My Kindle broke

It's just showing the empty battery screen and won't charge. The funeral will be private. Hopefully I will be back up and running soon.

The Yellow Wallpaper

After finishing the story "The Yellow Wallpaper", I was left with a taste in my mouth -- yes, I know the saying is "a bad taste in my mouth", but that's not what I mean. I was left with a lingering aftertaste, like mouthwash, except that it doesn't make your eyes water -- or maybe it does but not in an unpleasant way. The story sat with me.

Like most of my blog posts from the last five years, the idea for this post came to me months ago and then sat in my drafts folder. When I returned to the draft, it was only one and a half cryptic paragraphs and I couldn't quite remember what My Point had been. (If you are a regular reader or you read far enough back in my blog, you'll know that having A Point - or not having one - is an important part of my writing process.)

So, I decided to read the short story again and blog my thoughts, and see if I could conjure up the sequence of ideas that comprised the planned draft. Someone once told me that my instant messages were like stream of consciousness -- I hit enter at the end of every thought rather than at the end of every sentence or paragraph. I suppose this is a bit like that.

The very first line, which is also the first paragraph of the short story, suggests that the writer is some kind of impostor or that she is out of place. She describes her and her husband as "mere ordinary people", and because this is the late 1800s, she means economically = class = lineage. 

She describes their rental home as "secure ancestral halls", which seems rather pompous now, but I suppose was accurate then. Perhaps I am simply misreading her pride and pleasure in living in a beautiful place. I tend to be a spendthrift and "A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate" sounds like unnecessary expense for two people.

The other thing the first line does is introduce their home "for the summer" as a presence in "The Yellow Wallpaper". I was tempted to describe the building as a 'character', but that suggests some kind of permanence (not the fixed concrete kind, but more the flowing cement kind), because identity, especially when you're writing a character, requires a common thread, something holding the conflicting parts of a character together. (There are so many holes in that statement, but I am going to leave it be for now.) 

As you'll see (or as I'll argue), the building is more a reflection of the narrator's character than a character on its own.

The best thing about the short story is the sense of unease that stalks every line and makes the reader wince. It's like hunting a mythological creature from the sea -- a giant squid, maybe -- that, you'll discover at the last moment, is really hunting you. This unease first appears like a darting dark shadow and accompanying ripples in an otherwise calm sea that rears its head like that of a sea-beast eyeing its prey at the end of the first page.

The narrator notes there is "something queer" about the house because it is being rented out "so cheaply" and because it was empty for so long. (She also describes her assertion as "proud", which is the very last thing I would call the woman in the pages that follow.) The scales of the sea-beast's spine breach the surface as she notes that her husband "laughs" at her justified concerns, "but one expects that in marriage".

I'm not married, but "laughing at your partner" is not part of the marriage vows.

Like women have done throughout history, the narrator justifies her husband's 'micro-aggression' (I believe that's the 'it' term) saying that he "is practical in the extreme" and believes only in things that can be "put down in numbers". You see, Johnnie boy is a doctor and one of "good standing". I struggle to reconcile the two as medical data is qualitative as well as quantitative, but okay.

The narrator then makes a crack about voicing her concerns on "dead paper".

Further proving that she is rational, the narrator writes that her doctor-husband might be the reason she is not recovering (note: this is the first time we time she confides in us about her sickness): "You see," she says, "he does not believe I am sick!" Instead, Dr Husband minimises her illness by diagnosing it as "temporary nervous depression, -- a slight hysterical tendency".

Ah right. Here we have The History of Women's Mental Health in the Western World aka There's Nothing to See Here and Women Be Tripping.

Instead of getting angry, Mrs Doctor shrugs and says "what can one do?" Twice. At first, I was angry at her compliance, but then she writes that her brother is a doctor, too, and he agrees with her husband. Well, obviously, she's the problem then. Darn these women and their emotions.

So she complies with their treatments (for a disease that they say does not exist). And here we come upon my favourite line in the short story: part of her treatment is that she is "absolutely forbidden to 'work' until [she] is well again". I did some research and as the narrator suggests, many doctors believed that "women's problems" were the result of them thinking. (That's it -- the full stop's in the right place.) Women were just not psychologically strong enough to have thoughts. So the treatment was often to "not think". It was called "the rest cure".

I wish I were making this up but I'm not that creative.

Once again, the narrator disagrees with her husband and her brother. She thinks that the best treatment would be work and change (I would argue for purpose and a routine), but "what is one to do?" Indeed.

She does rebel by writing (what she is writing is not clear) and concedes that it is exhausting -- not the act of writing but of rebellion.

She tires of the topic so she changes the topic to -- can you guess? The house. The first thing she says is that it is "beautiful" and the second is that it is "quite alone", surrounded by "hedges and walls and gates that lock". Well, if that isn't a metaphor for something, I'll burn my English literature degree. She goes on about the gardens for a paragraph and mentions how the house stood empty for years ...

And then she says, "there is something strange about the house -- I can feel it". Isn't this kind of intuition part of what got you into this situation, Mrs Doc? Best keep that close to your chest. Oh no, too late. Mrs Doc tells her husband about her feeling and he tells her it's a "draught". I, too, struggle to differentiate between strangeness and a breeze -- it's an easy mistake to make.

Finally! She gets angry with her husband for thinking she's an imbecile and I am with her for all of two seconds before I notice the adverb "unreasonably". Now she attributes her entirely justified emotion of anger to a disease of the emotions that she doesn't really think she has. If she has a condition, it's in that tangled mess.

