The Master's Voice Project: More quotable Lem

"Although he was a Renaissance homo animatus and homo sciens, he took pleasure in contacts with people whom I would rank among the least interesting, though they present the greatest threat to our species; I mean politicians."

"Nye represented a very real power, and neither his manners nor his love of Husserl made him likable."

"Our ability to adapt and therefore to accept everything is one of our greatest dangers. Creatures that are completely flexible, changeable, can have no fixed morality."

"In another age, another era, he would have been, I am certain, a stern mystic, a builder of systems; in our era made sober by a n overabundance of discoveries, which tore apart like shrapnel every systemic coherence, an era which both accelerated progress as never before and was sick to death of progress, he was only a commentator and an analyst."

"I confess that he made me uneasy, because I do not believe in human perfection, and people who have no quirks, tics, obsessions, the touch of some minor mania, or points on which they turn rabid — I suspect such people of systematic imposture (we judge others by ourselves) or of totally lacking character. Certainly, much depends on the side from which we get to know a man. If, as usually happened to me, I first became acquainted with someone through his work — which in my profession is extremely abstract — and therefore, as it were, from the most spiritual side, the impact of meeting that entirely physical organism, which I had pictured instinctively as a kind of Platonic emanation, was always a shock."

— from His Master's Voice, by Stanislaw Lem.

This little gem of a book (just under 200 pages) gripped me from the start. I've quoted from it extensively, previously as well as above; Lem makes sweeping yet pithy statements on both the nature of Man and the natures of specific men.

The observations become wordier as the book progresses and the thoughts are more complex, constantly moving further away from black and white and the knowable.

Thus the means of civilizations replace its ends, and human conveniences substitute for human values. The rule whereby corks in bottles give way to metal caps, and metal caps to little plastic lids that snap on and off, is innocent enough' it is a series of improvements to make it easier for us to open containers of liquid. But the same rule, when applied to the perfecting of the human brain, becomes sheer madness; every conflict, every difficult problem is compared to a stubborn cork that one should discard and replace with an appropriate labor-saving device. Baloyne named the Project 'His Mater's Voice,' because the motto is ambiguous: to which master are we to listen, the one from the stars or the one in Washington? The truth is, this is Operation Squeeze — the squeeze being not on our poor brains but on the cosmic message, and God help the powerful and their servants if it succeeds.

Lem attacks the science fiction establishment:

One day I found him amid large packages from which spilled attractive, glossy paperbacks with mythical covers. He had tried to use, as a "generator of ideas" — for we were running out of them — those works of fantastic literature, that popular genre (especially in the States), called, by a persistent misconception, "science fiction." He had not read such books before; he was annoyed — indignant, even — expecting variety, finding monotony. "They have everything except fantasy," he said. Indeed, a mistake. The authors of these pseudo-scientific fairy tales supply the public with what it wants: truisms, clichés, stereotypes, all sufficiently costumed and made "wonderful" so that the reader may sink into a safe state of surprise and at the same time not be jostled out of his philosophy of life. If there is progress in a culture, the progress is above all conceptual, but literature, the science-fiction variety in particular, has nothing to do with that.

And he talks about the politics of the Cold War.

For all the questions it poses regarding first contact, alien societies, and the paradigms through which we attribute such concepts as intelligence, civilization, communication, progress — nothing much happens in this book — it's mostly an exploration of humankind itself, here and now, for it's only through others that we can come to know ourselves.

It ends like this:

I was never able to conquer the distance between persons. An animal is fixed to its here-and-now by the senses, but man manages to detach himself, to remember, to sympathize with others, to visualize their states of mind and feelings: this, fortunately, is not true. In such attempts at pseudo merging and transferral we are only able, imperfectly, darkly, to visualize ourselves. What would happen to us if we could truly sympathize with others, feel with them, suffer for them? The fact that human anguish, fear, and suffering melt away with the death of the individual, that nothing remains of the ascents, the declines, the orgasms, and agonies, is a praiseworthy gift of evolution, which made us like the animals. If from every unfortunate, from every victim, there remained even a single atom of his feelings, if thus grew the inheritance of the generations, if even a spark could pass from man to man, the world would be full of raw, bowel-torn howling.

Which a brings a tear to my eye. Because no matter what we find out there, we are alone.

I am at that age

And it was at that age ... Poetry arrived
in search of me.

Read Pablo Neruda. Read Poetry.

and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,

...

In her shoes

Yesterday, we fight. We're running late. She refuses — aggressively, physically — to let me help her tie her shoes. I glance at my watch, put down my bag, and resignedly wait.

I sit on the floor beside her. Still she insists on doing it her way, even in the face of failure, the evidence of the "knot" that slips open before she can stand up.

Twenty minutes of tears have calmed her somewhat. I solemnly promise to her that I won't do it for her. She allows my index finger to come close (but not touching!), to indicate how my way is just a little different than hers. She considers, and she tries it. From this point, it's easy to wiggle the loops and ends back and forth to tighten the bow.

We're ready to go. Late, but proud and finally smiling.

*****

This morning she creeps up to my bed and taps me on the shoulder. "Can I go play quietly by myself, Mama?" I mumble my assent, thankful for a few more minutes. It's not even 6:00 yet.

She's back soon, pulling me out of bed by the hand to see what she's done. Sheets of paper litter the kitchen table. All covered in big words: elephant, rhinoceros, veterinarian, and more. "Play" today evidently consists of the diligent copying of text. She asks me to read them to her and nods, as if to say, "Yes, that's what I thought."

*****

This morning she tied her shoes all by herself.

Links

...to reviews, in which other people have more interesting things to say than I do, and that should:
1. Convince me at long last to start reading Dumas's long-lost masterpiece,
2. Convince you to read Patrick Hamilton, and
3. Convince some doubters that Doris lessing is fully deserving of the Nobel Prize.

Dumas
A review of The Last Cavalier, by Alexandre Dumas, which is ready and waiting for me (What am I waiting for? — it's Dumas! Hurrah!):

Dumas, as Tolstoy said, was a 'novelising historian' rather than a historical novelist. He knew that fiction flourished in the margins of history, which is confined to obtuse and incorrigible facts; the novel specialises in the scrutiny of private lives, not public affairs.

Hamilton
Francine Prose gives a rundown of the intense and squalid Patrick Hamilton:

His ambivalence about his characters is frequently extreme; it's hard to think of another writer who so thoroughly despises the weaknesses of the very same men and women he so desperately and compassionately longs to save from themselves.

At times his view of humanity seems positively Manichaean. Half his characters are consumed by shame and regret while the other half feed on the tender, foolish emotions of the first half. He allows his characters to descend to a level of degradation so low that you might assume they'd hit bottom unless you'd read enough of Hamilton's work to expect them to sink further as they anguish over every major slight and minor decision.

Lessing
One review of Alfred and Emily, by Doris Lessing:

Alfred Tayler and Emily McVeagh are the writer's parents and this is a book of two halves — the first section is a novelist's game of might-have-beens: Lessing removes all the frustrations that circumscribed her growing up in Rhodesia, and gives Alfred and Emily the lives they wanted for themselves. The second section is another honest excavation of the lives they were all actually dealt. The gap is the one in which the writer has always lived.

And another:

But whenever she drifts too far from the subject, she returns to her two main themes: the eternal war between mothers and daughters, and the vital importance of women going out to work rather than suffocating at home.

The disembodied burp

Helena brought home a drawing this week that at first glance seemed unremarkable. I will not reproduce it in its entirety here, for you would only be awed by its unremarkableness. It has me and her, and a third little girl she has a fondness for from the daycare, all holding hands, with flowy hair, bright eyes, flitty dresses, waltzing through fields of flowers and butterflies.

But the sly grin with which Helena presented it demanded I take a closer look.

It's overlaid with a darkness, a black sun and a lot of brown. My raised eyebrow is returned with her mischievous glint, but she lets me in on the secret: les mots de toilette.

Inspired by a sudden scarcity in crayon colour options, her artistic endeavour is a test of societal boundaries as well as an exercise in Oulipian constraint.

