Did you get pears??

Old man: “Did you get pears?… Did you get pears?… Did you get pears??”

Old lady: “We’ll discuss it inside.”

–One of the best pieces of TV writing ever. Tear-inducing laughter. Wow.

Thank you, Mad Men.

Mountains, Yum

I’ve had a love of haiku poetry for as long as I can remember. Back in the 90′s I had a popular (among my friends) and controversial (relatively speaking) web site dedicated to haiku, and I miss it.

My sister, who shares my haiku fever (incidentally, the former web site’s name), sent me a book of Zen Haiku by Santoka Taneda, translated into English. He was a dude who decided to give up everything in his life to pursue a Zen lifestyle, wrote a bunch of “freestyle” haiku (not necessarily conforming to the 5-7-5 rule), became a zen priest while wandering around on foot begging, then basically copped to being an alcoholic and a zen poseur. Reading his story in two line snippets is kind of profound.

A few haiku from one of my favorite pages:

The few flies that remain
Seem to remember me.

(My favorite hot spring–)
Bathing alone,
Sleeping alone.

The small Buddha statue:
Rained on for the sake of human beings.

And of course, there are a few that probably didn’t survive the translation. Either that or I just don’t get it…

The newlyweds’ home is complete:
A new bucket.

So I’ve been inspired to compose more narrative haiku. We’ll see if I can do one every day for a week, starting with one explaining why I’m up writing this post:

No explanation
Body was cold, but felt hot
Insomniac writes

Kampai!

Jules Verne: Five Weeks in a really racist Balloon

So I finally finished Five Weeks in a Balloon, and I didn’t end up liking it any more as it went on. I don’t really know why, but the story just didn’t appeal to me. But the literal narrative aside, the book is a sad reminder of the predominant European condescension towards Africa and anyone of color back in the 1800′s (Five Weeks was published in 1863).

I believe I already mentioned that the book starts exactly the same as all of his other exploration stories (versus his survival stories, which start with a catastrophic event whisking a group of intrepid men somewhere or other). Since this is an earlier work, and I’ve already read many of Verne’s later works, I think the unabashed racism comes as a bit of a shock compared to the more tolerant, albeit ignorant, tones of the later stories.

Some quotes:

Nonchalance towards slavery, listing slaves among other “luxuriant items” traded by Arabs in Africa: “They trade in gums, ivory, fine muslin and slaves. Their caravans traverse these equatorial regions… in search of those articles of luxury and enjoyment which the wealthy merchants covet.”

On the finer things in Africa: “Why is it that such savage countries get all these fine things?”

A foreboding of the consequences of overconsumption: “The races of the future may repair hither… Just note the progress of events: .. Asia was the first nurse of the world… For about four thousand years she travailed, she grew pregnant, she produced, and then, when stones began to cover the soil… her children abandoned her exhausted and barren bosom. You next see them precipitating themselves upon young and vigorous Europe, which has nourished them for the last two thousand years. But already her fertility is beginning to die out; …Thus we are already seeing the millions rushing to the luxuriant bosom of America… In its turn, that new continent will grow old; its virgin forests will fall before the axe of industry, and its soil will become weak through having too fully produced what had been demanded of it…. Then, Africa will be there to offer to new races the treasures that for centuries have been accumulating in her breast.”

Although this hasn’t happened, because Verne, like all the other shortsighted white men back in the day, didn’t give the African people any credit towards utilizing their own native resources, and didn’t even foresee them as having the intellectual capacity to develop technology and trade to destroy their homeland on their own, or to suffer remotely the consequences of globalized capitalism, corruption and pollution.

I guess that on top of the story of three white dudes in a balloon over Africa not appealing to me, I was constantly pulled out of the story by moronic, ignorant remarks about the “black savages” and the superiority of Europeans.

“These tribes are considered man-eaters… It has also been asserted that these natives had tails, like mere quadrupeds; but it was soon discovered that these appendages belonged to the skins of animals that they wore for clothing… But one thing that has been proven true is the ferocity of these tribes, who are really fond of human flesh…”

“…If I have to be eaten, in a moment of famine, I want it to be for your [his companions'] benefit…; but the idea of feeding those black fellows–gracious! I’d die of shame!”