He won't even let her have the room she wants! She wants one on the ground floor because it opens onto the patio and the windows are bordered by flowers, but no. The fun police insist that they use a bedroom upstairs and again she justifies his iron rule, saying he's so "careful and loving". Those are not two adjectives I would usually put together and, to be honest, I'm willing Mrs Doc to run as if this were a horror movie and they had just discovered that the phone no longer worked.

Her husband is treating her like a child, which is perfect, because she reveals that the room they end up taking (the one he chooses) is -- wait for it -- the nursery. Next level of the metaphor locked and loaded.

Mrs Doc describes how "big" and "airy" the room is, with "air and sunshine galore", but I have watched enough horror movies and read enough ghost stories to know that bad things happen in broad daylight too. And the fact that the "windows are barred" is definitely not alarming, even though she immediately notes that they are barred as a safety precaution for "little children". Is that a thing? Do children often hurl themselves out of windows?

She then notes that the wallpaper is ripped -- but it's ripped above her bed to as far as she can reach, contradicting her little children theory. So she says it looks "as if a boys' school had used it". Again, is this a thing? Do boys at school rip the wallpaper from the walls?

The narrator rambles on for a minute about the artistic quality of the wallpaper and then chucks the 'S' word at you like a practical joke that isn't funny. Still describing the wallpaper, she writes that it's made up of "lame, uncertain curves" that "suddenly commit suicide -- plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard-off contradictions". Obviously the narrator has death on the brain if that's the first metaphor she thinks of for wallpaper patterns.

There's some more description of the "repellant" yellow-orange wallpaper, before Mrs Doc hurriedly notes that she must stop writing because Mr Doc is coming and "he hates to have me write a word". Luckily for her, for the next page or so she doesn't feel like writing, even though her husband is away day and even night -- say what? Apparently he's tending to "serious" cases. Oh, I'm sure he is.

The contradictions now pick up the pace: the narrator says, in one breath, that her case is not serious, and in the next, that "John does not know how much I really suffer".

Then comes a line that I highlighted on first reading: "He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him". I beg to differ, but that's another post.

Here we have the first mention of the baby -- her baby. But she doesn't talk about the child himself. She describes how "Mary is so good with him" and how she can't be with him because of her nervousness. At this point, my bet is on post-partum depression, which sounds like a darn good reason "to suffer" to me.

She quickly changes the subject back to the wallpaper. Hubby won't replace the paper because apparently the worst thing you can do for a depressive is "give way to such fancies". He convinces her that this is her idea, that the room a moment ago she was calling "atrocious" is now "airy and comfortable", by hugging her and calling her his "blessed little goose". I genuinely want to throw up.

She likes the room, she now says, but not the "horrid wallpaper". 

Mrs Doc describes how this room gives her a view of the garden and the bay and a "shaded lane" that runs from a dock to the house. She thinks she can see people walking along the lane, which doesn't sound unreasonable, but of course hubby gaslights her by advising her not to "give way to fancy" (again) because a "nervous weakness" like hers will lead to all sorts of ... well, more fancies. Fancies, being bad, I gather.

"So I try," she writes.

She thinks that writing might relieve some of the "press of ideas" she feels, but she's too exhausted -- that's definitely not a symptom of depression. I mean, it's not a symptom, it's one of the primary symptoms of depression, but I'm not a doctor.

I don't know much about abusive relationships, but to recap, we have a lot of gaslighting and some isolation. I have a feeling there's some love-bombing ("blessed little goose") and now she tells us that she can only see her family when she gets well, because "he would as soon put fireworks in my pillowcase as to let have those stimulating people about now".

And we're only 30% of the way through to this ode to wallpaper.

At this point, it occurs to me that I should separate this post into several shorter posts, but for now, I'm going to keep going. I may insert headings as signposts for the lazy (I mean, you're reading this 'summary', rather than the real thing, so ...).

Of course, it's the wallpaper's fault that she can't see her family -- its "vicious influence", "impertinence" and "everlastingness", represented in an area where the pieces of wallpaper don't align and one part of the pattern is higher than the other. As an editor, I can appreciate how frustrating it is when things are not done perfectly, so I'm with her, but I don't usually blame misused semicolons for my emotional (in)stability. 

But then she gets caught up childhood memories, describing how mini her would lie awake at night, afraid of "blank walls and plain furniture". OK, she doesn't say 'afraid'. She says she would get both "entertainment and terror", which tracks with what we already know about her and, quite honestly, describes her relationship with her husband.

She talks about the furniture for a bit and then we're back at the 'torn' wallpaper. It has a companion in the "scratched and gouged and splintered" floor. What were these boys up to?! "But," she says, "I don't mind a bit -- only the paper."

I'm not buying the excuse that this used to be a children's nursery or a boys' school dormitory. Unless they were feral children who had been captured and imprisoned in the house and had somehow gotten hold of weapons. I can't think of a more logical excuse for the state of the bedroom, but whatever it is, it's not unarmed children.

Luckily, a perfect example of femininity appears to compare our heroine against: the doctor's sister. "She is a perfect, an enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession." I love her already.

Mrs Doc has spied the approach of her sister-in-law through the window, so there's time to wax on about the wallpaper for only another two paragraphs: there's a second pattern that you can only see in certain light, one that's "strange, provoking, formless" and "seems to sulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design". That definitely does not describe our heroine -- the sense that there is something else happening beneath the front she presents to her husband and others. I'm reading too much into it, right?

