Luca Turin changed my life

You don't know who Luca Turin is? Some people think he's a hack and others a genius. I am on the side of genius. Whether or not his biology is worthy, the man has a nose and a sense of metaphor that changed my life. Let me explain.

One Friday evening bookshop expedition, I found a tiny hardcover in among the bold spines of other popular science titles. The cover is a smokey black and the title is written in a modern serif font, with large spaces between the letters lending it an edge of elegance: The Emperor of Scent.

The subtitle reads: "A story of perfume, obsession and the last mystery of the senses." Sprouting from this is a white dew-covered flower and two buds. The smokey grey is the dark background of the image, bleeding out.

The book is a memoir written by Chandler Burr, a journalist for the New York Times who wrote their perfume reviews - don't raise your eyebrows; you are still to discover the hidden world that is your sense of smell. It describes biophysicist Turin's increasing interest in our organ of smell and the perfume industry.

Like the war between Chomsky and Skinner, Turin pits the molecule vibration theory against the perfume industry's shape theory. The memoir is obviously weighted in support of Turin and casts him as the persecuted cowboy fighting the ills of urbanisation, and disregards contradictory evidence. This aside, Burr explains the theories clearly without patronising the reader, so even I felt like a competent biologist.

What enamoured me, though, were the descriptions of everyday scents, which break the smells into their components and build them back up again. Then there are the more unusual scents, which I doubt I have ever smelt, but can imagine. His metaphors are precise and you can't imagine any other plausible exposition of their merits and failures. The man is an olfactory genius.

The book obviously has implications for your reading of Perfume by Patrick Suskind, and vice versa. But it also has implications for your interactions with the world around you, using a sense that you probably never thought much of, sight and sound remaining the Zeuses of your sensory world, but in Turin's world our Hermes rules.

With the success of The Emperor of Scent, which somehow had gone out of print the last time I tried to get a copy, Turin has co-authored a guide to commercial perfumes, called simply Perfumes. The cover is beautiful, but what you don't see are the embossed, foiled and spot-varnished details.

Now I can get a fix of Turin every day, in his often scathing reviews of various perfumes (even those he ranks a five). Take for example, one of my favourites: Angel by Thierry Mugler. Calling the perfume "a high-energy state of contradiction" and "a joke", he breaks it down into:

a handsome, resinous woody patchouli straight out of the pipes-and-leather-slippers realm of men's fragrance, in a head-on collision with a bold blackcurrant and a screechy white floral.

This isn't the ambiguous realm of wine tastings, folks - find yourself a perfume stockist and try Angel. Then try another perfume and see if you can smell its components and how they work together. It's a miracle; I was blind but now I see. Whereas the epics among wine vintages suffer when set to a blind tasting, perfumes do not. You can distinguish a good perfume from a bad one almost instantly. Cheap perfumes are always bad, but so are most of the expensive ones.

If Angel is a joke, it is that of Truman Capote, while most perfumes are the slapstick comedies of Jim Carey or the gush of Maid in Manhattan.

This post came about from a recent foray into the perfume aisle. Oh dear heaven above, many of the perfumes have nice elements but ruin them by the dosing of one that drowns the rest. Not only against my skin, but against the objective whiteness of those paper strips. I felt like a walking headache.

With Turin's help, you understand how a perfume should engage with your own natural scent. How this engagement changes over the course of the day. How you shouldn't be able to smell a perfume that complements you, except for whiffs as you turn or gesture.

And the wonderful thing about this is, I think, something that is misunderstood about Turin. His is not the definitive off-with-her-head sentence on a perfume. Scent is about you. How it assists in creating your own identity, just as clothing does. (You can deny this, but then deny that you routinely categorise people based on superficial signals because you are able to process the immense amount of stimuli you are subjected to every day. I suspect that if this were true, you'd never leave your bedroom.)

I don't mind being a "perverse" joke, provided the meaning of it is my own.

Drag races in my mind

Thoughts are screaming through my mind, like racing cars on a bridge, weaving and jostling and breaking the rules without appearing to break the rules, and every so often one spins from the edge (because there are no barriers made of tyres - this is not mere sport) and disappears. Except, no wait, it doesn't disappear because my mind appears to be infinite, so it just spins around, bumping into other bridges and scraping pieces of cement and steel from the supports.

There you have it, folks, another crisis. Long overdue, really, like the shifting of the poles. What the doomsayers don't tell you is that we will survive the changes in magnetic fields, because we are resourceful (and annoying) creatures, although this is based on the evidence of blockbuster movies, where we annihilate the aliens - and I suspect that half the time we don't even know how we did it.

(Afraid of water? Really? Build a suit of armour. A wetsuit. Coat yourselves in Vaseline. I suspect that really these aliens figured out how dumb and superstitious we are and figured it was something in the air. And since they hadn't thought to build a suit of armour etc, and probably had no way to test the air to come to a definitive conclusion, they therefore could not afford to lose what brain cells they have left.)

My point is this won't destroy me - but don't tell me it will make me stronger.

To interrupt, and really to prove my point - Interception. Brilliant movie that set my little dinkie cars off on my Lego bridge (circular pun). But the scene where the merry band of blackmailers run from a pursuing band of snowsuit-clad symbols of the subconscious - don't make me laugh. I have had a few encounters with my subconscious and, trust me, its minions certainly don't run around in furry white suits on a snowy holiday.

There are no metaphors for the pain and suffering this force that we live with every day can and routinely does enforce. In fact, chances are you would be the tool of your own torture, so that it wouldn't have to waste time on more dumb creatures - guarding the one it has is probably punishment enough.

My furry pursuers and I have reached a truce, an equitable one. The alternative is pain and suffering in the form of an eternal crisis. This way I only have intermittent ones. Hurrah. But no, these crises are now a bonding experience. Hurrah.

I know where this crisis has come from. I don't like to stand still. My past might catch up. I am in charge of a humongous project, in a job I enjoy, in a company I like, with colleagues I respect. That sounds like a stimulating challenge, right, that doesn't leave much time for boredom. My past is 1 400 km away and for the time being staying put. But I am bored. Which does not imply I want to leave my job. On the contrary.

