Tripping

David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest is not a relaxing read. It's distinctly put-downable, in the sense that its sheer manic energy renders this reader so frazzled after twenty minutes or so that it has to be put to one side - only to inevitably be picked up as soon as recovery is effected.

Epic in its obsessiveness, mania, expansiveness, and dedication to exploring all forms of addiction and excess it represents everything we love and hate about modernity and America.

And since I've only just got started on it, it looks like I'm in for quite a trip. A big book in every way.

Alight

A quick word about a slow novel, and I mean slow in the best possible sense: I finished Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries last weekend and it was a blast. Actually, getting to the end by Sunday was a bit of a surprise as I still had a couple of hundred pages to go on Saturday and I thought it might take a week or so to read them, given how long the previous six hundred pages had taken. But things speed up considerably in the final quarter of the novel. A gripping courtroom sequence is followed by the increasing fragmentation of the text. Chapters get shorter and shorter, and seem to simply fill in some of the gaps in the very complex narrative. I'm not sure I successfully assembled the complete jigsaw on offer, but I put together a workable picture of what it had all been about.

As a kind of high-level, thought-provoking entertainment the work is an obvious success. I suppose a trickier question is whether Ms Catton gets beyond the fictional boundaries of her brilliantly realised world to say something about the way we live. Imitating Wilkie Collins in a sophisticated post-modern manner is great fun; but is it more than that? I think it is, but I'm not entirely sure how I can explain this. I suppose it lies in factors like the convincing evocation of small town life in a place at the edge of what we might see as the civilised world and the sure-footed sense of what it was to have been an alien in that world, as masterfully realised in the depiction of the Chinese characters particularly.

No wonder it won the Booker.

Escaping

Watched an excellent documentary just now about various opiates, with actor & good guy Brian Cox presenting. Fascinating stuff about just how widely used opium was in the nineteenth century. The rather spooky coincidence about this was that I'd been generally musing on the mechanics of addiction, particularly addiction to opiates, after reading the surpassingly excellent The Luminaries. Several characters in the novel are opium addicts and their addiction plays a central role in the plot, as you might imagine. This led me in the course of the week into a conversation with Chris about the chemical effects of opiates. He happens to be in the middle of writing the segment on heroin for an IB Chemistry textbook. And the subject of drug abuse was touched upon in the course of Jordan's visit last weekend as he was telling us about frightening numbers of young people he knows in the UK who ease their boredom by dabbling in the hard stuff.

It's frighteningly easy to understand the desire to escape the pains of living through this route. And it's even more frightening to witness the damage done. Fascinating as all this is, it's not something I encourage myself to think about too much. Too depressing, for one thing.

Weakness

I have a problem sometimes dealing with what I perceive to be weakness in others. It takes genuine strength to do so.

Coming To A Full Stop

Don't you just hate it when someone sends you a brief text message and doesn't conclude with a full stop? No, of course you don't. You'd have to be a bit crazy to get even mildly irritated. Writing a text message is not the same thing as composing an essay, and if a text comprises a single sentence, or sentence fragment, there's really no point to the punctuation mark.

But here's the thing: I do get annoyed when the full stop isn't there. My very real reaction is the irrational product of a somewhat obsessive nature. However, I'm proud to say I've never expressed that ridiculous annoyance to anyone or sought to pontificate loftily on the issue, because I'm sane enough (I think) to know it just doesn't matter. What I've tried to do, over the years, is to turn that obsessiveness in useful directions for myself and others. When I'm writing I attempt to be meticulous. That doesn't mean mistakes don't get through - I'm well aware of their frequency, so please don't write to let me know about them - but I'm annoyed when they do and I do my darnedest to correct them and learn. When I'm looking at the writing of others in contexts in which being 'correct' is of some importance I attempt to help them towards a sense of what it takes to achieve that.

Sometimes your inner fascist can be your best friend. But only sometimes.

Pushing It

Posted a personal best on the elliptical trainer this evening, but felt little in the way of a sense of achievement. Why so? Well, first of all it was only very marginally my best performance, not that much better than what I was doing roughly this time last year when I first started using the machine. And, secondly, I felt I was foolishly pushing too hard and not enjoying the experience at all. After the first fifteen minutes I knew I was going to be able to keep up the pace, but it was hard work doing so, and I did vaguely wonder if I might be putting myself into slightly dangerous territory through over-reaching.

I'm now thinking that it might be more fruitful to aim for longer bouts of exercise, stretching my current 35 minutes to 40 or 50, with no real attempt to push the pace whilst doing so. But, the problem is that at some level that feels a bit lazy. I'm finding it hard to strike the kind of happy medium of a sensible pace that came to me entirely naturally in my running days.

But I'm still grateful to be able to get going and keep going at all. At my age you count your blessings if you want to keep it real.

Service With A Smile

Getting young Jordan onto his flight back to Manchester this evening was not exactly an easy task, and at one point looked impossible to achieve. He left booking the flight to the last minute, exhibiting the calm insouciance of youth, convincing us old folks he knew what he was doing. Unfortunately, he didn't, as we realised when we got the Etihad desk and were told there was no ticket for him. Amazingly a number of counter staff for the airline took a genuine interest in helping us out when it would have been a lot easier for them to give us all the brush-off. The result is that he is now aloft, amid the clouds or above them, and on his way home.

We're now considering using the airline ourselves when we next visit the UK, despite their unfortunate sponsorship of you-know-who.

Glory Days

We're hosting young Jordan, Tony's lad, over the weekend - to our delight. It's been just over a year since Tony died and I still think of him a lot. Chatting to Jordan about his dad has given me the sense of shifting a kind of burden, and thoroughly enjoying doing so. I've spent the evening dealing with and re-telling a sequence of delightfully vivid memories. Talk about good times, eh?

Something Of Weight

I'm so thoroughly enjoying reading Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries that I'll be sorry to finish. Mind you, I've still got 200 or so pages to go, so it's going to be some little while before all the delicious mysteries of the plot are clarified - assuming that they will be, that is. But I'm almost embarrassed to admit that there're other reasons for my enjoyment of the novel not directly related to the wonders of its composition.

The physical pleasure of holding the book is such a distinct part of the experience of reading it that it would be dishonest not to own up to it. I suppose this is akin to the enjoyment people get from their smart phones on the level of the phones being appealingly designed objects with an aesthetically pleasing dimension to their usage. (That's something I've never felt myself but I'm guessing based on the way people seem to give themselves up in acts of abject surrender to the enchantment of their phones.) The paperback edition of The Luminaries I'm reading has a beautifully apt cover and it's satisfyingly solid as an object, though at the same time being easy to open and read, without breaking its spine, despite its 800+ pages. I've always enjoyed the physical act of reading, but I don't remember the paperbacks of my youth - which often fell apart in the process of being read - being quite so attractive as the ones the publishers come up with these days.

Oh, and it smells good too.

Getting Bigger

Had an interesting chat with Fuad over our extended weekend in KL about his umrah, which he undertook back in December. Our focus was the Islamic virtue of sabr, which translates inadequately as 'patience', and the pressing need for it in performing the holy rites: indeed, the pressing need for it in our daily lives, which performing the small pilgrimage to Makkah seeks to teach us. Goodness me, it's a hard lesson to learn; or, perhaps I might better say, to put into practice. Just when you think you've made some progress in the necessary self-control attendant upon the virtue, some pettiness emerges from one of the many small parts of the self to remind you that there's an awful long way to go.

The great thing is that life has a way of throwing up many ways to allow, indeed encourage, childish pettiness. I encountered several today and was reminded of how small I can be. But at least I can glimpse a bigger self somewhere in the far distance.