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The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze

This is the way it usually goes: the young man puts pen to paper in the belief that the word is mighty. He has read and read, but no text seem to touch directly on the living centre of life as it is lived now. The books are artifacts, contrived with an aim in mind. Often successful in achieving the aim, often perfect craftsmanship, but nothing to do with the thin edge of the new age as experienced through this one 'I'.

So he writes in an ecstacy, pouring words onto the page, feeling the equal of Goethe and Augustine, Camus or Kierkegaard. Not worrying about getting published; looking on such concerns as ignoble.

This state may continue for many years. Then comes the fall. It may be initiated by success in getting published. His view of himself as a writer shifts fundamentally. Writing must be for other people, not a narcissistic emanantion. There must be real characters (not transparant copies of the writer), plot, development. He begins to see his stacks of juvenilia as trails left from his thought-flow. A useful practice, an exercise in expressing oneself. But something to be embarrassed about if it should get out. Time to turn to the work of telling a story, close obversation, the arts of evoking particular feelings in the reader. Those who persist in believing that they have something to say are deluded. Their self-importance is laughable. All that 'what you say' is encompassed in how you say it.

---

You will have to take my word for it that I believed the world would never be the same, Saroyan writes of his first book. Most of the stories in this book purport to be directly autobiographical. "I am a young man in an old city. It is morning and I am in a small room." Another story is a complete synopsis of a film starring Tom Garner, from the viewpoint of Saroyan's seat in the theatre.

Now that I have been sullied by trying to get published, I find it hard to look at writing in the same way. Questions intrude: What type of man is this? How did he come to be? How did this get published? How does it fit in to other writing of that decade? What strands of the zeitgeist does he weave together?

And I always remember, I am reading this not because Saroyan wrote it, but because it was published. And no matter how much it may have the appearance of a diary, it is an act of communication. The confidence is there. His voice is worth listening to. Where did he get his self-image from, one young man walking through a city of millions? He doesn't tell us in his writings. "I am out here in the far West, in San Francisco, in a small room on Carl Street, writing a letter to common people, telling them in simple language things they already know."

Yeah, just who do you think you are?

Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates - or her publishers/agent rather - have had great success in smuggling her work out to the public as entertainment. Her collection The Female of the Species comes with a blurb beginning "With wicked insight JCO demonstrates why the females of the species are by nature more deadly than the males." The review in The Irish Times was in a section headed THRILLERS. A review in the New York Times by Hillary Frey says "Mystery and horror fans are most likely to relish this collection, which works best as a source of cheap thrills." "Oates's best form is still the novel. Yet stories don't have to be great to be addictive; they just need a trick - and Oates has nailed that."

It seems Frey believed what the cover was telling her: this is cheap genre fiction for the masses.

The final story Angel of Mercy tells the tales of two nurses, one born forty years earlier than the other. What connects them is that they worked in the same neuropsychiatric ward, though the one was long dead before the younger started in 1998. The title refers to how the older nurse saw herself as she administered mercy to the terminallly ill patients. Joyce paints the physival and mental degradation of a slow death. This will be disturbing reading for anyone with an elderly relative. The doctors are able to keep their distance, but the nurse "Always I had their best interests at heart not like the doctors keeping them alive like vegetable for the $" she writes in her secret diary, which was only discovered after her suicide. Through her whole life her 'mission' remained undetected.

The younger nurse next to nothing of the "Angel". But she becomes effected by the atmosphere of what they call with black humour "The City of the Damned". Though she starts out as a pretty peroxide blonde, over the course of ten years she gives up the idea of boyfriends and marriage. "Now she knew too much, there could be no more romance of the body. All that was behind her, disdained." And so, this entirely different person goes down the same path to become deliver her own sort of mercy.

The story is uncompromising - the issues of euthanasia it raises, the way in which modern medicine prolongs death to absurd lengths.

From an article on the mercy-killing nurse Cullen: "we might also note that a nurse who ends terminal patients' lives because of a belief that the patients are experiencing unnecessary pain may differ in some respects from a "serial killer" who simply stalks and kills healthy individuals. Without condoning illegal or unethical conduct, and recognizing that no health care worker has the right to make life-ending decisions based solely on her own sense of morality, we hope that the press will in such cases bring to light all potentially relevant factors. "

The marketing bio at the publishers feels it significant to mention she was picked for an Oprah book and reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, 'the first time any of her books reached the spot, though most have been critically acclaimed.'

I have some editions of JCO's early works. By the North Gate and With Shuddering Fall. The blurbs are:

JCO is a fine writer ... powerful examples of what the short story can be in the hands of a good writer ... she uncovers the universal core within a unique happening ... superb fiction by a national book award winner ... rich poetic hard and tender ... A masterpiece ... a rich and burgeoning talent ...

Compare with the blurbs in 2006: "JCO is a genius." "One of the female front runners for the title of Great American Novelist" "JCO can sweep the reader away" and the subtitle Tales of Mystery and Suspense. Funny how the word 'genius' serves to mean witty, clever, and accessible to all.

In fact there were perceptive newspapers reviews of Female of the Species. But they are not chosen to be blurbs. And the promotional website finds it preferable to menion Oprah (Oprah Winfrey, as every reader will know) and the bestseller list.

White Noise

I've been a long-time fan of J.G. Ballard and know his ability to detect the madness of the modern. DeLillo has the same sensors om alert in this book, but in a more light-hearted way. He doesn't have to search as hard to convince us of the strangeness of the era.

The narrator, Jack, is chairman of the department of Hitler studies at a small university. He has a warm-hearted wife and some 5 or 6 children about the house, most from previous marriages. There is nothing weird about Jack himself; the weirdness is of an everyday kind in the world about him. In an early scene they take a trip to see "the most photographed barn in America". It's just an ordinary barn, notable only for being the most photographed. A fairly obvious swipe at the notion of celebrities being famous for being famous, but the novel was written in 1984. Nowadays we accept such situations as being a foible of human nature; irony seems pointessly harsh.

On almost every page there is some event or image which could only below to the post-everything last quarter of the twentieth century. DeLillo himself may not always be aware of this: he's part of the age like a fish in water. For instance the children speak like adults and are treated like adults in a way which is becoming familiar. Little Steffie wonders if she should visit her mother. "You saw her last year, you liked her," says Jack.

When I spotted Denise I blew the horn and she came ovr. This was the first time I'd ever picked her up at school and she gave me a wary and hard-eyed look as she passed in front of the car - a look that indicated she was in no mood for news of a seperation or divorce.