I am difficult to manage. I am high maintenance. (Don't patronise me by pretending to be surprised.) But I have an insatiable appetite for learning. (This is the basis on which my subconscious and I have bonded so that we are no longer separate entities.) I need to be pushed, incessantly. I need someone to stand there with a stick and an ice pack, and I can't do it on my own because then the stick turns into a cat o' nine tails and the ice pack into the bloodied rags of a damp face cloth.

The usual solutions have made an appearance on the bridge and have one by one been mown down except the last: travelling, Master's, novel. But even this one doesn't quite soothe the bruising. For the time being, I am battling the urge to run by doing the things I had forgotten I liked: making things, drawing, gardening, mothering every living thing in sight (including geckos).

And writing. Hello regular blog postings and appearances on various social media.

Maybe it's ok for there to be drag races on the bridges that connect one roiling island of my mind to another. Something like the progressive levels of the Nordic spiritual plane. I like that metaphor. I might pin it up somewhere. So maybe the furry snow riders aren't pursuing. Maybe they are shepherding.

Armageddon in retrospect

Your moods are in flux during a day (right?). Different moods require different books (right?). Also, different situations require different types of book.

For instance, you are reading over breakfast and need some way to hold the book open without using your hands. You need a thinnish paperback that slides under your bowl with bending the spine. You are sitting outside. You need something sturdy that you can plonk on your lap or on the ground without the pages constantly flipping over. You need a thick hardcover.

(Right?)

I appease this fickleness by reading different books of different formats at one time. A fiction, a non-fiction, a science fiction. Sometimes I read multiple books from each type, provided they are easy to distinguish. In addition to reading Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth, I am also reading Armageddon in retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut.

(I confess, I have only now learnt to spell the word Armageddon. Don't judge me; at least I'm honest.)

This is a collection of short stories. I generally don't enjoy short stories, but the Byliner single series on Kindle has converted me. (Margaret Atwood has left me biting my knuckles bloody for her next installment - and I swear, she knows it! - and Nicole Krauss has intrigued me.)

I expected something different. Something more brutal, set in the middle of the action, throwing grenades at the reader - tsa tsa tsa. What I am getting is a Sunday drive that ends when the path becomes overgrown from disuse and a smoke bomb is set off overhead. Tssssssssaaaaaa. (Imagine I am out of the car by this time, else the metaphor doesn't work. Hang on, perhaps I should be taking a Sunday walk, but then where would it end...?)

I am only on the third story (I skipped the blah-blah of the son's introduction and a speech by the author - publishers need to start putting these things at the end, after we're finished reading - which took out about a third of the book - bastards), but the story "Guns before butter" has me dancing before the overgrowth, trying to figure out a way through short of scything the brush aside.

I won't describe the premise, because the moral will jump out at you if I do. But no! Two pages before the end, the moral is thrust aside by the flight of two pins but you don't know why at first, and really, I doubt you ever fully know, even though the writer convinces you that you do. You take a step further down the road (now you're taking a Sunday walk) and the brush begins to grow around you.

Those pins are rattling around in the corners of my apartment - not even in my skull, because my brain takes care of that - but out here in the real world. The short story will fall short of my excitement, I promise you, but that is because you are taking it on face value. Read it, think about it and listen to the pins drop (get it?).

At the risk of TMI, this is the book I read in the bath. It is light enough that I can hold it up without bruising the webby skin between thumb and index finger, and I can read one story in one, uh, sitting. Also, I need breaks from Sacred Hunger. I mean, it won the Booker, so what else did I expect from the novel?

On library cards

I think I have posted something similar before... or maybe I just meant to. I have visited The Library, religiously, every second or third Saturday since I was in Grade 2. As friends and readers may know, a 'little birdie' broke into our house one night and flew away with our TV. 'What will these children do without a TV?' my parents wondered.

'Read!' they shouted in unison. (No, not really. I don't how the conversation really went.)

The next morning we were surrounded by books in waist-high (my seven-year-old waist), horizontal bookshelves. This experience meant little to me at the time, mostly because what I knew about reading was Johnny and Mary going to town, spewing rhyming non sequiturs, depicted as children in 'sensible clothes' prancing around.

We were given barcoded cards, but the entry into the system was still done with cards placed inside the books when shelved and removed when they were taken out. (Yes, I am that ancient. I learnt to use a computer on MS Dos.)

The first book we took out on our first library cards was a picture book featuring crocodiles. Each page was filled with jungle scenes and crocodiles and tiny creatures to find - a mouse under a fern, a bird in a nest... We (my sister and I) took this book out every few weeks, until my mother insisted I was too old for it. I continued to take it out as a show of autonomy.

It all steamrolled from there. Soon I was reading my complement of books (three), plus two on my mother's card, in a week. I would finish at least one of these books that same Saturday. I would hide a book under my pillow and either hold it at an angle to catch the light from the passage or sit in the light that fell in through my open doorway with one ear cocked for the sounds of my parents going to sleep. I was never very good at pretending to be asleep when they checked in on me though.

In my defense (and that of my shortsightedness), I was never one of those children who fall asleep quickly. I could lie there for hours and hours and hours staring into the dark and imagining what the witch under my bed was planning to do to my toes and what I would do without toes, so why not make better use of my time - and imagination?

By Grade 8, I had the reading level of a Grade 12 - after which, I confess, my reading habit took a brief nosedive. I had read all the books in the children's and young adults' section, but wasn't quite ready for the adults' section (no below-the-belt humour intended). My world righted itself in Grade 10, though.

Predictably, I took English Literature as one of my undergraduate majors, and fell in love repeatedly. During my holidays from prescribed reading, I consumed everything I could find in the library by the author I was then enamoured with: Toni Morrison, Rebecca West, Henry James, EM Forster, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Zakes Mda... In my third year, I got a job as a bookseller, so now I could take five books from the library, three books on apro from the shop and buy books at two-thirds of the retail price.

If I sound as though I've read a ton of books, that's why. Note: trade publishers also give booksellers complimentary/advance copies twice a year.

By turns, I have worked as a book reviewer, publicist, editor and publisher, all of which, my friends, equals (yes) more free and discounted books. As you can imagine I have towers of the things, mostly in boxes at my mom's house, which amounts to a good few years-of-reading's worth. Still, I visit the library every second Saturday and/or Wednesday. I never take less than my full allocation and, no, I don't read them all, but I get to look at them for two weeks.

