Beginning Foucault's Pendulum

I wrote the bones of this post three years ago, when I was recovering from a reading slump. For most people, this diagnosis is not worrying - it means your life is full and you don't have time for frivolities. For me, a reading slump has a darker meaning. Reading is how I understand the world, it's how I soothe myself, it's how I gather the strength to continue from one day to the next. Without it, I'm literally body slamming the world without armour, with my eyes closed and my teeth clamped shut. (You may think I'm exaggerating here, and I can see why you'd think this, but no, dear reader, for once, I am not.)

Bear this in mind as you read on. It may also help you to know I never got any further than a couple of pages into Foucault's Pendulum.

I should have known, from the moment I read the word "isochronal" in the second sentence and had no idea what it meant or how it could possibly describe a type of "majesty".

(Devoted readers (yes, devoted) will know that I always read the first paragraph (or the first page if the book was written by Rushdie and measurements like "paragraphs" are relative) of a book before buying it. It is one of the rules I use to avoid becoming a hoarder living in an igloo made of mouldy and slowly decaying books. The other being that I may only buy a book if it is on my to-read list. Or if it should be on my to-read list. Or if I like the author and there is a space on my bookshelf or in the bookshelf that I am forced to buy to accommodate this new book. Or because, like a puppy, the book needs to be adopted. Or - anyway.)

I was standing in the second-hand bookshop (which is conveniently placed to intercept me on my way to my local grocery store). The store always smells like a rancid mixture of old books and liquorice, and I must be honest, is populated by a lot of black spines with red titles or pale spines with swirling fonts. At the risk of being a snob, I have also noticed, over the last eight years, how the contemporary fiction section (sub-labelled the "book group" section) has shrunk to two bookcases, while the romance section has swelled to four. I have never seen a Byatt on its shelves, although Lessing and Meek have made a couple of appearances.

There, at eye level, was Foucault's Pendulum, a book that is definitely on my to-read list. I didn't even bother to read the first paragraph. I slid it from its place and held it to my chest while I pretended to look through the rest of the bookcases. Once home, I placed it on my nightstand, ready to begin reading. But, as you'll remember, I was slumped, so the book sat there for a few weeks, judging me (or at least, reflecting my own self-judgement more clearly than a mirror).

Then, it happened. A sense of agitation that happens when I haven't read for a while. My imagination's withdrawal symptoms when subjected for too long only to movies and TV series. That evening I settled into bed with a cup of hot chocolate and picked up the novel as if it were a valuable relic. I studied the front cover, the back cover; I read the imprint page; I flipped through the pages and smelt them. Then, finally, I began reading the first paragraph.

What was I thinking? To break a summing-summing long sabbatical from reading with Foucault's Pendulum? A book that holds down post-graduate English-literature set-lists like a paperweight? Of all the books to ease my way back into the world where my imagination holds court, without allowing it to start chopping off people's heads.

Looking at the first page now, I see another clue (one that might have avoided this debacle had I thought to read the first paragraph in the bookstore - although, who am I kidding, what difference would that have made?): the epigraph is written in what looks to be Hebrew. Ahhh. It's not me, it's you.

Other clues include the fact that the book was written by Umberto Eco, he of The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (which I enjoyed - but mostly because of about two pages where he describes wandering around in a mist-soaked landscape as a young boy trying to avoid Nazis - and which many people did not). Then there's the fact that the third sentence hosts the symbol for pi (yes, the Maths symbol) and ... really, do I need to continue?

The original purpose of this post (I am upgrading from "Point" to "Purpose") was to point out the insanity of breaking my book fast with a book written by a master like Umberto Eco. (And remember that I am no ordinary reader, that books have been for most of my life a prism through which I experience the world, that a reading slump for me means not only boredom but having to face the world alone and without the code to understanding why things happen and how to respond to them.) 

