The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Essays in Love, and certain essential paradoxes

I was thinking in the shower, a hot and wonderful place to think in, where the only regard you have to your well-being is whether to turn slightly this way or that to receive the flow of hot water on each bit of skin in turn.  I'm still reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being  in small chunks, but have just finished reading Alain De Botton's Essays in Love, which I started out liking, began to turn my nose up at half way through, but persisted back into an admiring galloping speed read of the last half of the book, nosing out little truffles in inspiration. Alain de Botton is to philosophy as hot water is to the back. But more than anything it got me thinking about the terrible paradoxes that I accept without a blink.  There are so many of them, but I'm going to pick out a few.

Take Rudolf Steiner.  We sent our children to a Steiner school, and I'm glad we did. I've also read a lot of Steiner, almost equally divided between stuff that made sense with a certain amount of unentanglement, and stuff that was, to any rational mind, absolutely barking. No I take that back, most of it reads as absolutely barking, but it did produce this amazing education, that works with the whole child. So I'm trying to disentangle some of this. here's my lists of disentanglement (but don't worry back to Unbearable Lightness of Being and Essays in Love reasonably soon).

So:
The Steiner Paradox
1. Steiner school based on huge number of estoric writings and lectures from Steiner, ranging from angels to burying cow horns in fields as part of  bio dynamic agriculture, very difficult to make sense of. Child viewed as coming into their physical bodies not yet full incarnated. Child, 3-7 years old,  needs lots of play , rhythm, song, dance, colour, wonder, beauty.  Does not need TV and plastic toys and computer games.

2. Only the last two sentences are in anyway believable as a basis for an education BUT they do make sense, and that is why Steiner schools are wonderful places for the younger child, and certainly benefited all of ours.

Alright as far as it goes, can live with the esoteric stuff in the background, can see the results in the children - especially now we know many Steiner kids who grown up in their twenties and thirties.

Then there:
The What Am I paradox
1. I grew up in a miasma of half-baked beliefs, kind of twirled round in Christianity, certainly with hopes of an immortal soul, certainly with the sense of religion as a past it relic of ignorant ages, but most certainly of all without a clue as to how to live.

2. Seems likely we are just the sum total of the neuroscience of the brain (and other bits), but like the universe we are essentially emergent, I am the rather wonderful total of the atoms that make me up, albeit with the freedom to move think and express myself in different ways.

But I still search for meaning, the right questions, the right behaviours if not the right answers. I exist in a tepid pool of half baked agnosticism which is little better than hopeful atheism.

Then there is
 The Love Paradox

1. Tomas, answers, when being pressured to sign a statement reinforcing the letter that got him sacked from his job as a surgeon in Czechoslovakia (the Russians have already tried and failed to make him sign a retraction).

“It is much more important to dig a half-buried crow out of the ground," he said, "than to send petitions to a president.”

― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Whatever it means, I feel the same, even though I will happily shoot crows, rabbits etc to eat them - that's something completely different. It is the impulse of love that is important.

2. And soooo, back to Essays in Love where  where? fuck me! Looking for the quote I wanted in Google, to save typing it  all out, I searched for "categories of mature and immature love quotes" and found this from OSHo, the Bagwan, the Orange guy with all the Rolls Royces, you remember him in the seventies! 
It says about the same as De Botton, with a little more panache actually.  But bits of De Botton are worth quoting, particularly since he does express it rather well too: 

"The philosophy of mature love is marked by an active awareness of the good and bad within each person, it is full of temperance, it resists idealization, it is free of jealousy, masochism or obsession, it is a form of friendship with a sexual dimension, it is pleasant, peaceful and reciprocated [and perhaps explain why most people who have known desire would refuse its painlessness the title of love]. Immature love on the other hand [though it has little to do with age] is a story of chaotic lurching between idealization and disappointment, an unstable state where feelings of ecstasy & beatitude combine with impressions of drowning and fatal nausea, where the sense that one has finally found the answer comes together with the feeling that one has never been so lost. The logical climax of immature [because absolute] love comes into death, symbolic or real: the climax of mature love comes in marriage..."
Essays in Love p 202

I've left out a last rather stupid clever clogs clause tacked onto the end, about calling marriage "the attempt to avouch death via routine [the Sunday papers, trouser presses, remote controlled appliances]"   I don't think it is that - but then I'm lucky in that respect. And there is also a sense, and call me a romantic if you will, because that would be correct, that mature marriage in love doesn't stop a lot of immature behaviour on my part certainly, but it does flow through into a sense of absolute bliss, plenty of romance left  in there which appears in bright, light moments, and in quietness as well.  

still rereading The Unbearable Lightness of Being...

... as I am still rereading Shikasta, in bits when I feel like it, until suddenly  I get a momentum so that I keep going. What struck me today in The Unbearable Lightness of Being as I read in the late morning having come in from the town and a bitter wind, enough to get me up again and in front of the screen to start writing, was this:

"Here he was doing things he didn't give a damn about, and enjoying it"

This is by comparison to his previous profession as a surgeon ( the post 1968 Soviet backed authorities have forced him to resign because he will not sign a retraction of a letter critical of the Soviets) when:

"Whenever anything went wrong on the operating table, he would be despondent and unable to sleep"

Tomas is just doing stuff (window-cleaning) , without weighty responsibility, but with a nice weighty hangover of respect from his previous occupation, and from his refusal to retract.  It reminds me of having a migraine when I was working, not in the times when I grimly hung on and worked through it, but when I was able to go home and climb into bed between cool sheets and lie down with nothing but thudding pain to occupy my mind, as the nausea used to fade as soon as I was able to lie down.  I would be able to perch just on the edge of sleep with the pain carefully balanced, as it felt, at the edge of my forehead, pushed out from consciousness although still a presence. That effort meant that I couldn't think about anything else - or the pain would trample its way back in - and in its own way it was a delightful precipice to lie on, it felt white, soft and above all, safe.

Shikasta revisited 2

There was a time in my life - and I think it started in my childhood and just carried on, when I used to experience what I can only describe as a deep well of sadness. It used to come and go, sometimes just a background thing, sometimes overwhelming in its intensity. I still have it to a certain extent - it's why I weep in films or certain passages of books (Shikasta is one) with alarming frequency.  I kind of shook it off as a defining part of me about fifteen  years ago, with  a newer more outwardly successful period of my life, but it still returns to possess me at times.  It's strangely not unpleasant, not like  a cut or a blow or  a terrible event, or feeling cold or angry or frightened, but it is quite debilitating and all-consuming when it happens. It's like I get absolutely overwhelmed with empathy - it might be a film, a book, or, often, having children, it was seeing some small or large  hurt or disappointment that I could not remedy, and the distress would soak through my consciousness as if I were plunged into a pool of sadness and it had permeated every part of me. At home, out in the street I would have to exert enormous power not to openly weep, I wouldn't be able to speak without choking over the words.

The defining pull or feel of the "zone" though which the protaganist, Johor, approaches Shikasta, is described as nostalgia:

"Zone Six can present to the unprepared every sort of check, delay, and exhaustion. This is because the nature of this place is a strong emotion – ‘nostalgia’ is their word for it – which means a longing for what has never been, or at least not in the form and shape imagined. Chimeras, ghosts, phantoms, the half-created and the unfulfilled throng here,..."
Lessing, Doris (2012-05-31). Shikasta (Canopus in Argos: Archives Series, Book 1) (Kindle Locations 115-117). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition. 

