reading hevvy

Just about all of my reading is done for a purpose. Only occasionally do I read a book for "general knowledge", and almost never do I read a book "for fun".

Sound dreary? It isn't. For one thing, life is short, and I don't really have enough hours in it to read all the purpose-driven material that I want. But for another, those "fun" things, to me, aren't fun. Before long my eyes glaze over and I find I'm not picking up that book any more to continue on with it. I'm back to a full slate of motivated, "serious" reading.

What was the last thing I read for fun? Trying to recall... Two or three years ago I would sometimes peruse the paperback racks at the library, looking for something I might find entertaining. Mainly I had no luck. The racks there were filled with novels from series that for the most part lacked the first volume (presumably it was always checked out).

I remember going on a little vacation with Kimmie and Robin back in 1990--something we very seldom ever did, partly due to lack of money. This was a relatively cheap getaway to the Gulf Islands nearby. We were going to stay in rustic little cabins, ride our bicycles, and just relax. I took along some light "summer" reading, the sci-fi novel Count Zero by William Gibson. It had been a while since I'd read any science fiction--a staple of my youth--and Gibson was its hottest practitioner at that time. Here was my chance to kick back and enjoy some escapist fare.

Sitting at a quiet table in a cabin on Mayne Island, while deer moved silently outside, eating the motel owner's flowers, I tucked in to Gibson's cyberpunk novel. I felt a bit of a buzz as I started, at the imaginative settings and his tough, cynical style, but before long it palled on me. I finished the book, but I was not drawn in and carried along by the current of story as I used to be as a boy. I wasn't able to fully buy into the characters or the situation, even though I really liked the idea of futuristic hacker-jockeys moving through a virtual-reality space, breaking into data banks (I think that's what was in the book). It seemed that sci-fi reading was something I could not go back to, any more than I could go back to playing with Hot Wheels or Lego. Had I become entertainment-proof?

Well, my reading may not be "fun", but I do enjoy it. To me, this is fun. And it's hard to engage me in a story. Mostly what I think is, "so what?" Of course, I'm writing a king-sized story of my own now--one that I intend to be readable by me or people like me (if any such exist). I need to be reading about stuff that matters, and therefore that's also what I need to be writing about.

So right now it's Dante's Inferno for me. Not "reading lite". Maybe I need my own marketing phrase--how about "reading hevvy"?

making it good

What makes a piece of writing good? We always know how much we're enjoying something that we're reading, but it's hard to define what makes a written work enjoyable.

Establishing the criteria of quality in writing has been the business of literary critics ever since that job function has existed. But according to Northrop Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism, it is actually impossible to formulate "rules" of literary quality. If I read him correctly, he's saying that although we have a direct experience of the superior quality of one work over another, we can never finally say exactly why it is better. (Indeed, it was partly for this reason that he wanted to get away from the whole project of comparing the merits of various literary works, and see rather whether he could outline a "science" of literary criticism based on the purely objective aspects of literature--things that can be known.)

That may be OK for a literary critic, but a practicing writer does need practical guidance in how to tell good from bad, and how to steer more toward the former than the latter.

Speaking for myself, I would say that I'm guided, as a reader and therefore as a writer, by the desire to experience certain kinds of feelings while reading. Without going into the how of it, I'm seeking a kind of engaged interest--something that holds my attention and, in a certain way, compels my assent. I think that in order for this to happen, the writer's understanding of the world, people, and events must be similar to my own. I'm disengaged or put off if, while reading, I think, "That's not how the world works; that's not how people are; that's not how things happen."

I've mentioned before that the best writers make the familiar seem strange and the strange seem familiar. This perhaps is the heart of the matter for literature. The task is to create a work in which strangeness and familiarity are laminated together in endless tight layers, like the layers of hard and supple steel in a samurai sword. The more strange a work is in some respects--the fanciful world of Harry Potter, say--the more it needs to be homey and familiar in others, such as in the everyday interactions of its characters. The more quotidian the setting and its people, the more strange and mysterious the underlying universe of the story--and here I think of James Joyce and his Dubliners.

Different readers like different things. We have different issues, different interests, different life experience. Certain writers "speak" to me more than other ones do--and the same will be true of you.

As I've said many times before, I have a hard time now finding fiction that I can enjoy. For whatever reason, writers are not speaking to me. So I'm setting out to write the book I can enjoy reading. Will others enjoy it? Who knows. There are a lot of hurdles to get over before I can find that out.

the goal-directed life

Another morning, another cup of coffee, another blog-post. I've done my morning research-work (keying notes from A History of Technology, volume 2, and reading the online book The Private Life of the Romans); now it's time to get in a quick post. Such is the structured order of my day.

I like purpose. I've thought and said this many times, but only gradually is its full significance beginning to dawn on me. Everything that people do has some kind of purpose, of course, even the most random-seeming drunken rioting. But I'm speaking here of more consciously chosen, goal-directed behavior. I sense that choosing a goal that is in accord with one's nature, and then consistently pursuing it, is what we call the feeling of meaning in our lives.

The feeling of meaning happens on a smaller scale too. A memory that stands out for me was of traveling with my friend Tim in Spain in December 1978. We had arrived at Cadiz at the Strait of Gibraltar, and were driving through the city in our red VW Westfalia, enjoying the sights and the ambience: palmettos and the lovely blue of the sea after weeks of driving inland. As we drove down along the port we saw a large ferry docked there, marked with its destination: the Canary Islands. There must have been a schedule there, telling us that it would be leaving in a couple of hours. We looked at each other: did we want to go?

Yes, we decided. Cool! Neither of us had imagined we would ever be setting out for the Canary Islands. But we had to take care of some things first--I don't exactly recall what, whether just buying fuel and provisions, or getting the tickets from a travel agent, or taking care of some other business. But anyway, we had to hustle a bit in order to be able to make the sailing. We were still driving around Cadiz, but now we were driving around with a sense of purpose, with a time limit. There was a fresh feeling of adventure and urgency--would we make it on board the ferry? Or would we miss the boat? Now the views of palmettos and sea seemed more fleeting and precious, more charged with meaning. They were the backdrop of an adventure, and took a new aspect. There was a feeling of going forward.

We caught the ferry, and wound up spending Christmas and New Year on Gran Canaria--a delightful side-trip. The mini-adventure of catching the ferry had provided a story in our lives: a goal, and the question of whether it would be achieved.

To me the difference in feeling, the appearance of the very same scenery under these different mental and emotional conditions, was striking. It almost suggested the difference between the ennui of immortality vs. the fleeting excitement of finite life. Catching the ferry was a little metaphor of life: it's short; you've got to attend to your tasks and enjoy the view along the way.

So it is with my reading. It's almost all purpose-driven, part of a bigger project. I think of a guy I knew back at Buddhist Seminary in the Rockies in 1994. He was from (I think) Wisconsin--maybe Minnesota. And he read a great deal, almost all fiction. The way he selected his reading, though, was one I could never adopt. He scanned book reviews of publications that he respected, then set out to read all the works that got the best reviews. He wanted to be reading all the best and most important fiction being published in America. Apart from the fact that I don't read much fiction, this approach would be altogether too passive for me. There's no plan except to try to read everything that other presumed experts regard as "good".

No. I want to be going in my own direction, under my own power, as much as possible, as far as possible.

pointing-out instructions

In Vajrayana Buddhism there is a particular class of teachings called "pointing-out instructions". These are essentially tips given by a realized teacher to his student so that the student may recognize aspects of his experience for what they are. The student may already be having the experience, but doesn't know he's having it. So the teacher points it out to him. The teacher can't give you the experience, he can only point to it in the hope that you'll recognize it.

In a more mundane sense, I think this is basically what writing does, or is supposed to do.

For why, I wondered, in a world with so much sensual richness and variety, do I spend so much of my time scanning my eyes along a track of ink-marks on paper? As sensory inputs go, this is thin gruel. Imagine how quickly you would grow tired of scanning your eyes along the pages of a book written in a language you don't know. It would get very boring, very quickly. You would become acutely conscious of how little stimulation you're receiving, and seek to increase it, most likely by tossing that book aside and doing something else.

