Trying to be Nietzsche

For those lucky enough to be my friends on Facebook (which is a whole new level of friendship discovered only in the last ten years), you may know I am in a slump. A book slump. That right there is shame. I am not slumped beneath the pile of books I am reading or will read. Not slumped in a fort made of books or with the weight (well, technically mass) of weighty words or against my newest fictional friend or in awe of a conclusion. I am slumped against the altar of books that is my only sense of meaning.

I mean, technically, do I even exist?

That is only half facetious. Those of you who know me via my blog (a new type of acquaintance-ship) and those of you who know me in the real world and some of you who know me via Facebook, know how caught up in my literature my identity is. Oh, I know the difference between characters and real people, although the line between fantasy and reality is (thankfully) more like the boundaries between countries: a line on a piece of paper, a steady stream of stolen cars, firearms, poachers dodging the law and refugees dodging lions, and officers who take the blame from every politician who has never stood in the sun (although they'd be familiar with accepting bribes) but really have no power so they exert what power they convince us they have.

(I speak from limited but very thorough experience. I once presented myself at the South African side of the Lesotho border post. I walked in past what looked like a schooldesk and two women talking. They ignored me, so they could start yelling at me ten seconds later. I have flown to other SADC countries ten times and been interrogated every since time: oh, and my luggage searched. Every time. Another time I was stopped by an officer who had been waiting for me. While I was on the plane, they phoned my place of work to verify I worked there.)

What I am talking about is boundaries, however, not border posts. Although sometimes the line between those two is thin, too. 

I have lived at least hundreds of lives - yes, you non-believer, this saying is true. Holden of Catcher in the Rye: I ran away with him when I was fifteen. Sula of Sula: not my favourite of Toni Morrison's books, but a brutality that doesn't need fists or words. Adam of We are Now Beginning our Descent: I heard the alarms and explosions and quiet senselessness when he broke those glasses against the wall. Nancy Drew, of course (you didn't see that coming): she taught me never to accept answers.

In hundreds of places. In Midnight's Children: India's break from British rule and - instead of the joy of freedom - the conflict that is blithely described as between Muslims and Hindus. In The Road, the bleakness of pure existence that made the fantastically possible world of Oryx and Crake feel like a romantic comedy. The stream of conscious of The Waves that was a sea of voices telling a story of loss. A New York that Audrey Hepburne (however epic) could never embody in Breakfast at Tiffany's.

"It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end." That quote is painted across the top of the altar made of all these lives that are to me tangible. Sometimes it reminds me of the stupidity of people, I have to be honest, for the exact same reason that it is startling. We cannot survive alone (although I plan to prove Faulkner wrong when I find some hidey-hole and then pay people to deliver my manuscripts without explanation). Although  the first meaning seems to me to be the blandness of life - a kind of existential determinism (hah! I coined that).

If you threw one of these books at my head and did the border officer thing, first I would demonstrate the correct way to handle books (with reverence) and then I would read a few pages and remember about a quarter of what I had read, place it on my nightstand (opposite the stack of bookmarked books on my dresser (which is the same thing as my nightstand, just not next to my bed)), baby bunny would chew the cover and eventually I would  move it to the stack of books I am not slumped under.

Yes, I am being melodramatic (not about the bunny - she chowed two covers and a sticky note with a reminder on). It would not be a first - shush you. But what if I made you watch The Matrix and then led you into a room where Laurence Fishburne is waiting with two colored pills? Your mind would shut down, right? Now reverse that. I have been coughed up into the world made of binary code and I can see it but I'm too tired to read it. Yip, my life without books is exactly like that. Without, you know, all of those characters and settings.

FYI the plot of The Matrix is loosely based on a thought experiment devised by some philosopher as part of the metaphysical and existential debates. There is an amusingly vehement argument between the two camps, mostly because after a thousand years we're still just yelling at each other without concrete evidence either way. He said, what if you are dreaming, right now? One day you wake up and find that every experience, belief, emotion (you get it, and so on) is a fiction. Not one of those people you loved exists. What then? Which life is meaningful? What does that mean? And so on.

Also FYI, the movie was partly based on Neuromancer, which was based on the thought experiment. And also also FYI, there is no way to prove one way or the other. Don't bother. People much smarter than us have tried.

Neo and Morpheus (and that annoying Trinity) just assume one is better than the other and most people would react the same way. But apart from being a traitorous creep, Cypher may have been right about ignorance being bliss. I was very happy living two lives and I am not thrilled about now living my own without any distraction. 

Granted, perhaps it is the material that is the problem. My last read was A Canticle for Leibowitz, which if you have read this blog before, I did not love. It was like going for a blood test. I get anxious, not because of the sting, but because I do not like the thought of intentionally breaching my skin. I don't try to get papercuts, they just happen. (Like, daily. I can get a papercut just holding a book or opening a cereal box.) In other words, because I lost myself, so I think I lost you, it was bad because I struggled to pay attention, which made the rest of it awful, because I knew I was going to finish a book I didn't like and it was going to take a long time.

