O virtuous Atwood! Virtuous beer!

Great Canadian novelist, environmental activist, inventor, poet. Margaret Atwood is also a brewmaster.

A colleague stumbled across some NooBroo at a local dépanneur, and picked up a bottle for me. I couldn't be more chuffed (any chuffier?)!

Beau's All Natural teamed up with Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson to create MaddAddamites NooBroo, inspired by Atwood's novel MaddAddam and including many of the botanicals noted therein. Proceeds support the Pelee Island Bird Observatory.

According to the brewery website, "Atwood personally tasted and selected the bouquet of botanicals included in this delicate, delicious gruit." She describes it as, "Fresh and spring-like, confident and down-to-earth yet inspirational, rooted in the wild world of foraging and gathering."

Also: most excellent label. I especially love the bee. (Why yes, that is a wind-up frog sitting in the background on my desk at work.)

However, my daughter has raised a concern: she thought K~ was simply showing me the bottle, hadn't realized K~ gave it to me. And now I can't sleep because it seems to me I must've got it wrong. Just last week K~ was offering a taste of the honey her father had made, er, harvested, to the bossman at work, and he mistakenly claimed the whole jar. And so with NooBroo, I couldn't just admire the concept and the packaging; I had to take it, I have to drink it.

I have not yet sampled the brew. Quite in addition to clarifying the issue of ownership, I believe the gruit requires a leisurely weekend to serve as an excellent accompaniment to some fine literature. Perhaps it shall wait even, for The Heart Goes Last. (No, I don't think it can wait that long. Atwood's new novel comes out at the end of September.)

This most improbable of cities

I read Thomas Mann's Death in Venice in Venice recently, and it was a remarkably intense experience.

I began reading en route from Florence, in the train.

He saw it once more, that landing-place that takes the breath away, that amazing group of incredible structures the Republic set up to meet the awe-struck eye of the approaching seafarer: the airy splendour of the palace and Bridge of Sighs, the columns of lion and saint on the shore, the glory of the projecting flank of the fairy temple, the vista of the gateway and clock. Looking, he thought that to come to Venice by the station is like entering a palace by the back door. No one should approach, save by the high seas as he was doing now, this most improbable of cities.

I immediately regretted our approach. Although by our original plan we were to fly to Venice, and travel from the airport to the city by boat, we had been forced to revise several arrangements. Here we were on the railroad tracks stretching out from the mainland onto the sea with no inkling of what we were approaching — a train station like any other, the back door.

It would be days later that I fully understood, when we returned over water from neighbouring islands. Fairy-tale splendour, unreal city.

But at last we would leave with dignity and pride, not slinking through the servants' entrance.

Then I read about the gondolas.

Is there anyone but must repress a secret thrill, on arriving in Venice for the first time — or returning thither after long absence — and stepping into a Venetian gondola? That singular conveyance, come down unchanged from ballad times, black as nothing else on earth except a coffin-what pictures it calls up of lawless, silent adventures in the plashing night; or even more, what visions of death itself, the bier and solemn rites and last soundless voyage! And has anyone remarked that the seat in such a bark, the arm-chair lacquered in coffin-black and dully black-upholstered, is the softest, most luxurious, most relaxing seat in the world?

I was amused by Mann's description, but then shocked to discover its accuracy. They are blacker than black. Mann spoiled it for me. Why would I climb into that foreboding conveyance, glide to my afterlife? It took me some days to come to my senses: hundreds of people travel by gondola daily, my stepping into a gondola would not herald my death. Yes, it is the softest, most luxurious, most relaxing seat in the world. Maybe this is my afterlife.

Leaning back among soft, black cushions he swayed gently in the wake of the other black-snouted bark, to which the strength of his passion chained him. Sometimes it passed from his view, and then he was assailed by an anguish of unrest. But his guide appeared to have long practice in affairs like these; always, by dint of short cuts or deft maneuvers, he contrived to overtake the coveted sight. The air was heavy and foul, the sun burnt down through a slate-coloured haze. Water slapped gurgling against wood and stone. The gondolier's cry, half warning, half salute, was answered with singular accord from far within the silence of the labyrinth. They passed little gardens, high up the crumbling wall, hung with clustering white and purple flowers that sent down an odour of almonds. Moorish lattices showed shadowy in the gloom. The marble steps of a church descended into the canal, and on them a beggar squatted, displaying his misery to view, showing the whites of his eyes, holding out his hat for alms. Farther on a dealer in antiquities cringed before his lair, inviting the passer-by to enter and be duped. Yes, this was Venice, this the fair frailty that fawned and that betrayed, half fairy-tale, half snare; the city in whose stagnating air the art of painting once put forth so lusty a growth, and where musicians were moved to accords so weirdly lulling and lascivious.