The idyllic scene is strewn with pieces of garbage, covered in shit, and ants, and worms, and all things brown. (These are also numbered, as if to keep them distinct from the "real" picture. Like footnotes, but without any text accompanying them.)

I ask her about one wholly unrecognizable form, with small dots trailing alongside. She blushes. "Des foufounes. Avec des gouttes de pipi."

The detail shown here is a burp. A brown circle for an open mouth, a pink round of tongue, and a dot of black as the burp's essence.

How would you draw a burp?

Quotable Lem

"A specialist is a barbarian whose ignorance is not well-rounded."

"Evolution is, as an engineer, an opportunist, not a perfectionist."

"The satisfaction with which you parade your proof of the lottery origin of human nature is not pure. It is, besides the joy of knowledge, a pleasure in befouling that which others consider lovely and hold dear."

"I could respect philosophers only as people driven by curiosity, never as propounders of truth."

— from His Master's Voice, by Stanislaw Lem.

The Master's Voice Project: Reading Lem

Holy crap!

Have you read Lem?!

Thus far, I've read 18 pages of His Master's Voice, by Stanislaw Lem, written in 1968, consisting of Editor's Note and Preface, and I'm blown away. This front matter is in fact part of Lem's novel proper, written by a fictitious editor (the note) and compiled from unfinished scraps (preface) by the genius mathematician diarist whose quasi-scholarly chronicle of an investigation comprises the main story. In just a few short pages we go through postmodern metafiction and back.

The adventure itself, Peter Hogarth summarizes, "boils down to this: humanity came upon a thing that beings belonging to another race had sent out into the darkness of the stars." And it would bear poison fruit.

I feel I owe it to myself, to Lem, and to my Polish heritage to give his work a careful reading. It will be slow going. It is dense with Idea.

Every single paragraph could yield essays of great thought: the morality of science, that art and science and their criticism hold to different standards, psychoanalysis of the physicist, ego, the problem of subjectivity, good and evil and the "Manichean embrace," the absurdity of determinism, the laughter of betrayal, the mathematics of everything, the imperfection of humanity, the cracks in the foundation. To name a few. Holy crap. I mean: wow.

With sufficient imagination, a man could write a whole series of versions of his life; it would form a union of sets in which the facts would be the only elements in common. People, even intelligent people, who are young, and therefore inexperienced and naive, see only cynicism in such a possibility. They are mistaken, because the problem is not moral but cognitive. The number of metaphysical beliefs is no greater or less than the number of different beliefs a man may entertain on the subject of himself — sequentially, at various periods of his life, and occasionally even at the same time.

I keep returning to this paragraph (above), I think because I'm in a state of metamorphosis myself, and, having overcome the cynicism of youth, am embarking on rewriting my life from a different standpoint, to discern what is its fact and what possible stories it could tell.

Each of us is, from childhood, fastened to some publicly allowed piece of himself, the part that was selected and schooled, and that has gained the consensus omnium; and now he cultivates that fragment, polishes it, perfects it, breathes on it alone, that it may develop as well as possible; and each of us, being a part, pretends to be a whole — like a stump that claims it is a limb.

(I want to cultivate my other fragments.)

Right book, right time. I am ready to be swept away.

This is my brain on This Is Your Brain on Music

Another year of Blue Metropolis has come and gone. While this year I had the time to go, there was little inclination.

The only attraction for me was "local" boy Daniel Levitin, author of This Is Your Brain on Music, and it was a last-minute decision to trek downtown at the end of the afternoon last weekend. The show was sold out, but I benefited from one of a few cancellations.

Levitin briefly reviewed some main points from his book, complete with slides and audio samples.

(I can't help but compare Levitin and Steven Pinker, a presentation of whose I attended a few months ago (and no, I didn't get around to writing about it here). Pinker started out in Montreal and journeyed to MIT and beyond, while Levitin made the reverse trip. Pinker's event was a rock concert with high production quality; he's the Bono of cognitive science. The show, and it was a show, had well-rehearsed banter, precision timing — a choreography of slides, commentary, and use of physical space, and just the slightest edge of boredom in his voice. Levitin, on the other hand, was like some obscure little indie band no one's ever heard of, but there's something so genuine, and clever, about the performance you rave about it to all your friends and wonder why more people haven't heard of this guy.)

The main point of the talk, and the book, is what an amazingly amazing super-computer the brain is. We can identify a piece of music given just a couple notes of it, even if we've never heard that particular arrangement before, by picking out rhythm and relative pitch intervals and stuff like that and running those factors against the library of templates we have stored in our brains. No computer can do that, and Levitin says we're at least a dozen years away from technology being sophisticated enough to come close.

Levitin demonstrated the principle by playing us the opening of Beethoven's instantly recognizable Symphony no. 5, as played on power tools, which rendition no one was previously familiar with.

The whole left brain/right brain thing is a gross oversimplification, be you a listener or producer of music. Music is parcelled and processed by pitch, rhythm, timbre, volume, in different cerebral areas. We have a sense of musical syntax, whereby a phrase produces an expectancy generation, which is violated or satisfied, and we react accordingly. We have a reflex to move to music.

Music changes your brain. We feel strongly about it. It lights up primitive and emotional and pleasure centres. A sex-and-drugs-and rock-and-roll centre, if you will. Musicians have thicker corpus callosums (callosi?), being the bridge between the left and right hemispheres. Practicing an instrument changes your brain (Levitin reminds us: "practicing" anything changes your brain — it's called learning). But: a knowledge of music theory doesn't seem to affect or improve the way one responds to or produces music, at least at a biochemical level, much as reading and writing are inconsequential to story-telling. (Paul McCartney can't read music; Eddie van Halen is well-versed in theory. Who's the better "musician"?)

Levitin's very funny and down-to-earth. (He plays in a band at McGill: The Diminished Faculties.) He treated us to a pretty lengthy reading from his out-this-summer book, The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature (to be released August 15, according to Levitin; Amazon states September).

The excerpt was memoir-like, recounting the days when Levitin quite college to pursue the possibility of a career as a professional musician, to which there's some anthropocultural point. Levitin assures us the rest of book is not so autobiographical, but it would be no great crime if it were.

He's had some unusual occupations, many of which seem likely to lend themselves to the collecting of colourful anecdotes.

I chickened out from asking my recently pressing question: Do people learn to suppress the instinct to sway, tap, hum when they listen to their iPods and will I also acquire this skill with practice, or is it possible that music for many has become white noise?

Imagined response: "Obviously you lack discipline, you crazy person. Get a grip."

An evening out is always more than the main event. My outing was highlighted with incidental dialogue and an eerie soundtrack.

There was a small group of older people behind me in the line to enter the lecture room. By "older" I mean older than me — older than middle aged but preretirement; they frown somewhat on cell phones. They sounded like they intended to be heard. I hope I never do that. One garrulous creature stormed into their group with air kisses and odd pronouncements on some festival events and wandered off 5 minutes later; a woman in the group later loudly explained to her companions, "We tend to run into each other at any significant cultural event that's a little on the outré side. We share the same eclectic tastes, you see." People really talk like that!

Musically, the event was bracketed by a walk to and from the metro station, through long, empty, echoing hallways. I heard the occasional click of heels passing some distance from me. And then the swelling of the busker's instrument. He played the theme from The Godfather on what looked to be a plastic flute from the dollar store. He played it perfectly, plaintively. Over and over. On my return journey, he was still playing it. Maybe the only song he knows, or, it occurs to me now, the only one it's possible to play completely in tune on that particular instrument.

When you watch Doctor Who with a 5-year-old

The Sontarans are a warrior culture. They reproduce by cloning.

"What's a clone?"
I can handle this question.

They prepare for battle. Sontar-ha! Sontar-ha!
"Why are they chanting?"
"Mommy, what's war?"
"Why is there war?"
"Why are you crying, Mommy?"

On the mailing of bees

Today my work led me into the bowels of United States Postal Office documentation.

A fascinating place, that.

