I’ve read what the CEO of Substack had to say about free speech. It’s putrid. I’d like it if freedom also had “hate speech” built into restrictions on others who might like a word, its place in violence, its violence itself, and therefore also unacceptable to Substack.
These places trade on aggregation. (If not agression.) The writers and “content producers” wash one way and audiences have limited views of what’s the up-to-the-minute spot for the good stuff. So I get it, there is no site if people are sloshing away from it. There is also no site if your Ponzi-style marketing, which essentially works because it works, gets brown shi(r)t rubbed all over it.
For the moment I’m testing this out. All the owners are sucking orange Jellybaby right now. The taste will soon become obvious. (Junket.) I’m wading into this form of self-publishing—which seems to be what it is—as I might getting my books on Amazon via their platform, or handing out poems on the street corner, which is what my son has recommended to me. It’s a square where racists have walked, as they defile wherever they go. On other platforms there is active suppression of reality.
I’ll give this one a go for the moment, and look into it further. I’m staying here. Not quite hosting in my own shed, just looking up—
No eagle in this one…nnnope, can’t see ’em. Still, maybe.
Coffee Love Hearts as an Epiphenomenon
My partner in life was born on Valentines Day. It makes it ridiculous to eat out. We have both worked hospo venues on VD and have a heathy disrespect for the other customers on such days anyway. Sheer volume, though, does something. Like wartime surgeons I imagine from ER, the baristas at places like Jackson Dodds in Gilbert Road—Preston, I think it is—work as slowly as they can given the gazillions of coffee hangry cyclists and parents and cyclist parents roaming Melbs like locusts in Lycra, which alliteration I can’t even say on Sunday mornings.
It was at Jackson Dodds the young blokes (they are always young blokes but more on that later) first pored the pour in a way until then I had been impatient with in my professional life. I had seen such pouring as at best a performative swirl and the patterns made as flourishes of a one (bloke) who has so much juice they can tie the cafe latté foam with their tongue, as it were, whose Italianate job title came down to “Gaggia Jockey”. What the Jackson Dodds crew revealed to me, defiant of the red eyes and outstretched hands of mums murmuring macchiato and dads droning doppio, defiant of my own OCD chore timing and prediabetic hangover, it must be admitted, what they personified lord love their drifted soul patches and mullets, was love.
I’ve been thinking about shadows. About magic and power.
“There is nothing,” said the monarch, “except the power which you pretend to seek: power to grind and power to digest, power to seek and power to find, power to await and power to claim, all power and pitilessness springing from the nape of the neck.” “Thank you.” “Love is a trick played on us by the forces of evolution. Pleasure is the bait laid down by the same. There is only power. Power is of the individual mind, but the mind’s power is not enough. Power of the body deides everything in the end, and only Might is Right..[“]
TH White The Once and Future King
The Saint of Bright Doors won the Nebula award for best novel. It was nominated for the Hugo. It has won or been nominated for others. What interests me—this is not a review, so spoilers—is the notion that the narrator is the figure so often chosen as a villain in stories, whose third person descrpition of Fetter, arguably not the real protagonist, is so close I wondered often why it wasn’t in the first person. I will go back to look for clues on my second read.
We are not good readers these days. Everyone complains of it. Many blame social media, algorithms, now AI. (Personally, I believe things were going that way before, and it’s just another way of see Distraction and Stand on Zanzibar, hell, The Demolished Man.)
But this novel is so modestly written, and moving, that I had no possible distraction, if you don’t count eating and sleeping. I put down Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob by to read this; doesn’t mean he’ll win a Booker or Nobel, I’m talking about attention.
Vajra Chandrasekera is one we’re paying attention to at the moment, for better or worse. For me it’s better. I hope it is for him as well, that the book’s life and his career lead him into more.
The notion of the author’s persona as a little bit of flowing darkness moving from corpus callosum to bowel (via penis) and influencing the characters via small changes in their chemistry is a beautiful one and deserves accolades. It’s a lovely riff on the Graham Greene’s “splinter of ice in the heart of every writer.”