This week's view

This post was supposed to about the Cape Town Central Library, which has become My Library because of the range of books, the architecture and mass of books. This library is where I go when I need some reassurance. It's my rabbit hole. There are bookshelves around you, above you and in little rooms to the side... I can breathe there.

Sadly, I do not have the guts to delete this entire post and begin again. So perhaps those of you in the city should just take a gander instead.

PS. The library card is free, and you can take out seven books (I squealed out loud when the librarian told me) for two weeks and renew them twice - and then take them out as new books again! And the card works in any of the municipal libraries, so you just check online which library has the book you're looking for and pick it up. Really, why are you still in front of your computer?

What do Russia and dystopia have in common?

When I typed in the heading, the spelling feature in Chrome highlighted 'dystopia' and gave me only one option: 'topiary'. It's a bit of a leap from anti-paradise to a garden feature via Russia, but I'm sure that there's an answer out there. This is not what the first and last have in common, however, so perhaps we can ponder this in another post.

Multiple answers come to mind. The most obvious one is that this is the literature I am most drawn to at the moment. (One might be tempted to diagnose my state of mind here, but you're reading the post of an amateur anarchist, so really what did you expect?)

Ah, The People's Act of Love. Some of you may know how that book both terrifies me and is high on my favourites list. You may also know that the book haunts me in a tangible way, in that I am always aware of its presence, that just looking at it (as I am right now) is enough to plunge me into crisis and hold my head under water, and that I am not the only person to feel this way (click on link, now please).

PS. When trying to find an appropriate link, the first Google option was 'I love catching people in the act'. No words. Just resignation.

No one knows this personal snippet, except that now you do: when I was a child (climbing trees and reading, copiously) I believed I was Russian. Not consciously, of course. I only realised in adolescence that a) I believed this and b) it wasn't true. When I looked in the mirror I saw a snow-pale, black-haired child. (I am pale, but more the tint of hail clouds and my hair is a dull brown; not that I have a self-esteem issue but this is true.) I'm not suggesting anything esoteric here, only that I identified with something I had watched or read about.

So, it seems, anarchy isn't just an intellectual revolt.

It goes without saying that browsing secondhand bookshops is my favourite way to kill time. I confess, even on a Friday night, when my peers are donning heels and matching underwear. In need of indulgence, I was browsing (on a Wednesday not a Friday evening), finding nothing of interest until I browsed the 'Book club reads' on my way out of the shop (no stone left unturned). Four pairs of men (their hands tied behind their backs I see now) set against a background of snow. I knew I would buy it even before I picked it up.

The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-56 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. (This does not classify as a book club read, but I'm glad it was in my path, appropriately as I was leaving disappointed.)

There it was, as if it knew I was about to reread The People's Act of Love. That is crazy, yes, and anthropomorphic. But this book is enough to make me wax lyrical for hours, except that my words are usually inarticulate in this instance: "I can't explain it; the book destroyed me. Des-troy-ed." *shaking head* And again, on repeat.

This post is already too long, so I'm going to skip over to dystopia.

The list of great such novels is long, so look out for this post. War is dypstopia. It is pre-apocalypse. The thought of people dying and suffering, for decades after too, and often for no reason... How are we not as horrified by even one such event as we should be about children sleeping on the street? It is beyond my comprehension, as it is that I can sit here typing while people suffer. While children suffer. People, we are living in a dystopia. And there is nothing you or I can do. This is the nature of my nihilism.

Reading dystopian fiction relieves some of this pressure (while reminding me that I am a hypocrite) and often pushes me towards the ideals of socialism. Perhaps I should amend my heading: What do the revolutions and gulags in Russia and dystopia have in common? That answer is obvious. And here my shoulders hunch and I lean over my keyboard, gutted.

Intellectually, I can justify my current literary obsessions. Emotionally, the anger and helplessness at the bigness of life and death and pain (because no happiness or beauty can amortise pain) overwhelms me and this is the only demonstration of my refusal to accept this that I can muster.

My next read is We by Yevgeny Zamayatin, a translation of a Russian dystopian novel that, according to reports, precedes (chronologically and in content) all other such novels. Look out for future posts. I will try to contain my emotional nihilism, although really this is the nature of my blog and I shouldn't be afraid of potentially squeamish readers, because virtual sharing is about the construction of my virtual identity not yours - sorry folks.

Confession: I made it halfway through Nanowrimo...

...but I won't finish.

Silver lining: that's 17 more days than last year and at least as many words as I wrote for my real novel in three years (if I had been writing at the same pace for three years, I would have churned out close to 500 000 words, which is 10 novels - let's factor in redrafting and editing time, at the same rate, and that's five novels, which is four more than I currently have (counting together the two halves of two different novels). This maths looks wrong.

Wait! I was missing a 0. 50 novels! Shoowee.

Anyway, it looks like I'm going to break this brick wall before I break my head - not logically possible, granted, but metaphorically: suspension of disbelief. And physical logic. Maybe I'm Gulliver and the brick wall is really small. But why would I use my head rather than my foot? Or a tractor. Or a bulldozer. Maybe it's a brick wall in my novel, in which case I can just write it broken.

Just go with it.

Brave New World

Writing a review of a book that I finished reading five minutes ago seems like a violation, a desecration, blasphemous (and on and on goes the pseudo-religious rhetoric). But I need to sort my thoughts and I can only do this with words. I have just put down Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

I had expected something more shocking, something more like Do Androids Dream... or The Dispossessed, something that twists and turns, and beats you into an interpretation. But some of the power of this book is in its subtlety, the extent to which you buy into this society that buys into itself, its insidiousness. A less shocking consideration of the nature of happiness, and therefore being, and of free will.

Yet, at the same time, it posits two extremes, as all good moral dilemmas do, superficially forcing you into one of the camps. This reminds me of the lasting effect of your relationship with your parents: you either choose to inhabit their values or react against them (there's a private joke in this). As much as you may promise yourself otherwise, you have little psychological free will - you are the manifestation of the small violences of your unconscious.

And I have proof.

To continue, below the superficial manipulations and because of its insidiousness, the novel asks you questions about society in general and (your role as) the individual within it (insert the above again here). It is its own proof (not mine - mine is not imaginary, although on second thought in a sense it is). Who are you? What is your responsibility to yourself? To the collective?

