Date: 2008-09-22 16:30 Subject: The Now Habit by Fiore Security: Public Tags: neil_fiore, psychology, re-read

The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (1989)
By Neil Fiore
201 pages - Jeremy P. Tarcher

This is a pretty interesting book on procrastination, that takes a bit of a different approach than the usual advice that tells you to just set more goals and stick to a schedule and pull your socks up. There's some other aspects to it, but the main point of the book is that it recommends that you schedule your recreation and necessities and stick to those, and then try to fit in whatever you classify as 'work' around that.

My problem with procrastination can sometimes reach ridiculous proportions. This is actually the second time I've read this book, but it was rewarding to go through it again, and I think it encouraged me to try some of the strategies again. I do think the book is padded out a bit with some other ideas that don't really fit and aren't as helpful.

Date: 2008-06-30 18:04 Subject: Fifth Business by Davies Security: Public Tags: canada, highly_recommended, loss_of_faith_2008, re-read, robertson_davies

Fifth Business (1970)
by Robertson Davies
273 pages - Penguin Books

'Fifth Business' is a term (according to Davies) in opera or theatre which refers to a character that is neither hero or heroine, confidante or villain, but is still integral to the plot. In this case that role is played by Dunstan Ramsay, who is relating his experiences, but finds himself a supporting character in his own life story.

Dunstan Ramsay is born in the early twentieth century in a small Ontario town, and as a child he has an experience that will affect him the rest of his life: his lifelong friend and enemy Boy Staunton throws a snowball at him, but Dunstan ducks and the snowball hits the pregnant Mrs. Dempster instead, which leads to the premature birth of Paul Dempster. It's an event that haunts Dunstan with guilt all his life, but also opens up possibilities for all three of Dunstan, Boy, and Paul that wouldn't be there otherwise.

Dunstan goes on to fight in the Great War, and then becomes a teacher at a private school. One of his main interests in life becomes saints and the stories around them, and in fact he believes Mrs. Dempster to be a saint of a kind, and attributes three miracles to her. Dunstan (like the author Davies) is a Protestant, and hence there is some tension in his fascination with saints, as he belongs to a branch of Christianity that still honours the old saints, but doesn't recognize any in the modern age, as if sainthood was something that had gone out of style, or as if God had once been present in the world but has now departed.

The book follows Dunstan's life until he's about sixty years old. I find it hard to relate the quality of this book, but it is very good, and is not only Davies' best, but could quite easily be considered the greatest Canadian novel ever. It stands alone, but it can also be read as the first part in The Deptford Trilogy, which also includes The Manticore and World of Wonders.

'He told us, quietly and in the simplest language, that he had to run his Mission by begging, and that sometimes begging yielded nothing; when this happened he prayed for help, and had never been refused what he needed; the blankets, or more often the food, would appear somehow, often late in the day, and more often than not, left on the steps of the Mission by anonymous donors. Now, pompous young ass that I was, I was quite prepared to believe that St John Bosco could pull off this trick when he appealed to Heaven on behalf of his boys; I was even persuaded that it might have happened a few times to Dr Barnardo, of whom the story was also told. But I was far too much a Canadian, deeply if unconsciously convinced of the inferiority of my own country and its people, to think it could happen in Toronto, to a man I could see.' (pg.128)

Date: 2008-05-09 15:15 Subject: Peace by Wolfe Security: Public Tags: fantasy, gene_wolfe, loss_of_faith_2008, re-read, usa

Peace (1975)
by Gene Wolfe
264 pages - Orb

The narrator is Alden Dennis Weer, an old man wandering through the rooms of a large house which incorporates rooms from different times in his life. As he goes searching for his pocket-knife, various episodes of his life in the American Midwestern town of Cassionville come back to life, and, among other things, create a sort of personal history of the twentieth century. There are many memorable stories, but even more memorable are the stories-within-stories, such as the purchase of the chinese Easter egg, or the tale of St.Brendan and the cat and the dog, or the story of the apprentice pharmacist in a Florida town, the books of Gold, and the story of the young Chinese man who meets an old man in a hostel and gets to sleep on the old man's magic headrest.