For now, I am going to continue to read magazine articles a page at a time, flick through books I know I won't finish, listen to podcasts, and do crossword puzzles and Sudoku (I have a timed app - at the moment I veer between less than one star and more than three stars (I award myself these points) - it's fantastic). I will think about the books I have read with longing, like the longing Neo would have felt for his life if he had lived in a lovely apartment like mine with three bizarre animals and shelves of books that are here when I get my life back.

Also also also FYI, while I was trying to be Descartes, Sartre and Nietszche, just without the famous part, I forgot to tell you my next attempt (you should know I never give up). Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Adichie. I read Purple Hibiscus about six years ago and was thrown around in her character's emotions like dead leaves - the pretty yellow kind that kids make terrible and very unimaginative art with. My theory is that if I throw enough emotion at the part of my brain that is slumped over, I may push it right over. Either I'll then leap to my feet, view literature from a different angle, or close my eyes and pretend Morpheus isn't there.

The Goldfinch

We're one for three, people. Or one for eight, and I'll explain why, once I've led you on for a bit. We played poker the other day - remember? You still owe me 100 bucks. One of my hands was a three-of-a-kind, all queens. The rest of the game is fuzzy. My queens were Donna Tartt, Marisha Pessl and Scarlett Thomas, and even though they were all of a kind, Pessl got all the attention, dressed in black and sauntering in with creepy-as-heck film producer Stanislav Cordova on her arm.

Tartt and Thomas got a caption each, I'm embarrassed to say. This writer was too excited about the black diamond to appreciate the other two on behalf of her readers. Rookie mistake.

To recap (this bit stands out of the fog): I read the first novels of all three at roughly the same time. Like any parent will tell you, I loved them all the same. (Even though really I saw Tartt as a professional and the other two as up-and-coming amateurs.) So I loved them all equally, just differently.

I was finishing up my postgrad and internship, and settling into my first full-time job, in magazine publishing. I was still living in Jo'burg. I had the puffed-up naivette of a varsity achiever and the hangdog wariness of an intern (dust-covered, paper-cut, permanent marker-stained and all). Some things just stayed the same, like a troupe of mimes: my friends, social life, family, hangdog wariness and general sense of myself. Some things changed immediately, like a troupe of avant garde performance artists (tautology but anyway).

It was like trying to walk when the speed on the treadmill has been turned up. (Do you ever wonder what your ancestors would say as they watch you use a machine indoors to do something they did for survival and never paid for?) I was disconcerted... disillusioned... distraught... Ok, I'm all of these things on a good day, but add to this disconsolate, disorientated and distraught. (I was tempted to write 'deceased' and blame it on the dictionary, but this is probably not funny, though at the time I didn't think it was funny either.)

Let's get Ms Pessl down the red carpet first. As established, she wrote Special Topics in Calamity Physics and Night Film, and both have wormed their way into my heart (I should probably get a doctor to look at that) - Special Topics more so since I have seen how far Pessl could take improbable themes and twist them (and me) into infinity loops.

Look up a word for feeling isolated beginning with 'dis-' and that was me too. The book in my hand was a) a book club book, b) pink and flowery. But the character inside was neither. She might have been, under different circumstances, but the pink is scrubbed into a wish-washy grey and the flowers turn out to be those garden roses, that bloom quickly before the petals hang loosely for a while and leave behind rosehips. She has a mystery that isn't quite a mystery to solve, symbolism for solving scarier mysteries in your psyche.

 

Scarlett Thomas is next up. She wrote The End of Mr Y - that book that led to every publisher to incur the expense of dusting the block of the book (the ends of the actual pages) black, red and blue, maybe purple, in the hopes that readers would think they were original. Actually, we wondered how much that inflated the price by. Like Special Topics, Mr Y was a mystery solved by - or not solved by - quantum science, since for the last time, quantum physics and the laws of relativity exist on separate scales, unless you're saying you found the Unifying Theory?

I did not know any better either, and either way it is a good book. I read it in the dimmed lights of a house that has already gone to sleep until I was haunted again by the fate of the scribes in Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red: they go blind. (This describes every night, really, but Pamuk is quite convincing.)

Thomas has apparently written seven other novels, of which I have read two: PopCo and The Tragic Universe. If this were a card trick, the cards would all be of one suite. You don't read an author's works for the same magic display; you're looking for their signature style. Personally I don't care where or when we go, just give me more of what you gave me when we met. By which I mean not anything illegal. Both novels felt like the journal of an anthrophobe, even in a crowd of anthrophobes, which is some kind of impressive.

I am also disturbed that the profile photo of Ms Thomas is a selfie. Where is the publicity team (or person) and why does she look like someone I know but don't like?

I wanted to tell you earlier but I don't like to tell you how long it will take to get to My Point because sometimes you wander off. It's dim in here and I only have the one light, so stick close, because we're here. It's dim so you of course can't see anything.

