Writing – Don't hold your breath

Mythmaking

Hans Hummel is one of the fond legends of Hamburg. Two decades ago when I visited the city, his statues were everywhere. Now there are only a few. The rest were auctioned off the year after I was there last. Spotting the statue again chimed well with the book that I began reading in that city one evening. This was The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow. Undoing the tropes of fairytales, swashbuckling boy’s tales, and Tolkienesque fantasy is a genre that has developed in this century. This book is a very good example.

What does every king want? To stay king.
Alix E. Harrow (in The Everlasting)

“Study fairytales if you want to write,” my high-school English teacher had advised me, handing me a slim volume of Tolkien’s lesser-known stories. That remains true today, I found as I read this book. The story is a time-loop, of the kind that has become very familiar since Groundhog Day brought it into the mainstream. It is a love story between two soldiers, separated by a thousand years, and it is a story about the power fantasy that causes them to meet. In the structure and central theme it is similar to last year’s Hugo prize winner, Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh.

Hans Hummel statue, Hamburg 2005 — One of the Hans Hummel statues I saw in Hamburg in 2005. It would generate a bit of controversy today, I think

Nevertheless, its narrative structure is unusual. The first two iterations of the time-loop are narrated by different people, once each by one of the principals. So it took a while for me to figure that the two traversals of the loop were going to go slightly differently. The later traversals are written in other registers: for example, one as a fairytale. This is where secondary characters begin to come into their own, further subverting genre conventions. A stylistically interesting aspect was that through a large part of the book the second person narrative is used, but by different people. So the reader is drawn into deconstructing a power fantasy.

Everything I had believed in and fought for – crown and country, the flag and the church, even the past itself- had proved false. What remained were those trivial, nameless moments which would be swallowed up by the tide of history and forgotten: my father’s hand on my hair when I was a boy, ruffling it awkwardly, the brusque press of Sawbridge’s lips on my cheek; your eyes on mine at the very end, full of faith, so certain I would come back for you.
Alix E. Harrow (in The Everlasting)

It is interesting at the end to see the unmaking of Tolkienesque narratives: of anointed royalty, of magical objects, of quests to kill dragons, of jealousy amongst knights, and of the notion of just wars. Instead new narratives are seeded.They seem more like the Hans Hummel story. There are many of these also in Tolkein, but modern media corporations will not fund the making of movies from them. I’m glad that they are being arrived at, and enriched, by new authors.

Unbroken

If [they] could ignore the far-off rumble of combustion engines … they could experience an environment essentially unchanged and described by an unbroken 500-year tradition of poetry.
Ian McEwan (in What we can know, 2025)

Kalidasa, the poet who wrote in classical Sanskrit in the 4th century CE, is perhaps the oldest poet whose descriptions of the Indian landscape are still remembered. A prompt to illustrate a favourite quote brought together for me two authors whose works I like: namely Kalidasa, the poet, and Ian McEwan, the novelist, separated by two millennia and half the world. The novel from which I take the quote is an engrossing literary mystery set in a future world changed drastically by a climate catastrophe. Love and landscapes are very much at the heart of this novel, just as they are the heart of the poem Meghdoot.

Sanskrit text of Meghdoot by Kalidasa (pdf)
Holcombe’s translation into English (pdf)

The basic storyline of Meghdoot concerns a yaksha separated from his lover who asks the monsoon clouds (megha) to be his messenger (doot). The bulk of the 120 stanza long poem is a description of the landscape the cloud will pass on the way to the Himalayas. The first step of the journey concerns the passage over what we today call the Western Ghats. The featured image is from that region in the monsoon, and shows a wisp of cloud passing over Thosegarh waterfall. I’d taken this photo one year as I looked at wildflowers. Looking back at those photos I realized what a long time two thousand years are. Many of our favourite garden flowers, roses and tulips, had not yet been created. Many of the common weeds and wildflowers that we see had not yet been brought to India. But the topli karvi (Strobilanthes sessilis) is native to this region, and would have been caused to flower by Meghdoot.