The final scene (without giving anything away - don't worry, I would never deprive you of the joy of your first reading of a good book) is the only possible one. Even had the physical reality been different, emotionally it would have remained the same. Does this undermine the questions of the rest of the novel? Question upon question, some turning in on themselves, others content to bite their own tails. And hear I desperately want to make an allusion to the ending of another book but won't. Just know my lips are quivering with the impulse.

There is a sequel: Brave New World Revisited. Will it set up a 'No trespassing' sign in front of the winding paths of its ancestor (another private joke)? Will it wear away new paths (how?)? Will it stand on the shoulders of this novel to see further or will it cut this giant off at the knees? The blandness of the word tacked on at the end worries me. But is it a red herring? Oh, the drama of being a bibliophile, an aesthete, a navel-gazer.

Before I get to it, I have this overwhelming desire to reread Shakespeare, to immerse myself in its catharsis, to avoid losing myself (and my tenuous grip on the here and now) down those paths.

Describing trauma

Toni Morrison has said that the only way to depict a moment of trauma is not to. Trauma is the absence of words. It is the darkness of terror. She also uses symbols and time - think of Beloved or Song of Solomon. The act of killing one's newborn baby - slitting its throat - rather than allowing her to grow up a slave, tells the reader how traumatic the experience of being a slave must be as words never could.

Trauma, in this sense, is objectively traumatic - not the divorce of one's parents, the loss of one's home and other possessions, a break-up. This is violent trauma, unspeakable trauma. One person exerting power over another. Abuse. The kind of thing that pushes you to your knees, puts a gun in your mouth and explodes a hole in the back of your head.

Other authors choose other ways (and there are as many ways as there are means of trauma - I chose an imaginable terror, death (the true absence) and shock - an amateur tactic).

Czeslaw Milosz (whose book The Seizure of Power instantly took the field when I read it - see archived post) also chose absence - showing the movement of the troops and a brief moment when they crawl through besieged and ravaged Warsaw. He also uses another common tactic: bureaucracy and guilt. This last shook me because, as a regular reader will know, one of the main characters was me - his doubts were mine.

At the moment I am reading Where the Air is Clear by Carlos Fuentes. I am less than 50 pages in, but absorbed in the brutality of his prose. From the first pages, he shocks you with violence - violence of words and common, daily, urban traumas. Until you are carried along by them, expect them.

Then comes the musings of one of his characters, a preening fatcat who was once part of the revolutionary movement. The style of this monologue is immediately conspicuous. It begins simply and uses relatively (for Fuentes) subtle descriptions. Then... The things he describes, paragraph after paragraph, are unspeakable.

Yet, he says them.

This monologue is maddening - the nostalgia of this preening, fat, content man, whose brothers gave their lives in the most horrific ways. What is this but another approach to trauma?

I can't imagine what Fuentes has waiting for me next. But, like Milosz, I know my own sense of culpability - guilt and doubt - is about to be exploited until I experience the trauma of standing by while others suffer.

In search of my present

There are two perfect Sundays. One: a beautiful sunny day in view of Table Mountain, sitting outside in my own secluded piece of wilderness, writing, thinking, blogging, reading, considering the nature of being and so on, with two cats, a bunny and birds for company. Two: Taal Monument on a sunny afternoon, as above minus the cats and bunny.

Taalmonument is 45 minutes from Cape Town Central, on Paarl Mountain. It is dedicated to language (given that South Africa has 11 official languages). But essentially it is dedicated to one language: Afrikaans. Afrikaans speakers take their culture seriously (not as seriously as the French), but, in my experience, value the idea of culture and language (despite the bad press - it's complicated).

Seen from the highway (as I first did), all you see are two elegant spires rising out of foliage. I assumed it was a church. I had been along that highway, in that direction, many times, but this was the first time I had noticed it.

I have to interrupt myself now. The last hour and a half of my drive to (relocate to) Cape Town was an emotional experience for me, as even routine experiences are, for me. The symbol of this is the Huguenot tunnel. A python of concrete with occasional lights, dull so they reminded me of lanterns, cars winding through its belly. You are spewed out to the left of Paarl Mountain, on the same side as the monument.

Desolation. Relief. Ending. Safety. The present.

There are two other spaces (and I mean that in the philosophical sense, distinguished from place) that have brought me safely into the present: Taal Monument and an MRI scan.

The monument is a cold, textured Modernist structure of edges, curves, hollows and solids. You walk up two or three sets of steps, onto a platform that rises in front of you. Columns on each side of you like eunuchs that push you between two walls into a lipped chamber. The roof mirrors the rise of the platform, reaching higher and higher. You hear a rumble that is echo falling on echo falling on echo of a circle of water and a disguised fountain.

The roof still rises, into an elegant cone: a spire. It sits on a quarter of the circle of water. Lean over and look up and be sucked by the echoes into being-less. The flow of the structure pushes you on and out, through a second set of lips into an amphitheatre. The second spire, narrower than the first, stands behind you, an attendant.

The platform of the amphitheatre rises in a ripple, flat to your left and indented in front of you. Orbs sunk into the concrete at the highest point, bubbles in the ripples, a mirror of the rocks that give Paarl its name (pearl). Over the back wall of the space, you can see a hint of a view. So you are lead forward, climbing the rows of seats, to lord over a valley of winelands, fenced in by mountains in a semicircle and the ocean on the facing them.

That is what my present, my always, looks like.

The secret to Nanowrimo

"If you're not making mistakes, it's a mistake." Miles Davis

Who doesn't like a quote that unfolds the mysteries of life for you? Just like SparkNotes. And who doesn't like pithy epigrams, like: You have to fail before you succeed.

Ultimately, these cheat sheets are not helpful. (Prepare yourself for the insightful comment.) As any first-year philosophy lecture on epistemology will tell you, you can know something without understanding it. In other words, knowledge is not enough. (Also, SparkNotes is notoriously unreliable, perhaps to trick you into failing?)

This year is my third year signing up for Nanowrimo - National Novel Writing Month. (The link is in a nifty list somewhere over here <---.) People from around the world sign up and create a profile. From the 1st to the 30th of November, you try to write 50 000 words, in other words (punnage), a novel.

Don't bother to work it out: to finish on time you have to write 1 667 words per day. If you can write 500 words in half an hour (which takes practice), that means one and a half hours out of your day. Most of us can barely find half an hour for lunch, so this hour and a half is mythical.