Antonio drove us past the homes of Marco Polo and Casanova. He cries out before the bend. Kids in the upper story of some palazzo call out to him by name. This was Antonio's route. They all know him.

The gondolas have names. Some of them are engraved on a silver plaque affixed at the front: Cristina, Laura, Elena. Antonio's boat is called Pruna, after his mother.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous — to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

Today the gondoliers all steer while texting.

Passion paralyses good taste and makes its victim accept with rapture what a man in his senses would either laugh at or turn from with disgust.

Venice is absurd in its luxury, it drips with overindulgence, the lushness of its interiors, the richness of its food, the mystery of its labyrinths, the magic of its squares.

Death in Venice I knew by reputation to be a tragic love story of sorts. I was prepared for this, the perverse ramblings of an ailing old man. He obsesses over youth and beauty. I sat on Lido beach and watched, as Mann did, young bodies. I was prepared for despair.

I had expected something nostalgic and mournful. What I found was something altogether sinister. Not only is a plague of lusts, desires, and disappointments visited upon the central character, a literal plague descends upon Venice, not for the first time. A conspiracy of silence supports the bubble of the Venetian fairy tale. I regret that we were not present for the festa del redentore, which celebrates the end of the plague of 1576; perhaps the plague has not really ended.

Thomas Mann wrote Death in Venice in 1911. In 1954 he published The Black Swan, which I read last winter, which revisits many of the same themes, but this time from a female perspective. I'm astounded by Mann's ability to convey human experience in all its complexity, its joy and shame.

The contrast between youth and age is aligned with that of passion and knowledge. The passion of youth, the wisdom of age. With age, one should know better. The heart and the head. Forget the head.

Knowledge is all-knowing, understanding, forgiving; it takes up no position, sets no store by form. It has compassion with the abyss — it is the abyss. So we reject it, firmly, and henceforward our concern shall be with beauty only. And by beauty we mean simplicity, largeness, and renewed severity of discipline; we mean a return to detachment and to form.

Today marks the 60th anniversary of Thomas Mann's death, not in Venice.

Art heightens life

Art heightens life. She gives deeper joy, she consumes more swiftly. She engraves adventures of the spirit and the mind in the faces of her votaries; let them lead outwardly a life of the most cloistered calm, she will in the end produce in them a fastidiousness, and over-refinement, a nervous fever and exhaustion, such as a career of extravagant passions and pleasures can hardly show.

— from Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann.

Venetian comfort

The Comfort of Strangers, by Ian McEwan, is a strange little novel, set in Venice. One of his early works. It's short, and nothing much happens.

I'm not sure how he achieves it, but the novel has a very sinister tone — the sense that something's lurking in an alleyway or canal. Venice is labyrinthine and mysterious.

McEwan in my view excels at depicting relationships in all their nuance; what little is spoken between characters speaks volumes. Although the details of the story may seems far-fetched, the characters are very real.

And the title tantalizes. I'm still wondering who is seeking comfort from whom, who are the real strangers in this story?

She appeared greedy for the fact of conversation rather than its content; she inclined her head towards him, as though bathing her face in the flow of his speech.

I like this review in New York Times that manages to tell you everything about the novel without actually spoiling any of it, and still make you want to read it. "No reader will begin The Comfort of Strangers and fail to finish it; a black magician is at work."

The movie also is worth watching. It has a terrific cast. And scripted by Harold Pinter, it's mostly true to the novel.

Reading Italian style

I leave for Italy next week, and as such I've been reading all things Italian.

Here are two guidebooks I recommend:

Italy, Insight Guides is a little short on logistical details but big on flavour. This is the book I turned to to help me decide what regions I wanted to visit, but I'll probably leave the book at home.

Secret Venice is a treasure trove of weird and wonderful stories concerning the nooks and crannies of Venice, of which there appear to be plenty. Like the graffiti image of a human heart, scratched by a stonecutter who slept in the doorway upon witnessing a Levantine Venetian stab his mother and tear out her heart.

So yes, Venice is on the itinerary, followed by Florence, then Rome, with day trips here and there. (And as part of our preparation, we've been replaying Assassin's Creed II, to familiarize ourselves with the lay of the land.)

Quite apart from practical research, I've also been stocking up on novels set in those places. My reading material for the journey includes:

• The Comfort of Strangers, by Ian McEwan
• Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann
• Zofloya; or, The Moor: A Romance of the Fifteenth Century, by Charlotte Dacre
• The Woman of Rome, by Alberto Moravia

I've already started the McEwan, and it's short and very compelling and it'll be done before I leave. And I'm excited about the Moravia because it was referenced in Mad Men. But it strikes me that these novels are all a little dark. Perhaps something a little lighter, more gelato-inspired, is in order.

Do you have any Venice-to-Rome reading recommendations for me?