There's a break, during which the Fourth of July takes place, and Mrs Doc sees her family, and she says she's exhausted even though Jennie (the sister-in-law) saw to everything. That'll happen when you're depressed. Hubby seems to be getting frustrated because he threatens to send his wife away for treatment and while Hubby is bad, another doctor is bound to be even worse.

"I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time.

"Of course I don't when John is here, or anybody else, but when I am alone."

But there is a silver lining: Doc is away most of the time now, so Mrs Doc gets to spend time walking in the garden and sitting on the porch alone, rather than sitting in the house staring at wallpaper. But of course it's never far from her mind!

I'm getting tired of describing wallpaper -- I don't know how the author kept it up -- so I'm considering  a placeholder: [WALLPAPER]. I feel like I'm betraying your trust in me but this is also my blog and I can do what I want so [WALLPAPER].

Nah, I can't handle the sense of betrayal, so I came back just to fill this in. Mrs Doc tries to follow the pattern to "some sort of a conclusion" but finds it's not repeated by "any laws of radiation, or alteration, or repetition, or symmetry", but that it is repeated "by the breadths", you know, as wallpaper is. As a result the "sprawling outlines" create "slanting waves of optic horror, like a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase". Rarely do I meet a metaphor that fully obscures meaning, but this one is a contender. I have absolutely no idea what seaweed chasing more seaweed looks like.

Then Mrs Doc takes a nap (in a bed that is bolted down to the floor) because she is exhausted from describing the pattern of the wallpaper so indescribably. 

Our heroine's fatigue is getting worse. She feels a pressure to express herself and a relief when she does, but she says, "the effort is getting to be greater than the relief". Doc's response is "tonics and things", along with "ale and wine and rare meat". That is why doctors get a bad rap: bad doctors.

Perkins published this short story in 1892. Western psychology was only a few decades old and Freud was still obsessed with, well, his nethers, but she knew that the notion of hysteria was ridiculous and that the conventional treatments of the time were counterintuitive. However, it would be many more decades before doctors would come around to her way of thinking -- and how many lives were contaminated in the meantime?

According to one source, "hysterical neurosis" was only removed from the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980. But most doctors were no longer diagnosing "hysteria", in favour of more refined and appropriate descriptions of mental illness by then, right? Wrong. As late as the 1970s, two doctors misdiagnosed an outbreak of myalgic encephalomyelitis as hysteria. That's 80 years later.

Anyway, Mrs Doc tries to have a reasonable conversation with her husband about her options (granted she ends up crying) but he treats her like a child, picking her up, putting her to bed and reading to her until she falls asleep.

Then comes a gem: that she is simply not trying hard enough. "He says no one but myself can help me out of it, that I must use my will and self-control and not let my silly fancies run away with me."

At least the baby is safe from the wallpaper! That's not my thought, but hers: At least "the baby is well and happy, and does not have to occupy this nursery with the horrid wallpaper". "What a fortunate escape!" She seems to suggest that she is accepting a kind of punishment so that her child doesn't have to -- and this is the saddest part of the short story so far.

But she's only distracted from the wallpaper for a few moments, because only Mrs Doc can see the meaning in the wallpaper, which is becoming clearer every day. "It is only the same shape" despite have no pattern except breadth; "it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern". She forgets her mission here, which is to protect her son from being exposed to this ugliness, and thinks "I wish John would take me away from here".

I am getting whiplash.

Our heroine tries to discuss leaving with her husband, because "he is so wise, and ... loves me so." So she waits for him to fall asleep and then broaches the subject. Well, first, she waits for the moonlight (which she hates sometimes) to make the wallpaper creepier than normal, until "The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern" in its desire to get out, so much so that she had to get up and touch it to see if it was moving, and then she asks him if they can leave.

When she wakes him up, he asks her "What is it, little girl?"

I'm leaving a bit of a gap here for my blood pressure to go back to normal. Because if someone asked me that ... middle of the night or no ... even if I was touching the wallpaper to check if there was a woman trying to get out ... well, there would be problems.

Anyway, she asks and he says no, because she is really better, whether she realises it or not. Trust him, because he's a doctor, yadda yadda. She must be getting better because she argues with him.

To which he responds: "Bless her little heart ... she shall be as sick as she pleases!"

She leaves that without touching it and merely asks that he not leave her alone again before the lease on the house ends, which is only another three weeks. He assures her, and once more tries to convince her "Really, dear, you are better!" I'm proud of her as she starts to disagree with him, but then he gives her a "stern, reproachful look" like a father chiding a teenager. He gaslights her for a bit because he's "a physician" and she has "a temperament like yours" and then they sleep. 

Well, no, he sleeps and she tries to figure out where the pattern in the wallpaper (which doesn't exist) begins and ends.

And we're at 60%.

When morning comes, Mrs Doc is still trying to figure out the pattern. Except that, "by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law" that is "torturing". Essentially, you try to follow it and it evades you, slapping you in the face and trampling all over you. The outside pattern, in particular, is like "a fungus" -- "a toadstool in joints", whatever that means.

She confides in us that the pattern changes with the light -- but she is the only one who seems to notice, which is "why I watch it always". That's definitely why. It has nothing to do with the fact that you are struggling with mental illness and the only therapeutic advice you are getting is to eat well and spend all your time alone, away from family, doing nothing and this external factor gives you something to fixate on and obsess over.

Luckily, Mrs Doc is being a good girl. She is sleeping a lot -- no, wait, she pretends to sleep. Why would you do that?

She writes, "I am getting a little afraid of John" and his sister, too, because they ... seem to be colluding with the wallpaper. Paranoia? Not our "little girl"!

