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...)