Salman Rushdie

I read about the attempt on the author’s life and his wounding in the attack. I’ve read only one of his books – Shalimar the Clown, and a couple of short stories, which I enjoyed. Satanic Verses I once tried to read, but it didn’t hold my interest. I find something irritatingly affected about the man that keeps me at a distance. Maybe more than other authors, his personality seems to infuse itself into the writing. But my judgment is only cursory – I can’t really claim to understand Rushdie from reading one novel and listening to a few interviews. And it’s just a personal bias. Still, I obviously know him better than his would-be assassin – I suppose religion was the motivating factor and Rushdie was just a symbolic target. What an idiot, what a presumption, by an ignorant 24-year old, to harm one of the great writers of our era.

I think the irony at the heart of all religions is that real religion is not something that one can “follow”. Every religious tradition has its geniuses, but the greatness of most of them stems from the fact that they themselves weren’t followers. They were people who put their lives on the line, searched for truth, tried to go to the heart of existence and made a direct connection with the divine. In their boldness, uniqueness, and willingness to escape convention, they had more in common with Rushdie than with those who revile him and want him dead.

A good guide to religion and ideology is that wherever there are attempts to trap us in prescribed practices and ritual, such as prayer or meditation at regular intervals, we need to reject them. Whenever they take away our power to think for ourselves, require us to differentiate ourselves from others, wear identifying clothing or symbols, we should reject them. True religion is about freedom of mind and vision: we can’t understand any of the secrets at the heart of existence as long as we subscribe to set rules of behaviour or thinking.

It’s a funny thing; the religious geniuses were themselves, by the standards of ordinary 21st century society, crazy fanatics – they had to be – it’s just that they weren’t followers.

George R. R. Martin

Having finished reading all five volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire now, I began to read a bit about the author. Apparently he composed all his books – at least up to 2011 and maybe till today – on a DOS computer and in WordStar. There’s something inspiring about that simple fact: One of the most successful and prolific writers of our time requires nothing more than what most people regard as antequated software. He evidently rejected all the bells and whistles of modern word processors in favor of an old and trusted tool. As to technique, he says that he writes in a sort of daydream, though obviously he needs to be extremely systematic in order to keep all the threads of his epic together. I wonder how he compiles and catalogues the enormous amount data that he is working with? Software also as simple as WordStar? OrgMode could naturally handle both the writing and the data collection, and would be a perfect tool. When I write my epic, that’s what I’ll use.

Blog backlog up to date

I have successfully passed all of the home-spun html entries from recent months into org-static-blog, meaning that I now have a continuous archive for the last three years. The ones from before that time can be found on WordPress. I don’t plan to move more of them.

A website should be more that a blog, however – I would like to add new features as time goes by. My biggest dilemma is whether to bother with adding some sort of fediverse or social networking to the site; it’s somewhat of a distraction, and it isn’t really possible to do it in basic html like the rest of the site. The simplest format is Bob Mottram’s Epicyon, if I want to get that working. But it looks like it would be necessary to add NGINX to the server. That’s possible too, it seems: one can have more than a single web servre protocol running on a server.

A Life Full of Holes, by Paul Bowles

I finished that today. It isn’t really clear to me whether he wrote the book under a fictional pseudonym, or whether the Magrebi storyteller was for real. Anyway, it’s a great book, written in a very original style. I could easily imagine a Bedouin shepherd relating the story. It’s poignant and creates great sympathy for the narrator. Usually a book like this, written by a western writer would be suspect of disguised racism, condescension or orientalism, but it’s not what I feel here. He doesn’t paint a pretty picture of the westerners, “the Nazarenes”, who appear in the book, and doesn’t romanticize the locals – mainly you think that he’s telling it like it is. I think it most reminded me of a Nectar in a Sieve, a book by the Indian writer Kamala Markandaya that I read years ago, though A Life Full of Holes is less tragic.

Bad News

The Guardian brings today terrible stories of Ukraine, of Uyghurs, of Sudan, Sri Lanka and elsewhere. The world is full of sorrow. So let’s party?

That wouldn’t be for me to say, since troubles are more likely to make me turn inward. But either way, this is not the “Let’s fix things” mentality that we probably need.

What I’m reading

“Son Visage et le Tien”, a long essay by Jenni Alexis. Interesting, so far. The English Wikipedia article about him references an article in the Atlantic, “When does a writer become a writer“[1]. Alexis, like T.S. Eliot, Franz Kafka, John Steinbeck, Margaret Duras and so many others that the article doesn’t mention, has a daytime job. Winning the Goncourt prize came as a big surprise for him. It’s the kind of attainment that so many aspiring writers dream about.

Links

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/11/when-does-a-writer-become-a-writer/248945/

Despite all the predictions that the Pegasus affair would be all forgotten after a few weeks, no, the company’s woes seem only to be accumulating. Blacklisted by the US gov’t, half a billion dollars in debt, and now being sued by Apple.

NSO was about to sell hacking tools to France. Now the Israeli spyware company is in crisis. | MIT Technology Review https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/11/23/1040509/france-macron-nso-in-crisis-sanctions/

Apple Sues NSO Group For Hacking Its Users https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kbvyb/apple-sues-nso-group-for-hacking-its-users

“For the experts and activists who have been accusing NSO Group of enabling authoritarian abuse for years, it’s a victory that is long overdue.”