If Jack is in fact very faithful to Babette, and a dedicated father, it is only because it is in his nature. The family as a whole manages quite well without any principles, religion or core values.

B.R. Myers in an article in the Atlantic attacks the pretentiousness of current literary prose. White Noise is one of his prime targets; the author is indirectly referred to as 'a novelist of limited gifts.' The novel's depictions of contented consumers grazing around a mall, children mesmerised by advertising etc are described as "patronising" and "exaggerated".

True, DeLillo's main ideas are not new. But Myers is wrong to think there are no real people like this. The shopping mall and television are the environment in which whole swathes of people spend their lives. I have seen them. They are real. The opening of a new shopping center in this city was headline news for weeks. The new IKEA centre is attracting similar attention. It frightens me. For many of the people on reality/talent shows, seeing themselves on television is a magic so powerful their lives can never be the same again. For better or for worse.

Maybe this phase will pass soon, but at the moment it seems every irony is overtaken by reality.

The novel shows signs of being quickly-written, poorly-edited and aimed at the mass market. If DeLillo thinks a particular verbal trick is good, he'll have no problem with repeating it, even three times. So who is it trying to persuade Myers this is great literature? Why is he getting on his box like he's seen through the emperor's clothes?

The problem may be this: the college-educated reader reads a novel he likes. He wants to praise it, yet all he can talk about is "the writing". This is not the 19th century - he cannot talk about the truth expressed in the novel, or ennobling insights, or the artistic soul. So the novel gets misdirected praise for its prose and "craft".

This novel is great not because of the prose, but because the sensors are on maximum receptivity and taking in what's all around.

When Jack meets his fellow-academic Murray, one grips the other by the elbow and they walk across the campus "like a pair of European senior citizens, heads bowed in conversation". It's a throwaway comparison, but implications ooze from it.

It's so good he repeats it a chapter later.

Passion Play

Violent games of polo and kinky sex form recurring scenes in this novel. This is not normally why I pick up a book. But Kosinski was recommended to me by my students in Poland. I had heard of the elements of his biography.

Little Jerzy was brought up in Poland in a place and time that brought out the worst in human kind. He inhabited a world where the authorities would make him into either a slave or a corpse. "Kosinski appears to be obsessed with finding evil everywhere," said Ellie Wiesel in confusion and consternation some thirty years later.

At university in Lodz he forged an invitation to an academic conference in the USA. Indeed he forged whole departments and professors, both in Poland and in the USA. The authorities granted him a visa and an aeroplane ticket. He arrived at the airport with a poison ampoule in his pocket in case the scheme failed at the last moment.

Fabian, the book's hero, is a loner and seducer who plays by his own rules.

Closing in on youth - a young woman, a girl - Fabian could not resist its spell; he was compelled, his instinct honed by anguish. He would fix with an intensity almost clinical, bordering on obsession, on the sheen of a girl's eyes, the deep colour that washed pupil and iris, each filament of hair that streamed from her head ...

Was bedeutet das alles?

A short introduction to philosophy.

Our brave new world of simulated reality, mind-altering drugs, scans which predict what decision we make before we are conscious of making it, suicide commando atrocity chique, direct control of mechanism via brain waves, AI friends for the elderly, quantum cats, chemical castration, ethical arguments from sociobiology, Dubai city ... bring philosophical problems from the realm of musing to an intense interface with reality.

This little book makes only limited appeal to the richer possibilities of illustrating philosophical questions. For example the average reader will at least have heard of quantum mechanics. Why does a discussion of consciousness / free will still posit a mechanistic world operating to deterministic rules? Modern physics begins with observables, not with little billiard balls colliding with each other. "Physical reality" is a non-starter.

The chapter on Right and Wrong was most interesting to me. He picks apart the different possibilities of founding morals. The judging of others' actions as right or wrong is unavoidable by humans, consistency demands some reason for a person to do the right thing. These questions never much interested me before. Nagel's simple steps forward lead quickly into quagmires of thought.

There is no suggestion that anything other than diligence and pedestrian commonsense are needed to approach these questions. That's not bad as a methodology, but it's not true.

The Female of the Species

Some things to note about this collection of short stories:

• Each story previously appeared in some periodical, from Ellery Queen Mystery mag to the Kenyon Review. All are American. On this side of the Atlantic there are not sufficient outlets for a writer to do this.
• In a review I recall seeing many months ago in some Irish paper, the book appeared under the rubric Thrillers.
• Unlike her other recent books, the usual bio is omitted, at least on my edition: "JCO is on the faculty of Princeton University" etc.
• Cover blurbs are from the Guardian, Sunday Telegraph, and Sunday Times.

My favourite stories here were So Help Me God, The Haunting, and Angel of Wrath. I'll put down a few notes on The Haunting.

This story reads like something inspired by a song that drums in & out of mind. A female child wakes up from at night hearing rabbits crying, in this strange place, their new home, where they have moved since daddy died.

Daddy is dead. Dead Daddy. Daddy-dead.
Daddydeaddead. Deaaaaaaddaddy.

If you say it enough times faster and faster you start giggling. Calvin shows me.

Calvin is in fourth grade, her older brother.

The rhythmical prose is partly like a rock song lyrics, partly a child's chant, and partly the studied naiveness of My First Storybook. The place they move to is Cuyahoga - Cuy-a -- hoga -- which brings to mind the insistent refrain of a Talking Heads song. The "Daddy-dead" line above could be the Violent Femmes. The mother takes up singing in a bar: it's worth while doing a google on the songs/lyrics mentioned, they're part of the story. (though lost on this reader) Beyond the backyard the railroad provides another insistent beat.

The story is steeped in rhythm: Like Mommy says, it gets into your blood, says the girl child.

And when she asks where Daddy is now, these are the words a 5-year old cannot possibly understand, but will remember for ever and for ever.

He has gone to hell to be with his own cruel kin.

Say it aloud 10 times. Say it under your breath.

Taking influence from scraps of songs knocking about in your head is something a 21-year-old writer would do. Deuce to Oates for this story that draws straight from the well-springs. And for those hard nuggets of insight that sparkle in the text: "But now Daddy is gone, it's Mommy whose eyes are like a cat's eyes jumping at us. It's Mommy whose fingers twitch like they want to be fists." "the man from the sheriff's office, calling us Cavin, Marybeth, like a trick to make us think he knew us"

dead as dooornails

Cronin relates his encounters with the Dublin literary characters of the period. He too was part of that milieu, but with a kind of modesty - the bad kind - he says little about himself.

This is not my story. If it were I would describe the effect a first introduction to that great and gracious land (Italy) has on the traveller.

