calibrating my frivolometer

I sit here staring at the blank window of the blog-creation screen. All kinds of thoughts tumble through my head. What to say? What to write? Where am I going? What do I report?

One thought leads to another in a vast network of tinker-toy connections (I loved my tinker-toy set when I was five or six). For an investigator, like me, the search seems endless. Search for what, you ask? For stable beliefs.

Books are again accumulating in my reading-stack like planes over a crowded airport. Two more arrived yesterday: one from Amazon.com and one from a used-book dealer in Eugene, Oregon. One was a text on website development; the other a hard-to-get monograph on religion in the ancient Near East. I didn't start either one; I've got too much on the go. A feeling of limitation starts to encroach: the sense that I can read only so many books in my life; I need to choose carefully.

One of the thoughts that came up in the bouquet or fountain of possibilities when I was trying to think of how to start this was about frivolity. I think it was a couple of years ago that this word finally came to me as the label for what troubles me about most contemporary fiction and other cultural products. It's frivolous, generating a "who cares?" response in me.

As I tried to figure out what exactly is the difference between a frivolous and a nonfrivolous work, I eventually recalled these words from Thomas Pynchon's introduction to his collection of short stories, Slow Learner:

When we speak of "seriousness" in fiction ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death--how characters may act in its presence, for example, or how they handle it when it isn't so immediate.

I thought this hit the nail on the head. Now I would calibrate my frivolometer by measuring how completely a book or an artist is ignoring the fact of death. When you're dying, life matters. When you're not, you might think you can afford to pretend that it doesn't. It's mere delusion and denial--nothing more. But it is pervasive.

Being cognizant of death doesn't mean being depressing or humorless. It means being honest about your values. I believe it means looking at life from the perspective of a dying person--from the perspective of your deathbed. In fact, I think you could do worse as a writer than to imagine you're on your deathbed right now, and look to see what matters to you. That's what you should be writing about.

Coming to grips with death--with one's own death--is the task of middle life and beyond. The problem of how to swallow our own impending death is the core of the midlife crisis. If successfully met, it has a strongly maturing effect. I think this maturing effect can be visible in the work of writers and other artists, as it is in people's lives generally. The talented youngster becomes a mature artist, or, in Pynchon's terms, the apprentice writer becomes a journeyman.

Some authorities believe there's no hurrying this maturing process. I recall reading an opinion given by Alexander Solzhenitsyn on a debate about whether Sholokhov's novel And Quiet Flows the Don was written when Sholokhov was only in his early 20s, as was alleged. Solzhenitsyn dismissed this idea, since he regarded it as impossible for any writer, no matter how talented, to write anything of real maturity and worth until he or she gets into the 40s.

But I'm not so sure. There may be such a thing as "old souls", those who are mature beyond their years--in fact that seems obvious, in my experience. The opposite is certainly true: there are those who are immature for their years. And it may be possible, if you're serious and have the imaginative talent, to journey to a place of maturity, to visit it intensely enough to be able to write. My mother and I have been working our way through James Joyce's Dubliners, which he wrote in his 20s, and these works are anything but frivolous. His insight and expressive power already exceeded anything that almost any other writer could ever come up with, no matter how old they get.

Ach, I'm trying to console myself here a bit. As the world seems to whiz by, I bend over my scholarly books, reading, searching, puzzling...

top of the reading-stack

Hello friends. What can I tell you in the dark of a Monday morning in October, with rain pouring heavily outside for the nth consecutive day?

Kimmie is still on vacation, and now very much enjoying the new (used, actually) PC set up in her "office" (sewing-room/mad-scientist's laboratory of creative projects). I finally got all those machines set up, networked, and functioning. Now I'm pleased with the result.

On my current reading-pile is Neal Stephenson's 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash. I decided to get it after reading a feature article in the MIT Technology Review about the present and future of Web-based virtual reality, as embodied right now in Second Life and Google Earth. (The article, speculating about what a convergence of these systems might look like, was called "Second Earth".) In Second Life (which I've never explored), you, represented by an animated "avatar", enter a virtual world built mainly by your fellow visitors. There you poke around, do stuff, and interact. In the article, a couple of key programmers associated with this networked virtual-reality world said that they had been inspired by Snow Crash. Since the novel has had such an impact on people so influential on where our society is going, it is, as far as I'm concerned, socially significant, so I thought I'd read it.