Except, that depends: how badly do you want to be a writer? If not very or you're still thinking about it, give it a try. The experience is a good way to find out what your priorities are and how to manage your time. But you won't make it more than a week.

If your answer is a fire in your chest, then let me tell you about Years 1 and 2 before I tell you about 3 (although, really, the whole story's over there -----> in two nifty buttons above my reading lists).

In Year 1, I made it a week. By then I was something like 10 000 words below target and I hated the wretched piece of writing and I was so tired I swear my eyeballs were sagging. In Year 2, I made it three days. I started writing something very intelligent about illusion and hope and belief, and ended up with something that sounded like Twilight where the vampire's just some mute emo kid.

Granted, I later wove the first page of the aborted novel into my real novel.

Year 3 and I'm on target! (Ok, that's a bit of a lie: I went out last night instead of writing but plan to - will - make it up today.) I want this. So badly it burns like fire in my chest. I will wake up early, go to sleep late; I will not sleep for the last 72 hours and take leave; I will finish this year and, damn it, I will finish my real novel before my 30th birthday (in three months).

But I could not make it if I had not failed twice. In failing, I learnt how fast your motivation drops as soon as you fall a bit behind, that you cannot achieve something like this (without self-destructing) if you cannot sort out the rest of your life, and that I am first and foremost a writer, not a publisher.

I dreamt of being a writer when I was still a 'lightie' (also a ballerina, marine biologist and archaeologist). After an(other) aborted attempt at becoming a graphic designer, I realised that books were It. So I studied language, media and literature and became an editor, a copywriter and a publisher.

In the last year, almost every dream I have nurtured has unfolded: a home I love, a career, a growing zoo, friends, a sense of calm and perspective. There are two left: buying my home and finishing my novel. And I intend to accomplish the second one first.

I want the cover of my book to have this feeling

From the Book Cover Archive:

Top 10 authors I'd love to meet

While I researching the previous post I found this: Top Ten Authors I'd Love to Meet. I can't resist. But I'm not going to tell you why - I leave it open to interpretation (by my hypothetical readers who may or may not be simulations blah blah blah you get it by now).

1. AS Byatt

2. Haruki Murukami

3. William Faulkner

4. Virginia Woolf

5. Philip K Dick

6. David Mitchell (I'd also give LIMBS to have his talent)

7. Czeslaw Milosz

8. Italo Calvino

9. Umberto Eco

10. Milan Kundera

Maybe this list is obvious, maybe weighted with modern authors; maybe it doesn't take into account enough genres. (If so, I'd give another limb to meet Christopher Nolan.) Who cares - it's my list! You don't like it? Go make your own.

A brief (incomplete) history of revolution

What do The Dispossessed by Ursula le Guin, the Communist Manifesto and the recent Wall Street sit-ins have in common? (Actually, that should be obvious, and if not, read one or both and you'll get it.) I was reading The Dispossessed and the Communist Manifesto (I always read one fiction and one non-fiction book at the same time) at the same time as the sit-ins began.

It seemed as though history (and literature) was repeating itself. I was born in the early eighties and grew up in the nineties, when a popular culture rebellion gave way to an intellectual cynicism. I tend to view any group gathering with caution (and perhaps some degree of apathy), because the efforts of decades of Russian revolution, the hippies' campaigns of non-violence (and socialist-inspired and Epicurean free love) and the more sinister rebellions of punk culture and similar obnoxious groups, came to nothing. They all collapsed into their own centres and dispersed.

I've also read enough dystopian novels to know better.

The weak point of any such collective action is that eventually it matures into sets of rules and hierarchies - becomes a system. Those rules and hierarchies become ends in themselves, and all those naive (also hopeful) values are absorbed and become means to those ends. The followers become disillusioned and are not replaced by enough new recruits to keep the movement going. If it doesn't develop, it becomes static and eventually peters out.

The version of the Communist Manifesto I was reading was The Communist Manifesto and Other Revolutionary Writings, which presents the writings of influential philosophers in chronological order, so that you can trace the seeds of socialism. (This was where I met Bakunin, who dipped me into anarchism.) The speeches of the leaders (and followers, who often take up their phrases as mottos, without always knowing what they mean) were less coherent paraphrases of these writings! Did they know? Were they philosophy drop-outs who didn't have the patience to delve deeper? Or did they intentionally use and abuse these phrases to hook followers and confuse their opponents?

This last is a strategy recommended by Leon Trotsky. But if these political philosophers had delved deeper, they would have found that this is Stage 1 of Trotsky's map for rebellion. The second is to link those mottos to concrete action. Even if those actions are extreme. Because they're linked to what has become a value system, the actions seem necessary. Voile, you've accomplished a coup without much (only necessary?) violence and so swiftly that the collective has no time to question it until they're already implicated.

What does The Dispossessed have to do with this? Hey, I'm not giving you all the answers! Read it and see what you think. And, while you're at it, try Woman on the Edge of Time by Madge Piercy.

Just a glimpse

Normally, I don't like taking or sharing photographs - why replace the moment with a record of it? Isn't that the function of memory? Granted, memories shift every time you recall - or don't - recall them, but isn't that the fun of it - that your memory is actually dependant on the present and the present's plan's for the future? That it captures who you are, now and then? Yes, yes, all representation is subject to interpretation blah blah. But to some degree, a photo is static. If a doorway is blue, it will always be blue - well, until the photo fades - when your memory can repaint it brown or red...

Representations will always be less than experience (says the woman who doubts everything, who lives almost entirely in her head, and who thinks we could be simulations and still be happy - which is actually compatible if you think about it).

Having said this, here is a glimpse into my life, of literature and writing:

My writing and reading spot. A wild garden, a filled-in well, sunlight and a blanket.

The reads sitting on my bookshelf, waiting for the perfect moment to be read. Every book has a perfect moment and I can tell you exactly when and where and why I adopted every one of them.

Non-existence and why it doesn't really matter

Does this blog exist? Of course it exists, as data made out of 1s and 0s, and I see it and I read it, and if I show it to people, they can confirm that they see it and read it. No, it's not tangible, you leapfrog ahead, because by now you know where I'm going with this (and if it's just me reading this, then that really is redundant). So let's just leave it there, because we're like dogs chasing our tails here and surely there is something more important to talk about.