I used to read before falling asleep (and over breakfast and sometimes dinner), but over the last year I have replaced this with series. Which means that many of my dreams (some lucid, which, trust me, is confusing) now feature vampires and zombies, and I get fatally shot semi-regularly. Sometimes more than once. There have also been a surprising number of cameos by bears. Which is actually respite from a recurring nightmare I have had over the last seven or eight years in which one of my favourite and most encouraging teachers in high school tells me how disappointed she is in me and then refuses to acknowledge me, except to tell other people what a disappointment I am. Make of that what you will.

So, I wanted to restart my bedtime routine and I picked up my book and read the first three pages and realised that, although I was pretty sure those three pages were describing the pendulum and its movement, and I knew that pi is 3.142, that was it. I started again. But by the end of the first three pages, I somehow knew less about the book, as I was no longer sure that the pendulum was physically real or whether it was a metaphor, but the prose was very pretty ... and I fell asleep.

I picked it up the next night, because I don't quit. Not when it comes to literature. Reading it again, those three pages did not seem as cryptic. Even "isochronal" fell to my scrutiny. When I am tutoring and we come upon a word my student doesn't understand (kind of a surprise attack, but I'm not sure who's more surprised: the word or the student), I always encourage her to break the word down into its components. So, taking my own advice, if:

• "iso-" means "equal"
• "-chrono-" refers to time and
• "-al" means that the word is an adjective,

then "isochronal" means that the pendulum swings in equal measures. Which makes me wonder if this really needs to be said, since that's the sole purpose of a pendulum. And if you are talking to someone who doesn't know what a pendulum is or what it does (even though they are reading a book written by a polymath and polyglot and, no doubt, other poly-isms), does it really help you to help that reader by using a word like "isochronal", which apparently you need an English degree and an editing career to translate?

(Yes, I know now that Foucault's pendulum is an invention that demonstrates the Earth's rotation, wise ass, but that's not really the point of this post. What is the point? I'm getting there...)

As I mentioned right at the beginning of this post, back when you were a young tyke and I had such promise, this took place three years ago. What was the point and why, out of all the many, many posts I have started and abandoned, did I choose to revive this one? The glib response is that the moral of this post is that you shouldn't read books written by masters like Eco right before you fall asleep and you should always read the first paragraph before buying a book.

Another lesson is that reading is meant to be fun. True, literature is the web holding my world together, but that doesn't mean it needs to be a hard slog. I don't have to read and understand and enjoy every book because it's canon (otherwise Joseph Conrad and I would have a problem). In most cases, life stretching out behind and before me seems long (no matter what people say), but when measured against all the books on my to-read list, it's way too short, so why waste it reading books that don't pass the first-paragraph test?

Finally, for me writing is understanding, whether I'm doing the writing or I'm transforming the words on the page as the reader. I don't understand concepts (or myself) until I have trapped them in a cage of words. Except the cage is the opposite of a cage: it holds things in, but frees them at the same time (I'm doing an excellent job of illustrating my point here). Maybe Foucault's Pendulum and I just met at the wrong time.

PS. Three years later, I have no idea where my copy of the book is, which is odd, because I know exactly where every other book I own is. Make of that what you will.

A Canticle for Leibowitz: Part 2 of 2

What is the attention span of a gnat? I am figuring that we find out its life span and divide that into something objective, like the attention span of a fly, or by the amount of time they can spend on a single task. Then we could wander through a few academic halls and land up considering the consciousness of tiny flying animals or fall through the moldy hall that is when a baby becomes a person. As you may have surmised (and as intended) you may have noticed I have a short attention span, which I would compare with that of a gnat's - no, I will compare it and tell you it is two minutes and 3.2 seconds, because I can and I did.

I have also realised that I have said 'would have' a few times today. There are three 'have's in that sentence alone. What the heck is the point of that word? (And before you get snarky, you, I am well aware there is a linguistic answer, but my point still holds because this is my blog and if I say a gnat can only focus on a single task (as defined by me) for two minutes, that is valid.)