Also, of what it takes to mend a political situation.
Also, a mediation on predestination.
The doors, too, offer a wonderful take on the possibilites killed by religio-political machinations, the lives (and whole landmasses) rendered uninhabitable with the denial of freedom that is cloaked in the offer of freedom, the shutting off of human possibilities in sexuality, art, and just plain fun.
A boy is trained to kill by his mother, whose beautiful name, Mother-of-Glory, is by the end deeply ironic. Of course he rebels. It’s altogether possible she foresaw this.
It’s a classic born assassin trope and the undermining of this by Fetter, and perhaps his shadow, provides the way into the next main character here, the city of Luriat (an anagram of “ritual”), which is like a tropical version of Delany’s Bellona, the ever-burning city in Dhalgren. Its elaborate castes and neighbourhood heirachies are, we learn, all the product of the change Fetter’s father rang in the fabric of reality.
Later we learn this all the Bright Doors there are the product of the pinched off possibilites the so-called Saint the Perfect and the Kind, his father, has left in a megalomaniac and petty destruction of his mother’s island home, a place before names. Fetter travels from Acusdab (closest anagram “abacus”) to Luriat after his training is complete and he has made his first Unforgivable crime, assassination of his grand uncle.
“The Five Unforgivables are the major crimes as defined by your father’s ideological apparatus,” Mother-of-Glory says. She has given this speech so often Fetter knows it by heart, which is the point. “They are declared to be outside the jurisdiction of any regime of restorative or retributive justice. The Five Unforgivables are, in order of severity, matricide; heresy leading to factionalism; the sancticide of votaries who have reached the fourth level of awakening; patricide; and the assassination of the Perfect and Kind. By definition, they cannot be forgiven and cannot be redeemed. That means that if you commit any one of them, the cult will hunt you for the rest of your life, and make your name a curse for generations to come. Your mission is to commit them all. Your father abandoned us. We were unchosen, cast out of his eschatology. We are going to destroy your father’s cult and salt the earth where it falls. Now you say it.”
Fetter repeats the catechism, obligingly. He could recite these words in his sleep.
At this stage his mother’s project seems all rather nasty and worth our hero’s spurning. We are in the realm of dreams with a floating boy assassin with amputated shadow left somewhere behind. In Luriat we’re in the modern world, recognisably a place of wars and plagues, charlatans and inequality.
Fetter seems to be having a grim kind of fun, with a boyfriend and support group of other significant beings who have missed or denied themselves a possible destiny. Fetter plays all of this close to his chest, perhaps because his father is such a big cheese in the Saint world. As things turn out, despite Fetter’s best efforts there is no need for forgiveness or redemption for him.
The Perfect and the Kind gets his desserts and we have the mysteries sort of unveiled for us. This is more or less offstage, which for some I recognise might be unsatisfactory. However, Chandrasekera is slipping away from the genre’s expectations like the shadow he’s following, himself a shadow of the shadow.
There is a lovely description of a prison as large as a country (possibly) and Fetter’s rise from idiot to clerk to healer—and abruptly the story shifts sideways again, to the Perfect and the Kind’s inner circle, or at least his protection and some insight into his regime’s careless and intentional cruelty. I am not entirely sure what the Perfect and the Kind intends for the world, and it’s entirely possible he’s not after anything but survival and aggrandizement. He’s certainly not after pleasure, since by the time Fetter arrives in his environs his relationship with his offsider and sex partner is empty. Not love, The Mother-of-Glory has told Fetter all about their relationship, and what his father brought:
They infected us with strange ideas from the south-west. They brought doctrines of shame and disgust for the body and the glorification of the perfected mind. They asked us to look at our bodies not as the clean and perfect instruments of living that we had known, but as bags of flesh containing the thirty-one parts of impurity: the hairs of the head and the body; the nails and the teeth; the skin, flesh, and tendons; the bones and marrow; the heart, liver, and kidneys; the lungs, pleurae, and spleen; the intestines large and small—the shit and undigested food; the bile, phlegm, and pus; the blood, sweat, and tears; the fat, sebum, and spit; the mucus, the synovial fluid, the piss. They asked us to reflect on this and be repulsed: is the body not disgusting?