In Zone 6 lost souls congregate in what was a lush and green place, but now is dust and desert, waiting for the chance to reincarnate and "try again".   The narrative then describes Johor's meeting with some of the people that he had known, and  the distress, the grief, the pull that he feels for them - he sums it up like this:

" Already depleted by grief, that emotion which of all others is the most useless..."
Lessing, Doris (2012-05-31). Shikasta (Canopus in Argos: Archives Series, Book 1) (Kindle Location 204). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition. 

And it does feel, of all the emotions the most useless in terms of getting anything done - and yet, and yet, without the sensitivity and empathy that so debilitates me at times I would not be who I am, I would not have achieved the things I have done.

Doris Lessing was a pretty direct and no nonsense sort of person - the few times I met her we had short conversations about writing, the coffee, nothing of great significance, but she always had this questioning, inquisitive mindset.  "What do you write about?" I remember her saying when we were sitting together before a seminar in London, and she was genuinely interested. But she catches this sense of the strength of emotions, the importance of them and the destructive nature of their not being kept in check, not being recognised for what they are, across all her books I suspect her sense of empathy was just as strong as anybody's. 
There's a story she tells of walking though post war bombed out London, with a small child, cold foggy, and she is walking with tears streaming down her cheeks. A man stopped her and said "What is the matter?" She answered him, and then he just said "Oh well something will turn up", and walked off. As I recall the interviewer said something along the lines of "oh, that's terrible", and I think she said, "No, it was the best thing he could have said, because, of course, something did turn up."

So lastly, a talk that Doris Lessing gave, one of a series on Sufism in that inordinately posh voice of hers - don't let it put you off.
Doris Lessing talks about- well quite a lot actually

I've started reading Shikasta again, partly as a homage, partly because it is one of those books that underpins and supports me, and partly because it is one of Doris Lessing's best and greatest books, often misunderstood and often disliked by readers for one of two reasons:

1.  It's science fiction, and I don't read science fiction (subtext "I'm not a boy, I'm a feminist")
2. It's not science fiction, because it's not Heinlen, Arthur C Clarke etc. (subtext "I'm not a feminist, I'm a boy")

This how readers create their own worlds in spite of the words - the kind of readers I hate - they resist what's in front of them and twist it to their own world view, won't try anything new, won't think anything new. Dead from the neck up. It reminds me of a Nasrudin* story: 

Nasrudin met two men by the side of the road who boast about their tastes:
"I only eat the finest halva, studded with pistachios and almonds, wrapped in palm leaves."
"Well I only eat the finest saffron rice with chicken and goji berries  and acai berries from the deepest reaches of the Amazon forest."
Nasrudin pauses to think.
"Well I only eat wheat, ground up and carefully mixed with water, yeast, and salt, and then baked at the proper temperature for the proper time."

Doris Lessing was good on reading - said pick up all sorts of books - if you don't like them, if you get bored after the first few pages read somethings else.  Sometimes it's not the right time for you to read a book  - but you may come back to it years later and find that now is the right time.  This happened to me with Henrich Bohl's Group Portrait with Lady - borrowed from Candice in about 1977 maybe, got fifty pages in then couldn't get any further.  Picked it up may be twenty years or so later and read it avidly all the way through, what a great book I thought. Although I can't remember a thing about it now.  But Shikasta still haunts me in the sense of sitting in my consciousness as a kaleidoscopic introduction to a lyrical but stern sense of possibility.

From the first page:

"This is a catastrophic universe, always; and subject to sudden reversals, upheavals, changes, cataclysms, with joy never anything but the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes."

Shikasta,  Doris Lessing p3

There are four other books, all radically different in content and perspective, that give you this thoughtful and feeling distance from the obsessions and givens of our age.

*Nasrudin has a Facebook page now. Of fucking course. Lots of the stories are there with irritatingly little explanations of their meaning underneath. Ignore these as they will limit the way the stories can sit in your consciousness for decades and suddenly pop out.  In the Sufi tradition whenever one Nasrudin story is told, then six more should be told in immediate succession, so that, to paraphrase a lot of explanation and guff, maybe, just, maybe something from one of the stories will stick, usefully.

Here's an apple for the storyteller, and apple for the audience, and an apple for the one person who really listened

Oral saying I heard somewhere- I think I got this from Pat. 

I remember trotting it out at the end of a peformance at a festival, smallish audience of about twenty in a yurt.  Joss came up to me afterwards and said she didn't like that last saying - look at your audience, she said, they all really listened. 

Going for Blake and Boethius

I was reading Northrop Fry's 1957 essay, Blake after two centuries on William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, which is good in itself, especially in that he lets the poems speak for themselves, although always with that maddening dissatisfying absence of any explanation.

 "Such a poem.. as The Sick Rose", he says, "Has the power of speaking with the unanswerable authority of poetry itself". 

 I can imagine one of the more self-satisfied Sussex literature tutors I had leaning back with a great deal of self generated self satisfaction and quoting that sentence. (Actually to be fair there are just two tutors that I imagine doing that, there were some great tutors as well.)

The Sick Rose

BY WILLIAM BLAKE

O Rose thou art sick. 

The invisible worm, 

That flies in the night 

In the howling storm: 

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

He's right of course, not to pander to the English undergraduate that I was, plundering any book for some kind of unequivocal sense of meaning so that I could write the next essay.  It's worth quoting him (good ol' Northrop) in full:

"One may always meet a poem with a set of questions designed to avoid its impact: what does it mean; why is it considered a good poem; is it morally beneficial; does it say profound things about life, and so forth"

Love that " set of questions designed to avoid its impact".  Of course in meandering though this book a bit more this morning I do of course find a detailed exposition of what The Sick Rose means that is hilarious in both  its plausibility - it is one reading I suppose, and in its wrong headed limiting of the poem. I'll have to quote the fucker  to show you what I mean. One bit will have to suffice as it's too long to tap in all of it.

"The "Sick Rose" poem is the concrete expression of Blake's experience of the corruptive effects of 'social' love upon creative sexuality"

So says Wolf Mankowitz in his essay "The Songs of Experience", in the Casebook series book "William Blake Songs of Innocence and Experience", edited by Margaret Bottrall. He also says, and I quote and paraphrase, that it is "immediately apparent" that the rose is mortal, that the worm is evil and the "bed of crimson joy" is obviously the rose's sexuality etc etc. 

But I could equally make the case that The Sick Rose is, amongst other things obvs. an allegory of anal sex - i.e. rose as - well use your imagination,  "dark secret love" and so on. 

But all this is a digression from the main thing I found in another essay in this book, which must be left over from my Sussex undergraduate days in the seventies, - Kathleen Raine's rather dry essay "Blake's debt to antiquity" where she traces Blake's debt to Alchemy through such writers as Boehme and Paracelsus.  There's a wonderful bit of academic speak where she says, speaking of one of Blake's verse letters where he name checks the writers above, 

"From these passages we may gather [I just love this phrase haha ]that what fired Blake's imagination in the  Alchemical philosophy was the teaching of the famous Smaragdine Table of Hermes Trismegistus" 

But that isn't my main thing here: reading this I realised that William Blake was the missing link in two shows that I wanted to write and perform - one being The Celestial Tavern, - God's pub, me being St Peter being security on the door, an idea cooked up with Foz years ago, the other being a show based on Boethius' " Consolation of Philosophy".  I'm not sure how they will fit together in the final version, The Tyger will figure strongly - and one passage from the Visions of the Daughters of Albion, which is one of the most evocative and beautiful titles for a poem I know of, as Roger McGough realised as well.

Does not the eagle scorn the earth & despise the treasures beneath? 

