Writing, technology and memory

Lo these many years ago when I was writing my PhD thesis, I frequently voiced a wish that someone would invent a form of sentences and paragraphs that worked not in two dimensions, but in three: that had the structure, not of a straight line, but of a mirror ball, so that the sentence, the paragraph, the thought, the Thing would be constantly turning, revealing its different facets, and whoever was reading/looking at it could see how those different facets related to each other.

Which is how grammar itself works, really, and why Yoda funny is, but that's for another post.

I wanted this three-dimensional discursive artifact to be invented in order to be able to circumvent the problem of trying to write about something that couldn't really be understood until something else -- something tangential, or something that happened later -- had been explained. God had gone some way towards solving this problem when She invented footnotes, but there was still a long way to go.

Great leaps and bounds in this direction have been made since, of course, in the form of hyperlinks. I remember the moment when I first realised what hyperlinks were and how they worked: my first conscious thought was Damn and blast, if only these things had been invented before I tried to write my thesis.

The problem of linear chronology remains, of course, in that consciousness and its apprehensions are inescapably linear because of the way that time works, or at least time the way we understand it. You can still only read one thing at a time, and decisions must be made about the order in which you will read them. All the same, it would have been an enormous help to have been able to send my examiners (for who else ever reads PhD theses?) off at a hypertangent in order to find out extra things about the topic before proceeding further.

If I had the patience to read (and the brains to follow) Stephen Hawking, I might have a better handle on this, but life is short.

And because I am now trying to write a book, a book about Adelaide, for which I have a magnificently liberating -- and, for that reason, terrifying -- brief from the publisher (although since it's a book in a series and I'm in the fortunate position of having several earlier volumes to supply a context, it's less terrifying than it might have been), I have been thinking about ways in which technology might come to my aid.

What I need is a form of technology that will automatically record everything you're thinking as you're thinking it: some sort of microchip that reads your mind and has an Autosave function.

I'm sure it's possible. In fact someone somewhere has probably already invented it, and is merely having trouble with the patent. If so, I'm guessing the problem won't have been solved before February 1, the date the manuscript is due, which is a shame. And God knows I have wished to have one of these gadgets implanted many times before today.

But how else to record, without having to race to take notes to keep up with the brain when the brain is actually working this fast, which happens so seldom you have to grab it while it's happening, for who knows when it will come again -- how else to record the suddenly obvious solution, which came to me in the middle of dinner, to the structural problem of where to put the story of the sudden closure of Adelaide's Radio 5KA in 1941, when the government thought 5KA was being run by German sympathisers who were broadcasting in code was because said station managers were Jehova's Witnesses? For it belongs, it obviously belongs, in the section on Weird Adelaide.

What's more, as the radio station closure is all about the mood of Adelaide in wartime, I can tuck in, under that story's wing, my dad's recollections of being a 15-year-old ARP bike rider in 1942, pedalling up and down the streets of Adelaide's eastern suburbs knocking on the doors of people whose blackout curtains were not sufficiently closed -- recollections I was determined to shoehorn in somewhere but had not yet found a place for.

But I had to leave my dinner half-eaten and rush to the computer to write all this stuff down, because otherwise it would have whooshed past like a car in the rain and been lost to sight. I just wish inventors would invent things before I need them.

Another day, another blog

Loth to let the litblog thing go altogether, though one has tried and failed to keep it up at more than one site, one is having yet another go. Now that I've learned to export and import on Blogger, this newish blog incorporates all of Australian Literature Diary (2005-2010 on and off) and all (three whole months but gee it was fun while it lasted) of Ask the Brontë Sisters (May-July, 2007).

I originally called it 'Read, Write, Think' but on reflection decided that sends a terrible message, as one should think before one writes. It might be better entitled 'Read, Think, Write, Draft, Edit, Proof-read, Argue With Editor, Review, Fisk [which we of literary academe used to call 'close reading' before it began to be frowned on as ideologically unsound, and were taught, compulsorily and unrelentingly, to do many years before blogging was born or thought of, harumph, you kids get off my lawn, etc], Rave About Writers You Like and Whinge and Bitch About Other People's Terrible Ideas and Excruciating Spelling, Grammar and Style', but this should do to be going on with.