On the bright side, ensuring that no one knows the secret of the wallpaper (i.e. the woman trapped inside trying to get out) gives our heroine something to focus on. It gives her a purpose. So she eats well and says little and sleeps a lot (or at least, seems to) and laughs at her husband's unfunny jokes, and her doctor-husband is thrilled. 

But in reality, she is watching the wallpaper: "There are always new shoots on the fungus and new shades of yellow all over it. I cannot keep count ..."

After a week of fog and rain, the wallpaper unleashes another weapon: its smell, which "creeps all over the house". "I find it hovering in the dining-room, skulking in the parlor, hiding in the hall, lying in wait for me on the stairs." Luckily, she doesn't consider any drastic action as part of her final battle against the wallpaper. "I thought seriously of burning the house," she says. 

But then she gets used to the smell, so her focus shifts back to the colour of the wallpaper. Because she's noticed a new mark behind the furniture that goes around the room: "round and round and round -- it makes me dizzy!"

Then our heroine makes a horrifying discovery: there are many women trying to escape the wallpaper, but "the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white!" The discovery wouldn't be so bad, she says, "If those heads were covered or taken off". That's practical, I guess.

But no wait, that's not all. It gets worse: "that woman gets out in the daytime!" Our heroine knows this because she has seen her. She knows it's the same woman because she creeps and "most woman do not creep by daylight". She hasn't seen her in the house, but in the lane she can see from the bedroom window -- the one which her husband said no one used. She understands exactly why the woman creeps and hides, she tells us. "It must be very humiliating to be caught creeping by daylight."

And in an instant, we know the creeping woman is her, our heroine. "I always lock the door when I creep by daylight," she tells us. And "I don't want anybody to get that woman out at night but myself."

After that revelation, our heroine goes back to feigning ignorance. Now her obsession is removing the wallpaper. But she doesn't mean to simply pull it from the wall: she means to dissect it, pulling the patterns apart. And there's more to her plan, but her paranoia has now obliterated all sense and she doesn't dare "trust people too much".

She was being a good girl, but her hubby is onto her now and (I hate to be on his side but) she sees him as the enemy now. When he asks questions about her behaviour, where once she have seen that as evidence he loved her, now she states, "As if I couldn't see through him!" 

Because obviously the wallpaper has corrupted him.

I almost feel guilty that I've maligned the doctor's character so much to this point. Almost.

The husband and his wife are due to move back home the next day, with the room empty of everything except the bed (bolted to the floor, remember?) so Mrs Doc begins to pull the wallpaper down with the help of the woman inside: "I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled".

Her sister-in-law is a bit disconcerted, but ultimately doesn't protest when Mrs Doc says she wants to spend the night in the empty room.

That night, she strikes, locking the door to the bedroom and throwing the key out of the window. She has a rope, which she justifies saying that she will use it to tie up the creeping woman. If you think she has any rational thought left, that leaves when she bites a piece of the bed frame off in frustration because she cannot move it. Then she peels off the remaining wallpaper she can reach ... "and the pattern just enjoys it! All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths just shriek with derision!"

She is, however, rational enough to know she shouldn't jump out the window because "a step like that is improper and might be misconstrued". At least she still has her priorities straight.

The last few pages are hard to read.

Now she merges with the woman/women in the wallpaper. She sees the women from the window and she wonders, "I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper, as I did?" She fastens the rope around her (though it's not clear if it's by her waist or neck) and circles the room, her shoulder pressed up against the wall, so that no one can take her outside. "I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes at night, and that is hard!" she says.

Her husband finally finds the key and opens the door, but, ironically, faints as soon as he sees her -- so she has to step over him as she continues to pace the circumference of the room, over and over again. The last thing she says to him is, "I've got out at last, in spite of you and Jane! And I've pulled off most of the wallpaper, so you can't put me back!"

So our heroine wins, in a sense, by defying her husband, but at what expense? What other outcome was there in a society that denied her agency? She could either take that agency and be mad, or she could be "well" and live under her husband's thumb. But we know that, beyond the story, she's most likely going to institutionalised because of her behaviour, so even this choice is none at all.

Here we have the literal "madwoman in the attic" (coined in 1979 with Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gunbar's book, which you can access here for free) -- an unnamed woman suffering post-partum depression, treated with isolation and a lack of stimulation. That's where the taste in my mouth was coming from.

As I said at the beginning, the title might as well be The History of Women's Mental Health in the Western World aka There's Nothing to See Here and Women Be Tripping, but it's a lot less snappy than "The Yellow Wallpaper".

Disclaimer: I know that I have been glib about a very unglib topic, but that's my blog and it signifies my extreme frustration with the lack of sensitivity with which people still view depression  today. If you experience depression, please tell me how many times people have told you that you just need to exercise more?! I call it the Virgin Active Cure. If I had to blog my serious reactions, this post would be about two lines long and say pretty much this.

Lost: Part 1

 I'm watching Lost for the fourth time (thanks, Netflix). Apparently so are thousands of other people around the world, making the series a global phenomenon for the second time. 

Warning: the final season and especially the last episode always reduce me to tears -- ugly, uncontrollable, cathartic tears -- and I plan to blog about it. And no, the tears are not because of the shitshow that is the final season. I can't quite explain it, but this show does things to me. So why would I put myself through that -- again? Because the series is that good. 

I've been reading articles that other people have been posting about rewatching the series, like me, and watching the series for the first time -- and, most interesting, watching people watch the series for the first time, including this hilarious one. Something that keeps coming up is that new viewers, unscarred by years of waiting for some sort of solution to the many mysteries of the island, don't hate the last season. In fact, they think it's pretty good. And they can't understand why we think it means what we think it means.