Only poetry could win the vote

We were packing our bags. There was nothing that they could say now. Now they were trying anything to make us stay. Like a lover who was trying to talk reason into you as you were throwing your clothes into a suitcase, they went from saying soothing, reconciliatory, sweet things to calling you a complete idiot and telling you that you'd regret it for a sure. Well it was too late for all that.

We would go off on our own. We just wanted to speak French in peace. We wanted to whisper dirty things to our loved ones in French. There was a certain kind of love that could only be expressed in this way.

There was no difference between the expressions I like you and I love you in French. You could never declare love like that in English.

We loved in a self-destructive, over-the-top way. A way that was popular in sixties experimental theatre and certain Shakespeare plays. We loved like Napoleonic soldiers in Russia, penning beautiful letters while seated on the corpses of our dead horses. We were like drunk detectives who carried around tiny notebooks full of clues and fell for our suspects. We were crazy about the objects of our affection the way that ex-criminals in Pentecostal churches were crazy about Jesus. We went after people who didn't know we existed, like Captain Ahab did. We loved awkwardly and hopelessly, like a wolf ringing a doorbell while wearing a sheepskin coat that is way too small for him.

How could you explain that in a political platform? I wondered. I began to write a speech for Etienne. The only way that we would win the referendum would be if the speech-makes came out. Only poetry could win the vote.

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

Harkening back to the pre-referendum days of 1995.

Happy St. Jean-Baptiste Day, Quebec!

The joules of men

I started reading The Windup Girl some time ago, by Paolo Bacigalupi. It's slow going and fairly demanding reading, but in a rewarding way. There are no infodumps here; the reader has to figure out the terminology and the society and the politics as they go. It's rich world-building. (In this way this book is reminiscent of the work of China Miéville. These authors give their readers a lot of credit.)

Hock Seng's treadle loses its rhythm. "This is a difficult thing, I think. Even the Dung Lord must bow before the Megodont Union. Without the labor of the megodonts, one must resort to the joules of men. Not a powerful bargaining position."

I love this passage from early on in the book, because it makes no sense (what's a megodont? what's a dung lord?), but of course it makes all kinds of sense.

I imagine breaking the lines, for it to take the form of a poem.

Hock Seng's treadle
loses its rhythm.
"This is a difficult thing,
I think. Even the Dung Lord must
bow before the Megodont Union.
Without the labor of the megodonts,
one must resort
to the joules of men.
Not a powerful
bargaining position."

The language of science fiction is poetry.

So I'm plodding along and figuring things out, but also reminded of the value of taking things slow, the richness of slow reading.

Here we have calorie companies and generipping and seedbanks.

Best to trust no one, even if they seem friendly. A smiling girl one day is a girl with a stone bashing in the brains of a baby the next. This is the only truth. One can think there are such things as loyalty and trust and kindness but they are devil cats.

Grade 6 is so over

Two more days of school (sigh), but prom was Friday night.

Things I'm doing instead of blogging

Still reading, but in a pretty distracted way, and mostly just on my short commute.

Vacation planning and house hunting, both of which are time sinks of the highest order.

Cleaning closets, which while mildly satisfactory, the pleasure of giving away all my excess is shortlived, as its absence is barely noticeable in the sea of stuff amid which I live.

Moping, not excessively, but more than I ought to.

Composing blog posts in my head, but then forgetting to actually write them, as if the process of thinking them through were a sufficient mental exercise, and the act of writing them superfluous.

Replaying Assassin's Creed II in the belief that it is valid preparation for our upcoming trip to Italy, to familiarize ourselves with the streets and landmarks of Venice, Florence, ...

Not MOOCing, at least not since I completed a course on the world of wine, from grape to glass, even though I'm enrolled in a fiction writing MOOC — although I did watch The Beach, as "research," because the course featured insight from Alex Garland.

Not colouring either, and not watching Mad Men anymore, which makes me sad.

Trying hard to be nice, but allowing myself to think nasty, spiteful thoughts.

Stressing on behalf of my daughter, to ease her stress about year-end provincial ministerial exams along with all the other stresses of being 12.

Shopping, mostly for the kid because she won't stop growing, and also for a fancy dress and sneakers in preparation for grade 6 prom(!) (which went swimmingly yesterday).

Stressing about all of it, about work, about life in general, about getting my shit together and the prospect of buying and moving into a new house.

Wandering aimlessly, which allows me also to devote time to several of the tasks noted above.

Drinking Italian wine, of which I've never been a great fan, in order to prime my palate and develop an appreciation for it.

Dreaming strange dreams, like how the plane was landing in Skopje instead of Venice, and my phone needed charging but I'd gotten the day wrong so I hadn't had time to get a plug adaptor. I had to look up Skopje when I woke up.

Remembering to breathe.

