Chance conjunction of the day

The conjunction came from a song lyric and a book fragment, within not very minutes of each other.

The song lyric came first; it was playing as I worked on the text of an article about statistical testing:

She was physically forgotten,
Then she slipped into my pocket
With my car keys.
She said “You've taken me for granted
Because I pleased you...”¹

I was hungry so, when the track finished, paused the player and put aside the article for a while to get a bite to eat. Filling the gastric gap with a sandwich from my right hand, I picked up the book with my left to give my mind a brief change of scene as well. The book was an old favourite (in fact, I find that I already referenced this same line from it, earlier this year ... I'm getting repetitive) which is, to embroider the conjunction (or to suggest that am stuck in a particular past), very close to being coeval with the song:

There’s a photograph of an olive tree among the stones on my desk; when Luise left she wrote on the back of it: “I trusted you with the idea of me and you lost it”.²

It's so easy to take someone for granted and lose the idea of them ... not just a significant other, but oneself and (the thought that occurred to me in this case) those friends more removed as well.

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1. Paul Simon, "Diamonds on the soles of her shoes" on Graceland, 1986
2. Russell Hoban, The Medusa Frequency Ch.3. 1987, London: Cape. ISBN 0224024647

The blue, the blue, the blue!

Unreal Nature's "Rather than presumption" post, earlier today, quotes from a Vivian Sobchack essay on Derk Jarman's film Blue:

“ ...the image is not "empty"...”

How I wish that I could persuade the rows of art lovers who have sat, stony faced, before me as I talked myself blue (!) in the face, vainly trying to put over that very point.

Audiences whom I seek to similarly persuade of the depth and passion in Yves Klein's IKB works are equally unimpressed. I show them the intense blue of the sky between tall buildings (though not as intense as that in the steep Virginian valleys where Unreal nature is written) and invite them to wonder ... for a moment their eyes show recognition of how amazing that blue is; but when they drop their eyes again they have not altered their opinion of Klein.

I have often wondered whether Jarman had Klein in mind when he chose blue for that magical rectangle in the luminous dark ... or whether both of them were, like Robert Frost in Fragmentary blue, simply responding to a shared human entrancement described by Doris Lessing:

“She had clung here and looked up and out and it had been as if her whole self had filled with a need to leave here and let herself be absorbed by that endless blue — the blue, the blue, the blue!”

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• Doris Lessing, The marriages between Zones Three, Four and Five (as narrated by the chronicles of Zone Three). 1980, London: Cape.  022401790X. [Amazon link (physical book). Amazon link (Kindle).]

Quotation of the day

“[Auntie Jean’s] flat, although still in a state of disarray, actually looked considerably tidier than it had before the forensic team began to search it.”

This is from Freefall, third in the “Tunnels” series of books – aimed at a teenage audience, but a good adult read nevertheless – which I am gradually reading and will review together when I'm done.

Aunie Jean is a deliberately cartoonish character, half slattern and half goodhearted salt of the earth, but the above quoted sentence made me laugh out loud.

This illustrates one of the advantages of eReading, since I allowed myself to be seduced into it: I read mostly on a 120mm tablet (since I only eRead when on the move), never on a PC which is impossibly clunky ... but I can mark a section (like the one above) when I see it, on the spur of the moment, then instantly call it up, copy and paste it, later when (as I am now) at a “proper” keyboard. A researcher's dream.

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• Brian Williams & Roderick Gordon, Freefall. 2009, Frome: Chicken House. 9781906427054 (pbk).
  Also 2012, London: Scholastic, (Kindle edition, location 908-909)
  

They knew better

I have all of Luís Bustamante's books. First and foremost, because I love to leaf through the photographs themselves. Also because they are suffused with the gentle humanity which I so much admire in their author. And because they are so different. We are used to photographers having a personal stamping ground which they explore in new ways (or not), often with a trademark style. Luís' work is different; though there is always, in everything he does, a balanced blend of personal conscience and political awareness, content and approach are not subordinated to it. The latest, They knew better, is in a way the most overtly political image set of those so far published, but no less humane. It follows the progress of a group of secondary school pupils through the British anti war demonstrations of 2003-2005, but looks also at what is going on around them. I remember the student protests of the 1960s; this was the first time, since then, that the same passionate mass commitment seemed to resurface. It seems to have gone underground again; I was saddened to hear that The Guardian, supportive of the antiwar movement at the time, declined to review this book. Shot through with both commitment and humour, it's a delightful thing to have, to hold, and to return to over and over again just for the pictures. As with all of Luís' books, you'll find the full content available to browse (I recommend using the full screen option) here: http://www.blurb.com/books/4101573-they-knew-better

From the preface to They knew better: Ten years ago, on 15 February 2003 protests against a neo-conservative war on Iraq drew millions of people across the world, the largest mass protest in history. This was the peak of a series of events that started in 2002. By the end of 2002 and early 2003, large numbers of people mobilised against the West's preparation for war. Demonstrations took place in capital cities and at local level. For the first time in decades, people looked beyond consumer choices and started questioning the morality of their leaders' actions. On one day alone, up to 2 million people went into the streets of London and around 20 million mobilised across the world. The demonstrations took wide sections of the British public into the streets. This is the story of a group of school children [...] who took part in demonstrations against war and neoliberalism over the years. They attended the largest London demos as well as provincial ones, ending up with the Make Poverty History demonstration in Edinburgh in July 2005. While originally concerned with recording the group of youngsters as they went from one event to another, the camera inevitably got drawn to other participants, taking advantage of a unique opportunity to explore the rich demographics which make up British society. The debate still goes on but it's lost much of its relevance. We've moved on as T. Blair insisted we should. The world is a different place now, although not necessarily better. Despite the overwhelming use of force and cutting-edge technology, the war on terror hasn't been won but nobody seems to talk about it any more. A guilty silence surrounds the lies that preceded the attack on Iraq, its catastrophic effect and the flagrant abuses of international law and human rights. The perpetrators are still at large and some of them are treated as celebrities. An air of impunity surrounds those who went against the wishes of so many people. The waste of resources in this and other crazy schemes has pushed the West into a situation in which it just cannot go to war at will. The Western economy has been on the brink of collapse and many people have been disenfranchised. There was a sense of freedom and hope that lingered for a time even in the dark moments of preparation for war and then during the unleashing of the world's most devastating war machine on a country that was already on its knees. It became tangible that the world wasn't divided just between the audacious and the don't cares. For a short time humanity was possessed by an energy which had been lost by generations of conformism.

