Mind modelling

As you may have noticed, in general members of book clubs regard the characters inside books exactly the way they regard the characters outside books. The facts that the former are made of the alphabet and the latter of muscle, tissue, and bone are of little relevance.

— from The Summer without Men, by Siri Hustvedt.

Science backs this up. It's the same brain centres lighting up in response to a stimulus, whether in the world or in our minds.

This is the essence of a short online course I recently completed, and it's a curious serendipity that I was concurrently reading a novel that addressed the same concept within it.

By the age of 3 or 4, we develop a theory of mind, applying the sense of our own personness, to others, real or fictional, in order to understand them, to fill in the gaps.

Real life is good experience for understanding and appreciating literature; and fiction can be good practice for real life.

Certainly the girls attending the narrator's summer poetry workshop learn this lesson.

The Summer without Men was not the book I expected it to be. Having read Hustvedt before, I knew it wouldn't be chick lit. There's some angry feminism about it, not all of which I agree with.

The narrator's a poet, an academic. As much as she references Kierkegaard, I never fully warmed to her.

Reading Gabo online

The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World
"even though they were looking at him there was no room for him in their imagination"

Light Is Like Water
"Household objects, in the fullness of their poetry, were flying through the kitchen sky on their own wings."

Tuesday Siesta
"She bore the conscientious serenity of someone accustomed to poverty."

A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings
"a Portuguese man who couldn't sleep because the noise of the stars disturbed him"

Transcendence of form

Beethoven's music is Hegelian philosophy: it is at the same time truer than this; i.e., it contains the conviction that the self replication of society as something identical is not enough, indeed, that it is false. Logical identity as the esthetic and produced domination of forms is at once practiced and criticized by Beethoven. The seal of its truth in Beethoven's music is its suspension: the transcendence of form, through with form for the first time achieves its inner meaning. The transcendence of form is for Beethoven the portrayal — not the expression — of hope.

— T.W. Adorno, as quoted in Hegel — Purpose, Results and the Philosophical Essence, by Scott Hornton, in Harper's Magazine.

I've just finished another online course, this one exploring Beethoven's piano sonatas. I've learned quite a bit about the structure of Beethoven's music, and about the historical context for all the rules he was stretching to breaking point. And I've come to some understanding about some of the elements that attract me, about why I love Beethoven so much (even though I wasn't especially familiar with his sonatas before taking up this course).

I got to realizing just how modern Beethoven is, and it got me thinking about Kierkegaard and the crisis of modernity, and I started drawing connections, and recognized an ironic stance in Beethoven's work, how self-reference can only come from self-awareness, how he could be said to be composing metamusic. Beethoven of course precedes Kierkegaard, but Hegel would've been all the rage, and Kant: "The moral law within us and the starry heaven above us!" — which Beethoven had scrawled in a notebook. The music is becoming. And Beethoven is infinite.

And in writing my final assignment, I found scattered across the internet evidence that others have thought as I have. A reassuring thing.

And I am reminded to pick up Thomas Mann again. I must read Doctor Faustus.

Life has taught me to understand books

Learning to Read

If I had to look up every fifth or sixth word
so what. I looked them up.
I had nowhere important to be.

My father was unavailable, and my mother
looked like she was about to break,
and not into blossom, each time I spoke.

My favorite was The Iliad. True,
I had trouble pronouncing the names;
but when was I going to pronounce them, and

to whom?
My stepfather maybe?
Number one, he could barely speak English –

two, he had sufficient cause
to smirk or attack
without prompting from me.

Loneliness boredom and fear
my motivation
fiercely fueled.

I get down on my knees and thank God for them.

Du Fu, the Psalms, Whitman, Rilke.
Life has taught me
to understand books.

— Franz Wright

I am resplendent in divergence

The end is the best part. After the stop. I love the end. Sometimes I start chanting that bit spontaneously. "I am resplendent in divergence." It's a holy thing.

I've been looking for this song forever, because upon a time I owned it, on vinyl, and I think of it often, every time I encounter a new ism. Surely my vast knowledge of isms can be traced back to this song. I learned more isms than any 12-year-old ought to know. I developed a weird interest in the Great Schism, and also the teachings of Nestorius. I think solipsism may still be my favourite, though, because it was my first.

Sometimes when I hear bells, I say, out loud, "Bells! I can hear bells!"

Nobody ever gets the reference, though, with my chanting, or the bells, or the diction of various isms.

Having seen Divergent this weekend with my daughter, I am now, of course, resplendent in it.

Thank you, Internet, for restoring this divergence to me.

We are all comic characters

Lola's eyes gleamed with pleasure and interest as she listened to my tales of the cosmopolitans, all of them true but all fictions nevertheless. Shorn of intimacy and seen from a considerable distance, we are all comic characters, farcical buffoons who bumble through our lives, making fine messes as we go, but when you get close, the ridiculous quickly fades into the sordid or the tragic of the merely sad. It doesn't matter whether you are stuck in the provincial backwater of Bonden or wandering down the Champs-Élysées. The merely sad business about me was that I wanted to be admired, wanted to see myself as a shining reflection in Lola's eyes.

— from The Summer without Men, by Siri Hustvedt.

Closing the circle

The Circle, by Dave Eggers.

I mean, all this stuff you're involved in, it's all gossip. It's people talking about each other behind their backs. That's the vast majority of this social media, all these reviews, all these comments. Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream communication. And besides that, it's fucking dorky.

Like, smile, favorite, zing, tweet, thumbs up, vote up, recommend, pin, forward, plus, doubleplusgood.

Recommended for anyone who has ever tweeted, messaged, sent an email, answered a customer survey, reviewed, commented, posted a status update, joined a community.

Reviews

Bookpuddle:

Society buys into the idea that ever increasing levels of "transparency" are of ultimate benefit to all. The Circle implements what sounds like great ideas at first — politicians that wear cameras on them at all times, criminals that are easily identifiable in a crowd, children that can never be abducted because they are instantly trackable via GPS, etc., — but along the way, all personal freedoms are one by one jettisoned, and the reader is faced with seeing (literally) what it would really be like to be at all times monitored, and "known" by anyone else who wanted to observe what you were up to.

So Many Books:

The Circle was a page-turner, the horror of watching Mae get sucked into the hivemind is delicious.

Betsy Morais: Sharing Is Caring Is Sharing, The New Yorker

But even without the searing wit of "1984," the book is capable of landing on point—when it's at its most irksome. Where "1984" has the vigilant Police Patrol and Thought Police, "The Circle" has SeeChange and Clarification. Surveillance isn't a bad word; it's a gift, even a human right.

Margaret Atwood: When Privacy Is Theft, The New York Review of Books

The nineteenth-century art critic John Ruskin—who famously said, "Tell me what you like and I’ll tell you who you are"—viewed bad taste as a moral offense, and the young Circlers subscribe to this dogma: nothing gets you the brushoff more quickly than a pair of uncool jeans. Utopia, it seems, is an awful lot like high school, but with even more homework.

Ellen Ullman: Ring of Power, The New York Times

She is more a high school mean girl than an evil opponent. Perhaps this is what Eggers wants to say: that evil in the future will look more like the trivial Mae than it will the hovering dark eye of Big Brother.

Looking forward to Blue Met

The launch of the festival program is like Christmas for me. I look forward to it every year. Then I sit with my various coloured pens, marking the must-sees and the maybe-interestings, mapping and scheduling.

The 16th Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, themed "The Power of Words," runs April 28 to May 4, with some pre- and post-festival events.