The prose here is just wonderful, and is some of the best Wolfe has ever written. He is sort of channeling Proust and a bit of Joyce, as filtered through the Arabian Nights and the vast influence of middle America, with a guest appearance of some H.P. Lovecraft for good measure. I don't suppose there's any way of saying more about the plot without possibly including 'spoilers', but I don't think knowing any plot details can spoil a genuinely good book, though you should probably skip the rest if you don't want to know.

It was pretty clear to me even before I read much of the interesting speculation about this book on the internet, that Weer is actually dead, even though he seems as yet to be unaware of it. In fact, he isn't only dead, but he has awakened long after the human race has died out, and is in fact the last soul on earth. The large mansion which he wanders through, which he says he's built for himself to mimic many of the rooms he encountered in life (including the views out the windows) has a strong parallel to some of the memory devices people used before literacy was widespread, where they would create a house in their minds, and every object in it would be a reminder of something. So, my interpretation is that Weer is sort of circling and circling around in his memories as he tries to find peace about the things he's done in his life, as well as receiving clues about the reality of his situation.

This is at least the third time I've read this book, and it still really stands up. Perhaps a bit melancholy, but excellent. I also re-read a related short story:

"The Changeling" (1968) - collected in Castle of Days

A short story of about 10 pages about a man who went over to fight in the Korean war, got captured and then went over to the other side, and worked in China for a while before deciding to come back to the US. After getting out of jail, he returns to his hometown of Cassionville, even though he has no more family. He stays with a family he knew before, though he is shocked to find that one of their three children seems not to have aged a day, though nobody even hints at acknowledging it except the boy's father. The island on the river on which some of the story takes place is mentioned in Peace

( An excerpt of a section right near the end of Peace )

Date: 2007-09-18 15:52 Subject: The Illustrated Man by Bradbury Security: Public Tags: ray_bradbury, re-read, science_fiction, short_stories, usa

The Illustrated Man (1951)
by Ray Bradbury
186 pages - Bantam Spectra

A collection of stories that uses the framing device of the narrator, a drifter, meeting a man who is covered with tattoos; tattoos that start to move when you look at them, each one telling a story. Some of the more remarkable stories here are "The Veldt", featuring two spoiled children whose maliciousness towards their parents becomes absorbed by their virtual reality playroom, "The Long Rain" about a group of survivors of a crash on Venus that try to make it through an environment that is a never-ending monsoon, "No Particular Night or Morning" about an astronaut who slips into psychosis as he tries to only believe in things he can immediately see and touch, "The Concrete Mixer" about a Martian invasion which is easily absorbed into modern consumerist America, and "The Rocket" in which a poor man takes his children on a week-long tour of the solar system in a junked shell of a rocket that never leaves the ground.

This is a pretty good collection, but I don't think I'd class it among my favourite works of Ray Bradbury. A handful of stories here are also repeated in other collections, which leads to something of an over-familiarity, and I also think that too many of these stories are of the same 'shiny rocket blasting off' type, and that weakens the collection as a whole, even when the story is something of a parody. A few of these tales were made into a mostly disappointing movie released in 1969; a new Illustrated Man film is in the planning stages, and is going to be helmed by the same person that made 300 and the soon-to-be-released Watchmen adaptation.

Date: 2007-09-11 17:25 Subject: The Martian Chronicles by Bradbury Security: Public Tags: highly_recommended, ray_bradbury, re-read, science_fiction, short_stories, usa

The Martian Chronicles (1958)
by Ray Bradbury
267 pages - Time Inc.

Somewhere in between a collection of short stories and a novel, this book uses a series of stories to track the colonization of Mars by humans. Mars here is very much fictional, with a breathable atmosphere, water-filled canals, and most impressively a race of Martians who are many tens of thousands of years old, and have already left behind many ancient dead cities before they are almost entirely wiped out by new diseases from Earth. Near the end of the book nuclear war on Earth seems inevitable, and the continued existence of civilization on either planet is put in doubt.

This book is so amazing. It reminds me of why Bradbury was my favourite author for so many years. Just the writing itself is fantastic, but the imagination behind the stories is even more impressive. This is obviously not a history that could ever really take place, but is metaphor, mythology, and dream. The one thing I was surprised by in re-reading this is that a few of the Mars stories by Bradbury that I was expecting aren't even in this book; I only realized later that they're in other collections, even though they take place in the same chronology.