It became clear to me that he is relating the adventures with Brendan Behan not because these were so interesting in themselves, nor because he, Cronin, belatedly recognizes Behan as a writer of genius. They are related because some 12 or more years later it was Behan out of the motley company who became famous. Other characters get short shrift - a quick portrait of a barman called John is an exception.

Cronin conveys the impression that the character he sees in the pub is the writer. Admittedly he has set himself the restriction of relating only what he personally witnessed, but there's too much wallowing in pub scandals. Celebrity gossip from the man-about-town. A different narrator would perhaps have recalled different scenes, might have recalled some events involving less well-known but interesting characters.

"People are the same wherever you go." But are they? Maybe in some periods or places they are more snide, hypocritical, cynical. The denizen's of Cronin's 1950's pub scene for example. Unbounded generosity appears, but usually in the form of rounds of drink. I would have run a mile from McDaid's den. Run a thousand in fact, to America or further. God, I'm glad the 1950's are over. I'm glad I'm not a writer.

The damage due to an excess of alcohol and distortion of sexual relations comes across with no need of authorial comment. Many of the festering loyalities and petty begrudgery are typical of the alcoholic. Cronin however seems to acquiesce in what the man sitting at the bar will tell you; you're not an alcoholic as long as you're drinking Guinness.

Kavanagh drank stout in those days as a staple and was seldom drunk, or at least no drunker than the rest of us. . . . in later years whiskey had become the master and was cracking the whip.

Again in talking of Kavanagh:

At the time, personal affection, the intoxication of the daily company of genius and, I might add, the zest for combat, concealed much from me . . .

Don't be such a crawler, Cronin. The genius of a writer is in his writing, not his bar-talk. You'd have been better off getting off that stool and going back to your desk, exchanging a few letters with budding writers.

Had to laugh when I came across this bit later (concerning two Scottish artists):

And there was one strange circumstance: in those days they did not drink. They were not teetotallers; they took a glass of wine or two; but the serious drinking was to come later.

I was glad to finish this book. It was a surprise how I could come to dislike so much an author who has gone to some effort to efface himself from the narrative.

Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse

In the wealthy West there are always second chances. Every decision can be reversed - career, job, marriage - so in the end there are no crucial life decisions.

The story As I Sink Down perfectly captures a turning point in a man's life. He has dropped out of college, his girlfriend gets pregnant, decides to have an abortion. This is related in a deadpan first-person, getting the facts across. He takes on a temporary job as a miner, but already he can see this is to be his life from now on. Back-breaking work, little sleep, until the mind closes in. He must acquire what is generally called "maturity", so that he will work without complaint, without excessive recourse to alcohol. Like his father his only joy will be to see his nephews and nieces grow up. Although he may listen to the same rock'n roll, and see the same computers in the department stores, it's a world away from what's familiar here where I write.

I thought of how I had never known my father, and all the men he worked alongside, until I had descended into a mine myself.
I understood how it was them against the whole world. Nobody else mattered, nobody else knew.
Next day I worked. It was better than having time on my hands. I was no longer afraid. I worked well.

Those things he would have scorned as a rebellious student - a small clean apartment, a lazy, a pretty wife room now become unattainably distant.
We need reminding that failure exists - not the spectacular failure of a drug addict or criminal, but the stoic acceptance of a man who faces the prospect of slavish labour for the rest of his life. The common fate of the mass of humanity through history.

There's something odd going on in Honey. The story is about a retired couple who have settled in a large air-conditioned house in Phoenix, Arizona. They are the sort of people who hold very certain views on all topics. They know that they have worked hard to earn this big house, and that other people who have not achieved the same have obviously done things the wrong way.
The story is related from the viewpoint of the woman. Old Bob is made to look obstinate and ridiculous at a couple of points. "He would never realise, she understood, that his own wife could see him as something comical and ultimately futile, as in that moment when he cursed and stamped about a machine that refused to move."

At the end of the story he falls off a ladder. Hs wife rushes to help him.

When he opened his eyes there was an old woman standing over him.
Her stricken face . . . reminded him more of some grotesque insect than of his wife. He waited. It was coming.
'Honey! Are! You! All right?'
In a rage of agony, searing words like caustic bile rose to his mouth. He would not be responsible for what he said next.
But the pain in his body was so great he could only gasp one word.
'Honey!'

This is like a brief glimpse into the furnaces of hell. Nothing in the story prepares for it, least of all the title. That's what makes it great.

Another great story is An Evening of Love. It achieves a kind of perfection. (Not to turn this into a barbed compliment, but perfection only has meaning when there is a recognised standard.) Like many of the other stories, the viewpoint is entirely that of the unreflecting driven young man. There is intensity, there is coherence, like a sharp light shining outwards, delineating the harsh edges of the world. O'Ceallaigh writes about such men with as much insight as Kafka wrote about angst-ridden Jewish sons.

It's hard to determine a writers' intention. O'Ceallaigh seems to be presenting this material not for entertainment, nor to evoke sympathy for lower income groups, or change the world, but because it is real.

The piece A Performance stands out as a comment on how his work will be received. The performer undoes sutures and pulls aside his ribcage to expose his beating heart. The audience has its moment of catharsis. Simple as that, the author is brave indeed to throw down this successor to Kafka's Hungerkuenstler.

There are a couple of pieces near the end, including Gone Fishing, that seem autobiographical. Perhaps because of their incidental nature they've been tacked on at the end. I am glad they were included.

Disgrace

I read this over the course of a couple of flights and a train journey across Poland.

There I encounter old friends, and failures. "You Westerners", she said, "everything is so easy for you. You don't know the meaning of failure."

Gilead

Reverend John Ames married a second time late in life, and pens this long letter to his young son knowing he will not live to see him reach adulthood. The year is 1956, but the story winds in and out among tales of his father and grandfathers, advice to his son, and a diary of events as they unfold.

The viewpoint is unwaveringly that of the reverend. But it is more than a viewpoint - it is the coherent Christian perspective, one that was the base of European civilisation for a thousand years. No shadow of irony is cast, no hint of absurdity, no sentimentality. Ames seems to have borrowed much from St. Augustine's Confessions, intertwining personal worries with biblical verses, following reason up to a point and then yielding to the mystery of faith.

I walked up to the church in the dark, as I said. There was a very bright moon. It's strange how you never quite get used to the world at night. I have seen moonlight strong enough to cast shadows any number of times. And the wind is the same wind, rustling the same leaves, night or day. When I was a young boy I used to get up before every dawn of the world to fetch water and firewood. It was a very different life then. I remember walking out into the dark and feeling as if the dark were a great, cool sea and the houses and the sheds and the woods were all adrift in it, just about to ease off their moorings. I always felt like an intruder then, and I still do, as if the darkness had a claim on everything, one that I violated just by stepping out my door.