Consider a banana...

From Simon Says, the blog of this atheist's favourite theologian:

“Tax havens profoundly affect the way that we live ... They have contributed to a huge transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, both globally and within the richest countries ... ... ... Tax Havens have a huge impact on the developing world.”

...and...

“To see how Tax Havens work, consider a banana.  Every banana in your fruit-bowl has taken two simultaneous paths to be there.  One is the path of the actual banana. ... At the same time the banana takes a more circuitous route, but only on an accountant's piece of paper.”

This is from a review of Nicholas Shaxson's Treasure islands : tax havens and the men who stole the world – a book (aptly described as “exceedingly readable - more like a thriller than a work of economics”) which I, too, thoroughly recommend. I wish I had written as good a review myself; but I didn't, and being pragmatic I'll just refer you straight over to the man who has.

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• Shaxson, N., Treasure islands : tax havens and the men who stole the world. 2011, London: Bodley Head. 9781847921109 [or] 2012, London: Vintage. 9780099541721

Conversation overheard

In a book shop, two boys around eleven or twelve years old. The first suddenly grabs his friend's arm in excitement.

First boy: “Oh, WOW , look – Charles Dickens!”

The second boy says nothing, but looks bewildered.

First boy: “He writes brilliant TV history dramas … and now, look, they've made books out of them!”

With great regret

It is with great regret that I have heard, today, of the death of John Marx from complications following elective surgery.

My regular readers will have seen references to, and recommendations for, Marx Books. I have made several orders for books from John and though it may seem strange after so short a time (four and a half months), at such a remove (thousands of miles and an ocean), and on so tenuous a basis (vendor to buyer, entirely by web and email), I had come to think of John more as a wise friend than as a supplier.

John was … it's not a word I normally use or even consider, but it seems appropriate here … a gentleman. He was at least as concerned with making sure that he treated others fairly as he was with making a profit. He really loved books, too.

Earlier this month, I made an order from Marx Books. On the 13th, John let me know that it might be delayed as he was going into hospital for this surgery on the following day. Today I heard from his son, Sam, with the sad news.

I'm richer for having known you, John, however briefly; the world will be a little poorer without you.

Timeslips (sideways)

I have been sending out emails inviting people I know to participate in a survey organised by Elsie, a teenager who is researching a project on “what makes a novel a classic?”*

Replies have been rolling in from generous people who have given Elsie their time and thought. One of them is from Dirk Dusharme, who continued in a vein which (while not primarily concerned with SF) fits well with my “Timeslips” opener of yesterday:

It's funny though. Just this last week I was thinking I should go back and reread some of my favorite childhood books.

I was thinking Robinson Crusoe, Les Miserables, Kidnapped (which I remember really liking), Black Stallion (I read all of them), Dr. Doolittle (read all of them as well). So many....

And I don't know if you ever came across this series as a kid Danny Dunn and the.... Time machine, Homework machine, etc. They were all kind of technology things. Danny was a boy genius, his dad a rocket scientist, and Danny would get into some sort of mischief involving his latest invention. Kind of a nerdy Hardy Boys thing. Read all of them as well. I basically hid in the library as a kid... better than the real world.

[… … …]

...the first SF book I read that really captivated me [was] Andre Norton's Moon of Three Rings. It was like nothing I had ever read before [… … …] at some level, making me realize that characters in books could be very real and relatable. And that was important.

I never encountered the Black Stallion or Danny Dunn books, but I loved all of the others in that list. I have a surreal image of Dirk in a library in California, me in a library in South Australia, both devouring the same Dr Dolittle book at the same time (perhaps Doctor Dolittle in the moon, since that qualifies as a science fiction with its space travel by giant moth...)

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*If you want to take part yourself, feel free – Elsie would, I know, appreciate it. Click here.

• Hugh Lofting, Doctor Dolittle in the Moon. 1929, London: Jonathan Cape. 

Timeslips (1)

This is, functionally and organically, an extension of my first Vie Hebdomadaires post, “The puzzle that is me”, from 30 July. Perhaps extension isn't the right word; ‘descendent’ or ‘inheritor’ might be better. It's likely to be quite short; partly because I have only as long as it takes me to eat a bowl of soup, and partly because I don't yet know exactly where it is heading. It will have to be the first fragment of a self exploration in progress.

I said, back then in July, that a particular science fiction novel read in my early teens “changed me fundamentally and shaped my whole subsequent life”. To a more diffuse but equally real extent, that is also true of the whole gamut of science fiction which I read between roughly thirteen and sixteen. While this is a fact of which I've been generally aware for some time, over the past three months I've been thinking about it consciously and explicitly.

In second hand bookshops, charity stalls, digital reissues and the always excellent Marx Books, I've been deliberately looking out for copies of those titles and authors which I can retrieve from memory. Not according to a grand strategy; each quest is triggered by a chance association from another book read, by a day to day experience, by a remark in conversation.

I was a voracious reader at that time. Though many of the books concerned are, I now discover, quite slim, I nevertheless cannot any longer devour six or seven of them in a day. It's perhaps fortunate, then, that I can't remember enough bibliographic details to track down more than a few of them. Some I remember clearly and can go straight to them in a catalogue; Geoffrey Hoyle's October the first is too late was one such. Others I can find by following trails of breadcrumbs backward ... I could remember neither author nor title for Frederik Pohl's A plague of pythons, for instance, but searching online for a combination of things I did remember (coronets, mind control, science fiction novel, hoaxer, etc) brought them up fairly quickly. For some I have to rely on the black arts of which Ray Girvan is master; he has located several titles which defeated me completely, from almost no clues at all, and is currently chasing another for me.