The real star of this show is Donna Tartt (no selfies, thank goodness). Her first novel (and the first one I read) was The Secret History. It is set in a top, uptight university, that in some obscure way reminds me of that of Stephen Daedalus, with more sentences that have objects, verbs and subjects. The mystery here is chilling, maybe because you know it's skulking around and that it will get you the second you least expect it. There is also the circle of friends within which everything happens, this time like the discombobulated voices in The Waves.

Of the list so far, The Secret History and Night Film are neck-on-neck. Don't shout so loudly! You'll burst my microphone. Most people will probably disagree with me, and yes, that's half the joy, but Night Film is well-crafted and delicately paced. I dare you or Ms Tartt or Ms Thomas to find another novel that suspends your disbelief from the moon and tells you to go get it (unfortunately Google stopped investigating the elevator and I'm not setting foot on a rocket not built by NASA or the Russians) and convinces you that you can and that you should because this belief or disbelief has become critical to your existence.

I dare it to do that, while keeping you hooked on the plot and playing with the conventions of Nancy Drew and ilk, through 500-odd pages.

The Little Friend came next and always reminds me of Caspar the Ghost, and actually there is something in the book that reinforced this. This time, the death is right up front. The mystery is the death of a girl's little brother but the ending feels like the beginning, just with three-digit page numbers. This novel is the middle child that will never be as talented or mature as the eldest, and for a long time is the youngest, until a younger child comes along that makes it feel even less talented. (I anticipate some bullying.)

Cue The Goldfinch. I finished this two nights ago. More deaths, upfront, and some more that float around. A mystery, but it only becomes a mystery at the end, although it could have become one earlier. Cryptic enough? The mystery has to do with a painting of the same name, but in French, I think. A boy is in a museum when a bomb goes off and pretty much everyone but him is hit by falling and flying things, including his mother. The remaining family members are nonplussed, so he is passed around a bit, gathering more, unlikely family members.

My favourite character is his best friend, Boris, as to be expected because he is the underdog. The type of dog that will always be under. The type of dog that chooses to be under, even when you pull his blanket out and put it somewhere warm.

My description is cryptic because this feels like three novels in one, except that the sentences are long and loose, and as an editor I find this irritating. As we are told in the narrative (another irritation), the story is compiled from journal entries, to justify the style but the style isn't immature enough to need explaining. Just annoying. Holes gape through the plot as they do when I attempt to knit.

My reviews always get meaner when I am disappointed. Or hungry. Or breathing in fishy cat breath especially when I don't feed said cats fish.

What I am really irritated by is the ending. (Don't worry, I won't spoil anything. Wouldn't know where to start.) The main character is fairly disillusioned with some deep emotional scars and minor nihilistic psychoses (but it seems like everyone in the book is at different stages bipolar). Suddenly he trips over a moral! Look, another one! Granted some of them are projections, because logically they can't exist in the real world. He's not exactly pulling out Hawaii shorts and tiny umbrellas, but he may be sporting a golf shirt.

Another dud. Which means it is probably a good book, but cannot possibly have been written by the same person who wrote The Secret History, unless it's the reader that maketh the book? Not buying it? Anyway, we have eight books from three authors with chocolate biscuits going to the three first-generations and one second-generation. While I stand by my reviews, readers' experiences make for capricious reviews. Who knows how I would feel about Night Film if I weren't binging on sci-fi and horror right now, and if I didn't get such joy from being contrary.

But as I pointed out, I am always varying proportions of various 'dis-'s, even words I'm just making up now (the ones in this post are real though, honest). Every story is a quest story (even yours, Mr Eggers) - which is an hour and a half or 400 pages of a human life. We roleplay a crisis, snatch up the resolution and discuss the thing to pieces. The crisis is half our own. So, I suppose, a great (according to me) novel is one I live. I can take that.

PS. You knew, didn't you? The book the conclusion alludes to? I'll give you a hint: it's set in Siberia, and features a cannibal and cult of castrates. Couldn't resist.

A library, a pterodactyl and a communist walk into a bar

All hands on deck, front and centre (except you guys on the right and left), double time. Threat level: Cold War. All of it. Yes, the whole war. Just imagine you're under attack by capitalists or communists or global warming for you kids - whatever works. The crisis: I. 'I' am the crisis. 'I' am a crisis on the scale of the Cold War, capitalism, communism and global warming, and you are asking inane questions. Like, whether the Cold War and global warming are related. Kids. Psssht.

Just be glad I have put aside the d_st_pi_n fiction long enough for one post. Big Brother is hiding behind that lamppost next to my car and monitoring every piece of communication, except telepathy, and I need to throw them off the scent. Metaphorically.

Yes, I am kidding. You kids, you're a crisis all on your own.

This 'I' is the rabbit that philosophy pulled out of a hat a few hundred years ago. Or so they teach us in varsity. (Useful information, this.)

So apparently, before Shakespeare (yes, there was Chaucer) people did not have a concept of their 'selves'. They were part and parcel of their environments, like a child, whose selfishness is linked to the fact that they think the world is an extension of themselves. I'd hate to be you (again), kid, when you find out the truth. This explanation is a glorious mash-up, but that's why Google exists. True story. Only this last bit and not the rest.

