still like haruki

South of the Border, West of the Sun is a typical Murakami, ambiguous as to whether there's anything supernatural there. From what I can tell, there are three forces at play (each symbolised by a woman): 1. enduring nostalgia for a first love, 2. guilt, 3. mid-life mediochrity.

So after telling the story of his childhood dear (1), his high-school sweetheart (2) and the nothingness inbetween before his current predicament (married with 2 girls), Hajime is fascinated to hear about Izumi (2) and that she has changed. Inside Hajime is the insatiable feeling that something is missing, which leads him back to these past loves.

It's quick, it's not the best Murakami, but overall I think the sentiment is about right and I enjoyed it.

Mathematical Fallacies and Paradoxes

This is essentially a history of mathematics, told with an emphasis on paradoxes and disputes that have happened over time in the mathematical world. At some times things are simplified so as to be accessible to the non-mathematical orientated reader, however there is some description that gets pretty full on - so I wonder how successful this book was in that regard.

It turns out, in my opinion, that some paradoxes and fallacies are more fun than others. My favourite from this book probably being

A civil-defence exercise will be held this week. In order to make sure that the civil-defence units are properly prepared, no one will know in advance on what day this exercise will take place.

which has it's counterpart in a man rings his wife and says she will receive an unexpected gift, a gold watch. She knows it will be unexpected, but now she expects a watch, so it can't be a watch... then it is.

these are more logical than mathematical - perhaps a more appropriate one is to define a number as "the lowest number that cannot be defined in less than 19 syllables", however this sentence (which can also define the number) has less than 19 syllables, so it can't be that number! awesome.

DFW

I won't go into great detail here as I think I read brief interviews with hideous men, searching for the wrong thing. David Foster Wallace is widely hailed as a genius, or at least very intelligent, and he certainly comes across as such, however I wonder whether much of the time he is more focused on the perturbation of form as an end rather than a means to convey a message, feeling, emotion. I'm not saying that all stories should have a moral, but I like to be moved by a story, even if it is uncertainly or profoundly but in an uncertain direction.

I don't mind a story to leave you wondering whether the character should be sympathised with, but I'm not drawn into a story where a character is created, endowed with what purport to be the secret, unconscious or "real" ambitions of people. And then the question is, am I getting it wrong? If I am, is that my fault as a reader or DFW as an author?

Anyway, definitely worth reading, and I guess when a book makes me really think long and hard about what I think of it and why I think this way, it's proabably a good thing.

Magneto, Prof X read The Once and Future King

Magneto sits in a plastic prison, reads The Once and Future King, is beaten and has mind-control fluid dripped into his neck... then later, Professor X is teaching T.H. White to a class of young mutants.

So, X-men 2 and the fact my brother read it is the reason why I eventually came around to reading TH White's The Once and Future King. It is written in a similar style to C.S. Lewis' The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, which is mainly to say that children have a bit of the toff about them, "oh by drats, if he weren't so beastly!" There's also a fair lack of description in this type of writing - I guess to read more like folklore than anything else... this book assumes you know the general story of King Arthur already, and mainly works to add a few stories in, fill out a few details, and give colour to Lady Guenevere who is mainly portrayed as a pouty lump of contradictions (female). So, yes, it took me a long time to read (small words, long pages, sleep) and for the most part was annoying although a few bits are powerful and rewarding enough.

Another problem I have is that the definitive story of King Arthur, to me, is courtesy of a tape I had as a kid, which included many wonderful stories, including the lady in the lake (where is she TH?), the bit where he fights the giant, ends up being tricked into fighting and almost killing his friend, has his magic scabbard stolen and then is stabbed by Mildred, son of Morgan le Faye, then finally has to make a young man throw excalibur back to the lady in the lake (mind you, i don't think i heard much of lancelot at this time). But anyway, that story was ace.