There are several things that particularly interest me about delving back into what I read at a formative time in my life. The most obvious and superficial is finding out what it was, exactly, that so strongly influenced me – and why. There is also a historical fascination in looking back to how things were then. Even more interesting, though, is to discover what I was like then: to see what sort of teenager I must have been for this fiction to have precisely that effect upon my developing psyche. It's a fascinating voyage of self discovery.

I have to pick up my stylus and walk, now. A lecture hall full of eager (or perhaps somnolent) students awaits me. Rather than stow this and continue it later, this seems like a good point to break and post. I'll be back, in other (no doubt equally fragmentary) posts, to follow some of the threads I've started to gather here.

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• Fred Hoyle, October the first is too late. 1966, London: Heinemann.
• Frederik Pohl, A plague of pythons. 1966, London: Gollancz.

Finding Helen

I'm too much a scientist to give a moment's credence to the idea that coincidences have any significance; but human enough, at the same time, to enjoy (even as I dismiss it) the superstitious illusion that they might. A coincidence takes at least two components. This one has three: a place, an object, a book title.

I was last in this place, this city of absurd architecture, forty years ago give or take a week or so. I had come to visit a friend, but the hitching had been too slow to arrive at a time when I might still have reasonably knocked on the door. No lights were on, so I wandered down to the beach and curled up on shingle amidst the suck and blow scraping sound of surf beneath a jetty.

A coincidence also requires at least some element of unlikelihood, though this is subjective. Being in a place I have been before would, of course, score nothing at all for improbability; perhaps, though, the nearness to a four decade anniversary can be said to count.

The friend was Helen; I had known her since I was fifteen, though the friendship was maintained mostly through letters (our families were both peripatetic). Real meetings like this were infrequent though always natural and easy. It began as that preciously rare thing, at least for me (a boy at an all boys school): a friendship with a girl which didn't, at some level if only in subconscious and unrequited fantasy, involve any sexual dimension. Now, five years later, we were both students in different places a long way apart; this visit was one of the occasional renewals in person.

Next morning, when the sun had been up for a decent interval, I knocked at the door and, of course, both Helen and her parents scolded me for not having woken them. I spent a carefree few days there, then hitched out again. I saw Helen again, after that, but not here. She met a fellow student whom she would spend the vacations; I liked him, and he made me welcome in their home just as her parents had. Eventually she married, and so did I. She moved, and so did I. We lost touch. When I tried to find her again, through her parents, they too had moved and the trail had gone cold.

Now, forty years on, I sleep not on the shingle but in a comfortable hotel room. I shall, later in the day, catch an onward connection.

Wandering through the snaggle of little streets which make up what is a cross between hippy quarter and trendy tourist trap, I drift on impulse into a large premises containing a mix of small dealers on the scale from junk to antiques. A number of the displays contain significantly overpriced old cameras, which interest me, so I stop to look a them through their glass cases.

There are large numbers of old amateur folding bellows type portable cameras designed for 6cm roll film, though none of them is the fondly remembered childhood "sixteen on" Dalmeyer which might (despite the inflated price tags) make me consider buying. There are a couple of Ensigns: one in moderate condition and one, inexplicably more expensive, badly battered, corroded, decrepit. There are numerous Kodak Bantams, Brownies and Bullets, Ferrania and Ilford equivalents in Bakelite and plastic, Agfas and Arguses ... and, incongruously in their midst, a single spruce looking SLR: a Praktica LTL.

On that last visit here, forty years ago, Helen asked me to help her buy a camera. She needed one for her course, wanted it to be good enough to continue usefully into her subsequent career, but didn't know enough to make a confident choice alone. She liked my own Pentax Spotmatic, but couldn't afford to buy one of her own. The compromise we found was a Praktica LTL, which she carried home with an unrestrained delight that made my heart glow.

That the only SLR (indeed the only modern styled and technologically sophisticated camera of any kind) amid the dozens of older and simpler examples should be this particular make and model is, I think, as sufficiently unlikely to qualify as a component of coincidence.

Though aware, in the filing cabinet at the back of my consciousness, of the four decades old connection, it's not been on my mind and I have given it no thought nor attention. Looking at the LTL sitting there behind the glass of its case, amidst the worn and dusty relics, in perfect "as new" condition as if straight from the shop back in the summer of 1972, I suddenly feel the connection move from filing cabinet to heart.

The third element of today's coincidence is that this morning, before breakfast, I started reading a Colin Greenland novel. I am half way through it, and will finish it before the day is out. What is unlikely about reading a Colin Greenland novel? Nothing in itself, but I have only read one before: Other voices, from whose title I ripped off the heading for my blog roll on the left of this page. Despite being so deeply impressed by it that I have reread it at least a dozen times, and have for the past twenty something years been meaning to explore his other work, today is the first time that I have started another. And the one upon which I happened to alight when I bought it, picking from an Amazon list a week or more ago, is called Finding Helen.

The coincidence lies purely in the title, not the content, of the novel (though it's a powerful and engrossing novel; I recommend it).

Greenland's Helen is a petty, vindictive, malicious, self obsessed, narcissistic, life devouring monster. Mine was the opposite of all those things: warm, generous, funny, gentle, unselfish, with a ready smile for the joys of others and an impish grin always ready to break out at any of life's peaks or troughs.

Greenland's protagonist is a broken reed, abandoning his present life in pursuit of an illusory past. That's not me, either; I have no intention of chasing off on a fool's errand to track down and locate someone I used to know, half a lifetime ago when we were both different people.

And yet, through this three segmented coincidence, "finding Helen" is exactly what I have, inadvertently, done. She's been stored away too long in that dry filing cabinet; I'm very pleased to have found her, and to have her vivacity back in living mind where it can warm my world.