Today we see the forests of central India in patches where they are preserved. There are parts where historically recorded climate oscillations changed the composition of these forests drastically. For example, elephants became extinct from these forests about seven hundred years ago. Outside of the national parks today the forests are in danger again as human habitation and mining nibbles away at them. But the biosphere reserves try to preserve some of the old diversity. This chital (Axis axis, the spotted deer) grazing in one of these forests signals the presence of tigers and of other preserved species. The Meghdoot would have seen them all.

The Meghdoot was expected to pass over Ujjain, an ancient republic, which had recently been subsumed into a kingdom at the time of Kalidasa. Based on Kalidasa’s description of the city, some scholars have conjectured that the poet was born there, but similar claims, based on similar evidence, have been advanced in favour of numerous other places. When we visited Ujjain, I found no traces of the city that Kalidasa described. Urban landscapes change constantly. But on the outskirts of the town we stopped at the river Sipra (or Kshipra or Shipra; names change over two thousand years) which passes through the town. The poet described this as the river whose cool breeze is like the flattery of a lover trying to wake you. In the monsoon, standing on the banks of the same river, I felt that cool breeze. You have to imagine it from the photo above.

Another poetic flourish by Kalidasa concerns the monsoon cloud itself. He says that a rainbow which appears across the dark body of the rain cloud is like Krishna with a peacock feather stuck in his hair. It is amazing that in spite of the changes over almost two thousand years between Kalidasa and us, we can still see, if we ignore some things, the landscape that he saw. I have less familiarity with the later Sanskrit poets, but the descriptions that I know can still, sometimes, be recognized. We are fortunate; we live in the same natural world as our distant ancestors.

Luminous

Du muβt glauben, du muβt wagen
(You must trust, you must dare)
Friedrich Schiller (Sehnsucht)

Zeitgeist is something I could invoke when I write about Silvia Park’s debut novel called Luminous. Although artificial intelligence and robots in human and animal shapes are in the news today, the book feels different. Perhaps in the same way that Neuromancer felt like in 1984, when Bitnet had already connected the world, but few outside academia and the military knew about it. It is different now. Today’s military technology develops in full view. So don’t go into the book expecting to read a new Neuromancer.

The world of the book is built of many things: decommissioned war robots, which are still found semi-active sometimes (just as unexploded WWII era bombs are found now and then in the middle of German cities), humans developing emotional attachments to human-like robots (there is already couples therapy for humans and their AI lovers), an earlier generation of robots becoming nostalgic memories (just as we sometimes think of Sony Walkmans or film cameras), post-unification Korea still being socially divided (much as Ossies and Wessies remained distinct for long in reunified Germany), and war-criminals and corporate strivers oiling the mechanics of this brave new world. The story threads through lives of people in different parts of Korean society, and brings them to life.

In the world of online scams and people falling in love with chatGPT, it is clear that many humans let emotions overrule senses when they want to believe something. So much of the book is emotionally believable. In any case, writers have been thinking about humans interacting with nearly-human for over a century now. So, while reading the book I found echoes of other books, stories and movies (I’ve collected a little bibliography of such at the end).

An idea that was worked out very nicely in the book is how advances in robotics would lead to advances in prosthetic surgery. That leads on to the theme of the book. In interviews, Parks said that the theme is basically Peter Pan. I certainly see more: look at the bibliography at the end to see the echoes of other books that I found here. I found a major question that runs through the novel: what am I, my mind and memories, or my body? This is explored through three main characters: the child Ruijie, the cop Jun, and the robot Yoyo.

Ruijie’s story begins with this: Prepare your hearts, the doctors told her parents, instead of her. But Ruijie, three-time winner of the science fair, believed in the miracle of science.

Jun almost died in the war, but he was kept alive by prosthetic surgery. This is what he sees when he looks in a mirror for the first time after that: His chest, which he could stroke in awe, the greening archipelago where the flesh was still tender and alive, then it smoothed into blank arctic skyn stretched over his ribs.