It's meant to be a sort of journal, in which track is kept of what I read and write from day to day, what I notice in the reviews pages, little magazines, trade journals and lit gossip columns, and what I hear from my mates. Much like this blog, in fact, except without the cooking and cats and gardening and Tony Abbott and so on. Whenever there's a new post over there, I'll put up a link from here.

It's only words

Tony Abbott's argument against the formal acknowledgement of traditional owners at public gatherings is that it's 'tokenistic'. (Note to Tone: the people who do it do usually actually mean it. If they didn't, they wouldn't bother to do it. QED.)

He seems to be offering this, as so many concern trolls do, as a good argument for not doing it at all. I note that, monarchist and Catholic that he is, he's not making the same argument for acknowledging any monarchs or vice-monarchs present at the beginning of a speech, or for Parliamentary prayers.

Yet surely the same argument applies. I bet there are more people in Australia working hard for the improvement of Aboriginal people's lives than there are working hard in the cause of retaining the monarchy, for a start. And I bet there are a lot more people who find the prayers and the nods to governors that they are obliged to make 'tokenistic' than people who feel the same about acknowledgement of traditional owners.

But that line isn't really worth arguing with anyway; nor do I have anything to say about Wilson Tuckey except that he and people like him are the price we pay for democracy. I'm more interested in the widely-held assumption behind Abbott's pronouncement that 'mere' words are worth nothing.

This from a politician, and one who's worked as a journalist and written several books to boot, is particularly ironic, but that's by the way as well. What floors me is that even people whose stock-in-trade is language seem to feel quite happy about trashing language as essentially worthless. It's nothing more than intellectual laziness: an acceptance of the notion that words and deeds are somehow the opposite of each other, each with a clear moral value and no prizes for guessing which is which. The lure of the false dichotomy is strong, I know -- it makes opining so much easier -- but you'd think a Rhodes Scholar would have been taught at some point in his education how to avoid its simplistic snares.

Because speech is an act, and so is thought, and so is decision-making about how you will behave. To acknowledge traditional owners at a public function is to remind everyone present of Aboriginal history and culture. It's a small reversal of erasure and a little raiser of consciousness. Recognition is an act, and so is the expression of respect.

Further thoughts on the Random Academic Sentence Generator

As envisaged, I spent most of yesterday afternoon playing with the toy linked to in the post before last, and from that ludic activity (see what I did there?) a number of things emerged, as is so often the case with play.

You need to have a little play with the Generator in order to understand what it's doing. Stephanie in the comments thread assumed that it was about simple dislike of academic language (and perhaps more specifically the academic language of the humanities, especially of social theory), but really it's far more about making fun of people who over- or mis-use that language, usually out of ineptitude. It's not a mockery of general academic style (if such a thing really exists; more about that later) but a far more specific holding up to ridicule of the automatic resort to the buzzword du jour. It's a resort that characterises many a postgrad conference paper -- often, sadly, a paper full of what might have been good ideas, if only said ideas had been allowed to emerge from the cloud of abstract diction employed not so much as to do full justice to the ideas as to signal (albeit semi-consciously) the paper-giver's cred to her or his peeps and peers.

Most of the people who express general irritation, dislike and scorn of the kind of words involved in this game are people who are unfamiliar with those words and therefore feel confronted and belittled when they see them being used by somebody else. It's a version of something a fellow-student once said to me, while in earnest in pursuit of her Honours degree in literature, about how T.S. Eliot really shouldn't have written bits of 'The Waste Land' in German and Sanskrit and what-all else, because he should have known that lots of people -- like her, for example -- wouldn't understand them.

