Reading update

Reading Naipaul, Watching Gandhi

I haven’t read a lot of Naipaul’s fiction. I read Guerillas a few years ago. I have often tried to read one of his more popular novels, A House for Mr Biswas but without much progress. When fiction is set in or around India, I find it difficult to access. Usually, fiction carves this new space where you step in and think through characters based in other times and other places, mostly distant, which, fiction set in current times or about India does not provide. 

I read Naipaul’s essay collection, Literary Occasions sometime late last year. This is the writer talking about his making, about the years that formed him, about his early days, about the perceptions he has collected of growing up as a person of Indian origin in a foreign place which was still called Indies by another name. The collection also includes a couple of forewords to his books. It is an enjoyable collection, worth a re-read. There is the struggle and joy of him becoming a writer, and there's his joy as a reader as he takes us through his reading influences.

There are certain writers where their worldview seems to run like an identifiable thread running through their work, easy to be picked, a theme or a memory, and sometimes making it difficult to draw the lines between their memoirs and fiction. I have felt that while reading books by Marquez and in his autobiography. Similarly in Naipaul's writing, there's a recurring theme of  him being a perpetual outsider. Most of his essays seemed to return to the theme of his struggle with reconciling the world  that is and the world that he sees given his contexts.

Around the same time as I was reading Naipaul, we watched Gandhi (or re-watched it to introduce the movie to the kid as he wrote his essays on modern and historical heroes). And for me, the dawning epiphany was in finding a similar theme in Gandhi - that Gandhi’s views, thoughts and approaches to the world were shaped elsewhere (and not in India) and he arrived in India fairly fully formed, which might seem obvious, but not so to me so far given the way history is taught or written in India. He brought his outsider views to India and saw things differently. 

  

Zadie Smith

One of the last books I read in 2019 was Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. I have come across her essays and have loved reading them.  I read it like a page-turner for most parts, but in terms of overall thoughts,  I think I favour her essays over fiction. Similar to my discomfort with reading books set in India, books set too close in time do not let the longer, historical arcs to settle down that tend to form the background to a good reading experience.

Another thought that it brought up - although White Teeth charts people from different immigrant cultures, I felt somehow it didn't fully bridge the gap of seeing through two points. Unlike, say the authors who’ve grown up and lived in two different cultures and who write from inside those cultures. Perhaps it is just the way I feel, but the first-generation immigrants seem to work with a richer palette than some of the second-generation writers. Thoughts not fully formed, but something which appears to me as I read from say Rushdie, to Naipaul to Zadie Smith. Looking forward to reading Quchiotte in the near future once K finishes reading it.

Meanwhile, I continue to read Zadie Smith's essays. Hoping to read through her collection of occasional essays soon.

Poems and “The Order of Time”

Last few days have seen me return to poems – call it my poetry phase. A lot of TS Eliot and some EE Cummings. Between breakfastfood and coffeespoons, myriad meanings inherent in words occupy me.  I love being in that space, but words, at times operate in the realm of uncertainty. There being no one reading of the poems, sometimes one can be so lost in such triggered thought chains that it messes up one’s sense of perspective and objectivity.

Deep in a poem, it dawns on me that poems don’t deal with centre. They tend to deal with the extremes, the edges of emotions (of what I get of poems). Edges are where life finds meaning and its bounds, yet edges imply quite high highs and low lows. And yet again, if not for the edges, how does one even define centre? And most daily life happens in the solid centre. To be able to traverse and occupy both the edges as well have a solid grasp of the centre stays a perpetual aspiration, but not there yet.

By opening up to a poet’s influence and hosting a poet’s words in your mind, one begins to think in their metaphors and turns of phrase not knowing when the influence becomes one’s own belief. And I wonder at what point does the quote stop being a quote and becomes one’s own thought. Most of the time if it is a poet, it doesn't & perhaps shouldn't matter - the influence works for the better. But unless one perpetually questions, one risks rational, free and independent thought.

So how is one to restore objectivity?

There are many ways (I hope). At times, solving bounded, finite, complex problems works for me  – problems grounded in certainty. Where there are infinite interpretations to poems, there is only one possible picture waiting to be revealed by a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle, or one clean solution to  a difficult Math problem, or workings of an excel model. A consuming issue requiring every shred of attention and thought with just one possible answer helps at times.

Sometimes the displacement provided by a good novel or sci-fi works. At other times, science helps. It brings back the scale perspective.

**

With that, I started reading Carlo Rovelli’s  “The Order of Time”. This one is a small book, similar to his “Seven brief lessons on physics”.  It is focused on the nature of time.

The first section crumbles time for us, stripping it of all the conceptual layers that we think it of – of it being unified, of it flowing in one direction, of it being present, of it being independent. The second part describes and explores time thus delayered to its essence, and the final section rebuilds time for us. I am still in the first bit.

"Do we exist in time, or does time exist in us"

The puzzle of time is one of the fundamental puzzles linking the unanswered questions of gravity, consciousness, and perception, our existence itself. Like the people few centuries ago beginning to grapple with the idea of Earth being round and a moving body and not a fixed centre with the heavens moving around it, we find it challenging to accept time as not a uniform, constant, forever kind of thing the way we perceive it.

"We inhabit time as fish live in water" 

(and perhaps DFW would then ask, ‘how’s the water?’)

The subject fascinates me immensely. Previously, while reading another of Rovelli’s book, I had to resort to this freewriting post to find a home for my fascination. Even now, I have very limited understanding to have any coherence of my own thoughts on the subject. I’ll resort to quoting from the book.

Here's Carlo Rovelli talking about Einstein in that chain of exceptional people, Copernicus and Anaximander, and taking away the unity of time (that time passes slowly in some places and rapidly in others).

“The ability to understand something before it’s observed is at the heart of scientific thinking. 

In the course of making such strides, we learn that the things that seemed self-evident to us were really no more than prejudices.”

The relativity of time:

“Times are legion: a different one for every point in space. There is not one single time; there is a vast multitude of them. “

Moving to the direction of time, the difference between past and future:

“The difference between past and future does not lie in the elementary laws of motion; it does not reside in the deep grammar of nature. It is the natural disordering that leads to gradually less particular, less special situations.”

Talking about a pack of cards, sorted and then shuffled, and how our perception of entropy defines the shuffled pack being disordered, he draws the point that each ordering is as unique but we limit ourselves to noticing only certain aspects of the cards (say, color or suit or numbers – everything else seems to be non-unique). But the understanding that everything is particular makes the difference in past and future vanish.