I'm on page 198 of 468, reading two short chapters a day. It's holding my attention, which is more than most novels can do.

It takes place in a near future that includes, among many other things, a virtual Metaverse like our own current Second Life, although more potent in that people occupy it via VR goggles that immerse them in the experience, rather than merely watching it on a computer monitor. The main character, Hiro Protagonist, is a hacker and adept of the Metaverse. The book's title refers to a new drug whose effects seems to straddle both worlds: it fries your mind even as it fries your computer. (The term itself is apparently hacker slang for a computer crash so profound that it makes your monitor generate random noise or "snow".)

I remember my first exposure to Neal Stephenson. It was in a small bookstore in Sackville, New Brunswick, in 2002. I was still temporarily ordained as a Buddhist monk at Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia, and had traveled to Sackville with Ani Tsomo, a young Irish nun, to attend four weeks of Ponlop Rinpoche's Nitartha Institute, an intensive (and excellent) program in Buddhist philosophy held at Mount Allison University. Tsomo and I, in our robes, were browsing some local shops in our free time. We made our way quietly and separately past the shelves, the only shoppers moving over the worn linoleum tiles of the store. On a rotating book-rack I found a massive (1130 pages, plus an appendix!) paperback with the daunting title Cryptonomicon.

What's this? I wondered. Science fiction?

The blurb on the back advertised it as "three novels in one", including World War II adventure, cryptography, and high-tech finance. Intrigued, I opened it up. A few pages of enthusiastic notices, couple of pages of acknowledgments, a couple of epigraphs from Alan Turing and The New York Times, then, on page 1, the opener of a prologue:

Two tires fly. Two wail.
A bamboo grove, all chopped down
From it, warring songs.

...is the best that Corporal Bobby Shaftoe can do on short notice--he's standing on the running board, gripping his Springfield with one hand and the rearview mirror with the other, so counting the syllables on his fingers is out of the question.

Ah! A soldier-haiku-writer riding a vehicle of some kind at high speed! I was impressed with how original and vivid this was--and how it was not talking down to me. But I felt a clench of worry too, for it reminded me strongly of reading Thomas Pynchon, especially his most famous work, also set in World War II, Gravity's Rainbow. As I read on through the paragraph, the feeling grew. Here was a super-talented writer writing more or less in the style (incredibly, impossibly!) of Thomas Pynchon.

As a young writer I was a huge fan of Thomas Pynchon, and also tried to write in his inimitable style. It was a bust. One needs to find one's own style (no easy task). I'm less of a fan now, not so easily impressed by riffing. I thought I recognized in Stephenson a kindred spirit (he was born in 1959, just a few months after me), someone who had been thrilled and electrified, as I had been, by Pynchon, but who had had the energy and stamina to actually produce a long work (much longer than Gravity's Rainbow) in that profligate, inventive, and knowing style. If the rest of the book held up at that pace, it should be at least fun to read.

I returned it to the rack. I was too afraid of being dished up secondhand Pynchon, but more than that I already had more reading than I could handle with the Nitartha Institute. And once I had returned to the Abbey, "samsaric" reading was something that would be limited only to Saturdays, our day off. I gave it a pass.

But later, when I'd returned home to Vancouver, on one of my near-despairing traipses through a bookstore's fiction section, I gave the book another look, and realized that, whatever flaws I might think it had, it nonetheless was head and shoulders--possibly more--above anything else in the store inventiveness, intelligence, and refusal to patronize the reader. If anyone there deserved a chance, this guy did. So I bought the book (you're welcome, Neal--45 cents of your kids' education came from me).