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• Colin Greenland, Other voices. 1989: Unwin Paperbacks. 0044403097 (pbk)
• Colin Greenland, Finding Helen. 2002, London: Black Swan. 0552770809 (pbk.). [Amazon Kindle link]

More books, and the darker side of solitude

[this is a copy of my sixth post as a guest of Vie hebdomadaires]

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As will be obvious from my first post in this series, books (and fictions in particular) are important to me … to a very real extent, I am what I read. Today’s helping has no particular theme except that it brings another ragbag of book related ramblings.
Before moving on, let me share an unsolicited testimonial. After some time trying to acquire a digital copy of Zenna Henderson‘s The anything box (another of my teen influences) I found a reasonably priced copy (as opposed to many high-priced copies which I’d seen) courtesy of second hand dealer Marx Books in Lubbock, Texas. The words “courtesy of” are particularly appropriate here: John Marx, the proprietor, sent a personal email acknowledging my $5 order. Mr Marks is (unlike me) a real life Cliff Janeway and it shows. Impressed by book, despatch time, service and communication, I went back today for three more books (the site is very efficient, with an excellent search system to find exactly the book you want) … and received yet another personal email before the invoice, detailing exactly the condition of each book in my order and giving me the chance to cancel if I wasn’t happy with what I heard. I shall certainly be using Marx Books again
When I sang the praises of solitude, yesterday, in this series, I casually said that “Though I wouldn’t choose it, I could probably cope with solitude as a permanent state if I had to”. I was, of course, writing from the comfortable position of having that choice. I am, it has to be admitted, lucky enough to be able to play at solitude, and I have no doubt that I would see it in a very different light if it was enforced upon me. Even in wilderness, I am always a tourist – safe in the knowledge that can return to the safe bustle of city streets or tamed rural agricultural countryside whenever I like.
The difference is well depicted in a fictional setting by Ursula K Le Guin‘s Threshold (aka The beginning place), where solitude is used as a walkabout style metaphor for coming of age. The two young protagonists, both fleeing the constraints of home, seek solitude of different kinds in a timeless land which they discover on the other side of the “threshold” of the title. That solitude allows them to flourish and grow, though each resents the other’s presence. When the place makes demands of them, they find themselves adrift within it and without choice, at which point they not only must find strength in their togetherness but find the return to society their most desired goal.
What has prompted me to this line of thought is discussion of another book entirely: a novel which explores courage and endurance in the face of enforced solitude of a very different and claustrophobic kind.
One of the pleasures of blogging is the diversity of feedback, and especially that which comes as a surprise. Today I received two such despatches from the real. The first was from photographer Judith Acland, who tells me that she is starting Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable creatures on my recommendation. The second, from Jasmine Golledge, was a report from the middle of Emma Donoghue‘s novel Room, read on the basis of my post about it last year: “I’ve been unable to put down the book Room. I’m on page 277 already. Brilliantly written, compelling, heart wrenching – fantastic. Several parts have moved me to tears already, and it isn’t that often that a novel is able to do that. …. So far, excellent recommendation!”
That interim judgment was encouraging. It’s always a nerve wracking business, recommending a book and then waiting to see whether my opinion is shared by the person who has taken my enthusiasm on trust. And a recommendation placed out on the web in full public view is a hostage to fortune. I read Room on my brother’s recommendation, and was glad I had. My mother, who also read it on his recommendation, felt that it was exploitative: the novelist turning a profit on the real suffering of women such as Elisabeth Fritzl, Natascha Kampusch or Jaycee Dugard (a point of view which I can understand and respect). My partner, an English literature specialist with whom I usually share a great deal of common ground in reading matter who read it on my recommendation, left her copy behind in a Croatian hotel room by accident but without subsequent regret.
Jasmine, however, to my relief, wrote again later to confirm her approval. And since she did so in words which so perfectly encapsulate my own reactions, I’ll end by just quoting them instead of finding my own:

“One of the things I loved about this book was the way it drew me in immediately, and I didn’t spot any obvious plot devices that jolt you out of the story and make you aware that you are reading. ( You know the type … where the hardened detective goes home to his lonely house and begins ruminating on his old happy married life before his wife was murdered and he turned to drink, all the while stroking a kitten he rescued from a mine-shaft…).
It was beautifully written, the story flowed naturally and, I felt, didn’t give into the “they escape, the bad guy gets punished, all live happily ever after” tale that most people want. It showed, in very simple but devastating ways, the continued impact in small ways that most people wouldn’t even consider. Jack has to unlearn almost everything he thought about the world, the very nature of reality. The worst and most brutal aspects of humanity, and also the very best. His mother is a hero, and yet attempted suicide at a time he needed her most. The nuances of the ongoing difficulties and complexities of that relationship, and what the boy will grow up having to adjust to and live with, is more disturbing and terrifying than the idea that a man could capture and imprison a woman for so many years.
We hear those sorts of stories on the news all the time, we cry, we’re shocked, we get angry, and we maybe rant about how the abuser should be hung drawn and quartered or locked up for life. We argue about what kind of monster could do this to another human being, are they just evil, or did something in society or their own childhood make them that way, how did society/the police/the government not see what has happening and stop it. Then we mentally sigh and say, “well, they’re free now, and the bad guy has been punished” – and we move on with our lives. End of story. This novel blows that comforting allusion out of the water. It’s what I feel makes it shocking and disturbing, and yet also what I like about it. It challenged me to think about the minute ways the impact would continue to spread, like ripples on a pond.”

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• Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable creatures. 2009, London: Harper Collins. 9780007178377.
• Emma Donoghue, Room. 2010, London: Picador. 9780330519021 (pbk)
• Zenna Henderson, The anything box. 1966, London: Gollancz.
• Ursula K Le Guin, Threshold. 1982, London: Granada, 0586054073 (pbk)

The puzzle that is me

[this is a copy of my first post as guest of Vie hebdomadaires]

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When I was about thirteen years old, I read a novel which changed me fundamentally and shaped my whole subsequent life.

Given a dramatically hyperbolic statement like that, you’d expect me to have strong and detailed memories of it, wouldn’t you? Yet until quite recently I remembered only four partial sentences (not even verbatim, at that; just as paraphrase) which accounted for its influence on me, and one visual image constructed from text of which not one word remained. Title and author lost without trace. There were insufficient details in accessible memory even to attempt a Google search. I mentioned all of this to Ray Girvan (last week’s Vie hebdomadaires incumbent), in passing, during a walk and talk. The conversation pulled out of my memory a few details which I hadn’t previously known were there, and a few days later Ray sent me not only title and author but the link to an online copy of the text so that I could reread it.