This year's recipient of the Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix is Richard Ford. (But I'm not yet convinced I need to read him.)

At my first go over the program, I've identified two standout events:

• Thursday, May 1, an interview with Austrian crime writer Wolf Haas, author of the darkly humorous Simon Brenner books and for whom I've developed a fondness. I'm giddy with anticipation.
• Friday, May 2, Shelagh Rogers interviews Heather O'Neill, author of the amazing Lullabies for Little Criminals. No, I haven't actually read it, but I own a copy and I know all sorts of things about it and I expect it to be thoroughly amazing. She has a new book out.

I'll be poring over the event listings in more detail in the coming days — I'll let you know what else I find. The full program is available on the Blue Metropolis website.

Before the law

Orson Welles reads Kafka.



"Every man strives to attain the law."

Unnaturally extreme social needs

"It's not that I'm not social. I'm social enough. But the tools you guys create actually manufacture unnaturally extreme social needs. No one needs the level of contact you're purveying. It improves nothing. It's not nourishing. It's like snack food. You know how they engineer this food? They scientifically determine precisely how much salt and fat they need to include to keep you eating. You're not hungry, you don't need the food, it does nothing for you, but you keep eating these emptying calories. This is what you're pushing. Same thing. Endless empty calories, but the digital-social equivalent. And you calibrate it so it's equally addictive."

— from The Circle, by Dave Eggers.

Yes! That's the world exactly.

(As the novel progresses, there's a creeping sense of unease. Clearly something bad is going to happen to sweet Mae, new employee of the Circle, modelled after real-life Google.)

My reading is enhanced this week by watching Google and the World Brain, in which Kevin Kelly relates how Larry Page said, "It's not to make a search engine, it's to make an AI."

Also, "Google's Earth" by William Gibson: "We are its unpaid content-providers [...]. Google is made of us."

Everyone always mistakes everyone for someone else

The Letter Killers Club, by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, is a strange little excuse for a novel.

I want to love it, but I don't quite. For such a short novel, it took an amazingly long time to read. It's full of interesting ideas that aren't completely developed, aren't resolved, don't completely gel. The novel is a fantastic cerebral exercise, but it leaves me cold.

A conception without a line of text, I argued, is like a needle without thread: it pricks, but does not sew.

That's how I feel about this book.

The club is a secret society of men known only by nonsense syllables. They are "conceivers" — in the interest of purity, nothing is committed to paper. They meet weekly and tell stories that span genres, subjects, and formats.

But it's the framing story that captivates me — who are these men, why do they meet, what is so subversive in it, why must it be so secret? where is the political element? for it feels like there must be one.

Here are some of the themes strewn across these pages.

I walked quickly — from crossroad to crossroad — trying to untangle my feelings. The evening seemed like a black wedge driven into my life. I had to unwedge it. But how?

**********

I think this is all fairly simple: every three-dimensional being doubles himself twice — reflecting himself outwardly and inwardly. Both reflections are untrue: the cold, flat likeness returned by the looking glass is untrue because it is less than three-dimensional; the face's other reflection, cast inward, flowing along nerves to the brain and composed of a complex set of sensations, is also untrue because it is more than three-dimensional.

**********

And if the hectic youth who mistook our passer for someone else — racing up, then away — had been able to see through eyes to what is behind them, he would have understood once and for all: everyone always mistakes everyone for someone else.

**********

The fewer the managers, the greater the manageability.

**********

[...] you enter facts from the outside, not the inside, you're worse than your bacteria: they eat the facts, you eat the facts' meanings.

**********

Plotlines throw out disputes the way a plant throws out spores: into space, where they germinate.

See also
The Millions: Storytelling is a Deadly Business: Krzhizhanovsky's The Letter Killers Club
The Rumpus: Against an Ethical Machine

Inspiration is for amateurs

Last week I went to see Man Booker International Prize-nominated author and creative writing professor Josip Novakovich and two-time Booker Prize-winning author Peter Carey in conversation on stage.

I like Peter Carey, and I'm so relieved that the real-life Peter Carey does not taint my impression of his books, but confirms and enhances my suspicion of the sort of person he is. Wry and unassuming. Observant, clever. Genuine.

On the other hand, I've never read Josip Novakovich. Being a "local" boy (he's called Montreal home for some time), he has flirted with one of my friends. He completely won me over; a little obsessed with death, but in a good way, smart and funny.

The audio file linked to here is a little over an hour, but well worth it. The conversation is moderated; they cover topics including the writing process, inspiration, motivation, editors, how you view "home" when you no longer live there, outsiderness.

Highlights
Josip described in great detail a story he's working on, about a dying man who plans in great detail his own death, funeral, etc. but he — Josip — played it down as something he hasn't fully worked out yet. And Peter cried out, why bother? he's already plotted it out to the point that he — Peter — would lose interest with the project. (Peter himself may plot the skeleton of a journey, but the writing remains a journey of discovery.) And all of this has seeped heavily into my current reading (Krzhizhanovsky's Letter Killers Club) and studying (a MOOC on cognitive poetics) and stained it beyond repair.

Novakovich also said the best advice he ever received from an editor was to cut the first nine pages (and bear in mind that he writes short stories). As an editor, I love hearing anecdotes like this, about finding the real story in a glut of words, finding where the story really starts.

The big takeaway for me was in the discussion of "inspiration is for amateurs," driving home the point that writing is not a romantic notion; it's something they work hard at.


Learn more about the Thinking Out Loud conversation series on the creative process, sponsored by Concordia University and The Globe and Mail.

Peter Carey's latest novel, Amnesia, about a hacker, is due out in November. Why, yes, I do have a birthday around then.

No one should end his learning while he lives

We are living in 1937 and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organisation, education, graduation, for a century — for several centuries. The three- or four-years' course of lectures, the bachelor who knows some, the master who knows most, the doctor who knows all, are ideas that have come down unimpaired from the Middle Ages. Nowadays no one should end his learning while he lives and these university degrees are preposterous. It is true that we have multiplied universities greatly in the past hundred years, but we seem to have multiplied them altogether too much upon the old pattern. A new battleship, a new aeroplane, a new radio receiver is always an improvement upon its predecessor. But a new university is just another imitation of all the old universities that have ever been. Educationally we are still for all practical purposes in the coach and horse and galley stage.

— from World Brain, by H.G. Wells.

In this collection of essays, Wells envisions a massive, digitized, permanent World Encyclopedia, accessible to everyone. In 2004, Google announced that it had the same idea. Sort of.



Google and the World Brain is being screened tonight in Montreal.

I'm not able to attend, so I poked around a little and it turns out the film is readily available for viewing online. (But don't tell anyone. Pretty sure it's an infringement of copyright.)

Lettered excesses must be destroyed

"You know, Goethe once described Shakespeare (to Eckermann) as a wildly overgrown tree that — for two hundred years straight — had stifled the growth of all English literature; thirty years later, Börne called Goethe: 'A monstrous cancer spreading through the body of German literature.' Both men were right: if our letterizations stifle one another, if writers prevent each other from writing, they don't allow readers even to form an idea. The reader hasn't the chance to have ideas, the right to them has been usurped by word professionals who are stronger and more experienced in this matter: libraries have crushed the reader's imagination, the professional writings of a small coterie of scribblers have crammed shelves and heads to bursting. Lettered excesses must be destroyed: on shelves and in heads. One must clear at least a little space of other people's conceptions to make room for one's own: everyone has the right to conception — both the professional and the dilettante."

