Jonas David's Blog, page 12

700 year old emoji

I’m reading Purgatory by Dante, and came across this passage:

The sockets of their eyes were gemless rings; one who reads omo in the face of men, could easily have recognized the m.

My eyes widened a bit and I thought, that can’t possibly mean what I think it means. But I checked the historical notes on that verse, and:

The word omo (Latin, homo, “man”) can be “read” on the face of a man, if the eyes are the o’s, and the m is formed by the nose, eyebrows and cheekbones. It was believed in Middle Ages that God had thus signed and identified his creation.

This–combined with the jokes about the farting demon in Inferno–is leading me more and more to believe that humans never have, or will, change…

Inferno, by Dante Alighieri

Possibly due to my lack of college education, I’ve for some time been under the impression that many of these very old texts are read only for education purposes, and not for enjoyment. So when I came across a copy of Inferno in a Goodwill, and looked at the first couple pages out of curiosity, imagine my surprise at how beautiful, interesting, and just plain readable it was.

The narrator/author, Dante, is walking down a path when he’s attacked by various wild animals, and is unable to escape. A stranger (who he later recognizes as the poet Virgil, sent from heaven to guide him) saves him and leads him another way. Apparently the only way for Dante to get to safety is to first travel through hell. A bit silly of a start but, well written and right away we get into hell and start journeying down all the various circles of torments.

Besides the really great writing, and lovely descriptions of everything, I loved that hell was filled with actual people, many of which were contemporaries of Dante, making it a sort of reverse fan fiction about the recently dead. The version I read (translated by Mark Musa) was stuffed full of historical notes explaining the meaning of all the references to events and people. But even without the notes (I skimmed most of them) the text on its own was enjoyable just for the adventure and beauty of it.

I though, as I was reading it, ‘how could Purgatory and Paradise be interesting after this?’ well, I bought both of them and am currently reading Purgatory. It’s interesting, and enjoyable, and beautiful too! And from what I’ve been told, Paradise has one of the most beautiful endings to any poem ever… so I’m very looking forward to finishing this trilogy!

If you have even the slightest interest in ancient texts, or poetry in general, check this out for sure!

After Nature, by W.G. Sebald

I’ve never been able to ‘get into’ poetry before. Now I’m thinking I’ve just never been introduced to the good stuff, because this book has really grabbed me and made me want to seek out more like it.

The book contains three prose poems, or rather, three parts. Part one is about the 16th century painter Matthias Grünewald, of which very little is known. The poem gives an imagined (though based on the little facts we do know) personal, close view of the painter’s life, ending with his death. In the same vein, the second part is about Georg Steller, an 18th century German botanist. Both figures seemed to be pioneers in their area, but to have difficulty finding their place in the natural world.

The third part is an autobiography, in the same way most of Sebald’s books are, told by a maybe/maybe not real version of the author himself. This final part struck me as Sebald trying to face his own mortality. Though this is the first literary work Sebald ever wrote, it was not published until after his death, and that it comes ‘from beyond the grave’ so to speak, in my opinion adds to the potency

This final, first person part put a different twist on the first two (as happens in almost every Sebald book I’ve read, the end changes everything before it) and made me think that ‘After Nature’–instead of referring to the increase of technology and man’s dominance, and replacing of nature itself– could instead mean After Life. Man is part of nature, so for us to be beyond nature is to be beyond life. I think this could be the connecting theme, as each person in the book not only has trouble finding their place, but ultimately faces death by the end of each section.

I haven’t stopped thinking about this since I read it a few weeks ago, and I’m sure I’ll read it again. I don’t know if there are other poems out there like it, but if there are, I’m going to find them! And if not, maybe I’ll have to try to write them!

Austerlitz, by W.G. Sebald

Another stunning novel by Sebald, and this is the first of his to approach anything like a plot.

As with all of Sebald’s books, the themes are on memory, and the Holocaust. Of all his books I’ve read so far, this one most directly addresses the two.

The narrator, who as usual is a maybe/maybe not fictional version of Sebald himself, meets the title character Austerlitz, and they strike up a conversation about Austerlitz’s study of architecture. The rest of the novel is a series of these often interrupted and continued years later conversations, though in the book they are given as a narration of his own story by Austerlitz.

Austerlitz begins by telling the story of how he was adopted at a young age and never knew his real parents. As time goes by, he finds that certain sights, and certain thoughts give him strange feelings of unease or of deja vu. Eventually, through investigation of these things, and a search to find details of his past, he learns the reason he was brought up by a new family:

Both his parents were killed in the Holocaust, and before they were taken, they managed to send young Austerlitz away to safety, to a family in Wales who raised him.