People’s reactions vary. One extreme is: “Sick!” the manager said, delighted. “Are you some kind of new silicon?” “Cutting-edge,” Jun said.

But here is Ruijie towards the end of the book: When I asked my parents if I could have bionic surgery, my mom said my disease is in the brain. So it’s not like they can rehome my brain in a new body. The most they can do is copy and paste my memories. But if I still exist in this body and there’s a robot with my memories, then how could that robot be me?

Yoyo ties the many threads of the story together. Near the end Yoyo is talking to Ruijie: “It’s all the memories I hold within me. At least I’ll be able to pass them on, even if that was never my purpose. … Does this bring you comfort?” “I don’t know,” she said “… I’ve seen this before. Joy and sorrow. … There’s probably a German word for it.” “Sehnsucht,” he said, with a laugh. “But not quite.”

Seven related works
The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde) [book]
Second Variety (Philip K. Dick) [short story]
Supertoys Last All Summer Long (Brian Aldiss) [short story]
Roderick (John Sladek) [book]
AI (Steven Spielberg) [movie]
The Wedding Album (David Marusek) [short story]
We Are Completely Besides Ourselves (Katherine Joy Fowler) [book]

See! A lonely bark is rocking
And it seems no helmsman’s there,
Sails are open, waves are foaming,
But should a mortal soul dare?
Then its courage and faith alone
Must direct it – not God’s hand;
Only magic carries a man
To that magic wonderland.
Friedrich Schiller (Sehnsucht)

All photos in this post were taken on a phone camera with resident AI/ML. To me Schiller’s poem Sehnsucht seems to be about trying out new technology.

About blogging

Three things became clear to me this year about our blogs. We may put a lot of effort and thought into them, but they are just unsuspecting prey for forces that no one cares to control.

Several bloggers I used to follow stopped blogging this year. Some of them had registered their own domains. Once the bloggers stopped paying for these domain names, they became available to anyone who pays for them. When I clicked on them I saw what several other followers must have found: the domains all serve out porn until eventually the traffic of old regulars ceases. Sometimes, the domain is sold off to providers of other slop. None of us will pay for a domain in perpetuity, so this is bound to happen to any domain we register for personal use. Remind me not to buy a domain name for myself.

The second insight was weird. Out of curiosity I ran a test blog for one week. Each post was an image (taken from one of the many sources that give you free human-generated images) followed by a single sentence cliche like “Make this your day”. Within two days they began to get more traffic and likes than any post on this blog ever gets. I enjoy writing this blog, and I’m glad that there are people who enjoy what I write. What bothers me is that there seemed to be a substantially larger number of people who love less demanding reading. The lesson for myself was that I am in a minority, and I should continue to do what I enjoy.

Reflection of autumn leaves on the side of a bus in traffic. Osaka

The final realization is that every blog is now being hoovered up by data-hungry generative AI training bots. After noticing huge spikes in my traffic on some days, I went back and looked at my visit statistics in full. This inflation in the number of visits to my blog started at the end of 2023. That means for almost two years now my sentences have been fodder for gen-AI. It may have started with chatGPT, but now every Mark, Elon and Satya is doing it.

Dry gingko leaf on a polished wooden table. Osaka

Web 2.0 was always owned by corporates, but now it is trying to dispense with people who worked for them for free. Who needs bloggers, they think, if we can get gen-AI to write blogs which we can then pump full of ads. Not the humans who still like to talk to people. Not the humans who write about their own interests without bothering about statistics of likes and follows. So that’s my lesson to carry into the next year: enjoy what you do, continue doing what you like.

Mazes of Erice

“Oops! Dead end,” I exclaimed when I saw ahead of me only the Mediterranean. I turned back. The lanes of Erice are confusing for a while. Roads turn gently enough that you don’t realize that you are going north when you thought you were walking eastwards. You need to keep track of shadows, like in the old days. “But you could just use GPS,” The Family tells me. That would be cheating though.