— from The Letter Killers Club, by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky.

The Argo Bookshop book club meets March 27 to discuss this book over drinks.

Three novels about art, plus

I love art. As the saying goes, I don't know much about art, but I know what I like. Often I feel that I don't have the vocabulary to talk about art. But some writers do.

While nonfiction texts about art might teach me something about technique, form, history, context, I think fiction excels at teaching me to respond to and feel something about art.

Here are three novels that have dealt with art, artists, the art world superbly. (And it's telling that I was unable have yet to get around to review a couple of them.)

Art as business

An Object of Beauty, by Steve Martin.

The story follows young and ambitious Lacey Yeager as she climbs through the New York art world, starting in the bins at Sotheby's and finally owning her own gallery. This world is full of art history majors, and generally not people who actually make art.

It doesn't entirely succeed as a novel — I never cared what happened to Lacey. But it's a fascinating glimpse of a world few are wealthy, privileged, or determined enough to see. Steve Martin is a collector of fine art, and this novel is not about art so much as its value, whether to an individual or according to the market.

Art as an aesthetic principle was supported by thousands of years of discernment and psychic rewards, but art as a commodity was held up by air.

Read an excerpt.

Note, also, that gorgeous artwork is reproduced within.

Art as an intensely personal expression

The Woman Upstairs, by Claire Messud.
There's a lot of hate in this novel's narrator. Nora, gradeschool art teacher, rediscovers her artistic drive when she befriends the immigrant family of a new student, in particular his mother, an artist looking to share a studio.

Messud explores Nora's art-making and its concept, which in turn relies on Nora's interpretation of the art and biographies of Emily Dickinson, Alice Neel, and Edie Sedgwick.

It's said of Edie Sedgwick, but it may as well be about Nora, perhaps Messud herself:

When, as a woman, you make yourself the work of art, and when you are then what everyone looks at, then whatever else, you aren't alone.

I can't think of another recent novel that's been so divisive in its reception, so many voices whom I respect decrying that this novel is not worth the hype or critical praise, and it seems to me the lines are clearly drawn along gender and age. For me, that reinforces the point, that art, the creative process, is deeply individual.

Hate it for yourself.

Art for art's sake

What I Loved, by Siri Hustvedt.

I loved this novel. It brought me to tears, wonder, astonishment, despair. It's one of the finest novels I've read, ever.

Written from the point of view of an art historian with some artists as characters, it describes the (near?) contemporary art scene and facets like installation art such that I almost think I understand them.

In equal parts family saga, thriller, meditation, I'd say its primarily about love and loss. But its imbued with art, peopled with artists, who do art, who live and breathe art. It makes not just the characters' artistic visions come alive, but the very idea that there exists such a thing as artistic vision becomes crystal clear, and it makes me wonder how anyone could live without art.

"That's the problem with seeing things. Nothing is clear. Feelings, ideas shape what's in front of you. Cezanne wanted the naked world, but the world is never naked. In my work, I want to create doubt." He stopped and smiled at me. "Because that's what we're sure of."

Sample it here.

Coincidentally, I finally downloaded some of Hustvedt's back catalogue last week. And I was thrilled to discover that she has another novel freshly released, The Blazing World, about a woman painter negotiating New York's art establishment.

Plus
Mark Rothko on the Transcendent Power of Art and How (Not) To Experience His Paintings

Les Objets crépusculaires

The work of André Dubois is being featured as part of Art Souterrain 2014, showcasing art in the public spaces of Montreal's underground city.

André Dubois cuts fantastically detailed silhouette-like panoramas into things like coffee cups, shoeboxes, maps, and packaging and shines a light on them to cast a shadow image. The series Les Objets crépusculaires blew me away.

The cut-outs constitute a thing of beauty in themselves and are obviously the product of remarkable craftsmanship. Dubois's artistry lies not so much in the final image he creates but in the perspective he has mastered, his ability to understand how an angle of light will translate a flat surface of cuts and gashes into an evocative scene.

Art Souterrain is on for only two weeks (ending tomorrow), but having been on vacation the first week, and playing post-vacation catch-up the second week, I managed to see just a mere fraction of the art on show, at those venues closest to my office.

Happily, Les Objets crépusculaires is on display in the passage between Place Ville-Marie and La Gare Centrale until October 2014, so there's still time for me (for you) to drag friends and family out to see it.

And now I must go slash all my lampshades.

Reasons to read Stefan Zweig

I've only ever read Stefan Zweig's Chess Story, but there is so much more.

Wes Anderson

"It’s more like me trying to do a Zweig-esque thing" (via A Different Stripe).

That Zweig-esque film is The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Zweig biographer George Prochnik interviews Wes Anderson: How a Viennese author inspired The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Beware of Pity
The Sheila Variations: Beware of Pity, by Stefan Zweig

Although it is, essentially, a domestic tale, a kind of effed-up twisted drawing-room romance of horror (Jane Austen on crystal meth), surrounding it is the world at large, the military maneuvers and gleaming by-rote ritual that seems to give an order and continuity to a crazy world. Zweig knows what is coming, and so do we, which is what gives the book such a creepy pallor.

The Outlet: Beware of Memory: On Reading Stefan Zweig's "Beware of Pity"

Beware is a novel about the complexity of human emotions: about how people hurt one another without meaning to, about how love is as much borne of the happiness one can give as the happiness one can get, and how its absence is inextricably tied up with embarrassment, with shame, with the fear of proclaiming one's love before one's fellow soldiers, fellow men. It is about how Hofmiller grows up, with brutal abruptness, and realizes that he lives in a world far more complex, with boundaries between emotions far more easily blurred, than he expected.

Letter from an Unknown Woman
The Mookse and the Gripes: Stefan Zweig: Letter from an Unknown Woman

This is signature Zweig: highly emotional, almost ridiculously dramatic, yet it works. It works marvelously.

Les derniers jours de Stefan Zweig
Le Figaro: Stefan Zweig au cœur de la tempête

Plongée profonde au cœur de la tempête intérieure qui secoua l'un des grands écrivains du XXe siècle...

Homeostatic universe

A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. I've heard this phrase thousands of times, often with a hint of humour, referring to various things. I didn't know that it was Winston Churchill who said it, and I didn't know that the statement was in reference to Russia.

In a radio broadcast in October 1939, Churchill said:

I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.

Definitely Maybe, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

I hesitate to call it science fiction, although that's the label commonly applied to the work of the Strugatsky brothers. It's deeply psychological, with several ambiguities and loose ends. It could also be read as a political satire or social commentary.

I was realizing that just yesterday I was man, a member of society. I had my own concerns and worries, yes, but as long as I obeyed the laws created by the system — and that had become a habit — as long as I obeyed those laws, I was protected from all imaginable dangers by the police, the army, the unions, public opinion, and my friends and family. Now, something in the world around me had gone haywire. Suddenly I became a catfish holed up in a crack, surrounded by monstrous vague shadows that didn't even need huge looming jaws — a slight movement of their fins would grind me into a powder, squash me, turn me into zilch. And it was made clear to me that as long a I hid in that crack I would not be touched. Yet it was even more terrifying than that. I was separated from humanity the way a lamb is cut off from the herd and dragged off somewhere for some unknown reason, while the herd, unsuspecting, goes on about its business, moving farther away into the distance. I would have felt much better if only they had been warlike aliens, some bloodthirsty, destructive aggressors from outer space, from the ocean depths, from the fourth dimension. I would have been one among many; there would have been a place for me, work for me; I would be in the ranks! But I was doomed to perish in front of everyone's eyes. No one would see a thing, and when I was destroyed, ground to dust, everyone would be surprised and then shrug it off.