Bear with me; the link to this week, this day, will (I hope) emerge.

The book in question was Eight keys to Eden. It’s what is usually labelled “SF” … I really don’t much like such labels, but they do simplify discussion so I’ll grudgingly let this one in for now. And the reason it affected me so? It presented me, in a way which made sudden epiphanic sense to my thirteen year old mind, with the idea of critical thinking. The eight keys of the title refer to eight progressive steps in the development of thinking, of which only seven are given in the book – discovery of the eighth being, in a sense, the “next level” discovery of which the book is about. I won’t bore you with the full list (some of which are a bit dodgy anyway, I now see with adult eyes) but here are the first three which, in retrospect, were my launchpad:

1. Accept the statement of Eminent Authority without basis, without question.

2. Disagree with the statement without basis, out of general contrariness.

3. Perhaps the statement is true, but what if it isn’t? How then to account for the phenomenon?

It’s clear enough to see how this fits with the development of the early teen years.

I was emerging from my childhood, in which I automatically accepted what I was told by adults (the Eminent Authorities of my world at the time): Key 1. I was entering that phase where rebelliousness made me automatically reject anything an adult said, on general bolshie principle: Key 2. What the third stage, Key 3, offered me was a way to dignify my rejection (and also the all too frequent experience of discovering that I was wrong) with something more defensible, more philosophically grounded. I have no doubt that my parents and teachers found it even more exasperating to have me stroke my chin and say “hmmm … let’s examine that statement, shall we?” than the “who says?” which had gone before … and it was, to be honest, an egotistical act: but it also, nevertheless, triggered a real step forward in my development.

I’ll skip the others apart from this one, Key 6, which would sink down to sit as a slow burner in my subconscious and later emerge with particular relevance to my drift into statistics and, later still, research:

6. What if the statement were reversible, that which is considered effect is really cause?

So far, so good … but that conversation with Ray, and my rediscovery of Eight keys to Eden, was some time ago, now. I wouldn’t call on it as part of this, a “weekly life” series of posts, if it hadn’t a current relevance.

Though I’ve always been aware that I was a science fiction junkie in my teens, I’d not until recently connected that fact with either my own present state or my “laissez faire, laissez aller” belief, as an educator, in encouraging every student to embrace even the mistaken as part of a route to critical evaluation. Today, as it happens, has seen a stage completion in both processes (which turn out to have been the same process) in two parts.

The first part involved interweaving conversations with several people, including Ray again. Ray and I agree over much, but our occasional disagreements are what spur me to think. The second part was a serendipitous result of having been frenetically busy over the past month: my reading of fiction (vital to me as a way to unwind and maintain my balance) was mainly in very short fragments (sometimes as short as thirty seconds at a time) using an iPod hosted eReader app, supplemented (when at home) by parallel reading on paper of M K Joseph‘s The time of Achamoth (lent to me by Ray; see his post on it) and China Miéville‘s eight hundred and something page tome Perdido Street Station.

Of the conversations, I’ll mention only two strands as examples. With Ray, I discussed our shared tendency at a point in our development to wallow in (using Ray’s words) “ Von Däniken style mysteries, ley lines, Lethbridge pendulums, dubious ‘unlocking your inner powers’ books, Colin Wilson’s more flaky output, etc.” I personally feel that I came to no harm from that phase; it opened my mind to possibilities, and then provided me with plenty of opportunities to hone my critical faculties. I think the same is probably true of Ray, too, though he looks upon it with more scepticism – a good balance and mirror for my own assumptions. The second strand involves discussion of critical constructivist process with my two brothers (both of them also involved in education, though in divergent fields), kicked off by discussion of a paper in Pedagogy about close reading (or lack of it) by students.

The advent of eReaders, which make books very cheap to reissue, has had a similar effect to CDs and downloads in music: stuff which I read long ago, long out of print and unobtainable, emerges again into daylight. These digital reissues are, admittedly, of variable quality; the best are perfect, but many, like Gateway’s Kindle edition of Clifford D Simak’s Time is the simplest thing, are littered with OCR errors; they are, nevertheless, a goldmine of renewed easy access to otherwise lost material. Time is the simplest thing is also SF, as is The time of Achamoth, and the two have a common thread: travel denied to the human body (interstellar and temporal, respectively) are achieved by projection of the mind. Transfer of minds (from embodied brain to digital backing store) is also central to Iain M Banks‘ latest “Culture” novel, Surface detail. All of these have been in my fractured reading across that crowded month

Perdido Street, by chance, I started reading just as the overstuffed month began. I would normally have read it in a couple of days, but in the circumstances it took the full month and I only finished it this morning – just as I have the comparative leisure to start synthesising all of this. Perdido Street is not science fiction in the same sense as the others; its steam punk physical science is not just speculative, it is impossible in this universe … but I would classify it as SF nevertheless. It shares with Time is the simplest thing and Surface detail a common theme (amongst the many intertwined strands in each): what it means to be human.

And that, in a funny sort of way, is what has gradually trickled into my mind today: what it means to be human, and more specifically the question of what it means to be me. Because what has today suddenly become clear to me, after reading several science fictions from my early teens and several new ones as well, is that it’s not exactly what I read that decided what I am but the fact that I read it. Mark Clifton, Clifford D Simak, John Wyndham, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, and all the rest, rattled around in my head along with, ground and winnowed by, the heavier and more abrasive likes of Durrell’s Alexandria quartet and C P Snow’s Strangers and brothers sequence, Joyce’s Ulysses (another tome of similar size to Perdido Street Station) … and the result of the whole chance mélange, on this August day, decades down the line, is me.

With which I will end. If you’ve followed me this far through the rambling and incoherent maze (the title of this post, by the way, comes from a Simon and Garfunkel song – S&G lyrics also having been an important part of the mix), thank you. Good night.