Some of you may remember that game from long long ago which went “A twisty maze of little passages, all different.” That’s Erice for you. This medieval town atop a hill has only one advantage over that game. It is small enough that after a day you’ve figured it all out. But on that first day, all lanes looked like the one at the left above. Or was it the right?

Finally I come to two doors. But then neither of them looks right. It was not green for sure. I think it was brown. But it did not have a red post box hanging next to it. Let’s just go that way a little, and we’ll figure this out.

Back into the fray. “Look, we’re definitely some place new,” says The Family. Yes, we are. This is a little square, in a somewhat hexagonish style. Maybe if we go past that building into that alley there … There’s a nice polished door with a lion’s head knocker. Is that the one we wanted?

Sometimes you are afraid you’ll never find your way back to safety. Erice does have its dangers, so you either learn, or you are carted away with other live animals.

Here’s a story for Esther: I sipped my morning’s cup of tea as I reviewed post-midnight videos from the cams. Most windows showed empty streets with advertising pillars. The interesting one was the statue of the Mermaid on Redstreet. I let that creep, because I liked the snow piling up on her shoulders before sliding off repeatedly. I sped up the rest, until every passer-by galloped across the window. Nothing else ever happened of course, since resistance agents train the AIs to erase interesting things.

Freud on Transience

Somewhere I found an essay by Freud called “On Transience.” This little piece moved me more than I’d believed any of his writings might. He starts by talking of a friend, “young but already famous poet”, who feels no joy in seeing a beautiful countryside because of an awareness of its transience. Freud then talks of another way that people deal with the pain of a knowledge of transience, and that is to deny the transience by positing that beauty somehow transcends time. He dismisses this response saying “it is a product of our wishes too unmistakable to lay claim on reality.”

But the crux of his article is that he does not understand this at all. “A flower that blossoms only for a single night does not seem to us on that account less lovely.” He goes on to argue “A time may indeed come when the pictures and statues which we admire today will crumble to dust, or a race of men may follow us who no longer understand the works of our poets and thinkers, or a geological epoch may even arrive when all animate life upon earth ceases; but since the value of all this beauty and perfection is determined only by its significance for our own emotional lives, it has no need to survive us and is therefore independent of absolute duration.”

He applies this thought to the war that broke out a year later (in 1914) and writes that “It destroyed not only the beauty of the countrysides through which it passed and the works of art it met with on its path but it also shattered our pride in the achievements of our civilization…” [As a person from a part of the world which was devastated by the rapaciousness of this civilization I will merely quote Gandhi to you. When asked what he thought of Western civilization, he said “It would be a good idea.”] But Freud continues to the eventual conclusion that “our high opinion of the riches of civilization has lost nothing from our discovery of their fragility. We shall build up again all that war has destroyed…”

With this, the article becomes a philosophy for action that strangely echoes one that Gandhi developed in 1929, following the principles taught to the warrior king Arjuna by Krishna. That common response across cultures seems to me to be the only rational path available to us as we pass through a civilizational storm that none of us alive have seen before. Such storms come once in every two or three generations, and our response determines what our distant descendants will know us by.

A footnote: You can find the text by Freud in pdf form in a server in U.Penn. A footnote in the text declares that Freud spent part of the summer of 1913 in the Dolomites, but the poet cannot be identified. The Wikipedia page declares that the poet is definitely Rainer Maria Rilke, and the walk is fictitious. Even in such highly documented and recent lives, there is so much scope for radical disagreement!

What should I eat in Sicily?

Lampedusa’s Prince has few recommendations (black coffee with Monreale biscuits, rum jelly, caciocavallo cheese), strongly advises against soup (barbaric foreign usage of serving an insipid liquid as a first course) and instead suggests a macaroni pie. He saves his breath for food served at a banquet (coraline lobsters boiled alive, waxy chaud-froids of veal, steely-lined fish immersed in sauce, turkeys gilded by the ovens’ heat, rosy foie-gras under gelatine armour, boned woodcocks reclining on amber toast) and hits a high point with the desserts (huge sorrel babas, Mont Blancs snowy with whipped cream, cakes speckled with white almonds and green pistachio nuts, hillocks of chocolate covered pastry, brown and rich as the top soil of the Catanian plain … coffee ices … those cakes called “Triumphs of Gluttony”, shameless “Virgins’ cakes” shaped like breasts). I wish man could live by such confections alone.