I guess the emphasis of Once and Future King (and the reason it is being read in X-Men) is the realisation of Arthur that he has attempted to build a culture of Right over Might upon the foundations of Might is Right. This is the focus, at least of the first story, and of the last when Camelot's light is waning. The majority of the rest of the book focuses on the love affair between Lancelot and Guenevere - once again, it's reasonably unimpressive when so much attention is given to two people, both of whom come across as idiots. Maybe I just don't like dull people who attempt to overemphasize their discretions... Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Les Mis (although this wasn't adultery, just two very boring people in love).

At any rate, it is read, which is good.

Simon James - Jim Fish

The following was written for (and rejected by) the Lifted Brow -- almost 10 years ago. I very much understand why it was rejected. But still why not.  Some of the mathematical symbols won't work here so I replaced them with \latex :)

Jim Fish.

A bright yellow fabric caresses her skin.  Hong Kong actress, Elanne Kwong is next to me and I’m drawn to the yellow, draped over her leg like silken sun cut from a kid’s painting.  This image drifts, attaching itself to various fragments of memory and in each scene I can’t place her expression or reconcile what she says with the sound of her voice.  All I notice is the contrast of yellow against olive-painted and awkwardly sculpted thighs.  I try to keep that picture still, assuring myself that it’s why she’s beautiful –that I notice how beautiful she is in a unique way –but I can’t.  With each new detail the rest must be re-evaluated and, in turn, each change (∆y) itselfmust be integrated (\sum \to \int where ∆y→∞) into the scene.  I explain again that it wasn’t my fault when Arlie stopped breathing.

It starts with sitting on fresh pink linen in a dorm closed off by pale strawberry curtains. The light coming through is inoffensive, like the chatter outside that falls dead before I can make it out.  Physical disturbances in the air, I say to myself.  If Elanne Kwon were in the room, her leg tied in yellow ribbon, she might ask what I am mumbling.  “Your ear!”I could say, “it helps translate waves into words, images or even textures that make up memory.  You couldn’t just remember a series of vibrations.”

She is not impressed and she frowns.  “Don’t pretend that you actually think this through logically.  Like everyone else, you panic when you think about something that hurts you, whether or not it happened reasonably.” She would say something like that –something about my calmness seeming aggressive, something that makes it obvious that she does not understand.  Or perhaps the tone’s not right.  Maybe she’s calm, herself –concerned and solemn, “She’ll be awake soon.  You can let her know that you’ll make things better soon.”

Afterwards, far less excited about my insights on memory and sound, I am lying next to Arlie at home.  The lining of her liver is tender, and the acidity of her stomach unsettles her, but for the most part she is disorientated and fatigued.  I want to hold her so close, allow our bodies to fool me into thinking that I can keep her safe, that I can shield her from enemy fire.  But, instead I hesitate, apprehensive that she’ll be disgusted, bored, or that she’ll get sick from the motion.  I’m afraid to fall asleep.  I’m exhausted.  I didn’t, but I should –at this point –gently relinquish the sheet and swivel my knees out of bed. Elanne Kwong with a yellow scarf wrapped around her hips sits in the dark on the landing outside the room and I stand in front of her.  “I do panic,”I say.  The darkness makes me wonder whether she hears.  It occurs to me that I’ve told her this before –that I’ve been with her before any of this.  Do I keep noticing the legs and the yellow because we’ve slept together? 

  It’s impossible to tell for sure.  

One night, she sits beside me on my bed, holding a Chinese tea cup of yellow powder. Imagine using a yellow pencil to colour a many-rayed sun on a large vertical canvas.  The layers of yellow slide like graphite, some remaining on the canvas, others (infinitesimally small) floating down and being caught in this cup.  “Your mother’s outside,”she says looking at the yellow crystals –I wonder how such fine grains could still hold pigment.  “She’ll have to find you.”  

“It shouldn’t bother you so much if things are out of order,”she says and I recall the psychological adage that if you hear a conversation out of order, your logical mind reorders it before committing it to memory, like the ear unscrambling waves. 