But the mole knoweth what is there, & the worm shall tell it thee. 

Does not the worm erect a pillar in the mouldering churchyard,

And a palace of eternity on the jaws of the hungry grave?

Over his porch these words are written: ‘Take thy bliss O Man!

And sweet shall be thy taste, and sweet thy infant joys renew!

There's something here worth telling, worth playing with , worth putting together. Worms, eagles, tygers and a gentle mention for the horses of instruction.  

The Sopranos

Have decided to stop watching the Sopranos after six episodes, which was enough to show me that Tony Soprano ( and Uncle Junior and the mad henchmen and the bad henchmen) were just evil  violent fucks, end of story. How can there be any story once you have that laid out in front of you?  Yes there is some minor interest in how his children will take to the idea that he is Mafia, some interest in whether he will develop any self knowledge whatsoever in his therapy, some interest in the therapist herself, but it's not that much. Essentially the plots are going to be rehashes of every gangster film you've ever seen. 

On a personal level it makes me feel uncomfortable, as much screen violence does, but there's no existential shield here - you're not watching the crime,(as you do necessarily for the plot - that's the excuse in the most violent and nasty of crime / thriller plots, that the nastiness will in the end be redeemed or punished) , so that the good guys can win, you're just watching the plot. It's not more violent than say Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad, it just focuses one big fat lump of self satisfied  greedy bad , with nor redeeming features (he loves his children you say - c'mon who gives a fuck who he loves.  He's just one of the figures that used to haunt me in my nightmares, until I learnt to be conscious that I was fighting dream villains and began to beat the shit out of them in return until I woke up. 

Le Weekend

How many films have you seen about fifty something men recharging their lives and their libidos by having affairs with younger women?  Lots - even if you discount Woody Allen. This film turns the lost searchings of older men and women on their head - Jim Broadbent is entirely convincing as Nick,  the self defined under achieving husband of Lindsay Duncan's Meg, a teacher who is also looking for a new direction.  Hanef Kureshi's script is sharp, humorously incisive, bitter-sweet romantic comedy which holds on to both the comedy and the romance without ever getting cloying, but still managing to take the romance and turn it upside down and shake it a little.

Every long term couple will recognise the exchanges - " Have you got the Euro's", "Yes I Have" "Where are they then?".  What makes this film stand out is that is the way it builds up a such a coherent picture of a couple who stayed with the feminist concept of having a supportive male in a relationship,and Nickdisplays the agony of someone who's been that husband, but now finds that he has been metaphorically debollocked, he feels powerless and nowhere more hurtfully than in the scenes where he begs for sex, but she really isn't interested - they lost the spark. She tells him he is just a dependent.  There's plenty going on though in their 30th anniversary trip to Paris - you never lose interest - and it isn't all bad. 

The plot development where they meet the smarmy, confident and very successful academic, Morgan, played by Jeff Goldblum pitches up against all those films where... well, lets just say that  Morgan has ditched his (second) wife and married a younger woman who adores him - say no more, is very powerfully done. The dinner party they go to brings all the good and bad in their relationship to a head.  It's a great climax, thoughtful and affecting, to a thoughtful and affecting film. 

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera, day 3ish

Tereza loves books - they are her escape. So books do change people - or greet people with what they thirst for, even if they don't change worlds and societies. I would hate not to be able to read, because I read all the time, inhabiting other imagined worlds that enrich mine. I could imagine, though, being a carpenter who knew wood and its working inside out, with a great love for the sheen and touch and smell of it, and an ability to work with it and transform, and he might not read because there is enough in his craft. Or of a farmer or gardener so intimately and intelligently connected to the plants and the beasts around them that they derived complete satisfaction from the rich complexity of the things wrote therein. So maybe books are for the rest of us, who don't have a huge and great skill which we inhabit as in a different world that holds us up and subsumes us, we depend on books and reading for this enlightening other worldly transport. And, as dictatorial regimes all over the world know, if it does one thing, it makes us less biddable and more questioning.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

Quaintly reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being in a real paper edition, so fo course can't easily copy the quotes into this blog - though I'm guessing that someone somewhere has quoted the passages that struck me hard as well.  Let's Google and see. 

"Now what was tiring had disappeared and only the beauty had remained"

No one else has thought to quote it. It's a perfect summary of the feeling that remains when a loved one has gone away.

Oh and I was a bit unfair to Breaking Bad - in that the Ambiguous Last Redeeming Act was the only possible way of ending the series with any kind of closure. Not quite just the beauty remaining, but a sense that we had got away with it even if Walt hadn't.

Thursbitch, Boneland Alan Garner, Breaking Bad (warning: SPOILER if you haven't seen the last episode)

It's sad reading the shrill cries of disappointment of people who read Boneland wanting, expecting the same safe/frightening/comfortable swords and sorcery of the first two books, The Weirdstone of Brisingaman and Elidor, but it's entirely understandable. Alan Garner's moved on, and the medium through which he was trying to show/write his first books is long lost to him, just like my childhood readings of the books. All his books became bitterer and harder up to Red Shift, then sighed and sat in the poetic with the Stone Book Quartet. After that the books just scream of things nearly said, but unsayable.  There is a deep pain that tries to articulate itself in Thursbitch and Boneland, and set against the venal knowing psychoanalyst it feels more real, though harsher, more present, though inexpressible. Both books have an intense struggle in them, sometimes just local name after local name reverberating in the text, saying this is the land we lived in and its still there, weatherbeaten and mysterious, sometimes pages of spare dialogue that doesn't quite work in its hint of inexpressible forces unspoken and hinted at only in the tone or rhythm that the reader can give in the reading of it.

And then there was the last episode of Breaking Bad, with the expected (by me anyway) and obligatory (why I expected it) Ambiguous Last Redeeming Act.  Did Walt call for Jesse to be present so that he could kill him too, then, seeing the state he was in dive on him to save him from the hail of automated bullets. All far too simple, in its way.

A Man in Love (My struggle book 2), Karl Ove Knausgaard, still hanging in there, nearly at the end

Karl Ove continues to inspire and make me feel better about my life. I read this while sheltering from a thunderstorm at the allotment this morning, in the ramshackle shed that just about supplies cover from the rain.

The flat landscape, the sun rising, the stillness outside, the sleeping passengers, reinforced by a happiness that was so strong I remembered it twenty-five years later. But this happiness hadn’t had a shadow, it had been pure, undiluted, unadulterated.
Knausgaard, Karl Ove (2013-04-25). A Man In Love: My Struggle Book 2 (My Struggle 2) (Kindle Locations 8482-8484). Random House. Kindle Edition. 

In previous posts I've written about that sense of fear, that shadow that stops me from being simply happy and content in a way that I did manage when I was younger. Not always, but some of the time.  I seem to feel so much better actually at the allotment, there's a sense of calm there as well as the magnificent view ( I watched the storm clouds mass over the sea from my hilltop plot, and the most beautiful birdsong).  Partly I think it's the physical work, the keeping going, partly being outside surrounded by green, bathed in fresh scented air.  I had another idea to add to the story that I began yesterday and I hope that will allow the story a greater range, across a meadow of childhood, across the darker recesses, but, finally, hopeful, childhood nurtured in the bower of a family that values kindness and communication, that can't stop bad things, but takes them in its stride. The kind of family that I want to have supplied, and probably did, no I know we did.