I'm trying so hard not to give spoilers here. If you haven't watched the series, stop here. Your viewing should be unmarred by any expectations.

I, like everyone else, thought that the last season, especially the last episode, meant that everyone had been dead all along. That everything the characters had gone through had been part of some kind of shared purgatory, lowering the stakes (because they could never have been rescued and all the trials they experienced were meaningless set-ups) and rendering its mysteries void.

Apparently, and this is a big apparently, we were wrong. It's one reading, but one that new viewers don't share. Which means that we're all obliged to rewatch the series and see why our cynicism led us to the worst possible conclusion. All hands on deck. Or bamboo. Or whatever.

But I started rewatching the series before I read these articles and the mystery deepened. Why? Some people, most of them uncultured heathens, don't like the series for the reason the rest of us love it: the mysteries. I once read that people formed viewing parties each week, after which they'd discuss their theories about where the island was, what the Dharma initiative was, what the numbers meant, who the others were, what happened to Walt and more. 

I'm a viewing party of one. And so far, I want to know two things: where the polar bears came from and what the smoke monster is.

The series may be the product of several writers' imaginations, but it became something more concrete over the years. It doesn't matter that we don't have any answers (or that we have several hundred instead) -- the island exists out there somewhere now because we willed it into being. The mysteries are the important thing, the soil on which the island is built, and the joy of the series is uncovering clues and piecing them together -- no matter whether or not they actually lead somewhere. It's a Schrodinger's box situation; they're both there and not there at the same time.

In Part 2, I plan to discuss the first thing that intrigued me about the series: the characters and what they represent. But I rarely plan my posts (no sarcasm needed, thanks) (this one was meant to be about how the first season primes us to read the final season as we did, so I guess that'll be forthcoming too), so who knows. See you in the next one.

Questioning my sanity

So I've finally done it. No, not started (re-re-restarted) Ulysses, because if I could get past the first 20 pages, I swear I would pay for one of those sky-writing messages. I think reading (never mind understanding) the 500+ pages of grammar no-nos that is Ulysses may be a bigger accomplishment than writing the darn thing. (Calm down. I'm kidding.)

I could keep anticipating your guesses, but it's Friday night and I'm tired, so I'm just going to get right to My Point (I'm as surprised as you).

I finally started Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. 

This may be a Ulysses situation, where I read the first 20 pages 50 times and then give up, but this book has sentences with full stops so I'm fairly certain I'll get to page 50. (Again, I'm kidding. Although my Kindle says that it will take another 54 hours to read both Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, which is a pretty daunting prediction.)

I've been avoiding it because it has been described as the 'Bible of capitalism' and I have some fundamental issues with capitalism as a social system. Although, can you really call it a social system if it's designed to benefit the few and ignore the needs of the rest of the population? (Relax, it's just a question.)

Then I read Anthem and I was (predictably) annoyed. A little more than annoyed, actually. The premise isn't that unusual: a communist fever dream where everyone is controlled by a central force and difference is anathema. My issue with these types of stories is the assumption that communism is the same thing as socialism (this is directed more at the reader than the author) and that it inevitably leads to a grim dystopia (this is wholly in the pen of the author).

I promised myself then that I wouldn't read Atlas Shrugged because I value my sanity. So what has changed? Nothing. Except that maybe my sanity is in a less precarious state. Or it's teetering on the edge of a rock on the edge of a precipice and a gust of wind will push me over into an abyss. I guess we'll have to see.

Confessing my first crime

Once upon a time, I thought that not finishing a book you had started was a crime. A social crime on par with stealing, only justified in the most dire of circumstances. Who leaves a story stranded like that? I wondered. What kind of degenerate abandons characters they haven't even met yet?! 

(You probably think I am exaggerating, and I understand that, but I am not. I still do not fully trust People Who Do Not Finish Books On the Regular.) 

I ploughed through Michel Houellebecq's Atomised on this principle -- come to think of it, that may have been the book that broke me (go read some of the reviews and you'll see what I mean. Whatever you do, do not read it.). A short time later, I picked up a book by Richard Powers, the first pages of which had the vaguest scent of Houellbecq's horrifying imagination, and I noped right out of that first chapter. 

So it began.

Next was The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, which I just kind of forgot to continue reading. I was about a quarter of the way through and then I started reading something else, with the intention of coming back to it, and I just never did. This was more a case of neglect than abandonment, but that's still a crime.

Since then, there have been many -- oh so many -- books that I have cracked open and left cracked, with no intention of ever trying to undo my crime, and a small contingent that I plan to visit again. I'm making my way through Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light again (although I confess to taking a quick break to read The Wild Things).

Two of Roberto Bolano's books -- 2666 and The Savage Detectives -- have fallen victim to my Houellebecq-inspired crime spree, as well as The Biographer's Tale by AS Byatt, The Golden House by Salman Rushdie, Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer, Save Me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald, The Birds Fall Down by Rebecca West and the second book in the Last Policeman series.

All, according to the critics, good books, but not enough to hold my attention. See, I'm an editor, which means I spend the whole day reading and rereading content, focusing on words and phrases to try to make them as functional as possible. After a solid eight or ten hours of this, it's hard to get out of that mindset. Truly great books lull that part of my brain to sleep, but good or almost great books leave room for that part of my brain to kick.

So, in the meantime, I have reread a few books, looking for that feeling you get when you read a truly beautiful book. I'm a literary junkie looking for a fix. And finding it in works like The People's Act of Love by James Meek, Marissa Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics and Night Film, Margaret Atwood's MaddAdam trilogy, and most recently, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.