But it's clear that the Sentence Generator game was invented by someone very familiar with the vocabulary of social theory, the sort of familiarity that is of necessity always the case with good parody. The Portsmouth Sinfonia



(there are at least two, possibly even three, quite good sopranos in there, which, as a discriminating observer points out in the comments thread, kinda ruins it)


or Alexander McCall Smith's Really Terrible Orchestra



(again, it's the sops who are a little bit too good to do this performance justice)


are well aware of the humour intrinsic to their bad playing of music they love (as the conductor of the Portsmouth Sinfonia once remarked, 'Somehow the closer we get, the funnier it is'), and anyone who was ever present at the legendary Parody Nights held at the annual conferences of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature will be likewise aware that effectively making fun of something can only be done out of a deep familiarity with your subject. I think the people who invented the Generator were having the same sort of in-joke as whoever wrote that wonderful faux-glossary that did the rounds some years ago, identifying the 'meaning' of the names of numerous philosophers and theorists. To this day I occasionally find myself thinking 'Ooh yuk, this omelette has gone all Merleau-Ponty.'

What the Random Academic Sentence Generator does (see examples in rainbow colours, in that last post but one) is produce sentences in the form of simple thesis statements or arguable propositions. The syntax of every sentence it produces is the same: 'The A of B Cs the D of E', where everything except C is an abstract noun or noun phrase. It's the kind of thing that Lewis Carroll would have loved, and that his weird creatures would have said all the time and probably have stretched to include direct paradox. The happiness of unhappiness reveals the mundanity of distinction. The profitability of loss resides in the rubberiness of exactitude.

Or you could do it -- with a vengeance -- with managerial language: the rationalisation of the organisation strategises the bendability of key-player identification. Or, to take an example closer to home, the magisteriality of felinitude underlies the performance of cathood.

Etc. Ask me to defend any one of those propositions and I will do so vigorously. It's not about the absence of logic or of truth; the more I played with the Generator the more astonished I became as I realised that almost every sentence it Generates can be defended as a logical proposition and quite possibly actually true as well. Abstract nouns are just like that.

To reiterate: what's being parodied and mocked by this game is not so much either the specific words or the general style, but rather the kind of use to which both are too often put. 'Academic language' is not a separate species; the academics who are also good writers (by which I mean here 'fully aware, thoughtful and discriminating about their word choices and their syntax') freely use the specialist vocabulary of their discipline, whatever that discipline may happen to be, as a way of identifying quite precise and specific things -- theories, concepts, ways of seeing -- but are able to use that vocabulary to clarify rather than to obfuscate, and to do so within a framework of accessible, engaging writing. 'Academic writing' doesn't occur inside a box, but along a spectrum of usage and style.

And I quite like specialist academic vocabularies, not least because I know that the thinkers who come up with them are almost always well-intentioned and benign. In a way it's the opposite effect from the one you get in the broad use of managerial language that Don Watson takes on in Bendable Learnings, and maybe this is partly because the purpose of so much managerial language is -- unlike the language of thinkers and scholars -- deliberate moral obfuscation. If you start out using 'rationalise' to skate over the fact that six hundred people have lost their jobs, or 'incentivise' to mean 'offer an indecent amount of money to one person who doesn't put in anywhere near as many hours as a truckie desperate to keep his job or the working mother of pre-school twins', it's an easy step from there to a whole managerial layer trained to say that the scale of the event potentiality is likely to negatively impact the outcomes, instead of 'Oh my God there's a monstrous unfightable fire headed your way in overdrive, get the hell out of there as fast as you can.'

Two things I've learned already today and it's not even lunchtime yet

(1) If you're trying to think through/develop/write a complicated argument about Aboriginal writing and its relationship to ideas about 'literary merit', a 180-word book review being written to deadline is not the place to do it, and anyway you're far better off waiting for your dear friend L, co-author of Intimate Horizons: The Post-Colonial Sacred in Australian Literature, to arrive tomorrow to give her seminar at Adelaide U so that you can pick her brains about the current state, if any, of academic debates around this question and her own ideas about it.

(2) Work really does expand to fill the time available.