The disconcerting conclusion -

“the difference between the past and the future refers only to our own blurred vision of the world. …is it really possible that a perception so vivid, basic, existential—my perception of the passage of time—depends on the fact that I cannot apprehend the world  in all of its minute detail? Even allowing for the fact that our perceptions of the world are frequently wrong, can the world really be so profoundly different from our  perception of it as this?”

Next he dismantles the idea of ‘now’:

“The idea that a well-defined now exists throughout the universe is an illusion, an illegitimate extrapolation of our own experience."

And temporal structure without the present:

“In short, a common present does not exist: the temporal structure of spacetime is not a stratification of times … it is, rather, a structure made up entirely of light cones: More than a hundred years have passed since we learned that the “present of the universe” does not exist. And yet this continues to confound us and still seems difficult to conceptualize. 

If the present has no meaning, then what “exists” in the universe? Is not what “exists” precisely what is here “in the present”? The whole idea that the universe exists now in a certain configuration and changes together with the passage of time simply doesn’t stack up anymore.”

And this is where I pause. A lot more still to go and gradually the time spent on each new page has increased. He also quotes a lot of poetry, and notes “Perhaps poetry is another of science’s deepest roots: the capacity to see beyond the visible.”

**

Although most other times, science tends to work, today, I think I should have picked up a jigsaw puzzle instead or fiction. Even after those hours deep in Carlo Rovelli’s book, for the closing word  to capture some of Rovelli's essence of time, I still think of Eliot's words:

"Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.”

I feel like quoting the whole poem. He further says:

"At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance."

Come to think of it, Four Quartets and Carlo Rovelli are a good pairing.

But the thing is, the problem I set out to solve still remains.  

Perhaps, time itself is the solution.

Difficult Loves

I have been reading Italo Calvino’s short story collection, Difficult Loves. These stories were written in the 1940s and 1950s when Calvino was still in his 20s and 30s.

These stories follow the private thoughts,  the stream of consciousness (though much structured than usual streams) of people, the protagonists. A day in their life. An adventure. Or a phase in their life. The adventure of a soldier, a reader, of a poet or a traveller. Mostly men. A few females too, like the adventure of the bather who realizes she has lost her swim suit in the water. And then the adventure of the reader. Private sensations, private thoughts so articulately laid out that you slip them on like a glove.

Which then draws you to the writer. How well can he create the sensations that you get in the story and the characters and are one with them without thinking that you are reading the written word.  In that sense different from Balzac, my last read. Balzac’s was the writing which recreated the world he writes about. Calvino’s is about the person – you can almost feel the same things the characters feel, you get to be one with his characters.

One of the stories, the adventure of the photographer is apt for the modern times of Instagram. What he says here is worth remarking on since he says this in the 1950s.

“You only have to start saying of something: ‘Ah how beautiful! We must photograph it!'  and you are already close to the view of the person who things that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it had never existed, and that therefore in order really to live you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity; the second, to madness.”

This is before the same character takes on to photography himself. And over the course of the story, enamored by photography, his efforts are directed towards wanting to create a portrait out of space and time. Like any artist, trying to create something that can breach the boundaries of the finite, and dissolve into and exist in that other dimension of thought, the dimension outside of time and space.

**

Each story is a world in itself. Requires me to pause once I close the page on the story and just ruminate. Dwelling on the space it creates, not letting go. These stories deal in emotions, sensations. Beautiful stories, and although translated, the magic works. There are a couple of long short stories too. One of them, Smog – the story is alright, not as hitting as the shorter stories – but I get it, given the lingering smoke that has pervaded everything in Sydney for the last few weeks, now months.  And in parts, little parts, Smog also reminds me of the opening setup of Pessoa’s Book of disquiet.

One more long short story to go before I mark this one as read.

Makes me wish – if I could make a cave in time, or a kind of loop in time, where I can just read and read, and then once done, come out and still be at the same time where I left off, or if not the same time, may be five mins later. I wish, I wish!  But it doesn’t work that way.


**

Later (Feb 19): Finished reading Calvino's book, and I finally get my books-read in the year count to two. The last story in the book was about real estate and changing nature of cities, and people - a long short story. I think I liked the shorter stories in the book better. Hoping to read more from Calvino soon.

Balzac's Père Goriot

Written in early 19th century, the book is one of the most widely-read translated Balzac novels, depicts the France and society of early to mid-1800s – alien from the one I live in, operating with very different moral compass and social mores. Strange land early France. Stranger were its social codes.

One reads Balzac for perhaps the world he creates for you. Reading his opening description of the Pension, one can almost see, smell and feel what he shows you. Fast paced, short novel, but so rich in detail and drama that you live in that parallel universe for the hours you spend with him. No matter what the moral and social contradictions it plays in your head and all the inexplicable observations you end up piling your thoughts with.

The novel is set in a boarding house in Paris, where there's Pere Goriot, a retiree who seems to have happily married off his daughters and given them his fortune and now lives frugally, and there’s Rastingac, a law student, fresh from the provinces, full of high ambition but the ways of making your way to the top in France of those times are less through hard work (as the modern, free society wants you to implicitly believe), but as everyone in those times seem to understand, explicitly in who knows who and who bestows favour on whom. The construct of marriages is more like economic and social partnerships, and almost everyone is crafty (all women, men), laying out schemes to get what they want. And layer on that a father who believes the only way to live is to keep pampering the grown-up, married daughters to the extent that after he has given all his fortune to them, he takes out his remaining annuity principal to fund a party dress (!) leaving him with nothing to live on or to give any more which brings its own heart-breaking realizations.

It all is intriguing, and for lack of a better word, strange. Every character is flawed, and not really true to themselves, inconsistent through the temporal dimension of the novel – like real people, as if the author is also getting to know them with you and not really knows them already. And perhaps that’s what it is – a reflection on the society of those times, penned so close to reality that it reads like satire. You do feel like following up on the characters and for that we have the whole of Balzac universe, over 90 novels he wrote in this ‘Human Comedy’ series. Before Zola peopled the streets of Paris with his characters, it was Balzac.

I enjoyed the read and the contradictory firing up of thoughts. It addresses some innate curiosity - this contemplation of worldviews of people of a different place and time - it satiates some and then adds more questions. And Balzac seems like a big mine to explore those questions.

Long long ago, I read a collection of his stories, and this was the first novel. The edition I read from is Norton’s Critical Edition, translated by Burton Raffel and comes pack full of responses on Balzac from Emile Zola to Proust to Henry James to modern times too (I hope to read through some of them). For the time being, perhaps that’ll be all of Balzac for me, but I do know now whom to read if I need a total capture of senses. So easily takes you away from the realities of your own day and time, both public and private.