I'm confusing myself just trying to write this. Revert to metaphor.

So this rabbit is easy to catch but difficult to hold. Nonetheless various philosophers manage to get hold of Rabbit and label him (with non-toxic paint, don't worry). The rabbit is labelled ontology and metaphysics and existentialism and Picasso - hey! - and other labels I can't read because they're in point 2 font and this rabbit is, as I mentioned, difficult to hold. And no I didn't label him with my name. Run free, Rabbit!

I want to be a library. Sorry, I couldn't find a solid foothold down from the metaphor's ledge, so I jumped. In the past, I have wanted to be a spreadsheet, a data capturer and a municipal grass cutter, so on the bright side, this is an improvement. As you have noticed (I assume nothing less of you), all are passive sponges whose water is instruction (my metaphors are mixing again - they get out too much).

The aforementioned improvement is that this option is more possible. Right? C'mon, you have to admit that being a library is far more possible than being a spreadsheet. Unless there is a reverse process of machine to AI and Pinocchio to little human kid (heavens above do I dislike that story). I mean, I could sew the books to my clothes, for example, but I would probably fall and get a hundred papercuts. Or I could learn the words of every book as in Fahrenheit 451.

Who am I? What am I (review on Neuromancer pending)? And more practically (apparently; personally, I'm in favour of the previous question so don't cry on my shoulder when you wake in the underbelly of the earth wearing scratchy clothes and AI thingimabobs are on your tail, because Descartes and I, we beeen dere), who do 'I' want to be?

Darn these books. The ones I have read and haven't and never will read, but not the ones I don't want to read because, well, I don't care enough to darn you. They really mess with your head. Although, mine was a little messy to start with. Nya nya I never make my bed so there. These books (pssssht) had me convinced that being a grown-up meant sailing through life and over bumps with elegant prose flowing from one's mouth. My mouth at least.

I had written my book of life: I had a goal and a plan and both involved books because, you know, if I were allowed to, I'd build a fort out of books and only come out once every two weeks to go to the library. I distinctly remember having a goal and a plan, but I've tippexed over them so many times I've forgotten them both now. But on the acknowledgements page of my book, it says: books do not teach you how to live; they teach you how to live in a book. Which I would do, if one would offer.

Two paragraphs later and I know what I can't be: a spreadsheet, a library or myself in a book. And don't tell me everything is possible, you, unless you want to show me how to physically morph into a tabby pterodactyl or be a library!

Life teaches you how to live life - a pity the librarian didn't read over the terms and conditions with me. I mean, I was like six. I doubt I could spell library. Don't defect! My fort of books is still standing. In here, life is elegant (unless you count Michel Houllebecque or Aryan Kaganov), even the bumps, which are more like speedbumps than the fins of mako sharks. A school of them. Have I mentioned that I dislike the ocean?

How about this: if I stop posting about That Kind of Fiction, can I be a pterodactyl? C'mon, I live in a literary fantasy, so all you need to do is write a character who morphs into a giant leathery bird into my book of life. I'll throw in my laptop.

Science fiction is more than a Spock costume

I may have blogged about science fiction before, but that was before I used labels. If it is not labelled and therefore not searchable, it lives in a rarely visited hovel with car phones and beanie babies (though these are making a comeback). And this is not another discussion of how interest in science fiction, comics and musicals waxes during years of social turmoil, because, like, duh. When bankers are jumping from buildings and Kanye still thinks he's god, who doesn't want to imagine they are a suave superhero in a cape rescuing screaming (always screaming) women. Or something.

No, no, the Point of this blog post is that I like dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, as well as a difficult one to define: fiction about the city - not just set in it or a travel guide or a map, but wherein the amorphous spirit of the city is a character - and this is mostly labelled science fiction so that it doesn't have to live in the same hovel that Kanye (who?) will one day inhabit.

The genres of science fiction and fantasy do not have fans, they have cults. Compare the fans of Legally Blonde with those of Star Trek. Unless things have changed in the last 6,5 minutes since I checked my RSS feed, blondes whose peroxide has burnt its brand logo in their brains and who trip over crucial evidence in a trial and claim to represent women's lib, do not host massive conventions that even the producers of Legally Blonde and Twilight now attend.

I am not a cult fan. Of anything much, including life. (Nor am I blonde, nor do I scream (I tried once and all I got was a scraping caw) and the fool who tries to rescue me will get a weapon from my weapons belt lodged in his eye socket.) Except books. I will go to the grave insisting that The People's Act of Love (yes, that book, and shut it) is the best book written in the last two centuries and I would proudly host a convention in the topic, although I wouldn't dress up as one of the characters because they sound smelly.

Woman on the Edge of Time was a surprisingly powerful novel - surprisingly because I had never heard of it before a friend recommended it. (I could go on a rant about how literary literature written by women (nevermind anything that has a socialist flavour) and science fiction are herded into their own hovels. But I won't.) It is about a woman whose one alter ego is in a psychiatric hospital (the kind where they throw away the key) and the other finds herself in an utopia of the future.