Do not judge a book by its movie, folks. Even on a second reading, Cloud Atlas is the kind of book I wish I could write, but since I can't, I'll just read it over and over again, finding something new each time.

I am confessing my crime partly because I hope to stop doing it. But, really, I'm just assuaging my guilty conscience so I can sin anew.

Westworld, Season 3

Originally, this was going to be a post comparing the Terminator franchise with Westworld. I'll explain why a bit later, but I've decided that my love for the former can't share a post with another franchise, especially one not worthy. (Yes, I said it!) That post also explains why I have shifted the focus of my blog slightly. Basically, I spend all day reading and editing text, so all I want to do afterwards is not read. But I still need stories to cope with the everyday, so I watch a lot of TV, which means you'll just have to accept that I'll be posting about TV series more. It is what it is, and I'm not going to argue about it.

Anyway ... I was motivated to write this post after watching Season 3 of Westworld (which was about a year ago, and no, I haven't watched Season 4 yet, for reasons to be explained - let me finish!). Something had been jumping up and down at the edge of my awareness from the end of Season 1 and through Season 2. By the middle of Season 3, I was having full-on conversations with the "something".

The androids are too human. They have clearly been written by humans. It's a bit like watching a portrayal of a human created by an alien that only knows about human behaviour from watching mainstream TV.

The androids think of themselves as singular identities. They refer to themselves as "me" and "I" and they have memories that they seem to organise in a linear way, like a human would. This singularism is forced on us because we are encased in a single body. Although our cells die and are replaced, and we grow and mature and creep toward death, most of us experience our bodies as a constant entity (note I said most).

The "I" of the androids, however, have been housed, first, in a "mainframe" as part of a computer program, and then downloaded into multiple bodies to live out different storylines. Their names and identities change with the story. Although the series doesn't deal with this, I don't see how it would be profitable to have each character active in only one place in the park at one time. Surely, you'd have the same character in multiple destinations, where you are sure they won't run into each other.

Once their story - or their part in a larger story - has ended, their "I" is uploaded again and interrogated, while their bodies are either prepared to go back into the field or archived and replaced. This would happen daily or every few days.

Now, bear in mind that many of the storylines were traumatic, especially for women. They took place in the Wild Wild West where women were at best someone's daughter or wife, and at worst, worth less than a cowboy's horse. Most of the female androids experience both extremes and everything in between during their 30 years or fewer in the park.

Dolores and Maeve

When the androids escape, they are wearing their respective bodies, and their personalities continue to develop in a way that is consistent with their programming and their experiences in the park. They think of themselves as singular selves with a history and a future that they are fighting to protect.

I couldn't jump this hurdle. I couldn't reconcile how an android that has existed both as part of a computer program and as different personalities playing out the same scenarios over and over could think of themselves as a singular identity rather than a pluralistic one. (Note: I'm adopting "pluralistic" as the antonym of "singular" because that's the word that keeps coming to mind, and if the writers of Westword can play fast and loose with meaning, so can I.)

Once they leave Westworld (the park), Dolores and Maeve think of themselves as separate people, but if they are the product of the same program, are they really? Surely the edges of their personalities would blend into each other? Surely they would be the same and different at the same time?

I expected both characters to become more "glitchy" as they spent time in the outside world - not necessarily in a negative way. I expected them to display a digitally induced form of DID (dissociative identity disorder), where the multiple facades of their person-hood would become apparent. I expected them to act more like a product of a computer program.

But instead, they doubled down and became more human. And I got more and more irritated, until by the final episode of Season 3, I was shouting at my computer. I think I missed a lot of the subtext - and probably the larger text - because I was so lost in trying to reconcile how these two characters could be so human. (In other words, I may have gotten some of the details wrong, so please don't bother me about them.)

Sam Worthington in Terminator Salvation

The link to the Terminator franchise comes in the fourth instalment, called Terminator Salvation. Don't shoot me, but I actually like the movie, not as a continuation of the series, but on its own. Christian Bale is the worst John Connor, but Sam Worthington (despite what I think of Avatar, which is not good) steps up and does a great job of getting us to relate to his character, before we find out his secret - the secret even he didn't know. *dramatic pause*

In one of the last scenes, Skynet appears to Worthington's character and lays out how it is using Sam to get to John. Apart from the ludicrousness of a computer program explaining its evil masterplan to one of its own servants, Skynet displays the same kind of singular identity that the androids in Westworld do. Perhaps that is the only way to engage with us humans, but it's just so ... jarring.

I don't know what I'm expecting instead. Perhaps some of the hammy acting from Dr Who (of which I'm a fan, before you come for me, but come on - Daleks?), except without the characters melting down because the human brain is incapable of housing a digital entity (I feel like I've seen that somewhere before ...) or the offensive attempt to portray genuine mental illness as something to ogle.

As much as I enjoyed Season 1 of Westworld, I've been avoiding Season 4. Perhaps the writers and actors addressed all this and so I'm complaining into a void. Perhaps ... Or I'm going to spend another eight episodes yelling at my computer. Stay tuned.

The Somerton Man

I'm breaking the mold (my mold, which admittedly was already fractured and worn) here by blogging about something that is not literary or related to publishing or my frustrations with publishing or about the discord between the world of my imagination and reality or - you get the point. For those of you already familiar with the Somerton Man, you can probably jump ahead or just skip this post entirely. I have nothing new to add. All this information has ben analysed and debated over and over and over. But if you're still reading, let's go.