The above section gives a good impression of the whole book. In a couple of places he broods at a more theological level, bringing in Feuerbach and sundry authors he has read.

The madness of the modern is far distant in this story. It is a shock that the mythological conception of the universe is so close and yet so extinct. The calm piety of the narrator is placed in the last decade in which it was possible - any later and such belief begins to reek of reactionary fundamentalism, a willful turning away from science and modern thought.

The medium is the message. This book could have been an elderly parishioner's accolade to his lineage of pastors. It could be the editied diaries of a preacher. But no, it is a piece of literary fiction, a novel for the international market. Winner of the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award, blurbs of praise from all the large newspapers. The author seems to have drawn a lot of Jesus-nostalgia out into the open. Even so, I'm baffled.

Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys

So, you can write. You've got the sense of pacing, the skill to juggle styles, a keen eye, the nuts and bolts of grammar too. So, what are you going to do next? Employ these skills to uncover new truths about human nature? Show us what real people are and how they behave?

Will Self (surely not his real name) has got the control of language and the pyrotechnics. He's smart enough to know that there's nothing he can teach that anyone wants to learn. And as for authentic characters, there may be a good stock of those left in poorer countries, but none among his intended audience. There are whole schools of philosophy to tell us there's nothing real to write about. Inevitably the stories he chooses are whimsical pastiches: i.e. brilliant and irreverent.

I changed my mind though when I reached Caring, Sharing, a classic speculative (that's the word that replaces science fiction) tale of a world where people have 14-foot tall 'emotos' to hug them. A world where we can all be children in the arms of the dim-witted (but emotional 140+ IQ) cuddly giants.

This story skips the authorial wink "look at what I'm doing now" - like in the story Flytopia where there's a town called Inwardleigh (inwardly - get it?). In this story too - to take just one example - a character wears a foulard tie. If it was a blue and red striped tie I'd think 'Hmm, why is that significant?" But a foulard tie tells me I'm not as clever as Will Self. By the time a character stops off to buy pork sausages I'm thinking, what? No coarse-cut Cumberlands with thyme?

He's great for abartig moments of perception - the crows in a park are described as:

In their greasy, feathercapes of grey and black, they might be avine impersonators, hustling a sexual practice founded on fluttering and paid for in peanuts.

Love it or hate it, Will is a meister at glossarial overkill:

Well past its fashionable sell-by date, the hotel's décor retailed a series of dazzlingly crass decadences, which Travis knew provided salience for his own sepia image.

Deuce to him for throwing out stories based on on some juvenile speculative premise. I too would love to write a story about bluebottles taking over the world, the mind of a two-year-old being swapped with that of a businessman, a twist in the universe so suddenly everybody's name is Dave. Sounds like nineteen fifties sci-fi fun. But it's not that way with Will. The plot seems secondary to the linguistic special effects, the show of bravado, a coke-turboed ad-lib exhibition.

Here's a few new words I learned:

moue    ultramontanism    rentier    bias cut    orchidaceous    with dispatch    obloquy    purlieus    louring    electrolier    foulard    empyrean    as well as plenty that I did understand, (amn't I clever) like adipose, agglutinative, Besserwessi, idiolect, ziggurat, velveteen, liveried, bodice, wisteria, eidetic, deliquesce, amniocentesis.

Now to read some reviews on google . . . seems like his name is genuine. What an advantage in life to have.

Philosophy is for Everyman

Despite the title this is not an exposition of a philosophical view. It is a series of essays based on televised lectures Jaspers presented in the 60's. He speaks of political freedom, the individual in a mass society, the roles of sociology and psychology, the ineluctable nature of ideology, man as an animal.

Faced with the highest human images we say in self-defence "I don't want to be like that, I want to be like everyone else."

The overwhelming majority of peoples and nations testify against freedom.

Marx and Freud have created a ruinous conception of man. . . . they were men of hate, who, like prophets, inspired faith.

Philosophy of Existence,

I read Jaspers because Sartre waffles and I can't understand Heidegger. This book was first presented as a series of lectures in Frankfurt in 1937, soon after he had been dismissed from his professorship by the new regime. Nowadays the ideas he presented are labelled existentionalism™ and discussed exclusively in universities. The word itself becomes just another "ism' along with the now more fashionable post-modernism, deconstructionism, structuralism. I only mention these latter - I don't know what they mean.

™   I remember someone (a college teacher actually) asking me if I adhered to the existentionalist philosophy. Whenever I go to write "existentialism" now I feel a chuckle coming on. A few days after I wrote the above I noticed his infectious legacy.

Any bullet-point summary I might make of Jasper's thinking would make him sound like a new-age holistic guru more concerned with making the world a warm fuzzy place than with truth. I get impatient with any modern day criticisms which oppose an intuitive or artistic way of knowing (emotional intelligence and the like) to the exact sciences.

When reading his ideas on freedom I assumed he had read Camus's work - Jaspers postulates a man who cannot accept the transcendence of freedom. On checking dates it was a shock to learn this book was published two years before Camus' Myth of Sisyphus.

"Either I sink into the bottomless of the infinite: I stand in Nothingness, in the face of which I am what I can be through myself alone." . . . "If nothing comes to meet me, if I do not love, if what is does not come to me through my love and I do not become myself in it, then I remain in the end as an existence that can be used only like raw material. "

(Jaspers would not claim that there is an error in Camus' thinking.) Jaspers, like all the Germans, is big into talking about Being with a capital B. This used to annoy me until I realised the word does not come loaded with preconceptions. I think of it as all that is or can be spoken of, or thought, or felt. The word itself however does tend to lead to questions such as "what is the Being of "belief"?" - avenues which Sartre goes down ad nauseum. What Jaspers points out is that Being is not and cannot be restricted to only determinate objects. Being has at times in history variously been interpreted as purely objects, or purely subjectivity, or matter, or energy, or mathematical law, or God, or illusion, or spirit. By understanding these attempts to grasp being I can approach Jasper's thought that it is something else, and even saying "is" here is already deceptive. He uses the word "the encompassing" to encompass the reality that yields both objects and the subjectivity that encounters them. The word already presumes some kind of unity - a more analytic person will insist on sticking with things that can be known and will be forced into taking one mode of being for all of being and dismissing other thoughtpaths as worthless. (This 'dismissal' is often more brave and honest than the alternative.)