But back to Karl Ove, he slips in and out of the hell that can be a life in your forties, when successes have happened, but they haven't changed your underlying sense of worth, don't make it easier to sweep floors and empty bins, don't make it easier to communicate the depressive moments, sometimes insulate you from the good times (that shadow of fear), don't stop you from stopping yourself enjoying yourself.  He experiences and writes so well about those times when you are so locked up in yourself that you can't get out, you can't join in, you can't celebrate.  Yep, been there, and in the other places too, the joyous, and have never understood how literally you can switch from one to the other in an instant, just a little stimulus, the wrong word or the right word.  Why are we (Karl Ove & me...  and others  I'm sure) so volatile, so unable to accept our blessings, so quick to bury ourselves in undefined, terrifying .. what?  remorse? depression, fear. Something that swoops over the self and shrouds it in unfeeling.

Meditation helps. I watched myself this morning, in the 20 mins I set aside just to sit and think, watching the feelings rush in, like the dark clouds across the sea today, and just letting them enter and knot up in my stomach ( can I really write? should I start the WordPress project, can I do it? how long is this fucking meditation going to last, for God's sake?), and as I did that they dissipated and went.  They would return  but each time I felt the knot and the thought I just sat still and let it pass. 

A Man in Love: My Struggle book 2 - day upon day

I've taken just to highlighting passages in  Karl Ove on my Kindle, often without any comment as they speak so clearly for themselves. It's easy then just to view my notes and marks from the menu and zip through looking for the passage I want.  That too is an eye opener because I realise how many passages I have marked that i have simply forgotten about.  That's not say that I wouldn't remember them if I had the right stimulus, but it emphasizes how much i forget, even from books that I have ready many times. War & Peace is probably a bad example, being a very long book (do I really need to say that - isn't War & Peace just synonymous with "very long book"), but when I ask myself - "What do you remember?" - and I have read it at least twice (is it three times?? why can't I remember that?), the first thing I think of is the Count having a dressing gown made of red squirrel fur.  I don't even know if that is from the book, or from a snippet about Tolstoy's life.  To be fair it is some time since I even reread it - and the first time was the Constance Garnett translation that I heaved all round France for three months and finally read in a little village in the Pyranees while working the vendange.  I have this melange of impressions - running away (or into?) battle, the socially awkward Pierre, a bet where someone drank a bottle of vodka standing on a window ledge, the Princess's stiff father, a Prince and an estate.  But here isn't much else there, it's like a forgotten faded BBC costume drama remembered for its period detail and production values.  I do better with Anna Karenina, which is not really about Anna Karenina, it's about Tolstoy, having a family and farming an estate - Vronsky and Karenina are just foils, although the image of Vronsky riding the mare to death in a race is indelible, as D.H. Lawrence said, but he is still peculiarly blank, a rather stiff and hopeless product of his times, as is Karenina. But then I reread that on holiday in Crete only ten months ago.

So today I meditate, run a little in the woods, walk down past the bakers, and think of an image, which fits with another previously written snippet, and realize I have a fully formed story to be written ( the first paras written just before this). I recall my wife's remark that I span the personal and the wider political stuff well in short pieces of writing ( although she thinks I lack the commitment and stamina for a novel), and know that the bombing of Yugoslavia will counterpoint this story of this young boy's 

...taking on seriously of Christmas as an emotionally significant commercial family event, where presents were to be bought and left underneath the Christmas tree ... 

The story begins to shape as I walk back, playing Graceland on my iPod, and the combination of the two starts, as it does now, the tears streaming from my eyes. Luckily I have sunglasses on as the tears run slowly down the outside of my cheeks, as I am not sobbing, just feeling, I don't know,  my soul's rain run across my face. Tears, anyway, that I cannot stop. Even now the keyboard is blurred, another reminder that I must learn to touch type.  People would worry if they saw me, but they wouldn't understand how this kind of feeling and weeping is essential to me - it brings me back to life.

A Man in Love: My Struggle book 2, Bobby Fischer, the end of innocence.

When you don't have a normal job, when you have to self-define - writing, housekeeping, anything that doesn't really have external status, there is plenty of time to mull over and stew in what meaning there is in what you do.Especially when you fall out of a daily rhythm - perhaps a late night, too much to drink, a slight hangover - and a malaise descends.  I read Karl Ove lying bed this morning, comfortable, warm and was feeling safe and secure.  His prose is relentlessly good, his thoughts run on in streams of meaningful consciousness, and it feels very privileged to be able to do this. Then I look up, recall the film / documentary about Bobby Fischer that i saw last night and unease creeps under the duvet, I feel tired, drift off, wake with the thought of Fischer's pursuit by the American government.  Fischer was a brilliant chess player, but completely insane it goes without saying. He disappeared for twenty years after the 1972 world championship match against Boris Spassky - refused to defend his title against a new contender, against whom he would probably have won easily.

Twenty years later he has a rematch, put together by a millionaire chess enthusiast, in Yugoslavia in the middle of the civil war there.  It's a pale affair, complicated by the fact the American sanctions against Yugoslavia mean that he is indited for playing there, and will lose all the money he won (he did win again), and possibly be imprisoned,  if he returns to the USA. He disappears again.

Then, just when everyone has forgotten about him, he surfaces in Japan, making a telephone call after 9/11 , a rabid totally insane call where he fulminates that the USA had it coming, a call full of bile and hatred (he's also, despite being Jewish, become a very nasty, rabid anti-semite).  Bush decides to extradite him and he is arrested in Japan.  Iceland give him a place to go, and he ends his days there, mad and bad, but mainly mad - a ranting obsessive.  What shocks is the fact that the USA went after him, even though he was so obviously a seriously insane has-been.  And what do you do when a very powerful country does that? You have to begin to doubt the sense of the American government, chasing straws - the Bradley Mannings and the Snowdons of this world are suffering the brunt of a country that is still the most powerful in the world, but is slowly losing that power and showing a very unpleasant vindictive authoritarian streak.  It's the same continuum of oppression that you see in Russia (Pussy riot & countless others) and China (Al Wei and countless others). Huge countries that have huge power.

I read some more Karl Ove. There's a few passages about goodness / innocence, I'll just pick out a short quote. 

"What you lust for is innocence and this is an impossible equation" 

What I want to do is enjoy and feel safe in that good warm feeling, under a duvet, reading good literature, but I never feel that innocent safety that I used to feel for long.  The world casts its shadow, money and things done and undone cast their shadow, there is no safe place anymore.  I have no innocence left, nothing left in which to bask and hide. Watching re-runs of the Edwardian farm is the nearest I get to those simpler states, and even then there is that doublefeel (as opposed to doublethink), where you feel good about the enthusiasm, the ingenuity, the beauty, but you know that in real life it was also undercut by starvation, disease and hard labour.  

Harley Loco - Rayya Elias, The Centre of the Cyclone, The Human Biocomputer, The Scientist: A Metaphysical Autobiography, John C Lilly,

One of the things that this memoir, like others of this genre, the "I fucked up bad with coke/e/alcohol/absinthe/heroin/opium/valium" genre (no-one's done a ketamine one yet - except Yes They Have!! - John C Lilly, he of dolphin research and The Centre of the Cyclone, and The Human Biocomputer followed up his seriously serious taking of acid with a major, and I mean major, ketamine habit - this indiscretion is now going to be the main subject of this blog entry, but I guess I need to finish the sentence outside the brackets first), illustrates is just what huge quantities of illegal drugs you can consume, for days on end, before it all goes really, really bad.  