9.3.7 Bees
Bees are acceptable in the continental surface mail when shipped under federal and state regulations to ensure that they are free of disease. Packages of honeybees must bear special handling postage, except those sent at a First-Class Mail rate. Only queen honeybees may be shipped via air transportation. Each queen honeybee shipped via air transportation may be accompanied by up to eight attendant honeybees.

Were I a queen travelling by air, I'm not sure eight attendants would suffice.

There was Neruda

Then I heard a faint sound, as if someone were crawling over the terrace. My curiosity piqued, I opened the French doors and went out. The air was even colder than before, and there was no one on the terrace, but in the garden I could make out an oblong-shaped shadow like a coffin, heading towards a sort of pergola, a Greek folly built to Farewell's orders, next to a strange equestrian statue, about forty centimetres high, made of bronze, and perched on a porphyry pedestal in such a way that it seemed to be eternally emerging from the pergola. The moon stood out clearly against a cloudless sky. My cassock fluttered in the wind. Boldly I advanced towards the place where the shadowy figure had hidden. There he was, next to Farewell's equestrian fantasy. His back was turned. He was wearing a velvet jacket and a scarf and a narrow-brimmed hat tipped back on his head, and he was softly intoning words that can only have been meant for the moon. I froze in a posture like that of the statue, with my left foot off the ground. It was Neruda. I don't know what happened next. There was Neruda and there a few metres behind him was I, and, between us, the night, the moon, the equestrian statue, Chilean plants, Chilean wood, the obscure dignity of our land. I bet the wizened youth has no stories like this to tell. He didn't meet Neruda. He hasn't met any of our Republic's major writers in a setting as elemental as the one I have just described. What does it matter what happened before and after? There was Neruda reciting verses to the moon, addressing the minerals of the earth, and the stars, whose nature we can only know by intuition. There I was, shivering with cold in my cassock, which of a sudden felt several sizes too big, like a cathedral in which I was living naked and open-eyed. There was Neruda murmuring words I could not quite understand, but whose essential nature spoke to me deeply from the very first moment. And there was I, tears in my eyes, a poor clergyman lost in the immensity of our land, thirstily drinking in the words of our most sublime poet. And I ask myself now, propped up on my elbow: Has the wizened youth ever had an experience like that? I ask myself seriously: Has he ever in all his days experienced anything like that?

— from By Night in Chile, by Roberto Bolaño.

Darby M Dixon III said it about another novel, but it holds true here: "I realize that I'm reading a book in large part about a society or a people in which poetry is absolutely vital and that I can not imagine this novel being written in America, by an American, about America." I don't know how I feel about that either.

I'm about a third of the way into this novella, my second foray into Bolaño's work, and I promise you there will be more.

It's breathtaking, leaves me breathless, I've said this before of his stories, this hypnotic, driving rhythm that leaves me gasping, it's so honest and passionate. Kind of a similar feeling to what I remember from Hopscotch. Only I'm older and wiser now, and maybe I get it a little better, which makes things all the more happy-and-sad-together than they ever were.

The things of which things consist

The city wakes in a foul mood most mornings, being in direct relation to the hockey score of the night before.

Cognitive dissonance, last week: It's 21 degrees outside and I'm staring at a patch of snow in the courtyard. (It's gone, finally.)

Coginitive dissonance, this week: It's bloody cold. Head hunched down, I watch commuters collect on the metro platform. Winter boots side by side with flip-flops. I'm mildly disgusted that so many would bare their ugly toes (let alone so early, so suddenly) in a city I'd always considered well-shod.

I'm having occasional bouts of spring-cleaning fever, and the closets are being attacked, in a (conceptually) systematic, if not exactly (physically) orderly, fashion. There's a coat in the closet, on J-F's side. He asks what I intend to do with it. I stare at him blankly for a while. I ask what he wants to do with it. "What do I care? It's not my coat." Umm. It's not my coat either. "Have you ever seen me wear this coat?" Umm. Have you ever seen me wear this coat? "Look at this coat! Can you even picture me wearing this coat? I wouldn't be caught dead wearing this coat." It's a large men's jacket, red with a plaid woolen lining. No, he wouldn't wear such a coat. I'd assumed his mother had given it to him. "How long has this coat been in our closet?" As long as I can remember. It's moved house with us. "It must've belonged to one of your ex-boyfriends." Umm. No. Not a one of them ever enjoyed the privilege of leaving a coat hanging about my closet. And I can't picture any of them being caught dead in it either. For two weeks now, the coat lies in a puddle in the middle of the bedroom floor, waiting to be claimed.

In a reversal of roles, Helena asks us to hurry up, please, as we try to get out the door in the morning. Because if we're late, there won't be room for her chair in among the girls. She'll have to sit with the boys, and she doesn't like that. All they do is burp and fart and make faces. Sigh. It doesn't get much better than that, kid.

An unearthly whiteness

I've wanted to read Ice, by Anna Kavan, ever since I read about that troubled writer in Doris Lessing's collection of essays, Time Bites. It's been a hard book to find, but it's suddenly available here and there (get your copy now), having been recently (2006) reissued (three cheers for independent publishers, but I do wish they'd invest in a proofreader — on the spine the author's name is spelled "Ann" without the final "a").

I'm not altogether sure what to make of it, but it is weirdly beautiful.

The unaccustomed cold made my head ache as I stared out, straining my eyes in the effort of trying to avoid icy patches, where the car skidded out of control. When the headlights fled over the roadside ruins from time to time, the brief glimpse always surprised me, and vanished before I was sure I had really seen it.

An unearthly whiteness began to bloom on the hedges. I passed a gap and glanced through. For a moment, my lights picked out like searchlights the girl's naked body, slight as a child's, ivory white against the dead white of the snow, her hair bright as spun glass. She did not look in my direction. Motionless, she kept her eyes fixed on the walls moving slowly towards her, a glassy, glittering circle of solid ice, of which she was the centre. Dazzling flashes came from the ice-cliffs far over head; below, the outermost fringes of ice had already reached her, immobilized her, set hard as concrete over her feet and ankles. I watched the ice climb higher, covering knees and thighs, saw her mouth open, a black hole in the white face, heard her thin, agonized scream. I felt no pity for her. On the contrary, I derived an indescribable pleasure from seeing her suffer. I disapproved of my own callousness, but there it was.

This passage came out of nowhere (the first of many instances like this). The narrator is driving along a road, and suddenly we veer right off, but only for a paragraph or two, and the story picks up again where we'd left off. Is this deviation from reality a dip into his imagination, or his own psychological problems, or a poeticized version of his haunted reality?

And what is this ice, then? A symbol or metaphor? Of what? the girl? the relationship? the world? What?

I was frustrated by this novel early on — had no idea what was going on — even while the language danced hypnotic circles around me. One day on the metro, I found myself formulating the thought, "I don't have time for 'difficult' novels." Of course, I don't really mean that; but every now and then I have to question why someone would choose to eschew typical narrative patterns, when they would serve the purpose equally well. Now, I'm sure there is, in fact, another purpose. And it's only pretentious on the part of the artist when I don't get it.

Anyway, here I was, reading on the metro, not fully getting it. The only way I could describe this book is "trippy" (the more literary among you may prefer the term "slipstream"). And I was a bit pissed off about about not getting it. I happen to like, have always liked, "hard" books. Am I so out of practice? Are my hard books not challenging me enough? Have I deluded myself in my belief that my reading interests are open-minded and far-reaching? I'm a far better reader now than I was 20years ago, thanks to my experience in reading and in life — was this book so far beyond both?

But a funny thing happened. It started to come together. Whether it's because I'd been out of the habit of this kind of challenge and it took a few days to warm up those muscles, or because the narrative style took a turn, I can't say. But things became more obvious toward the end.

Doris Lessing said, "This Ice is not psychological ice or metaphysical ice; here the loneliness of childhood has been magicked into a physical reality as hallucinatory as the Ancient Mariner's."