It is strange to me to think that Jasper's ideas are discussed in philosophy departments in universities. I can't imagine students sitting around talking about these things. Sometimes I take a sentence at random from this book just to feel how gnomic it sounds out of context. His thought is not well-argued; it is precise, not vague, lucid, always lucid.

"we make our existence into an object for ourselves, acting upon it and manipulating it."

The masses are our masters; and for every one who looks facts in the face his existence has become dependent on them, so that the thought of them must control his doings, his cares, and his duties.

Here is the wiki page of quotations from Jaspers. Mark them well. Here are some more.

BBC website

'Altruistic' Brain Region Found   Scientists say they have found the part of the brain that predicts whether a person will be selfish or an altruist. Altruism - the tendency to help others without obvious benefit to oneself - appears to be linked to an area called the posterior superior temporal sulcus. Using brain scans, the US investigators found this region related to a person's real-life unselfish behaviour.

"Although understanding the function of this brain region may not necessarily identify what drives people like Mother Theresa, it may give clues to the origins of important social behaviours like altruism."

When I was small I used to read science books which explained all our actions are the result of genes and brain cells. I wondered what would happen if the common ignorant people came to believe this.

We are seeing it happen now, for those who have eyes to see.

Collected Stories

The only story of Babel I had read before I bought this collection (two years ago now) was The Story of my Dovecote. I did however come across a reference to him in a travelogue by Danish writer Carsten Jensen. It prompted me to track down more of Babel's work. I read the stories, was fascinated by the displacement of emphasis, the tangle and clash of names and details interspersed with visionary flashes. These are some of the tricks in his repertoire: jumping into a dialogue with the context delayed by a few paragraphs or not given at all, scrawny bearded characters who rant for a moment and disappear, elements of grotesque folk tales. It made me question again my own puritanical view, my unwillingness to use artifice.

It is hard for us - me - to imagine the conditions under which Babel lived. Russia has had a thousand year history since the days of his boyhood. The words on the page are in a style that still comes across as edgy, modern, but if you were to go to his native village it is fairly certain there would be no-one to remember his family name, the house where he grew up (though I am sure some university has put up a plaque), the shops and theatre houses Babel describes. The war in Poland in which he fought does not feature highly in folk memory there, being displaced by other sufferings. It is referred to as the 1920 war, to distinguish it from the others.

I rooted out Jensen's book from my cardboard box. There are three and a half pages on Babel's work; surely unique for a travel book on the far east.

Babel was one of the seminal writers of the twentieth century and his style - almost reportage in its immediacy, ice-cold, but not without lyrical intensity in its matter-of-fact rendering of detail - was destined to found an entire literary school. Babel gives the impression of being sublimely indifferent to the events that take place under his nose. He makes no judgements, does not interpret these events, seems barely to comprehend them, and it is this distance which in a subtle indirect way accords his writing style its pathos. But it would be wrong to imagine that this pathos springs from the presence of death on the battlefield, the sufferings of men, their recklessness and self-sacrifice. Rather it is the pathos of self-refutation. So writes an intellectual who longs with all his might to free himself of his spiritual baggage, to escape the moral labyrinths of soul-searching and surrender instead to an elemtary man's world of action and intoxicating freedom. The pathos of this style is not the pathos of the warrior, but the pathos of intellectual suicide, the pathos of self-loathing and spiritual flagellation.

. . .

When an intellectual writes like this, he does so because he is doing violence to his self, his empathy, his right to doubt. He longs to break out into a more simplified reality, into the spring that will release him from the autumn in his heart and the spectacles on his nose. It is a style that would like to be viewed as a salute to a new reality and it is as such that it comes to create a school in the twentieth century, as an expression of the intellectual's fascination with anti-intellectualism

"You four-eyed lot," one of the Cossacks says to Babel. There they are again, the glasses, in a version reminiscent of the phrase "to speak with a forked tongue," to be a liar and a crook. Seeing with two pairs of eyes amounts to the same thing. You can't trust an intellectual. He is the outsider, able to atone for his position only by removing his glasses and becoming one with the people, that company of noble savages. Which is what Babel does: he atones and becomes one of them, by trading the kingdom of the intellectual for a Cossack horse.

Jensen's book was a present someone gave me when I lived in Poland. I just noticed the dedication: Let us always stay in touch. I have had no contact with that person for over six years now.

Consilience

This whole book is a reassertion of rationality and the power of science. It starts with an overview of the Enlightenment, and the soul-comfort a scientific world-view brought to brave thinkers in those times. The Ionian Enchantment, he calls it. He well captures the intellectual excitement of the era, the freedom from superstition science brings. And for good reason; in a short autobiographical insight not repeated elsewhere in the book he writes:

I had been raised a Southern Baptist, laid backward under the water on the sturdy arm of a pastor, been born again. I knew the healing power of redemption. Faith, hope, and charity were in my bones, and with millions of others I knew that my saviour Jesus Christ would grant me eternal life.

This was in 1940's Alabama. Young Wilson chose to study biology. He saw how the theory of evolution, and later genetics and cognitive science, undermined the beliefs of his community. And these sciences continue to undermine people's naive beliefs concerning human nature. Here are a few recent news items:

• Gene for shyness has been isolated
• Damage to the frontal lobes in childhood impairs social behaviour without impairing intelligence
• Personality change due to freak accident
• Good-looking people have a more attractive body smell
• A mutation involving outbursts of aggressive behaviour has been isolated on the X chromesome

Everyone is familiar with the idea of the human body as a machine developed by evolution for the purpose of surviving long enough to propogate. Since Darwin's time it has been abundantly clear where the theory of evolution would lead: human behaviour, our values, our altruism, our tribalism and our arts are rooted in our biological nature. For some familiarity breeds contempt, and they continue their lives unaffected by such scientific results, and furthermore they dismiss them as irrelevant to ordinary life. For others the constant awareness that they are determined and bound creatures can shrink their self-image, narrow the circle of responsibility. Let me not speak in generalities here: a teacher friend had a pupil present him with a doctor's note. The boy had been diagnosed with a behavioural problem that made him lie compulsively.

Wilson does not emphasise the destructive side of such knowledge. He is in thrall to the Ionian Enchantment. Currently sociology, psychology, anthropology, political science, ethics, and art criticism each have rules specific to their domain. Each of these subjects is characterised by divisions into schools of followers. They also often involve close study of the works of the founder, unlike the hard sciences where almost nobody studies, e.g. Einstein's original papers. Wilson wants to show how the humanities can and must be based on the hard sciences - this is what he terms consilience. In effect he wants to make the soft sciences turn hard. It is a pleasure to read this unashamed and robust argument for the unity of all knowledge. There are some great passages on the evolution of mind and culture. He lists the universals of culture, whch include joking, sports, and dream interpretation. In the future be able to ground such behaviours in genetics and epigentic rules. In other parts he looks at mother-child bonding, incest taboos, colour vocabularies, etc, and shows how how the first steps are been made at explaining these on the level of genetics and evolutionary biology.