Like this, they brought endless categorizations and subcategorizations and enumerations of being and experience. They brought, almost incidentally, the politics they knew, of centralization, of the consolidation of power, a politics of thrones.
It is significant that the shadow, small dot of yin in the bowel of the Perfect and Kind’s yang, entered through his “yang” during sex with his employee. This is an integrated vision of diversity against perfection, of plurality against totalitarianism, of sharing against accumulation.
I see the world of Bright Doors as somehow upside down, with the island to the fairytale north of the subcontinent that is so big there is no continent for it to hang off and it is the only land in the world of ocean.
Work of this kind would have been impossible in the “Golden Age” of Science Fiction, and impossible without the reaction to it in the 60s and 70s. It is also impossible to see where this novel came from without other literatures, the kinds arising out of places where the stories are not entirely Christian, such as South America and Asia.
(Of course, Blish’s After Such Knowledge is a great example of where such magic can come entirely out of European tales and sui generis minds, I’m in no way bagging that.)
I’d like to see wonderful work of this kind arising from my own continent, which it has, and for the rest of our societies to come to the conclusion I have about this work: it is not merely the vehicle for an allegorical expression of the urge to diversity and freedom, unpefectability of heart and blood, it is the manifestation of such a life. I always try to see the reality of existence behind a work of art. This is not the author’s biographical world. It is as curated as any other aspect of a novel.
It does, however, have the ability to seep around the curation, to say things about an everyday life that the purely intentional might actually occlude. It might take many years for this stuff to find focus, since we take so much for granted about an increasingly global circumstance of life. It might also prove very thin, as in a superhero movie, whose only colloquialism is the globally translated one.
In The Saint of Bright Doors, we’re constantly getting nods at such circumstance. It’s not totally visceral, but this is Chandrasekera’s first novel. He’s steering intuitively through all the right things to have accumulated in some years a really substantial body of work. I won’t make any predictions, but I will read what comes.
Yes, that’s a joke. Yet, the very least we can do is mention where we stand. Where I stand is, typically, not coherent. That all this is complicated has been seen as a drawback for the Yes case. Well, damn our simple declarative sentences.
Stop making sense.
Sense is progress in science, but it’s a drawback in public life. My sister is volunteering for the Yes campaign, handing out leaflets and so on. She was told by an old white bloke that she ought to admit she’s Indigenous. Pretty sure it was the same guy who later was having a go at those he saw as unfairly (!) claiming aboriginality. Our family is not, let me say, indigenous to this unceded land.
Here I try to think about the problem with the word “racism”. We are individually likeable people, many of us, not actively racist. Passively racist? Well, there it gets complicated.
Having said all that, there is of course a simple set of words which really do promote the Yes case: love is the answer.
Vote Yes for love.
Not a Racist
Breaking out of my sovereign mind today Caste detritus my personal chicken run,
Bath of the bath of the bath is a bath All dust is crime.
I have my reasons and they’re terrible That’s the way I like it, unexamined,
Law of the law of the law is a law All pure in time.
Shooting a koala sign isn’t gunning for them Driving a car too fast at night, driving any car,
Line of the line of the line is a line All side by side.
In your dead Indo-Dutch tongue petjo Several words for “concubine” means,
Word of the word of the word is a word All said out loud.
I can what I want and laugh and it’s whatever No need to fix things I am happy,
I of the I of the I is an I We’re all the same.
Imagined, all of this country, like it or leave.
So furious I could not say with the weather, who Slight of clouds, sneer of rain, too well-observed I thought promised, We got ready to dance but we woke before the band Glad in garish flappy things, gladder, and that’s serious Irresistible rhythms of the chuff reused as sand: It was a battle hymn we hopped to Horn gone In the finish At the dawn Barefoot in our heads Alone.