There’s a lot more, but you get the idea. Also, I didn’t enjoy reading about how much fun it was for the sportsman in the group to kill elephants, and how much he wanted to just kill everything he saw for sport. Yes, Europeans were so very civilized.

Then there’s the fun reading the translation of Verne’s French. As previously mentioned, Verne’s translator often used the verb “ejaculate” to indicate an interjection in the dialogue. It happened a lot in this book, along with some other choices of words that are comical after 100+ years of language evolution. Some funny quotes:

“The Victoria resumed her flight, driven along by a spanking breeze.”

“Be quiet on that score, my dear Dick. With a little medicine, I shall work my way through the affair!”

“Ah!” ejaculated Kennedy, “the horrible brute! I can hold back no longer.”

“Oh!” ejaculated the astonished friends.

So I didn’t like this one, but the later books really are a world apart in their tone. And though Verne was probably playing up the characteristics of the arrogant British rather than expressing any agenda of his own (he was generally more about capturing realism in his stories), it is just a sad reminder of why the slave trade was so ubiquitously accepted at the time. But I don’t recommend reading this book unless you’re fascinated by the science of balloon travel. Around the World in Eighty Days is a much better adventure story.

Jules Verne: Five Weeks in a… Are we there yet?

I love Jules Verne. I really do. But I am having the hardest time reading Five Weeks in a Balloon. I bought one of those giant seven-books-in-one tomes of Verne’s work, but I put off reading Five Weeks, the first in the series, for many years because I knew it would be a bit dryer then the rest of his later works (albeit shorter, mercifully. Looking at you, Mysterious Island). I have one of these giant tomes for H.G. Wells too, but Verne’s is bigger, and the print is half the size. The only reason I’m reading it now is because I need to get rid of this book before I move.

Anyway, the first 40 pages of the book are a series of bland narratives around conversations about the proposed trip in a balloon across Africa. And a lot of the conversations are completely incoherent. Maybe it’s lost in translation:

“You see, my friends, when a man has had a taste of that kind of travelling (old spelling), he can’t get along afterward with any other; so, on our next expedition, instead of going off to one side, we’ll go right ahead, going up, too, all the time.”

All of Verne’s protagonists are the same: a highly respected and knowledgeable man with a crazy idea who convinces some people to along on a wild journey. So the first 40 pages are basically him saying “Yes, this will be awesome!” and them saying “No, it can’t be done!” over and over, while Verne lists the technical specifications of the balloon in greeeeeaaaat detail. And I love his scientific musings, but they’re usually diluted with a bit more… Well, story.

On an unrelated note, Verne’s translator consistently used the verb “ejaculated” for interjections. I dunno if it’s the same verb in French, or if it just didn’t mean the same thing back then–and I do know there’s a double meaning, but still. I can’t help cracking up every time he says it:

Talking about Jupiter:

“…and the years last twelve of ours…”

“Twelve years!” ejaculated the boy.

Snicker snicker snicker.

Why are they talking about Jupiter, you ask? Good question. That was on page 38. Modern writers are always told to start in the moment of story, and while Verne does a bit of dicking around in all his beginnings, none that I’ve read has started this slowly.

So I’m now on chapter 12, and they’ve just gotten into the balloon. Hopefully now it will, er, pick up.

EFH2T and H.G. Wells: The Superlative Now

Everything From Here To There » Blog Archive » The Superlative Now.

My second post on Billy Corgan’s holistic livin’ blog looks at H.G. Wells’ description of the world in Comet, and compares the “bad” world then with the “bad” world now.

I’m honestly starting to wonder if we’ve always hated the world, or if there’s ever been a time in the past where people have been generally cool about things the way they were. It seems that as the world gets smaller, our complaints get bigger.

The Superlative Now

I just finished reading In the Days of the Comet, written by H.G. Wells over one hundred years ago, which is a before and after description of the world and relationships around the time of a great “Change”. Without giving too much of the story away, I’m amazed by the similarities in the lead character’s description of the “before” world, the bad world that everyone was so happy to see disappear, and our world today, the world that we all seem to be hoping will disappear as well. Aside from the dated vocabulary and writing style, quite a lot can be readily adapted to describe the world as it is now.

On the economy:

” Here… we’re on the verge of the biggest lock-out in the history of this country-side; here’s distress and hunger coming, here’s all the capitalistic competitive system like a wound inflamed…”

On war:

“On no conceivable grounds was there any sense in modern war. Save for the slaughter and mangling of a multitude of people, the destruction of vast quantities of material, and the waste of innumerable units of energy, it effected nothing.”