From the Penumbra-verse

Having enjoyed Robin Sloan's Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, I long ago subscribed to his newsletter.

This week he tells of a mysterious little book, Iterating Grace, that is cropping up in mailboxes around San Francisco.

It's a neat little story, and completely in line with Penumbra, fetishizing bookish artifacts while embracing the digital future.

In Silicon Valley, so many people had collaborated to create so much, only to watch it crumble and wonder how real it had ever been. For a lot of tech workers, this only led to despondency and debt. But Crooks seemed to find the dot-com economy's impermanence electrifying. Start-ups, he realized, were a kind of spiritual exercise. He wanted to live that experience again, but in the purest possible form. He wanted to "touch the ESSENCE without gloves," as he put it in the summer of 2003, in an email to his uncle.

Quite apart from, Who is Koons Crooks and how did he get here?, Iterating Grace comes wrapped in an enigma of its own: who wrote it?

The short book has been digitized — it's a quick and interesting read. And Alexis Madrigal details the circumstances of the book.

Buffering

1.1 Satin Island, by Tom McCarthy, is one of my favourite books in recent history.

2.1 Some books I want to read cold. I don't want reviews to colour my impressions. This is one of those books. Partly because I want to be able to later report on it purely, without my personal opinion having been influenced. Partly because I want to test myself: read the material, write the exam, gauge whether I arrived at the same conclusions as the acknowledged experts. Partly because I want my journey to be wholly original, so that I can then write something wholly original. It represents a tension between individual and collective thought.

2.2 I was caught sitting somewhere, waiting, and it was not appropriate to be reading a real book, and it was not clear how much longer I'd be waiting like this and my attention was unfocused, so I started reading my phone, and I skimmed a review I'd bookmarked (see 2.3). I noticed reference to the cover art and thought I could safely read this section without encountering spoilers, but then I realized it was about the US edition of the novel. My copy looks completely different. Whatever this review said, it would not apply.

2.3 Christopher Urban in Los Angeles Review of Books — A Satin Island of the Mind:

A characteristic of a good (and usually difficult) novel is that it teaches you how to read it as you go along. Satin Island does so without even having to open its pages. On the cover of the book, five of the subtitles: "Treatise, Essay, Report, Confession, Manifesto," are crossed out, leaving only "A Novel," and rightly so; for Satin Island is indeed all those things, but it is first and foremost a novel. The colorful foil jacket is a great piece of cover art (a co-worker picked it up after seeing it on my desk all day, and asked if she "Could just look at it?"), and it, too, offers numerous possible interpretations. Easiest of all is to connect the dots of oil (or ink?) to see a stick figure, an effigy, a Christ-like crucifixion of the shroud mention in the book's beginning, cutting sideways, right to left, across the top of the graph-paper background. But turning the book horizontally and (touching on a soccer analogy made in the book) one sees the figure as a goalie, protecting the "grid-like" net, the streaking dots as the projected path of the ball, the "goalie's anxiety at the penalty kick," to take a line from Handke.

2.4 Or possibly it was this review, by Jonathan Russell Clark at The Rumpus, which starts with the clues on the (American) cover:

On the cover of Tom McCarthy's new novel, a number of words appear crossed out. "A manifesto," "an essay," "a report," "a confession," and "a treatise" are all struck through, leaving only the words "a novel" un-slashed. But none of these terms quite captures what Satin Island really is: a polemic.

And later:

The stories, if we can call them that, have little or no thrust, no narrative momentum. Instead, they greatly suggest meaning with proximity yet seem to mock you for finding any. In other words, McCarthy throws out many of the so-called rules of fiction writing in order to depict something he believes to be greatly missing from realism: the erratic and associative movements of the mind.

2.5 My cover has a colour wheel (rather, a buffering symbol in full colour), dripping with thick black oil. The oil slick is slightly raised, satiny to the touch. I love that the front- and endpapers show the oil bleeding down from the top edges. I love that my copy is now fairly filthy, signs of rubbing against other books, stains from being slid across tables, a lots of tiny rips in the jacket from me cramming it into my purse, a hefty scratch not quite tearing the paper likely caused by my keys being jostled about in said purse, and some buckling, having dried after partly sitting in a wet spot of white wine. I usually take good (but not obsessive) care of my books, but this one looks like I picked it up off a park bench.

3.1 It's about a fucking corporate anthropologist. How awesome is that?

I was the in-house ethnographer for a consultancy. The Company (let's continue to call it that) advised other companies how to contextualize and nuance their services and products. It advised cities how to brand and re-brand themselves; regions how to elaborate and frame regenerative strategies; governments how to narrate their policy agendas — to the press, the public and, not least, themselves. We dealt, as Peyman liked to say, in narratives.