“I’m not stupid,”I say.  “we impose linear orders on things so that we can deal with them, fill in the gaps and missing colours so that they can be processed without confusing us.  Like partially ordered sets.  It’s like this…

Let Abe a set of memories (concerning both events and thoughts) that are subsumed into your identity and let ρ be the relation “causes”, (i.e.  a ρ b if a causes b).  (A,ρ) is then a partially ordered set (poset[1]).  Let k be your current state of mind : a ρ k \forall a \in A\{k}.  If there exists (\exists) an e: e ρ a \forall a \in A\{e} →(A, ρ) is a lattice, and teleologically, e is the single most important influence on k.  Presupposed here is, of course, the imposition of an order and the possibility of a homeomorphism such that ρ might be substituted with “is more influential than”.  Furthermore, the likelihood of a unique k and/or unique e might be insignificant, except in the case of fish with |A| \approx 2. 

“…I know that it’s pointless to look for order or initial causes.  They’re just excuses and empty consolations.”  I say.

Elanne Kwong listens to the story about my fish, my mind is swimming somewhat at this stage. “It’s okay,”she says. “I might have given you too much.”

Arlie and I had fish. Jim was my fish and he was kept company by a jumping fish.  The jumping fish kept escaping from the small fish-bowl, and so sometimes we used a grey cooking-tray to stop her from jumping out and suffocating.  She’d still jump of course, and we’d watch her mope close to the stones for a few days after hitting her head.  Jim was pretty fascinated by her, and was close-by whenever she was fixing to jump, although he kept his distance when she sulked at the depths of the bowl.  

One day, we saw Jim with her near the stones.  When she returned to the surface a few days later, he hadn’t moved.  He stayed there, pining after her until his stomach began to bloat and what at first appeared to be lazy finning lapsed into a drift, and then finally he was floating sideways at the surface.  His little gills had not been used to the deep water like those of the jumping fish.

I don’t remember whether Jim died before Arlie stopped breathing in the car or not.  I don’t really remember the sequence between the night I see Elanne Kwong with the yellow scarf after the hospital (it must have been a hospital, with white instead of strawberry sheets), and the car. I may have been upset some of the time but I was calm.  I wanted her to calm down.  

“The water would not have been so deep that your fish couldn’t swim there.”  Elanne Kwong says, skeptically interrupting.  “Maybe the jumping fish hit Jim on the way down,”she returns to the empty teacup.  “After hitting its head…maybe it was his head and not his gills?”  

I don’t remember how I react to that.  In any case, there should be nothing I ought to feel guilty about.  I’ve never told Elanne Kwong how beautiful Arlie was.  I haven’t confessed that the same trepidation from being beside her would be repeated and stretched over the following months –wanting so much to comfort her, but too afraid to touch her.  Beautiful and inconsolably sad.  I’m sitting in the car seat with that succession of moments between us, like a pulse of light from a supernova.  Rather than attempt to reconcile the disparate timeline evoking the collapse, I console myself that everything is as it should be  (\sum ∆y→0 as y→∞).

I think Elanne Kwong, wearing a guava t-shirt, will open the car door soon.  My mind drifts and I imagine seeing myself climb into the driver’s seat.  What do I say?  Tell myself that all powerless experiences should be replayed, their outcomes altered with the newly developed coping tools? Tell myself that everything he fears will happen, happens –it won’t matter so much?  Tell him the sun’s light isn’t coherent, but if painted it can be filtered into a flat and bright yellow?  

I get a small fright when an unfamiliar body resumes the driver’s seat.  She looks at the sun, and its fingers. “I don’t want to forget,”I tell her.  “I don’t want to rearrange and recolour the memories until they resemble something I’m okay with.”  I want to say that I don’t want to be okay with it, but I might have said this already.  

The girl looks away from the sun, her eyes toward me for the first time.  “You’re worried that it’s a compromise between relinquishing and reconciling, that you can’t reconcile your Arlie before the hospital with the one after.”

“No,”I say, half to myself.  “They’re the same. I know.  People don’t act rationally.”