There was apparently a disappointing television mini-series based on this book, as well as at least one adaptation that I remember on Ray Bradbury Theater, but while I was reading this I was thinking that the only way it might be possible to do this book justice would be to use the rotoscoping technique found in animated movies such as Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly. That would be something to see.

Date: 2007-07-19 10:28 Subject: Lieh-Tzu Security: Public Tags: china, highly_recommended, lieh_tzu, philosophy, re-read, religion, slackerdom

Lieh-Tzu: A Taoist Guide to Practical Living
translated by Eva Wong
247 pages - Shambhala Dragon Editions

The Lieh-Tzu is a book traditionally attributed to a person of the same name who lived in the 4th century BC. Along with Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching and the book of Chuang Tzu, it is one of the three main texts of Taoism. This is presented as not just a translation but a "hermeneutical opening-up" of the text, which essentially means that the aim is more to get across the various layers of meaning, rather than to make a literal translation of the original text.

This is just my latest time re-reading this book, but I always find it delightful; both comforting and thought-provoking. Most of the text is short tales that span a page or two, and remind me a lot of western fables or parables. A lot of the emphasis is on the usual Taoist themes of ambivalence about the cares of the world and acknowledging our uncertainty and lack of knowledge of even the most basic aspects of our lives.

( Excerpt: 32 - Who is confused? )

Date: 2007-02-17 11:12 Subject: Notes From Underground by Dostoevsky Security: Public Tags: fyodor_dostoevsky, re-read, russia, the_dostoevsky_project

Notes From Underground (1864)
by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky
136 pages - Vintage Classics

'...all this will produce a most unpleasant impression, because we've all grown unaccustomed to life, we're all lame, each of us more or less. We've even grown so unaccustomed that at times we feel a sort of loathing for real "living life," and therefore cannot bear to be reminded of it. For we've reached a point where we regard real "living life" almost as labor, almost as service, and we all agree in ourselves that it's better from a book.'(pg.129)

The narrator introduces himself in the first part of the book, "Underground", and proceeds to go on a rant/screed/confession. He is a former civil servant who has retired to a meager little apartment after inheriting some money, and though he is full of misery and spite and many other things, he is happy that at least his spite is his own. The narrator goes at a lot of targets here, but one of his primary attacks is against the idea that scientific and economic progress will lead to universal human happiness. He attacks the idea that life can be refined down to a scientific formula, and that once everybody's motivations are put on a chart, and harmonized, we can all progress together, in peace. The underground man says this is nonsense, because people do not act in enlightened self-interest, and in fact if you built someone a life that was happy and well-ordered and rational, the one human thing that that person would be sure to do is to mangle and destroy it, if only to assert that he still has some measure of freedom. Interestingly, Dostoevsky apparently included a Christian alternative to the isolation and hatred of the narrator, but that was cut out by the censors.

In the second part, "Apropos of the Wet Snow", the narrator relates some episodes that occurred in his past, in his mid-twenties, when he was still something of a frustrated dreamer. First, he is insulted by a burly officer who moves him out of the way as though he's a chair, and our narrator then neurotically tries to 'get back' at him, following the officer around, fantasizing different schemes day and night while the officer is not even aware that this man exists. Then, the narrator forces himself into a circle of old school acquaintances whom he actually despises, and invites himself to a going-away dinner they're holding for one of them. The narrator does not want to be there, the others don't want him there, but he stubbornly stays and endures humiliation, awkwardness, hostility. The night ends at a brothel, where, while lying beside a prostitute, he starts talking romantic bookish nonsense which he doesn't believe himself, but sounds quite nice when divorced from reality. He plants a seed of hope in this prostitute, but when she comes to his apartment to see him several days later, he is back to being ridden with anxiety and neurosis, and he tries to insult and demean her in as cutting a way as possible so that she'll leave.

I've been fond of referring to this book as my autobiography, at least in some emotional sense. Re-reading it again (probably at least my 3rd reading), I don't think I felt the connection quite as intensely, but it's unquestionably a staggering piece of writing. It's a monumental work on several levels. Philosophically, it condenses the argument against the systemization of reality, and Hegel-derived socialism; and in mocking the meager limits of reason it's probably the best fictional representation of the existentialist position. In terms of literature, it is an unsurpassed example of the extreme subjectivity possible when using an unreliable narrator, and how the character's psychology shapes the style of the book; and in terms of Dostoevsky's development as a writer, it's really the gateway into his greatest works. And, on a personal level, for the individual reader, it's hard to find any greater or more intimate and intense exploration of alienation, anxiety, social awkwardness, and of the outsider who both shuns and is shunned by society, but also torments himself about it at every moment.