But reading in English is something I can do, happily, for hours each day. Indeed, I feel I'm missing out if I don't read in a day.

It's not purely a matter of entertainment. Activities that are "purely" entertainment--such as, say, video games--are things I usually tire of quickly.

No, for me reading is about learning. But it's not simply learning for its own sake. For to sustain a positive interest in learning something, you have to feel that it's relevant to your experience, your life. You need to feel that the new knowledge is, in the widest sense, practical. The knowledge will enrich your experience of life.

When I read nonfiction, like, say, A History of Technology, I'm learning in a straightforward, traditional way. The knowledge is practical for me because I'm writing historical fiction and need to know those things; and also because it enriches my appreciation of the world around me. Instead of looking at, say, a ship in the harbor and simply taking it for granted, my view of it is enriched by having learned a little about the history of ships--about how they evolved ultimately from the dugout canoe, and how for a long time they bore traces of that origin in their design and construction. Instead of merely sweeping my eyes over the ship, en route to looking at something else, I might actually see it, notice it. It becomes a more vibrant detail of my experience. In a certain sense, it has been pointed out to me.

Fiction makes this process (potentially anyway) more intimate and intense. A stream of artistic prose carries your mind along a track of pure noticing. Just as, in a painting, every square millimeter of the canvas had to be worked by the artist, had to be seen and depicted, to create a vibrant work that is purely and everywhere the expression of the artist's vision, so in a work of writing every word is a contribution to a total, unflagging act of attention by the writer, communicated to the reader. Word by word, the writer draws your attention to things: sensations, thoughts, feelings. One by one, point by point, in a meaningful, purposeful structure. The writer is pointing out aspects of your experience to you.

This is what makes a resort to cliches such a sin in writing: it is a failure of attention, shoving something fake into an intimate experience of genuineness.

Yes, I like having valuable things pointed out to me. So I'll keep on with my reading.

hearts of darkness

Having set aside, as I mentioned, the historical novel Spartacus by the young Scottish writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon, I continue to read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Now about 20 pages in, I find I'm continuing to really enjoy it.

Let's take a look at how Conrad opens the story:

The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.

I found this opening interesting, but not especially exciting. Its high content of nautical jargon shows that this is a special interest of the narrator, but for me has a slightly distancing effect. And although the Wikipedia article on Conrad says that he is "recognized as a master prose stylist," I personally find his prose a little bit awkward, a little bit hard to follow. I sometimes find myself having to read his sentences a couple of times to get their meaning. Maybe this is due to the fact that English was a language that Conrad, a Pole, did not pick up until he was an adult. Still, his opener is good because he does not talk down to the reader; the narrator is treating me with respect, so I'm willing to extend him lots of credit.

Prose style is important, of course, but I think it is not by any means the main ingredient of high-quality writing. Trying to think of what actually is the main ingredient, I've come up with: "way of seeing". It's the writer's way of seeing the world--along with the ability to express this--that sets him or her apart. What details does he relate in order to convey his meaning?

Conrad opens Heart of Darkness by setting the scene: the Nellie rides at anchor at flood tide on the Thames estuary, and its officers are hanging out on deck waiting for the tide to change. The narrator names three of them by title only--Director, Lawyer, Accountant--but the fourth by name: Marlow. I found the first sketch of Marlow striking:

Marlow sat cross-legged right aft, leaning against the mizzen-mast. He had sunken cheeks, a yellow complexion, a straight back, an ascetic aspect, and with his arms dropped, the palms of his hands outwards, resembled an idol.

I would say that at this point, in paragraph 4 of the story, I felt myself engage with the narrative. Marlow, after this short introductory description, is already an interesting and unusual character--very specific. I found myself curious about him right away. You won't find a character description like this in an average potboiler novel. An average writer doesn't see people this way--isn't able to see them this way; that is exactly why that writer is average. It is not the flattering description of a hero (sunken cheeks, yellow complexion), but an interested and detached description by a keen observer who chooses telling details. A sailor, sitting cross-legged against the mizzen-mast, palms outward, to me is an excitingly real image. It engages my belief in what I'm reading, and bonds me to the narrator. I start to feel that I can really trust him with my attention and credulity.

I first read Heart of Darkness in, I think, 1979, probably just after seeing Apocalypse Now, when I learned that the movie was based on Conrad's book. Since Apocalypse Now was regarded as an "important" movie, and I was a budding film-maker, I wanted to get a better grounding in what it was about. (The movie itself was, for me, a disappointment.) I didn't give the novella the attention it deserved, and raced through it to "get it read." I didn't remember much about it.

The thematic path that has led me back to it is via Sven Lindqvist's "Exterminate All the Brutes", an investigation into the origins of genocide. Heart of Darkness is one of the central books he looks at. Lindqvist shows persuasively the documents and events that Conrad was exposed to just before he drafted his famous work--tells the story of how the ideas were formed and shaped.

It's part of the story of evil: where do the evils of our world come from? What drives us to commit acts of evil? These are questions that preoccupy me now.

new bookcase, new book

Yesterday was sunny but still unusually cold. I spent most of the afternoon assembling the Billy bookcase Kimmie and I bought at Ikea last weekend and then rearranging my bookshelves. The task was bigger than I'd expected, and I wound up losing patience and just stuffing books in wherever I could. But my office is clear again of tottering stacks of books on chairs, desk, and floor. I love it.

At reading-time I felt vaguely dissatisfied with the stack of books I've got on the go--a feeling that comes over me from time to time. I take it as a sign of the shifting wind of my interests. I read a passage of the Iliad, then a few pages of House of War by James Carroll. But I didn't really feel like reading anything else that I had on the coffee-table.

I let my mind wander over subjects: what's missing in my reading diet? Science? What kind of science? Psychology?

Very quickly my mind zoomed in on the book Anatomy of Criticism by Northrop Frye, a lavender-colored paperback I got in February. Could that be it?

Trusting my hunch, I came down to the new bookcase (located in the empty windowless room where we keep our freezer) and collected the book. I started reading, and found myself immediately absorbed. Yes: this was just the thing.

Many years ago I was given a book by Northrop Frye, The Great Code, as a gift from our friends the Burts. I still haven't read it. Anatomy of Criticism is, I think, his most famous work, one in which he sketches an outline for a "science" of literary criticism. I decided to buy it when I found it referred to in a work on the epic genre. Apparently Frye said that epics are created by authors at times of greatest stress in their lives. I wanted to find out what else he may have to say about them.

Right from the start I felt myself in sympathy with Frye and enjoying the way his mind works. His "Polemical Introduction" to the book starts thus:

This book consists of "essays," in the word's original sense of a trial or incomplete attempt, on the possibility of a synoptic view of the scope, theory, principles, and techniques of literary criticism.

Whew, a bold agenda, right in the first sentence. But what really hooked me was this sentence, toward the end of his long opening paragraph:

My approach is based on Matthew Arnold's precept of letting the mind play freely around a subject in which there has been much endeavor and little attempt at perspective.

Fantastic! I found this sentence provocative and stimulating. What is it about it that I find so appealing?

It's the conjunction of "much endeavor" and "free play". This, I'm sure, is how valuable discoveries are made. You work hard at something, but unsystematically, because it doesn't yet have a system. One things follows on another, and you just attend to those things. Then, after a time, you gain an unconscious familiarity with the subject. Your conscious effort impregnates your unconscious, and you feel its stirrings in hunches and creative ideas. In that condition, that tension, the imagination can burst forth with new things.

This is another variant of the relationship of research to creative writing, I think. You learn and learn, maybe without much system, and then ideas start coming. You have the materials with which to create.

As I read I found myself laughing out loud at some of Frye's dry witticisms--rare for me while reading.

Yes, it was just the thing.

an elephant and his beliefs

My life these days is largely reading--more than it is writing, that's for sure.

I've always loved reading, and I do more of it now than I ever have before. Our old family friend, the late Dorothy Burt, born in 1908, spent much of every day reading for a large part of her adult life. Her day was broken down into the different things she read: The Observer, The Manchester Guardian, nonfiction book, fiction...

I used to think it was a bit strange to spend all of one's time reading and never doing anything, or at least writing something oneself. I think I still feel that way, although I'm less sure.