We're onto John C Lilly now though - after the LSD centre book, The Centre of the Cyclone, and presumably a long time in counter culture circles, as they used to be known, he got heavily into ketamine.  He didn't slump on thew kitchen table in a  K-hole - he went all the way down that hole and out the other side into other universes - or so he reports. His book The Scientist: A Metaphysical Autobiography is a bizarre mish-mash of his writings,  bits that others have added, out of context photographs of famous people (including Richard Fenyman) with quotes from them beneath the photos saying, more or less the same thing,  that John C Lilly was a nice, intelligent interesting guy, an obligatory foreword from Timothy Leary. I still don't know what to make of him. He believed, from his ketamine induced journeys, this (only a full quote from his Wikipedia entry will suffice:

Solid State Intelligence
Solid State Intelligence or SSI is a malevolent entity described by John C. Lilly (see The Scientist). According to Lilly, the network of computation-capable solid state systems (electronics) engineered by humans will eventually develop (or has already developed) into an autonomous life-form. Since the optimal survival conditions for this life-form (low-temperature vacuum) are drastically different from those needed by humans (room temperature aerial atmosphere and adequate water supply), Lilly predicted (or "prophesised", based on his ketamine-induced visions) a dramatic conflict between the two forms of intelligence. Wikipedia, 29/07/13

He once rang the President of the United States to warn him about this entity, after which he was forcibly detained in a psychiatric hospital



I picked up the book second hand because I'd always liked the stuff he wrote about acid. This book was a bit of a shock with its mixture of fantasy, reportage. To me it's a reminder that very bright people can have truly awful, wacky views despite their preeminence in other fields. You've only got to think of Linus Pauling, double Nobel prize winner and his obsessive belief that vitamin C cures 75% of all cancers. 

A Man in Love (My struggle book 2), Karl Ove Knausgaard, many days in, The Player of Games, Iain. M. Banks

Ill today, and somehow Karl Ove Knausgaard was too much to read while feeling slightly nauseous and uncomfortable.  I picked up The Player of Games to read again, but the print was small and unclear - that slightly smudged effect that you get in cheap paperbacks and the paper  yellowed with age so it wasn't a comfortable reading experience.
I had a look how much it cost on the Kindle, and it was only £3.99, so I downloaded it for  big font size easy read.

I had forgotten the basic premise of The Player of Games, even though it's one of my favourite books.  The eponymous player of games is tricked into playing a game in a far off civilisation, blackmailed in fact. He has committed a small indiscretion, but one that , even in the anything goes tolerant world of the Culture (even because it is an anything goes tolerant world), will haunt him if disclosed. It's both the relative littleness of the thing, but the fact that it impinges on his honesty so directly, that almost hollows out his life, makes it worthless, when he been having existential doubts about its worth anyway. This unease is at the heart of the book, and although it is soon eclipsed by the events that follow, this time round I reflected on the the way in which he would never forget the dishonour that he had committed on himself, even as the thing itself diminished through time and perspective. It was like a low level ontological nausea that mirrored the slightly physically sick feeling I had myself.

A Man in Love (My struggle book 2), Karl Ove Knausgaard, Day - well. quite few in now,

Karl Ove Knausgaard washes his pretty mucky emotional linen in public so you don't have to wash yours.  That's a bit unfair to Karl Ove Knausgaard because he also has some great epiphanies as well - sometimes the shining white linen is flying out on the lines in bright sun and breeze.

Someone, in a film somewhere, I can't remember which - maybe it will come back to me at the end of the post, is going on and on about Ingmar Bergman and what a depressive and depressing Norwegian film maker he was, and what a depressive and what a depressing country Norway is,in a pompous, irritating way, until, finally one of the other characters cracks, lays into said Bergman judge, and leaves the scene with a great last line, half shouting half hissing it - "And Bergman was a Swede not a Norwegian".  Kar Ove has a lot to say about Norway vs Sweden, especially on how correct the Swedes are, how they do things just right, and how intellectuals are intellectuals, proles are proles,but bus men are bus men only temporarily while they finish their Phd. So where is all this going? Nowhere fast as they say. I'm just delighting in Karl Ove pouring his soul and his gripes down on the page, going from one to the other without so much as a blink. It is a fantastic portrayal of masculinity in all its shades. 

Our society has ever come to terms with the fact that some men don't like boxing, DIY or football, some women like DIY (my wife for one), and like doing it. So while being very proud of the fact that my wife has designed and made a huge built in wardrobe in our loft bedroom from scratch, I'm also slightly diminished in some way. I've never been good at that stuff - always bodge and cram things together, as my wife never fails to point out. Now she goes out to work, with a burgeoning new career, while I stay at home and cook, write, grow, shop, play online poker and Settlers of Catan. It has given her hugely increased confidence, and accentuated a certain natural tendency to bossiness that occasionally comes out in uncomfortable ways for me .  On Thursday night at a dance class, as we were leaving the room, she says to me in front of one of the dance instructors "Don't leave your glass there - clear it up", and I do a sort of double take to indicate to the dance instructor that I'm not accustomed to being told what to do by my wife, before picking up the three plastic glasses stacked on the window sill, the top one of which is mine, and chucking them in the bin. Perhaps I am a little over sensitive - no that's a lie, there is no perhaps about it, because outside I ask her not to tell me to do things (in that tone of voice ha! yes there is a certain tone, not too over the top or obvious, just a little imperious) in front of people.  She acts mature and puzzled, but fuck it, I had to say it for my own self respect.  Obviously she was right about the glass - I should have just put it in the bin in the corner right away- but I didn't like it pointed out like that. 


Not that I am complaining, but I realise that I liked being the one who came home with a large income, who ran stuff, who was a boss, who was used to being in command of things (or at least that illusion of command that comes from being near the top of the pile).  But I can't say that I'm unhappy now- I might miss the money and the status, but I don't miss the politicking. 

A Man in Love (My struggle book 2), Karl Ove Knausgaard, Day whatever, empathy and action

Through a series of events / sets of feelings, listed below (though not an exclusive set)  I've failed to find the BBC series The Victorian Farm on watch again or Netflix, but found it on Youtube on my Nexus 7 tablet then and fixed it up so that it plays on the Mac Mini through the TV. 

The events:

1. Picking out Far From the Madding Crowd for our lodger to read.
2. First time out rabbit hunting at the back of the downs.
3. Weekend comedown misery /sadness, empathy, happiness
4. Heat and warmth and the smell of the outdoors in summer.
5. Karl Ove of course.

I'm nearly in the state of mind that I was when living and teaching drama and english in Hackney in 1979/80, a long hot autumn where i was so phased by the teaching and the urban life that I watched All Creatures Great and Small on the huge TV we had in our skip furnished living room in short life housing in Rushmore Road.  It's that longing for something a bit simpler and idyllically rural.

Then that, for some reason got me thinking about empathy and good works. If you are as lucky as I am, and have any degree of sensitivity, then you have to feel deep sadness and compassion at the plight of so many around you, and of course in the world at large. At times it's almost overwhelming. And I began thinking about those practical, energetic types who do good things, who become councilors  who become Mother Teresa's if i can use such a crude blanket term to cover all passionately driven do-gooders. And I suspect that empathy and compassion are not a great part of their lives - there is no room for it - they're driven by and ideology of compassion or empathy which is not the same thing. So for example a "mother Teresa" type will have no problems excommunicating the aborticant, the left wing ideologue has no problem with the ends justifying the means. And that's putting aside the nakedly ambitious, the sociopaths and the unreflecting. Perhaps these people are effective in that they get things done, but I think they damage as well. Single mindedness always carries bigotry on its shoulder. Good reflective people are slower to act, read books, make our society better, the others shoulder their way through the crowds, knocking the slow and the meditative aside, and, incidentally kicking the shit out of each other where their paths cross. 

