The Death of Imagination

With exquisite timing, the weather turned just after Labour Day. It had threatened to do so earlier--in fact, I'd turned off the AC Sunday in anticipation of not needing it again until next year and was forced to relent that very afternoon. But it's been consistently under 20°C since yesterday evening and that's where it will stay for at least a couple days. We'll probably get some glorious fall weather pretty soon, but right now it is grey and rainy and I'm loving it.

This is what I've been waiting for for weeks, where it actually feels like a reward to stay in and not a punishment. I'm wearing flannel pyjama pants and drinking tea and basically indulging in all the Fall Things again. One of those things is reading. My official Spoopy Book for Fall this year is something called White is for witching by Helen Oyeyemi; don't know anything about the book or the author except that I was intrigued to see what a British Nigerian's take take on the classic haunted house in the English countryside novel might be.

So far I'm still wondering. A hundred pages in and it feels like she's not done assembling the pieces for her plot. She's rather thoroughly introduced her main characters--including the house, which actually has dialogue (or rather, monologue, as it addresses the reader directly). Amusingly, she's just introduced a character with a Nigerian given name who seems like a cringeworthy cliché (she cooks for the family and practices juju) but I trust her to have some interesting twist in store.

COVID seems to be affecting my ability to concentrate, given my seeming inability to finish anything. I've already chronicled how Un nos ola leuad took me simply ages, despite being an excellent work, and the same thing is happening with El amor en los tiempos de cólera. I stalled out for a while about the same time as the juvenile romance did but then García Márquez surprised me by shifting the focus to a successful middle-aged marriage, which is much more my style. I've just crested the two-thirds mark and hopefully gathered enough momentum to finish it off before the end of the year.

Its latest competition is something called Sarmada by Syrian author Fadi Azzam. I think I may actually have ordered this because I was intrigued by a novel being told from a Druze viewpoint. Still very early days but I find his prose very readable so far. It will be a joy compared to the novel I just finished, Erhöhte Blauanteil by someone named Bruno Steiger (who's so obscure this novel wasn't even in Goodreads until I added it). A mere 126 pages, it nonetheless took me weeks to finish because there's no plot to speak of, just a Mary Sue Swiss-German author of obscure novels going on endlessly about Peter Handke (who I haven't read and don't plan to) and avoiding work. I can't even tell you why I decided to finish it, to be honest. I guess I just kept thinking there had to be something more to it than there was.

So vacation was the worst of times for reading, and the best of times. My flight day out was almost 16 hours all told. I thought by the end of that I'd be too tired to even focus on print but that turned out to be where I really hit my stride: I finished off a short novel set on Oʻahu (Zamora Linmark's Rolling the r's) and read 200 pages of a longer one (Hulme's The bone people).

Then I bottomed out. Evenings, when I'd normally be reading to fall asleep, I was keeping Ginger Farmboy company. Even the day I spent recovering from seasickness I don't think I read more than one or two short stories in Under Maui skies and other stories, a collection by local boy Wayne Moniz that I found in the "Hawai'iana" section of the Maui Friends of the Library Bookstore in the Queen Ka'ahumanu Center in Kahului. (Apparently they have a warehouse south of town with ten times the number of volumes but we didn't have time to make it there.) Not great literature by any means but everything else they had looked worse.

I had high hopes for the return trip, but I was sleepy on the flight to the mainland and developed motion sickness on my last day in California, so I could only read with great caution. The time shift wrecked my sleep schedule so when I got home I found I had to force myself to stay up in the evenings to get back on track. Reading isn't conducive to that, especially something like the Hulme that requires significant concentration.

But now I'm back in the saddle. I dawdled over Julie Otsuka's The Buddha in the attic, a short novel with a simple style the nonetheless had some heft. It's an account of issei and nisei immigrants in California in the early part of last century ending with their deportation to the camps in 1942. Rather than focus on a single family or settlement, as most authors would, she tries to tell the story of all the immigrants at once using a first-person plural voice that embraces multitudes. You'd think that might be distancing but I found myself having to take breaks to stave off getting too farklemt fun hertsn.

Randomly, I also picked up some Flaubert again. I recently acquired Trois contes and raced to finish "Un cœur simple" before leaving for Maui so I wouldn't have to haul it with me (slim though it was). Last weekend, I began "Saint Julien l'Hospitaleur", which is a trove of vocabulary for medieval things like turrets and headdresses. I'd really like to get back to Un nos ola leuad but a couple weeks ago I hit a patch of full-on Literary Welsh and skidded hard. Maybe next week when I start to get my concentration back.