Ice is not the sf dytopian novel I was expecting. The end of the world serves as a backdrop; apart from whatever metaphor or poetic imagery it may serve, the ice that is descending upon the world allows for chaos, an imbalance in the social and political structures, allowing these characters to move and act as they do.

I'm not sure I'd categorize Ice as dystopian at all (much the same way I don't think McCarthy's The Road qualifies; the wasteland setting is an accident of circumstance, even if essential to propel the characters, but the book's not about that); it's a book about a dysfunctional relationship.

Ice is about a girl and the narrator, their past locked into their present, with no hope of a future.

Then there's the other man, who may be that side of the narrator he doesn't like to look at square on.

In an indescribable way our looks tangled together. I seemed to be looking at my own reflexion. Suddenly I was entangled in utmost confusion, not sure which of us was which. We were like halves of one being, joined in some mysterious symbiosis. I fought to retain my identity, but all my efforts failed to keep us apart. I continually found I was not myself, but him. At one moment I actually seemed to be wearing his clothes. I fled from the room in utter confusion: afterwards did not know what had happened, or if anything had.

Elsewhere: The Times Literary Supplement, and a more scholarly take.

Personally, I did not know what had happened, or if anything had.

Love her

Then, Estella being gone and we two left alone, she turned to me, and said in a whisper:

"Is she beautiful, graceful, well-grown? Do you admire her?"

"Everybody must who sees her, Miss Havisham."

She drew an arm round my neck, and drew my head close down to hers as she sat in the chair. "Love her, love her, love her! How does she use you?"

Before I could answer (if I could have answered so difficult a question at all), she repeated, "Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces — and as it gets older and stronger, it will tear deeper — love her, love her, love her!"

Never had I seen such passionate eagerness as was joined to her utterance of these words. I could feel the muscles of the thin arm round my neck, swell with the vehemence that possessed her.

"Hear me, Pip! I adopted her to be loved. I bred her and educated her, to be loved. I developed her into what she is, that she might be loved. Love her!"

She said the word often enough, and there could be no doubt that she meant to say it; but if the often repeated word had been hate instead of love — despair — revenge — dire death — it could not have sounded from her lips more like a curse.

"I'll tell you," said she, in the same hurried passionate whisper, "what real love is. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter — as I did!"

When she came to that, and to a wild cry that followed that, I caught her round the waist. For she rose up in the chair, in her shroud of a dress, and struck at the air as if she would as soon have struck herself against the wall and fallen dead.

— from Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens.

Pretty powerful when told to you by Hugh Laurie amid a crowd of strangers on the metro platform at 8 in the morning.

Enchanted

This book is gorgeous. The Enchantress of Florence, by Salman Rushdie, casts quite a spell.

I've never read a novel of Rushdie's before (though his editorials are of great interest and I greatly admired his performance in Bridget Jones' Diary), nor have I ever felt particularly inclined to. Something about this book, though, drew me to it.

It's been a long time since I was excited about a book's glorious physicality. It's a completely subjective experience, and my impression is one I'm entirely unable to explain, but I think this book as physical object is beautiful, and I want to fondle it, turn it over and over and over.

The dust jacket is yellow and orange-red, the colour of spice, and it makes me hungry. Its design is a weird mix of Florentine flourish and orientalist illumination.

The most striking element, to me, is the endsheets — a minor detail, but one that has me exclaiming, "Look at this! Isn't this book beautiful?!" Beautiful!

As for the story, it's magical and riveting. I've had a hard time putting it aside. It's been the perfect complement to my reading of Amir Hamza, similar in flavour, but more modern (read: accessible) in its language and pacing — and I was thrilled to see the great hero referenced herein — and to the family's recent viewing of Sinbad movies. There's nothing I love so much as a vaguely middle-eastern mystical mythical adventure romance.

Pirates! A mysterious ambassador! Brothels! Secrets! An imaginary queen made real! Revenge! A forgotten princess! A painting the painter hides himself in! Vampires (and none other than Vlad Dracula himself)! Tulip superstitions! The four Swiss albino giants (Otho, Botho, Clotho, and D'Artagnan)! Macchiavelli! A magic mirror! Screaming mandrake roots!

Behind the fabulous stories is a philosophical exploration of being in the world.

The emperor Abul-Fath Jalaluddin Muhammad, king of kings, known since his childhood as Akbar, meaning "the great," and latterly, in spite of the tautology of it, as Akbar the Great, the great great one, great in his greatness, doubly great, so great that the repetition in his title was not only appropriate but necessary in order to express the gloriousness of his glory — the Grand Mughal, the dusty, battle-weary, victorious, pensive, incipiently overweight, disenchanted, mustachioed, poetic, over-sexed, and absolute emperor, who seemed altogether too magnificent, too world-encompassing, and, in sum, too much to be a single human personage — this all-engulfing flood of a ruler, this swallower of worlds, this many-headed monster who referred to himself in the first person plural — had begun to meditate, during his long, tedious journey home, on which he was accompanied by the heads of his defeated enemies bobbing in their sealed earthen pickle-jars, about the disturbing possibilities of the first person singular — the "I."

The interminable days of slow equestrian progress encouraged many languid wonderings in a man of speculative temperament, and the emperor pondered, as he rode, such matters as the mutability of the universe, the size of the stars, the breasts of this wives, and the nature of God. Also, today, this grammatical question of the self and its Three Persons, the first, the second and the third, the singulars and plurals of the soul. He, Akbar, had never referred to himself as "I," not even in private, not even in anger or dreams. He was — what else could he be? — "we." He was the definition, the incarnation of the We. He had been born into plurality. When he said "we," he naturally and truly meant himself as an incarnation of all his subjects, of all his cities and lands and rivers and mountains and lakes, as well as all the animals and plants and trees within his frontiers, and also the birds that flew overhead and the mordant twilight mosquitoes and the nameless monsters in their underworld lairs, gnawing slowly at the roots of things; he meant himself as the sum total of all this victories, himself as containing the characters, the abilities, the histories, perhaps even the souls of his decapitated or merely pacified opponents; and, in addition, he meant himself as the apogee of his people's past and present, and the engine of their future.

There are human mirrors. Doubles. Reflections. East and west. Counterparts comprising a whole. Dream, reality. God, man. Plot parallels and situational analogues.

There is great awe of women and the mysterious power of the feminine that holds sway over even emperors.

Sometimes in the woods near the farm in Percussina he lay on the leaf-soft ground and listened to the two-tone song of the birds, high low high, high low high low, high low high low high. Sometimes by a woodland stream he watched the water rush over the pebbled bed, its tiny modulations of bounce and flow. A woman's body was like that. If you watched it carefully enough you could see how it moved to the rhythm of the world, the deep rhythm, the music below the music, the truth below the truth. He believed in this hidden truth the way other men believed in God or love, believed that truth was in fact always hidden, that the apparent, the overt, was invariably a kind of lie. Because he was a man fond of precision he wanted to capture the hidden truth precisely, to see it clearly and set it down, the truth beyond ideas of right and wrong, ideas of good and evil, ideas of ugliness and beauty, all of which were aspects of the surface deceptions of the world, having little to do with how things really worked, disconnected from the whatness, the secret codes, the hidden forms, the mystery.

Here in this woman's body the mystery could be seen.

There are pages of bibliographic references at the novel's close, among which is listed Calvino's Italian Folktales. A good reason to pull that one down off the shelf for a revisit.

And it's funny.

"The Hindustani storyteller always knows when he loses his audience," he said. "Because the audience simply gets up and leaves, or else it throws vegetables, or, if the audience is the king, it occasionally throws the storyteller head-first off the city ramparts. And in this case, my dear Mogor-Uncle, the audience is indeed the king."

Blue, again, in a literary way

The 10th Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival takes place April 30 - May 4, 2008. This year's theme: on the road (and I take this coincidence as some auspicious planetary conjunction):

They may walk or run, cycle, row, sail, fly, blast off — or use any one of hundreds of other possible vehicles. Or they may sit quietly, day after day, in a room.

Because they write about the places they have been — whether in memory or in their imagination, they allow the rest of us a way of traveling too, guiding us through regions, galaxies, eras, cultures and states of mind, strange or familiar or some combination of the two.