Food should be plentiful in Sicily. After the end of the Punic Wars it was called the granary of Rome, for the amount of food it exported to feed Roman citizens and armies. During the republican period, governors of the province were known for corruption, leading to repeated revolts by the peasantry. But during the imperial period it seemed to have been more peaceful with Siracusa, Catania, Panormus (modern Palermo) and Lilybaeum (modern Marsala) known to be thriving and rich cities. There was no indication of a major falling off of agriculture during the Moorish and Norman rules, or later. So I assume that there will be a variety of local food.

Leonardo Sciascia in Day of the Owl makes even fewer recommendations (mutton must be eaten hot, swimming in fat, and savoury with pepper, and as for coffee one must drink a strong double every half-hour). But fortunately, there is a strong warning not to eat polenta like a northerner.

So I had to turn again to Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano, always generous with details. I could see that fresh fish and seafood, olives and olive oil, and many kinds of sweets are highly recommended. Skim the rest for details.

Fresh anchovies … [dressed] in a great deal of lemon juice, olive oil and freshly ground black pepper …

Eat a brioche with a granita di caffe …

Coral sauce, made of langoustine roe and sea-urchin pulp, to be used on spaghetti …

Super-fresh cod poached with a couple of bay leaves and dressed directly on the plate with salt, pepper and Pantelleria olive oil, with a side dish of gentle tinnirume …

[With a] large serving of haddock, in the refrigerator he found a sauce of anchovies and vinegar …

Hefty serving of caponata …

As a first course, he served him a large dish of macaroni in a light sauce dubbed foco vivo (olive oil, garlic, lots of hot red pepper, salt), which the inspector was forced to wash down with half a bottle of wine. For the second course, he ate a substantial portion of lamb alla cacciatora that had a pleasant fragrance of onion and oregano. He closed with a ricotta cheesecake and small glass of anisette …

Twenty cannoli, fresh out of the oven, ten kilos’ worth of tetu, taralli, viscotti regina and Palermitan mostaccioli … as well as some marzipan fruits, and, to crown it all, a colourful cassata …

Two slices from a loaf (of wheat bread), dresshed them in olive oil, salt and black pepper, adding a slice of pecorino cheese, … to form a sandwich,

[He] filled a saucer with green and black olives and cut himself a slice of bread.

Baby octopus alla luciana and a very simple fresh tomato sauce

Ten or so olives, and … a slice of caciocavallo cheese.

I’m looking forward to eating my way through Sicily.

What’s the past pluperfect of skibidi?

Cambridge dictionary has an entry for the word skibidi. From the usage examples it collects, it could be a noun, an adjective, an adverb and a verb. Nouns may have cases, but English is not strongly cased. Verbs definitely have tenses: past, present, future each with aspects (simple, continuous, etc). The past pluperfect refers to an action that was complete before another took place. So …

My heart skibode before I told the others to look at the elephant sculptures we passed outside a fibreglass workshop in Assam.

I read that the Oxford dictionary has dropped the words anomaly and acrimony “because no one was using them anyway” and added the words rizz and skibidi. I did a quick check on Google ngrams, and found that in the period between 1700 CE and the present the word anomaly has never been more popular. Currently 4 out of every million words written in English is “anomaly”. The popularity of acrimony has been dropping; now it is appears twice every ten million words, down from a peak of 6 in a million in the 1770s. Rizz, that popular word on the internet has also sunk from a high of appearing about twice in a billion in the 18th century to about 6 times in a hundred billion now. So much for the objectivity of dictionaries. I would trust the internet more.