Does that sound more like the threat of an alien intelligence or of government?

Dmitri Alekseevich Malianov, astrophysicist, is on the brink of a great discovery.

In the yellow, slightly curved space, the axially symmetric cavities turned slowly like gigantic bubbles. Matter flowed around them, trying to seep through, but it couldn't. The compressed itself on the boundaries to such incredible densities that the bubbles began to glow.

His wife and son have gone to Odessa, leaving him alone with the cat to work. But one interruption (a beautiful woman) follows another (a delivery of vodka and caviar), and soon a full cast is parading through the apartment: Arnold Pavlovich Snegovoi, highly mysterious neighbour, colonel, supposed by Malianov to be a physicist, in rocketry. Valentin Andreevich Weingarten, biologist and womanizer. Zakhar Gubar, master craftsman techie, patent holder of several inventions, lady-killer of the highest degree. Vladlen Semenovich Glukhov, orientalist.

And Philip Pavlovich Vecherovsky, state prize laureate.

Vecherovsky lapsed into muffled guffaws that passed for satisfied laughter. That's probably the sound H.G. Wells's Martians made when they drank human blood; Vecherovsky guffawed like that because he liked the poem he had just read. One would think that the pleasure he derived from poetry was purely physical.

All these men are connected, their life's work has been waylaid, the universe is conspiring against them. I find it curious, and commendable, that while the supposed cosmic intelligence is unknowable, there is no hypothesizing about anything like God; for these are men of science (or at least, academic rigour), living under a godless Soviet regime.

When they are forced to consider that the orientalist is among their ranks, they realize that it is not merely scientific advances and technological innovation that are being stifled but rather the whole of knowledge of humankind.

Continued reference to Vecherovsky's Martian guffaws lends to the impression that there is something alien among them, even while Vecherovsky is firmest his conviction that he knows what's going on and how best to combat it.

The story is presented in the form of excerpts, all starting with ellipses, sometimes midsentence, but they are presented in order, with no obvious gaps between them. Excerpts of what?

There are so many unresolved situations in this book. It's impossible to state with any certainty which occurrences are purely coincidental or imagined or planned as a joke or part of a grand conspiracy, whether governmental or cosmic in nature.

Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers, which I read a couple years ago, conveys suspense and horror so palpably; I count it as one of my favourite books ever. Definitely Maybe takes place in a more familiar environment, yet is more mysterious — the enigma it is wrapped in is subtler. It is less about an obvious external threat than a creeping paranoia that's generated from within.

I finished reading Definitely Maybe a couple weeks ago, but I find myself thinking of it often. It is in fact more potent now than when I turned the final page. I continue to consider, with a shudder:

Work toward what end? What price my family, my peace of mind? At what cost knowledge?

See also Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings.

Body mind change

A while ago I attended an exhibit exploring the work of David Cronenberg. That visit included a tour of BMC Labs, after which I engaged in the experience of personalizing my own pod (a biotech enhancement) for brainstem implantation.

At its core a series of psychological profiling questions, the customization process was dressed up with audiovisual clips and social media interactions for an unsettling, emotional, but also weirdly satisfying narrative exercise.

Once calibrated according to my personality, the pod was brought to maturity in optimal lab conditions.

The implantation ceremony was held a few weeks ago. I was unable to attend, but it's been reported on at Fangoria.



My own pod is being delivered to me by mail.

Mind reading: cognitive poetics

How to read... a mind is a two-week online course starting March 17, offered by the University of Nottingham.

The journey from new student to advanced study is really very short. Over two weeks, you will become fairly expert in cognitive poetics. You will understand in quite a profound way what it is to read and model the minds of other people, both real and fictional. You don't need any preparation other than your curiosity and your own experience of reading literary fiction or viewing film and television drama.

Although I haven't figured out how to read the title of this course, it sounds fascinating, and far too short. I'm going to be an expert in cognitive poetics!

I am positively addicted to MOOCs. (And I love saying "MOOC.") I just finished my fourth MOOC last week, and I start another next week. Only one of them has been purely for personal interest — the rest were for, as they say, professional development. "How to read" (MOOC number six) is a return to feeding my non-working life.

Sustain them

My assistant's favourite poem remains a secret, but I maintain that it's not an inappropriate discussion to have. To the contrary, I think it's essential, and my assistant has dropped in my esteem as a result. (My assistant also favours American spelling and is lax about punctuation.)

There are days I'd rather have a poem than an assistant.

Today's poem (courtesy of the Poetry Foundation app):

The Metaphysical Countrygirl

You, functional space
variants in voltage, the only light
Transitory effect of Love
several different lights
Sustain
Sustain them
you sustain them.

— Omar Pérez (tr. Kristin Dykstra)

An octopus that doesn't even exist

"Or take our situation, for instance, why do you say it isn't a manifestation of a supercivilization?"

"Hmm, too human. They've discovered that earthlings are on the threshold of the universe. Afraid of the competition, they decide to stop it. Is that it?"

"Why not?"

"Because that's fiction. Dime-store fiction in bright, cheap covers. It's like trying to fit an octopus into a pair of tuxedo pants. And not a plain octopus at that, but an octopus that doesn't even exist."

— from Definitely Maybe, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.

Despite the awesomeness of the interwebs, there is an appalling dearth of images of octopuses in tuxedo pants, let alone any that approach what this passage conjures in my head. The occasional jacket-wearing octopus, yes. Also, people wearing tuxedoes while eating octopus. But no pants-wearing octopus.

There you have it. Proof that such an octopus doesn't even exist.

Note: It should not be construed that this novel is in any way about octopus — tuxedo pants-wearing octopus, space alien octopus, or octopus of any kind. There is some caviar, though. And to this point, there is some conjecture as to the existence of (non-octopus-like) space aliens. The quoted passage is a simple — and delightful — metaphor.

A romance in lower mathematics

The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics — book by Norton Juster, adapted into animated short by Chuck Jones.


(Via Brain Pickings.)

Moral of the story: "To the vector belong the spoils."

Yes, no, maybe, perhaps

Malianov's wife is away, and a friend of hers comes to stay:

...then he poured her another glass of wine. The decision to toast the use of the informal Russian personal pronoun for "you" came up. Without the kissing. Why should there be kissing between two intelligent people? The important thing was spiritual rapport. They drank to using the informal "you" and spoke of spiritual closeness, new methods of birth deliveries, and about the differences among courage, bravery, and valor. The Riesling was finished, and Malianov put the empty bottle out on the balcony and went over the bar for some cabernet. They decided to drink the cabernet out of Irina's favorite smoked crystal glasses, which they chilled first. The conversation on femininity, which came up after the one on manliness and bravery, went very well with the icy red wine. They wondered what asses had decreed that red wine should never be chilled. They discussed the question. Isn't it true that iced red win is particularly good? Yes, absolutely. By the way, women who drink icy red wine become particularly beautiful. They resemble witches somewhere. Where precisely? Somewhere. A marvelous word — somewhere. "You are a pig somewhere." I love that expression. By the way, speaking of witches — what do you think marriage is? A real marriage. An intelligent marriage. Marriage is a contract. Malianov refilled the glasses and developed the thought. In the aspect that a man and wife are first of all friends, for whom friendship is the most important think. Honesty and friendship. Marriage is a friendship. A contract on friendship, understand? He had his hand on Lidochka's bare knee and was shaking it for emphasis.