This sounds like a Bruce Willis movie, which isn't a bad thing because 12 Monkeys is still sitting with me and I enjoyed Looper. Now here is a more appropriate place for aforementioned rant. The novel has distinct feminist and socialist flavours. It was written in the 70s, when the world (read America) was more idealistic in that it believed that the ideal could be won if you fought for it. (Now their children are doing the same; search Anonymous + hackers and OccupyChicago/SanFrancisco etc.)

How does that make you feel? Are you less or more likely to read the novel than when I initially recommended? Why? I'll admit that if I had known, I would have hesitated to pick it up now. It sounds... heavy, I would have said. I being the person with Ulysses, a book that is undecipherable according to those in the know i.e. who have finished it, on my dresser and Murakami's 1Q84 on the bookshelf. I being the person who reveres The Road as cruel, beautiful and illuminating.

This was not what I had intended to blog about. I was going to follow up with The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin. But this is another heavy novel, full of feminism and socialism and human rights, and I am too tired to lift it, so I guess you're too tired to read it. If you're still there. You might be reading through the troves of articles about Anonymous - now there's a real life story designed to extract the idealist in you. (Ask Kanye to sort it out.)

I do like the list of things I like above. I enjoy novels that pick me up out of my comfort zone so that I can view the world around me, without feeling like none of this chaos can be contained or sanitised. These novels outline my own ideals, so that I can scratch up the edges in the real world. So I guess I have tricked myself and returned to the original tired premise. It's tired in part because of the labels we have stuck on it. Science fiction is more than a Spock costume. That is the type of fiction I like.

The Magic of Reality

"How we know what's really true." (We don't and nothing, she said, discombobulating? discorporealising? dematerialising!) But Philip Pullman says it's better than Bill Bryson's tome and Ricky Gervais says he knows enough science now to write his own book (the same book, I'd think, but maybe he can get the illustrations redone. Or just done. And insert some witticisms). I don't enjoy detective thrillers (that's what the blurb says it is), but I do enjoy popular science.

A popular science book is an odd choice for a plane ride when you're aweary and the airline has ignored your many pleas (ok, barbs) for help (ok, vengeance). My Kindle I had mislaid? misplaced? left on the hotel bed! I slept through the flight anyway.

The Magic of Reality is basically a much much (much) thinner A Short History of Nearly Everything, but it focuses on answering specific questions that a layman with a high school F in science might ask. Mostly because she has forgotten. Perhaps intentionally. "What is a rainbow?" was enlightening. (Har!) Also "What are things made of?" because it is about atoms. Atoms, people - person. Endlessly fascinating.

As a friend pointed out, this type of book will be bought by this type of reader. It's pitched at young people, to improve 'scientific literacy'. Only if your parents are scientists or you are failing science and have bought every study guide on your and the nearest continent (via Amazon.com obviously). Chances are you spend your nights hunched over something that steams or rattles, with a single study lamp that casts a halo of light around you. The equivalent of reading after bedtime under your bed covers.

There is one other reason you might read this book. The reason I have held off mentioning the author until now. (Was I sneaky enough? Or did you cotton on in paragraph 2? That's usually where it happens. Yep. Blogger Stats tells me so. No, not really. We're waiting for the pupil tracking implants. Not, not really.) It's one of the reasons I chose this book for my aweary, vengeance-d, Kindle-less flight. Richard Dawkins.

I hesitate here, wondering whether his name should begin a paragraph, have a whole paragraph to itself (room to stretch) or be hidden as it is. Should it even be on the cover of the book? Although endorsements from two other famous atheists would still be a giveaway.

Richard Dawkins is a famous - infamous - scientist. Yes, scientist. Contrary to popular opinion, he is not a professional atheist. We don't have popes. And if we did, he already has a job. Writing. (He's written more books than Danielle Steele. Ok, not quite. But still.) Notice how this is the first thing we tackle? No review says: "Bill Bryson tackles a range of subjects with thoroughness, but the airy-fairy-I-feel-'energy'-in-the-landscape factor is annoying." (Which he did FYI. And I was annoyed FYI.)

But this is actually relevant. If you had been consistently challenged over something like this with the virility of someone who feels passionately about something (feels, folks), would you be defensive or would you brush it off? Not being a saint, I would do the former. I might actually start graffiting walls or wearing leather jackets or hanging out in the hipster part of town. (*&$@ I already live there.)

Or poking at my bullies from the pages of my book. With a tone. You know the one. The one with feelings behind. The Magic of Reality is a good book and it addresses some of the fallacies in the Bryson book. Even though the book covers things I have already read about, precisely because I enjoy this type of book, the explanations and metaphors have changed how I visualise the concepts, so they are easier to pull out and elucidate at any moment. He has also given me better ways of evading? excavating? elucidating! them.