It's windy today, and warm by the standards of the last couple weeks (though par for November in general). Walking to lunch, I was showered with dead leaves and I loved it.

It made me think about my odd affection for reading works set at the time of year and/or in the weather conditions I'm currently experiencing. I never want to read a story set at Christmas unless it's actually close to Christmas and I'd much rather read a novel set in the springtime when it's actually spring and not when there's snow on the ground.

I'm not sure how far back this tendency goes but it's only gotten stronger with time. Now I stop reading books cold when I realise they are "out of season". And if the author aligns the chapters to calendar days, I will try to read each chapter on its corresponding day. (Sometimes this works better than others; I had one Swedish novel where most of the action took place over a couple weeks and then there was a sizable gap before the last couple chapters.)

In any case, winter has come early this year so I'm already reading Russians. I've got a lot of choices, but for the time being I'm tackling two early works by contemporary post-Soviet authors. One is Минус (translated as Minus by Arch Tait), a semiauthobiographical novel by Roman Senchin, an ethnic Russian from the Tuvan Republic. It's set in Minusinsk, a city at the southern tip of Krasnoyarsk Krai where his family fled after the fall of the USSR.

It's surprising that I'm able to remain sympathetic to the protagonist despite his sexism, racism, and homophobia. Perhaps it's because he seems more than anything to be passively regurgitating what he's been brought up with. There's the sense that, in a better environment, he might have become a better person. But he's surrounded for the most part with much bigger wastrels and bullies and ends up looking decent by comparison.

One thing it conspicuously lacks is humour, but luckily there's plenty in Viktor Pelevin's short stories, even if it is of a particularly bleak and satirical flavour. The stories in the collection, A werewolf problem in Central Russia, date from the early 90s and focus on the contradictions of the USSR. The stories are surreal parables, somewhat in the vein of Kafka or Schulz, but with a contemporary sensibility.

I'm not sure what I'll transition to after this. I have my eye on some more Russian works and some South Asian ones, but I feel like I should get back to reading in a language other than English. I have works in Swedish and Welsh at the ready but my last experiences with those were disheartening. Maybe it's time to bring back German.

Seems like forever since a reading update. Looking at my Goodreads, I see that--what with all the disruption to my routine--it took me three weeks to get through my most recent novel. Sometimes travel is a great opportunity to get through something, but more often it means I'm so distracted that I forget I even have a book with me.

Thanks exactly what happened on the ride back from St Louis. It was a full train, so after the fella settled in on the aisle side, I took out my paperback and slid it into the seat pocket in front of me. Then I remembered that part of the reason for booking an afternoon run was to enjoy the fall scenery speeding by. So I headed to the café car--and fell into a conversation with a rotating cast of strangers that occupied me for the next four hours. By the time I got back to my seat, the four gay guys heading up to Chicago for a weekend on the razzle had finished two bottles of wine and they swept me up into their antics so fully that I was half a block from the station before I remembered my book.

No problem, it was a used bargain anyway, I figured I'd just rebuy it. But I was impatient to finish it and didn't want to wait for delivery. It was published last year, so not necessarily recent enough to be in stores but likely to be found in library collections. Checking the catalog when I got home, I found it available at a local branch of the Chicago Public Library and resolved to do something I'd successfully avoided for 31 years in Chicago: get my library card.

It was kind of a frustrating experience. I was in kind of a mood when I got there and it wasn't helped by the woman at the front desk who spoke instructions in a quiet voice and didn't explain them. Whenever I asked for clarification, she just repeated herself, and when I got frustrated, she made a remark about "some people" to the next person in line. Well, whatever; Big Red told me afterwards that the Edgewater Branch is not the best, so maybe I'll give the one in RP a try.

The book in question was An excess male by Maggie Shen King. I knew nothing about her, but the blurb looked interesting and the story hooked me in. She alternates between several narrators, which I felt was a good technique since it builds sympathy for each one in turn. Moreover, the focus of the novel is on relationship dynamics, so it helps the reader understand the conflicts and miscues which occur between the four main characters.

Set in near-future China, the novel starts out as a domestic drama: Due to the lopsided sex ratio, the State has legalised polyandry and one of the "excess males" seeks to marry a woman with two husbands already. Then, after you're invested in the characters, it pivots to thriller in a way that doesn't feel heavy-handed. The protagonists discover new aspects to themselves, but they don't magically develop any powerful skills they weren't invested with previously.