In my case, although I enjoy reading, I seldom read purely for "pleasure". For me, all reading is study, and that in fact is why I find it pleasurable. Possibly then it's not really reading I like, but learning, and reading is still the most efficient, accessible, and affordable way to learn. Aristotle said that humans by nature love to learn, and that the appeal of art is exactly that we learn from it.

So I'm learning. But am I really? In one obvious sense I certainly am. I do retain some quantity of what I read (less than I'd like). But the motive that keeps pushing me to read more is a feeling of dissatisfaction: that I have not yet learned what I'm seeking to learn.

What am I seeking? I'm searching for my beliefs. What do I think is true? What are the reasons--the real reasons--behind what I see in the world, in my experience?

According to William James, a belief is by definition a concept that we use as the basis for action. We act on what we believe, and only on what we believe. I reach down to my keyboard right now to press keys because I believe that when I do, the corresponding letters will appear on the monitor before me. (So far, so good.) I'm doing that because I believe that when I press the Publish Post button on the screen, this post will uploaded to my blog and become available for people to read. If I found out that these posts were not being uploaded to the blog, I would quite soon stop writing them. My belief would have changed, and with it my behavior.

I look around me in the world and see, mainly, actions based on erroneous or misguided beliefs. These happen on vast, world-changing scales. If, for example, you believe that the U.S. invaded Iraq, as was stated, in order to root out weapons of mass destruction, then that whole costly invasion and subsequent war was initiated on the basis of an erroneous belief. But even if you believe, as I do, that the invasion was for quite other purposes, such as "future oil security", or even "world domination", these too, in my view, are mistaken, since I am certain that neither one can be achieved in this way. Enormous resources are being consumed and lives lost right now, as I type, all on the basis of mistaken beliefs.

In Buddhism, it is taught that we are all separated from complete great enlightenment by the "two veils": the veil of "conflicting emotions" and the veil of "primitive beliefs about reality". Both of these are very difficult to remove, but the first one, "conflicting emotions", is much easier than the second, "primitive beliefs".

It might seem odd that an Indian monk who lived 2,500 years ago would, if he could look at our modern society with its secular outlook and advanced technology, describe our beliefs as primitive--but he would. He did. Our modernity and technology don't touch the issue of our basic mistakenness about things.

Of course, I'm not going to find Buddhist-style enlightenment in books. But I do want to become informed. Even in this relative and temporal way, I want to find out what the true causal forces are working in the world around me. I don't want to act--I don't feel I can act--until I feel I understand what's going on well enough. That means that instead of going out to achieve things, to crusade in the world, I'm sitting in my soft chair, book and highlighter in hand.

I feel like an elephant. It's said that an elephant will not step onto a bridge that won't hold its weight. An elephant just knows. And yet it's probably not just intuition; the elephant must look at the bridge, examine it, and come to a conclusion on the basis of its observations. It arrives at a belief about the bridge, and acts accordingly. I feel that most actions in the world are like that bridge, and I'm still trying to figure out if it will hold my weight.

"exterminate all the brutes"

Part of my problem in starting a fresh blog-post is not that I'm running out of ideas for posts, but that there are too many ideas--too many things to talk about. I find it intimidating that here, with my chance to talk about anything I want, I come up against the limits of what I can express--how much time and space I have to say whatever I may want to say. How well do I use the resources I've been given?

One very provocative line of reading and thinking lies with the book "Exterminate All the Brutes" by Sven Lindqvist which I'm making my way through.

The quotation marks are part of the title; it's a literary reference. Do you recognize it? It's from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, first published in 1899. The line is due to the colonial despot Kurtz, summing up his attitude to the locals over whom he has absolute power, and giving voice as well, as Lindqvist shows, to the de facto agenda of European colonialism from its start.

With a book like this, there is always the danger that it will turn out to be politically correct preaching and finger-wagging about Eurocentrism and racism. This book is not the least bit like that. It is indeed about colonial cruelty and racism, things that Lindqvist clearly deplores, but his approach is that of a curious, puzzled, and highly motivated investigator. And his method, so personal and individual, has as much poetry in it as scholarship.

His "method", if it can even be called that, was to journey to North Africa, to the Sahara, with a computer and a mass of data discs containing relevant research texts. There, while making his way from desert city to desert city by bus and taxi, he studied, thought, and read--all the while taking in the strange and frightening colors of his surroundings. In a series of short chapterlets, almost always less than a page, he shows the connections he makes between the historical and literary material, interspersing his thoughts with descriptions of his journey, his dreams, and a few striking memories of his childhood in Sweden. It's a truly unique literary stew--and a marvelous one.

Taking Heart of Darkness as a watershed, a powerful literary indictment of colonialism as it was (and is) actually practiced, Lindqvist uncovers many of the specific sources and inspirations that Conrad drew on to create his story. (Conrad of course had also skippered a riverboat on the Congo for awhile.) One fascinating insight is that H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds, published in 1898, was itself a work in this same stream: the cruel, pitiless, technologically superior Martians were simply the British or the French, and we hapless humans the "natives" of Earth, targeted for destruction so that our new overlords could harvest the coveted resources of our planet. Wells, like Conrad, was a critic of colonialism.

Lindqvist shows that Wells's vision was no exaggeration. One of his disc sources included Winston Churchill's account of the 1898 battle of Omdurman in the Sudan, in which 11,000 Sudanese were killed and 16,000 "wounded" (no one knows whether any of these actually did survive), while the British took only 48 casualties. As Lindqvist puts it, "the entire Sudanese army was annihilated without once having got their enemy within gunshot." In the words of Churchill, who was there:

It was a terrible sight, for as yet they had not hurt us at all, and it seemed an unfair advantage to strike thus cruelly when they could not reply.

The British soldiers' rifles grew so hot from continual firing that they had to exchange them for reserve rifles, rotating them in and out of action. Brass shell casings formed into hills beside the shooters. The climactic colonial "battle" for dominance of North Africa was a turkey-shoot.

Covering as much ground as it does, Lindqvist's book is brief: a total of 172 tersely written pages. And that's another thing: his prose, even in translation, is a model of vividness, clarity, and power. Picking a passage more or less at random:

Clusters of animals and people are incessantly on their way across the dried-out riverbed that is Tam's equivalent of Hyde Park. Weary camels lower their heads and blow at the dust to see if conceals anything edible, and patient goats graze pieces of paper. Women come with their burdens, not on their hips as in In Salah, but on their heads. Groups of boys drift around, every step tearing up a cloud.

But Tam has a specialty. It has a road--indeed, a motorway--on which if necessary you would be able to make your way across the river bed with polished shoes. It is reserved for the army.

An officer comes across this bridge on his way to the post office, four men with him in white lace-up boots and white helmets, the chinstraps under their noses. Outside the post office they march on the spot while he walks past the queue, demands a stamp, and sticks it on. Then six steps forward and another spell in neutral as he mails the letter--at which they all march on with the same solemn expression of satisfaction.

Not bad at all.

a writer and his vocabulary

By the time I was 10 years old, I was known among my friends and classmates for having a large vocabulary and knowing "big words".

I was proud of that, or maybe I just took it for granted. But by the time I finished high school, while I knew that my English vocabulary was larger than most people's, I was conscious that the language has far more words in it than (probably) anyone can learn. Also, since I wanted to be a writer, I needed a vocabulary, and it should be bigger than that of the average person, in the same way and for the same reason that an artist's pencil collection is bigger and more diverse than that of the average person, who uses pencils only to jot phone messages.

And, in my reading, whenever I came across a word I did not know, I recognized that the writer, in knowing and using that word, had an expressive option or tool that I lacked. I came to think, "I could not have written this--I don't even have the vocabulary to have written this." Never mind talent and training, do you have the tools? It's like looking at a painting and realizing, "I could not have painted that, simply, in the first place, because I don't have those pigments!"

Want to write like Lawrence Durrell? You've got some studying to do, pal. Want to write like Thomas Pynchon? Get thee to a dictionary.