I'll give you that one. My mind is doing somersaults lately and I'm starting to feel a bit queasy.

I've been listening to a podcast about language and non-existence (oh and here she goes again), which also features dogs chasing their tail - it was all very interesting, but really it doesn't change the fact that we talk about non-existent things every day (and there is the option that nothing we talk about exists - just an option) and never question the truth of these statements, because that's how language works.

Words are reassuring because they are arbitrary. A table could be called a gloop and it would still be a table (given that there is a table there, of course). Words are used to talk about non-existent things and to lie and to be sarcastic - and we usually understand what the other person means (depending on our shared cultural capital, but the point still holds).

Despite what people think, words have no necessary relationship with truth. (And this is where I deviate from all these philosophers who chase each other's tails over this.) My perspective is predictable, I know, but hear me out.

Words are used at our whim. If you are honest, your words will be honest, but there's really no guarantee even of this. The layers below consciousness are tricksy things, bent on protecting us from ourselves, which often means determining what we perceive and how, and then allowing our consciousness to cobble together a view of the world. Which we express in words that these layers have smoothed out for us.

Ah, the shifting landscape of paranoia. Twice shy and all that. No one's fooling me a second time. Which really only means the shadowy 'they' have won, but really they win either way, which is kind of my point.

Literature banks on the arbitrary nature of words. It creates fictional worlds melted together with autobiography and real settings and even real people and events, to illuminate some aspect of the human condition. But it never pretends to harness truth to its cowboy belt - and if you think it does, that's all on you. Every sentence is mediated with "I think" and "Maybe" and "Have you considered whether...", and of course "If we do this, what will happen?" At most, it asks you to think about yourself and understand how those layers and layers think they're protecting us and whether they are.

The fickleness of words is the only grip I have in this world, precisely because they never lie to me. I never have to consider whether they are real or true or false, because it's on me and my relationship with shared meaning. My truth is how I perceive the world, but that doesn't make it authoritative; really, pretending it is would be like coming in last in a race and getting a conciliatory medal.

Having ranted to an audience that may or may not exist, I plan to curl up next a fire with my book, which is really all the security I need in this shifting world of meaning.

A one-sided conversation about Nihilism (spoiler: I win)

You think I'm joking when I say I'm a nihilist, right? Ah, how witty, you think. Also, she can spell. So I'll follow her on Twitter or read her blog. Supposing anyone reads this and that Blogger isn't actually recording my own page views, even though I asked it not to.

I'm not joking. I don't know that I exist, never mind anything else. (And no, that does not make me a solipsist - I'd have to know I exist to believe that.)

All I know is that I know nothing. I can't prove that a table exists and I certainly can't speculate on the nature of existence or the self. Ah, but you so clearly have a personality and a mind... to lose, you counter. Ah, indeed.

And what is that except a mechanism we have evolved to continue our gene pool in this place that I'm not sure exists. Or something. Preposterous! Preposterous, indeed.

So, please, explain to me the nature of this mechanism: of the self and the purported soul. Counter, with evidence, the thought experiment that we're hooked up to a machine and dreaming this, and if you can't, please tell me what's on the other side of this dream world.

This makes me an epistemological nihilist. I know nothing, therefore I believe nothing. (Notice that I never said I believe in nothing (because not believing in something doesn't cause it to cease to exist, like a game of peek-a-boo or hide the child's nose), or nothing exists.) This seems to me to be the smart move. You probably beg to differ. I'll argue that belief is just a survival mechanism to make sure we don't off ourselves at the futility of it.

The great thing about nihilism is that, philosophically speaking, it's difficult to counter. Every time you say something, we shrug and say 'We don't know.' And you can't say boo. Which is great because I can be competitive. Unless I'm losing. Then I'm bored.

When I sat down to write, I was really thinking about the thought experiment above, the one that sounds remarkably like the Matrix. (Gasp!) I've already said I've lived my life through books. Books make me happy. Does that make my happiness less? Because it's not based on experience? Or does the experience of reading count?

If the part of the brain that is happiness implodes, what then? If you can't experience emotion, can you really be said to exist? Isn't that what personality boils down to? I like this because it makes me happy; I don't like this because it doesn't?

Is happiness dependant on interaction with others? With the external world? Does it have to have an objective basis? Or can it purely be subjective? If so, why shouldn't I be content to be hooked up to machine? Or live in fictional worlds?

And if happiness is a survival mechanism, Darwin's construct, then why would it isolate rather than integrate me? Knowledge is great. It helps us find life on other planets and cure diseases and such. But doubt in one's own existence? Really? A life lived in literature? Really?

Hang on, maybe I'm the weak link, the one being wiped out of existence... (Stop sniggering, you.)

One thing I didn't mention about nihilism: we're not any more satisfied with our answer than you are. It seems wrong that we should doubt ourselves, when we might not exist in the first place. I, for one, am open to counter-examples and evidence. I'm used to being disappointed, though. I bury my disappointment in fiction and words. Other people use drugs, alcohol and sex. I still think I got the better end of the deal.

(But don't even get me started on the reassuring arbitrariness of words or Descartes and the Giant Spaghetti Monster...)

Somersault

May I add to my previous post that the conventions of literature lull you into a false sense of security only to surprise you? I have never anticipated that I would sympathise with the leaders and members of a religious cult. Perhaps part of this sympathy is pity, which would be more expected.

I'm reading Somersault by (Nobel-Prize winner) Kenzaburo Oe at the moment. (Disclaimer: I'm only 170-odd pages on.) The novel follows the reformation of a cult in Japan, which initially disbanded because a radical faction attempted to take over a nuclear-power plant in order to turn it into a nuclear bomb. The title refers to the leaders' denial of the principles of the entire cult, which is seen as a somersault by the media and its consumers.

The novel begins years earlier, when we are introduced to three of the main characters. A fourth is introduced separately. This introduction is brutally honest and yet empathetic, and is my favourite part of the book so far.

The novel then speeds forward and we are introduced to the fifth and sixth characters, the former leaders of the cult. They are known only as 'Patron' and 'Guide', encouraging us to think of them in mostly symbolic terms. Yet their names seem to mistranslate the nature of their roles, which in turn begins to breed a mistrust of these characters. Which is in turn countered by the natural sympathy we feel for those who are physically ill, which they (and another character) both become.