She also wraps it up nicely. The setting is too dystopian to allow a genuine happy ending, so were left with probably the best that could be expected under the circumstances. Everyone's worse off in some ways, but they've all grown to appreciate each other on a deeper level than before, and King allows us hope that maybe things won't always be so dire.

If there's one thing that left me unsatisfied, it's the world-building. The tech level isn't substantially different than our own even though it's stated that the "excess male" protagonist's fathers were already subject to similar marriage restrictions and rigid matchmaking procedures 40 years earlier, seemingly placing the action about 50 years from now. The technological development just doesn't seem to match the amount of social development that's supposedly taken place.

But that's a small problem. As Le Guin said, even when it's set in the far future, science fiction is really about the present, and King's book is clearly a critique of the PRC and, specifically, their invasive measures of social engineering and surveillance. I also found it interesting how cynical she is about sexism in an East Asian context; despite the fact that their scarcity should give them more bargaining power, women are still depicted as bearing a disproportionate domestic burden.

The Tanizaki was, as expected, a bit disappointing. He spends much of the novel ignoring his clever premise in order to tell another salacious story of carnal obsession, something he does much better in his later works. Then, having reengaged the plot, he ties it up rather abruptly just as it finally seems to be bearing fruit. In her analysis, the translator tries to milk it for meaning by doing an autobiographical reading. Apparently it was written the same year as Tanizaki's celebrated dispute with Akutagawa, which culminated in the latter's shocking suicide. It's not particularly convincing, but it was interesting to learn about this period in Tanizaki's life and this provided a natural segue to taking up Akutagawa again.

I'd left a single story unread in the collection I bought last year, 地獄変 ("Hell Screen"). Initially, I'd skipped it because I'd recently seen the film adaptation from 1969 but at some point I decided to put off reading it until the Ghost Festival. That came earlier than expected, but then Sunday was cool and misty and seemed ripe for reading something "spooky". I enjoyed it so much that the next day I checked out from work a copy of his 河童 (Kappa). Unfortunately, the supernatural elements in it are entirely window-dressing for a satire of contemporary Japanese society. It's sort of charmingly odd, but not as inventive as I would have wanted.

In any case, it's a quick read and I'll probably be done with it tonight. Then I expect I'll finish up my volume of short stories by Chanelle Benz. Diverse in style and tone, they tend to focus on mixed-race women in harrowing circumstances. In general, I'm finding the contemporary stories more satisfying than the historical ones, with the tale of a woman returning to the South to track down her birth father being my favourite of the lot. This sounds similar to the plot of her first novel, which a friend favourably reviewed, so I may give that a shot as well.

Meanwhile, I've started on There, there, my sole birthday gift (unless you count the miniature of Welsh gin my brother gave me Saturday). The author is Tommy Orange, a Cheyenne from Oakland, and the major figures are all "urban Indians" living in and around Oakland. The format is a familiar intertwining narrative involving at least a dozen narrators. (So far, each has gotten one chapter but it looks like you get to hear from some again in Part II.) It's all competent enough, if a bit exposition-heavy, but I fail to see what the fuss is about, so it may take me a while to finish (especially if I end up getting distracted by something else).

If this hadn't been such a year for allergies, I would've recognised the onset of a cold Wednesday evening for what it was. Maybe starting zinc then rather than the next morning wouldn't've made much difference. Certainly, tiring myself out with a half-hour stroll would've made less sense.

But I didn't and so I tried to compensate by taking all day Thursday. I assumed I'd be at my most infectious then and decided to spare my coworkers. If anything, I felt worse today, but that can probably be explained by not sleeping away the entire morning.

Despite some half-baked notions about making calls or doing laundry, I did nothing productive. Near the end of the day, I realised that I could still take a bath and change the sheets, which would not only make me feel much better but also give me a jump on weekend chores. But even after some frantic scrubbing, the tub was too filthy to consider filling and I abandoned the idea.

What I did get done was some reading. In a burst of indecision, I started on both the Erdrich and on a translation of Tanizaki that I'd bought some time in the last year and was just waiting for cooler weather to start on. It's an early novel of his, 黒白, which was serialised in a newspaper and might not even have been published separately in Japanese yet.

The English version was translated by Phyllis I. Lyons, who I met at a discussion last year before it had even come out. I remember that she explained how she settled on the title In black and white. I can't remember if she also talked about how she dealt with names, but if she did, I wish I'd listened.