By the time I got into my mid-20s I stopped letting words go by me. I started making my own bookmarks by cutting sheets of white 8.5"x11" typing-paper into 8.5" strips. One sheet of paper would make about six bookmarks. Then, while reading, when I encountered a word I didn't know, I would stop, open the dictionary, and write out the word and its definition on my bookmark. Each bookmark became a two-sided column of words and definitions. When both sides of a bookmark became full, I would then review the words, sometimes testing myself but more often simply reading over the list and the definitions, and then discard the bookmark.

As time went on I became more rigorous. Instead of looking up only words that I hadn't seen before, I started looking up words that were not in my "active vocabulary"--words that I could not use confidently and correctly at will. What does the word fletch mean? It's kinda familiar--something to do with arrows. Yes it is: it means to feather an arrow. When you put feathers on your arrow, you're fletching it.

I've been using that system ever since. I store a sheaf of cut bookmarks at one end of a bookshelf in the living-room. The first 20 or so are all partly used. When I stop reading a book (I was going to say finish a book--but often I don't!), I slip its bookmark at the front of the sheaf. When I start (or resume) another book, it will be the first bookmark I pull out. So it's a LIFO system ("last in, first out").

The stack of books I've got on the go at any one time keeps my bookmark sheaf fairly well mixed. Each bookmark has words on it from several different books, often read at widely different times and from different fields. Usually, when I look at the words on a bookmark, I remember what book I learned them from. I get a feel for the vocabulary of the writer.

For example, a couple of days ago I finished a bookmark. I've got it right here. The first word on it is band shell. (Know it? I was pretty sure I knew what it meant, but I was just assuming--and for me, that's not good enough, so to the dictionary I went: "bandstand having at the rear a sounding board shaped like a huge concave seashell".) I remember looking that up while reading Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs.

But the next word on the bookmark, carrefour, I remember from William James, specifically his Principles of Psychology. (Know it? "1: crossroads; 2: square, plaza".) The next seven words on the bookmark are all also from Principles of Psychology (inspissate, intussusception, holystone, sapid, sthenic, pyknic, whilom). But the next word is backwater, and with this I know that I've arrived at a new source--Walter Scott's Ivanhoe. Scott chewed up the rest of that side of the bookmark, and the whole back side: 29 words in all before I had to fish out a new bookmark (and I'm still not finished Ivanhoe).

It's the archaic language, of course. What are the chances that I myself will ever want to use words like malapert ("impudently bold: saucy"), hilding ("base contemptible person"), or pouncet-box ("box for carrying pomander")? I don't know. I like having the choice.

Last night Scott finished off a second bookmark--although this one had room on it for only two more words when I pulled it from the sheaf (and what were they? quean, "a disreputable woman, specifically, a prostitute"; and bar, in the sense of "railing in a courtroom that encloses the place about the judge where prisoners are stationed or where the business of the court is transacted in a civil trial"). This bookmark began with the word by-blow ("an illegitimate child"). Most of the words on the first side are from the same book, but now, darn it, I can't quite remember what that was. Whatever it was, it was quite a long time ago, and featured medieval or archaic vocabulary (ewer, shotten, collop, etc.). Darn. What the heck was it?

Anyway. Two bookmarks are ready for the recycling bag. I'll review them, and let them go.

lifestyle of the independent thinker

Yesterday I worked on both projects. I pushed ahead with more investigation relating to The Mission, and in the afternoon, after lunch and my energizing siesta, I opened up the Word files I've got on my future-fiction opus, and picked up there more or less where I'd left off.

It felt good. I'm able to write the way I read: switching from one thing to another, refreshed by the change when my attention flags. Plus, with the future work (I'll just call in Project B for now), I felt actual creative excitement, something I can experience only in small, controlled bursts with The Mission, hemmed in as it is by the complexities of factual research. With Project B I can let the volcano of my imagination spew forth its forms--which it is well able to do.

In that way I can happily pass a day in complete solitude. I saw no one yesterday from the time Kimmie left in the morning till she returned at dusk. No one phoned. I did not stir from the house into the gray rain. But the day felt productive to me, so I was happy. I moved slowly from one activity to another, but by and large, I did not waste my time.

Commuting to work, for example, is a waste of one's time (apart from all its other negative attributes). I don' t do that. Going out to lunch while one is at work is, generally, a waste of time and money. I don't do that either. Preparing to go to work--dressing, grooming oneself, and so on--may not exactly be a waste of time, but it can be an irksome, unwelcome chore. I don't do that either. I shave, dress, and so on before I leave the house--when I'm ready, not under the gun first thing in the morning.

All these facts make my life appear leisurely. But as I looked at it yesterday, I waste very little time. First thing, out of bed, I make the coffee and then hit the office, studying my PC's operating system, then typing research notes from highlighted books (for example, from The Roman Conquest of Italy and The Cults of the Roman Empire this morning), then writing my blog-post. Next: breakfast. Almost always cereal, taken in the living-room while reading a magazine. No, not Star Weekly; usually one or other of Scientific American, The Economist, MIT Technology Review, Canadian Geographic, or Popular Science. Then some exercises and stretches, and on to my writing day.

I fix myself some lunch, over which I do more (purposeful) reading. Then comes teeth-brushing etc., and my siesta--necessary to make me more alert in the afternoon, and to prolong my shelf-life a bit in the evening. Then it's on to errands, or, if I have no pressing errands, like yesterday, I can get back to the office and (hopefully) do more. Yesterday it was Project B.

At 3:00 p.m. it's back upstairs to start reading. I make some tea and read from about four books I've got on the go. Yesterday it was Angela's Ashes, Letting Go of the Words, The Roman Conquest of Italy, Six Degrees, and The Act of Creation. Each of these is project-oriented. I'm reading Angela's Ashes mainly so I can better help my mother work on her memoir. Letting Go of the Words is a web-copywriting text (and a very good one). The Roman Conquest of Italy is background for The Mission. Six Degrees is to enlarge my general knowledge of what's happening in the world, and is also background for Project B. The Act of Creation, a psychological text on creativity, I'm reading as part of my ongoing research into the nature of identity--which is really a larger philosophical project.

Often, as yesterday, my reading period is punctuated by a fitness walk with Kimmie when she gets home. We do a brisk walk through the neighborhood, and she can talk about the latest office politics. Then, come 7:00 p.m., Kimmie and I have dinner. My "work" day is over, and I'm ready to watch some TV, usually programming I've borrowed from the library. By 9:30 I'm starting to nod off, and it's time to hit the sack.

Sometimes, watching the news and so on, I think I should be doing more in the world. People are out there, doing stuff, and maybe I should be out there doing stuff too.

But that passes. I'm getting to know myself well enough that I don't feel confused about what I should be doing. A few days ago, maybe while I was lying awake in the night, my true job title came to me: independent thinker. If I had to sum up what I think my function is on planet Earth, that's probably it. The other things that I do--creative works and so on--come out of that. I feel I was put here to think independently.

I feel very good about that. It implies a lot. As vocations go, it's quite rare. Looking around me at the world, it appears that very little true thinking is being done. And of the thinking being done, very little is what I would call independent.

So there you have it: the lifestyle of the independent thinker. Not very appealing, perhaps--unless you happen to be one.

an afternoon's reading

For me, "writing" is mostly research. I spend most of my time learning about what I want to say. How does this process work?

There's a kind of cause-and-effect process; I pursue threads of research. Yesterday, for example, I read from three different books. At teatime I tucked first of all into Home Networking Bible by Sue Plumley--a book I bought last September, having spied it among the stacks of books on the bargain table at Save-On Foods. Its printed Canadian price was $42.99, but Save-On had it marked down to $14.99. As one of the "Bible" series of computer books published by Wiley, it's supposed to be comprehensive about its topic. I had always been rather mystified and intimidated by the concept of computer networking, so I saw an opportunity. I had bought the Windows 98 Bible and been quite happy with that, so I picked this one up as well. I'm reading it now because it's time to get a new computer, and I want to provide Kimmie with a computer as well (probably this one), and to share our broadband Internet account--so home networking it is. I'm gobbling it up quickly, because I want to move on this.