This longwinded approach brings us to my place in the book and a paragraph that has illuminated my feelings of sympathy and mistrust. Patron says of Guide, "He gave meaning to the disaster that had ruined half my life, and through his help I discovered a new whole sense of self. What he made whole was me, the Savior, whether false or genuine."

"Whether false or genuine." What should we make of this? That this is a personal crisis projected onto a mass audience, that the man is mentally ill, that he doubts himself? Was the earlier somersault the truth? Are the leaders sadists or just in denial? If there is doubt, surely the natural conclusion is: false. Yet his followers hear him say this and experience no doubt.

Can this be seen as a comment on the nature of religion? That faith encourages one to overlook inconsistencies. That it requires such oversight? The novel boomerangs between sympathy and mistrust, and so many other emotions, that I am losing confidence that it can answer these questions. All I can do is record my questions and revert to them when I am finished reading.

When I read over this draft, I take back my original premise. I am not surprised and I do not feel much sympathy for the leaders of the cult, but for the followers, which is a common reaction to these things. Are the leaders more accountable than the followers, or vice versa, and can cultishness ever be justified? The questions keep piling up.

Life as narrative

My life is a string of narratives, and not in the academic sense. The books I've read have become the stitching of my life. Tell me a story about your life and I'll point to a book it reminds me of. Every emotion, every thought, every idea and every line I have written finds a corollary in a book I have read.

Literature is an escape from my life and is my life, it is my religion and my occupation, the basis of friendships and my only friend.

I've been reading since I was seven - when someone broke into our house and stole the TV, so my father took us to the library to keep us occupied. I can remember the pages of my first book (crocodiles swimming in a crowded landscape, where no matter how many times you looked you always found something new), but not the title.

I remember climbing trees to read in their uppermost branches, sitting in sunshine with a book, listening to thunder and lightning punctuate dialogue, reading in the light from the passage after bedtime, sitting on the school bus with these friends. The smell of certain books. The plastic slips over the covers. My preference for paperbacks which has lately shifted to hardcovers. The bruises between my thumb and forefinger from holding them up.

My day begins and ends with books. I read over breakfast. (Well, under breakfast, literally, because I usually hold the pages open by placing my bowl on them.) I read in bed. I read in between too.

Some books possess me, others bore me, some make me think, many more fuel existential crises, others inspire me or challenge me or just baffle me; there are those that claim me, refine my principles, change my mind, teach me, lambast me, require more of me, allow me to be less than perfect, and of course, entertain me.

How sad, that I have little else to say for my life. How alone I am. How lonely. How privileged I am that I have had so many meaningful conversations. That I have the language to tell my story and those of others, that I have lived so many lives and met so many people, and loved them all. Even the vile ones.

The stitching of my life is multi-coloured and various. It holds my own narrative together. Most people have a crutch, I think, and this is mine. But I am not afraid of mine, nor ashamed, nor lame without it. It has taught me to tell other stories and see into other lives. But perhaps, for every gift, something else is withheld. Perhaps a distance between my world and that of others is the price of this privilege.

Plowing the dark

It seems as if technology in the 21st century develops so quickly that soft- and hardware are obsolete as soon as they are released into the market. The same could be said about my latest read.

Plowing the dark is set in 1989/90 and was published in 2005. It juxtaposes two settings: a multinational’s lab, intent on being first-to-market with quality virtual reality technologies, and a man who is being held hostage in Iran by religious fundamentalists.

In the first setting, the characters wrestle with the dangers of virtual reality versus the enthralling experience of it, the differences in perspective between generations, the constantly updating technology. It asks why we need to replicate daily experiences virtually and why art no longer fills our aesthetic hunger.

In the second, the man is in isolation and treated like a chained dog. He gets through the days, weeks and months using routine and his imagination, and negotiating for small, everyday concessions which he appreciates as great gifts.

In the first few chapters of the book, I was uninspired by the themes, which seemed dated six years later. Perhaps the author means to trick the reader into apathy, maybe not. Reading on, the characters contribute so many perspectives to any debate, whether about technology, art, accountability or moral philosophy.

The chapters featuring the hostage, in a few pages, provide a key to his experiences, experiences far from our own lives if we have the luxury to read this book. It stands on its own (to be honest, I wish more pages were spent with the hostage), yet provides an apt metaphor for the concerns of the first set of characters.

As with Three farmers on the way to a dance, the novel is more concerned with exploring its theses than the conventions of fiction, but unlike that first novel isn’t didactic (although, again, I felt differently in the first few chapters).

Since I’m only halfway, I could only speculate any further. Perhaps the remainder will swing back to trite didactics; perhaps it will prophesy our present and future; perhaps asking this of any novel is too much of a burden. Regardless, the novel has already made me think and even hunger for the physicality of art and quiet spaces.

The Seizure of Power

A good author creates characters who sit beside you while you while are reading and walks beside you when you are not. Sometimes you identify with them, sometimes not; sometimes you empathise with them, sometimes sympathise, sometimes neither. A good author writes characters into life.

But have you ever encountered a character who is you? One who tricks you into believing you're not alone or crazy, until you remember that they're fictional. (Perhaps that is better - they will remain frozen in time, never disappoint you and never grow into someone you don't recognise.)

Peter Kwinto (Quinto) in The Seizure of Power by Czeslaw Milosz is my fictional doppelganger. He is an officer in the half-Russian, half-Polish army that is pushing back the German troops who have captured (and razed) Warsaw at the end of World War II. At the beginning of the novel, he is plagued by conflicting emotions, but is essentially idealistic, justifying the fear the army instills on communities already traumatised by war as part of the process of attaining freedom.

Despite having been exiled to the Urals and now implicated in the tragedies of war, he remains idealistic about life and human nature: "The bliss of being among the living... Peter lifted his hand and moved his fingers, overcome with wonder at the year, the month, the day and the hour."

As the war ends, Polish Socialists fight the influence of Russian Communists, who believe they have equal rights to the minds of the Polish people given that they made up half of the victorious army. Those minds are plagued by unexpressed doubts: about whether the Socialists can offer anything different to the Communists or the capitalists, about the future, about whether the war has really ended.