Get up
All things drive to ends forgotten on the road All things and a bentwood chair as well, creaking La I lost my love on a day of equal night, Forgot memory of air is not campaign, This cheap context idiot fake for a crown,
My new novel, The White Library, is out everywhere now. It’s a pity there is no paperback; still, digital can be something better these days. So far, people seem to like it. There’s an excellent review from Ian Mond in Locus and a five star review on Amazon by somebody who ought to know, a librarian. I must get get off my arse and make sure that the next novel will get read. That one is called Three Friends. It’s been sitting around pretty much finished without me approaching publishers. (Covid. Moving house. Building a house.) At last, on the Surf Coast, I can think.
What is it about? First attempt at a pitch. <clears throat>
Three Friends is subtitled a massive conspiracy. That kind of does it, I reckon, because it is, and if I saw that it would grab me. If you look at the fact that it’s an “anti-anti-utopia”, as Kim Stanley Robinson has recently described the mode, set in the near future, you might think that politics is what motivated me, but it’s more like a reflection on what my work has been over the years. A collision of two things. Quite incidentally, I’ve been looking for an agent recently and, collecting reviews, having to read them, I must admit reviewers have for decades picked up my preoccupations.
My work is always about friendship. Groups of friends. Told in natural dialogue.
In the Locus review, Ian Mond wrote, about the plot of The White Library,
I will say it features a romance as heartfelt, genuine, and unconventional as anything you’re likely to encounter in literary or genre fiction.
Which, apart from being embarrassingly kind, echoes Martin Livings in Eidolon nearly thirty years ago, talking about The Weird Colonial Boy. He uses the words,
Voermans’ second novel has a kind of open-hearted sincerity that makes Adams’ Mostly Harmless look like a cynical marketing ploy.
It goes on in a still more embarrassing vein, the kind of review you wish everybody read. (Thank you Martin Livings!)
The point is, I think it’s driven by the dialogue.
I’m motivated by what are essentially poetic images. At least one has to settle before I begin to write. There is a doozy in this one. Yet, what brings this down to earth is the way people speak and what surprises and delights me and if I am honest is one big reason I write: even those people in my novels who may start out “unsympathetic” are never only that. They turn around and do—such things! And the sympathetic can be more than flawed. All in their words. I have an urge to inscribe what I see as ordinary existence into the—frankly—whacko plots and ideas in my work. Don’t know why. It’s something I have in common with Samuel Delany and is probably more what attracted me to his work than a lasting influence. Even in the Neolithic, a character is close miked and you can hear coloratura, feel bass growl. Such influence is hard to tease out, though, obviously, when he’s such a genuine superhero to the whole field. And I love Hemingway dialogue as well, whatever else he may have done. Le Guin I admire as much, but there is none of those qualities in her dialogue. It’s complicated.
So, character. But where are the limits to naturalism? Written before the pandemic, Three Friends takes off from such an MO at the points language will break down, like suicide, childhood sexual abuse, loneliness. Rhythm changes, as Jerzy Grotowski pointed out in Towards a Poor Theatre. So each character has a style of non-prose—poetry, if you must. Three Friends is part-autobiography, a reaction to a workplace with HR that promotes “mindfulness” as if the workplace and world are not dysfunctional. And I have to say it is an anti-dystopia set in Melbourne; it’s also made of my life.
When will we see it? Perhaps next year! Oh, and here’s some Surf Coast, our new front yard view:
So my website has been updated and I’m on leave for a week, just for the crack of it. Few plans. I have mapped a ride going along the ring road and down the Diamond Creek Bike path into the CBD, which is about 45k and a precursor to doing a proper Olympic triathlon distance, which I think is 1.5k swim, 40k bike, and 10k run. Not sure I will be doing that. We’ll see how we go with the ride. If I wind up in the city I’ll take a leisurely swim at the City Baths and then – maybe – ride home, but there should be no problem about taking a train besides borrowing a Myki ticket.
Finish that fantastic Terrence Deacon book Incomplete Nature, and relax with some fiction. Who knows, maybe I’ll finish that poem about Gough in China.