First: I love mysteries. You may have realised this when I blogged about Marquez' Chronicle of a Death Foretold. But it has to be the right mystery. My criteria are vague. I'm not much for supernatural theories - magic is just science we haven't figured out yet, so nothing 'mystic'. I enjoy true crime, but not all true crime. I'm interested in crimes affecting women (I can make a sarcastic comment here but I won't), and not interested in crimes involving children. I'm interested in why people break the social contract, but I don't believe in making excuses for deviant behaviour either. (Life's hard, but it's not a character in your story and so it also doesn't owe you anything.) I particularly like frustrating mysteries, where there is a set of clues and the "truth", but the only way to link one to the other is to have been there and witnessed it.

Cue: the mystery of the Somerton Man. I referred to this offhand in a recent (time is relative) post, but let me explain why I'm writing about it now: the mystery was recently solved, except that it wasn't. We now know who he is, but not why he died or - well, you'll see.

On 1 December 1948, on a beach in Somerton Park, Adelaide, Australia, two horse-riders stumbled across a man in a suit. At first, they thought he was doing what people do at a beach (particularly, I would imagine, in a post-world war society): sitting on the sand, watching the waves and contemplating the choices he had made, but as they rode back home, they realised something was wrong. There was no obvious cause of death, and witnesses reported they had seen the man in the same position the previous evening from about 7 p.m.

He was dressed formally: in a shirt and tie, brown trousers and shoes, and a tailored double-breasted jacket, but he was not wearing a hat (remember: it's 1948). He did not have a wallet and there was no other form of identification in any of his pockets. In fact, the labels had all been carefully cut from his clothes. Police immediately suspected suicide, or perhaps a stroke (but that was not quite as racy).

But then the autopsy found his stomach, intestines, kidneys, liver and spleen all to be "deeply congested" while his heart was perfectly normal. The Somerton Man had been poisoned, but there was no trace of any poison in his blood or in any of the affected organs. The only conclusion the coroner could make was that his death was "not natural" and probably "not accidental".

(I'm going to condense time and mix details like this with the findings of the police's investigation because, well, I can. Also, I am going to leave out dead ends, like people incorrectly identifying the body to police, because you can read all that online but not here. The Wikipedia entry is a very detailed account.)

The coroner noted that the man's shoes were clean and had been recently polished, suggesting he had not been wandering the shore and considering the many ironies of existence. The sand around the body was not disturbed and there was no evidence of spit or vomit, which one would expect from a man dying of poison. Later, a witness would claim that he had seen one man carrying another in the vicinity on the night the Somerton Man died.

Found in various places on the man's person were: an unlit cigarette, a box of cigarettes (which contained several cigarettes of a different brand), an unused rail ticket to Henley Beach, a possibly used bus ticket, a comb, chewing gum and a half-empty box of matches.

The police were unable to identify the man using his dental records. Two newspapers ran the story, but all the tips flooded in in response to the publicity led to dead ends. So, the police made a plaster cast of the man's head and shoulders, the coroner embalmed the body and it was buried.

I know what you're thinking. It was my first thought, too. It's 1948 and the man has no identification, not even the labels on his clothes. Obviously, he was a spy, because the movies have taught me that every vaguely suspicious person in the 1940s was a spy. Apparently Adelaide was Spy City because there was a military research facility nearby and Australia's espionage (I mean, intelligence) organisations were going through some "changes", so they had a surplus. We'll make this The Theory to Beat.

The next "break" in the case (check out the lingo) was a piece of paper that was sewn into one of the man's trouser pockets, which was discovered several months after the body came to be just a body. (Note also that there was evidence he had tailored other spots on his own suit, which will be relevant shortly.) It was rolled up and on it was the phrase "Tamám shud", in a "foreign" script. The phrase comes from the final page of a book of poetry titled Rubaiyat of Omar Kayyam, translated from Persian to English in 1849, and it means "it is ended". The poems are all about living life with no regrets and, so, dying without any baggage (excuse the pun). It looked like the paper had literally torn from a copy of the book, rather than copied by hand.

Actual photo of the script, via Wikimedia Commons

That book turned up in the backseat of someone's car, which was parked near the beach and had its windows open because it was a different time. The final phrase had been torn out from the back of the book, so it cannot be coincidence. The car owner gave the book to police once he realised it was relevant to the case, but he said he did not know the dead man. Some reports say that the book appeared in the man's car a full week or two before the Somerton Man died, suggesting he was staying in the area and that he visited the beach at least once before his death.

The book contained two pieces of information. The first was a series of capital letters, written by hand at the back of the book, that were assumed to be a code:

Police scan of the handwritten code, via Wikimedia Commons

However, cryptologists have never been able to break the code and at least one professional organisation asserts that it cannot be a code. So far, this is very spy-like behaviour - except for the fact that this book landed in the police's hands at all - supporting The Theory to Beat. 

The second piece of information was a telephone number, also written at the back of the book. This phone number belonged to Jessica Ellen "Jo" Thompson, who claimed she did not know the dead man. However, police noted that she was being "evasive" (I am curious what exactly this entailed) and that when she was shown the plaster case, she looked like she was "about to faint" (you know, as women do). She then asked that her name and other details be removed from the case files (and the police complied). 

Jo died in 2007 and in 2014, her daughter Kate said she believed her mother did know the man but for some reason refused to acknowledge him. There were also details about her mother that Kate couldn't reconcile, like the fact that Jo spoke Russian but refused to say where or when she had learnt the language and she was interested in communism (which of course means she must have been depraved). The only clue her mother left her daughter with was the offhand comment that the Somerton Man was known "at a higher level than the police force". What are the chances that they were both spies? I've already covered the "surplus" of "agents" both in the area and after the war, so I'd say pretty decent.