The 2008 Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix is being awarded to French writer Daniel Pennac, who writes both for children and for adults.

The festival programme is now online.

I endeavour to be in town for the festival and not pressed by work deadlines. I've managed to attend only twice in the years I've lived here (no matter how often I blog about it).

I'll examine the listings more closely later. Currently, Daniel Levitin (Your Brain on Music) stands out, and maybe Robert J Sawyer, who does have some interesting ideas about all sorts of interesting things, even if I do think he's a crappy writer.

There is water at the bottom of the ocean.

And sometimes I need to be reminded of it.



"There is water at the bottom of the ocean."

This is one of the very first songs I loaded onto my recently acquired MP3 player. If there's a song I should have at the disposal of my auditory apparatus, yielding to the control exerted by my little finger, available to me at all times and forever, this is it.

Having come to the end Chapter 11 of Great Expectations, being all that I'd foreseen to load, I find myself waiting for a train and having to listen to — gasp! — music. (The audiobook listening on my daily commute is immensely enjoyable, by the way. I will continue with this book, and I will find others. But this is "reading" to be entertained and distracted. I will not expect an audiobook to change my life, nor that I remember it for very long.) Music!

I stand there, toe tapping, body swaying. I feel conspicuous. I restrain myself from humming, but it takes a great deal of effort. I smile. I feel like I have a secret.

(I have a few secrets.

'What am I?' he said, as if speaking to himself, but using the driver's own language. 'I'm a man with a secret, that's what — a secret which only the emperor's ears may hear.' The driver felt reassured: the fellow was a fool after all. There was no need to treat him with respect. 'Keep your secret,' he said. 'Secrets are for children, and spies.' The stranger got down from the cart outside the caravanserai, where all journeys ended and began. He was surprisingly tall and carried a carpetbag. 'And for sorcerers,' he told the driver of the bullock-cart. 'And for lovers too. And kings.'

I have a review copy of Salman Rushdies's The Enchantress of Florence — I'm loving it.)

I am mystified that for all the wired heads I see riding the metro, more people aren't tapping their toes, swaying their bodies, restraining their hums. Have we lost (are we being trained to lose) the capacity to feel the music?

Perhaps this is why I listen to music so relatively little: it carries me away too easily.

There is water at the bottom of the ocean!

Bestowing a robe of honour

Being the 1st-quarter progress report as it regards my attempt to meet the reading challenge I signed on for.

The book: The Adventures of Amir Hamza: Lord of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction, by Ghalive Lahnavi and Abdullah Bilgrami.

The beginning.

A favourite sentence: "The following night it suddenly snowed so hard and became so bitingly cold that tongues froze inside people's mouths."

An extended excerpt.

Where I'm at: page 250, more than a quarter of the way through and nearing the end of Book One. I hadn't read from this tome in weeks, if not longer, till this weekend. Its physical size has a lot to do with this: I wouldn't dream of carrying this book with me on my daily commute, and the rest follows. Simply: I pick up, and then read to finish, much smaller books instead.

Intent to finish: absolute and reinvigorated. Robes of honour! Tricksters spiking the wine! The tales are messianically magical and the language is exquisite.

The might of the reed is tested by the narrative's power, and the vigor of the swashbucklers of colorful accounts is now manifested in the arena of the page.

The witness of evil

This book is extraordinary: The Painter of Battles, by Arturo Pérez-Reverte.

(It's been more than 2 months now since I read the book, and almost as long since I gave any thought to commenting on it here. The bones of what appears below was written weeks ago — most of it really; I don't even know how to flesh it out, now.)

(This book was released in early January. I'm a big fan of Pérez-Reverte, and was lucky enough to have received a review copy. I was surprised not to have heard anything about it, and reserved the task of digging up other reviews till after I'd read it and formulated an opinion. It turns out that it had received some press, during the week of Christmas — no wonder I missed it (I was too busy eating and drinking).

I've been putting off writing about it because I felt I needed a large block of time — sitting, thinking, writing — in order to do this book justice. The more time that elapses, however, the harder it is. And it's been my experience that those books that have the hardest-hitting impact on me are the hardest to articulate my thoughts about.)

The truth is: I'm not sure it altogether works as a novel, in terms of plot and plot resolution.

(See the "late" reviews in recent weeks in the Montreal Gazette (whose book coverage, surprisingly, has vastly improved over the last year or so) and the Philadelphia Inquirer; I single these out as providing accurate summaries, with impressions similar to mine.)

Basically: a world-renowned war photographer (Faulques) gives up his craft and takes on a very personal mural painting project.

The final result of it all had been the collection entitled Morituri: his last published work. The shortest route between two points: from man to horror. A world in which the only logical smile was that of the skulls painted by old masters on canvas and board. And when the twenty-three photographs were ready, he realized that he, too, was ready. So he put down his cameras forever, called on everything he had learned about painting in his youth, and looked for the appropriate site.

One day, one of the subjects (Markovic) of one of his award-winning photographs shows up, announcing that he's there to kill him, Faulques with that photo having ruined his life.

It's a little too... melodramatic(?) in its events but dispassionate(?) in their execution to be fully believable. For all it matters, the encounter with his would-be killer is an imaginary one. Faulques confronts one of his old photographs, and the discourse that ensues with its subject occurs strictly within his own head, being the function and generation of his creative process.

(Which may as well be how it is that Perez-Reverte came to write the damn thing. He used to work as a war journalist.)

This novel is an remarkable meditation on art, photography, the relationship between artist and subject; the nature of war; love, compassion, human nature itself. A truth always just beyond our grasp. "The geometry of chaos in the serene face of a dying girl."

The atrocities recounted are terrible. Whether they are composites of actual events or their details have been adjusted to serve the narrative purpose — doesn't matter. They are unquestionably in essence real.

Fiction has the power to invoke what newscasts manage to distance from us.

There are no new questions and certainly no answers, but they are freshly expressed.

(I'd noted many passages. To cite or synthesize any of them now seems so trite.)

We were talking about horror and losing the clean focus of the camera. And you know what I think? That you were a good photographer because to take a photograph you have to frame, and to frame is to select and exclude. Save some things and eliminate others . . . Not everyone can do that: set himself up as a judge of all that's happening around him. You understand what I'm talking about? No one who is truly in love can make that kind of judgment.

When I was in grade 7, a classmate called me "aloof." I had to look it up, but I could not disagree with her. For some reason, this seemed highly relevant when I was first setting out these thoughts. As a state of being. An attempt to understand, objectively, by detaching, that to which one has an overwhelmingly emotional response to. A survival mechanism of sorts. Stepping back is the only chance to catch a glimpse of the cosmic plan.

When we divorced ourselves from nature, we humans lost the ability to find consolation in the face of the horror awaiting us out there. The more we observe, the less meaning it all has and the more forsaken we feel. Think how — thanks to Gödel, who certainly rained on that parade — we can't find refuge any longer in the one place we thought was secure: mathematics. But look. If there's no consolation as a result of observation, we can find it in the act of observation itself. I'm talking about the analytical, scientific, even aesthetic act of that observation. Gödel aside, it's like a mathematical procedure: it has such certainty, clarity, and inevitability that it offers intellectual relief to those who know how to utilize it. I would say it's analgesic.

It's clear to me that Pérez-Reverte loves — and knows — fine art. Why waste words trying to do what pictures have already done? Below are just a very few of the many paintings referenced.

"Triumph of Death," Bruegel the Elder:


"Duel With Cudgels," Goya:


"Battle of San Romano," Paolo Uccello:


"Thebaid," Gherardo Starnina:

Seeing a painting like that makes it clear that photography isn't good for anything. Only painting can do what that painting does. Every good painting has always aspired to be a landscape of another landscape not yet painted, but when the truth of a society coincided with that of the artist, there was no duplicity. True magnificence came when they separated, and the painter had to choose between submission and deception, and call upon his talent to make one look like the other. That's why the Thebiad has what all masterpieces have: allegories of certainties that become a certainty only after a lot of time has gone by.