Rather than get into a detailed discussion of how various kanji can be used to render homophonous surnames, she adopted the convention of romanising a name "Cojima" to indicate that it was a less-common form than "Kojima". This is rather important to the plot, which revolves around an author who makes the mistake of referring to one of his characters by the name of the acquaintance he modeled him after, who spells his name in a distinctive fashion.

It's a short novel--only 215 pages--and Tanizaki's prose is so comfortable that I've almost effortlessly read more than a quarter of it. His chatty narrator has some of the preoccupations of others in his books but is if anything even more neurotic; some readers would find him insufferable, but I find myself responding with a wry smile.

The Erdrich is a very different experience. It takes a hard turn in the very first chapter and I made a very conscious choice not to take it on transit because I don't want to deal with feeling wrecked in front of strangers. Some reviews faulted the dilatoriness of the narrative and the unsympathetic nature of the non-Indian characters, but I'm not finding either to be a problem.

I called Mom last night to coordinate arrangements for the family wedding we're attending in Kansas City in October. She's driving so I'm planning to ride back with her to STL (thoughts and prayers, please!) and tack on a few days there.

She told me a little about the book she'd gifted me for my birthday. (When I didn't recognise the title, I assumed it was something I'd put on my wishlist and since forgotten about, but it wasn't.) Then she surprised me by asking about Toni Morrison. I happen to be reading Beloved at the moment, which I recommended to her with the caveat that it's a slavery narrative, which makes for tough reading sometimes.

"I have limited tolerance for that," she told me, "because of people I knew who had chips on their shoulders and wanted me to apologise for things my ancestors had nothing to do with."

"Our German ancestors weren't in the country back then," I told her, "but they definitely benefitted from the enslavement of African-Americans. The effects of that persisted all the way up until the 60s."

Up to today, actually, but I know that can be a harder sell for liberal Boomers like my mom who think they solved racism with the Civil Rights Act. In any case, she acknowledged the truth of that and we moved along to other things.

She also confessed something to me that she admitted to not being able to tell her daughter: That she fears for the safety of her grandsons because they attend integrated schools and have diverse friends. At first I thought she was implying that their Black schoolmates were more likely to be involved in crime, thus exposing them to more risk of violence.

But then she drew an analogy to learning I was openly gay. She used to have anxiety dreams about me being fagbashed in Chicago. So her fear is that bigots targeted POC will end up harming her grandchildren as well. I guess it never occurred to her that her grandsons' friendship with POC helps keep them more safe. (Or maybe she has considered that and it doesn't matter to her.)

So much to unpack here. I'm hoping we'll have some time during our time on the road to do it.

Speaking of Beloved, I'm in the home stretch. I got a little wobbly early on but once I finally twigged to the nature of Beloved's origins, I became more invested in the story. I've never thought of Morrison as a magical realist so I wasn't expecting so much fantasy in the narrative. It's well-integrated though.

The only inclusion that I find jarring is the discussion of "breakfast" during Paul D's captivity. It strikes me as unlikely and anachronistic given how uncommon fellatio was in the USA until relatively recently. Of course you can read it metaphorically, but there are so many documented horrors so viscerally rendered in the text I don't know why she felt the need to include this invented one.

Saturday morning, as the temperature was already hitting 30°C, I finished reading the Fuentes. Fittingly, it concluded with a rhapsodic description of the jungle, though it was set at night, which made me somewhat wish I'd pushed through and completed it Friday night.

Regardless, I feel like I deserve a medal. Tuesday I showed my copy to Uncle Betty and had him read about a page of descriptive narration. He's probably the best-read Spanish-speaker I know and even he had trouble with some of the vocabulary. Fortunately, the last couple sequences weren't as hairy as a lot of what had come before, though I often was a bit confused as to what exactly was happening to whom.

Now that I've read the whole thing, it's easier to appreciate the structure. The flashbacks seem random in time, but eventually you notice that Cruz is going both further back and further forward. The last two extended narratives are of a New Year's party where he's already geriatric and of the end of his childhood at about 15 or 16; the brief concluding passages are his birth and his death itself.

All in all, I think it holds up well despite being nearly 60 years old and having survived to see many of the techniques it pioneered adopted by other (often lesser) authors. I may even read it again someday, but first I'm looking forward to something a little easier. On a whim, I picked up Bolaño's collected short stories and promised I wouldn't read them until I was finished with Artemio Cruz. I read one Friday night and found it refreshingly comprehensible without resorting to a dictionary.