Brothers, sisters and anthologies : oh the irony

So when I got home this afternoon from fifteen rounds with a sibling -- the ferocious upfront one, all teeth and claws all the time, and no backing down until one of you dies -- so stratospherically stressed out that my eyeballs and teeth were aching and there was a strange metallic taste in my mouth that no amount of medicinal chocolate would shift, I found two things in the mail.

One was a copy, kindly sent by Allen & Unwin, of Charlotte Wood's new themed anthology of specially-commissioned stories by Australian writers about siblings, entitled Brothers and Sisters. The other was my copy of the current Australian Book Review, in which critic Peter Craven continues his attack on the team of scholars of Australian literature (of which he is not one) who edited the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, including moi, that he began in his magisterially and savagely opinionated review of the anthology in the previous issue.

I've been a fan of Charlotte Wood's since I read her novel The Children, in which she shows great interest in the sibling dynamic and great skill in representing it, an impression further borne out by the brilliant, funny, moving introduction to this new book. And after reading the ABR correspondence pages I'm considering the possibility that one way to understand the shifting, endlessly complex dynamics of the literary scene and all its tortured interrelationships is to think of it in terms of sibling relations, where the keynote is intensity for better or worse, and where endless fights for territory, dominance, independence, sentimental vases and Mummy and Daddy's approval all take place in the hothouse arena of shared interests and common experience.

At the very least, I find that thinking about these things anthropologically and psychoanalytically helps me to get some distance on them, to back away from the rage. It's that or the bottle shop, and I have too much work to do tonight for the bottle shop to be an option. Besides, I want to be fully alert when Germaine takes on Planet Janet on Q&A.


Cross-posted at Australian Literature Diary

... and a bad bad review ...

There are four kinds of book review. There's the good good review, which is both favourable about its subject and skilfully, knowledgeably written on the basis of a careful, thorough reading of the book in question. There's the good bad review, which is well executed in all respects but unfavourable. There's the bad good review, which is favourable but a bad example of the book review genre.

(There are many ways of badly writing a review: not reading the book properly, making opinionated and magisterial assertions instead of properly arguing your case, getting your facts wrong because you haven't actually read the book, pushing your own pet writers and ideas at the expense of the book you're supposed to be reviewing, blowing your own trumpet about your own achievements, not distinguishing between your personal opinions and the actual facts, making wildly offensive statements, and so on and so forth.)

And finally there's the bad bad review, which is ... Well, you know.

A few years ago I was invited to participate in a forum at the University of Sydney on the subject of book reviewing. Allotted a generous amount of time for my talk, I needed to come up with an infinitely expandable structure for it, something with a strong backbone that I could sketch out and then amplify here and there, both at the keyboard and then again, if called for, on my feet.

In the end, I came up with a way of doing it that meant I had a single central line of argument and organising principle: the text of the talk was a heavily annotated list of the people and entities to whom/which I believe a book reviewer has a responsibility. It was a list whose length surprised even me (for over the decades I have given these matters a great deal of thought), as I thought about just how many people and things I have at the back of my mind, or even halfway to the front, whenever I review a book. The list looked something like this:

1) To the readers of the review, to

(i) describe the book accurately,
(ii) tell the truth as you see it, and
(iii) provide entertainment and useful information.

2) To the potential readers of the book (some overlap there, obvs),

(i) not to mislead them about its contents, and
(ii) to save them $30+ if that's what you think.

3) To the writer(s) and/or editor(s) of the book,

(i) to read the book carefully and comment on it thoughtfully,
(ii) not to misrepresent it, and
(iii) not to say anything that will actually make them want to slash their wrists.

4) To the literary editor who saw fit to commission the review from you, to

(i) justify her or his faith in your (suit)ability and expertise,
(ii) write to the word length you were given,
(iii) provide clean copy in the requested format (e.g. not phone it in, say) and
(iv) provide said copy on or before the deadline you were given.

5) To the publication for which you are writing,

(i) to pay attention to its house style,
(ii) to fit in with its general editorial approach and standard of writing,
(iii) not to write anything that will either require extensive and expensive legalling, or, in the absence of said legalling, get the publication sued, and
(iv) not to compromise, or indeed trash, its reputation.