On material inequity:

“…Through the private ownership of land that had resulted from the neglect of feudal obligations in Britain and the utter want of political foresight in the Americas, large masses of property had become artificially stable in the hands of a small minority, to whom it was necessary to mortgage all new public and private enterprises, and who were held together not by any tradition of service and nobility but by the natural sympathy of common interests and a common large scale of living.”

On religious extremism:

“You can no more understand our theological passions than you can understand the fancies that made all ancient peoples speak of their gods only by circumlocutions, that made savages pine away and die because they had been photographed, or an Elizabethan farmer turn back from a day’s expedition because he had med three cows.”

“Suffice it that we lost our tempers very readily in pursuit of God and Truth, and said exquisitely foolish things on either side.”

On the environment:

“Young people nowadays can scarcely hope to imagine the enormous quantities of pure litter and useless accumulation with which we had to deal…”

On health:

“…A large part of the physical decline that was apparent in our people during the closing years of the nineteenth century… no doubt due in part to the miscellaneous badness of the food they ate…”

On popular culture:

“…Penny fiction, watery, base stuff, the dropsy of our nation’s mind… warped and crippled ideas and contagious base suggestions, the formulae of dull tolerances and stupid impatiences, the mean defensive ingenuities of sluggish habits of thinking and timid and indolent evasions.”

And so on.

Reading this book, I’ve been reflecting on the idea that we seem to be generally convinced that “now” is always the greatest challenge, the most dramatic time, the superlative moment, and it continues to be. But if we have felt that way in the past, why do we keep feeling that way? And why do we continue to have reason to feel that way?

There’s a whole school of thought around the concept of focusing one’s energy and attention exclusively on “now”, not living in the past or in the future. I’ve studied that idea and been convinced of its merits, but I feel that something is being left out. If we don’t reflect on the past or consider the effect of today on the future, how can we have any perspective on the present?

Here’s a silly example: as I write this, I am recovering from what is, in reality, a very minor cold. I hate being sick, as do most of us, so I tend to feel a bit pathetic and dramatic whenever it happens, probably just because of that feeling of general helplessness and lack of control over my body. That, and it feels nasty.

Amazingly enough, however, I have to go out of my way to remind myself that I’ve been much more sickly in the past—in fact, I know that the worst flu I’ve ever had happened about a year and a half ago—and that in just a few days I’ll be fine again. Even though I completely understand those facts, it still feels just a little bit false, because I can only really experience the way I feel right this second.

As a larger example, if I look at my life objectively, then the lowest point has to be when I was 15 years old. Even now, I go back and forth between feeling like it was all a horrible nightmare, and feeling like I’m reliving everything I went through all over again. But somehow, even though intellectually I see that as the worst of the worst, it still feels as though all the pain I feel today, now, in this moment is somehow bigger; even though I “know” that whatever trials I face today are trivial by comparison, it’s sometimes hard to muster the energy and motivation to face them.

Wells’ protagonist, on his former life:

“…Has not some queer nightmare spirit out of dreamland slipped a pseudo-memory into the records of my vanished life?”

Wells’ book demonstrates this “superlative now” idea on the large scale; we, as a global community, seem to understand intellectually and have some perspective on the challenges we face today based on the trials of the past, but in practice, that understanding sometimes feels false.

I’m currently living in Berlin, a place with some obvious dark points in the past. Everyone still talks about the Wall all the time, but it’s very romanticized and glamorized the way people tell the story now. Then there’s the Nazis, which the Germans on a personal level try their hardest not to talk about, but on a national level take a stern, confrontational stance to talk about publicly.

But the things people are upset about these days are taxes, the Deutsche Bahn, the welfare system giving people too much money, the welfare system not giving people enough money, the weather, how lame the Berlin club scene has gotten, etc. I’m generalizing, but the point is that I have never once heard anyone say, “Y’know what? This is nothing compared to WWII.”

I am not suggesting that we all start living in the past, or to take the problems we face today—both personally and globally—less seriously, but I feel that at least for myself, freaking out about every little thing that comes up in the “superlative now”, regardless of how trivial it might be, is a waste of energy.