Peter is no different, except that these doubts coalesce into doubts about humanity, about the repetition of history, about the nature of time and existence. After he learns that his wife is dead, these doubts became increasingly, conflictingly hopeful and nihilistic. The death of his wife confirms what he has always known: that he is alone.

He comes to believe (hope?) that only a traumatic history can create a utopian future, through incremental changes in the collective consciousness. Thus he, stuck in this traumatic moment, can only hope for the absence of death or the absolution of escape.

Yet, in appearance, he bends to the requirements of society, acquiring a job in the government and even informing on another man. This leads to other doubts - about one's accountability for one's self, toward other people, within a community. Is this accountability or blame, and with whom does it rest?

Around him, people smooth over these doubts saying, "Everyone plays a part nowadays and nobody believes in anything."

Despite the absolute statements that he finds in doubt, Peter is essentially at the whim of his emotions. Towards the end of the novel, he cries, "Why? Why are you responsible for what you really are? Can anybody say: 'I am myself' when he worships in spite of himself, worships what he hates?"

The final line embodies Peter's quest: "...was it not better, instead, to ponder the only important question: how a man could preserve himself from the taint of sadness and indifference."

I wonder, how can one not come to the same conclusions, not be assailed by the same doubts and the same conflicting emotions, focus on the everyday when questions like these, seemingly only theoretical, form the foundations of this moment in time? Life is an eddy of trauma and joy and more, but these become blurred in the larger context of human history. There are really only two options in this moment: to escape or to find whatever joy one can in each day. Sometimes the two options are the same.

A Suicide, a War and a Shipwreck

Just as a piece of writing is threaded with symbols and themes from the writer's subconscious - it being the real writer, I would argue, and us just fingers pounding a keyboard like the hypothetical monkey - so that same piece of writing adopts the symbols and themes of the reader's subconscious, and is kneaded into a slightly different, still recognisable shape. Nothing revolutionary here: the author never died; he just joined hands with the reader, the text itself, the larger context and so on. Like a nursery rhyme. (What this means for the higher power that Nietzsche pronounced dead, who knows. Maybe he was always just a pretty rhyme.)

Everything I read is forced into conversation with everything else, into saying things they perhaps didn't mean to or didn't know they were going to say.

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides references a scene from Mrs Dalloway and by extension, for me, The Waves both by Virginia Woolf and, of course, the movie The Hours. From postmodernism to modernism, from a novel in which the collective narrator points to us as fellow voyeurs, to a novel in which we are invited to watch. All of this ends in Ms Woolf walking into a river with a pocketful of rocks and nods to Sylvia Plath with her head in an oven. Giving the finger to a world that we are all forced to watch consume itself. By defiantly consuming one's self. Although Mr Eugenides might argue that this act is really desertion, leaving one's fellow soldiers to advance on the front-line alone.

Then there's A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood, the structure of which mimics that of Mrs Dalloway, but with only brief moments of her sympathy, which is demoted to sentimentality, as if to protect one's self against the fire from the front-line. And briefer moments of shining transcendence, which are even more self-consciously sentimental and ultimately held underwater until they stop shining.

And where has this extended metaphor of war come from? From The Seizure of Power by Czeslaw Milosz, where political allegiance is a bit of flotsam being hurried along the world's oceans. From here to the desecrated naivety of Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance by Richard Powers (both of the characters and the author) and a leap to A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel, in which the French Revolution is a soup of naivety, childhood traumas and survival mechanisms.

I could swim my way into science fiction, psychology texts, African literary fiction and South American magic realism in a few strokes, but I suspect you're already swimming in another direction or colliding against one of those pieces of flotsam - or perhaps clinging to it together with Pi's tiger from Life of Pi by Martel Yann.

The world is just another text or a library (an underwater one if we want to continue the metaphor) - gosh and here we escape into the corridors of Jorges Louis Borge's infinite library and his lottery.

If you want to see my soul, here it is, laid bare. (Prometheus and his liver.) It's as good a map as you're ever going to get, although there is no key except that of your own subconscious. (And ricochet back to A Single Man and on to Michel de Certeau's 'Walking in the City' and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Marco Polo....)

What, on earth?

This morning, literally three minutes ago, it hit me again: What am I doing here?! This crisis is getting old, but somehow it’s not getting wrinkled as it ages – it’s as shiny and appealing as it was five years ago. What on earth am I, a bibliophile, a writer, doing making books to sell? Who do I think I am?!

I recently moved up the ranks (well, one rank) as a publisher. I love the strategic thinking that my job requires: analysing the market and feeling out weak points, devising something to buffer that week point and then making it look pretty. Well, I would if this was what my job entailed. Except that in moving the book through the process, it comes out looking just like everything else. And the market doesn’t want to buy it – we have to convince them that it fills that weak point. Twist their arms into a Chinese bangle. Join the system and convert people, like a Jehovah’s Witness.

But do these books really do anything? Of course a book is a valuable thing. But are these books priceless or just pricey? I don’t think open learning will be effective – copyright exists because people want to be paid for their creative property. Open learning is only appealing because universities need more funding and entrepreneurs want to make money while being considered to be philanthropists. Open learning is the market of the wealthy and well-meaning but naïve liberals.

So again I say, publishing should be left to those who like books and those who don’t care, never to those who worship at their altar.

An update

Having moaned for the last few years about publishing and the sense that it is both the right and the wrong place for me, I am a-moving on. But not away from publishing - further into it. What are you doing? part of me yells (referring to herself in the second and now the third person). Finally, yells another. I (first person, singular) am becoming a publisher.

Note: I have no delusions about the new post. Technically, it's a promotion. Realistically, I am exchanging one set of challenges, perks and frustrations for another. The industry is the same no matter where you go.

But one day, I want to be in charge of a little part of that industry. I want to put my over-inflated sense of responsibility to good use. I want to make decisions, however difficult, and be responsible for them, rather than being held indirectly responsible for and suffering the implications of decisions I do not and cannot make. To do that, I have to do my time, earn my stripes, gather the scars and make a hit-list. No, not really. Only in my imagination.

Now I am not so lost in my imagination that I think that one day, oh one day, we will stop carving up our beloved pets and serving them in paper take-away bags. No, I may be idealistic but I am not stupid. But, I think, maybe one day I can dish one of my favourites up on a silver platter and feed starving children all over the world. Or something (this metaphor is running away with me a little).