Harley Loco - Rayya Elias - Day 1/2

From one dysfunctional author to another, Ryya Elias writing has a less writerly, more amateur feel to it, but she tells the story well, and her voice comes through.  Her background is, in the words of a less wordly connected world, exotic - family origins in Turkey which her family fled in 1915 ahead of the pogrom, then Syria and the flight from ethnic/religious conflict to the USA. She has more horror in her life than the poor old cold existentially angsted Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard, but also a lot of fun and, I don't know, more life in her. As ever it's always comforting to read about people who are more fucked up than you, and to find out that they turn out OK. (Whether that's the case with Karl Ove I don't know yet - there are four more books in his "My Struggle" series that haven't been translated into english yet).  

A Man in Love (My struggle book 2) - , day 3

Karl Ove certainly captures the torment of being a man with a toddler in a group of mainly yummy mummies, especially when he is unable to participate very well, is head over heels in instant lust with the fit young guitar playing leader of the session.  It's a symptom perhaps of his malaise that he doesn't lust after the yummy mummies either. It's a terrible shorthand, "yummy mummy", meant to be demeaning, but I see it much more positively.  These young sexually active (well mostly, maybe) attractive women with small children, who hasn't walked behind a woman like that watching the movement of shapely buttocks beneath thin cotton but sensible dresses - or pictured that tired that tired rushed woman who has come out with no make up, hair awry, on the side of the bed instead of at the helm of a pushchair.  It seems like he has cut himself off from the most ordinary of consolations and feels himself diminished and damaged by his poor showing.

He says he wants isolation - that's why he never goes to the same cafe for too long, so as the waiters don't get familiar. I'm beginning to wonder what he would be like to meet - presumably terse, morose and eager to leave. But maybe he's not, maybe this is all a pose, just a description of that set of feelings, that persona that everyone inhabits in some hours, minutes or days of their lives, when they cannot find meaning in contact, only a kind of rough solace in being alone, anonymously in a big city, or alone completely. . 

A Man in Love (My struggle book 2) - , day 2

This man is or was seriously depressed would be my snap diagnosis. He describes the nightmare of the convivial school/ nursery gates world so well - at least I wasn't the only shrinking, horrified scurrier away from the conversations and arrangements that were made.  Usually I had to rush off to work anyway, but I shared the terrible blackness that descended on me whenever I had to attend a school / child focused social occasion. Luckily I was able to palm them off on my wife, but sometimes I had to go. Here's a paragraph from a lengthy and painful description of a four or three years old's birthday that he had to attend with his wife and children:

"The thought of going in and sitting at the kitchen table again was not exactly appealing, so I opened the bathroom door, locked it behind me and stood there motionless for a few minutes. Then washed my face in cold water, dried it carefully on a white towel and met my eyes in the mirror, so dark and in a face so rigid with frustration I almost started with alarm at the sight."


Knausgaard, Karl Ove (2013-04-25). A Man In Love: My Struggle Book 2 (My Struggle 2) (Kindle Locations 694-696). Random House. Kindle Edition. 

It's a point of horrified self-recognition, and it's the second time I've used horrified in this post, because the feeling is that strong.  What have you become when you cannot bear the sight and sound of these good, friendly ordinary people?

A Man in Love (My struggle book 2) - ,

It's a stunning start; probably more so for anyone who has had children and taken them to stay with childless friends.  Perhaps a slightly guilty, but soon shrugged off, sense of recognition from just those same childless recipients of families coming to stay. And maybe a sense of disbelief from those who are childless and don't have families to stay, or have children but don't stay with the childless. And a sense of sadness from those childless who do have children  to stay and love every minute (despite the tiredness), and their visitors who absolutely love going to stay with them and are eternally, and I mean eternally, grateful for their reception.  Karl Ove Knausgaard maybe a bit of a selfish cunt at times, but he's an honest selfish cunt, and there aren't that many of them around, particularly those that can write so well and so accurately. I love reading this book, I have to ration myself so i don't read it all in one sitting.

I can't say the same for Candide , which I've always meant to read and am 1/3 way through. It's of its time I guess, and I'm just speed reading knowing what will come next.  It must have shocked deeply at the time - and rightly so, meaningfully so. It does make me reflect on writing that will endure and writing that is of it's time only - both are important.  Maybe the latter are even more important because they pave the way, they split apart the mindsets of the moment and allow something else in.  

My Father's Tears and other stories - John Updike, Zero Point Neal Asher, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murikami, And I forgot Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasan, and the Shining Girls by Lauren Buekes, and Zoo Story by Lauren Buekes

The three books I have been reading, the Asher finished last night, one of those books you could call High Octane because the violence and the battles and the sci-fi are always ramping up the tension. Readable, though, very readable, though nothing much to write about here, except that the language of porn appears to creep into the book - the arch villainess and evil ruler of this dsytopian earth hears that one of her senior staff likes to to have three men at once because she says she "likes all her holes filled at once".  It's a strange unappealing misfire, a cliche in itself.

MY Father's Tears has some outstanding writing, and also some duds. It must have been released after John Updike's death - I'm sure he would have spotted the repetition of "seemed to know the ropes" about two separate groups of tourists in Spanish Prelude to a Second Marriage, only a few pages apart, you would have thought an editor would to.  The Varieties of Religious Experience, doesn't quite work either, it's a little too obvious, but I can see that he had to find some response to 9/11, and parts of it are fine. It opens well with Dan Kellog's revalation that "There is no God", the opening words of the story, but doesn't add anything that Updike hasn't more fully explored elsewhere in The Beauty of Lilies, or A Month of Sundays, or Marry me - the list goes on, the list of Updike's attempts to reconcile belief and the intellectual imperative of atheism.  But  Delicate Wives is a perfectly formed story. I'm about half way through, but have been knocked off kilter by the Varieties of Religious Experience, and Spanish Prelude -  somehow it diminishes the book as a whole to have not so good stories, which is crazy - although maybe not, it makes you start each new story with a little quiver of fear that it may not be up to much.

Murakami's book I bough while walking in the Brecon beacons in a rare moment of 3G access to download it.  I'm glad I did - his I was going to say "flat laconic style" fits this kind of autobiography, but it's not flat, it's not laconic - it is just so well written in a Murakami way that it gives the appearance of flat laconocism (whatever that is, use your imagination) while flexing  and pushing ideas and images out from the prose.

Carl Hiaasen is a rocking read, the synopsis in the Guardian's recommended summer reads sums it up well - disgraced cop, beauteous coroner, monkey fired from the set of the Pirates of the Carribean for unsavoury behaviour. The rest is plot, guts, guns and fat hot Florida.

Lauren Buekes is another great find, after her free book Moxyland, started buying her books, weird crime/sci-fi , post cyber punk mayhem, witty and funny and disturbing in  equal measure.

Well at least I've written something to day.

Crimes & Misdemeanors

Crimes & Misdemeanors turned out to be a much better film than I thought, having watched the first 20 mins or so and got a bit bored some time ago. It does deal with the two worst fears of the liberal conscience - your loved one going off with a complete arsehole and committing a heinous crime for which you know you should be punished.  But there's a throwaway line, when the Woody Allen character's wonderful Bruno Betelheim substitute (warning , small spoiler here) , who is so full of wisdom and  insight, commits suicide, Woody Allen says 
"I grew up in Brooklyn, no-one committed suicide, they were too unhappy"

Depression and misery and a sense of proportion

Hearing about the death of Ian Banks and watching the last episode of Game of Thrones and the marriage at Frey's castle is not a great way to cheer the day.  Sundays malaise, too much over-indulgence over the weekend, all cast a pall as grey as the sky is today. Out in the garden there is a bird singing, counterpointing the greyness, bringing a sense of proportion. It's not me that's dead, Game of Thrones is not real and our capacity to feel is what makes us human. All the same it feels better to hide away in silence, to pull up the covers and listen to this one bird singing an illimitable song.