So, I finished A Canticle for Leibowitz by sheer force of will. My opinion hasn't changed. Although the structure is interesting, the symbols are heavy-handed. I could not empathise with a single character until the last 2% of the book, but by then I could also not subjugate my lack of suspension of disbelief. (I am really trying here. Whenever I want to point out how illogical something is and that it is a result of laziness not plot, I hear the 'eh' of Dwight from The Office every time he wants to point out something illogical - usually to do with bears. It builds up at the back of the throat and pops from the nasal cavity like a buzzer in a game show.)

This isn't a spoiler, unless you are inclined to belief: the book is set over centuries upon centuries, where humans build up their technology over and over to a point when they can create nuclear bombs. How? How could this happen?

Geologists tell us (although this may be a fringe group of rogue scientists who do not believe in pollution) that the poles are overdue for a shift, whereupon north becomes south, confusing swallows, polar bears and brown bears, as well as pirates and hopefully radar linked to bombs. It may or may not kill us (dust storms, rampaging polar bears and swallows, bombs). Also, (and FYI) a certain degree of climate change is normal, judging by the ice age and the fact that Europe was a desert. (Interesting point: the size of dinosaurs was only possible because the density of the air was lower than it is now.)

Given this was written in the 60s, this would take us way into the 5000s, when (hopefully for the planet) we are extinct, because, entropy. More than a few of the surviving populations would have some kind of mutation (not the X-men kind, but if I could choose, something that gives me the ability to sprint and climb like a mountain goat, because, zombies) from the recurring nuclear bombs, which they would need anyway for the fittest, which no offence, cannot be almost exclusive to monks!

Here's another meaty one for the academics: technological determinism. This book assumes a single pinnacle of human discovery and creation. Bombs, intercoms, phones, planes etc. But a) I can imagine oh so many alternatives, like, what if we discovered the more eco-friendly (and therefore smarter) solutions to electricity, fuel and, errr, general human habitation, first? And b) does this 'pinnacle' really make society 'better'?

This a controversial topic and my gnat brain has moved on. Name of the Rose depicted a monk and a monastery in Italy that captivated my imagination. In this book I met three monks I did not like or only learnt to like in the very last pages of their chapter. It is one thing to kill off characters like a gnat flaps its wings and another thing to just move me to another monastery and then tell me they died of old age while I wasn't looking. It, in fact, makes me care less about your very stupid because they are very human characters. I have compared my brain to a gnat more than once today, therefore your argument is invalid.

Initially my foray in the world of insects was intended to justify A List. First, I did not want to talk about that book of invalidities as it shall be known from now on. Second, I am already bored, so I figured that bullet points would be more my speed. Since this argument is so very compelling, I shall add A List now, in the same blogpost, because I do not feel like writing out more than one tweet.

In the spirit of the above review (don't groan, you) I am going to pick five of the least dis-believable books I have read. I will however use short phrases instead of full, therefore very boring sentences.

1. A Canticle to Liebowitz
2. A Stranger in a Strange Land: life on Mars, general 60s-like (and spirited) shenanigans, a human taking on the physical abilities of another species as if sprinting like a cheetah were a combination of will and absence of will
3. Heart of Darkness and Atomised: more a lack of liking and an abundance of hatred than of disbelief
4. Zoo City: animal familiars that appear when you commit a crime, the final scene
5. Her Fearful Symmetry: ghosts, the characters' complete absence of character, other characters, plot - all of it, narrator (and all this from the writer who made me believe in time travel!)

While we're at it, let's add Gulliver's Travels

I always feel the need to point out that magic is meant to be compatible with physical laws, like gravity and the conservation of mass. Even zombies have an (albeit loose) explanation! So if something that didn't exist before is magicked into existence and it is made of atoms, where were those atoms before? Because so many other tricks rely on the existence of atoms - and I do not mean an interpretation of quantum laws, because *insert game-show sound effect*. Oh, I'm overthinking? Well - ok, the gnat has flown off.