What words are left after such terrible beauty?

Interview.

Excerpt.

Afraid

Yesterday Helena brought home a fabulously weird drawing: her papa battling a vampire, blood on its lips, Helena watching, terrified, from the corner of the page. Detail below:



Here's Helena in a state of terror fleeing some prehistoric scorpion at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, a couple weeks ago:



To my eyes, the resemblance is striking.

The divine diktat

I've just finished reading Seeing, by José Saramago. It starts off as a sharp political commentary, and is not heavy-handed at all, though I'd expected it to be and for this reason even stayed clear of it till now.

I started to falter — life distracting me — just as the tone of the book changed. And it helped remind me: the key to reading Saramago is in your breathing. Really. And I breathed lighter and easier, and I found that the book was not just clever and witty, but really, really funny. If you breathe the sentences right.

It was a pleasant, very sunny morning, which shows yet again that the punishments of which the sky was such a prodigal source in the past, have, with the passing of the centuries, lost their force, those were good and just times, when any failure to obey the divine diktat was enough for several biblical cities to be annihilated and razed to the round with all their inhabitants inside. Yet here is a city that cast blank votes against the lord and not a single bolt of lightning has fallen upon it, reducing it to ashes, as happened, in response to far less exemplary vices, to sodom and gomorrah, as well as to admah and to zeboyim, burned down to their very foundations, although the last two cities are mentioned less often than the first, whose names, perhaps because of their irresistible musicality, have remained forever in people's ears. Nowadays, having abandoned their blind obedience to the lord's orders, lightning bolts fall only where they want to, and, as has become manifest, one can clearly not count on them to lead this sinful city and caster of blank votes back to the path of righteousness. In their place, the ministry of the interior has sent three of its archangels, these three policemen, chief and subalterns, who, from now on, we will designate by their corresponding ranks, which are, following the hierarchical scale, superintendent, inspector and sergeant. The first two sit watching the people walking along, none of them innocent, all of them guilty of something, and they wonder if that venerable-looking old gentleman, for example, is not perhaps the grand master of outer darkness, if that girl with her arms about her boyfriend is not the incarnation of the undying serpent of evil, if that man walking along, head down, is not going to some unknown cave where the potions that poisoned the spirit of the city are distilled. The sergeant, whose lowly condition means that he is under no obligation to think elevated thoughts or to harbor suspicions about what lies beneath the surface of things, has rather homelier concerns [. . .]

So the book moves into this near-farcical police investigation, and carried me swiftly along.

He did all this with great concentration in order to keep his thoughts at bay, in order to let them in only one at a time, having first asked them what they contained, because you can't be too careful with thoughts, some present themselves to us with a cloying air of false innocence and then, when it's too late, reveal their true wicked selves.

Very funny book, in fact.

Except for the ending, which punched me in the gut.

An abundance of riches

Received last week, a box, a long time coming. Weeks went into considering what should go into it, weeks more into waiting.

Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens. An audio CD, wherein the story is read by Hugh Laurie. When I opened the box and pulled this one out, I was devastated to see that it's abridged. I immediately searched out my original order — there must be some mistake; I clearly remember investigating this edition and never in a million years would I have opted for abridged. But clearly I did; I am unable to duplicate my research efforts — nowhere is it shown to be a 15-hour recording (and surely not abridged) except in my imagination, and everywhere labeled as the product I received. I only hope my frustration with abridgements is offset by having Hugh Laurie read this one to me. Although, currently Hugh Laurie succeeds only in reminding me of work, since at our New York meetings I met the company's chief medical director, who has cultivated and completely mastered a House-like persona — the look, the mannerisms, the gruffness. Also, this is my first audio book, not counting various radio-broadcast readings and in particular The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio series, but I look forward to loading it onto the MP3 player — a technology I own but haven't really got a feel for — and forming a new habit, on those days when the metro is too crowded to open a physical book. I don't know how great my expectations are.

Captain Pamphile, by Alexandre Dumas. Because it's Dumas! Père Pamphile ran the establishment where Edmond Dantès celebrated his betrothal. I assume it to be the same Pamphile and this the book of his earlier adventures.

Ice, by Anna Kavan. On my list since I read Doris Lessing's endorsement of this phantasmagoria.

His Master's Voice, Stanislaw Lem. A project I'd like to undertake is to read Lem's opus. This on the basis of having read no Lem ever. My secret ambition, given enough drive, time, and smarts (or at least dictionaries), is to translate Solaris directly from Polish into English (the only English translation available came via French, and this is shameful), or set up a communal wiki-type effort to do so. But I'm thinking I should actually read some Lem first and see if I have an affinity for it before embarking on a project beyond my abilities.

The Sinbad Collection. Because it's Sinbad! Amazingly, the special effects are not nearly so laughable as I expected them to be. And with a 5-year-old at your side, the adventures are pure magic, again.

Nothing as trivial as that

" . . . but old Sam's just come clean with me. You know the way he drops in every afternoon to watch the sheets roll out. Well, this time he seemed rather excited, or at least as near as he'll ever get to it. When I told him we were on the last cycle he asked me, in that cute English accent of his, if I'd ever wondered what they were trying to do. I said, 'Sure' — and he told me."

"Go on, I'll buy it."

"Well, they believe that when they have listed all His names — and they reckon that there are about nine billion of them — God's purpose will have been achieved. The human race will have finished what it was created to do, and there won't be any point in carrying on. Indeed, the very idea is something like blasphemy."

"Then what do they expect us to do? Commit suicide?"

"There's no need for that. When the list's completed, God steps in and simply winds things up . . . bingo!"

"Oh, I get it. When we finish our job, it will be the end of the world."

Chuck gave a nervous little laugh.

"That's just what I said to Sam. And do you know what happened? He looked at me in a very queer way, like I'd been stupid in class, and said, 'It's nothing as trivial as that'."

— from "The Nine Billion Names of God," by Arthur C Clarke.

Phoning it in

We've been in DC this week — me and the kid. J-F dropped us off at my sister's place on his way to Florida to watch training camp.

I've had my trusty laptop on my lap and have been working half the time, but that's fine. There's still plenty of morning and lunch and evening time for just hanging out — "just us girls," as Helena says — although, I do regret missing out on Tuesday's zoo excursion.

Helena's passed out early from exhaustion a few times. She woke one night, hungry. We watched tv: Mothra vs Godzilla, dubbed in Spanish, which features some exquisite music. A weirdly magical experience after midnight and with a 5-year-old by my side.

We had chili dogs at Ben's Chili Bowl: "It was not uncommon to see such luminaries as Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Bessie Smith, Ella Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway, Nat King Cole, Redd Foxx, Dick Gregory, Martin Luther King Jr., or Bill Cosby at 'The Bowl.'" I let Helena chalk her name on the bathroom wall.

We picked up some treats, and Helena scored herself a free cupcake, just for being cute.

We saw dinosaurs, and rode the carousel on the Mall.

I bought a book for me (By Night in Chile, by Roberto Bolano) and a book for the kid (There's No Place Like Space, from the Cat in the Hat's Learning Library). I'm not finding much time to read, but am progressing slowly through José Saramago's Seeing, having temporarily set aside the Alain Robbe-Grillet I had with me on last week's business trip to New York, the effect of being stuck reading which while my flight was 3 hours delayed was suspiciously like banging my head against a brick while walking round in a circle of constantly decreasing radius.

Today Helena and her aunt agreed to go to the zoo again, for my benefit. That is, last time was for my benefit, for me to get some work done; this time was for my benefit, to get to go to the zoo.

Today we saw a magnificent octopus.

J-F will be arriving soon; then we head home.

Beatitude

for every sweet lump of baby born that women croon over, is one vast rotten meat burning slow worms in graves of this earth

— from Desolation Angels, by Jack Kerouac.

How I came to know Jack
I've never read any Kerouac. That is about to change.