PS: A few weeks later. Thinking about Balzac's world, and other fictional worlds of a time and place removed from ours. All worlds different from ours seem absurd and unreal. To the people living in those worlds, the world is what it is, and everything makes great sense. But someone looking at them from somewhere else, a wonder arises, things don't make sense, and a 100 questions crop up. And you need to suspend that disbelief to swim in those waters. That way of existing seeming the real and the only way to be for the people inside. But seen from a different vantage point, things don't line up the way they do inside, like the sphere for the square.

I guess, so it goes for our world too.

Wrapping up 2019

Here’s the list of books I read in 2019 (most recent at top) 

• The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton 
• Small Memories - Jose Saramago (A memoir)
• Train Dreams by Denis Johnson 
• White Teeth by Zadie Smith 
• Literary Occasions by VS Naipaul (Essays) 
• Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov (Memoir) 
• Work Suspended and other stories - Evelyn Waugh (SS) 
• The First Person and other stories - Ali Smith (SS) 
• Nobody's Looking At You by Janet Malcolm (NF/Essays) 
• Victory - An Island Tale by Joseph Conrad 
• Such Fine Boys by Patrick Modiano (translation) 
• My Antonia by Willa Cather 
• Public Library and other stories by Ali Smith (SS) 
• A Manual For Cleaning Women - Lucia Berlin (SS) 
• Welcome Home - Lucia Berlin's Memoir (NF) 
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (SF) 
• My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante 
• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens 
• Bleak House by Charles Dickens 
• The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan 
• The Muse's Tragedy and Other Stories by Edith Wharton (SS) 
• Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata (translated by Edward G. Seidensticker) 
• The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe (translated by Bayard Quincy Morgan) 

A shorter list compared to the other two recent years. Not many. However, for a while, I did write about the books I read. Glad about that. For the most recently read ones (the 5 or 6 not-linked bullets), my notes are still in draft-form. Not a lot, but hopefully I’ll get around to cleaning the drafts – and then perhaps I might still have a para for each of those not-linked bullets, if not a post. 

2019 also marked the decade for this blog. I started this when I got my first kindle, when they launched global shipping, in 2009. I was still in my 20s and A was still a baby/ toddler then, almost. We were still in Mumbai then.  I’ve still got that first kindle somewhere – a bit dislodged from its original book-flap cover, although it never seems to go beyond the frozen screensaver image.  There’s a blacker, newer kindle now which too gathers dust since I gravitate towards books in their physical form. 

Compared to all the other blogs I have launched and closed meanwhile, this one has been here for a while, so cheers to that and to the decade of ‘the kindled and the unkindled’.

Not that these markers matter much but new years, new months, new weeks, they all bring a fleeting lift – a re-imagining of self, a refresh of resolutions, a renewed sense of possibilities. 

Here's to 2020, and to reading.

A poem by Borges

Here's a poem I read recently. One of Jorge Luis Borges' poem, translated by W.S. Merwin.

I don't get around to reading many poems. And when I do read them, at times I don't get them. They require patience and keenness to enter the poet's frame of mind.

However, this one speaks to me. I now have it on my phone and I go back to it often. Sharing it here.

The South

To have watched from one of your patios
the ancient stars,
from the bench of shadow to have watched
those scattered lights
that my ignorance has learned no names for
nor their places in constellations,
to have heard the note of water
in the cistern,
known the scent of jasmine and honeysuckle,
the silence of the sleeping bird,
the arch of the entrance, the damp
- these things perhaps are the poem.

The collection is called 'Selected Poems' by Borges edited by Alexander Coleman. There are a few more which I'll like to add here. Soon.

Nabokov's 'Speak, Memory'

It took me a few weeks to cover the distance from front to the back cover of this book. It demanded attention, and lengths of uninterrupted time. The initial part was swift, and I read and kept a lot of notes which pretty much form this post. The last few chapters were slow for me. There came a few days of not attending to this book and rather read a lot of other stuff - essays, a lot of utilitarian research, not literature really. The flow had been interrupted, and the magic was undone. But I do have the memory of the magic. Hope the post still shows how enamored I am, and hope to read it again some time! And hope to read more from Nabokov soon.

**

Speak, Memory is Nabokov's memoir, a selective autobiography of the first 40 or so years of his life. A lot of the writing here has been published elsewhere as essays, stand-alone narratives. But he revisited them in compiling this collection. Put them in the broadly natural flow of his life.

He writes about time. He writes about themes. He writes about his earliest memories, and makes us see them, vivid. There's beauty dripping from every page. Words and words! One can keep collecting Nabokov’s words the way he collected butterflies. Beautiful words and phrases making what he says his own. The thought that it leads me to is that there is little new to be said under the sun, but the way he says it, Oh! Such beauty. Makes you wonder why bother to read anything else. He writes like a poet. There is so much heartbreaking beauty in his prose. His words, his phrases and what he sets up for you. What he shows you. How he sees things and what he chooses to interlace and this beautifully, detailed, intricate, yet, such fine account.

The book accounts for the years 1903 - 1940. Nabokov was born in 1899 and broadly kept in step with the century’s years. From his earliest memories in Russia - 

“The old and the new, the liberal touch and the patriarchal one, fatal poverty and fatalistic wealth got fantastically interwoven in that strange first decade of our century.”

Little that I can add, just quote. And a lot so quotes I have. 

He talks about time, and his philosophy is perhaps what lends weight to his beautiful prose. 

"I have journeyed back in thought — with thought hopelessly tapering off as I went — to remote regions where I groped for some secret outlet only to discover that the prison of time is spherical and without exits."

"Initially, I was unaware that time, so boundless at first blush, was a prison."

"How small the cosmos (a kangaroo’s pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!"

"I felt myself purged abruptly into a radiant and mobile medium that was none other than the pure element of time. One shared it - just as excited bathers share shining seawater - with creatures that were not oneself but that were joined to one by time’s common flow, an environment quite different from the spatial world, which not only man but apes and butterflies can perceive."

"One night during a trip abroad...I recall kneeling on my pillow at the window of a sleeping car and seeing with an inexplicable pang, a handful of fabulous lights that beckoned to me from a distant hillside, and then slipped into a pocket of black velvet: diamonds that I later gave away to my characters to alleviate the burden of my wealth.”

“The following of such thematic designs through one’s life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography.”

It has something perhaps to do with the way English is his language but not the first tongue. English, learnt in different surroundings. It is a medium which opens up a wealth and treasure of thought and books, but it is an acquired medium. The original medium was something else. Does it affect the way we relate to words and language?