However, the 'true' here is between science and myth as explanations for, well, the world. You guessed it, with specific digs at Christianity. Enlightening sometimes, but often bullying. The true I was looking for was objectivity and our subjective viewpoint - not our experience of the world as metaphor, but what we can assume to be objective when our viewpoints are subjective.

Like the light spectrum and colour pondering, about whether colour is perceived differently by different people. (Answer is no FYI.) Or the tree falling soundlessly in a forest pondering. (Yes.) The philosophy of science pondering. (Maybe. All of the above. Who knows.)

Looking at it, that's a tall order for a book aimed at teenagers. If Pullman got away with blatant criticisms of Christianity without a peep from people with feelings though...

Both these authors capture a youthful exuberance (more abundant than the petty digs, I promise) at the world and how it can be explained. Even when talking about some of the myths, you can almost see Dawkins bobbing up and down with excitement. And if he graffitis a few walls, it's because he is so excited about the jigsaw puzzle of the world and being able to describe it, that he cannot contain himself. Feelings, again. Like colourful parasites.

So perhaps I did get what I was looking for in this book. I wanted someone to help me draw the line between subjective and objective. Until then, I view the world with suspicion. Dawkins didn't give me a slice of chalk and ruler; he gave me a glimpse of what it is like to view the world with excitement instead.

World War Z

The book, not the movie. There's a book? There is a book. From the movie poster alone, I can tell they do not tell the same story. Well, ok, there are zombies (the book discourages this moniker, only partly tongue-in-cheek). But the story is definitely not told by Brad Pitt. (I can tell because of the accent.) And the story is in every other way almost completely different.

So, I haven't actually watched the movie. Everything in this post is anecdotal or based on Wikipedia (PS. open source geniuses, 'encyclopedia' is spelt 'encyclopaedia') or based on the movie poster with the remarkable visual illusion that we can see the curve of the earth.

The book is good. Read it. It sounds much better than the movie. It's a book, so it never is what it says it is. Or says it is about. The book is not really about zombies. To my mind, they don't feature except to propel the plot. The story is told entirely in transcripts collected by a man who works for the UN and never reveals where he was during the war. Like a professional researcher. (This isn't sarcasm or a plot hint. Researchers should really remain separate from their subject. Like anti-Jane Goodalls or -Pitts.)

This movie and its main character are just such easy bait.

Wait for it... Did you get it?

Because it is a report, World War Z is set after the zombies have been brought under control. (Hint: a zombie is by definition dead and therefore cannot be brought back to life. Gross. So yes, by massacring them.) The researcher travels around the world to meet key members of the resistance, who tell their stories, some about failures (most) and some about successes. The stories are technical, moving, military, esoteric, pathetic and disturbing.

Together they make a picture of how we behave in crises. Most of our behaviour is reactionary, I'm afraid. Some of it is a modern hubris, a belief that primordial threats guided by random desire can be destroyed by weapons and strategy, like night and the lightbulb (and a generator, obviously). Bravery is often pure instinct; but instinct is also reactionary.

Another common reaction is to blame. Most of the accusers are justified, but this is easy to say in hindsight. Again, reactionary.

It's easy to take the moral high ground in this story - become its saviour (my hint is: zombie's can't climb - get it?). I often take issue with dystopian novels, in that they assume the worst of human nature. Not all of us are going to start eating each other to prove our status in what is essentially the same world as our ancestors and animals live(d). You don't find tears running down their bones because they were hunted by lions and hyaena. That's life.

But you are at least one of these people (and no, not Brad Pitt, who from the sounds of it drags trouble behind him on a leash). The reactionaries. And, likely, a corpse.

If you protest (reactionary), consider that the novel contains hints of the HIV pandemic and racial segregation. How have you reacted when met with these 'wars'? Jumped to the front line? Sacrificed yourself? Found something else to blame? Hightailed it up a tree? (Smart.) This. Is. Life. There is some war right on your doorstep. Maybe this novel is about the worst of human nature.

Segregation was, predictably, the one I identified with the most, in both Israel and South Africa. Especially given my home town is point 0. We are introduced to the man who conceived the most effective strategy to end the war - and also the most horrific. He is a psychopath (not in the murderer sense, but in the clinical sense: he lacks emotions, which makes him a great strategist). He was also one of the architects of apartheid.

These facts alone - even without more back story - make me think twice. More times, in fact. I don't know. There is no right answer. This isn't even an issue of subjectivity. What justifies such brutality? The ends? The ends justifies the means? I can't endorse that. But do I want us (humanity) to live or die? I would have said I didn't care - this is life - but then why am I turning this around in my brain?

Again, take note that I have not watched the movie (although in a sense I have because I have watched other such things featuring other such headline names). Yet, I have a string of other jokes to tell and disjunctions to point out. But that is less interesting (?) than the conclusion of this movie and another, and their books. In I am Legend utopia follows in the wake of dystopia. So much work to be done blah pop another grape in my mouth.

This is life. Life doesn't award you some oasis in green and leafy parks, at the centre of which is the Fountain of Youth. (Fittingly mythical, but one that men with an eye on knighthood killed themselves to... not find.) Life (my life, at least) is philosophical crises, as well as physical ones. Some personal and some social. What is humanity? Where do you fit in? And what would you do to maintain your status quo? Is it worth maintaining?