I think that was November 2004 (unlike nonfiction books, novels I don't sign and date--usually I'm too disappointed in them to keep them, and wind up sending them to a used-book store, where they're worth more unblemished). Well, I read the whole thing. That's saying something, since not only is the book long, but I just don't finish books all that much, especially novels, which usually become stale and uninteresting (to me) long before they end. I wasn't thrilled with Cryptonomicon, but he kept me interested enough to keep reading. Stephenson really is able to dish up surprises, and situations that are lifelike in their tragicomic complexity. Quite consistently he is able to evoke a sense of richness in his world--that quality I yearn for and look for in writing. And even if he doesn't always completely succeed in what he sets out to do (which always seems to be more or less hugely ambitious), he does not talk down to his reader. For that he has this reader's gratitude.

So Snow Crash seemed like a low-risk buy to me (and another 45 cents to Neal). And so far I am indeed, mostly, enjoying it. He has a gift for jarring, outrageous, and hilarious similes and metaphors, in that way faring tolerably well against writers like Pynchon or Tom Robbins. It's a whole hell of a lot better than the flat, stale, unimaginative, often semi-literate prose of most published fiction.

How about a sampler. Here is chapter 1, paragraph 1 of Snow Crash:

The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He's got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachno-fiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.

If being a fiction-writer means being able to evoke a world forcefully in the mind of a reader, Stephenson is one, certainly for this reader. He's earned his 90 cents.

another one bites the dust

Yesterday, during my afternoon reading period, I started by reading the novel I had on the go (I always start my reading period with the novel if I'm reading one--which I'm usually not), in this case, The Jewel in the Crown by Paul Scott. I made in to page 124, then thought, "Nah, I think I'm done with this."

What made me decide to pack it in?

In a word: story. It's not that the story is bad--it's very good. But Scott prosecutes it much too slowly for my taste (and I can tolerate a very slow-moving story). My theory is that Scott, writing in the 1960s, was a victim of the 20th-century reaction against storytelling. With such literary masters as E. M. Forster and James Joyce inveighing against story and the "go-ahead plot", story became uncool--at best a distasteful chore for a serious novelist. Story was for lowbrow, commercial works of fiction.

Lawrence Durrell in his Alexandria Quartet certainly deviated from a straightforward narrative, telling his "story" by means of a kind of collage of images and scenes, which no doubt were thought to be more aesthetic than a lead-footed, sequential reportage of events. I myself, as a beginning writer, inspired by these writers, briefly experimented with a nonsequential approach to narrative in my second "serious" short story (the title of which I can't even remember). Then, inspired by Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, I sought to push the envelope of plotting by creating a story that was complex and farcical.

Those efforts eventually died a natural death, both for me and for other 20th-century rebels against story. When it comes down to it, any movement or idea that's based mainly on reaction or rebellion is necessarily short-lived, lacking any positive underlying purpose of its own. There's something of the juvenile in it, indulging in the luxury of criticizing those who have come before, without offering anything concretely better. One seeks to be avant-garde, different from one's teachers and predecessors. In my view, it amounts to a basic and relatively immature way of coping with what Harold Bloom calls "the anxiety of influence"--the fretful desire of the new writer to get out of the shade of his teachers.

So: Paul Scott. Part One, "Miss Crane", was pretty good from a story perspective--not bad, anyway, since he is narrating the life of an English spinster missionary in India, with tremendously sympathetic insight into her inner world as well as knowledge of the exotic world of India under the British Raj; plus he narrates the exciting event of riots in Mayapore in 1942, and what happens to Miss Crane when she is swept up in this social convulsion. The account is slow (taking us to page 85) but effective.

Part Two, "The MacGregor House", is more a collage of pieces written from the first-person point of view of at least three different individuals. Forty pages in, it has not told much story (we learn that Miss Crane caught pneumonia after her ordeal in the riots, and later burned herself in despair), but rather has given a great deal of backstory about the Indian character Lady Chatterjee and exposition about the stately MacGregor House where she lives. Yesterday, when I found myself reading a passage describing every fixture in the bathroom of the MacGregor House, I thought, "All right, enough already."

The intent, no doubt, is to steep the mind of the reader in the essence of what it's like to be there--to feel and smell the place. But I couldn't help thinking about Stephen King's advice to fiction writers: set a scene by giving three telling descriptive details--three, and only three. Why are we dwelling on this bathroom? Maybe something important is going to happen here, eventually, but do we really need a full page of description of it now?