The way Nabokov writes, he defines, he collects, he classifies. He talks about mushrooms, about his family tree, and despite some of these being tedious, in his hands they flow like poetry. I don’t know is this a bias because reading him seems like a win - a delight of words, of phrases, of sentences, of ways of seeing, and of philosophy. You get everything in one book. And because there is so much to be gleaned, I re-read the chapters I’ve just finished reading to revel again in those beautiful sentences. True pleasure and joy.

His initial years in Russia were very comfortable. Perhaps very few people live like that. The extremely rich perhaps. And I was intrigued at the places where he talks about the family tree going back to 1300s and the way his mother managed to live without getting into kitchen or household admin! Very few women have managed that in their lifetimes.

**

What you take away from books is the number of things or imagery that is vividly created for you. Some books leave you with a few, but the really successful ones with you leave you with a lot of those. The way Katherine Mansfield sees things. Some of the early bits of Mrs Dalloway. And so much from Nabokov.

May be it is a product of the attention you can bestow on the book. The openness with which you let it affect you. It is your openness, your eagerness to receive and seek, and the author’s dealing with the subject, in this case his memories make them stand true for you.

“It is certainly not then - not in dreams - but when one is wise awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement , on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow that blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.”

The eye of the artist. The memories of a writer. As he says, he has lent so many of his memories to his characters. The eye that traces the past from a dim fog and makes it come alive for us. The way the perspective is drawn is that of a visual artist. So much more than just a writer.

Even shadows moving through the garden path bring alive a summer afternoon - “Eyed shadows moved through the garden paths. On the white window ledges, on the long window seats covered with faded calico, the sun breaks into geometrical gems after passing through rhomboids and squares of stained glass”

About the nonutlitarian delights of art:

“When a butterfly has to look like a leaf, not only are all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but marking mimicking grub-bored holes are generously thrown in. ‘Natural Selection’ , in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behaviour, nor could one appeal to the theory of ‘the struggle for life’ when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance and luxury far in excess of a predator’s power of appreciation. I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.”

**

However, as he moves out of Russia, the book loses a bit of vibrancy. And although I enjoyed it, I felt that joy was a little bit lacking from that writing. May be it was a byproduct of the attention I had on reading. I do not have much to quote from final sections of the book.

Sometime, perhaps when I read it again.

The final section of the book is a pseudo-review by Nabokov of his own book. I am glad that most of this post was drafted as I was still reading through the initial bits. Because once you read the final section, it is a recap, and a light thrown on his thinking process, on the mechanics and it is a nice wrap and little is to be said after that.

But let me close this post with another quote of his. Here, he reminds us again of the elasticity of time:

“ I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness - in a landscape selected at random - is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern - to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”

Recent reads - short stories

I recently read a couple of short story collections.

One was Ali Smith's "The First Person and other stories". And the other was Evelyn Waugh's "Work Suspended and other stories". This is a late update. I read them a few weeks ago.

I enjoy short stories. They are also good for times when it is difficult to carve out sustained reading time.  I feel that with essays too. More recently, it has been Nabokov's Speak Memory and Teju Cole's collection of non-fiction writing. They send me on different paths too. More on them soon - that is, once I finish reading them. The point is difficult to read a complete narrative or a novel at the moment. So reading whatever takes me away for a little while but brings me back soon.

Ali Smith's this collection was different from the Public Library one. I had loved that one. This one, the First Person and Other Stories, was a little bit difficult to completely warm up to. The language and the smooth, flowing narrative is the same as any other writing by Ali Smith. It is the characters, their sadness at times, and at times the strangeness of the set-up. There were some interesting bits - I would say, more of a mixed bag, this collection. There's this thing about her writing, she quotes from so many places, and she uses such beautiful words, that I'm often tempted to stop and look them up deeper, but there is a compulsion in her sentences, which pulls you along. It is like a slide. Once you are on it, even though you do wish to go slow and look around and enjoy the scenery, you cannot do much; you just slide.

I felt that most of the stories here were exploratory. They explored a setting - the narrator and narrator's younger self. The narrator and a lost cause/ lost child. The narrator and a random parcel at her doorstep. It starts with something and as if, the author wishes to see where it will take her. And it takes her to strange lands. I feel I need to reread some to understand what is really going on, to understand the intent or even where the focus of the story lies.

I liked "True short story", a story about short story. More than a short story, an exploration of what a short story is and leaves you with collectible quotes from several writers. Consider this:

"Tzvetan Todorov says that the thing about a short story is that it's so short it doesn't allow us the time to forget that it's only literature and not actually life.

Nadine Gordimer says short stories are absolutely about the present moment, like the brief flash of a number of fireflies here and there in the dark.

...

William Carlos Williams says that the short story, which acts like the flare of a match struck in the dark, is the only real form for describing the briefness, the brokenness and the simultaneous wholeness of people's life."

The other collection I read was Evelyn Waugh's "Work Suspended and Other Stories". I haven't read anything from Evelyn Waugh in the past and this seemed like a good way to get introduced to the author. This one is a collection of short stories and a couple of novella length works. Most of the short stories in the collection are satirical. Interesting picture of the times - 1920s, 1930s, between the wars. Depicting a wide and disparate set of people and their lives, immediate problems and their preoccupations. One of the novella-length story, Scott King's Modern Europe, is another satire. This time focusing on a school teacher from England on a trip to a fictional totalitarian country, and through his journey, we explore the difficult, senseless, nightmarish random country (reminded me of early pages of The Unconsoled or a bad dream).

The one story that stood out in all this, was Work Suspended. This one was different from all the rest. More like a novel. Traces the life of a writer of detective fiction, and his fascination for a friend's wife - not much in this seemed satirical. His work gets suspended because he puts his book away to make way for the war.

Interesting collection. Keen to read more at some point.

Take this waltz

This one is not a book related post.

I am going through a song phase. Every once in a while I go through a song phase, or a poem phase that lasts until I wear out the song a bit, but before I do so, I wish to capture the latest one here. A few days ago it was 'a long and winding road'.

The current one is 'Take this waltz' by Leonard Cohen and I discovered it very recently, and it has grown on me. Helps that it is a poem too (by Spanish poet Lorca), which took Cohen somewhere around 150 hrs to translate to get it just right in English. I am not sure whether I get the poem completely - I get the mood, the tone, and I love the pace and the way it is set to song. And like all haunting poems, this one too lives on love and loss.