Well, because the angel fish are breeding and their young are being eaten in the big communal aquarium, I sacrificed my tattoo plan for a King George whiting on my forearm, to be based on the fabulous Roger Swainston art. This to me was a long-term project anyway, since the colours of a whiting are so subtle and tattooing generally so crude, that I don’t trust the artist to do Swainston justice. Besides, I had not asked permission. So while that one waits, Cathy and I went out and bought a small antique table for the hallway, and a three foot tank, with all the bits (more expensive than the tank). I am not chickening out of the tatt! And besides, it is very vain….
So besides my tax return, I may be doing some gardening in an aquarium. Then I’ll leave it for a couple of weeks. If the fry get eaten once or twice, well, that’s nature, and we’ll try to rescue them in nursery, but once the new environment is ready, they will have only themselves to blame if they get too hungry and gobble them up. As Natalie pointed out, I can be the God of Angels, then. Mwah-hah-hah-hah!
Met the wonderful Miss Glenda for dinner the other night at Rumi, which is an elegant but loud Lebanese restaurant in East Brunswick. It’s Lebanese in the sense that many smart restaurants in Melbourne are Greek, French, or whatever. Ethnicity is a train track rather than a station, to mangle what Samuel Delanysaid about the meanings of words.
The meaning of our ethnicity is as confused as anything else. I heard an interview with my late mother, firm but gentle in her insistence that she felt Dutch, or, at most, a Teenager, no matter how persistently Maria Zijlstra sought traces of minority identity. Her family had lived in the Indonesian archepeligo for over two hundred years. Aboriginal-Irish-English-Scottish Australians are politically regarded as Indigenous, which is a good thing. My mother was regarded as an Indo. (This group, during the Japanese occupation of the Indonesian archipelago, was too large to imprison.) Her point to Maria was, though, that your immediate surroundings count for so much.
And the ethnicity we make, like a track laid down in front of us (and taken up too sometimes, or at least let rust), can be taken into your imagination to produce fine food.
I would like to write about my ethnicity that way. (I’d also like to not fill people up uncomfortably the way Rumi doesn’t.)
We’ve been advised to go home early or late because of the 45 degree temperatures today. I’ve been hard at work, of course, so I’m leaving late. Spare a thought for me on the bike. But I must leave sometime to save the poor pooch, who has taken to playing with his water and backup water, leaving him with nothing.
I’m off now.
[LATER]
It wasn’t so bad after all, since there was cloud cover and the temp was down to the low forties. As I rode I contemplated the fact of the chill on the opposite side of the world. I now see it’s warmer in London: 1°C. This weather is so fierce. Apart from anything else, this kind of thing is going to make our lives so much more expensive. Surely it will be cheaper to spend the money on evening the climate out. But the struggle is more religious than logical.
We see the Liberals in this country led by a man whose basic idea seems to be that people were born in sin and that this is the tendency, our motivation. So it’s what – the Hobbesian, vs the Administrators? Tony Abbott, leader of the Opposition, is a man in the mould of John Howard, not in that they have the same beliefs, because belief, although the maker and motivation of the person Abbott, is not the motivator of the politician Abbott. In other words, anything for power. This may stem from a deeper belief in the strong man, which trumps many of his other beliefs. He’s not simple, but it seems to me that it falls into place – including his amicable relationships with the likes of the Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard – when you consider that first and foremost he is a professional politician. This, John Howard showed himself as time and again, to the point where he lost his seat.
So Abbott plays the best angle he can, considering Prime Minister Rudd’s position just one more angle, which of course it may be (and may be simply in happy coincidence with Rudd’s convictions). And if this game is motivated by anything like a conviction it is in an unsubtle interpretation of Hobbes. We know Abbott believes that Original Sin is the well of everything.
I believe it is not, though I am agnostic about the short-sightedness of love, so I may wind up agreeing with Hobbes on that. I am an atheist and also reckon there are better metaphors than Original Sin to describe our state, be that one of hopeless Homer Simpsonism or the poetry of Anarchism.