A Death in The Family (My struggle book 1) - Karl Ove Knausgaard - day - well I've lost count

Well past the half way mark in this now, and reading some astonishingly raw and real passages - it is a reflective book that makes you reflect in a similar way, so a proper journey. Absorbing, all that stuff people say when they really get int a book, but with a sometimes uncomfortable grittiness that is itself the thing that makes it so absorbing. 

I'm starting to look at some other blogs now, having followed a link from Facebook for one, and found another through looking up some New Agey type training thing - Landmark - which appears to be a direct descendant of Erhart sensitivity training.  Realise that there are all sorts of people who love being pushed to be positive, nay shouted at, forced to cry tears of joy, forced catharsis - all great stuff if you can a) afford it (they charge a lot) and b) have enough credulity to take it all on board. It's the next step from all those inspiring quotes and pictures you get reposted on Facebook, and works off the premise that people really do want to change, and there's gold in them psyches.

I can't talk - I loved all the ecounter groups and therapy groups in the 1970s and early 80s, loved the emotional thrill I got from them - but then they were mostly free. Or self organised - we ran a "therapists group" for some years. I certainly got a lot of self knowledge out of them, and learnt alot about whant made me and others tick. I'm sure I'd be a vey different person if I hadn't undergone them, but, but, but that hasn't stopped me from hurling headlong into things I shouldn't, making dreadful mistakes - or you could say it has helped me do things just right, live a fulfilling creative and happy life, understand where I coming from and where I'm going.

The new play is going to be about that pivotal point when you have achieved - well achieved enough, and you have this choice between continual play and hedonism, and something else potentially of more service and good. 

Brighton Fringe - Sleeping Trees Odyssey, A Death in the Family day - whatever! lost count now, BaggageVarious

A blog is just like a large book - a way though it you get sidetracked and read / write something else. In Brighton Festival time now so reviewing shows almost every night. The first one was a cracker - three man improvised show and none the worst for that. Funny , fizzing with physical inventiveness - I suppose I could post the whole review here, but I'll wait and post the link to the review sites once it's published.

Still reading A Death in the Family, which has some great sustained lyrical writing about being a teenager, first love - it does get that sense of the romantic that overwhelms the sexual, while being so tied up with it.  There's a wonderful passage where he is upstairs with one of his fiorst girl friends, and she takes off her top and bares her breasts.He is, of course  transfixed, but also strangely unmoved - and it captures that huge adolescent sex drive, where all you think you want is access to those mysterious warm folds of a woman's body only to find that there is something missing if the romance isn't there.  I think this compares well with the female experience of having sex and finding it underwhelming and not that exciting (well described in Janet Street-Porters autobiography Baggage, that I just read in one day a few days ago,and countless other women's biogs and fiction).

A Death in the Family - day 2

There's a good passage in  A Death in the Family which explains that when you are grown up (i.e no longer a child , no longer striving with wonder, activity and boredom), you have the measure of things - the framework in which your life exists, and "that is when time begins to pick up speed" and begins racing through our lives - "before we know what is happening we are forty, fifty, sixty ..." The consequence is, as he says when he sees his father both from the perspective of the child he was and the adult now older than his father at that time:


"...on the one hand I see him as I saw him at that time, through the eyes of an eight-year-old: unpredictable and frightening; on the other hand, I see him as a peer through whose life time is blowing and unremittingly sweeping large chunks of meaning along with it.

Knausgaard, Karl Ove (2012-03-01). A Death in the Family: My Struggle Book 1 (My Struggle 1) (p. 10). Random House. Kindle Edition.

The image of time blowing these rock like chunks of meaning is a strange one, located in the fact that the father he is/was observing is wielding a sledgehammer to break rocks and widen their vegetable garden. Shades of Ozymandias, or that riddle in the Hobbit. How can something so insubstantial and ethereal break so much apart.

Every so often.. Freedom from Fear - The American people in Depression and War 1929-1945 Day 3, A Death in the Family: My Struggle Book 1 (My Struggle 1 Day 1

Every so often the faintly discernible thread that links the reading of one book with the reading of the next is cut by something external - it might just be a change of venue, or even an abrupt change of mood where what you wanted to read yesterday suddenly becomes distant and boring, or it might even be (worst case scenario) a slow growing disillusionment with a book, a creeping sense that this really isn't worth the effort of plodding through, a narrative that gradually condemns itself with weary banal slow (very slow) steps, as you spend more time wondering whether it's worth finishing, especially if you have put hours and hours of reading effort in.  It's like climbing a promising hill, nice path, interesting prospects on promise only to peek over the top at yet another steeper hill lost in mist and drizzle, with no relief or end in sight.

For me two days ago it was just being in a different place, a long drive up to Retford for the funeral of my best friend,  and picking up a huge unwieldy book  called Freedom from Fear - The American people in Depression and War 1929-1945, starting it, and being completely transported into the desire to know what happened in this huge country, to make it what it is today, along with a not quite random secondary desire to maybe pick up Boardwalk Empire again - I think we left off watching about episode 4 or 5.  It means I abandoned The Point, although I will go back and read those stories, perhaps in parallel.

Then back home, sitting at the table in the kitchen reading the Guardian review, I found a book review of the second book in a series by Karl Ove Knausgaard: A Death in the Family: My Struggle Book 1 (My Struggle 1), a review that made me turn to my Nexus 7, charging quietly on the computer desk behind me,  and, since it was reasonably priced, buy it immediately, and then begin to read it, and realise  certainly from the first two pages, that this was a good decision.

So there I am with two new starting points, the Dostoevsky looking less attractive now, though I think I might gallop through Notes from the Underground again, but now as then I find his vituperative, twisted character strangely uninteresting, a mouthpiece for views and prejudices that don't really sit very easily in my life. It feels like a very nihilistic text. And then alongside, a difficult parallel read again ( I'm keen on parallel reads, sometimes linked, sometimes not, one book enriches another if only by giving you a change of style and track) of Rowan Williams book about how Dostoevsky (probably) can show and teach us a lot about faith and belief, once you separate put the rabid nationalism and obviously ridiculous poses. I'm beginning to prefer Chekov to Dostoevsky, and, possibly, Tolstoy.

Charle's D'Ambrosio, The Point & other stories

Ever since I been listening to the New Yorker short fiction podcasts I've been meaning to buy some of the authors I had never heard of before. Started with The Point, the tile story of which is read here: The Point. I'm already having a break from the Dostoevsky, but yesterday was a busy day, and the second story in this collection was the one I read: "Her Real Name".  Just like when I listened to the podcast of "The Point"  I was a little uncertain about the voice, but then got swept into this hot, dusty elegy, with its contrasting ending out on the water, black and cool at night.

It felt quite long, maybe because I wanted to finish it before I went to sleep, but I didn't want to rush the reading. It's about 40 pages long, so say 12,000 words - a substantial length for a short story, there's plenty you can pack in. And there you are, another strange story absorbed, another set of images, quite strong at the moment, but how long will they last? The Point itself is fairly unforgettable - I think I may have listened to it twice (or else it made such an impression on me that I just think I've listened to it twice). When I first listened I had to break off h ten or fifteen minutes in and I wasn't that happy with the story, wasn't sure if I would go back to it.  But I did - I started again, and got involved in that narrator's voice - a thirteen year old boy, somewhat unbelievable, but somehow believable.