- Felix

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• Ian M Banks, Surface detail. 2010, London: Orbit. 9781841498959 (pbk). [Amazon link] Also Kindle edition, 2010, London: Hachette [Amazon link]
• Mark Clifton, Eight Keys to Eden. 1962, London: Victor Gollancz. (originally a book club edition 1960, Garden City NY: Doubleday. Also 1982, Norfolk VA: Donning. 0898652588. Available as electronic text from The Gutenberg Project.)
• Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria quartet. 1968, London: Faber. [Amazon link to 2005 paperback edition] [Amazon link to Kindle edition]
• M K Joseph, The time of Achamoth. 1977, Auckland NZ: Collins. 0002223023 (hbk.).
• James Joyce, Ulysses. 1922,London: Egoist Press. [Amazon link to 2010 paperback edition]
• Karen Manarin, Reading Value: Student Choice in Reading Strategies. Pedagogy, 2012. 12(2): p. 281-297. (Abstract available here.)
• China Miéville Perdido Street Station. 2011, London: Pan. 9780330534239 (pbk.) [Amazon link] (original publication 2001, London: Macmillan). Kindle edition [Amazon link]
• Clifford D Simak, Time is the simplest thing. 2011London : Gateway [Amazon link]. (Original publication 1961, Garden City NY: Doubleday)
• C P Snow. I’ll not take up the space necessary to list the whole Strangers and brothers sequence of eleven novels, but here is an Amazon search link.

On growth and form

In my mid teens, my family were for a while in a small city close to the border between England and Wales. I have, in general, little good to say about the school I attended there; but two of the teachers were inspirational and played a large part in shaping my life.
Also critical to what I would become was the Municipal Public Library.
It's difficult, now, to explain how wonderful libraries in the UK used to be. They are still immeasurably valuable, of course; without them, minds would be infinitely poorer; but their wings have been successively clipped by rounds of financial cutbacks and by changes in social outlook over the years. Back then, a fourteen year old with his head full of ideas planted by one of those inspirational teachers could walk down to the library and ask for ... anything at all. For free.
One of the things I asked for was Erik Pontoppidan's 1755 The natural history of Norway. Luckily for me (I hadn't realised that the original would be in Danish), the library actually obtained a copy of the 1855 English translation instead. It arrived within the week, brought down for me from the British Library: a huge, old book, printed in archaic type on thick paper pages which I turned in awed reverential amazement. I couldn't take it home; it had to be read in the library itself, brought into a side room where a librarian engaged on administrative tasks could keep a discreet eye on me; but I didn't care. I cycled from school to the library each day and immersed myself in it, reading it twice before it had to be returned.
Another request was for D'arcy Thompson's On growth and form. It came in the second, larger (over a thousand pages) edition from 1942, and it took me a full year to read. I didn't have to read it at the library this time; I could take it home with me, though I had to renew it every two weeks and return it to the shelves every six before (it was on local stock, not on loan from elsewhere like Pontoppidan) booking it out again the following day.
On growth and form was perfectly designed to penetrate my fourteen year old (fifteen year old by the time I finished it) psyche. The two inspirational teachers happened to be in maths and biology, and On growth and form was a meeting of those two fields, a revelation which entranced me in itself. It had at least two other tricks up its sleeve as well.
First, it was written in a beautiful way. The English Literature teacher at school was not one of the inspirational ones, in fact he seemed to have a talent for treading on any youthful interest he encountered (unlike the later Mr Abbot), but he was unable to stamp out the love of language and literature which my parents had kindled in me. The syllabus included plenty of material into which I could disappear, hiding in the undergrowth beyond his reach. And On growth and form was literature in the same way: a lyrical and beautiful landscape in which I could wonder and wander.
Second, it spoke to another discovery which I had made and was exploring at that time: that mathematics and the visual plastic arts were intimately linked. I had recently discovered (in the classroom) the magical alchemy of transformational geometry and the way it could be elegantly encoded in the four or nine digits of a matrix. Thompson's chapter IX, "On the theory of transformations, or the comparison of related forms", showing how this idea could be extended to variable physical identities, took my breath away.
Nowadays, anyone can play with his concepts in a few seconds, using a visually intuitive warp mesh in a graphics package like PaintShop Pro or the more rigorous symbolic methods of a computer algebra language like Mathematica, but in 1966 they were well beyond my (or even my teacher's) analytical scope. That inability to emulate, however, did nothing to take away the sheer awe inspiring beauty of seeing Thompson transform for me on the page one fish or one skull into another. One of the central messages of On growth and form is nature's economy, reusing a simple idea over and over again, and this chapter encapsulated it in way which drew art, biology, language and mathematics in one beautiful gift wrapped package. I have since discovered as an adult that this same chapter is his best known and most widely quoted; but at the time it belonged to me alone.
The reason On growth and form took me a year to read was not just those thousand plus pages; I would have covered them fairly swiftly, slowed down only by the wish to savour them and think about their content. No; what took me a year was laboriously decoding (dictionaries on one side, grammar guides on the other) all his untranslated passages quoted from French, German, Greek, Italian and Latin. I had none of those languages (I still have none in any functional sense), but kept worrying at them until I extracted at least some partial sense from them. Then there were the casual references to Buffon, Democritus, Kant, Maxwell, Plateau (of those five I had heard only of Buffon, and that through his eponymous needle) and others, all of whom I had to look up .
I now (again as an adult) see that Thompson was both brilliant and blinkered, also of a classically educated class which was already beginning to disappear as he wrote. Nobody could write a book like his now, and hope to sell it. And yet, I don't regret the difficulty of reading it. I was, at the time, going for a cross country run every morning (although I told nobody at school and avoided games afternoons if possible): forcing aching muscles beyond common sense for the endorphin rush and the pleasure of early light on dew laden landscape had a lot in common with pushing through unknown linguistic thickets for fuller understanding of Thompson's lucid English. And muscles develop with use; when, a couple of years later on an English literature course, I had to study Chaucer, the same mental muscles stirred, remembered themselves, and didn't let me down; in fact they carried me on through chunks of Dante's Inferno and Vita Nuova, Bocaccio's Decameron, not to mention T S Eliot's relatively trivial scatterings of a lines, couplets, quatrains.
Another two or three years down the line, as an undergraduate, I returned to Thompson, and to chapter IX in particular. Then, though I never forgot him, I didn't see him again for decades. But recently I have been gradually, little by little, here and there, gathering again the books which influenced me as I grew. Many of them arrive thanks to the love of my life who hears me mention a book and goes off to find it for me: so it was with On growth and form, which she gave me on my most recent birthday in an abridged version (a mere 345 pages) perfect for reacquaintance.
By coincidence, whilst writing this I have received an email from a talented social sciences student with whom I am currently working, in which she mentions the effect of seeing a documentary:

"…while I was never good at physics or chemistry … a friend of mine sat me down in front of a documentary ... Basically a lot of talking head quantum physicists talking about quantum physics, but in a very accessible way. But it totally blew me away. ... Once it had finished, my friend and I went and sat outside in the night air, barely talking, just sitting there and breathing, and looking at the world in an entirely new way."

I recognise that feeling; and it is one of the things which Thompson gave me, all that time ago when England was winning the soccer world cup. Science too often takes a po-faced view of itself, demanding to be taken very seriously and feeling belittled if it is treated as a launch pad for general, nonscientific cultural growth. But science and general culture are mutually dependent; neither can exist without the other, each can inform and infuse the other, and they should celebrate any bridge between them, whatever its nature or extent and however tangential.
And, to come back to where I started, free public libraries are a vital investment in cultural completeness - even in the wonderfully empowering days of the world wide web.

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• Erik Pontoppidan, The Natural History of Norway [English translation by Andreas Berthelson] 1755, London: A. Linde.
• D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On growth and form. (Abridged) 1992, Cambridge: Canto. 9780521437769 (pbk.). [Originally 1917 and1942, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.]

A new habitat for the short story

I'll get to the point of this post shortly, but I have some background to cover first. Feel free to jump down six paragraphs if you wish to skip the front matter.

Since I last posted on the subject, my attitude to eReaders in general and to the Amazon Kindle in particular have undergone some adjustment. I've been meaning to write about this for some time, but it hasn't happened yet ... since it started with a comment from Matthew Revell, I owe him more than anyone an account of my journey; but he waits in vain.

To sum up: I still much prefer, when reading for pleasure, the physical experience of turning paper pages ... but I now keep that physical experience for reading at home, in libraries, or at other locations where I can leave a book and return to it. For those times (much of my life) when I am on the move, I now carry books in electronic form. It save s weight (see Dr C's comments on this), and better still for me on bulk. It saves the problem of worrying that I haven't enough books with me to last the journey.

There are some practical considerations to be taken into account. One of them is social: my partner and I share very similar tastes in fiction reading, tending to pass books back and forth, but she has no intention of reading anything on a screen. This means, in practice, that I split my reading in two: at home I read books which she is likely to read as well, or has already read, while on the wing I read titles not likely to interest her.

Then there is the matter of reading speed: I have discovered that I read much more slowly on an eReader than from a book. At first it took me between twenty and thirty times as long to read the same material. It dropped from that, but seems to have plateaued at a factor of fifteen or thereabouts. There are confounding factors when it comes to being precise about this. I read fastest from the Asus tablet (somewhat larger than the standard dedicated eReader screen) and least rapidly from the iPod touch. on the other hand, the Touch can be pulled out and read in circumstances (and short periods of time) where the tablet, an eReader or even a paperback book wouldn't be practical. So, I have abandoned dedicated eReaders and use applications on tablet and Touch instead.

This has the advantage that I am not tied to any one system (you can have any number of eReader apps on one device) but, in practice and despite previous adverse comments, I use Amazon Kindle apps much of the time because their WhisperNet system is so convenient. WhisperNet keeps the devices synchronised so I can read on the tablet while on a rail journey, put it away as I get off, then pull out the Touch whilst waiting for a minute in a queue for the exit and continue reading seamlessly. That synchronisation helps to offset the reading speed loss, since I can reclaim reading time in moments when it would be impossible to get out a paperback from my bag, find my place, read, put it away again. And if I want to refer back to a book when at a conventional keyboard (to check or extract a quotation, for example) then it is instantly available there, too, in an equivalent PC application.

Anyway ... enough of that. The real point of this post is that, having started using eReader software regularly, I have discovered a particular collateral benefit which I hadn't previously suspected.

New technologies change habits and cultural formats. There is nothing wrong with that; it's the way life is and always has been. Nevertheless, sometimes an environmental change condemns to Darwinian extinction a form which I valued. The flip side (an archaic metaphor, that, deriving as it does from single song shellac and vinyl records) of this is that new conditions can become more favourable for previously endangered species.

For a long time, now, one such endangered species has been the short story. There was a heyday in which magazines formed a rich breeding ground for short fiction; nowadays, it survives only in collected form as a way for publishers to cash in on the success of a novelist. But the eReader, the cheapness of electronic publication, and the willingness of big beasts like Amazon and Apple iTunes to let individuals try their luck (it costs the big company nothing, and may sometimes pay off for them) means that the short story now has a new outlet.

I only realised the potential for this, in an epiphanic moment, when I picked up a copy of Geoff Powell's The Painter for one Euro on Amazon a few weeks ago. It's fractionally more than that, now, but still at a price which anyone can pay in a sprit of experiment ... if I like the story (as I did) I've gained riches; if not, I've lost only small change.

I have a number of short stories and one novella in my Kindle library, now. I hopefully imagine a future in which short fiction might be handled as albums of music are now ... as single stories and, if we like what we read, as collections too.

Enigma

“The two men disliked each other but only one of them knew this and he was the one to whom it didn't matter.”

(P D James, An unsuitable job for a woman. 1972, London: Faber and Faber.)

A bestiary (Bush Falls)

When I bought a second hand paperback copy of Jonathon Tropper's Bush Falls for fifty cents from a charity shop, it was only to make up a round sum of money with my other choices when I took them to the counter. I thought that I was getting a light, forgettable, humorous read. What actually got was a fine, wonderfully written piece of literature which I enthusiastically recommend to anyone ... but I did get the humour, which pervades the book.