For his whole adult life, Austerlitz has somehow managed to block out all knowledge and awareness of Germany, or anything to do with the war. It has been a giant, subconscious blind spot for him, and in the telling of his story to Sebald, he details the painful and nearly deadly effects of finally coming to grips with his past and what happened to his parents.

This story is gripping, upsetting, sickening, enlightening, sad, and beautiful, and really brought forward the reality and the long term effects of this horrible event to me in a way that not many historical writings have.

Near the end of the book Austerlitz describes some of the events that took place at Theresienstadt, the concentration camp/ghetto that he suspects his mother was taken to. The description is written in one eight page long sentence. The effect is powerful. As I read the increasingly upsetting events described, I felt unable to stop reading, there was no natural stopping point, no natural place to look away. I was dragged along unwillingly with everyone in that camp, as atrocity upon atrocity piled on and nothing was done, and no one looked, or spoke up, or acknowledged the reality of it.

By the end, I just felt a kind of helpless rage. Not only at these past events, but at the present state of things. In only seventy-five years we’ve completely forgotten what happened, and it is happening again right under our noses. Fascists, and even literal Nazis, shout filth in the streets and are taken as viewpoints worthy of protection. We, the US, are running concentration camps–by any reasonable definition of that term, they are concentration camps–for immigrants at the southern border, and the majority of people, in power or otherwise, close their eyes to it. They say ‘it’s not so bad’ or ‘they broke the law, so they deserve it’ or ‘they aren’t American so it doesn’t matter.’

We turn away refugees. We torture, and call it ‘enhanced interrogation.’

I remember learning about the Holocaust in school, and people in my class wondering ‘how could everyone just go along with it?’

This, our world right now, is how.

If you read one book by Sebald, I hope it is this one.

Somniloquy ep#5: Tropes!

I haven’t posted about my podcast in a while! Why not? I … don’t know!

Episode FIVE is now out, I can’t believe it’s been so many! Check it out here, with special guest Caitlin Coxon!

A book too good for me to handle? Some thoughts on impostor syndrome.

I recently (start of the year) had a bit of a crises of confidence, and I’m still not sure I’ve fully recovered. It was probably a combination of many things, but I think W.G. Sebald’s books (Vertigo and The Emigrants) were a big factor. Not only because they are about memory and perception, but because they are just so indescribably good. They are exactly the sort of subtle, eerie, unsettling, strange, and beautiful writing I want to create myself. And seeing something so finely crafted and, in my eyes, perfect, made me think ‘i’ll never write anything like that.’ It didn’t take much for that to spiral into ‘am I even good at all?’

We all have that voice in our head telling us to improve, that we can be better, or on bad days that we suck, that we’re a joke. But this was the first time I ever wondered if maybe my entire perception of my skill was an illusion. I thought: maybe I am not good, and have never been good, and all my perceived improvements are on the same level as a child learning to put eyes in the correct location on their scribbled smiley face. What if, after nearly ten years of focus and practice and learning, I’m still just a beginner? I had a mini anxiety attack thinking these thoughts. And as of now I haven’t written any fiction for most of the year.

Recently, I’ve finally started to get over it. I am starting to get my inspiration back, starting to find joy in the creation, and reason to create in my self–outside of the approval of others. I’ve started making progress… but then…

I came across Austerlitz in a used bookstore… I bought it…. and it sat on my shelf while I read other things, because I was afraid that it would have the same effect on me. But I could not resist looking at the first pages, and I fell instantly in love. And oh no, I’m reading a Sebald book again.

Will this book be too good for me to handle? Will I fall into a spiral of self doubt and hopelessness, will I start again to worry that I can never achieve something like it?

This time, I don’t think so. I think my experience this year was necessary, and I look at it as an inoculation against future mental crises. Just because there exists art that I don’t have–and will never have–the experiences or skill to create does not mean that I can not create any art. And if something I read is beyond my abilities, I can (and must) learn from it. And while I learn, I can allow myself a pat on the back for even recognizing the subtle intricacies of Sebald’s creations–because that in itself is a skill that not many have (otherwise he’d be a household name!)

Anyway, all that is to say that I’m reading a Sebald novel again, and I don’t think it’s going to be as risky as I feared it would be! That strengthening of my psyche is a kind of learning and improvement, too.

Invitation to a Beheading, by Vladimir Nabokov

I always come back to good ol’ Vlad, and this one keeps up the pattern of being awesome in unexpected ways.