In other words, if an animal familiar appears, was it lurking around waiting for you to do something awful? Is it missing from a zoo somewhere? Is it a manifestation of some communal judgement? Someone, somewhere, must have a clue - must have noticed a trend of disappearing animals - even if it isn't yet verified. And what trend is there regarding the type of crime considered worthy of a (really awesome - and if you're handing them out I'll take one) animal? Legal, societal, religious? Just one real clue, please. (I also want the awesome inseparable animal. Imagine walking down the street with a tiger, a polar bear, a tortoise, a wolf - do they come in extinct too and if so, hello, black rhino.)

Impressive - my attention is holding more like a fly battering itself against a window. (As I typed that, my bunny sat on my stomach, so maybe I am sorted. Still, a polar bear? I adore polar bears.)

What a meandering post. I think the most meandering I have ever written. Perhaps this is a good thing, because it gives me more wiggle room in future. To sum up: every book mentioned in this post, except for the Umberto Eco, is ridiculous. According to the woman with her gnat in her skull. The unconscious doesn't restrict itself to dreams. Do you see it? I asked for a polar bear when I had already been given a gnat. Does the extent of the crime affect the size of the animal? Could an insect be a familiar? That seems a bit of an anticlimax. Like this conclusion. (I walked right into that one.)

Show pigeons are walking existential crises, if you think about it

I am suffering a dry streak, my friends. Dry as all those rivers that were dammed to make dams because some committee wanted a dam and be damned the ecosystem. Dry as the absence of vowels in the word. I can't find anything good to read. And I don't mean 'good' as is literature, but I don't mean cult classic either. I have been abandoned by books I actually want to read.

In the not-too-distant past there has been The Passage and Night Film and Mara and Dann. But search back through these archives (maybe you will find something more interesting back there) and see that they are segregated by months. Years, maybe? Possibly. Probably. Perhaps - no, definitely - I am being melodramatic, but see, this is how I count my days, months and years. This is how I catalogue my memories.

A show pigeon

I don't think: "In February last year, I sat outside on a bench and watched a show pigeon trying to be a dove while I wrote." I think "A hardcover Kurt Vonnegut was on the table and I was listening to Ben Howard. It was windy, a cold wind, but I liked being outside." Before this, I had read Fahrenheit 451, which although I don't talk about it much is one of my favourites. It is a lonely book, as any book set in a policed dystopia must be. I had read it sitting on my bed between naps.

Some of my collection of must-I-finishes? includes A Widow for a Year by John Irving, The Luminaries by Elenor Catton and 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. Even before I finish the first sentence, I am on the tracks of my own stories, the book held in front of me like a disguise - rendered useless by the fact I am alone. Since I am being picky now, the author needs to go big or go home. I want a plot that knocks on my breastbone and yells that he will huff and puff if I don't give him my heart to chow on.

Metaphorically. Of course. Definitely. I mean, who doesn't love the bolschy character who is a bit of a bully but who also has a heart that tells him when to use it?

I had to think for a moment to remember what I am technically theoretically and painfully reading now. A Canticle for Leibowitz. One of the big bloopers in The Passage was that nothing had decayed much 100 years later. The ragtag team ate dented cans of peaches. Electricity grids still ran, albeit failingly. Did you know that the acid in modern paper actually makes it less durable? Books made of paper from the last century or so will crumble sooner.

Did you also know that in 1000 years, men in habits will be finding receipts and to-do lists hoarded in a time capsule where nothing else has survived time? And - oh this is my favourite - that all of human knowledge will disappear into warring factions of Neanderthals, in which women are once again just wet nurses. And that we will be forced to walk with a silly man in a brown habit who we cannot love even as a baby brother who likes to recite poetry he doesn't understand.

It would make sense if you read it. But don't. Let me finish and tell you at length how awful it is. My version will be a better read.