I am thus far loving Definitely Maybe, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. I love the drunken trajectory of this particular passage.

(I'm slightly puzzled by the pig expression, though, and the use of "somewhere." Perhaps the translation is too literal here. I'll have to ask around. In Polish you can use "somewhere" as an exclamatory expression signifying something between indifference and disbelief. Perhaps something similar is going on here.)

It was originally published in English under the title A Billion Years Before the End of the World. I don't know the rationale for the title change to Definitely Maybe, but I can't help but be reminded of Kraftwerk's 1986 classic, Sex Objekt. (That album is now my reading soundtrack.)

NPR review.
Excerpt.

The devil in a bottle

The experience of Mikhail Bulgakov's short story Morphine is exquisite and hallucinatory, but its meaning is a little elusive.

On the surface it's the story of a young country doctor who turns to morphine to quell his stomach pains, perhaps the manifestation of a deeper suffering. Polyakov had been in love with an opera singer, but she left him. "I was a man full of joie de vivre until my domestic drama."

Add a layer of biographical context. Bulgakov himself was addicted to morphine. During the First World War he served as a doctor on the front, where he suffered serious injuries and developed a habit.

Polyakov tries to wean himself from morphine by taking cocaine. "The Devil in a bottle. Cocaine is the Devil in a bottle":

There's no pain. On, on the contrary: I'm anticipating the euphoria that will soon be coming. And then it does come. I know of it because the sounds of the accordion which Vlas the watchman, rejoicing at spring, is playing on the porch, the ragged, hoarse sounds of the accordion, which come flying to me, muffled, through the window pane, become angelic voices, and the rough basses in billowing furs hum like a heavenly choir. But then, after an instant, obeying some mysterious law which isn't described in a single one of the pharmacology books, the cocaine in the blood is transformed into something new. I know: it's a mixture of the Devil and my blood. And on the porch Vlas flags, and I hate him, while the sunset, with an uneasy rumbling, scorches my innards. And that's how it is several times running in the course of an evening until I realize that I'm poisoned. My heart starts thumping such that I can feel it in my arms, in my temples... and then it sinks into an abyss, and there are sometimes moments when I think that Dr Polyakov won't come back to life again...

But a Bulgakov-loving Russian I know tells me this is a story about the revolution, how morphine (or vodka, or whatever) is the only means of coping with the insanity, horror, devastation, absurdity of sovietism.

Indeed, Polyakov's diary runs from January 1917 till his death in February 1918. "There's a revolution going on there." "Far, far away is dishevelled, turbulent Moscow." Perhaps the woman he pines for, unreasonably, is Mother Russia.

Medical professionals will view Morphine as a document with educational value, for example: "Bulgakov's short story Morphine documents the decline of Dr Polyakov and illustrates a number of salient professional issues such as self-medication, abuse of authority and risks to patients."

So many stories in this one story. And if we go back to the beginning, it's still not clear where happiness lies.

Morphine was originally published in 1926 and is generally collected in A Country Doctor's Notebook. Morphine is also published on its own as a New Directions Pearl.

Has anybody seen the adaptation of A Young Doctor's Notebook with Jon Hamm and Daniel Radcliffe?

Typical archetypical

It's a futuristic mystery dystopian sci-fi action-adventure romance. More or less.

Archetype, by M.D. Waters, is a terrifically engrossing read, perfect for a day spent sick in bed, or a weekend trapped inside your home, or very long bus rides. You get the idea. It's the kind of book that's more unputdownable than others.

The reviews and promo copy consistently reference Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale. There's some of that.

Emma wakes up in a medical facility with no memory of her life before "the accident" and little knowledge of how the world works outside of the hospital. Clearly she is expected, by her husband as well as by her doctor, to conform to a specific model of wife. There's an intense Stepford Wives vibe (and a direct reference to that classic) to Emma's education regarding her expected behaviour.

Meanwhile, Emma deals with nightmares, which early on we suspect may be memories, and an inner voice that expresses constant resistance to the world outside. Emma thinks of the voice as a third party, but it's more likely a voice of conscience, or consciousness, her true self struggling to emerge through the haze of medication and neuroelectrical treatments.

It's only gradually that we become aware of the sociopolitical circumstances beyond the four walls to which Emma is confined, and indeed from which it seems she's being "protected." Women are commoditized and fertility is highly prized.

"That seems to be the big enigma for us all. Nobody can seem to pinpoint the exact reason, so they blame it on Mother Nature. Her way of compensating for the overpopulation of our species.

"Unfortunately, we'd already begun taking the steps to take are of this ourselves. Globally limiting families to one child, and at that time — oh, I'd say this started roughly two hundred years ago — couples could change the sex of their child to whatever they wanted. Men wanted their family line to continue, you see, so they chose male children more often than not."

[...]

But if you have the ability to change a child's sex, why not make more girls?" I say when I am sure his long explanation has ended.

He finds the book he was looking for and pulls it free, then heads back to his chair. "It has been outlawed after what happened last time. We do not want to risk a shortage of boys. Forcing nature to do our bidding is a risky business."

Gradually we learn about the Women's Training Centers, where women are prepared for marriage.

"Roughly a hundred years ago, a civil war broke out and split the United States right down the middle. Women in the west live free, while the east forces women at a young age into society as they see fit. It's slavery masked as a training center."

So that's the dystopian backdrop. The rest is spoiler territory.

Archetype is more entertaining than thought-provoking, but it does raise some interesting issues about identity. It's not Atwood-caliber prose or imaginings. And perhaps it tries to pack in a plot — or genre — or two more than it ought. But it's suspenseful, and there are a few twists that caught me off guard. And I will be reading the sequel, Prototype, due out in July.

(Note that this book is in some places billed as YA, but it's a little too steamy, in my view, to fit comfortably in this category.)

Excerpt.
Profile: Shelf Awareness (in which the book sounds smarter than its author).
Review: A.V. Club.

How you do remember happiness

Clever people have been pointing out for a long time that happiness is like good health: when it's there, you don't notice it. But when the years have passed, how you do remember happiness, oh, how you do remember it!

— from Morphine, by Mikhail Bulgakov.

Some books I'd ordered arrived yesterday. Coincidentally they're all Russian, setting off an olympic marathon of Russian literature.

I've yet to read past the first paragraph of Bulgakov's short story Morphine, but I love the design of this slim volume, the feel of it, it's whiteness, it's lightness, like a sheet of ice. Happiness.

What is tango?

"Tango?" said Mrs Rupa Mehra in alarm. "What is tango?"

"Bye, Ma," said Meenakshi. "Tango. A dance. We're going the Golden Slipper. Nothing to worry about. There's just a large crowd and a band and dancing."

"Abandoned dancing!" Mrs Rupa Mehra could hardly believe her ears.

— from A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth.

(I'm only about a third of the way through the book, but the number of pages is alarmingly high — easily the equivalent of two average novels.)

Part seven with all its parties and socializing has been particularly delightful. Lots of clever repartee, and throwaway lines like, "He's just a writer, he knows nothing at all about literature."

Born to stand out

While I like to think I'm above judging a book by its cover, I do put some store by the jacket copy.

Wonder, by R.J. Palacio, is not the kind of book I ever would've considered picking up on my own, for me or my child. I'm all for overcoming adversity, and most novel plots play on some variation of this theme, but reading about overcoming physical adversity (as opposed to, say, character flaw — and I recognize that a good book, which this is, will still incorporate all that fine moral, social, character stuff regardless) generally isn't my thing.