Scott's ability to describe and evoke his world is powerful. In the midst of that bathroom description on page 119 is this image:

At the opposite end of the bathroom--fifteen paces on bare feet across lukewarm mosaic that is slightly uneven and impresses the soles with the not unpleasant sensation of walking over the atrophied honeycomb of some long forgotten species of giant bee--there is an old-fashioned marble-topped washstand...

The striking, far-fetched, and rhapsodic metaphor of the honeycomb might not be out of place in, say, Gravity's Rainbow, but in my opinion would be much more powerful as the passing thought of a character, say, Daphne Manners, the girl who stays at the house and uses the bathroom. It should be a thought flickering through her mind while she is on her way to doing something--preparing to go out on a date with the District Superintendent of Police Ronald Merrick, say. But Scott takes us on a long museum-tour through the house, with no story in process, which eventually strained my patience to the breaking point.

So there it is. Paul closes up another novel unfinished--a novel he has finished before, and admired before. It's not that I no longer admire it--it's just that, now, I can't seem to finish it.

the artist: pregnant, worried, normal

Still involved mainly with copywriting. Due to the short timeline it's taking most of my days this week, and no doubt on into next week. I'm afraid my own creative project sits in neutral except for a bit of note-typing in the early morning, my research reading in the afternoon, and of course some worrying in the dead of night.

In fairness to my project, a goodly chunk of that worry is devoted to the fact that I'm not really working on it at the moment. The worry takes the form of, How will it ever get finished if I don't work on it? Since the answer to that question is straightforward and undeniable, worry ensues.

I have to accept that worry is a normal part of the process--normal for me, anyway. I've been thinking about the relationship of creators to their work, and how a creative work is indeed much like a child. One of the similarities is that once it is made (born), it becomes its own person with its own career, independent of oneself. It might be loved by others, hated, or largely ignored, the exact reaction being hard to predict in any individual case.

No doubt there are countless examples of creative works--like children--for whom great things are predicted by their creators, but who never achieve any conspicuous success. But there are the interesting opposite cases too, of created works for which their creators foresaw only a modest career, but which went on to fame and fortune. I think of the little book Man's Search for Meaning by the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, essentially a memoir of his experience as a prisoner at Auschwitz. He expected the book to have a certain limited appeal to his fellow psychiatrists, but not beyond that, and he wrote the main draft in nine days. When it was eventually published it became an international bestseller (and deservedly so), to his own astonishment.

Another book that shocked its own creator with its success, as I recall, was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, published in 1974. This odd book, a mix of philosophy, autobiography, and I think fiction, became an immense bestseller for Robert Pirsig, its author. It represented a discontinuity, not part of the smooth stream of things being produced and published at the time, not part of the pack.

As I think about it now, I like both of these books partly because they are not frivolous. The authors take life seriously and have something important to say about it. I feel heartened that there is (or was) an audience--a large one--for that type of work, for when I look at what is being published as fiction today, and produced in film and TV, I see a great tide of frivolity. Contrast this observation by Thomas Pynchon in the introduction to his collection of stories called Slow Learner:

When we speak of "seriousness" in fiction ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death--how characters may act in its presence, for example, or how they handle it when it isn't so immediate. Everybody knows this, but the subject is hardly ever brought up with younger writers, possibly because given to anyone at the apprentice age, such advice is widely felt to be effort wasted.

To me, frivolity arises from pretending there is no such thing as death. Our society as a whole tends to indulge in this neurotic fantasy, so perhaps it's no surprise that so many of our cultural and artistic products reflect it.

Anyway, I set out to say that, given the parallel between a created work and a child, I'm now still at the gestating-mother stage. As far as I know, it's normal for mothers-to-be, especially first-time ones, to worry, at least sometimes. "What if that hamburger I ate has a negative effect on junior?", etc. The worries themselves probably do not have any positive effect on the developing baby, but they probably don't have much negative effect either. Nature takes its course, and the result is an unexpected creature--often one that has certain distressing similarities to one's own parents...