6) To the people who are paying you to do a decent job of work, to be worthy of your hire.

7) To the literary culture in particular and indeed to the culture in general, to make a worthy contribution to it and not demean or devalue it by adding junk rather than good useful stuff.

8) To yourself,

(i) to maintain your standards, not just professional but also moral (say, turning down editorial requests to review books by friends, rivals, enemies or old lovers),
(ii) to refuse to say anything you don't mean, and
(iii) not to make yourself look like either a wanker or a dickhead, or both. 'Both' is possible but not attractive.

On not writing about s*x*

*Yes, that is a joke.


I've been seeing a fair bit lately, online and off, about this book: Krissy Kneen's Affection: A Memoir of Love, Sex and Intimacy. I have not read it and this is not a review, just some brief thoughts about the idea.

The review in that link refers to Kneen's quest for 'essentially innocent pursuit of pleasure without harm'. I don't know whether that's what she says herself and am responding only to that notion, with which I take issue on more than one count. Here in my mid-fifties I've come to the conclusion that there is no bodily pleasure without harm: sex, drink, drugs, alcohol, food, exercise, they all involve risk, if not to oneself then to some other poor sod. The only truly harmless pleasures are those of the heart, the mind or the soul and sometimes not them either. And as far as casual sex is concerned there is very rarely, if ever, pleasure without harm at all. It is not 'essentially innocent', indeed it is not innocent at all. I don't mean 'not innocent' as in 'guilty'; I mean it as in 'knowing'.

I'm not saying don't do these things, oh my goodness me no. Goddess forbid. What I'm saying is don't kid yourself that there is no harm done. Rainy Day Men #3, #7 and #9 please note, and #7, no, you did not say you were sorry, and you are not forgiven and will never be forgiven.

The other thing, as suggested by that last sentence, is that I cannot imagine writing such a memoir without in some way identifying the men involved, if only to themselves and that would be quite bad enough, thank you, unless of course I was doing it out of revenge. (Even if he read this blog, #7 wouldn't recognise himself there, which of course was part of the problem.) One would have to circumlocute and vague out to the point of blandness in the writing and extreme frustration in the writer. And they are not my secrets to keep.

But one positive thing. How wonderful that a woman can write such a book. Not only that she can write it and have people engage with it seriously, without shaming her as a slut (well, only the religious nutters and the very old will do that these days), but that she can even bring herself to write it at all. Here's Virginia Woolf in Professions For Women (1931):

... she had thought of something, something about the body, about the passions which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say. Men, her reason told her, would be shocked. The consciousness of what men will say of a woman who speaks the truth about her passions had roused her from her artist's state of unconsciousness. She could write no more. The trance was over. Her imagination could work no longer. This I believe to be a very common experience with women writers - they are impeded by the extreme conventionality of the other sex. For though men sensibly allow themselves great freedom in these respects, I doubt they realise or can control the extreme severity with which they condemn such freedom in women...Telling the truth about my experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet.

Clearing the decks

Last time I whinged in this my OWN PERSONAL ONLINE SPACE about feeling crushed by the workload, some drive-by psycho, a species of which I seem to get more than my fair share, unless it's just the same one all the time, in which case s/he will no doubt show up again here for another round of ticking off a total stranger for what she writes in her OWN PERSONAL ONLINE SPACE, and if s/he does, the comment will be binned, and God if there's one thing I do love it's a subordinate clause, turned up in the comments box and snottily pointed out with a disturbing amount of hostility considering that it's a total stranger, or perhaps it isn't, which would be worse, and isn't it interesting that these people are always anonymous, which I think is pathetic, that I'd get more work done if I didn't spend so much time blogging about how much work I have to do.