"The search for human nature can be regarded as the archaeology of epigenetic rules" he writes. Is human nature to be discovered by investigating the hundreds of societies that exist on earth, or is it to be discovered by introspection by the individual? Wilson is clear that it is the former. His work is a triumphant yea-saying to the march of the consilient (reductionist if you prefer) point of view. But at length it will undermine its own impetus.

In discussing the distinguishing features of human thought:

intuitive and dogmatic, bound up with specific emotional relationships rather than physical casuality, preoccupied with essences and metamorphosis, prone to use language for social interaction rather than as a conceptual tool . . .

. . . the same preliterate traits are commonplace in citizens of modern industrial societies. Systematic logico-deductive thought, which is very much a specialised product of Western culture, comes hard on the other hand, and is very rare.

There you have it - the crack that reveal both the strengths and weakness of the whole. For if this is human nature, then whence is the imperative to study science? Whence the imperative towards knowing the truth? The justification for imposing science on thousands of schoolchildren?

The fundamental explanation of mind is an empirical rather than a philosophical quest.

In a chapter on ethics he makes the claim that a true science of ethics would seek to form a code which best reflects the intuitive principles that are part of our heritage. A code which accords best with human nature. Similar principles would be applied to political science and practical politics.

This is frightening stuff. Yet where is the alternative source of guidance? If ought is not is, then what is? pleads Wilson. I don't have the answers, I'm just pointing out that Wilson is inconsistent, and digs the ground from under himself.

He is lead at last to the fantastically evocative statement:

The symbol-forming human mind however, never stays satisfied with raw apish feeling in any emotional realm.

In other words it is human nature to be disatisfied with human nature. This is pretty much the starting point of existentialism:

Man is a power to be, an impulsion, a bounding-leap, a being in advance of hmself. But for Jaspers the human being tends to extend beyond human existence; for Heidegger there is nothing else but the world of man, thrust outside of himself and in front of himself . . . the human is always something more than what he is (immediately) even though he is not yet what he shall be.

This is from a standard book on existentialism - I do not provide references.

The book ends with a discussion of some environmental issues, and the future of mankind over the next century. It's the best general science book I've read for a decade - dump Dawkins in the bin and put Penrose's new book at the end of the shelf (it will be too difficult for you anyway), this work will equip you to better understand the untethered world we now inhabit.

The Unconsoled,

As a child I used to read the novels of Dostoyevski, J. P. Hartley and Henry James. The characters were full of emotional complexity, bursting with motivations and sensitivities. The people among whom I grew up were simple-minded, half-animalistic by comparison.

For a long time I held the idea that the people in those times and places were more real, and that mankind had degenerated since into superficial, babbling creatures, without thoughts inside their heads.

What does this have to do with Ishiguro's novel?

Mr Ryder, a famous musician, has arrived in a provincial city to give a concert. The citizens are worried about the direction musical taste has taken in their city over the past couple of decades. There is a lot of anxiety between them over obscure points of musical interpretation. They are concerned to give the right impression, to provide appropriate care for Ryder's elderly parents, to ensure his stay among them is comfortable. This extreme sensitivity extends to other parts of life. The porter lectures Mr Ryder over four pages on the honour and discipline of his job, and the decline in the porter's craft over recent years. He invites Mr Ryder to see the 'Porter's Dance' - just one of many traditions surrounding the trade.

The hotel proprietor at one point relates to Mr Ryder a series of events trivial in themselves, but which under his interpretation portend the negation of his life's work and a future split between him and his wife. There is no bottom to the depth of interpretation in this novel. The characters have a complexity which opens inward to an infinite space.

Maybe Ishiguro wanted to portray an alternative world of dignified, deep personalities. Or maybe he just loved setting up a sense of mystery. He could have done it in half the number of pages. Once we get the idea that, for example, the porter worries incessantly about the dignity of his craft, there is no need to see this pattern implemented with other characters. Obsessive contemplation recurs again and again, just a few times too many.

The novel is ultimately disappointing. It captures an atmosphere of repressed communication, of hearts churning beneath a white shirt and bow-tie. But it captures it repeatedly, and the ending just peters out.

It's a strange book however. It leaps back to the days before psychology, extermination, mass media and terror. It skips the whole 20th century and reclaims a sense of the diginity of the characters in this story. The drive of much modern fiction is that our motives are not as pure as we think. If a character in such a novel were to jump into life and read it, he would feel hollowed out, exploited and cast aside.

A character in Ishiguro's novel on the other hand would be likely to commend the author on his perceptiveness and point out a few instances of misinterpretation.

Once Upon a Number

The quotation from Hume with which he prefaces his book aptly sums up his own, optimistic, view of the connection between hard science and general life.

"I cannot but consider myself as a kind of resident or ambassador from the dominions of learning to those of conversation, and shall think it my constant duty to promote a good correspondence betwixt these two states, which have so great a dependence on each other."

Paulos speaks with the voice of the enlightenment, from an age when truth was worth striving for, and once achieved could be put to the service of humanity, to ennoble us, materially, intellectually, spiritually. He addresses the man-on-the-street, with a confidence that mathematics should be of interest to everybody. There is no condescension in his tone. He doesn't present absurdly simple mental exercises for the reader and then pat him on the back.

The book is in one aspect a collection of anecdotes about the application of maths to everyday life. The most obvious area is statistics and their use and abuse, but he finds many more fascinating examples.

• how our naive estimations of probability can be wide off the mark
• how stats can be abused
• Bible codes
• prejudices and how they can slant our interpretations
• extensional logic and the stock market
• emergence of order from randomness

One of the paradoxes he mentions is the lotto, say for example a 6 digit lotto. Every number has an equal chance of winning, right? Not true. Numbers which are in an easy-to-remember form like 234543 or that could be dates e.g. 140297 win the lotto more often. Put like that it's baffling. But think about how the lotto works. If the number drawn has not been chosen by anyone, another number is drawn. And so on until a number is drawn for which there is a winner. Many people choose their birthday etc as their number, and so these types are over-represented. Paradoxes like this can appear in covert ways when we apply maths to reality, and usually so as to reinforce the beliefs held by the person making the argument.