Probably it is the Rebecca West that I'm reading (her journey through Czechoslovakia, and its constant reference to Vienna). I am enjoying this on loop. And since it's that part of the phase where I need to tell everyone I meet to listen to this song, I am sharing it here (since this song is a poem too). Until I decide better, here goes:

Now in Vienna there are ten pretty women
There's a shoulder where Death comes to cry
There's a lobby with nine hundred windows
There's a tree where the doves go to die
There's a piece that was torn from the morning
And it hangs in the Gallery of Frost

Aey, aey, aey, aey
Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take this waltz with the clamp on its jaws

Oh, I want you, I want you, I want you
On a chair with a dead magazine
In the cave at the tip of the lilly
In some hallway where love's never been
On a bed where the moon has been sweating
In a cry filled with footsteps and sand

Aey, aey, aey, aey
Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take its broken waist in your hand

This waltz, this waltz, this waltz, this waltz
With its very own breath of brandy and Death
Dragging its tail in the sea

There's a concert hall in Vienna
Where your mouth had a thousand reviews
There's a bar where the boys have stopped talking
They've been sentenced to death by the blues
Ah, but who is it climbs to your picture
With a garland of freshly cut tears?

Aey, aey, aey, aey
Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take this waltz, it's been dying for years

There's an attic where children are playing
Where I've got to lie down with you soon
In a dream of Hungarian lanterns
In the mist of some sweet afternoon
And I'll see what you've chained to your sorrow
All your sheep and your lillies of snow

Aey, aey, aey, aey
Take this waltz, take this waltz
With its "I'll never forget you, you know"

This waltz, this waltz, this waltz, this waltz
With its very own breath of brandy and Death
Dragging its tail in the sea

And I'll dance with you in Vienna
I'll be wearing a river's disguise
The hyacinth wild on my shoulder
My mouth on the dew of your thighs
And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook
With the photographs there, and the moss
And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty
My cheap violin and my cross
And you'll carry me down on your dancing
To the pools that you lift on your wrist

Oh my love, oh my love
Take this waltz, take this waltz
It's yours now, it's all that there is

A few recent reads

Last few months have been different than normal in quite a few ways. No matter the specifics, but they left me with little time or desire or both to read or if read, then, to write. I could read a little bit this week, so here again, trying to fill in the gaps.

Some notes on a few of my recent reads:

Janet Malcolm's Nobody's Looking at You

Her Forty One False Starts sits on the shelf - been sitting there for a while. I have read it haphazardly. Quickly read a  few essays and then couldn't read the rest. And hence, still counted as an unfinished book on my list. So when I came across this one, I didn't give in to the temptation of reading by pull. I read it through from beginning to end, over this week. And glad that I did.

This is her most recent essay collection I believe - writings from different publications. Divided in three main groups. First one is profiles of a few people beginning with Eileen Fisher, about Yuja Wang, Rachel Maddow and about a second-hand/ old books store in New York. I loved each one of those profiles. Quite contemporary compared to some of my other readings. One can just google and read up more around and about the subjects from wherever JM leaves off.

The next section is around American politics and processes. Little context for me but I liked her writing, and I was keen to read cover to cover so I pushed through that section.  A lot of references in the 'The Art of Testifying' piece were lost on me. But immediately next was the piece on Sarah Palin and family, and one doesn't need much context for reading through it ('Special Needs'). It was a strange, intriguing piece. More than the writing, I think for me what held me was the dissonance of what one knows, being a non-American, and what JM shows. The writing was engaging, gossipy, humorous and still somehow, fair, sympathetic.

The final section was around literature, and mostly reviews of books on a range of topics, from feminism, sexual harassment to Tolstoy, Bloomsbury set, Plath and Hughes, and some more. There was an interesting essay on translations of Russian fiction - edifying, akin to enrolling in a class, and I mean it in the best way. The books she reviews are not my standard reading fare and glad to read reviews and views and thoughts - again akin to learning from a teacher. These are more than reviews, they give a flavour, a context, and a lot of comparison and information, like any good essay. I am glad that I read them otherwise they don't really show up on paths I take.

Most of the essays in this collection are available in online archives of these mags. Enjoyed it. Next steps - quite keen to look deeper at Eileen Fisher (the company) and the related question of eventual company ownership.


Joseph Conrad's Victory - An Island Tale

I liked this one. Very different from the last one I read from him (The Secret Agent). In parts reminiscent of Heart of  Darkness. But just a little bit - mainly in the colonial way,  to the extent that it is set in that slice of colonial time and space which regards non-White world as racially inferior.

And still, it is not about people in any general sense. It is about a specific person and about circumstances. And about passivity and activity. And about the way life works sometime. If one can look past the annoying colonial set up, and the presumed superiority of that set-up, and one looks at the protagonist, Heyst just as a person living on an island, giving it all up, cutting off all ties (almost), and still, due to some random chain of circumstances, getting caught in the web of life again, and losing. It is about how one sees through the world, understand it is all a farce, and yet one gets drawn into it, makes ties, and then those ties define the chimera of life. One tries to reason, explain, apply logic and structure and sequence and narrative, but things happen all of the sudden, and the tables get turned and if the passive wouldn't act, then activity comes to them.


Such Fine Boys by Patrick Modiano (translation) ****

I don't seem to have any notes for this one except for the four stars I've added on my recent reads page. This fairly recent translation came with a foreword by Clezio. The book is a sort of sketchbook, a collection of portraits. A few boys who attended a boarding school together. The narrator and a few other boys, the abandoned, unwanted (but not without substantial means) children at this school near Paris. Now adults, at different points in their lives. Each chapter picks up one of the boys or characters from the school the narrator comes across at some point, and through that portrayal, the narrator tells us a little bit more about the history, the old times at the boarding school, their lives on the weekends and the current times, and somewhere in the chapter, the narration shifts and the person being narrated about becomes the narrator. Their lives in and around Paris. It is the bizarre-ness of these lives that was the most arresting bit. I still recall certain scenes from the book and at times get tempted to believe that I watched a movie or saw a show. But it was all the author in translation working on my imagination - images and scenes as vivid as a TV show.

On recently reading Hilton Als' Paris Review Interview, I came across this interesting way he refers to theater. He quotes Dianne Wiest:

She wrote to me, “A great play turns you [the audience] into each character . . . It pulls at you to question your thoughts and feelings through the prism of characters. A great play requires hard work from an audience. It is not about something, it is the something. The conflict belongs all to you and you live it and carry it with you.”

Something that Patrick Modiano's book ends up doing to you.

My Antonia by Willa Cather

Another beautiful read.