3.2 Peyman is his boss. I also work with somebody called Peyman. I had never encountered the name before I worked with him. Our Peyman is an IT guy. But also vague and elusive.

3.3 I wondered if the next character might also be relatable to someone I work with. Lo and behold, a robotic Finnish monologue.

3.4 There were other things I'd been thinking about that suddenly worked their way into the novel. The problem of "field" versus "home." How the company where I work runs on anxiety. And then the things I read about would crop up around me. Like the traffic patterns. And thyroid cancer. What if this novel were actually telling me my story, and I was reading it just ahead of it happening? This turned out to be not that book. (How would I go about writing that book?)

But the more you start looking for things (like dead parachutists), the more they start cropping up.

3.5 Do you remember the raid on the Armando Diaz school, during the 2001 G8 meeting in Genoa? Me neither, and I used to keep informed back then. U's friend finally tells him her account of the events. I've heard more about the raid in the last few months, in the news and on Netflix, than I did at the time.

3.6 It's a buffering problem. Everything is slightly out of sync. Always in a state of being processed. That is, lag is a problem, buffering is its state of being.

4.1 U compiles a lot of dossiers — scraps of paper stuck on walls or sorted into portfolios. My dossiers are pastel-coloured sticky notes gently tapped onto the sausage coils of my brain, but with a swoosh of the hair on my skull, they waft away.

4.2 I had at one time intended to quote passages — 2.3 The Company's premises; 4.1 On Lévi-Strauss; 5.5 The Company's logo, a Babel tower; 7.9 The buffer zone of small objects on the counter in front of the woman at the bar; 8.9 The cleaning of the desk; 8.12 Tabula rasa, carte blanche; 10.3 On elemental properties, differentiation in its purest form; 12.17 Text messaging as the key to immortality; 14.12 The anachronism of payphones — but they've all run away from me. Just read the book.

4.3 Duncan White in The Telegraph:

There is evident pleasure taken in puncturing conventional consolations. We don’t want plot, depth or content," McCarthy has said. "We want angles, arcs and intervals; we want pattern." McCarthy will give you pleasure but he won't give you resolution. Closure is an illusion, the Koob-Sassen Project cannot be understood, the Great Report cannot be written. U tells us that there are occasions when he thinks he is about to grasp "the plan, formula, solution" but "before waking, with a jolt, I watched it all evaporate, like salt in a quiet breeze".

Yes, we want pattern. Beautiful, beautiful pattern. We create it when it isn't there.

4.4 It feels significant that subconsciously I chose my laser-cut metal bookmark depicting the New York City skyline — the view as if from Staten Island — to mark my place.

4.5 The report still needs to be written:

Then the Great Report would not be something that was either to-come or completed, in-the-past: it would be all now. Present-tense anthropology; anthropology as way-of-life. That was it: Present-Tense Anthropology™; an anthropology that bathed in presence, and in nowness — bathed in it as in a deep, bubbling and nymph-saturated well.

4.6 I can't get over how smart this book makes me feel. It makes me complicit. I will be part of the Present-Tense Anthropology™ armed resistance movement. I feel simultaneously connected and disconnected, in a state of buffering. Erudite books generally make me feel stupid, or at least small. Therefore, either this book is not nearly so smart as I think it is or it is much more.

4.7 The employee–employer described by Patty Hearst syndrome. We are all cogs. We are all the machine.

This pretty much set up the protocol or MO I'd deploy in my work for the Company from then on in: feeding vanguard theory, almost always from the left side of the spectrum, back into the corporate machine. The machine could swallow everything, incorporate it seamlessly, like a giant loom that re-weaves all fabric, no matter how recalcitrant and jarring its raw form, into what my hero would have a called a master-pattern — or, if not that, then maybe just the pattern of the master.

4.7 Jeff Turrrentine in The New York Times:

McCarthy isn't a frustrated cultural theorist who must content himself with writing novels; he's a born novelist, a pretty fantastic one, who has figured out a way to make cultural theory funny, scary and suspenseful — in other words, compulsively readable.

The rat, the cats, and the snake

Last night I dreamt there was a rat in my bed, but ultimately I expelled it from the Eden that is my home.

In my dream, I stirred from my sleep and felt a presence above my head, the cat perched on the headboard, I thought, as she used to sometimes do on the old bed, the one I shared with my other half when I had another half, and the old bed was where it used to be on the other wall. I thought it was the cat, but then I felt the cat nudge at my hand, which was hanging over the side. I glanced up, and in my half-sleep I thought it must be one of Helena's stuffed animals, though I didn't recognize it, but then it moved.

Then I realized it was a rat, and I slowly rose from the bed and grabbed it around its fat neck with both my hands. It tried to gnaw at my hands and wrists, but fruitlessly. I stuffed it in a paper gift bag, held it closed, carried it out onto the deck.