Now while this is doubtless true, it shows a deep ignorance of the writing process and its many stages, most of which are not visible to the naked eye. I was reminded of this by a wonderful post from ThirdCat, currently in Spain and on her way to Scotland where she will perform in her own one-woman standup show at the Edinburgh Fringe, which is one of the things the post is about. She considers blogging the whole process in a series called the Road to Edinburgh and then remarks

a ‘Road to Edinburgh’ series threatens to be a bit like a term-long school project at the end of which the teacher might write, ‘Tracy might have done better had she spent more time doing her project and less time talking about it.’

Now as you can see, this teacher and my drive-by psycho (who I sometimes think is no more than a projection of my own superego, which is the bit that stands over you like a sergeant-major telling you to be good and obey the rules, as opposed to the id, which is the bit that keeps getting Barry Hall and Sam Newman into trouble) have a great deal in common. But I think they are both wrong and here's for why.

The writing process, as any writer will tell you, and not just creative writing but any writing, is a series of complex manoeuvres, all of which but the final writing-it-down are invisible to the naked eye. You have to do a great deal of mooching and faffing and dreaming and meditating and wandering off down blind alleys. You have to, as it were, draw sketches and rub them out and draw more sketches. I've said before in other places that I think blogging is like dreaming and one of these days (when I don't have so much work to do, and am therefore living on nettle soup) I'm going to actually read up on dreaming and write something substantial about writing and blogging and dreaming.

But for the moment I have cleared my head to get back to work (being here at the computer at 7 am on a Saturday morning because I woke up worrying about the workload and couldn't get back to sleep) by the simple expedient of whining about it first, and somewhere in the recesses of my subconscious, two book reviews have been forming themselves into sentences and paragraphs.

David Eagleman

This bloke was in Sydney last week for the Luminous festival, in a collaborative show with Brian Eno at the Opera House; did anyone see him?

I don't know how well his little book Sum: Forty tales from the afterlives would work as a performance, but qua book it is pretty damned dazzling. As a neuroscientist, albeit a freakishly young-looking one, he has probably spent a fair amount of time thinking about (a) how the brain orders information, (b) what constitutes a human being ('Sum' here is a Latin pun), and (c) death. The fruit of said thought is here, in forty hypothetical scenarios about what might happen when we die.

Clearly he's also a poet. Look at that word 'covey', suggestive as it is of birds and (with one change of letter) witches, which some would say are the two creatures that might produce an angel if they bred.


Some highlights:

In the afterlife you discover that God understands the complexities of life. She had originally submitted to peer pressure when She structured Her universe like all the other gods had, with a binary categorization of people into good and evil. But it didn't take long for Her to realize that humans could be good in many ways and simultaneously corrupt and mean-spirited in other ways ... Might it not be possible, She considered, that a man could be an embezzler and still give to charitable causes? Might not a woman be an adulteress but bring pleasure and security to two men's lives?

*

When you arrive in the afterlife, you find that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley sits on a throne. She is cared for and protected by a covey of angels.

After some questioning, you discover that God's favorite book is Shelley's Frankenstein. He sits up at night with a worn copy of the book clutched in His mighty hands ... Like Victor Frankenstein, God considers Himself a medical doctor, a biologist without parallel, and He has a deep, painful relationship with any story about the creation of life ... reading again and again how Dr. Victor Frankenstein is taunted by his merciless monster across the Arctic ice. And God consoles Himself with the thought that all creation necessarily ends in this: creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.

*

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second in when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, some time in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

The modern, the postmodern and the possibly post-postmodern: two or three ways of looking at the truth

Perhaps you remember the story of Ariadne, who saved Theseus's bacon when he went into the labyrinth to search for the Minotaur. She stood outside with a ball of thread and handed him one end of it so he could find his way out again. It's essentially the same sort of story as the Hansel and Gretel breadcrumbs. And I often wish, when I start chasing down something or other online, that I had a thread with a loving heart at the other end of it guiding me back to where I started, or had had the foresight to leave a trail of breadcrumbs in the deep dark hypertext forest, one that would eventually take me back to the work I'm supposed to be doing.