Next: The Golden Ass by Apuleius. I bought the book just this month through Abebooks from a bookseller somewhere in the Southeastern U.S. It's the Wordsworth Classics paperback edition, translated from the original Latin by William Adlington and "revised" by an S. Gaselee. I bought this book as a result of reading Hellenistic Religions, an excellent little book by Luther H. Martin. Martin opens his text with a discussion of The Golden Ass, which was written in the 2nd century AD, because he regards it as a perfect picture of Hellenistic thinking and feeling about the world and about religion.

In it, the first-person narrator, a certain Lucius, is traveling on business to a city in Thessaly, Greece--a place reputed to be the birthplace of magic--and discovers that his hostess, Pamphile, is herself a witch. In his eagerness to learn about the hidden arts of magic, Lucius seduces his host's maid Fotis, and persuades her to take him to where he can watch Pamphile change herself into an owl--a trick she does so she can fly away secretly to her young lover. Lucius, craving such an experience for himself, induces Fotis to get him the magic ointment, but when he puts it on, he is transformed into not an owl, but an ass--Fotis in her nervousness has grabbed the wrong ointment.

As luck would have it, thieves break into the house at this moment, and in the chaos Lucius, now in asinine form, is dragooned into becoming their pack-animal, and finds himself willy-nilly on an adventure as a mute ass. The supposed cure for his condition is simple: he just has to eat some roses--if he can find them. But so far, the thieves have him under tight control (and they're none too kind to their stolen animals).

When I received my copy of the book, I was at first disappointed to discover that the translation was done in 1566; indeed, it seems no one even knows who William Adlington was, since, except for his moniker on the title-page of this book, there is no record of him. The prose style, therefore, is essentially pre-Shakespeare, although it has been modernized (and punctuated) by S. Gaselee, a "fellow and librarian of Magdalene College, Cambridge," in 1922. I regretted not picking up the version translated by Robert Graves, one of my favorite writers. But now that I'm actually in the book, I'm finding it very readable--much more so than I expected. Indeed, to my surprise, the book is something of a page-turner. I read it as I do my nonfiction books, highlighter in hand, picking out cultural tidbits as I go.

Next: The Sorrows of Empire by Chalmers Johnson. I bought this book, along with his earlier work, Blowback, from Amazon.com last month. The paperbacks, published by Owl Books, are part of The American Empire Project, an organization devoted to exposing and documenting the rise of the American empire. I was put on to the books by reading posts on TomDispatch, a blog of dissent by Tom Engelhardt against injustices perpetrated by the U.S. government. Chalmers Johnson, a longtime American academic specializing in Asian economics and politics, is a contributor to Engelhardt's blog.

(Tom Engelhardt I discovered, in turn, via Google News, my homepage. I clicked on an op-ed piece by him that appeared in the South China Morning Post. It was a very well-written, cogent essay, critical of some aspect of U.S. foreign policy, written from a point of view I had not yet seen anywhere in the U.S. press. It led me to check out Engelhardt's blog.)

I had just finished reading Blowback, first published in 2000, and plunged immediately into The Sorrows of Empire, enjoying Johnson's knowledgeable, authoritative prose. (Blowback, by the way, is a jargon term of the CIA, referring to violence perpetrated against Americans by foreigners in retaliation for clandestine operations undertaken by the CIA. An example was the 1988 bombing of Pam Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people--payback for a 1986 Reagan-administration aerial raid on Libya that killed Khadaffi's stepdaughter. Another example is the 9/11 attacks on Manhattan and Washington, which occurred just a year after Johnson's book was published.) The Sorrows of Empire, published in 2004, already has a much different, starker tone than the earlier book, for Johnson says that while Blowback was still a warning about the possibility of America's morphing into a full-on empire, he was now writing about what he regarded as an accomplished fact. Or, as Johnson himself puts it:

In the wake of September 11, 2001, it no longer seems necessary to issue warnings; instead a diagnosis, even an autopsy, may be more appropriate. In my opinion, the growth of militarism, official secrecy, and a belief that the U.S. is no longer bound, as the Declaration of Independence so famously puts it, by "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind" is probably irreversible.

The United States, with its obsequious Congress and its docile press, is at this moment undergoing transition from a republic to an empire (or, in the usual euphemism, a "lone superpower")--a point crossed by ancient Rome just at the time of my own story. In that sense, it is very germane to my own work. But mainly I'm reading it to become a better-informed citizen of the world--a responsibility I take seriously.

So there you have it: an afternoon's reading by the writer.

thinking before acting

I continue to make my way through The Varieties of Religious Experience, the landmark book based on a series of lectures that William James delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1901-02, as Gifford Lecturer on Natural Religion. The approach he decided on was to examine the psychology of personal religious experience: what are the feelings, thoughts, and acts that we call "religious", and what is their value?

With such a topic, everything depends on the qualities of the teacher. What are his own beliefs or prejudices? How tolerant and open-minded is he? What is the caliber of his intellect? For his thoughts to have any lasting value, he must not be pushing any private religious belief of his own; he must be wide open and tolerant of others' beliefs; and he must have a mind that is deep, subtle, sharp, and sympathetic.

William James is all of the above, in maximum degree. Hence this book, published in 1902, is still valuable and relevant today. Indeed, like any classic, it has the freshness of the present moment.

Two days ago I was reading lecture 18, "Philosophy", in which James, having covered much ground in earlier lectures on conversion, saintliness, and mysticism, addresses the conceptual content of religion: the power and value of religious ideas. With breathtaking brevity and assurance he sums up scholastic philosophy about God, then, as a tool to gauge the value of the ideas, he introduces the philosophical method known as pragmatism, first formulated in the 19th century by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. James encapsulates Peirce's idea as follows:

Thought in movement has for its only conceivable motive the attainment of belief, or thought at rest. Only when our thought about a subject has found its rest in belief can our action on the subject firmly and safely begin. Beliefs, in short, are rules for action; the whole function of thinking is but one step in the production of active habits. If there were any part of a thought that made no difference in the thought’s practical consequences, then that part would be no proper element of the thought’s significance. To develop a thought’s meaning we need therefore only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce; that conduct is for us its sole significance. To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, we need then only consider what sensations, immediate or remote, we are conceivably to expect from it, and what conduct we must prepare in case the object be true.

As I read this paragraph, highlighter in hand, sitting in my soft leather occasional chair, I felt that I was arriving at a major station in my thinking career.

I had been exposed to the philosophy of pragmatism before. Indeed, my introduction to William James was via this philosophy, and the first book of his that I bought and read was Pragmatism, based on lectures given a few years after this series in Edinburgh. But this compressed summary of the philosophy, given as a preliminary to examining other ideas, struck me: it sank home.

Beliefs are rules for action. The whole function of thinking is but one step in the production of active habits.

It's not much of an exaggeration to say that I've spent my whole life thinking. Thinking and studying. Thinking is "thought in movement". I have been searching for beliefs, or "thought at rest". Without firm beliefs you can't take action. What would you do?

But it makes a huge difference what one believes. It's useless to have beliefs that lead us into mistaken or even catastrophic action. As Bertrand Russell said, "I don't want to die for my beliefs; I might be wrong." The personal convictions of George Bush an Tony Blair have not led them to take worthwhile actions, in my opinion--quite the opposite. History is a train-wreck of actions undertaken by people with strong but mistaken convictions.

So my lifelong "analysis paralysis" may not be a bad thing. The Hinayana view of Buddhism, as well as the Hippocratic oath, say it well: "First, do no harm." At least if you're sitting on a meditation cushion, anxious and confused about life, you're not making things any worse for your fellow beings.

Of course, I'm a living being and I do take action all the time--every moment of every day. But my action tends to be, more often than not, retreating to my soft chair, highlighter in hand, and opening another book...

boneless tongues

I probably need to make a lifestyle adjustment in order to get back to writing. As time goes on, I will need to make a regular place for paying work, and right now that's sitting right smack in my usual writing period of the day. In the past I have bumped my writing period to first thing in the morning, over my morning coffee, but this is not my preference; it has the flavor of duress. Of course the problem of creation vs. earning has always been central to many artists' lives.

In some sense I'm not (yet) too exercised about my long tarrying at chapter 30, since the problems I have been tussling with in it--and solving--reach far beyond the confines of that chapter. On the other hand, no matter how slowly this train moves, I don't feel comfortable when it's just sitting at the station.