Paulos writes about the application of maths to court cases, and in particular to the infamous O.J. Simpson trial. He describes some of the twisting of statistics by the defence in that trial. It is implied that if the jury had been a little more aware they wouldn't have been as easily fooled. "We're so often cocksure of our decisions, actions and beliefs because we fail to look for counterexamples, pay no attention to alternative views and their consequences, and distort our memories and are seduced by our own explanatory schemes."

And we will become more and more so. The O.J. Simpson trial is only the beginning. The rule of reason is at an end. Reason is boring. An investigation into whether Clinton ejaculated on a dress, a car chase televised live: these are things that never happened on earth before. There will be more of them. Does anyone still believe that education is bringing us towards a better society, that the insights Paulos is bringing to the masses will improve them? At what point was it in the late twentieth century that insight and reasoning ceased to be something to strive for and became a lifestyle choice?

At certain points in the book it becomes clear that Paulos is aware of - what should we call it? The crisis of the modern? He writes: "We're content to pick up small bits of pattern if ever and wherever they might be found. Indeed this book's piecemeal, episodic structure is due to a similar impatience with lofty claims and simplistic theories." Yes, but your plea that we should have more reason in our lives is one of those lofty claims.

It's a strange universe we have arrived at, where a book on how a little analytic thinking can help us in our lives comes across as old-fashioned, willfully naive, out of place in this era.

I was wondering why he didn't have a brief account of another point of interface between mathematics and society that mathematicians like to talk about - the 2000 presidential election where Gore got the majority of votes but Bush got elected. The president is elected on the number of "electoral votes" he gains, and the number of electoral votes is only roughly proportional to the population of a state. The Bush campaign conserved resources by campaigning hard in the marginal states. That could be taken as an application of mathematical reasoning.

I looked at the inside cover and found it was published in 1998. It made me wonder if his faith in commonsense, (supported with a little mathematical insight) would be the same if it was written today. The call to listen to reason seems weaker now. Pointing out to readers the perversions in logic that sold the war to the common people would seem a necessary task, but one to be undertaken stoically, not in any hope that things will get better.

I examined the library slip pasted on the front leaf. The book has been borrowed 5 or 6 times a year for the past three years. That's about the maximum in fact, because people can renew online for up to two months.

The Limits of Vision

It was title that attracted me - I thought immediately of William Blake, who in fact makes an appearance in the book - that, and the recommendation by Jeanette Winterson on the cover. "A genuine and rare work of the imagination."

It's always exciting to read an uncompromising work that pays no heed to the populist notion of readability. The narrator, Marcia, can look at a crease on a bedsheet and go off on a convoluted chain of associations. It is more a compulsive burrowing downward than a flight of fancy. The white sheet becomes a snowy shore, there is a house at the edge of the snows; someone lies dying. It's an old woman in a strait-jacket. She has been stabbed by the man who does not dream. He treads backwards on snow-shoes, making his escape, until on the white horizon he sees the Queen of the Snows.

Marica spends some more time in this landscape, and ponders this question: geologists make great studies of creases in the earth's crust just because they are big and last long, but why shouldn't sheet folds be as important because they are small and here only briefly?

She goes downstairs to continue the day's cleaning. The old grey carpet only seems grey, down on hands and knees there are islands of wool on a lattice of threads, and even in the poor light the fibres are a riot of colours. Marica follows the course of a dustball across this ocean for three full pages until she reaches the fungus, who personifies the Empire of Decay. She talks with him until the doorbell rings, three times. It is her housewife friends, coming for the coffee morning.

Throughout the day her mind veers from bits of dirt to conversations with the likes of Darwin, Blake, and Teilhard DeChardin. The buzzing inside this housewife's head is utterly disproportionate to her mundane reality. We are told Marcia is a mathematics graduate, and now she stays at home cleaning all day while her husband goes to his office. However there is no real sense of the tragedy of a mind growing in on itself. It's all sophisticated entertainment. The intricate machinations are sometimes fascinating, often boring, and always with arbitrary twists.

My chief complaint is the narrator's vision is just not weird enough. I feel the author is only pretending; at heart he is comfortably in the same universe as Marcia's husband and the doctor in the white coat. He has given us only a fictional Marcia.

Best New American Voices 2003

It's a collection of short stories from Hodges Figgis bargain basement, though a sticker on it proclaims WATERSTONES. There are a number of such collections still down there awaiting release. The stories have been collected from creative writing programs and workshops around North America (which includes Canada I feel forced to add). I have always disliked the idea of writing courses, even before I knew they existed. But exist they do, and if any writer wants to meet people who know something about good writing and generally socialise with people who know how to read, then he/she will eventually join some programme. I can't really believe that their writing will become conformist because of this. What causes conformity is assuming that if a writer doesn't have an MACR then they are not polished enough to be published.

I've read three stories so far. They are in fact quite 'literary' in style, that is, they presume the reader has read a fair amount of modern writing and is familiar with the techniques. They are good, well worth reading, but so far they haven't said anything to me.

You Must Remember This

Middle-aged parents, a teenage daughter, first girlfriend. What is Aiden O'Reilly doing reading a novel devoted exclusively to these themes? Is it that old cliche, she sees into the universals of human nature? I don't think so. In a work by any other writer I would give up half way. But Oates is in control of strange magic. She involves this reader in the sin of caring more about her creations, as creations, than I do about the typical real people they are based on.

The prose races, carried along not by plot devices, but by the gathering crests of people's inner thoughts, or purely by the narrator's revelation of what is happening, released clause by clause, insight by insight. With Oates there is no end to what insights can be won into the most ordinary turn of events.

The novel is about a family in 50's New York State. Contemporary events make their appearance - the son is drafted to Korea and Mr Stevick gets reported to the police for appearing to know too much about Soviet Russia to a patriotic customer at his furniture shop. (Later, he invests a lot of money in building a nuclear shelter.) But mostly the story is about 15 year-old Enid, her attempted suicide and affair with her uncle. The plot goes into her uncle Felix's life - a boxer and man of action. The sections on her brother Warren could form a separate novella, but they are if anything more interesting than the main plot. In saying that the prose style and inner thoughts are more important than the plot I might give the wrong impression that this is a "literary" novel. The cover blurbs will correct this: This is a very sexy novel - a novel that will make you sweat, summer or not. Blurbs are by the Daily Telegraph, Cosmo, and Vanity Fair - but what publisher wouldn't try to smuggle out a work of great art as a thumping good beach read?

Oates is the goddess who can alight on any life and make it glow with significance.