What brought this on, I hear you cry. It's work, she said piteously; I have here for review a rather funny book called The Coronation, one in a series about a sort of Late Victorian Russian Sherlock Holmes called Fandorin, by Russian writer Boris Akunin. And when I sat down to start writing the review (always a challenging moment), I thought that since the coronation in question is that of Tsar Nicolas II, the last of the Romanovs, I'd better just Google the era first to get a firmer grasp on the Imperial family and its names and dates.

Younguns already look at me uncomprehendingly when I tell them not to trust Wikipedia to be necessarily telling them the truth, so it's only a matter of time before our understanding of what the truth is really does change -- at grassroots level, not just in the staffrooms of besieged Schools of Humanities -- forever. On the other hand, then Wikipedia tells me a story like this about discovering the truth:

Decades later his body was disinterred from the grave in the Cathedral of St.Peter and Paul in St. Petersburg so that a sample of DNA could be taken from the remains to see whether skeletal remains allegedly belonging to his older brother, the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, were legitimate or not. The DNA sample obtained from the remains was an exact match with those obtained from the remains of Nicholas II. Beyond the grave, George had once again proved to be of service to his brother. After the completion of DNA testing, the remains of Grand Duke George Alexandrovich was once again laid to rest not far from those of his older brother and family.

If the story is true, there's something peculiarly satisfying about the neatness of its ironies. Both Wikipedia and DNA testing are extremely recent inventions, both allegedly dedicated to the cause of truth albeit by different, perhaps even opposite, means. DNA testing is a product of modernity's narrative of science and progress, and so is the internet itself. But Wikipedia is a postmodern phenomenon, one whose essence is the idea of a challenge to authority, and in which constant change is the norm. Being brought the one by the other raises questions about both that take me a long way away from the book review I'm supposed to be writing. (Although I suppose the coronation of Nicolas II was the beginning of the end of pre-modern Russia and its ramifications for world history.)

And in the meantime, there's a curly question of grammar in that quotation. Is it 'his remains was' or 'his remains were'?

Immortality: a thought

Tennyson, who really was quite an extraordinary sort of chap as fellow devotees of A.S. Byatt will know, once wrote a poem about the myth of Aurora, Greek goddess of the dawn, and her lover and husband Tithonus, who was a mortal man until she went off to Zeus and asked him to grant Tithonus eternal life so the couple could stay together forever.

This, obligingly -- and obligingness was not Zeus's forte as a rule -- he did. But the catch, and there's always a catch in these myths, was that they forgot to ask for eternal youth for him while they were about it. So Tithonus got older and older, but could not die.

Tennyson's 'Tithonus', in which the helplessly ever-aging man is speaking, begins like this:

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
the vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
and after many a summer dies the swan.

Me only cruel immortality
consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms
here at the quiet limit of the world,
a white-hair'd shadow, roaming like a dream
the ever-silent spaces of the East,
far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.

Tithonus is, in fact, the Undead. And what made me think of this poem is the gory vampire novel I have chosen to replace the unreadable Dean Koontz one (see previous post). For much is being made in this book, as well it might be when you are trying to fight them off, of the fact that vampires cannot die or be killed unless you utterly destroy their hearts.

And it occurs to me for the first time (although Ken Gelder probably had this idea in Chapter 1 if not the Introduction to his book on vampires) that they are the shadow side of that eternal life in quest of which humankind continues, usually to its detriment, to go. But lift that rock -- look under the Philosopher's Stone -- and what will crawl out from underneath it is something seven feet tall with shark's teeth that wants to rip your head off and drink your blood.

I assume therefore that one of the morals of the vampire story, as of so many stories, is 'Be careful what you wish for', and that it belongs to that powerful old family of narratives that show the horrible fate awaiting the Over-reacher, the mortal who dares to try to usurp the prerogatives of gods: Prometheus, Faust, Viktor Frankenstein, and all the dead bodies who litter the stage at the end of every Renaissance revenge tragedy.

None of this stuff belongs, however, in a 180-word newspaper review. Which is why I have a blog.