But eleven years on, I am still hopeless at gauging my daughter's tastes.

She received Wonder back in November, and over several weeks I'd been reading it aloud to her at bedtime.

August Pullman was born with severe facial deformities. Because of his health and all the surgeries he'd undergone, he was homeschooled. But at age 10 he enters fifth grade at a mainstream school, where he learns all about the real world of the social politics kids play at. This, compounded by the fact that he has the kind of face that makes people scream, shudder, turn away. Born to stand out, and sometimes invisible because of it. But he makes some true friends, and ultimately the entire school rallies around him.

The novel starts from Auggie's perspective, but it switches between several narrators, including Auggie's sister and some of his friends. This helps keep the story fresh, unpredictable, and moving swiftly through the school year.

It's all told with a light touch — it's funny and deeply affecting. And when Auggie's dog dies, Helena and I were in tears (I think reading it aloud made me feel it more intensely); we had to skim over a couple pages.

Books with "serious" subject matter, aimed at kids, I think run the risk of moralizing too much. For my taste, it could've been a tad more subtle: For example, one teacher at the beginning of every months presents precepts for consideration, which are nothing if not hitting you over the head with a life lesson. But coming from a teacher, these were more natural and easier to swallow than if they'd come from the narrator, or even a parent. That said, Helena was unfazed, and didn't detect any preachiness at all. (And to be fair, many of the precepts come from the likes of Virgil, Confucius, Pascal.)

Helena rates it four and half stars out of five, and is hoping for a sequel. It's a book we continue to talk about well after having turned the final page. Consider it recommended for that age set.

The open call (now closed) for postcard precepts on the author's website indicates that another book is in the works, but there's no indication how it will relate to Wonder.

Book trailer.

Waiting for socialism

It took me a long time to read The Graveyard, by Marek Hłasko, despite its being merely 140 pages long. It's dense with politics and a whole country's emotional baggage.

I first read Hłasko about 20 years ago — The Eight Day of the Week was just about the only book of his readily available in English. The Polish crowd I ran with couldn't sing his praises strongly enough. Hłasko is Poland's James Dean, its Angry Young Man. It's 1950s angst, but on another planet; Holden Caulfield's life of privilege shrinks to nothing when compared with growing up in the shadow of Communism. You want phoney, try on some party propaganda.

"It's funny," Franciszek said. "Man always dreamed of one thing — knowledge. That was the meaning of his eternal struggle. He dreamed of only one thing — to understand his times, his purpose, his place, his meaning, and his moment in eternity. And now that he has come closest to this understanding, knowledge is his main enemy. It's better not to understand — knowledge is a disease."

"No," the painter said. "it's death. It's worse than death. It's an encore piece, and encore to something that didn't exist, that couldn't be taken seriously." He waved the bottle joyfully. "How about a drink?"

The Graveyard was firmly rejected for publication in Poland. It appeared first in France in 1956.

It's the story of Franciszek Kowalski, a factory worker and party man. He meets up with an old friend and they go for a few drinks. On his way home, drunk, he manages to insult a couple police officers. Very soon, the exact nature of his innocent drunken outburst is called into question. A night in the drunk tank pales against the ensuing difficulties at work, with the party, and at home.

What begins with bureaucratic absurdities moves into surreal, nightmarish wartime flashbacks. And then. One by one, Kowalski hunts down his old comrades in the underground, looking to restore his faith but instead finding deeper truths.

He rose suddenly and began to pace the room. His neck grew purple, and his upper lip quivered. "Goddam it to hell!" he said. "To hell with this goddam chatter! What matters are the consequences, the final consequences. Once you've started a revolution, you have to realize that it can't be stopped, or moderated, or turned off, or delayed. A revolution can be only won or lost, and that's all. What horrifies you? The dimensions? The methods?"

"The consequences," Franciszek said. "What you said a moment ago. Is the revolution a blind, brutal force?"

Birch gripped Franciszek by the arm and led him to the window. Before them lay the wet city, bristling with scaffoldings. "Here, to this place," Birch said, "in I don't know how many years, a man will come who hasn't yet been born. He will come and he'll want to live, to have food, an apartment, children, a family; he will want to live in security and he will expect the time he lives in to provide everything a man is entitled to. I assure you that he won't be concerned with your sufferings and doubts, or mine. He will evaluate the world he finds by the yardstick of his reason. And that's all."

Franciszek wants only to know what kind of man he really is, what he really is, but what a quagmire of mistruths he stirs up. That should teach him drink vodka on a weeknight.

There's joke early on that sums up the moral-political confusion of the times:

Once again he ran in his unbuttoned overcoat through the wet, muddy streets. He stopped suddenly. [...] He heard the furious screech of brakes behind him, and jumped aside.

"What are you waiting for?" the driver screamed, "For applause?"

"For socialism," someone said on the sidewalk.

Reviews
Cleaver Magazine
Numéro Cinq
The School of Washington

A short story about storytelling

One of the MOOCs I started last week — Content Strategy — is, ironically, less than engaging. The definitions — of content strategy, content marketing, journalism, branding, and other terms — are muddled at best, where I so desperately yearn for clarity. So far I've learned only that "people will only learn about things they're motivated to learn about."

I was, however, heartened to find, buried in the discussion forums, a note on the importance of storytelling (and a link to this clip). While I find the marriage of narrative concept to business context a bit unsettling (I like narrative, business not so much), it's also reassuring — it acknowledges a truth that great authors have long known, that Don Draper has long known, that I've long known.

The strife of love in a dream

This weekend I saw the exhibition Splendore a Venezia.

It was lush and overwhelming, probably very much like the times it was meant to depict. It aimed to explore the interrelationships between the visual arts and music in the Venetian Republic, from the early sixteenth century to the fall of the Serenissima at the close of the eighteenth century. Ambitious.

In fact, it's several exhibitions rolled into one. I for one could do without the filigree and flourish; you can keep your Venetian School paintings. I was perfectly enthralled by the instruments of the era, musical manuscripts (a first edition of Vivaldi's Four Seasons), and other texts.

Some specific things I learned:

• Venice was a republic. Despite many hours of Assassin's Creed gameplay, the nuances of the political structures and relations of the time eluded me.
• Venice was a great publishing centre. This was in part owing to the standardization of musical notation; the local music industry created many printing opportunities — scores, libretti, programs.
• Venice enjoyed a thriving tourist industry several hundred years ago. This is evidenced by bound albums of commemorative woodcuts of public ceremonies and other occasions.

Thanks to this exhibition, I now have several new favourite things (and/or obsessions)...

Standing Man Playing a Viola da Gamba, by Paris Bordone (1500–1571). Pictured here. A small chalk sketch, to my eyes a gem among the oversize oils. "The composition anticipates the poetic depictions of mythological subjects that became popular in the mid-sixteenth century."

Sonata in G minor, for cello and basso continuo, RV 42, by Antonio Vivaldi. The piece was included in the audioguide of the exhibition, and this version was much lighter than any other rendition I can find on the internet.

Viola d'amore, which somehow looks wrong yet beautiful, flat-backed and with too many strings. Sympathetic strings, it turns out. This one had a scroll that, looked at head on, formed a heart.