Dostoevsky - Language, Faith and Fiction

From sexy cult to  the ex- Archbishop of Canterbury's book on Dostoevsky is a big step, but Dostoevsky has had a huge impact on me and my reading from teenage years onwards. I'll probably start rereading Notes from Underground just to get all Dostoevskyied up.  And spelling that name - it's so easy if you break it down
Dos     (2 more syllables)
toev  ( a russian toe)
sky (as in reach for)
There are plenty of alternative spellings - Penguin go for "Dostoyevsky", but that adds an extra complexity, so I'm sticking with the simplest, and if it's good enough for the Archbishop of Canterbury than it's good enough for me. 

Being able to spell Dostoevsky is always impressive, should there be anyone to display this talent to. I speak as someone who once wrote a "beautifully suggested" essay on Dostoevsky, and existentialism, but misspelt Sartre as Satre all the way through (way back in the 1970s, Modern European Mind at Sussex University).

So Rowan Williams take is a specifically Christian one, natch, ( I don't think he's read or will read Pedro Juan Gutierrez) and is coming from a deep (as in knows a lot about) theological perspective, most of which is lost on me.  But his reading of Dostoevsky is still accessible and meaningful, as long as you take it slowly. I'm going to use the blog to try and keep track of what he is saying, in the hope of finding what? Enlightenment?  Probably not, just a clearer light shone of the complexities of Dostoevsky.

So lets have a sample of Rowan William's prose. This is genuinely the next sentence I read as I picked up where I had left off this morning.

"What we have here, in fact, is remarkably like a highly dramatized version of the Hegalian Unhappy Consciousness, with a few extra refinements: the self's ideal existence is unattainable, and what is actually experienced in self-awareness is failure and finitude  finitude itself as a form of humiliation"
p19
(my link added for the Hegalian Unhappy Consciousness, should you be unfamiliar...)

I'll come back later and add some more as there are other things to do - and this snippet is, in context (rather unfair just to lift it like this) insightful. I think. I do need to think, and the challenge of having to do that will keep me going.

Dirty Havana Trilogy - Book 2

This collage of the stink and press of poverty with the slightly less confident celebration of  sex and rum continues.  At the moment he is trying to sell a bucket to make 20 pesos, he's starving, his partner of the moment is spending a week with a rich Spanish tourist, so there will be no money or food until she gets back. I'm wondering where it's all going, but that's just the thing, at this level of poverty there is nothing but the next meal, the next sleep, the next day, the next fuck if you're lucky.

Asimov's , The Skiff

Primarily this is a blog about reading but occasionally other subjects creep in - like I'm writing this in the Skiff having signed up for a day a week. Plus I went to meet a business partner re setting up a website and training business, so am now all geared up to learn WordPress, maybe even make a business of it. t

Aimov's is still good hard sci-fi, with enough interest as well as innnovation to make most of the stories intensely readable.  The Fantasy & Science Fiction story that I was reading though turned out to be a bit of damp squib - full of quasi (or real, maybe not quasi) Quaker stuff that I thought was all very worthy, but not interesting to read, and a kind of nothingy ending. There was this simulacrum  of a steampunk kind, that may or may not have had a soul imprisoned in it, and that's just as bad as slavery isn't it. Yes. End of story.

I've started to write  a bit here as well, but the laptop I am using is uncomfortable, hot (literally), and I haven't brought a keyboard with me, so my typing is full of typos.  But I think I might be able to write here. The Ivan and Alenoushka story is taking some different directions - and I'm appreciating just how much sheer plod it's going to take to make it into the novel I want it to be. I'm torn between inventing some action now, or choosing another perspective.  I think the story needs a little bit more suspense in it. What I am trying to get , to practice, is when to introduce the more savage action, that moves the story up a step, rather than the slow psychological approach of, say, a Richard Ford novel ( if he wrote sci-fi that is).  It is quite good writing here, though, I'm in this little self-contained bubble surrounded by people.

Iain Banks

Desperately sad news, delivered with his typical black humour and optimism: http://www.littlebrown.co.uk/a-personal-statment-iain-banks.page

The only writer who has ever created a decent utopia, in the Culture novels - or at least one I would like to live in.  I simply don't know what to say - he says he probably won't last the year, so the last book will be The Quarry.  The best science fiction writer I have read.

Portnoy's Complaint, and all the Books I Am About To Read or Finish or Give Up On.

Finally, finally - I have changed the default font for this blog to Arial, instead of having to reset it everytime I make a new post. It's not a blogger setting - you have to change the default font in Chrome - as set out here.
http://joshwentz.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/change-default-font-in-blogger.html

So the last few pages of Portnoy's Complaint were a bit mad and incomprehensible to me - it felt as if he hadn't run out of rage, just run out of narrative and words. There is a sense in which yes his impotent encounters in Israel neatly tie up, in narrative terms,  his rage at the Jewishness he grew up in, at the goy world he grew up in, and now the "real" Jewish culture that he has jetted into.  That is always the way with novels, - endings are difficult after all those words and all that build up, unless you're Jane Austen or a nineteenth century novelist, in which case endings are literal - marriages, deaths, successes. Modern novels struggle with these because they are too unambiguous, and if we've learnt anything in the 21st century it is that most things are uncertain and ambiguous. The things that aren't - the fundamentalists of any religion or political organisation, the bigots, the simply stupid are mainly just rather upsettingly and fuck-up-the-worldingly wrong.
So what now? I thought I'd make a list of the books that I have to read at the moment, or books that I'm half way through. This  may be a long task, and I might give up halfway, as i have given  up half way in so many of these texts.

Churchill - biography by Roy Jenkins - half read.  It's a bit massive, Churchill isn't that intrinsically interesting compared to, say, Lincoln (Team of Rivals is a long plod, but I finished that), or Nixon (Jonathan Aitken's biography - one perjurer writes about another - I really liked the irony of that, and it's well written & interesting - Nixon is a fascinating character.

number9garden - Dacid Mitchel - he of Cloud Atlas - picked it up 2nd hand. Really liked

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet  

Incandescence - Greg Egan - half way though this, left off about a year ago as i ran out of steam - going to have toi pick up a complex plot again to finish this.

Dostoevsky - Rowan Williams - the ex Arch Bishop of Canterbury's critical study of Dostoevsky, that I struggle with - I'm going to have to restart this. 

We Yevgeny Zamyatin - started this, but found it fundamentally depressing, in the same way that I found The Handmaid's Daughter fundamentally depressing - so won't finish this - must give it back to its owner.

Then there's two or three more Roth, and two or three more Richard Ford, The English Patient, book 5 or 6 of Game of Thrones , and that's apart from the maths stuff I'm interested in, poker books, new issues of Asimov's and Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Started a story in the latter last night which is strangely compelling (I can't be arsed to think of anything more original to say) - a story of Quakers hiding a runaway slave, but finding that the slave hunter after him is a metal built simulacrum full of cogs and gears - kind of steampunk meets Django Unchained - it's so fantastical, yet it's kept my interest - in fact I 'll finish it now.

And of course the next two books in the Dirty Havana trilogy.
There's probably more lurking downstairs - books that I've picked up somewhere and didn't quite get around to starting, +there's Charles D'Ambrosio's The Point in the post, and none of this counts any of the re-reading I'd like to do.