the school’s property, they breached the fence that separated a neighbouring garden from the fleet of cars, I knew they belonged to someone else and I liberated them anyway, but it was messy and violent.

I have a lilac tree outside my bedroom window now. Until last week, there was another tree symmetrically flanking my terrace, but it fell victim to a construction fence, or the construction workers, or the school’s expansion and revitalization plans. The building I live in now was built on concrete stilts. This winter we learned, as heavy machinery tore through the old annex building, that our basement has no wall. We stood on the sidewalk and peered into the cellar like it was some cutaway dollhouse, like I could just reach in to extract the garden chairs rather than lug them up the rickety ladder, through the trap door, across my art space and the dining room through the sliding doors.

Hyeseong Cho, The Silence 230914-1

Somehow all this helps to make Houses of Ravicka, by Renee Gladman, make sense. All this, and having travelled to places where there are no street signs, or you don’t know where to find the street signs, or the building numbers aren’t in order, or you discover a place you want to return to but you can never find it again.

First, I left my invisible structure and then I walked. No, first I breathed to descend my structure and then I set out to walk. My immediate neighbors did not seem to notice that my living differed from theirs in that my flat of rooms existed in a geometric impossibility. My rooms opened and closed depending on how air moved through my body, and their rooms did not open and close. For a long time, before I understood my breath, I was stuck in one strange light-filled room. [...] When I'm at home, everywhere I stand is the center space, a space surround by objects, and no matter how far I walk in one direction , the room comes and settles itself around me, until I breathe and am in another room, the room for sleeping, the room where I draw. [...] Living was like writing a long, immersive essay: inside something fluid and labyrinthine, where light shined in at odd angles, even during the new moon. Sleeping was a terrifying pause in writing. Walking was writing. Each room held an essay you wrote as you breathed and the subject of the essay usually had nothing to do with the function of the room, but maybe the room's architecture, for that day, was shaped by the quality of your thinking. First I breathed the steps to my house, and then I descended them. 

For more sensible commentary on this odd novel, see The White Review.

Coincidentally, while preparing to visit my hometown, I browse online for local art galleries and discover an artist who paints street windows and sudden walks. She cites an encounter with Franz Kafka's "The Street Window" as a window onto her perspective, an exploration of the "sudden exposure to the scrutiny of myriad gazes." I hope she's read Gladman, because the happy accident of me discovering her while reading Houses created new doorways for me to step through.

Gladman writes in the afterword:

I was now saying something about [architecture] that allowed me inside structures, no longer running my hand along the exteriors or standing outside looking up at the verticality of them but inside now, occupying space that is not visible from the other side of the wall.