Practically every page has at least one line which I itch to quote ... but this one, echoing as it does my recent A bestiary (2) post, is the one I've chosen.

The narrator, Joe, after nearly two decades of alienation, wants a rapprochement with his family. In this scene he has accepted an invitation to dinner with his estranged elder brother, sister in law Cindy, and their children. The children have a cockatoo, called Shnookums, which they are teaching to talk. We join them in the middle of a fraught conversation...

“Before I can ask him what he means, Shnookums comes flying into the dining room and performs a reckless dive into the chicken marinara, splattering the red sauce across the tablecloth as she flaps her wings in a frantic effort to correct her flight path. [... ... ...] The bird spins around on the serving platter as if it's standing on a lazy Suzan, unable to take to the air again because of the saturation of sauce in its feathers. Cindy swats at the bird, missing completely but knocking over her wineglass, which spills onto the table, and the wine bottle, which hits the wood floor with a resounding thud. "Goddammit!" Cindy shrieks. We all watch, mesmerized, as Shnookums finally extracts herself from the chicken dish and takes a few jerky steps across the table, leaving perfect red footprints on the tablecloth in her wake before coming to a stop directly in front of me. "Hey, dickhead," she says, and that pretty much wraps up dinner with the family.”

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• Jonathon Tropper, Bush Falls. 2005, London: Arrow. 0099461234 (pbk.)

Un Lun Dun

Today's good read was China Miéville's Un Lun Dun, to the delights of which I was introduced by youngest brother and my new sister in law.

Set in an alternative fantasy version of London (the "abcity" of "UnLondon"; the title, Un Lun Dun, is the name chanted rhythmically by a crowd), it first reminded me of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere and then, in turn, of many other fictions from Robert Heinlein's Our fair city through Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the sea of stories to Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines. But that makes it sound derivative, which it emphatically is not – it is anarchically (literally, in several senses) itself.

It is illustrated liberally by the author. There are references to other abcities, including Parisn't and Lost Angeles ... but put them aside for other dream times. There are flying buses, and buses that climb walls on gecko feet. There are tribes of parkour "slate runners", packs of carnivorous giraffes, mutant ninja dustbins called "binja". There is a bridge which goes from somewhere to somewhere else under the control of the Propheseers. There are many other things, but discover them for yourself.

Un Lun Dun is, in some ways, a typical heroic quest tale ... but in other, perhaps more important ways, it is exactly the opposite. It delivers more messages, and addresses more themes and messages, than I can begin to list... but it doesn't preach and, most of all it is a wonderful story

There are many, many passages which I want to quote here ... but that would leave you with the feeling of having read the book without getting any of the flavour. So, I'll content myself with offering this one sentence from roughly halfway through the novel:

“Deeba, Hemi, Curdle and the book walked out of the Talklands to look for a forest in a house, accompanied by the words Cauldron, Diss and Bling.”

It's wonderful; I urge you to go and read it.

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• China Miéville, Un Lun Dun. 2007, London: Macmillan Children's. 0330450395 (pbk.)
• Neil Gaiman. Neverwhere. 1996, London: BBC
• Robert Heinlein, "Our fair city" (short story) in several collections including The unpleasant profession of Jonathan Hoag. 1976, London: New English Library. 0450028860 (pbk).
• Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the sea of stories. 1990: Granta in association with Penguin. 0140140352 (pbk)
• Philip Reeve, Mortal engines. 2001, London: Scholastic. 0439993458.

The painter

The Painter, a short story by Geoff Powell, is a delightfully turned and tuned psychomyth on the power of parental love - and the power of art to reimagine the world.

And almost free too ... put it on your Kindle, or your favourite Apple/Android device, or even your PC, and encourage the author to write more.

Bryant and May, light

In my "Prostho plus" post, a couple of days ago, I focused on humour – not difficult, in what was, in one of its many dimensions, an openly comic novel.

I wouldn't describe the Bryant and May novels of Christopher Fowler (which I discovered, as with so much else, through JSB) as comic, but they certainly contain immensely comic lines and passages. Here are two of my own favourite examples...

From Seventy senen clocks:

“The coven has a resident numerologist called Nigel. He's very good at Chaos Theory, which is just as well because his maths is terrible...”

and from The water room:

“The last time Bryant had accessed police files via the Internet, he had somehow hacked into the Moscow State Weather Bureau and put it on red alert for an incoming high-pressure weather system. The Politburo had been mobilized and seven flights re-routed before the error was spotted and rectified.”

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• Christopher Fowler, Seventy-seven clocks. 2005, London: Doubleday. 0385608853 (hbk).
• Christopher Fowler, The water room. 2004, London: Doubleday. 0385605544 (hbk).

Prostho Plus

In his JSB post "The roots of fiction", yesterday, Ray Girvan mentioned Prostho Plus, a novel by Piers Anthony. The protagonist is Dillingham, a dentist kidnapped by aliens, who tries to buy his freedom by practising his profession on a variety of worlds and life forms.

As I said in a spur of the moment comment to the post, “I loved Piers Anthony at a certain age ... but I went on loving Prostho Plus after I left that age...”

I hadn't reread it in forty years, but still vividly remembered parts of it. I was particularly fond of a scene in which the protagonist attempts to solve the oral hygiene problems of Trach, a vegetarian dinosaur diplomat. He tries cleaning Trach's teeth of food debris by filling his mouth with a quick setting foam. I couldn't remember exact words, but even in paraphrase memory it remained hilarious. At Ray's suggestion, I obtained and read a copy of the novel today and refreshed my memory. Here is the foam tooth cleaning snippet; it still makes me laugh just as much at fifty nine as it did when I was nineteen:

The cast seemed to have set somewhat more securely than anticipated. Dillingham took his little prosthodontic mallet and tapped at the mass, finally dislodging it. "See all that green stuff embedded in it?" he asked the dinosaur, pointing. "That's the left-over greenchomp, all yanked out at once."

Trach pointed in turn. "See those little white bits also embedded? Those are teeth."

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• Piers Anthony, Prostho plus. 1971, London: Gollancz. 0575006463.