I was pissed off at the cat for not caring. I hoped to lure the neighbourhood cats into finishing the rat off. They were all there, in the yard, but the courtyard was swampy, like after the thaw, though it never puddles like that in this reality, and the cats sat on their individual island mounds. Curious about all the water but wanting to stay dry, they were not interested in the rat.

Then the construction workers came through the passageway into the courtyard and I wanted to show them the rat. I opened the bag and a silver snake was wrapped around the rat, trying to sink its fangs in. And the rat squirmed away and scampered off.

This is a true story, a true dream. I think it tells of how the rat that was my other half is expelled from my life. The cats are me, the feminine, safe, dry, and indifferent. The snake means the transformation is happening.

All the strange things that have no purpose other than making life more awesome

"In the Bible, it says that God invented the universe in seven days," I started. "But there was actually an eighth day, and on this day God created all the strange things that have no purpose other than making life more awesome."

[...]

"On the eighth day God invented the sound of rain and electricity. He invented roses and tattoos of roses. He invented city beaches and goldfish. He invented spots on cheetahs and made the legs on women longer than they needed to be. He invented trumpet players and haikus. He invented tiny old men that serve espresso, and wild flowers in abandoned lots. He invented constellations and neon lights. He invented being ticklish and exaggerating. He invented snowflakes and dinosaur bones for us to dig up. And most importantly, he invented a little boy on Boulevard Saint-Laurent who would be greatest figure skater and greatest kisser the world had ever seen, and he named him Raphaël Lemieux."

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

This is a fine example of how Heather O'Neill makes life a little more awesome.

Colourless dreams

Early this month I started a reading a novelization of the life of George Sand. How is it that such an interesting historical figure could be rendered so mind-numbingly boring? With excruciating physical detail, that's how.

They say it's the small details that bring historical fiction to life, but in such quantities they seem to deaden it.

This is The Dream Lover, by Elizabeth Berg. Is this just a matter of the wrong book at the wrong time for me? Have you read Berg?

I admit to having been charmed by one line: "I was thrilled by the way Jules made an intimate act intimate."

I have picked up and put down this novel a couple times already. Maybe I'll try one more time. Maybe I won't.

Damp secrets

The Service of Clouds, by Delia Falconer, takes its title from the epigraph from art critic John Ruskin in "Of Modern Landscape": "if a general and characteristic name were needed for modern landscape art, none better could be invented than 'the service of clouds'." I'm not really sure what that means, nor what significance it has as this novel's title. Perhaps the novel is meant to depict an interior landscape, but it is decidedly not a modern one.

It is a huge responsibility — one I rather dislike — to read a book pressed upon you by a friend who professes it to be among their favourites. This is not a book I would've picked up of my own accord. But once started, it's not one I would abandon, either — I was wholly interested to know how it would turn out.

In fact, at its very best, it calls to mind the magic and awe I felt when reading Richard Powers' The Goldbug Variations and Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale, two books I think of fondly.

The novel is, as advertised, "sumptuously poetic" and "seductively lyrical", but for my taste, excessively so. Many of the descriptions run on, and I would skip through them. Quite possibly because of this I have missed out on beauteous and nuanced observations of the human condition.

When I recounted the terrible winter of 1918, I could not find the words to tell him how Mrs Grudge, who had been widowed two years by the war, was found in her chicken shed, her cheek flattened against the faeces and pellets on the floor. I remembered how Mr Medlicottt, just weeks before his own loss, had returned to the pharmacy to give an account of the post-mortem. He had stood behind the doctor as his government-issue scalpel made a red line from the tip of her chin down to the sparse triangle of hair below her belly. Before the muscle and the inner organs were revealed he saw pale beads of fat which spilled and gleamed. The voluptuousness, he said, had surprised him. Inside her womb the doctor had found a lump of tissue attached to a damp hand of chestnut hair, which he pulled taut with one hand while he detached the tumour with his knife. Springing from her belly, the growth bobbed from his gloved fingers like a shrunken head. When it was bisected there were two crude teeth caught like see pearls at its centre. The doctor dropped the flesh and teeth and hair into a jar of spirits and took them to a sandstone building in the university on Parramatta Road, islanded by the traffic which made its way into the city form the west. All that day I was haunted by the thought of those damp secrets unwound on the wooden table.

What exactly is going on here? Something nefarious and sexual is implied here. Is it a baby, or a tumour? This is a fairly extreme example, but it demonstrates my overall impression of the novel. The language is cryptic, and the book wants to be thought clever — it's too clever to tell anything straight. It's like a poem that's deliberately ambiguous; it probably has something concrete to relate, but the more metaphor and symbol that can be packed in, the more important it sounds.