For the time being, over my morning coffee, I'm keying notes from A Study of History, volume 1, by Arnold J. Toynbee, and from A History of Israel, volume 1, by Theodore H. Robinson. I continually ingest more research books and convert these slowly into typed notes for myself. I suppose this process will not end until I have polished my last draft for the last time. Indeed, the only thing that will probably end it will be the taking up of reading for my next project, whatever that might be.

Yes, folks, I love reading. I always have loved it, and a day in which I don't read is both rare and, for me, feels rather wasted. I feel that I've cheated myself of what I love the most.

When I was first exposed to Buddhist thought while traveling in 1979--in the form of books, of course: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig and The Way of Zen by Alan Watts--I discovered that conceptual knowledge, the kind derived from books, can never lead one to an accurate relationship with reality. I found this to be both liberating and disappointing. Liberating, because it seemed to confirm a sense of restlessness and dissatisfaction in trying to learn the truth from books. Disappointing, because I felt that what I had always loved to do was now, in some sense, a waste of time.

This tension followed me in the ensuing years. When I took up meditation in 1986 I learned again that enlightenment can never be attained conceptually; it can only be a matter of direct experience. Nonetheless, the meditation center offered courses in which books were studied, and this type of study was encouraged. I latched on to it and studied dharma books--along with my regular diet of reading, which I never gave up.

Luckily, as I progressed in my Buddhist practice and studies, I became more relaxed about the role of reading. While concepts were still regarded as a faulty and incomplete way of knowing, they were still essential for the student. The real problem was in clinging to concepts: solidifying them as "true" and thereby creating stumbling-blocks for oneself.

I remember attending a dharma talk given by the late Tibetan teacher Jamgon Kongtrul in Vancouver. He was a young man (soon to die in a car crash in India). As I recall, the teachings were on the bardo--the "in-between" state that we inhabit between successive births. In the Tibetan teachings, a number of vivid, phantasmagoric events happens to us in this state. The question came up as to whether such experiences were real or not.

Jamgon Kongtrul responded that "these experiences are beyond duality, so you can call them real or unreal, just as you please."

This struck me. On the one hand it seemed annoying and irritating that there was not a clear answer as to whether something was real or not. But on the other, I felt power being placed in my hands--in the hands of all of us. Whether we call something real or not, in any given situation, is for us to decide. How we term things, how we see them, how we choose to respond, is a power that always lies with us. Even "reality" is situational: something that is useful in one moment, but not in the next.

I recalled another thing I had read, a commentary by some Zen master on the enigmatic statements of another master: "His tongue has no bone." At first it was a baffling image, but soon it clicked: our boneless tongues can move any which way. They're not constrained or forced by anything; they are not limited; they are free. Free to say "real" one moment, and "unreal" the next.

When I was at the shedra or monastic college at Gampo Abbey in 2002 I did lots of reading and writing--more than I did meditating. There we were taught to regard study itself as a practice, like meditation, undertaken with discipline and a certain attitude. We were still taught that a buddha's mind is free of concepts, like a cloudless sky. But I was and I remain skeptical of this. As far as I was concerned, if a buddha was using words, he was using concepts. It seemed to me people were too eager to usher concepts out the door, like unwanted relatives at a party.

But then again, what does it matter? We can call them concepts or not, just as we please.

into Poetics

Still dealing with the wonky text-input here on Blogger. I discovered that I am not alone, but that others who use the Firefox browser on the Windows 98 platform have this problem. I guess I'm probably hooped.

Yesterday was a mini-Christmas (and quite cool outside, as it happens). I received two shipments from Amazon.com: three books by Aristotle--the Poetics, the Politics, and the Metaphysics--and one book by the 18th-century Scottish statistician William Playfair, entitled An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations, Designed to Shew How the Prosperity of the British Empire May Be Prolonged.

I was delighted with them all. Even though I mainly, for reasons of economy, buy used books, I especially love to get new ones. But the one I was particularly looking forward to was Aristotle's Poetics, a slim Penguin Classic of about 140 pages, most of which consists of the introduction by the translator, Malcolm Heath. Letting the others wait for the time being, I launched my reading period with this book.

I was finally driven to buy the Poetics through my research into the field of literary genre--and especially of my own current genre, epic. Robert McKee lists the Poetics as one of the key reference works for the screenwriter (or storyteller generally). Apparently Aristotle was the first to apply an inquiring mind to the question of how stories work--what are their parts, how do they fit together, and how does the whole thing function? I've read very little Aristotle over the years, but as I have become exposed to his ideas I have increasingly come to see him as a bold, original thinker whose ideas are still striking and fresh today. What a treat to have a whole (little) book by him devoted to the art of literature.

Aristotle was known in the ancient world as an excellent prose stylist; his writing was considered exemplary. Unfortunately, none of his published work has survived (or has been found). All the surviving works of Aristotle are of the nature of notes, possibly lecture notes. They are intended for students, perhaps only senior students, not for a general audience. As a result, the writing tends to be cryptic and difficult for the new reader.

So Malcolm Heath starts off this translation with a lengthy introduction, in which he recapitulates the essence of Aristotle's argument, fleshing it out with examples and warding off potential miscontructions. Wanting to get right to the text, I was going to skip the introduction and read it afterwards, but I found that it is too good to miss, so I am reading it first after all.

Already, after just a few pages, I've encountered many striking and provocative ideas. How about this direct quote from Aristotle's Metaphysics, with which Heath launches the main part of the introduction:

All human beings by nature desire knowledge.

We all need knowledge and use it, but Aristotle means more than this: that we seek knowledge for its own sake, and find the acquisition of it pleasurable in its own right. Animals might need and use knowledge, in the sense of learning what to do in a particular situation, but humans enjoy it. I know this is true for me.

As I understand it, Aristotle goes on to show how the arts arise from this human desire for and enjoyment of knowledge. All the arts, including the art of poetry, operate by imitating objects of experience. The experience of aesthetic enjoyment happens when we recognize the imitated object in its imitated or represented form--for noticing similarities between things is exactly knowledge consists of, at bottom. He's saying that the enjoyment of a work of art is essentially an experience of learning. Fantastic!

At least, that's my effort to summarize the first page. I'll be reading every page, you may be sure.

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.

Battle of the Quartets: Scott vs. Durrell

I don't read much fiction these days, so I feel that when I do, as now, I should probably talk about it. This blog is devoted, after all, to a work of fiction. What are my thoughts about fiction? What am I looking for in a novel?

I've started reading, I think for the third time, The Jewel in the Crown, the first in Paul Scott's four-part Raj Quartet. Kimmie got a Granada mass-market paperback edition of the book in 1986, when the British miniseries based on the books was recent and popular. I'm glad, personally, since the mass-market paperback is still my favorite format of book, even though the contents of most mass-market paperbacks now I find completely unappealing. This copy has a kind of cameo image on the cover of Art Malik and Susan Wooldridge, the actors who played the characters Hari Kumar and Daphne Manners in the miniseries. It was first published in 1966, when the author was 46 (he died in 1978).

Paul Scott's style is grave and meticulous. He himself served in the British Army in India and Malaya between 1940 and 1946--the period of which he writes--and so knows the world of his story at first hand. Each page and each sentence is impregnated with his authority over his fictional world--one mark of excellence in a novel.

The book, 576 pages long, is divided into seven parts. Part One is called simply, "Miss Crane". Let's take a look at the first sentence:

Imagine, then, a flat landscape, dark for the moment, but even so conveying to a girl running in the still deeper shadow cast by the wall of the Bibighar Gardens an idea of immensity, of distance, such as years before Miss Crane had been conscious of, standing where a lane ended and cultivation began: a different landscape but also in the alluvial plain between the mountains of the north and the plateau of the south.

This sentence, 75 words long, is also the whole first paragraph. Its size and complexity signal that this work will make certain demands of the reader, and in fact I find the sentence somewhat involved and hard to grasp. I always have to read it two or three times to get the meaning from it, which, in my opinion, tells against Paul Scott as a stylist. There is a heaviness, a portentousness, a certain sense of the juggernaut of history trundling forward, ready to crush all in its path.