Bibliolatry: an exploration

You're mouthing out the words still. Bib-lio-la-try with a jump and slide from 'Bib' to 'lio' so that 'lio' sounds like 'leo' and two quick rehearsals to get the accent (as in ' not your native drawl) correct, then the easy part: 'la' and then 'tary', except you double-check whether it is 'tary' or 'try' or 'tarary' (common mistake, I say, blushing), because when you run all the sounds together, you still put the emphasis on the second syllable, not the first, and 'try' becomes 'tary'.

If it were easy to say, it wouldn't be such a wonderful word.

It means to idolise books, before you ask. You knew what it means? Five smartie points to you who couldn't pronounce the word a paragraph ago. I'm comfortable admitting I didn't know the word until yesterday. Did you know then that the connotation of 'idolise' here is religious: literally to worship an idol? Only bibliophiles could conceive a word about their obsession that has religious connotations.

Who oh who would worship a book, you-who-aren't-bibliophiles-and-are-living-vicariously wonder. No, you don't. Because then there would be no blog post and you wouldn't be reading it, and this clearly is a blog post and you are reading it, so the answer is me - and perhaps you, too.

Blasphemy! Heresy! But listen here, ours is a quiet and solitary idolatry - we're not exactly sacrificing animals to our bookshelves. Just time and a few trees. If anything, we should be at the mercy of the environmentalists, except that they're busy raising money and protesting conferences and reading.

This whole blog is devoted to my bookshelf (with regular deviations into metaphysical crises, as befits a reader. And a writer. Ask yourself which of these you are). It's an altar. I admit it. An altar, not The altar, because I brush my teeth and eat my vegges on the other side of this page (which is incidentally the same side of the page that you are on). Sometimes I don't read. Don't cry. I read a lot. I just don't read all the time. Although, nothing else is quite as satisfying.

Devoted. Did you notice that? This blog is devoted to... Now I'm not the only one engaging in blasphemy! My blog is too! Like a plague it travels. This digital world mimics its backbone of hidden 0s and 1s. It is ordered and logically structured. Maintained by the pulsing of keyboards. It is to blasphemy what the gutters were to the Black Plague.

Don't abandon me yet - I promise I am not contagious. Although who's to say I didn't catch this from you?

The wallpaper of this blog is a black-and-white shot of a railway bridge. It looks as though it is three-dimensional, but it isn't. It cannot be. Even if Google Glass succeeds in displaying a world so convincing that you try to reach for a book, you cannot. (You will reach through the bookshelf, but don't worry, you can't get stuck. I think.) This whole digital world is one-dimensional and, to some extent, an illusion. (I don't really sit with my head propped to the side like that. Sometimes I change my clothes, too.)

Now that I think on it, the photo tells you what to expect from this blog: nuances, shadow and light, and hints of other things. A snapshot without a supporting landscape, where the viewer is two-faced (the photographer and you - oh and also me, since I chose it), that you cannot touch or walk into to find out what those hinting things hint at. And all so hipster-ish-ly black-and-white cool. We see what the photographer selects for us to see. You read what I select for you to read (granted, sometimes things slip from the edges of my fingers and perhaps you catch them).

To get to business now, my thanks to Barthes and Derrida and even Descartes for providing the argument I can't argue against but others can by burying it under the word 'extreme'. Meaning is lost, well, it was never there, I protest fists in air (on behalf of those oblique writers), blah blah, stop rolling your eyes. Can I then truly idolise anything? Yes!

Let me explain. Words are in on it. The whole business. Words are wind, Jon Snow. In Ragnarok (mixed references but you understand), the god Loki values nothing. He turns everything inside out and upside down to understand it and make metaphors of it. He's the one worth trusting when Odin's looking at you with his one good eye and the other eye that sees more, and suddenly you do not know who you are. He is also very serious and not much fun. I'd run for Loki's camp any day.

Words pretend, a lot, just like the trickster god . They gain your trust, though notice they never ask for it - the gullible lot we are, we just assume. Not gullible, no, just hopeful. Hope springs eternal, to complicate the barrage of sayings I'm throwing in the hopes that you'll agree with me just because you're too overwhelmed to fight back. (See what I did there?) But when you uncover their disguises, they laugh, shrug their shoulders and say it was all a hoax anyway.

Don't cry (again. You are an emotional bunch). When the one-eyed and all-seeing god is staring at you, it is very reassuring to know that it is ok to know that you don't know and that not-knowing can be discovery.

Discover. Discovery. There we go! Bibliolatry is idolatry of a tricksy creature - creatures - that laughs at itself and you (and you at you) and then leads you down the winding path. Paths. This blog is one path, and because the 1s and 0s (and our attention spans and our capacities to process information) say so, it can only be one path with one view, even if we can meander to create a beaten track from which we see the one view from different perspectives.