Hypnerotomachia di Poliphilo, attributed to Francesco Colonna, and translated into English as The Strife of Love in a Dream. There wasn't much of a description, just publication details. It's only with further research that I learned it incorporates many languages into a tale replete with Roman gods and goddesses, exquisite architecture, trysts with nymphs, and hidden messages. The book lay open; latinate text and a woodcut image, nothing special at a glance. What was noteworthy, however, is how clean it was for a 500-year-old book — trim pages, crisp text, clear lines.

Ah, Hypnerotomachia! This is just the beginning.

Novels not included

Having read, and absolutely loved, Roadside Picnic some time ago, I'm really excited about the upcoming release of Definitely Maybe, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, from Melville House.

So I was inspired, as I am from time to time, to poke around the Internet to see what else by the Strugatsky brothers is available in English these days. And I found the little gem known as Novels by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (Book Guide):

The book description begins thusly:

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Commentary (novels not included). Pages: 24.

A list of chapters and an excerpt follow. And the excerpt is very boring.

The excerpt alone must account for nearly 5% of the whole of the book's contents. And for just $17.21 you can have several more pages just like it of material you can access online for free.

The spirit of capitalism never ceases to amaze me.

One step closer to ruining my entire life

I discovered the Hyperbole and Half webcomic blog several years ago and thought it was one of the funniest things I'd ever read. No hyperbole.

And now there's a book: Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened, by Allie Brosh. Yay!

So I bought it for my other half at Christmas. (Am I the hyperbole, and is he the half? Are we together a hyperbole, and the child is a half? Half what?)

It's a tradition that I get him a graphic novel at Christmas (I wonder if he realizes that), and this year I thought the book should be funny, and this book is very funny, even though in tackling depression as a subject it's no less serious than the memoirs, journalistic experiences, and apocalyptic dystopias I've gotten for him in the past.

But I don't think he likes it. I can't tell if it hits too close to home to be funny or if it's too foreign to strike a chord. Maybe because he's not really a dog person (though, nor am I). After thumbing though it he told me, "It's very female."

?#!?

I really don't know what to make of his comment. I don't know what to make of him. (Do you?)

Anyway, I whiled away an afternoon with this book. It was far more enjoyable than vacuuming or doing laundry.

Most people can motivate themselves to do things simply by knowing that those things need to be done. But not me. For me, motivation is this horrible, scary game where I try to make myself do something while I actively avoid doing it. If I win, I have to do something I don't want to do. If I lose, I'm one step closer to ruining my entire life. And I never know whether I'm going to win or lose until the last second.

It's funny (did I say that already?), and sweet. And it all sounds very genuine and sincere. And it reminds me of my own childhood, even though Allie's anecdotes are nothing like anything that happened to me as a child.



Interview. "Good comedy has a lot in common with good horror."
The making of Hyperbole and a Half — in pictures.

The MOOC experience, continued

I recently completed my second massive open online course (MOOC). This time the course was User Experience for the Web offered by Open2Study. The course was self-paced.

It was completely different from my first MOOC.

The differences are attributable to three main things:

• subject matter: User Experience for the Web vs Søren Kierkegaard: Subjectivity, Irony, and the Crisis of Modernity
• platform: Open2Study vs Coursera
• course format: self-paced vs weekly assignments

Details and observations
While the recent course was self-paced, mostly what this means is the material is already canned. You don't have to wait until the following week for the next block of videos and quizzes to be released.

This course does actually have some structure, 4 modules that could be consumed over 4 weeks. (Quite likely this course may actually have been first introduced with weekly releases.)

The course information for User Experience indicated that the material would require 2-4 hours a week. I'd say it's significantly less. (For Kierkegaard, I'd put in more time than indicated.)

(One could at this point access the Kierkegaard material and consume it at one's own pace, condensing it all into a week or so. But I doubt many people would want to do so, given the intensity of the subject and the time commitment for an 8-week course.)

Each module consisted of 8-10 topics presented in videos ranging in length from about 2 to 7 minutes. There is a 1-question quiz at the end of each video segment that reinforces a key point.

I did most of the coursework (that is, watched the videos) over my morning coffee. With the videos at about 4 minutes a pop, they're bite-sized and it's really easy to say, just one more. I did about 2 modules a week (with a break for Christmas between weeks). I can easily imagine that one might complete the entire course in 1 day.

This setup really did motivate me to keep going.

The videos show the instructor talking, and writing key points on a clear-glass whiteboard. It's all shot against a black background; he uses pink, yellow, green, and blue pens. The presentation is very clean and minimal. While it doesn't compare to the production of the Kierkegaard course videos, it is well suited to the course material.

No required reading. No essay.

Because the course is self-paced, the forum has the feel of a static archive more than of an ongoing and dynamic discussion. The discussion is filtered by module, but this wasn't obvious to me. The setup does not encourage participation.

Class stats indicate that 8,386 students have taken this course and that there are 1,316 classroom posts. (Less discussion and fewer students than Kierkegaard, but no organization. Invisible yet chaotic.)

Open2Study gives you badges for "accomplishments" (like linking a social media account). I hate this kind of thing (I wonder who likes this kind of thing). The alerts are distracting, not motivating. (The alerts are probably configurable, but I'm lazy.) (My skepty-sense is tingling: badges are less to do with motivating a user than generating soundbites that are sharable on social media for the purpose of product promotion disguised as individual accomplishment.)

The final grade is based on the module "assessments" — multiple-choice tests consisting of 5 or 10 questions. (I suspect the format may have been changed from 5 to 10 questions sometime during my enrollment, as for the first three modules, 10 questions now appear, 5 of which I have not answered.)

This course was not affiliated with any university or other learning institution (other than Open2Study itself). The instructor was a professional consultant.

Intangibles
For Kiekegaard, the course page felt like its own place, with discussions, assignments, resources all handy and centralized. I felt engaged and immersed in the course material. I felt like a student.

For User Experience (ironically) I felt very much like a consumer; the classroom is just a slight corner of the Open2Study brand.

I felt less invested in the User Experience course, partly because of the subject, but the whole of the presentation of the course contributed to my not taking it too seriously.

This was reflected in my grade, an easy 88%. A perfect score would be in easy grasp for anyone, but because of both online and real-life distractions, I didn't care enough to make it happen. Contrast this to the 92% I scored for Kierkegaard, of which I am immensely proud and I feel I worked hard for.

I don't feel that I learned anything; rather it served to consolidate what I already know from business experience, editorial instinct, and common sense. (This is still worth something.)

The User Experience course felt very lightweight. That's definitely due to a combination of factors: the subject and my attitude towards it, as well as the course design.

Summary
It's probably fair to say that you get from MOOCs what you put in to them.

I took the User Experience course because I have a mild interest in the subject as it relates to my work; it's not a deep personal interest or an academic curiosity as I felt with Kierkegaard. And I was curious to see how other types of courses in different MOOC environments operated.

Also, I think I may be somewhat addicted to MOOCs, the rush of the combination of learning, discipline, and achievement.

This week I start 2 more courses: Content Strategy for Professionals: Engaging Audiences for Your Organization and Writing for the Web. They are a little more closely related to each other in terms of subject matter (and I'm taking both because of how they're related to my work, rather than purely for personal interest), but they are on different platforms, so they should be easier to compare.

See you on the other side.

Such faces

A corpulent man with a friendly face rose from his seat behind the desk. He had the clay-colored complexion of those who never get enough to eat, live in stuffy rooms, and breathe large amounts of stale smoke. His cheeks were pendulous and his eyes red from constant lack of sleep; most of the people entrusted with looking after the souls of others have such faces.

— from The Graveyard, by Marek Hłasko.