The celebration of the 50th anniversary of On the Road (published in 1957), while I recognize it as an important landmark of American literature, blah, blah, blah, did not inspire me to read it. Nothing about it captured my interest, honestly; which is kind of weird actually, in light of those things that generally do capture my interest. But there you have it: I haven't read Jack.

Then last week, I had to go to New York City, for meetings for work. And it so happens that our New York office is across the street from the New York Public Library. And it so happens that there's an exhibition running there till March 16: Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac on the Road. Featuring the scroll on which On the Road was written (or a reasonable facsimile thereof).

I had a few spare minutes at lunch, and it seemed the library would be a worthwhile destination. And it was.

I had time enough to walk through quickly, and be astounded. A notice on Jack's view of sex and celibacy caught my attention, in which I read the above quotation ("every sweet lump of baby born that women croon over"! — isn't it beautiful?! (the idea being that the procreative act is the original source of all our misery on earth, all sweet babies die)) and I was lost, found, swept away, in love, and wanting to know everything about Jack.



What I now know about Jack
He loved Beethoven.
He loved cats.
He loved baseball, and managed fantasy leagues obsessively.
He loved his mother.
Not only did he author a classic — give voice to a generation — with On the Road, he supplied the titles for both Allen Ginsberg's Howl and William S Burroughs' Naked Lunch.
He kept a list of other artists' transgressions against the beat gospel (as it was in his view).
He put the beat in beatitude.

Beethoven and cats. That's all I needed to know.

An aside
I went to New York City, and all I got for my boyfriend was this lousy t-shirt. From the library.

I looked for Jack Kerouac at the bookstore on my return to Montreal. I didn't have much success at first. By accident, I stumbled across a locked glass case up against a column and not noticeably related to any one section. I had to ask for access to browse, and had to ask why it was under lock and key. Those titles identified as high potential for theft, the clerk told me. Bukowski, Burroughs, Camus, Philip K Dick, and Kerouac.

Monsterpiece Theater presents

Ali Baba and 40 Thieves, starring Ricardo Monsterban and 40 thieves.

Dedication

I continue (to try) to weed. Franny and Zooey, by JD Salinger — I don't remember reading it. I'm not sure why I have it; I mean, apart from it being Salinger, I never felt a particular draw to reading this or any other of his work, no matter how much I love-love-loved The Catcher in the Rye. It's sat there for years. Occasionally my eyes set upon it, and I think I should get round to reading it one of these days.

I start reading on the metro platform the next morning. Inside the front cover is a brief dedication. My heart breaks a little.

love to izia
on her 21st
'lainie

From my best friend, a very long time ago.

We were messed up at 21. And somehow I managed to cast aside this gift she gave me. That is, I kept it, on a shelf, but I failed to receive its message. Or non-message. And this makes me tremendously sad.

We knew there's no keeping a born scholar ignorant, and at heart, I think, we didn't really want to, but we were nervous, even frightened, at the statistics on child pedants, and academic weisenheimers who grow up into faculty-recreation-room savants. Much, much more important, though, Seymour had already begun to believe (and I agreed with him, as far as I was able to see the point) that education by any name would smell as sweet, and maybe much sweeter, if it didn't begin with a quest for knowledge at all but with a quest, as Zen would put it, for no-knowledge. Dr. Suzuki says somewhere that to be in a state of pure consciousness — satori — is to be with God before he said, Let there be light. Seymour and I thought it might be a good thing to hold back this light from you and Franny (at least as far as we were able), and all the many lower, more fashionable lighting effects — the arts, sciences, classics, languages — till you were both able at least to conceive of a state of being where the mind knows the source of all light. We thought it would be wonderfully constructive to at least (that is, if our own "limitations" got in the way) tell you as much as we knew about the men — the saints, the arhats, the bodhisattvas, the jivanmuktas — who knew something or everything about this state of being. That is, we wanted you boh to know who and what Jesus and Gautama and Lao-tse and Shankaracharya and Hui-neng and Sri Ramakrishna, etc., were before you knew too much or anything about Homer or Shakespeare or even Blake or Whitman, let alone George Washington and his cherry tree or the definition of a peninsula or how to parse a sentence. That, anyway, was the big idea. Along with all this, I suppose I'm trying to say that I know how bitterly you resent the years when S. and I were regularly conducting home seminars, and the metaphysical sittings in particular. I just hope that one day — preferably when we're both blind drunk — we can talk about it.

We've seen each other only a handful of times since we were 21. We even got drunk, though not quite blind. We've talked in circles around something essential; we manage to get a little closer to it when we talk with our pens, now our keyboards — a dialogue at such lengthy intervals, it may as well be conducted by message in bottle.

(The conversation started some 10 years previously and is primarily about the nature of happiness.)

By 21, we'd made fundamentally different life choices, and non-choices; talking was strange, but also strangely... unnecessary.

What was she trying to tell me, with this book, when we were 21?

Did she see herself in Franny? Or Buddy? Or was that supposed to be me? She admired the writing, thought I'd like it too.

I read further; I recognize parts. I have read this book. Simply, it failed to make an impression on me. Which makes me tremendously sad.

That's why Franny and Zooey is on my shelf.

Things I can't find

(and it's driving me crazy!)

My cell phone. Which I hardly ever use. Last seen on the shelf by the front door sometime during the Christmas season. If I don't find it soon, really soon, and charge it up with credit (which I suppose I could do without actually finding it — hmmm...), I will lose my phone number. I don't understand the ubiquity of the cell phone when the terms and conditions of using one are so inconvenient.

My daughter's birth certificate. Which we'll need in order to cross the border, to enjoy a planned kind-of-roadtrip, 2 weeks from now, in which the kid and I will be dropped in DC to hang with my sister. I can see it in my mind's eye — it's in a plain white envelope along with the letter from J-F granting me permission to take her cross-border; I came across it relatively recently, in a pile of documents it shouldn't've been filed with. I cannot remember if I left it there, or filed it someplace I felt it more logical to be; but it is in neither of those places. We've applied for a replacement.

My Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, 4th edition, desk reference. It used to sit right beside the American Psychiatric Association glossary. I know I used it, for reference, last spring. My boss last week asked me if I was familiar with it, would it have the info required for one of the projects we're working on, maybe we should get one for the office. I offered to bring mine in. I've spent far too much time looking for it. We've ordered a copy for the office.

The slipcover of the complete third series of Doctor Who on DVD, the one with the Doctor and Martha pictured. Deep down, I don't really care where it is, but it bothers me that I have no idea what happened to it. (What do people do with those covers? Does anyone actually slip the DVD back into it? Throw it away? I have a squashed stack.)

In a general way, I'm bothered that I'm unable to find (to buy) a replacement for the black beret with the black embroidered stylized flowers that I lost a few months ago, between my office and the metro, all of a 2-minute walk, indoors. Months ago, and I'm still bothered.

I always know where everything is. More than anything, I'm bothered by these lapses in my attention.

Still life

As I've begun to weed, inevitably covers are drawn back, pages are turned, and snippets are read. While this is mostly an act of instinct, a lack of self-control, it is, on the whole, useful to the decision process.

Some books I don't remember reading at all; I just remember liking them. What do I do with those books?

Take for example, the prologue from Tom Robbins's Stll Life With Woodpecker (a beat-up mass-market paperback):

If this typewriter can't do it, then fuck it, it can't be done.

This is the all-new Remington SL3, the machine that answers the question, "Which is harder, trying to read The Brothers Karamazov while listening to Stevie Wonder records or hunting for Easter eggs on a typewriter keyboard?" This is the cherry on top of the cowgirl. The burger served by the genius waitress. The Empress card.

I sense that the novel of my dreams is in the Remington SL3 — although it writes much faster than I can spell. And no matter that my typing finger was pinched last week by a giant land crab. This baby speaks electric Shakespeare at the slightest provocation and will rap out a page and a half if you just look at it hard.

"What are you looking for in a typewriter?" the salesman asked.

"Something more than words," I replied. "Crystals. I want to send my readers armloads of crystals, some of which are the colors of orchids and peonies, some of which pick up radio signals from a secret city that is half Paris and half Coney Island."