When we feel that now is the most difficult time ever, I think it can seem like an extremely daunting task to try and improve things. So maybe having just a bit more perspective could help us put the energy we use freaking out to practical use; that energy could be motivating instead, as if to say, “We’ve gotten through greater challenges, so we can do this.”

The characters in Wells’ book figure this out as well. After the great Change, everyone is immediately struck with horror and guilt over what they now considered to be a lifestyle based on utter insanity and cruelty. But they don’t allow themselves to dwell, knowing what work there is to be done to make the world the place they envision from their new perspective.

“I was doing nothing to prevent it all! …And it’s fools like us that lead to things like this! …But this is being a fool. Talk! I’m going to stop it.”

H.G. Wells: more quotes and final thoughts on The Food of the Gods

I finally finished The Food of the Gods, and I figured out what it is about it that bugs me so much. It’s something I felt while reading Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, and something I’ve noticed in general about books published after an author reaches the peak of his fame. When authors get to that point, they start writing much longer books, and I don’t think it’s because they suddenly have more words to put down. It just means that they aren’t editing as tightly.

The story in The Food is evolutionary, taking the reader from the food’s incipience through the lives of people it affected and to the climactic confrontation between the big people and little people. But there is no resolution to the conflict. Rather, because the book was already so incredibly long, it just stops.

The same thing happened in Mysterious Island more or less, in that the book was painfully, epically long, but the ending happened in about a paragraph.

So my problem is with the amount of self indulgent filler left in the beginning and middle of the book that could have been taken out and replaced with more meat in the end. But, since Wells was not editing as tightly as in earlier books like Moreau and Time Machine, which are marvelously pithy works, he allowed himself to meander through various unrelated trains of thought en route to the actual story, which was really about the giant children.

Some examples:

Page one has a random tangent on how scientists disliked being called “scientists”, then goes on… “…and Professor Redwood rose to eminence–I do not clearly remember how he rose to eminence! I know he was very eminent, and that’s all. Things of this sort grow.”

“I watched the lantern slides come and go, and listened to a voice (I forget what it was saying)… and there was a sizzling from the lantern and another sound that kept me there, still out of curiosity, until the lights were unexpectedly turned up. And then I perceived that this sound was the sound of the munching of buns and sandwiches and things…”

“That of course was a ridiculous dream, but it shows the state of mental excitement into which Mr. Bensington got the real value he attached to his idea, much better than any of the things he said or did when he was awake and on his guard. Or I should not have mentioned it, because as a general rule I do not think it is at all interesting for people to tell each other about their dreams.”

I should remind at this point that the narrator of The Food is not a character in the story, and is never explained or exposed in any way. He does, however, make random reference to himself throughout the book, though not substantially enough to explain why. In Wells’ other first-person narrated stories, the voice of the narrator fit in perfectly with the character, and in the end, I had an understanding of why the character told the story the way he did.

Overall, I think the book seems like a second draft, awaiting an editor’s red pen. I love Wells’ writing, and find many of the random tangents amusing, but honestly I could have done with fewer pages, or more story.

More miscellaneous gems from the end of The Food:

“…as they came along, they had heard a pitiful squealing and had intervened to rescue three nestling tits from the attack of a couple of giant ants.”

“Already we go picking our way among the first beginnings of the coming time. And all we do is to say ‘How inconvenient!’”

“They have taught me… that all true religion was to shelter the weak and little, encourage the weak and little, help them to multiply and multiply until at last they crawled over one another…”

“…a tabernacular beauty…” (just love using ‘tabernacular’ as an adjective)

“Then for a space the road ran naked across a down, and they seemed to hang throbbing in immensity.”

And on that poignant remark, I bid farewell to The Food.

July 16 2010 note: These Food of the Gods posts are so surprisingly popular, will some of you readers please leave a comment and tell me why you are searching for posts on this random book? Thanks for reading.

writing: (re)creation

this blog is to help consolidate all of my online creativity, and possibly help me, and anyone else who’d like to do so, keep track of The Ve.

been chewing on this massively silly sci-fi story for a while now, and i can’t shake the nagging feeling that it’s also a bit stupid. i suppose it should be a hint when i’m writing if i know i don’t like it… but i’ve pondered some large scale format changes, and maybe that will help me like it better. i mean, i like it, but i’m not sure i like it. (moore’s paradox)