Location, location, location

When you are choosing hotels for your travels the words of the real-estate magnate Baron Samuel (yes, there were real estate magnates earlier) take on an increased significance. Then in between maps and hotel aggregators, if I have the chance, I try to trace fictional locations.

I hadn’t paid much attention to the location of Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano and his police station in Vigata, a fictional town in Sicily. Now, since I was trying to ready a travel itinerary through Sicily for myself, I paid attention to real places named in the novel “The Voice of the Violin.” How could I try to find a plausible location for Vigata. Right at the beginning there is a phone call from police headquarters in Floridia near Siracusa. Later, the Hotel Della Valle, crucial to the story is said to be located halfway between Vigata and Montelusa behind one of the most beautiful temples in the world (historical conservation … be damned). There is a hotel by that name located between the ruins of the temples of Zeus and Hera in the town of Agrigento. Montelusa is a real town, to the east of Agrigento, closer to Siracusa. There is an autoroute from Agrigento to Palermo, where flights from the Italian mainland land. This is also crucial to the story. So I would tend to locate Vigata on the south central coast of Sicily. My favourite would be actually rather close to Agrigento, in a village called Porto Empedocle. This had a lighthouse at the end of a long spur near which there is an inexpensive but well rated restaurant called La Spiaggetta. From the reviews it seems that this could well be the kind of place at which favourite customers might be served couscous with eight different kinds of fish.

Il Gattopardo / The Leopard

Fiction is my starting point when I begin to think of travel. All of us are already mentally prepared to travel to Sicily by Mario Puzo and his Don Corleone. Over the years I had added Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano and his wonderful knowledge of the local food. But then I found that I should counterbalance this with what some think of as among the finest novels of the 20th century from Italy, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel called Il Gattopardo, whose title was slightly mistranslated in English as The Leopard.

I read nothing more about the novel before I started reading this story of a minor Sicilian prince set during the Risorgimento. I skipped the introductory essay and went directly to the opening chapter “Introduction to the Prince (May, 1860)”: The daily recital of the Rosary was over. For half an hour the steady voice of the Prince had recalled the Sorrowful and Glorious Mysteries; for half an hour other voices had interwoven a lilting hum from which, now and again, would chime some unlikely word; love, virginity, death; and during that hum the while aspect of the rococo drawing-room seemed to change; even the parrots spreading iridescent wings over the silken walls appeared abashed; even the Magdalen between the two windows looked a penitent and not just a handsome blonde lost in some dubious daydream as she usually was.

The para long sentence seemed to me to be from a novel written late in the 19th century, the kind that draws you into a different world right from the start. I read on, but was confused. Not by the story, which proceeded linearly through the Prince’s day, illuminating the times as it touched on the surroundings: a dead soldier, a dead marriage, a fossilized religion, and Bendico- a faithful old dog. At the end of the long chapter I was no longer sure that the novel was written so long ago. Could this structure have been used before À la recherche du temps perdu and Finnegans Wake? But caught in the narrative, I read on until the widening gaps of time between the chapters made clear that I was reading a novel from the 20th century mid-century modern. The words “Love, virginity, death” would rise again to sum up the story.

I thought the story had ended with the ending of the chapter “Death of a Prince (July, 1883)”: When she was face to face with him she raised her veil, and there, chaste but ready for possession, she looked lovelier than she ever had when glimpsed in stellar space. The crashing of the sea subsided altogether. But last chapter was “Relics (May, 1910)”, the next. This time the end was certain. The Prince’s aging unmarried daughter spends a day re-examining her life, sees things clearly at last, and flings out of a window the last remnant of her past, the pelt of Bendico: During the flight down from the window its form recomposed itself for an instant; in the air there seemed to be dancing a quadruped with long whiskers, its right foreleg raised in imprecation. Then all found peace in a little heap of livid dust.

This is what I like to take away from a novel, not the places and things one would see, not even the tastes and smells of a region, but an understanding of the past that underlies what I might see.