But this is not a dystopian novel and so there is light. A flickering solar light, maybe, or the slow beam of a long-dead star. I borrowed and started reading The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco. Not a recommended read, unless you enjoy pirouetting on a pinhead that is an idea with far too many rust spots to be appealing.

You know (yes, you know) that in my roving mind, ideas are important. Critical in fact. Stories of what we might do when the ties of society are loosened are vital, because that is who are, isn't it? How else can we understand ourselves as moral beings? How else can I understand myself? (That is hypothetical, because I don't and I am not sure I believe people who say they do.) Right now, steam is exploding from my nose and ears like a cartoon bull, at the frustration of being and of knowing. These are the kinds of stories I tell myself when I am pretending to read.

Umberto Eco is a true polymath, like Noam Chomsky: he is an expert in so many specialised areas of study that to call him a generalist is also inaccurate. I am in awe and jealous of the man, who by my age had probably already written two books and disproved a host of flawed ideas. I am also embarrassed (as if he were standing in front of me) by how little I have achieved. 

To take another hammer to my street cred, I only read Name of the Rose after my literature degree. Just before this, I had read My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk.

Aside, because now I know I must write a post on translations: Pamuk's writing is beautiful and made more beautiful by the strangeness (in the literal sense) of the culture, history and language. In this book, the culture is the Ottoman Empire under Sultan Marat III and a murder mystery than circles the scribes in his employ.  The novel binds itself around notions of representation and art. For example, is it art if it is mimicry? It posits that a piece of work is a form of immortality - but is it? What about those sculptures sitting in museums that we can't identify? Is that a legacy?

Name of the Rose touches on so many of the same themes, extending my experience of both novels so that they seem sort of magical (and you know I am not one to use these words lightly. Except when I am making fun. Which is often, but not now). The novel is set in a monastery in Italy, about 150 years before My Name is Red, there is also a murder mystery and the monks are also scribes. While the Ottoman scribes are also working in service of their faith, they enjoy beauty and their craft for craft's sake. Both sets of works are decadent, but the Italians are more repressed and conflicted. Probably not as repressed as the British.

In Eco's world, art does not exist for art's sake. In Pamuk's world, art for art's sake is still a form of worship. When I think of the latter, I think of rich reds and blues. When I think of the former, I think of cool golds and greens.

This venture off-the-beaten-track was not meant to be The Point, but is somehow still is The Point. (Despite what people tell you, haphazard meetings are usually more useful than laid-out plans.) The Island of the Day Before reminds me why I love to read. Why I am mostly Reader, some Writer and a fraction of other stuff that I lost years ago and am still looking for. (If you find it, keep it - I clearly don't need it.)

Books are my religion. I mean that in a quasi-blasphemy way. Most people believe in the things that they can see and touch, and that they exist, which leads to a comfortable belief that the world exists as a place with meaning. I however am an extra in The Matrix but I am very conscious of all the set pieces. Metaphorically. Where the set pieces form a dangerous a chain of existential corkscrews. Which means the 'I' that is me is usually very confused and a confused animal is an edgy one.

Books are the antidote. A novel is made-up - the story finds a way to exist in a candyland of wirly-girglies without having to touchdown. (That is just how confusing life feels to me.) It is made of words that never promise they are real but can be content in being this in-between thing. Ideas, too, are multi-coloured strands that can be strung out further, tied up and then untied. They make space and time in which to be examined, and don't hassle me to make a decision every time I put a key in my front door to unlock it.

If you are the kind of person who reads the conclusion first, this post is not about a single novel at all. But intention is nine-tenths of meaning, so know that I meant to and then got carried away. By which I mean I meant to do that, but you need not read it. I don't think this post was meant to be read; I just needed to write it.