Organizing some news feeds under Vivaldi

I put some of my RSS Newsfeeds in order in Vivaldi. My idea is to use it for blogs, rather than busy news sources. For that reason I first added RMS’s political notes, and then removed it. Because if I want to use it as what Dave Winer calls “a river of news”, RMS dominates too much. But the links are good. It would be better if Vivaldi made it possible to use sub-folders for different areas (and hence sub-rivers – by being able to click on the top folder that includes each set of feeds).

It’s a little disappointing to see many of the bloggers whom I bookmarked falling silent for months on end. Many people invest a lot of time in producing a nice looking blog, and then forget to use it.

Paywalled systems

I had a look at Glenn Greenwald’s website (http://glenngreenwald.net). It’s an outdated mess, with stuff requiring Flash player. His website doesn’t mention that he is now on Substack, (greenwald.substack.com) of which I was already aware. I can’t afford to subscribe to him on Substack, any more than I can afford to pay for other news sources. For now, I support the Guardian with a monthly donation, but can’t afford to do that for every web journal I visit. Steve Winer, who is wealthier than I am, has written about this problem. If enough websites gang up on me and offer a subscription model that works more like the music streaming services, offering a monthly subscription that allows me to read, say, 50 or 100 articles a month, across different journals, maybe I would pay for it. I think that the only real solution to paywalls is a model similar to the music streaming services, with a flat monthly subscription similar to that of Medium. But Medium reminds me a little of the gig economy; there are a few top earners, but even they are not getting paid so much. For bloggers and independent writers, what would work best would be to get together and create a “writers guild” or cooperative, working as a non-profit, so that the writers themselves don’t get cheated.

I don’t mind the presence of ads, only the nasty ones and trackers.

Open Library

I was delighted, then disappointed, to find https://openlibrary.org, where one can “borrow” books for a limited time. The problem is that the presentation makes them not very readable. Might be okay for students, but not really for readers. Someone put in a considerable amount of work in making the books available, but didn’t go the full route. At minimum there should be a phone application enabling comfortable reading of the books. The project belongs to archive.org, the internet archive, and uses the same login for both.

Links

India hovers over the Pause button for Big Tech’s march onto one hundred million farms • The Register https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/22/india_agristack/

The Sheltering Sky

Reading The Sheltering Sky of Paul Bowles. It’s interesting and well-written. The characters are racist and sexist, of course; I haven’t a clue whether that reflects the views of the author, because we aren’t intended to admire them.

Gene Wolfe on literature’s mainstream

“Incidentally, I’d argue that SF represents literature’s real mainstream. What we now normally consider the mainstream—so called realistic fiction—is a small literary genre, fairly recent in origin, which is likely to be relatively short lived. When I look back at the foundations of literature, I see literary figures who, if they were alive today, would probably be members of the Science Fiction Writers of America. Homer? He would certain belong to the SFWA. So would Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare. That tradition is literature’s mainstream, and it has been what has grown out of that tradition which has been labeled SF or whatever label you want to use.”

Larry McCaffery interview with writer Gene Wolfe.

Sebald’s prose

A good writer is a good communicator, which requires an eye for detail and a knowledge of what is being described.

“Everyone was plainly already asleep, and it was some time before an aged porter emerged from the depths of the house. He was so doubled over that he cannot have been able to see more than the lower half of anyone standing in front of him. Because of this handicap, no doubt, he had already taken a quick glance at the latecomer outside the glazed door before he crossed the hall, a glance that was the more penetrating for being brief.”

“Just as the winter days I had spent in America three years before had been dark and colourless, so now the earth’s surface, a patchwork of greens, was flooded with light. In the long since abandoned pastures stretching towards the mountains grew clumps of oaks and alders; rectilinear plantations of spruces alternated with irregular stands of birches and aspens, the countless trembling leaves of which had opened only a week or so before; and even on the dark, distant slopes, where pine forests covered the mountainsides, the pale green of larches lit by the evening sun gleamed here and there in the background.”

The Emigrants

Reading Sebald’s “The Emigrants”. I so much enjoy his writings. His early death was such a cruel tragedy, but somehow reminds me of the stories and anecdotes he writes about:

“Sebald [aged 57] died while driving near Norwich in December 2001. The coroner’s report, released some six months later, stated that Sebald had suffered an aneurysm and had died of this condition before his car swerved across the road and collided with an oncoming lorry.” (Wikipedia)

Ecclesia

“In the Roman basilica of Santa Sabina, site of the motherhouse of the order of Friars Preachers, the remains of a fifth century mosaic can be seen. It depicts two women, each with a book in her hand and beneath each is an inscription: Ecclesia ex Circumcisione on one side, Ecclesia ex Gentibus on the other. It provides evidence that even in the fifth century the Church was seen to be composed of two essential constituents: Jews and Gentiles — reconciled by the Cross of Jesus, gathered together as one people by Baptism. ”

I’m proofreading my scan of Bruno Hussar’s book “When the cloud lifted” for republication.

Prosed

Feeling out of joint with the culture or our times as I do, I find myself escaping either into the future, through the reading of science fiction, or into the past, by reading works of earlier times, especially of those authors who seem more in tune with my soul, due probably to a similar defect of character that removed them from the popular current of their own era, in a like manner that I am drawn into dominions distant from the habitual haunts of my own – solitary men and women who cared little for the approbation or disparagement of publishers, critics and contemporary mavens who often panned their creations as unreadable folderol, and whose genius was only appreciated much later and so, as anyone who has blundered upon his opus has probably guessed, happenstance I’ve belatedly discovered, albeit only in translation, this fellow Proust, and he’s already having the most marvelous effect on my writing. Oh!