“But if you don’t believe it yourself, your efforts to see her as both widens the rent.  Neither Arlie is real.”(a \in Ɽ → a+i,a-i \in Ɽ)  Do you ever wonder which of Kafka’s girls he loves most?  

Caressing this girl’s leg is a soft red fabric.  The red seems ornamental, flowing down from her wrist to her hips and slightly touching her thighs.  The thighs are beautiful, they would arouse me if I would let them.  The red is a bit harsh; not so delicate like a daffodil yellow. 

---

[1](a,a) \in ρ \forall a \in A(reflexive),  

  (a,b) \in ρ→(b,a) \in ρ \forall a,b \in A(a≠b) (anti-symmetric)

  (a,b) \in ρ \cup (b,c) \in ρ→(a,c) \in ρ  \forall a,b,c \in A(transitive)

Pushing a Boulder, scooping Sand, piling rocks into the river of Hades - all fun

The village in The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe has at its mouth a number of holes, each containing a house. These houses represent the only defense for the village against the sand, which like a liquid will pour through the village unless it is shovelled out of these holes indefinitely - of course, it is an endless task.

It's an interesting take on the idea of finding duty in a sentence of endless servitude. Camus' Myth of Sysiphus is another example, however in the book it refers to the River of Hades. My suspicion is that this "river of Hades" is not derived from the Greek mythology, but rather is given as a crude translation from a Japanese myth - I've got no idea though. In the River of Hades example told throughout the book, shovelling the sand is like piling up rocks in the river of Hades, and there too they are never allowed to complete the task.

This story differs, however, especially if we think of the protagonist and how he deals with his sentence. After arriving in the town, he stays one night with "a woman" who seems a little vague about how he will leave the next day. I like imprisonment stories where the capture is never really acknowledged - however this type of dialogue between the two changes as the story develops. So as a starting point, we never really get the idea that the sentence is carried out with duty - those in the holes are condemned and essentially slaves to the village. It is not until many attempts to escape that the protagonist defers his plans indefinitely.

I couldn't help but think that given the situation and the woman's loneliness, it would have seemed natural just to accept the imprisonment from the beginning - since there is nothing to go home to, however this must be a peculiarity of my own ideas or the influence of Camus.

There are 3 sex-scenes in the book, all quite confronting and not so romantic - in fact, the way the woman in the dunes is treated is really quite appalling... despite her lay-down attitude, I think she still deserved better. Oh well.

Extension du domaine de la lutte... "whatever"

The English title of this short novel, "whatever" is somewhat unfortunate, since the phrase evokes the attitude of young teenagers rather than the struggle of modern man in confronting life's indifference whilst "in a depression". The french title translates literally to something like extending the domain of the struggle (not difficult to discern from the words) and this is something more like what is going on.

Set in and around Paris, Houellebecq draws a lot from Sartre and other writers in that tradition. As well as many passages in the book reminding me (sometimes bluntly) of Nausea, some reminded me of Unbearable Lightness of Being, Fight Club or American Psycho. These similarities are sometimes interesting, however since Houellebecq fails to depict a unique or new crisis in man, I found it hard to find any of the revelations (or lack there-of) important.

His protagonist is ironically funny, sometimes aggressive in his dislike of people (particularly attractive/sexual women), at others surprisingly empathetic. Many of the wry observations refer to his company, the main office and it's software development (the program is called Maple, which is a mathematics programming package in reality but I couldn't quite gather whether he was aware of this or not).

What perhaps distinguishes this story from others is that the lead character is given a diagnosis. He is told that he is "in a depression" and we see the beginnings of the altered interaction with his co-workers after this (he's only got one friend). The depression is expressed more specifically through the character's loneliness, his lack of a loving girlfriend (many mentions of his ex- of 2 years), and how these things are needed for fulfilment when God is taken out of the picture - so in this sense, it moves beyond the existentialist dilemma and toward the more-human need for interaction and love.