He recommended the Remington SL3.

My old typewriter was named Olivetti. I know an extraordinary juggler named Olivetti. No relation. There is, however, a similarity between juggling and composing on the typewriter. The trick is, when you spill something, make it look like part of the act.

I have in my cupboard, under lock and key, the last bottle of Anaiis Nin (green label) to be smuggled out of Punta del Visionario before the revolution. Tonight, I'll pull the cork. I'll inject ten cc. into a ripe lime, the way the natives do. I'll suck. And begin...

If this typewriter can't do it, I'll swear it can't be done

How do I discard a book that starts like that?

Monsterpiece Theater presents

The Taming of the Shoe



"To thine own self be shoe."

Truth (and beauty), out of the corner of your eye

I'm not sure who the madman is, and I'm still thinking about what it means to dream of Turing machines. A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines is by cosmologist Janna Levin, and it's lovely. Potential madmen dreaming: Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, and Levin herself. This reader, too. Dreaming, perhaps, of some quintessential truth, just beyond reach.

Kurt Gödel:

He is still all potential. The potential to be great, the potential to be mad. He will achieve both magnificently.

Everyone gathered on this Thursday, the rotating numbers accounting for some three dozen, believe in their very hearts that mathematics is unassailable. Gödel has come tonight to shatter their belief until all that is left are convincing pieces that when assembled erect a powerful monument to mathematics, but not an unassailable one — or at least not a complete one. Gödel will prove that some truths live outside of logic and that we can't get there from here. Some people — people who probably distrust mathematics — are quick to claim that they knew all along that some truths are beyond mathematics. But they just didn't. They didn't know it. They didn't prove it.

Gödel didn't believe that truth would elude us. He proved that it would. He didn't invent a myth to conform to his prejudice of the world — at least not when it came to mathematics. He discovered his theorem as surely as if it was a rock he had dug up from the ground. He could pass it around the table and it would be as real as that rock. If anyone cared to, they could dig it up where he buried it and find it just the same. Look for it and you'll find it where he said it is, just off center from where you're staring. There are faint stars in the night sky that you can see, but only if you look to the side of where they shine. They burn too weakly or are too far away to be seen directly, even if you stare. But you can see them out of the corner of your eye because the cells on the periphery of your retina are more sensitive to light. Maybe truth is just like that. You can see it, but only out of the corner of your eye.

And Alan Turing:

Where is God in 1 + 1 = 2? Nowhere.

Over the coming days and weeks and on into months, he feels the last of his spiritualism evaporate like the cooling remains of a fever. He is left without remorse and wonders how he ever clung to his awkward faith with such emotion. We're just machines. At the age of twenty-three and for the rest of his life he embraces, without reservation, a mathematics that exists independently of it. We are biological machines. Nothing more. We have no souls, no spirits. But we are bound to mathematics and mathematics is flawless. This has to be true.

Where is God in 1 + 1 = 2? There is no God.

[. . .]

To his great surprise his materialism is not so sad. He moves with greater ease and resilience and less fear. It is as though his eyes have suddenly come into focus from a nauseating blur and the whole world looks brilliant. All of his senses have sharpened so that colors and sounds and smells and textures are splendid and vibrant, his experience of them a heart-soaring joy. Every blade of grass glistens. The hard Cambridge wind batters respect out of him. The barren twist of every branch of every tree, even the weak fog of light, the whole of the world sings out to him as though he has never seen or heard anything before. With the sheer pleasure of this tactile awakening, his love of nature intensifies as though he has finally given over to her, wholly and without inhibition. Within days his spiritualism is no more than a mildly embarassing, childish memory. In its place is a calm, impervious materialism — nothing like the sad bleak emptiness he feared. He would have a bad time trying to put it into words. No single word could mean this thing. He would have to write something lengthy with many caveats and tangents and even then he knows he would not successfully express the immediacy or the splendor of the visceral experience. Maybe in another's mind better words would come, but not in his. And so his mind offers him something simple. Only one word comes to him over and again, and it could be only this — a word he doesn't often think to use: "beautiful." It is beautiful.

I won't pretend to know what this book actually means or what it aspires to do, beyond speculating as to the character and thought of these two eccentric minds, but it's quite beautiful. This is a fictional account of the lives of Gödel and Turing. There is no hard math here. The philosophical concepts Gödel and Turing played with are presented quite simply and often tangentially. There is no direct relationship between Gödel and Turing. Turing's work drew on Gödel's ideas, but they never met. But parallels are drawn, perhaps no more complicated than the fact that these are two geniuses firmly detached from reality. The story is told with a cool detachment, which proves to be highly poetic.

Excerpt.
Review by M John Harrison.
Interview (Quirks & Quarks, CBC) (mp3).
Janna Levin.

Related:
Jonathan Lethem and Janna Levin discuss truth and beauty (transcript):

Levin: Something I find particularly interesting is that science, I think, is the last realm in which people talk to each other seriously, with a straight face, about beauty. Visual artists would never say that's a beautiful piece of work, not in really contemporary, cutting-edge art.

Lethem: That's a very difficult phrase. After modernism, beauty is terrifically suspect.

Levin: Right, absolutely. And it's considered kind of provincial to aim for something beautiful. We're not doing pretty pictures here; we're doing something else. But in science, we really hold on to beauty and elegance as the goal because, for reasons that I think nobody fully understands, it's a good criterion for distinguishing what's right from what's wrong. And if something is beautiful and elegant, it's probably right. Occasionally, you'll see something that's so beautiful and so elegant, and it's not right, and you can't believe it's not right.

Weeding

I've decided to weed my books. There's just not enough room.

There is various shelving around the house, for the kid's books, for cookbooks, for colouring books, for board games, for dictionaries and the atlas. But 4 bookcases are mine, and they're bursting at the seams. More bookcases is not an option.

For this reason mainly, as well as a few others, I'm ready to go digital. (Not tomorrow, but I'm preparing.)

Books by some authors I will not part with, such as Calvino, Saramago.

I have duplicates of Douglas Adams, and of 1984. I don't think I will ever read Anna Karenina again; if I do, it will be in a different translation. I'm keeping Bridget Jones's Diary, but not the sequel.

I'm taking each book off the shelf and carefully weighing its worth before sliding it back into position. I am formulating criteria:

Will I ever read this book again?

Really, that one question ought to do it.

The discards are accumulating. But.

But this hoarding of books is an unreasonable compulsion, and it's a tough habit to break. I find excuses.

Did this book have a significant impact on me?
Will I ever have reason to refer to it?
Do I have a strong sentimental attachment to this particular physical specimen (for my notes, an inscription, a memory)?
Is it a book that is exceptionally hard to find?
Is it a book likely to fall out of print and not be digitized? (I will keep the Delacorta books.)
Will I regret having disposed of it?
Should I keep it for Helena's sake, to tempt her, to guide her literary discoveries?

I discarded The Children of Men, but then I created an exception for all books fitting the category of u-/dys-topian fiction (if anything's my thing, that's it), so I pulled it back.

There's the broad category of, umm, "esoterica" — for lack of a more precise, overarching label — (Schulz and Gombrowicz; Breton and Appolinaire; Perec and Pavic), some samples of which fit my criteria, others not quite.

I don't know what to do about The Martian Chronicles — I bought this paperback at a garage sale for 50 cents, after having spent weeks looking for a copy, overwhelmed with the need to reread it, having no idea whatever happened to my own. If I put this copy in the box, will I be able to find it at a garage sale when I need it?

And, seriously, what of the impact on the child? I did not grow up in a home with shelves of books. I relied on libraries and instinct and gifts for literary guidance. For better, or worse? Do I keep Dracula, Frankenstein, Ayn Rand (oh, come on — every adolescent goes through an Ayn Rand phase) just so the kid might "discover" them earlier? Or would she then snub them as her mother's books? If I dispose of them, will they be out there for her when she's ready for them, will she be able to find them, will she know that they exist?

I used to imagine I'd grow up and have a house with library. But life happens, and I'm letting go.