What I recall and what stayed - This little kid at the end of chapter 1, going to his grandparents after his parents are no more, alone in this world (the vulnerability of little, lonely kids!!), after a long travel, last miles of his journey, in the middle of nowhere, night, between heaven and Earth - away from everything that he knows- and that night, the author says that the child does not pray, but believes what would be would be. I am unable to recreate the effect that it made on me. But the juxtaposition of this little, vulnerable fellow and this big, freeing thought - what will be, will be somehow warmed up my heart.

The book is about this kid growing up at his grandparents' - initially at their farm in the open country, the West, and then in a small town nearby, and this girl, Antonia, and her family, who arrive to the neighborhood on the same day as the narrator, European immigrants, and they set about to rebuild their lives in this new country. A portrait of life in the farming America at the turn of last century.
Choices available to boys is different from those available to girls. It is an interesting portrait of those times, those lives and the place.

My first from Willa Cather. Over time if I come across more, I'll hopefully read more.


Public Library and other stories by Ali Smith

Quite enjoyed this one. Interesting, beautiful stories.Strange emotions. Poetry. Sentences run along carrying you with them. So fast, gliding. Different stories highlight different people. From Katherine Mansfield, to DHL. And then throughout the book, what people think of libraries, public libraries and how they are important. A book about books. If you love reading, you love such books. So many references. There are words she plays with, collects, loves. Then there are all these people she reads and admires. And then there are so many interesting, curious facts. And then her own memories and dreams. And they are all beautifully, breathtakingly meshed together in these stories. So although the narrative strangeness and abruptness can jar you, the flow is too smooth to stop mid-way. If anything, you turn back, and reopen the pages to slide down again and see the vista at may be a different angle than seen first.

Another author I want to read more from.

A portrait, and an addition to wish-list

I was recently drawn into a write-up by a portrait. It is a profile of Russian writer Maxim Osipov. Consider this:

(Photograph of Maxim Osipov by Elena Anosova for the New Yorker)

This beautiful portrait drew me in. The light seems like afternoon reflected off snow. The wood, the smoke hanging in the air - such a beautiful capture. Everything opposite to where I am. I have never lived in a place where it snows. Visitor, yes, but never struggled with the slush, the wet, the snow the cold. And the wooden walls and the desk and the cabin. Where I sit, everything is white around me - the desk, the walls, the white-framed window shutters blinding off the green tree and blue sky and white clouds outside. Nothing  brown and warm. Hence the very idea is beautiful in its other-ness. At times the opposites are interesting because they represent all that you are not. In that, complementing you.

Maybe I am wrong with all the assumptions above. May be. The portrait released that chain of thought. I kept staring at it for a bit and then since it mentions Chekhov in the first breath, I had to read more. The promise of such write-ups is delightful.

This article by Joshua Yaffa introduces Maxim Osipov to the English speaking world. It mentions that he is a doctor, a practising cardiologist in the Russian town of Tarusa, 101 kms away from Moscow. Living in the quiet provinces. Writing, publishing, essays and this collection : "Rock, Paper, Scissors". Added to my wishlist.

The mood of the portrait, and generally the idea of Russia, the earthy, snowy feel to the books - be it the Hunter's sketchbook (another one halfway read, on my wishlist), or other Russian short stories, they are like comfort food. The idea of a cold evening, hot chocolate, snug blanket, cosy thick socks and the book. The idea.

It helps that it is the beginning of  winter in our hemisphere, and although I live nowhere close to snow, the light slants more these days, and the roads are full of fall leaves, and the breeze can at times pierce through you, making the idea of a book of Russian short stories in a cosy setting all the more attractive.

Here is a sample of his writing from one of his essays - the complete quote is from the New Yorker (article linked above) -

" A year and a half after his first essay appeared in Znamya, he published an elegiac follow-up called “Complaining Is a Sin,” in which he describes receiving an early-morning summons from the hospital. “Cold, fog,” he writes. “Ten minutes later, you run into the office, shove the plug into the socket, everything is noisy, you put on a robe, look at the canvas-colored twilight outside the window, and say to yourself, ‘One, it won’t get any better, and, two, this is happiness.’ ”  "

Lucia Berlin

Not a lot going on in terms of reading at the moment, but this overdue update on Lucia Berlin. I recently read her collection of short stories : "A Manual for Cleaning Women" and her memoir/ letters "Welcome Home".  My notes from a few weeks ago:

The Manual for Cleaning Women is different from Evening in Paradise - another of her story collection I read recently. Unlike as in Evening in Paradise, the stories in this collection are not chronologically arranged. One wouldn’t think that they all relate to one person. One would think it an interesting collection of characters, places and viewpoints. If I had picked up the book without any context, would have read it differently. But now that I know the context, and I know it is all Lucia, and her difficult, difficult life which she opens up for us without a single note of complaint. (And that is the really impressive bit. The reason the writing appeals so much is one can perhaps wonder at the life, but the one who lived it, did not use her whimper or whine or complaint. It is all so full of life, and the spirit  to deal with the anything and everything.)

Welcome Home is a memoir, incomplete, peppered throughout with pictures of her, her family and all the different places she lived in. She did not complete it. It leaves off when her kids were still very young and Buddy Berlin was still around. You see glimpses of her stories in that writing. Or perhaps it is truer the other way round. You see glimpses of those houses in the stories.

You don't know her, but after reading these stories you know enough of the themes that have stayed with her through her life. The things that work their way in fiction again and again.

Similar to what Doris Lessing does. Or what Gabriel Garcia does in Living to Tell the Tale. When authors draw so heavily from their lives, you read their memoirs or their books and you jeep getting echoes or déjà vu.

Then there is another list, of all the problems with different houses. Reads like poetry. Sheer number of houses she lived in. Makes you wonder about yourself. And makes you want to do that exercise for yourself.

All this doesn’t take much space. Then there are the letters. It took me a while to bring myself to read the letters. On one hand, there are her stories,  written in very alive, sparse, clipped prose. The stories are matter of fact, no complaints ever comes through. And then there are these letters. One wonders that they are published because people wish to know more about her. And you understand more of her struggle, her life. May be the mystery would have been better. May be, we need heroes who don't complain.

Apart from the emotion on no complaints, the other emotion was wonder and a creeping desire to judge (the desire to judge manifested after the letters. The stories had left me with awe and wonder). It is such an off-centre life. And lives are products of choices. At times things happen where people don't have control. But at times things happen because people have a choice and they make certain choices. And then when you see other's choices, you start wondering - and unless you stop yourself, one can get to judging too. But one needs to stop. There is no right and wrong. Just choices. And one can almost identify with her at times even if most of the times she stays enigmatic, alien.