A very rewarding re-read, though I'm not sure I was quite in the mood for it. Up next month is Crime and Punishment, in the Pevear & Volokhonsky translation which I have not read before.

Date: 2006-08-02 18:26 Subject: The Gifted Adult by Jacobsen Security: Public Tags: giftedness, mary-elaine_jacobsen, psychology, re-read

The Gifted Adult: A Revolutionary Guide for Liberating Everyday Genius (1999)
by Mary-Elaine Jacobsen
399 pages - Ballantine

Firstly, I haven't been really reading a lot of books front-to-back lately, mainly either just reading parts or abandoning them. I'm not too worried, I figure if I really enjoy reading it'll come back after a break.

Anyhow, I'm re-reading this, but I read it before under it's previous title Liberating Everyday Genius. Both titles are kinda sketchy, though I guess this one is a bit better. The author's choice to use her own capitalized terms like 'Everyday Genius' and 'Evolutionary Intelligence' sometimes sounds a bit too new-agey.

But, it's interesting how much more you pick up on a second reading. And how many different things. I suppose it's a product of both reading the material a second time, and being at a different place in your life. I realized that because I'm so adaptable, for various reasons I've been mostly simulating the self I present to the world. And it's very tiring and not very satisfying.

Date: 2005-09-03 17:28 Subject: Peace by Gene Wolfe Security: Public Tags: gene_wolfe, re-read, usa

Peace (1975)
by Gene Wolfe
264 pages
Orb

This is a memoir of Alden Dennis Weer, a man living the American Midwest town of Cassionsville, from his childhood near the beginning of the 20th century to an older man sometime after WWII...and possibly much later after that. There's sufficient hints dropped to make the reader understand that not only is Weer now dead and re-living his past (and subtly altering it as he interacts with it), but he is the last spirit on the earth of the human race, which has long died out. I suppose you could venture that he is in Purgatory?

I remember reading this book a few summers ago, and thought it would be good to read it again. The prose is still very beautiful, reminding one of Proust, while being as complex as a Joyce or Faulkner. The Midwest and the passing of time, of all things, is evoked strongly. A second reading didn't clear up a lot of the mysteries, but it made me suspect there maybe isn't *quite* as much there as I thought there might be.

So, what is the book about exactly? Well, it traces various episodes from Weer's life (and many of the people he encounters seem to, not entirely coincidentally, come to grim and violent ends), as well as diverging into other stories, ghostly stories, that recall Arabian Nights.

'What went wrong? That is the question, and not "To be or not to be," for all of Shakespeare.' (pg 215)

And, it has one of my favourite covers: ( cover )

Date: 2005-08-23 15:50 Subject: The Sickness unto Death by Kierkegaard Security: Public Tags: kierkegaard, philosophy, re-read, religion

The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Edification and Awakening (1849)
by Soren Kierkegaard, writing as Anti-Climacus
translated by Alistair Hannay
188 pages
Penguin Classics

It's been a little less than a year since I read this for the first time, and as I was feeling a bit stuck with certain things in my life, I thought it would be a good time to read it again, as I was meaning to anyway. I've given this book the designation as my favourite, and I suppose reading it again didn't do anything to knock it off that position, though, perhaps understandably, it didn't shake me to the core like the first time.

The theme of the book can be gleaned from the table of contents, where the first part is titled The Sickness unto Death is Despair and the second part is Despair is Sin.

I suppose the parts that struck me most this time were not just the not wanting to be a self, but also the despair of wanting to be a self, as in wanting to be another, autonomous self, instead of the self you are, as created by God. And it's a good reminder that to despair over sin is the continuation of sin.

Also a good reminder of the different spheres of the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious, so that when you can see the empty triviality of dealing with things on the purely aesthetic level, it is perhaps time to move on to a wider view of the world. My reading of Kierkegaard stalled sometime during the winter, but I think now I'll go take another run at one of those half-finished books.