Millenium People

I remember the shock I felt when I saw the vivid design and metallic cover of Cocaine Nights. Everything about it screamed blockbuster. I scanned through the blurbs and traced the line of white cocaine on the mirror-effect surface. There was nothing on the outside to remind me of the Ballard I had read all through my youth. The hype machine had reached him and transformed him to "a cultural icon".

But it had not transformed his writing. I found it hard to believe that the moguls could market him as a product for the masses. His writing has always been animated by ideas more so than plot, style is valued more than character development. His writing simply had nothing in common with popular literature.

But if I'd been more savvy about how the media operates I wouldn't have been surprised. The film Empire of the Sun had been a huge success, and Ballard was acquiring iconic status. The media does not care if your writing mercilessly probes the 20th century landscape of fame, media distortion, mass hysteria, shopping malls and emasculated lives. And so though even the most dim-witted of the publisher's advertising executives could see the irony of a recommendation from the Daily Mail being displayed proudly on the front cover, yet they still put it there.

Long-time fans of Ballard will let themselves be carried along by the neutral voice of the narrator, waiting for those moments when the text turns a corner into the bizarre and visionary. A Ballard character is a complex mechanism of drives and cogitations which reveals itself in cryptic sentences just a couple of times over the course of a novel. They are not plausible characters - but then the Michal Ryan's and Theodore Kaczynski's of this world are not plausible either. And it is these kinds of people that Ballard is probing.

Millenium People follows the narrator, David Markham, as he investigates the apparently motiveless bombing at Heathrow airport which killed his first wife. He is led into a world of middle-class rebellion and motive-less violence. Many of the ideas are similar to those explored in Running Wild - and if you can get your hands on that tiny gem of a novella then read it. I much prefer its minimalist style aand precise pacing. This latest novel seems to make too many concessions to the mass market in toning down the abstract prose, keeping to the 290 pages length, and keeping the plot skipping along with rather too many coincidental meetings.

Don't bother reading the blurbs though. They will only make you disappointed with the novel. Try to pretend it's something you picked up at a jumble sale, a work by an obscure author who served a short sentence for possession of cocaine.

The Captive Mind

This is a collection of essays from the 1950's by the Polish poet. He seeks analogies and historical precedences to try to understand the grip Communism took over Eastern Europe after the war. We are on the outside of that type of society, and can observe and delineate the forces at play. It is different in our own type of society. We are fish in water, and cannot describe the medium through which we move.

There is a sequence of four essays, originally published in Polish, on Polish writers whom he denotes Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta. These would be fairly well-known figures to Poles at least. I don't think Czeslaw is trying to preserve anonymity, it's rather that he wants to dispel any preconceptions about them. It might also be a legal chicanery. Czeslaw writes about how each of these writers coped with the regime, to what extent they had to compromise, to what extent they became apologists. In the conditions in which they lived, writing could never be a merely artistic activity.

Reading it I get an enormous sense of the tragedy of lost idealism in this century. It seems salvation lies in discarding any kind of political idealism, apart from the very modest aim of making laws which facilitate business.

The first essay, Looking to the West, reminded me of Enzensberger's essays (below). It is exhilarating to see our western world seen at such a broad angle. Reading newspapers gives you the feeling that the world changes irrevocably every ten years. It seems the ideas and values of the eighties are already old hat, never mind the sixties. Reading these essays is like seeing our patch of the world from a great height. Things have changed indeed, but we are still in the same era. We have not yet come to terms.

The Street of Crocodiles

"He was small, unattractive and sickly, with a thin angular body and brown, deep-set eyes in a pale triangular face." Thus begins the translator's preface to this collection of Schulz's fiction. The stories spill over with blinding white sunlight, dust rising from the roads, the odour of ripe apricots, nooks, broken furniture, and all manner of kitchen utensils. Be warned: This is not a spare, understated style of writing. This is a hothouse of impressions.

Schulz came from a city you have never heard of, and few knew him as anything other than a schoolteacher in the local liceum on the day he was casually shot by a Gestapo officer.

His work has often been compared with Kafka's. (Schulz was the first to translate Kafka into Polish, but this was after Schulz's main works were completed.) Both created private works of the imagination which only indirectly reflect on the age in which they lived.

Read him and enjoy the cumulative sentences, the rich descriptions, and the odour of concealed corruption that permeates the street of crocodiles.

ROBOT

An account of an MIT researcher's life & work constructing AI creatures. His view is that to create useful electronic intelligence one should start by trying to mimic primitive creatures like flies or beetles. The practical applications he thinks up betray a severe lack of imagination: hoovers that seek out dirty spots on the carpet, a machine to fetch you a beer from the fridge. But it is not his technical accounts of progress in automata that fascinated me. It was this: I believe myself and my children to be mere machines . . . when I look at my children I can see that they are machines interacting with the world.

Mediocrity & Delusion

A short collection of essays by a German poet and thinker. Some date from the 70's. Enzensberger can say more about the modern world in four pages than others can in a whole book. I much prefer his confident, reasonable voice, addressed to the general interested reader (as if they still exist), than I do the voice of Derrida.

His short essays range over television, tabloid papers, the tenacity of literature, the World bank, international terrorism (in 1986). I like them because they are a critique coming from someone who is not immersed in the modern and has not accepted its premises. Also he is a poet himself, a creator, and never sinks to being a mere negation of all that's new.

Shadows on our Skin

Having lived abroad over half my adult life it's perhaps understandable that I have no allegiance to Irish writing. The author's being Irish has never influenced my choice until recently. Now I keep an eye on Irish writers old and new. Shadows is written in a very spare simple style. It's set in 70's Derry. But the violence remains in the background - at one point several shots are fired and two British soldiers are killed, but it takes place just out of sight around the corner. It's very readable and very real. Some might call it deceptively simple - I'd call it simply simple. I don't mean that in a derogatory way.

Homo faber

A 50 year-old Swiss engineer on his way to South America to work on some turbines. He has a belief in progress, education, rational relationships between people. He has limited tolerance for self-indulgence, over-emotional behaviour, religious faith. Art & music he can tolerate if it is classic - nothing 20th century, except of course the technology.

His world-view takes a battering several times and he is plunged into a confrontation with the irrational. The characters and situations are surprisingly modern - there are only a few points where you remember the year is 1957. This is partly because he leads a high-tech life, flying from New York to Paris on business, renting cars, using his skills to help develop poorer countries. He is the epitome of the international modern man.

One chapter is set in Cuba. It was interesting to catch this glimpse of life before the revolution there, and to realise that Max Frisch had no idea what drastic turn history would take there.