So, we're not blaspheming, if only because our paths are too convoluted for you to capture and prosecute us.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Immortality. Now there's a concept. Concepts. A few thousand of. Religion embraces a number of those. Faith too. Myth. I read a book called The Infinite Book (spoiler: it isn't), which recounts a few thought experiments taking into account probability theories and human behaviour research about what we would do. (I would either hole up in Borges's library or vote for mortality - really, is one of these not enough?) And immortal life - I'd call that a tautology.

Enter The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.

Misleading tautology? Henrietta Lacks' story deserves to be told. (I started to rampage about this woman's rights, a la Skloot's book, when I saw the other side of the argument. More to come. Patience is a virtue.) Henrietta was an African-American woman treated for cancer in the 1950s. The cancerous cells were like ants - she was treated for one cluster in her cervix and suddenly they were everywhere. After the autopsy, the doctor described the clusters as pearls coating every organ.

Enter the 'bad guys'. Even before Henrietta's death, doctors harvested the cells as part of a routine harvest for medical research. Growing cell cultures was at the time the medical profession's Holy Grail. Except, well, this grail was discoverable. A cell culture is basically a cluster of cells that you can sustain in the lab, outside of the human body. A ready supply of material to experiment on. Obviously, you need specific conditions, which was a hit-and-miss with no principle to work from before Henrietta's cells.

These cells being like ants, they divided like crazy, even out of the body. Short version: the cells were named HeLa and eventually companies began processing and distributing the cells for cash. Lots of. The polio vaccine was developed using HeLa and the cells are still used in labs around the world for research. Tada; this one woman has helped, is helping and will help to extend human beings' lifespans.

Did the doctors have the right to first harvest and then use her cells for commercial gain without her or her family's consent? US law then and to some extent now says yes. The book suggests no (unbiased much?). I was convinced (which speaks well of the writing) but now I wonder.

See, my first reaction was a writer's: to imagine scenarios full of philosophical meaning and emotion. Bear in mind: a) I am a nihilist, which means that in the absence of evidence otherwise, nothing has meaning (which explains my sense of humour) b) the story reminds me of a creepy short story about an ape subjected to scientific experiments that dies and returns to kill his torturer (and no, not Kafka's) c) another Gothic short story about a man who dies and is buried but his soul remains trapped in his body (burying my hamsters was traumatic and I want to be cremated).

I keep imagining that some essence of Henrietta remains in her cells, even those that form in the lab and not in her body. In fact, her preacher cousin echoes this, to my sentimental horror. Researchers have injected all sorts of viruses into her body, from polio to HIV, as well as bond them to the cells of an ape and clone them. Hee-bee-gee-bees. If this is immortal life, keep your blerry library.

And here my balloon deflates to earth with a whistle. Cells that have no will and are not sentient might be life but do not have life. (The whistle is a sigh of relief. The phrase is just a literary device!) Not only that, but the original HeLa cells are mostly dead (except for one or two frozen cultures, kept as a record). These cells are the descendants of roughly 3 times the number of days since the Adam and Eve were extracted. The line is immortal, not the lifespan of the cells.

You probably arrived here before me; revisit the horror of points b and c on an impressionable, imaginative and very empathic child. Ms Skloot also arrived here long before me. Roughly half of the book focuses on Henrietta's daughter Deborah. I thought this was a failing of the book, a pandering to the wishes of the family to get them to endorse the book. But Deborah, her children and grandchildren represent immortality. Each ancestor lives on, however diluted, in our cells. The life in question is that of the human race (which, to point out is not strictly immortal, as in unkillable and infinite. Just saying).

Which brings us round to the ethical dilemma. Deborah was profoundly 'messed up', and not only because of the issue with the cells and partly because of institutionalised racism (highlight, star and underline 'institutionalised'). She was paranoid, depressive and perhaps manic. She had little education and so was stuck in that quagmire of wanting to do better but not having the time, money or qualifications. All she really wanted was someone to explain what exactly HeLa was and why it was.

The irony of the story is that Deborah and her brothers cannot afford medical care or medication, despite the fact that their mother's indirect contribution to science cannot be calculated.

Taken without context, that fact seems profoundly unethical. However, if we begin to assign rights to cells and/or tissue outside of the body, things begin to get a little... chaotic. Does this apply to my skin cells? To a bloody plaster I remove? To my tonsils or wisdom teeth? Must the doctors get my consent before they incinerate the tissue? What if I want them buried? Do I have the rights to profit from your scientific knowledge and ingenuity, and from a company's processing and distribution structures? My contribution is precisely 'indirect' - tissue I happen to have growing in my body. Can we compensate evolution too?

(Hmmm that last question would make a good story.) Luckily, I am a writer, so I can pose the questions without having to provide the solutions. What a nihilistic profession this! I don't have to make a single decision without proof; I can put two (or more - I think that's called rugby) opponents into a ring and manipulate situations that reveal their essences. And, if I want, I can choose one side and arm it with steroids. But I still don't have to back it! Because I am but an onlooker. And you are but a reader.

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...)