It opens with a direct address to the reader, emphasizing the literary, "told" quality of the work. I personally find the use of the word then, after Imagine, to be kind of artificial--trying to inject a sense of being in the middle of a story, rather than at the beginning. As though the narrator were retelling the story from a different viewpoint--something like that.

The sentence contains drama--"a girl running in the still deeper shadow"--but drama seen from a detached, godlike perspective. The narrator seems to be stressing not the girl running, but the "immensity" and "distance" of the landscape on which she runs, and perhaps, by extension, on which we all run.

In short, for me this sentence has problems. Nonetheless, if I were encountering it today for the first time in a bookstore, I would keep reading. It more than passes my first-sentence test. Why? I think for two reasons: 1) the content of the sentence is not trivial or frivolous, and 2) the author is addressing me as an equal, showing respect for my intelligence. That's more than enough reason for me to keep reading.

I was going to comment on a certain quality in the sentence of being overwrought, over-precious, and over-subtle, and perhaps try to blame that on Scott's seeming admiration of Lawrence Durrell and his Alexandria Quartet; but when I pulled out my copy of Justine, the first of the Alexandria Quartet novels, here is what I found as the opening paragraph:

The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of spring. A sky of hot nude pearl until midday, crickets in sheltered places, and now the wind unpacking the great planes, ransacking the great planes....

The longest sentence here is 24 words. It is not ponderous or portentous. Scott's writing has the quality of a deep, searching report, but Durrell's narrator here is first of all a poet. His choices of word and phrase are fresh, original, and striking at every turn. I remember when I first read the phrase "A sky of hot nude pearl", knowing I was reading a writer of the top class. It's as though Durrell's narrator is searching for a way to convey how intoxicated he is with the sensuous deliciousness of the world.

Paul Scott is no poet. But for all that he is, in my opinion, a better novelist than Durrell, or anyway one more able to sustain my interest and attention. I remember being excited at how vivid and sensuous this opening of Durrell's was, only to find that my attention flagged in a welter of short scenes that did not add up to a strong story. Scott clings tenaciously to his thread, sticking with it for dozens of pages on end, which tenacity communicates a sense of confidence in the importance of his story. He's never in a hurry, because what he's talking about matters.

I became tired of Durrell. His aesthetic rhapsodizing wore thin. Now, 80 pages into The Jewel in the Crown, I'm finding depth, subtlety, and continuity. Those things will keep me reading.

the science of fiction

I've been meaning to talk about an intriguing passage I read in Toynbee's A Study of History (volume 1). Here it is:

There are three different methods of viewing and presenting the objects of our thought, and, among them, the phenomena of human life. The first is the ascertainment and recording of "facts"; the second is the elucidation, through a comparative study of the facts ascertained, of general "laws"; the third is the artistic re-creation of the facts in the form of "fiction."

I'm finding that Toynbee is full of startling assertions, but I found this one perhaps the most startling so far (I'm about 160 pages into volume 1). Toynbee is placing history, science, and fiction on a continuum--they're all, in some sense, the same thing! (Actually, Toynbee goes on to say that this categorization is originally due to Aristotle--almost more startling!) He goes on:

History, like the drama and the novel, grew out of mythology, a primitive form of apprehension and expression in which the line between fact and fiction is left undrawn. All histories resemble the Iliad to this extent, that they cannot entirely dispense with the fictional element. The mere selection, arrangement and presentation of facts is a technique belonging to the field of fiction; no historian can be "great" if he is not also a great artist. It is hardly possible to write two consecutive lines of historical narrative without introducing such fictitious personifications as "England," "France," "the Conservative Party," "the Church," "the Press," or "public opinion."

Fascinating. I seem to recall my late brother-in-law Freddie dismissing history because of its inescapable bias or "point of view"--but here Toynbee is asserting that this "bias" is of its essence, not something that negates its worth but something that makes it worthy.

Let's take another bite:

So science and fiction by no means confine themselves to what are supposed to be their own techniques. All sciences pass through a stage in which the ascertainment and recording of facts is the only activity open to them. Lastly, the drama and the novel do not present fictions, complete fictions, and nothing but fictions regarding personal relationships. If they did, the product would consist of nonsensical and intolerable fantasies. When we call a piece of literature a work of fiction we mean that the characters could not be identified with any persons who have lived in the flesh, nor the incidents with any particular events that have actually taken place. In fact, we mean that the work has a fictitious personal foreground; the background is composed of authentic social facts. The highest praise we can give to a good work of fiction is to say that it is "true to life."

Toynbee is saying that every novelist is a historian and a social scientist recording authentic observations about the world, but peopling his document with invented characters. The "inventedness" of the characters makes the document both possible and effective. I'm assuming that he is implying that the better the novelist is, the better a historian and social scientist he is. I would add to that the better a psychologist, since, although the characters are fictitious, in order for them to ring true at the level of individual motivation and behavior, they must obey the "laws" of the inner life--as opposed to the social life--of all people.

As a psychologist the novelist must be subtle and genuine, a good observer. Interestingly, real psychologists are not necessarily good observers or understanders of people. I recall when I lived with Brad and Keith in our upstairs duplex on 12th Avenue back in 1980: as young intellectuals we had lots of books. Keith in particular was omnivorous, even indiscriminate in his buying of used books on impulse. Some of these were real lemons. After a while, we came to store the worst of these on top of the toilet-tank in the bathroom, with a sign on the wall that said "emergency wipe". Here went things like poetry by Rod McKuen and philosophical tracts by Ayn Rand.

One of the books that wound up on the "emergency wipe" pile was Walden Two, a Utopian novel by B. F. Skinner, the famous behaviorist. I only ever read the first few pages, but they were pretty dire. The writing was at the level of a low-grade science-fiction novel of the 1940s or 50s, but instead of having the redeeming interest of imaginative views of future technology and alien life-forms, it was offering a portrait of an "ideal" society as conceived by a behaviorist--a pretty poor substitute. I just remember descriptions of characters in the opening pages: the confident, assertive demeanor of the university grad, and the nervous deference of the guy who had not graduated from university. The rats running in Skinner's mazes had more complex motivations than these guys. Having such caricatures walking around in something so pretentiously titled as this book earned it a spot on our "emergency wipe" pile.

Anyway, all that by way of saying that "real" psychologists (I actually don't regard behaviorists as true psychologists at all) are not as good at psychology, in a certain sense, as a decent novelist. I'm a scientist, after all!

I think back to another memory: my friend and classmate Don in grade 5 told me his way of keeping the meanings of fiction and nonfiction straight: "bull" and "non-bull". Well, I'm happy that Toynbee has shown that the distinction is not so clear-cut. The two are mixed, no matter what hat we're wearing.

from magic to religion

Time to type in a quick blog-post. I'm pushing the pace a bit so I can get to a current copywriting task that has a close deadline. Although very few deadlines in life are "real", as an independent contractor it's well to meet them if possible.

Still, over morning coffee (and I'm still on my second mug) I like to type in some research notes. Today it was from Frazer's classic The Golden Bough, chapters 44 and 45, about "Demeter and Persephone" and "The Corn-mother and the Corn-maiden in Northern Europe", respectively.

Obscure, you say? Maybe. Personally I'm finding Frazer's book, first published in 1922, even more fascinating on this read-through than I did when I first read (most of) it in 1978-79 on my trip to Europe with Tim. I remember back then picking up the hefty paperback with a sense almost of obligation, as something I should read, but usually finding myself more drawn in than I expected. The Golden Bough bogs down only in amassing examples of Frazer's various points, which amassing he did in order to show the truly worldwide scope of his theory, as well as to offer maximum support for an argument that he expected to be resisted by the reader.

For Frazer looked into a great many of the strange, even baffling, customs, rites, and superstitions of the world, on every inhabited continent, and saw order and purpose. We receive traditions, our culture, and act out things as it were automatically, in the same way that our body performs things by habit. Thus, in the same way that we put up and decorate Christmas trees and hide Easter eggs and dress our kids in costumes to go trick-or-treating, other people dance around maypoles or call the last sheaf of harvested wheat the Old Woman or give up their children to be roasted alive in a bronze bull.