Coincidentally, I finished two other books at the same time: a collection of short stories by the Iraqi diaspora writer Hassan Blasim and a compilation of contemporary Vietnamese short stories by writers born since 1965. The latter wore out its welcome; despite the diversity of authors, it felt repetitive, lacking both stylistic and tonal range. Most of the stories were tragic and focused on protagonists (often first-person narrators) who wax nostalgic for the rural villages they were forced to abandon. After a while, they became hard to distinguish.

The Blasim went much quicker. I was worried I would find the casual brutality exhausting (there's a lot of rape in these stories, some of it presented with disturbing off-handedness) but there was enough humour and fantasy to prevent that. Sometimes I feel like he was going for shock value, sometimes I just didn't know what his purpose was. At least it felt like a good corrective to God in pink, the debut novel from a Canadian-Iraqi named Hasan Namir that I finished three weeks ago, which I found contrived and unconvincing.

Maybe now, with summer nearly over, I'll have the time to read the Tove Janssen I acquired back at the beginning of May. I've tried reading a few pages and it's made me feel dumb. Hopefully the vocabulary will come flooding back, but for now it's like, "Did I really used to be able to read Swedish?"

At CAKE this year, I picked up a couple of titles for the niblings plus three for me. I've been pacing myself when it comes to reading them because there's something anticlimactic about dropping $20 on a new book only to finish reading it in an hour.

Monkey chef was a good read: a straight guy trying to be honest about his shortcomings and his struggle to be a better person, particularly where women are concerned. What really sells it is the location: a primate sanctuary in South Africa. The people-are-just-like-monkeys parallels aren't really necessary but they don't detract from it either and I liked that some elements (e.g. why some of the other volunteers don't like the narrator) aren't really resolved. He also seems to have avoided score-settling, which is a hazard with memoirs like these.

I had higher hopes for Upgrade soul so naturally it left me somewhat disappointed. It's very high-concept science fiction: an aging couple pay for an experimental procedure to rejuvenate their bodies but it goes wrong leaving them weakened and with horrifying duplicates of themselves. The best thing about this book is the art, which is beautiful and detailed without being slavishly realistic. The author takes some chances with the characters, too, prominently featuring POC and the severely disabled.

Unfortunately, I ultimately felt that he dodged some of the central questions in favour of Grand Guignol twists. The doubles end up making some morally fraught choices (to say the least) and I expected to see more in the way of psychological consequences for the protagonists. How would you react to witnessing a being with the same thoughts and memories as your partner do something unthinkable? How could you feel secure in the relationship with them after that?

A lesser but still important flaw is that much is made of the doubles being not only physically but also intellectually superior to the pair. Yet when one of them takes matters into their own hands in the third act, they seem to act without much of a plan. This feels to be a common flaw in a lot of science fiction--supposedly superintelligent beings which just don't act that way--and it's sad to see Daniels fall into it.

The last comic is the one I have the humblest hopes for. Honestly, I bought it more because the illustrator is a friend than for any other reason, so if it turns out to be good, that'll be a bonus. I'm a frustrated comic book artist myself so I feel like I should do what I can to encourage others.

So I took half a Lorazepam last night just to make sure I didn't fret myself awake at 4 a.m. yet again and I guess it worked? I basically slept through but I'm still sleepy at work today and I can't tell how much of that is residual to the medication and how much is that even eight full hours isn't enough to wipe out my recent sleep deficit. At least the stomach upset wasn't as bad as I'd remembered and the dreams were better.

Today is the kind of day which makes me nostalgic for old-school roleplaying: overcast with a front moving in, stirring up the wind and raising the temperature. Yesterday evening I didn't accomplish much but I did talk to Crazy Brother for an hour on the phone about his character, which I think counts as a mitzvah. He's playing an android in a space game so I tried to steer him a bit into metaphysics: If she was built by other androids, why is she programmed to find anyone attractive? (He seems committed to a romance with another player, for some reason.)

This evening will be our last session of The Watch. Several of the players are saying it's the longest campaign they've played in ages--since the early 90s for JB. I just have to smile at that. How long was Unknown Armies, two years? Our next game is going to be a complete change of pace: urban fantasy in a Mexican setting. We'll be joined by dedos which I'm hoping will shake things up a bit.

When itchwoot was in town, I started browsing for something to read in German again and stumbled across Lotte in Weimar, which I'd left half-finished. I'm pushing through slowly--today I just officially crossed 60%--while I focus on other works. I finished off a volume of Albanian short stories from at least a year ago, started a novel from Monica Ali, and read one of my new acquisitions from CAKE. I'm still waiting for it to be consistently warm enough to start on my real summer reading.