That's how I feel this week. And it shows. All those souls to look after.

Interzone

Last week I went to Interzone. David Cronenberg: Evolution, an exhibition exploring the filmmaker's oeuvre, is on at TIFF until January 19.

Seeing as my brother's a film buff, and an enthusiast of Cronenberg in particular, this seemed like an appropriate event to make a present of over the holidays. My sister joined us (she drove).

While I wouldn't exactly call myself a fan of Cronenberg — I've seen his work from The Fly through Crash, and a smattering of more recent movies — Naked Lunch is one of my favourite films of all time (perhaps because it affirms that art is shit).

You don't need to be a film geek to appreciate this exhibit, though there were plenty on the premises. You don't need to know anything about Cronenberg going in; you will know plenty when you come out. It would help at least to like movies, and be open to exploring one of the twisted minds that creates them.

The minutiae of film-making

Multiple drafts, discarded drafts, deleted scenes. Promotional material. Comment cards from focus group screenings (of Videodrome, "awful").

The periodicals strewn across coffee tables. The letterhead notepads on desks. Those horrid surgical instruments from Dead Ringers. The Telepod. Labels on pill bottles, labels on bus spray. Storyboards, designs, mock-ups. Loads of props and costumes.

Film clips on monitors throughout the exhibit give context, as well as behind-the-scenes footage and commentary.

Here's a picture of my brother sidling up to a Mugwump.

One employee (at least, I think he was an employees) approached us to share anecdotes of Cronenberg's early days of filmmaking in Montreal. When he found a suitable apartment complex for his film location, he rewrote the characters of the neighbours to match the actual residents. The employee was brimming with enthusiasm for this method, as if he'd just learned of it and was dying to share.

Cronenberg on Cronenberg
Three short films were being screened on a loop just outside the main exhibition space. They are framed as being an autobiographical commentary.

Camera (2000), created as part of the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Toronto Film Festival, features an older man being filmed by a group of kids who've found a camera, and sharing his internal monologue while he experiences it. He comments that we think of a camera as recording a moment, but rather it records the death of a moment.

At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World in the Last Cinema in the World (2007), commissioned by Cannes Film Festival for its 60th anniversary, is hilarious, in a very dark way (as if that really needs to be qualified). Reality-TV style, the title character, played by Cronenberg, prepares to shoot himself, while the annoying commentators natter on about Jews and Hollywood.

The Nest was made expressly for this exhibition. It's weird in a way that's precariously balanced between funny and uncomfortable. This is a recording of a woman's presurgery consultation filmed from the perspective of the doctor, as if he has a camera strapped to his head. Her top is bare; she wants to have her left breast cut open in order to remove the nest of insects she hears rustling around in there. The "doctor" — who denies being a psychiatrist, she thought she'd be meeting a psychiatrist — is hesitant about the procedure and wonders about consulting with an entomologist, although he makes some pretty precise observations for someone who claims not to know anything about bugs. Also, the consultation takes place in what is obviously a dingy garage, complete with air pump, paint cans, gardening tools, and a pile of old fluorescent tubes.

Ongoing immersive narrative

Upon exiting the exhibition space, one is encouraged to visit "the lab." Serious stuff — 3D printers, walls of jars, embryonic pod structures in fluid. The narrative begins with the activities of BMC Labs, a fictional biotech firm that has partnered with David Cronenberg to develop biotech accessories inspired by the intellectual property found in his films.

(The white-coated lab technicians are remarkably straight-faced, but I managed to reduce one to laughter.)

The real adventure is online. Body/Mind/Change uses an "artificial intelligence recommendation engine" to custom-design a POD (Personal On-Demand), a biotech enhancement for implantation into your brain stem.

A series of unsettling questions is used to calibrate your personal pod with a psychological profile on scales of fear, anger, joy, sadness, regret. The experience unearths flashes of memories that you are asked to respond to and to interconnect. My pod's story has now been woven into that of other pods, and the narrative continues. The algorithm also offers suggestions for books to read, personal challenges to undertake, and career choices.



A wholly unique and clever exercise to undertake if you're at all interested in how we construct identity and tell stories: www.bodymindchange.ca.

Weight, comfort, inevitability

Lata went for poetry. On the way, however, she paused by the science shelves, not because she understood much science, but, rather, because she did not. Whenever she opened a scientific book and saw whole paragraphs of incomprehensible words and symbols, she felt a sense of wonder at the great territories of learning that lay beyond her — the sum of so many noble and purposive attempts to make objective sense of the world. She enjoyed the feeling; it suited her serious moods; and this afternoon she was feeling serious. She picked up a random book and read a random paragraph:

It follows form De Moivres's formula that zⁿ = rⁿ (cos n + i sin n). Thus if we allow complex number z to describe a circle of radius r about the origin, zⁿ will describe n complete times a circle of radius rⁿ as z describes its circle once. We also recall that r, the modules of z, written |z|, gives the distance of z from O, and that if z'=x'+iy', then |z-z'| is the distance between z and z'. With these preliminaries we may proceed to the proof of the theorem.

What exactly it was that pleased her in these sentences she did not know, but they conveyed weight, comfort, inevitability. [...]

She read the paragraph again, looking serious. "We also recall" and "with these preliminaries" drew her into a compact with the author of these verities and mysteries. The words were assured, and therefore reassuring: things were what they were even in this uncertain world, and she could proceed from there.

— from A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth.

No resolution

In 2013 I read approximately 50 books. Some were very long, and some were very short. I say approximately because some were so short it doesn't quite seem fair to count them. And it depends if you count all three parts of the trilogies that were packaged as single volumes. And there's the book I mostly reread, cuz I was looking for something and got sucked in, but I didn't count it because I skipped a few pages here and there. And then I included something I read for work and not for fun. And I'm too lazy to make a decision about these things and go back and count them properly. I read approximately 14,000 pages (why, yes, I did keep track). I say approximately because some page counts include endpapers and other book matter, and given the wide variety of material I read, one cannot establish a standard page. Also, about a third of my reading was e-reading.

About a book a week. That's about normal for me for the last several years. About 38 pages a day. That's not likely to ever change much, as that's just how much time there is in a day. Good for me. As for people who continue to say they don't have time to read: whatever.

My very favourite book that I read in 2013 was Kate Atkinson's Life after Life.

To everyone who visits my humble little blog, cheers! I just uncovered a slew of comments I was previously unaware of, made mostly via Google+, I think. I didn't mean to ignore you, I just didn't know you were there.

Random Things

How awful was The Time of the Doctor? Taking shortcuts in all the wrong places in favour of overly drawn-out sentimentality. And a bunch of it was just dumb (see this review, for example).

The article "How Do E-Books Change the Reading Experience?" demonstrates how people continue to conflate content with form. One of the contributors writes, "E-reading opens the door to distraction." Get a little self-discipline, I say.

I started a self-paced MOOC back in December, User Experience for the Web, mostly for work-related reasons but also because I'm kind of hooked on the MOOC concept. I'm determined to finish it in the next couple days, and I plan to report on the experience here.

Started playing Psychonauts with the kid. It's no Grim Fandango, but it's fun, and it does take me back... (to a simpler time? a previous life?).

I am reading A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth, with a few people. A very big book. A coworker and I had drawn up a reading schedule — we're slated to finish by May. I was a couple weeks late getting started, but now I find myself pulling ahead. It's really wonderful — soap-opera-y and political. I was delighted to find that it is being read by dovegreyreader and company, so there are some resources for us to fall back on.