The only information Jo would give the police is that she had owned a copy of the Rubaiyat during the war but she had given it to a soldier named Alf Boxall, and so for a while, police believed that Boxall was the Somerton Man. But in 1949, Boxall was found to be alive and in Sydney (with the wonders of social media, I imagine they would have found him sooner). He still had the book and the final page was intact (although technically, that doesn't prove that this book was the same one Jo had given him - apparently, it was not that rare a book).

In January 1949 (roughly two months after the Somerton Man's death), staff at the Adelaide railway station (remember the train ticket) reported that a suitcase had been checked in on the day of his death (30 November) and had not been claimed. The outer label had been removed. Inside were some of the normal things you'd expect to find: pyjamas, slippers, a dressing gown, a pair of trousers (although, interestingly, the cuffs of the trousers contained sand), underwear and shaving items (but no socks). But then there were some unusual things: a screwdriver, a well-worn table knife, a pair of scissors, a square of zinc and a stencilling brush (used on merchant ships).

Also in the suitcase was a spool of orange thread, which matched the thread that had been used to sew the scrap of paper into the Somerton Man's pocket.

A police photo of the discovery of the suitcase, via Wikimedia Commons

The labels on these clothes had been removed too, but the Somerton Man had not been as careful here: some of the clothes had different spellings of the name "Keane" stamped on them and there was a laundry bag with the same name. The clothes could have been second-hand (today we'd say "vintage"), but what are the chances that all of his clothes came from the same source? This was another dead end as the police could not find a missing person with the surname "Keane" or "Kean", not only in Australia, but in other countries too.

As I mentioned, leads continued to trickle in but none of them stuck.

Let's take a massive leap forward now, not only in terms of time but technology. Jo had also had a son, named Robin. In 2013, Robin's widow and his son gave an interview claiming that the Somerton Man was Jo's lover and Robin's father. The proof: the shape of their ears was the same (I kid you not). The police decided to re-open the case and exhume the body to try to extract some DNA evidence. That proved futile, as the body had decomposed too badly, but several strands of hair were found embedded in the plaster cast, which turned out to be viable.

There were a lot of "cooks" in the kitchen by now (most as unqualified as me), but a physicist and electronic engineer named David Abbott and a forensic genealogist named Colleen Fitzpatrick were on the trail with the hairs from the cast. They used the DNA they were able to extract and ran it through a "genealogy research database" (the home page of which claims that "Anyone can upload their DNA profile, analyze the results, and compare DNA shared with others"). They found a distant cousin of the Somerton Man and used that information to construct a family tree of a couple of thousand people (which, still, was the best lead anyone had had in 60-odd years). 

With a bit of sleuthing, Abbott and Fitzpatrick found their man: Carl Webb, an electrical engineer from Victoria, Australia, who had disappeared in 1947. (I do have to point out that this investigation was private and did not take place with police assistance, and that it still needs to be verified by sources other than the media, but I'm going to go with the DNA evidence and the woman whose entire career is dedicated to this kind of thing (i.e. Fitzpatrick) over the organisation that did not find the identity of the Somerton Man in - let me calculate this again - 74 years.)

The information on Webb is pretty scant. He was apparently born in Melbourne in 1905 and then married in 1941. He was "an instrument-maker" and his wife was a "21-year-old foot specialist", according to an interesting article in Smithsonian Magazine. Webb left his wife in 1947 and she started divorce proceedings (in  his absence) in late 1951, being apparently one of the only people who was not aware of the tantalising mystery brewing across the whole second half-century of the 1900s. He liked to read and write poetry, as well as bet on the ponies (those in the know now speculate that the "code" at the back of the book was a shorthand record of the horses he had bet on). Oh, and to nail this coffin shut, his sister was married to a man named ... Thomas Keane.

As I "hinted" at at the beginning of this post, the mystery is solved but not: we have a name and a bare timeline, but not the details of the tapestry, the meat of the pie (inside joke). Was Webb poisoned by someone else, or did he decide that life was just not worth the hassle? If the former, which I am going to tack to The Theory to Beat as the most likely, what was he poisoned with and why did it not show up in his blood or organs? Who was the man who allegedly carried him to the beach and then staged his body? Why was that scrap of paper sewn into his clothing? Why were all the labels removed from his clothes and from his suitcase? What happened in the year and eight months between when he left his wife and shuffled off this mortal coil without a soul noting his demise, at least in public? And what was his relationship with Jo Thompson?

Shakespeare had the innocent Juliet ponder, "What's in a name?" This story suggests not much, particularly if more than half a century has gone by between a man's death (which seems to be the most interesting thing about his life) and the opportunity to erect a headstone. All of which could be proof that he was a spy and doing a better job of hiding it than Jo Thompson. Alternatively, facing down the bleakness of existence in a really bleak decade, perhaps he thought he would do in death what he couldn't do in life: leave a mark, which is kind of like poetry writ large.

I still back The Theory to Beat, for the record. I'm invested in it now, which is proof of nothing. We have the evidence and there is the truth, but we have no way to link those two things together, except using a narrative (and until someone cracks the code of time travel - but then wouldn't we already see proof of someone already having returned to past and solved the mystery?). So I suppose in the end, this ended up being a literary post, in a sense.

A police photo of the Somerton Man's corpse, via Wikimedia Commons