Frazer's project, which took him decades, had him tracking the gradual evolution of magic into religion--for he contends that magic is the more ancient view of the world, what he regards as a primitive form of science. In his view, an animistic view of the world, in which every object had its own life and soul, not unlike the way we regard the world as young children, evolves into a world in which invisible but anonymous spirits animate things, able to flit from one to another, until eventually these spirits become identified as individuals--as gods, with names and biographies. Ultimately, in Frazer's rationalistic eyes, this view becomes superseded by a scientific outlook, in which the forces of nature are seen in their most objective and also effective way. No doubt in deference to his readers, he pays lip service to the validity of Christian belief, but it seems unlikely that Frazer, having examined so much world mythology, and having described so many beliefs and rites that are essentially the same as the Christian myth, personally bought into any religion as more valid than the others.

Reading The Golden Bough is still an eye-opener for me. Our whole rationalistic, scientific worldview is like a thin shim of ice on an ocean of beliefs and feelings that are alien to it. I'm relatively unsuperstitious, but it's still there within me, a vague fear sometimes of not doing things a certain way, of not following the "proven" path. Even my father used to wear a special pair of red socks to do video-editing, because they made the equipment work. It was a joke, of course--and yet I'm pretty sure he wore the socks. Frazer would understand that immediately as an instance of "contagious magic": probably Dad once wore these unusual socks, which may have been noticed by colleagues, and on that day the editing equipment happened to perform better than usual. The coincidence of two unusual events links them causally in the "savage" (that is, our) mind. Thereafter, if Dad had failed to wear the socks, and the equipment had failed to work properly, he would have had only himself to blame. Who knows, maybe his colleagues would have sacrificed him to the god of video-editing.

I was planning to read only a little into The Golden Bough this time, since I felt I'd never have the oomph to make it through all 934 pages. But I'm on page 610, and still absorbed...

keeping the jury out

For the past months, or even years, I have written this blog by simply sitting down at the keyboard and starting to type. When I first launched the blog I used to worry about what I was going to write about. I kept a separate Word document with ideas for blog-posts. I've long since given up that idea; usually I never went back to it to look. The blog is too informal and too unpaid for me to worry much about its content. I have a few regular readers, a larger circle of occasional readers, and a still larger circle of people who visit the site after making a search for some item of information, such as "writer's lifestyle" or "Mumbai mafia".

I hope that at least some of these people find what they want--or at least something that interests them. I feel a certain sense of responsibility (and guilt) that people might be looking to this blog as a source of accurate factual information. I can say that at least some of the information offered here as factual is also accurate--but that's about all I can say.

I began this post with the vague sense that I'm hitting a dry patch, or at least maybe running out of fresh ideas for blog-posts. Yesterday I was talking with my brother-in-law Mike, who had come down to Vancouver from the Okanagan as part of a Mothers Day get-together with my mother. He has enrolled in a truck-driving course for the summer, and as part of his research into the world of trucking has read a number of truckers' blogs, of which I understand there are quite a few. The process of reading each of these blogs came to the same end: he saw what the attitude of the writer/trucker was, and the posts then simply continued in the same vein.

When I pressed Mike to explain what he meant, he said that each trucker tended to have either a positive or a negative outlook on his or her experience, and then, whatever happened, each event would be seen and interpreted in light of that outlook. A "positive" trucker would see an event in a positive light, as confirming his or her viewpoint on life; a "negative" one would see it in a negative light, also confirming his or her view.

"When I got to that point I would just stop reading," said Mike.

Of course my first thought was: Uh-oh, what about my blog? What category am I in? Am in a category?

My next thought was: What would have to be different about those blogs to have encouraged Mike to keep reading?

Clearly what would keep him reading would be some kind of freshness, unpredictability. He was implying that for each of these blogs there was no need to keep reading. He had already got the "message" of the blog, the message of the writer, and all the rest of the material was simply further examples of that message. I'm guessing that had Mike found a blog whose writer had not already made up his or her mind that life was positive or negative, but who was still investigating the issue, weighing new evidence each day, as it were, he would have stuck with the blog a lot longer. As readers we don't want to leave the courtroom, so to speak, while the jury is still out.

I get the feeling that there is something very important here, not just for writing but for all of life. The writer--or the person--who has made up his or her mind about life, about experience, has ceased to become interesting, in a sense; he or she is now selling a product. Just as I don't need to watch another commercial to learn that Colgate regards oral hygiene as important, and that the best way to promote it is to use their product, I don't need to hear anything more from someone whose view of life has already been reduced to a few set ideas or slogans. All future experience will simply be further evidence of that. And interestingly, in the case of the "positive" and "negative" truckers, the same experience will serve as evidence of opposite conclusions, depending on who has it.

The interesting writer then, or the writer who continues to be interesting, is the open-minded one, the one for whom the jury is still out.

In terms of a single work, the interesting one is the one whose outcome you can't foresee. You don't know which value is going to triumph in the end. It looks like it could go either way, so you stay tuned to find out.

Have I "branded" myself? Have people figured me out? How many visitors to this blog have moved on, thinking, Oh yeah, I see where this guy's coming from?

Right, Paul: open-minded it is.

bold ideas

Back to my regular morning notes today, after a detour yesterday into some administrative things and preparing some notes for a possible copywriting assignment. Today back to the oppressive stack of texts bearing down on me.

This morning I started keying notes from the two-volume abridged version of Arnold J. Toynbee's A Study of History that I received last week. Apparently an American historian, D. C. Somervell, passionate about Toynbee's monumental work, took it upon himself, for his own interest and amusement, to create a compressed version of it (a man after my own heart!). He wrote to Toynbee telling him about his work, and it turned into a publication project in its own right, coming out in 1947. I have the two-volume mass-market paperback edition, used, which came in its original slip-case. My copies were printed in 1971, and so I have the extra pleasure of reading a book from that period, that looks and feels like the paperbacks I handled when I first started reading seriously for myself.

I'm drawn to large, comprehensive systems of thought, so Toynbee is just the ticket with his theory of how civilizations come and go. I've only just started reading volume 1, but already I'm enjoying Toynbee's bold way of comparing the unfolding of history in different civilizations around the world (and am of course impressed with the erudition that allows him to make these comparisons--he seems to know all aspects of world history from antiquity on). There is something exciting about reading new, bold ideas, well thought out. Most books do not contain these. Most writers are not in a position to think of them, or to support them properly if they do think of them. Most nonfiction books present more or less "modest proposals" in a reasonable, conservative way. They're fine and valuable--but they're not the stuff of real intellectual excitement.

I admire a writer and thinker who takes the bull by the horns. A tough, thorny, intractable problem? That's okay--they jump in and go for it.

On a smaller scale I similarly enjoyed Morphology of the Folktale by the Russian scholar Vladimir Propp, which I recently finished reading. Writing in 1928, Propp was confronting the, to him, unsatisfactory state of knowledge of the fairy tale (for his work was really about fairy tales, not folktales). Fairy tales and folktales had been intensively collected and studied for close to 100 years when he took up the task, but there was as yet no generally agreed system of classifying them or analyzing their features. So he took the bull by the horns and came up with a structural analysis of the Russian fairy tale.

He made some amazing discoveries. One was that when a fairy tale is broken down into a series of what he called functions, or character actions, there is a fundamental unity of structure to all Russian fairy tales (and therefore, possibly, to all other kinds of fairy tale and stories in general). Despite a great seeming variety, the fairy tales present the same functions in the same order. In 1928 Propp had discovered a regularity to story structure that foreshadowed the idea of the "monomyth" presented by Joseph Campbell 20 years later in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. It behooves storytellers to be aware of these things.

Propp did what amounts to a genre analysis of the fairy tale--of the type recommended by Robert McKee for screenwriters (and storytellers generally). A genre is a structurally stable form that has been proven to work. Presumably it works because of some deep affinity with human experience and the human mind--some conformity with the way reality is. Propp says that a fairy tale commences with one of two possible situations: lack or villainy. Either someone does something hurtful or unjust to someone, or the hero becomes aware of a deficiency in his life, and sets out to rectify it.

So yes: bold ideas, bold thinking--keep 'em coming.