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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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. .
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?
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.
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 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"