This book tells the story of Cincinnatus C. , a 30 year old teacher convicted of ‘gnostical turpitude’ and his experiences waiting around in a cell for his own execution.

What struck me most about this book was the unsettling variance in tone. Throughout the story we get regular doses of Cincinnatus’s internal thoughts, his anxiety and constant fear about his upcoming death, his inability to think about anything else and inability to focus on writing his final thoughts because his captors won’t tell him when the exact date he will be killed, meaning he has no idea if he’ll have time to finish. These parts are very human and identifiable, and made me think about my own impending death.

Yet alongside these existential fears is the complete ridiculousness of all the other characters involved. His jailer, his lawyer, the librarian who brings him books–all of them are clownish oafs who want to make friends with him, and expect him to be grateful for how they are taking care of him so well, and call him a sourpuss for being so down in the dumps all the time. This all made the scenario so much more terrible.

Early in the story a second prisoner is introduced, and the guards play matchmaker with them, basically forcing Cinncinatus to be friends with this person, who only wants to show him photographs and talk about fishing and play chess, and has zero fear or worry, or desire to talk about their plight. We find out later that this ‘prisoner’ is actually Cinncinatus’s executioner and the entire charade was for the purpose of becoming friends with his ‘client’ before the execution, so that it would be less barbaric.

All this forced kindness in the face of an execution had the effect of a mounting feeling of horror in me. The feeling was that everyone in the world was in on it, everyone knew and accepted that Cinncinatus was to be killed (for what, we never find out exactly, but it seems to be related to some aspect of him as a person) and everyone was happy and celebrating it, and Cinncinatus himself was perceived by everyone else as some kind of grump for not just accepting and going along with it.

It’s quite a feat, in my opinion, to write something that can have me laughing, while also feeling a kind of existential dread at the same time. I’ve not yet failed to recommend a Nabokov novel, and this one won’t break the streak. Definitely check it out!

Just 400?

I got to 400 books read on my Goodreads account recently, and though I’m sure that’s not every book I’ve ever read, it is not far off.

What a low number! I’ve been reading 25+ years, and that’s the number I’ve reached? I fee like I never have time to read these days, and in the past 6 years (since I’ve been keeping track) I’ve read/listened to nearly 150 books. So it seems like that total number should be much higher.

Those 400 books, then, are the ones I can remember reading. And if I can’t remember reading something, then I suppose I might as well not have read it anyway.

I seem to be reading at a reliable pace of 30ish books per year (even though I keep trying for 40) so, if I’m lucky, I’ll have time to read another ~1500 books in my life. Yikes! Is that a low number or what..

Seems to me that means I should pick up the pace…

The inner workings

Having recently read some great sci-fi for the first time in a couple years, I have some thoughts.

I think my perspective has changed after the past few years of reading pretty much only literary classics. Coming back to science fiction after that, everything feels so transparent. I’m not sure if it’s me, or just this book, but this is what I felt:

I felt like I could see every move the author was making. I saw each bit of foreshadowing and set up and why he was doing it. A leads to B leads to C. The inner workings of the story seemed to be laid bare, without even an effort to disguise them. Though one can say the ticking and turning gears of a watch is beautiful and skillful, it is still something mechanical, unabashedly and proudly–not something organic. And organic is what I’ve come to feel writing should be.

Is it the genre, or is it the author? I’ll have to read more sci fi to be sure, but I suspect some of it must be to do with the genre. Sci fi by its nature requires lots of explaining. There are guaranteed to be new concepts and technologies in a sci fi novel–after all, that is the driving force for the author to even write the thing: to show off new ideas and technologies. The steps needed to bring the reader to the point of understanding how something works probably can’t help but feel somewhat mechanical.

I think this also is part of why I haven’t written sci fi (or fantasy) in a long time: I’ve grown to intensely dislike explaining things.

I feel I’ve been mutating for the past six months or so, and am about to start writing again. But my style may have completely changed by then, just as my tastes have…

The Wandering Earth, Cixin Liu

The first sci-fi I’ve read in a couple years, and I picked nothing but the best of the genre.

Liu is an endless fountain of ideas, and although I was tricked into thinking this was a novel by the way they marketed the version I bought, I was not disappointed, and was constantly surprised and entertained by every story in this collection.

What always impresses my about Liu’s books is the sheer SIZE of the ideas. You start reading and you think, wow that is interesting, but then he keeps going, taking the idea further than you ever thought possible.

I was stunned, I laughed, a few times I felt like crying. A grand, and wild collection of stories.

Check it out!