Perhaps my judgement is so harsh because I did not like the heroine or find her romances wholly believable. Eureka Jones is a capital "R" Romantic, but ultimately I found her reserved and passionless even (especially) when she professed her heartbreak. At times there are weirdly sexual references. Is this novel a meditation on love? It is not even the story of a romance. It is the self-indulgent musings of a silly young woman, one with her head in the clouds. One who's learned everything about love from vaguely suggestive poetry.

I liked this novel's opening, when it recounted the character's family histories. But it lost me when it spoke of love. I understand love and romance completely differently, in a much fuller, more passionate, more romantic way than poor stupid Eureka. She's found nothing.

The story is set in Australia in the years leading up to and just after the First World War, when a lot of nations and individuals grew up. The main love interest photographs clouds and is based on real-life Blue Mountains photographer Harry Phillips. Clouds are a key motif throughout the text, but it could just as easily have been rock formations, botanicals, or photographic emulsions.

Reviews
Happy Antipodean
New York Times

Reading Group Guide

Warning: there are no unicorns in this book

There are no unicorns in this book, not really. The Gallery of Lost Species, by Nina Berkhout, has a picture of a unicorn on the cover. It looks like a real unicorn, too, not some childlike rainbow-prancing animation.

The flap copy also refers to the unicorn:

Just as thirteen year-old Edith Walker is about to leave childhood behind, she thinks she spots a unicorn high on a slope while hiking. Her daydreamer father Henry convinces her that what she's seen is real. Edith's sighting of the fabled creature — and her unfailing belief that the imaginary creature will eventually be found — sets in motion a series of events that impact the next decade of her life.

Symbolism, much?

So for some reason I expected this book to be a quest for that unicorn. A bit of a fantasy novel, YA maybe. I wasn't sure I wanted to read this book.

But the website copy provided a few more details:

Fulfilling her father's wish for her to work in a museum, Edith takes a job cataloguing artwork at the National Gallery of Canada, where she meets an elderly cryptozoologist named Theo. Theo is searching for "Gauguin's mystery bird" and has devoted his entire life to tracking down extinct animals. [...] Edith develops an unlikely friendship with Theo when she realizes they might have more in common than she imagined: they are both trying to retrieve something that may be impossible to bring back to life.

Aha! Cryptozoology. There's something I could sink my teeth into.

But Edith doesn't go looking for the unicorn, she just remembers it from time to time. And the cryptozoologist is a fairly minor character.

So this gallery of lost species consists of a unicorn, a bird, and Edith's sister. And maybe Edith herself, and Theo, and Edith's failed painter father, and her mother is certainly a species unto herself, who doesn't even know she's lost. Liam, who fell hard for Edith's sister, he's neither much of a species nor is he lost, though he's lost to Edith, who fell hard for him.

I feel like I was tricked into reading this book. Like when my mom is watching TV and some movie's just starting, and she tells me to come watch with her, it's such a nice movie, but I don't really feel like it. But she tells me the title and its sounds vaguely familiar, like something that may have interested me once upon a time. And I start watching it from where I stopped midtrack crossing the living room, and then I perch on the arm of the sofa, and before you know it I'm curled up beside my mom with a blanket and the tears are streaming down my face, and I'm thinking, this is not a nice movie at all, it's not what I thought it was at all.

This book is like that. I got sucked into Edith's childhood, living in the shadow of her sister, living in the whirlwind of their crazy mom, and wondering why their parents were even together, they're both of them so weak in their different ways. And then they're teenagers, and the drugs start, and the sister leaves and goes to the other side of the country, and she just can't keep it together, and the alcohol, and barely making ends meet, and people die, and life just happens, and it's so sad and depressing, she's a lost cause, and they're all doing stuff for the wrong reasons, they're so screwed up.

So it was a good book, in that it was entirely compelling, I couldn't wait to find out what happened next.

But had I known what it was all about, it's not the kind of book I would've picked up. I still kind of wish there'd been an honest-to-goodness unicorn quest in it.

Everything beautiful makes them cry

"You're mistaking happiness for unhappiness. That's why the French are so melancholic. Everything beautiful makes them cry. They invented existentialism as an excuse not to love their wives."

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

All time is unredeemable

When I was 17, I would ride the bus up to the university. For art and culture. By myself. I'm not sure why I thought that would be a cool thing to do. Certainly I enjoyed it, but I suspect it was something I felt I ought to do, in order to become the person I thought I wanted to be.

I didn't tell any of my friends. I don't remember what I told my mother — she would've been supportive of the endeavour in theory, but horrified that I was going alone. I must've lied.

So I was 17 when I first saw Jean-Luc Godard's Prenom: Carmen. Which I'd wanted to see because I liked Carmen, the opera, the story. What did I know?

So I was 17 when I first heard Beethoven's String Quartet No. 15 in A Minor, when I first heard it in a significant way. In that movie.