Age and bitterness will no doubt decide me.
(Though it’s nice to see Bob Hawke so positive with his heart so rent.)
When I got home sure enough Teddy Boy the dog had kicked over all its water supplies and when I ran the tap for him he drank so vigorously he vomited, drank again, ate the vomit and, while I was having a cold shower, ate two of Oscar’s Pokemon caramels off the table.
Google told me that I should watch out for panting and lying down. Thanks. It’s 40°C guys!
Well yes, we did get married. I haven’t posted for so long it seems that this website has been forgotten. In fact I’ve grown a little allergic to this whole business of publishing on line because of a couple of site invasions by phishers. Wordpress has almost been ditched; I’ve had a go at the security and gotten rid of the unwieldy – and so, risky – Leftwrites. But I suspect that it will only slow the attackers…. Had a word (several) to the service provider, who don’t notify you if you have trouble, though they have services that do that for them. Tom, Ant, Suzie and Fiona.
Ant, Fiona, Suzie and Tom.
But enough grumbling. Life is good and so is the weather. The novel is still not published but we will go into that during this year, and the next novel as well.
The fishing is not too bad, there are, as usual, far too many things going on to report adequately. There is a dog:
Teddy Boy
Already far bigger than this. There was Mia’s visit, Tim’s come to work at DIIRD and Xmas and all that. Phew. I’ll add more details later.
Well the wedding is nearly here and with it the honeymoon. We’re determined to travel light this time – a four wheel drive seems packed for two weeks on the road but we’re talking two 32 L day packs – and we’re casting about for novels to take with us.
I’ve put Accellerando and Little Brother on my crackberry, as well as Ulysses and Pride and Prejudice – could re-read that anytime – but Cathy reckons she’s not enamored of reading stuff on such a small screen. I, too, like the image of myself on a balcony in Portugal overlooking the Atlantic and staining the pages of some tome I’ve not had time to read. The idea is to bring something with lots of pages and small print, or several books with small print – anyway, something to save us from the floating population of Airportery. So far:
Infinite Jest (I’m reading Consider the Lobster and love it)
The Slap (Cathy’s book club is doing it, but, though it’s 580 pages, it’s big print and margins)
The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts
Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (I know, it’s not long or anything, but it’s so beautiful and funny)
Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land
See, the books have to be (1) swappable between us and (b) good value on the abovementioned basis of weight thrift. If anyone’s got suggestions, do tell.
They are, aren’t they? I mean there are lots of embarrassingly bad
songs. And also there are no bad songs. I mean it is the fact that
people get out there and sing them, in car parks, shopping centres, yes,
on stages, swimming along on the left hand of the lane – or the right,
as Frank Sinatra did – and the song that moves you comes later.
The reason I’m looking up songs is that eight other guys are as well,
and a few other people I suppose. The Five O’Clock Shadows were the
support act for the kids at my children’s school concert, held at
Darebin Arts Centre. People seemed to like it and now the band – “the
band”, it’s perhaps less than six rehearsals – are looking all over the
place for songs. It’s funny! Some of us are going with what they
already knew, some of us what they always wanted to play, some of us
what they could not sing with other bands and some are just going along
with the thing because it’s all pretty good, all music, really.
It’s always hard to say how things are going with a novel. *I* reckon
it’s going well. So does Jill. Anyway, one can talk about what one has
read and how it relates, at least a bit. This is a good thing. I mean,
it’s fun. There is a rather out-of-date link to the research on the
right hand of this website, under Latest Novel.
What sort of thing am I reading now? Well, my mate Damien sends me bits
and pieces to read that no longer convince me that I’m totally ignorant
about AI, just bloody-minded. I’m not reading a lot about AI. I am
reading about revolution. We are Everywhere has some moving stuff
about the police brutality at Genoa. And Despatches from the
Barricades by the BBC editor John Simpson has some good stuff on what
it was like Czechoslovakia in the days before the Communist fall. And
I’m still reading To the Finland Station which when I get going is
bloody great.