By the time you read the three books, you know her well, or so you think. And you get it. And you feel sad. It is a slippery slope.

As in one letter she says to Ed:

"Once when I was very little in the Grand Canyon there was a waitress with a huge tray of coffee in cups walking across the restaurant. One of the cups fell and smashed on the floor and she sort of looked up at heaven and said oh hell and tossed the whole tray onto the floor and split. That is what I do all the time."

My Brilliant Friend

It has been over a fortnight now since I read this book by Elena Ferrante. I read it through quickly, but then couldn't get it out of my head.  Still understanding how I feel about the book. Do I like it? Too raw, too close, too much ruffling of guarded emotions, yet, yet, yet, I knew I felt like I needed the next one, immediately.  However, other things came up, and I haven’t got around to getting hold of the second book, and now, the distance of time has dulled my love-hate emotions for the book. Yet, there is this delightful feeling of expectancy, of knowing that there are a couple of books out there which I can dip in when I want to and dial into that engaging roller-coaster of a reading experience.

I am a late arrival to the Neapolitan novels. Everyone seems to have read them. And of course, there is the show. It is the story of two girls, two friends growing up in Italy in 1950s. The first book in the series deals with early life and adolescent years leaving us at a point where one of the friends get married.

It is a different world. A different life. It is one of the points of view that one doesn’t read about much because people living those lives perhaps don’t get the time to write it down, or are not people of letters. Their lives are full, intense. Even David Copperfield’s life seems a far cry from the daily lives of these folks in Naples. The story is from the point of view of someone who has not had a privileged life, or privileged upbringing, or even exposure to privilege (the way DC has), and yet, they grow up and write this account.

It is not just that the material means are little. It is the dichotomy. The struggles of life would perhaps resonate with so many of the girls growing up in developing countries even now, 70 years down the line, who traverse two different worlds in their early lives. The age-old, traditional, paternal world of home, where family, women’s roles, women’s opportunities are still rooted in ancient ages, and then the other world of modern education exposing them to ideas, books, thoughts, and people and exposing them to lifestyle, culture, of what they return to every night. It is interesting, to grow up like that.

In a sense, it reminds me of the autobiographical writings of Simone De Beauvoir and Doris Lessing (the two writings I read last year, the first books of each of their memoirs) where the authors are growing through the same years as Lila and Elena. Girls growing up in different parts of the world, last century, going to school, living at home, relating with their families, siblings and friends, relating with others’ expectations and their own expectations of themselves.

I am touching upon the book’s characters, but the book is not about Lila or about Elena, it is about their friendship, their lives together. And it is enjoyable. But perhaps where my thoughts linger most after reading are always on the lives lived by those characters where my mind imagines itself in their shoes living their lives.

I enjoy reading about the books other people read, about things they are learning, and about the hardwork they are putting in. It warms my heart to see honest effort. It might sound strange, but the best loved passages in the book are where Elena balances her work at school with her home, and with discipline and will decides to work early in the morning and late at night to ensure that she stays on course for next classes. Things like these make me wonder that perhaps people who have less are the most driven and motivated. And perhaps having less is a blessing in disguise.

Then there is the brilliant Lila. After brilliantly pursuing excellence in whatever she does, she goes on to read and master what she reads. One can almost understand and identify with Elena's fascination with Lila. What it perhaps refers to is the unattainable, the slightly out of reach, the out of bounds, but just enough to fascinate, to be desired, knowing that you fall short, like someone in a Zeno's paradox, you'll never reach the desired, just keep getting closer, and left with that feeling of incompleteness to that extent.

Oh the vulnerabilities of being human, of growing up, of caring, of feeling, of knowing too well. Of having what you wish to be always in sight, and yet, knowing that you can not be that. The cruelty of knowing, of seeing more than what can keep you blissful, ignorance is bliss and all that. Of seeing everything in its raw shape, and then sitting, heartbroken.

Another reason why this touches so is growing up where I grew up, I have witnessed some of the heartbreak. Not personally, but so many instances around me. Where I grew up was more privileged than the girls from Naples, but still, middle class, the social construct, of taking care of home (people and times were not rich enough for modern luxuries of gadgets or money-bought luxuries of external help), and the general question of how much do you need to study given that one is a female.  After a point, what's the point? Personally, I and a few of my friends have been fortunate, but we come from changing times. We were some of the more fortunate ones, while people around me and families around me still believed in the way things used to be - the traditional, the way society had existed for ages and ages. Then there's this thing about not knowing. When one does not know, one doesn't struggle. It is only when one sees or thinks that there is another way that discontent arises. And with it, the struggle. When you grow up a particular way, the other way is always going to create battles inside you.

That explains some of my love-hate relationship with such fiction. Also the reason I do not enjoy fiction set in India. It is too close for comfort, guess too confrontational. It is a reminder to so much more, of unfairness. It calls to mind things forgotten and may be, forgotten for the better. Gets unpleasant.

So much for the ranting post. I am quite fascinated by the book. I know I’ll seek out the next one at the earliest opportunity, so more, then.

The Salmon Of Doubt

Talking about Science Fiction, I felt like revisiting this post sitting in my drafts for a while now.  I picked up Douglas Adam's The Salmon of Doubt earlier in the year. I didn't get to finish reading it, and I don't have with me any more so I doubt I'll close this one. But I do have a collection of quotes, which I intend to put up here.

There are certain authors who delight you with the lightness of their touch. There is Douglas Adams, and there is Bill Bryson. For both, their love or joy of their pursuits shines through in their writing, passing on to you in form of good cheer and joie de vivre. 

The Salmon of Doubt is a posthumous collection of writings by Douglas Adams, classified under the heads of Life, Universe and Everything. It has autobiographical sketches, essays, interviews and notes on books, and a partly completed Dirk Gently novel. The book is interspersed with brilliant morsels from his writing. I read most of it except the unfinished Dirk Gently novel. I do not know whether I wish to read it (the novel). Not what the author wanted to share perhaps.

Here, perhaps, it is worth quoting what Douglas Adams says of PG Wodehouse. It will pretty much convey what one can say of him,

"Shakespeare? Milton? Keats? How can I possibly mention the author of Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkins and Pigs Have Wings in the same breath as these men? He's just not serious!

He doesn't need to be serious. He's better than that. He's up in the stratosphere of what the human mind can do, above tragedy and strenuous thought, where you will find Bach, Mozart, Einstein, Feynman and Louis Armstrong, in the reams of pure, creative playfulness."

I think 'creative playfulness' is what defines his work too.