I was 17 when I studied T.S. Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and wrote a response.

I was 19 when I first encountered the Four Quartets. When I met David. When he brought me Beethoven's Late Quartets.

Last weekend I saw the Emerson String Quartet perform No. 15 in A Minor at Bourgie Hall. It was perfect.

It's one of the sexiest pieces of music I know, the way it breathes with exquisite anticipation.

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.

I have nothing to hide

I've played with personas, I've tried to compartmentalize my various selves, but it's too hard. It's contrary to my experience of reality; everything bleeds into everything else. (Even this blog, Magnificent Octopus, was conceived as a magnum opus, an everything, a unifier.)

In the end, it's all me. I've always used my real name. Why wouldn't I? I have nothing to hide.

Last weekend, though, I came to the stark realization that "I have nothing to hide" is a vulnerability in the armour of freedom I wear so brazenly. It can be used to undermine my right to privacy.

Everybody has something to hide. And I'm prompted, what if you're applying for a certain job, what if there's a regime change in 5 or 10 years' time, what if.

So let me say instead: I stand by all I say and do. I have nothing I should ever have to hide.

From Anonymous to Edward Snowden: Hackers as Activists, was a fascinating discussion, part of this year's Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival, moderated by Will Straw and featuring anthropologist Gabriella Coleman (@BiellaColeman)and Ubisoft content director Thomas Geffroyd (@Orph30), who worked on Watch Dogs, a game about a hacker.

---

On my way out to the event, I continued reading Satin Island, by Tom McCarthy, and I was just at the part where Petr was telling about people hacking down the Berlin wall. I was jarred by the use of the word hack — here it was starkly physical, people chiseling and chipping away at this massive physical structure, which itself was a mere symbol of something much stronger and vaster, something social and political, some great divide. And this word was buried in this tiny account which was surrounded by talk of U's company's Project, his growing fantasies of vandalizing the Project and its associated structures, of sabotaging it by feeding faulty data into the Project.

That word, "hack," is a loaded word. To cut, to cough. To cope, to loaf. To work as a mercenary, to work in the service of mediocrity, to sell out. As regards the technological connotations, see Ben Yagoda's A Short History of Hack.

---

Hacking has a long and proud history that depends on craft and craftiness, with the intent of repurposing machines to do things they weren't designed for. It has its own tradition and folklore; this is evident in naming practices, and Coleman gave the example of UNIX, which was based on the overly complex Multics, in effect castrating it, and thus its name memorializes the condition of its birth.

Hackers tend to combine tech savviness with a touch of compulsive disorder. They have a highly developed sense of humour, hence Easter eggs. They take pleasure in breaking (into) things, just to see if they can. Which gives them the knowhow to build better things. They work as system administrators and security researchers.

Hacking embodies a counter-cultural, antiestablishment spirit. The idea of hacktivism then takes up the cause of freedom, free speech, free access, and freedom of information. And that's a good thing. How could it not be a good thing?

Geffroyd made the point that we're very quick to give up our freedoms in North America. For a continent founded on the principles of liberty, it's easy to convince us that the greater good outweighs our individual rights. This is not so true in Europe (Germany is one of the biggest defenders of personal privacy), and he surmises that this is the legacy of World War II, which Europeans still live with in a relatively immediate way. Take for example the Gestapo, who used government files to identify Jews; the Stasi, who used surveillance and other techniques to identify dissidents. Europeans know firsthand the terror and danger of the surveillance state.

Whether or not I have anything to hide, I should never have to hide.

---

How does a modern anthropologist go live among the natives when the natives are an underground subculture? (Tom McCarthy asks the same question in Satin Island, which is about a corporate anthropologist.)

---

It was a provocative hour; there was no time for an in-depth analysis of today's privacy issues, or WikiLeaks, or the infiltration of communication networks. But it definitely opened my eyes to the interconnectedness of many of these issues, and confirmed for me that I need to take responsibility for being better informed so I can be a better citizen.

Some of the subjects that were touched on...

People:
Jacob Appelbaum
Aaron Swartz
Anonymous: The Masked Avengers in The New Yorker.

Issues:
Journalists' email being vacuumed by security organizations: GCHQ captured emails of journalists from top international media
The need to ensure free speech and privacy for lawyers, activists, and journalists.
Internet crime laws
The Five Eyes, an alliance that shares intelligence, in circumvention of domestic privacy laws: About.
Televisions collecting data via camera and microphone: Your Samsung SmartTV Is Spying on You, Basically

Tools:
Copyleft, copyright that guarantees free distribution terms.
Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) data encryption: About.
Tor, for preserving anonymity online: Download.

See also
Hacking Watch Dogs – An Interview With Thomas Geffroyd
Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous by Gabriella Coleman – review

The ridiculous squalor that was everyday life

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

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

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