The Prague Cemetery

The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco is not on my list. Go ahead and check. The Name of the Rose is not on my list of 'books that never leave you'. I think. If it is, I didn't put it there. Then there's Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, which I defend only because a polymath such as Eco is entitled to brag about said polymathical... polymathicalness... polymathicy. (FYI, spell check says the middle is correct. And this confirms that spell check knows everything. More than Eco, perhaps.)

Now, I can brag about having read these books because a) they were difficult and b) I wish I were an Eco or a Joyce or a Woolf. (At what point in your life do you become a polymath? Do you have to be able to read Chaucer at age 5 or are you suddenly gifted with a voracious appetite for learning on an auspicious birthday, like 21 or 25? Do you sleep? Do you eat? Do your children like you?)

Also, I just finished The Prague Cemetery, and once again, Ayn Rand and Neuromancer must move aside. Not really for any good reason except that I just finished it and have An Opinion.

If you have ever read Eco, you know that a flash mob's worth of characters break the waves of any protagonist's life. Sometimes as guest stars and sometimes as extras. It doesn't matter; we are expected to remember them all. The same applies to the Youtube channel's worth of actual flash mobs. I know, another reason Eco writes these novels is for his bookclub of learned colleagues who read it twice and make notes (not in the book, you, that's... sacrilege).

Speaking of sacrilege, the plot of the novel is a history of European sects in the late nineteenth century. Christianity, Jesuits, Judaism, Masonry, Freemasonry, nationalism and more. The joke is that most of these folks have a handful of cash hidden in their sweaty palms, in return for cheating someone out of something. Our 'hero' is no different and has a stack of neuroses to boot. We travel with him through Italy and France as he forges documents, particularly last will and testaments.

I call him a 'hero' because he is on a 'quest', an existential mystery around a series of black-outs. To colour those missing moments in, he appropriates Freud's then-untested strategy of psychoanalysis. In other words, he talks - writes - it out (pun!). Although it only really features at the beginning and end of the novel, psychology is also portrayed as a sect, albeit a divided one.

No doubt I was oblivious to many in-jokes shared between the types of people who 'post-it'ed the pages of the novel. I picture them tagging their favourite jokes and telling them at the next dinner party (which looks like a LAN party except there isn't any technology beside the microwave). I'm glad though, because the novel is dense enough (yes, the book is literally thick, too). As it is, I only just remembered most of the people's names. Unfortunately mostly not what roles they play in the plot.

Book reviewer cynicism aside (it's stuck on with superglue, so I'm just going to nudge it aside - there!) I enjoyed the superficial layer of the plot (or in other words, the parts of the plot I understood). It is less absorbing than Name of the Rose but easier to read and less self-indulgent than Mysterious Flame (although it does also have pictures).

Superhero costume back on (yes, reading is a superpower, you) the end of the novel - of the quest - caught me by surprise. I can imagine Eco has a dinner party that he doesn't want to go to, to get to by 19.00. He is feeling malicious because he has just written 400 pages about a man who is afraid of women, so he organises a set of bizarre, gratuitous events and ends with the obvious conclusion. He smiles because ending with the obvious is a joke in itself.

While I frowned in confusion and occasional realisation during most of the novel, it ended with my mouth open in surprise. Ok, not just surprise; horror. No blood, no explicit suffering, no violence, but some serious violation of society's moral code. And my personal one.

I read somewhere that Eco is one of the only polymaths - if not the only one - alive today. (As if they teach courses in this sort of thing. I wonder what the requirements are.) But be warned that being European and/or the last remaining member of an academical sect entitles you to be offensive. Perhaps the offenses are justified because they are realistic (ummm?) or are part of an in-joke (UMMMM?). Luckily there are no pictures showing these ummm's. Or the publisher wasn't invited to the dinner party and revenge is sweet and those pictures fell into the bucket of water being used to clean the floor.

Here's an in-joke: I am going to a dinner party and so I shall plop a slapdash conclusion here. I don't have in me to be offensive but to be obvious: I read the book, I finished it and I liked most of it except the ending. And the parts where I felt stupid. Bye.