This is him introducing himself:

"I just want to mention one thing, which is completely meaningless, but I am terribly proud of - I was born in Cambridge in 1952 and my initials are DNA!"

His thoughts on perspective and the way we see the world. He is writing in late 90s, when the world was very different. But like some of the uncanny sci-fi writers (read Arthur Clarke), he is spot on stuff  - the way cloud computing, the way internet has changed, about online advertising.

Here's him talking about Online Magazines (note, this is in 1995). After discussing an advertiser paid online magazine method,

"That's one model of how online magazine work, and it is, of course, absolutely free to readers. There's another that will probably arrive as soon as it becomes possible to move virtual cash around the Internet, and that will involve readers being billed tiny amounts of money for the opportunity to read popular Webpages. Much less than you would, for instance regularly spend on your regular newspapers and magazines because you wouldn't be paying for all the trees that have to be pulped, the vans that have to be fueled, and the marketing people whose job it is to tell you how brilliant they are. The reader's money goes straight to the writer, with a proportion to the publisher of the Web site, and all the wood can stay in the forests, the oil can stay in the ground, and all the marketing people can stay out of the Groucho Club and let decent folk get to the bar.

Why doesn't all the money go to the writer, I hear you (and indeed myself) asking. Well, maybe it will if he's happy just to drop his words into the digital ocean in the hope that someone out there will find them. But like any ocean, the digital ones has streams and eddies and currents, and publishers will quickly have a role finding good material to draw into those currents where readers will naturally be streaming through looking for stuff, which is more or less what they do at the moment. The difference will lie in the responsiveness of the market, the speed with which those streams will shift and surge, and the way in which power and control will shift to those who are actually contributing something useful rather than just having lunch.

The thing we leave out of the model is, essentially just a lot of dead wood."

- Wired, 1995

The joy is in  his way of looking at things. The conclusions he draws, what he takes away.

About Comedy, and a way the world has changed:

"The thing that hit be like a thunderbolt... was that comedy was a medium in which extremely intelligent people could express things that simply couldn't be expressed any other way... 

Creative excitement has gone elsewhere - to science and technology: new ways of seeing things, new understandings of the universe, continual new revelations about how life works, how we think, how we perceive, how we communicate.

Where, thirty years ago, we used to start up rock-bands, we now start up start-ups and experiment with new ways of communicating with each other and playing with the information we exchange. And one idea fails, there is another, better one right behind it, and another and another, cascading fast as rock albums used to in the sixties." 

On coding:

"Whatever complexities a computer produces - modeling wind turbulence, modeling economies or the way light dances in the eye of an imaginary dinosaur - it all grows out of simple lines of code that start with adding one and one, testing the result, and then doing it again. Being able to watch complexity blossom out of this primitive simplicity is one of the great marvels of our age, greater even than watching man walk on the moon."

And on how to see the world. The macroscopic, and the microscopic.

"There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away, and think this to be normal, is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspectives tend to be. "

"The other thing that comes out of that vision of the universe is that it turns out to be composed almost entirely, and rather worryingly, of nothing.  Wherever you look there is nothing, with occasional tiny, tiny little specks of rock or light.  But nevertheless, by watching the way these tiny little specks behave in the vast nothingness, we begin to divine certain principles, certain laws, like gravity and so forth.  So that was, if you like, the macroscopic view of the universe, which came from the first age of sand. " 

"The next age of sand is the microscopic one.  We put glass lenses into microscopes and started to look down at the microscopic view of the universe.  Then we began to understand that when we get down to the subatomic level, the solid world we live in also consists, again rather worryingly, of almost nothing and that wherever we do find something it turns out not to be actually something, but only the probability that there may be something there." 

From "Is there an Artificial God?" Complete text of this here. 

This, above is one of my favorite bits. About infinities within and infinities without.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

I read this one by Philip K. Dick yesterday. Short book. Over in a few hours. Have found science fiction after a while. Although there are days when I really crave sci-fi, at times just to get a perspective and distance from things and thoughts at hand.

I enjoy sci-fi by Arthur C. Clarke. And for his lightness, brightness and joy - Douglas Adams. Happy to re-read Space Odyssey and Hitchhiker any day. And of what I've read from Isaac Asimov, I've mostly enjoyed. I haven't read Ursula K. Le Guin's fiction, just a bit of non-fiction, keen to read Left Hand of Darkness. I haven't read a lot by Philip K. Dick. I tried Ubik, but couldn't get far in. I'll try reading The Man in High Castle at some point.

'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' is a 1968 novel by Philip K. Dick. Short book. Quick read.  The internet tells me that the book inspired Blade Runner, the 1982 movie. It is set in a future where Earth has become quite inhospitable, has much fewer people after World War Terminus, most having emigrated away from Earth, and there is a lot of dust, abandoned, unoccupied dwellings, and kipple. What is kipple? The un-ordered, the mess, the disintegration of everything organised, the chaos, the entropy. Eventually kipple is meant to push out everything which is non-kipple and take over what remains of Earth. Many animals are extinct, it is a world without birds, and to keep up with the Joneses, people are expected to take care of real animals - the animals you own become the signifier of your wealth/ place in society. And hence, there is a thriving industry of fake, electric animals. In this set up, there are androids (hard to distinguish from humans, and often not aware themselves that they are androids) and the perpetual question of how good AI can get, and then there is the protagonist whose job is to retire/kill rogue Androids.

So far, so good. The story then unfolds over two days, with a thriller like chase sequence.

With sci-fi, the joy is in the construct, the imagination, the new set-up and how thoroughly authors can think and thrash out a new reality. Beyond that, how the story unfolds and how well the author can hold you varies from book to book and author to author. This one, I read it through for the story, but not a fan.

The way I see it, there are perhaps two kinds of science fiction. One is the fast-paced novel, where a lot goes in to set it up, the imaginary world with its own problems, but then the way the protagonists behave reads like thriller. And then there are the more ironic, satiric, or questioning the absurd by putting the sci-fi construct on them - where authors choose to comment on and examine the modern realities and social questions through this new lens or framework offered by imaginary fiction. Such examination reveals new angles and throws light on aspects not commonly perceived - take 1984, or Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, Handmaid's Tale or some of Doris Lessing's fiction, or for that matter, The Glass Bead Game. Both kind of sci-fi take the same path initially - the detailed set up, the displacement of the reader from the current existing realities before the road forks, and one path goes down the thriller route, and the other, literature.

The book at hand I feel goes down the thriller path. Though I must say that it held me better than the other cold book I am reading (The Unconsoled) where the real is perhaps more alien than a world with humans who wonder whether they are androids.