Under an Afghan Sky

I was recently reading A House in the Sky, Amanda Lindhout's account of her fifteen month captivity at the hands of Somali kidnappers, and came across this passage early on:

Melissa Fung, the CBC television correspondent who looked so purposeful and confident, couldn't know that sixteen months later, on a return trip to Afghanistan, she would get kidnapped outside of Kabul and spend twenty-eight days as a hostage, kept half-starved in an underground room in the mountains.

I immediately felt deflated because I thought that I was reading about the Canadian journalist who had been held in a hole in the ground, so it was just by happenstance that I had picked up the wrong memoir. I went on to quite enjoy Lindhout's book, and although comparisons between the two might not be fair, I can't help but compare them now, and as a result, Under an Afghan Sky falls short. 

Of course, I'm not comparing the two women's actual experiences -- whether for one month or fifteen, being held against your will by armed young extremists must be a hopeless and terrifying experience, and both Lindhout and Fung held up much better than I suspect I would in their stead. The real comparison is in the reporting of their experiences, and my biggest complaint about Fung's book is that it came off as a bit dry and clinical, curiously lacking in heart, yet -- and here's where I get to look like a hypocrite -- I had initially been put off Lindhout's book because she collaborated with another writer, someone who added flair and drama that I initially felt built up a barrier between me and the plain truth. Under an Afghan Sky seems to demonstrate what happens when a straight-up journalist goes solo with her material: the story lacked in storytelling. I was teary throughout much of Lindhout's account, full out crying when she reunited with her family, but totally dry-eyed (though not completely unaffected by the details) throughout Fung's.

Mellissa Fung was (until very recently) a CBC correspondent and so many of her attitudes displayed in Under an Afghan Sky demonstrate why I resent my tax dollars funding the public television station, or at least its news division anyway. Most annoying was her voicing the Canadian left's reflexive anti-Americanism in statements like: I thought that by trying to make Zahir see that there was a difference between Canada and the United States, I could make him realize his captive wasn't a sworn enemy of the Taliban the same way an American might be. I thought that after 9/11 we were "all American" and that Canada was actually leading the efforts in Afghanistan -- a maple leaf on her backpack wasn't going to get Fung out of this jam. Also: "I agree, I think George Bush is a very bad man," I said. This wasn't completely untrue, and I figured it was time we agreed on something. I understand trying to find common ground with her captor, and also appreciate that many people didn't find Bush too bright, but "a very bad man"? Later, Fung made this statement: It was Wednesday, November 5, and the night after the US presidential election. I wondered what had happened, and hoped that America had made the right decision. The right decision, electing Obama. What hubris coming from a Canadian journalist, and totally inappropriate coming from someone who reports for Canada's national broadcaster.

Despite her no-atheists-in-foxholes-constant-rosary-recitation, Fung also takes swipes at Christian fundamentalists (equating a devout Muslim's prayer cycles to that of a "Deep South" Christian and saying, "God knows there are enough problems with Christian fundamentalists in Western society…") and also demeans her own Canadian citizenship: Just like I wouldn't say I'm a devout Catholic, I wouldn't call myself an unduly patriotic Canadian…But everywhere I went, I was pretty proud to be a Canadian, proud of everything Canada stood for internationally in the tradition of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau. In the tradition of Pearson and Trudeau is really important there -- the peacekeepers-not-policemen foreign policy that certain proper-thinking people think should be Canada's only role internationally -- you know Pearson and Trudeau, the Prime Minister who charged into Korea and the one who chummed with Castro soon after the Bay of Pigs. 

Her politics aside, I was also surprised that Fung seemed to empathise with her kidnappers, blaming a generation of domestic war for their criminal activities. While I could see why Lindhout understood her captors' motivations (the young men who held her wanted the ransom to fund their education and marriages) I was dismayed that Fung could also see logic in her captors seeking ransom to buy Kalashnikovs and materials to make the IEDs that were all too often blowing up the Canadian Forces that she was embedded with.

And one last comparison -- Lindhout's book included information about what her family and the Canadian Government were doing to secure her release, including information about how the ransom negotiations were going; information I found very interesting and compelling. Fung's book didn't share any of this, despite including letters from her "special friend" Peter, a man who began writing letters to her while she was being held because "I wanted you to have a record of what went on". These letters, while loving, don't actually include any information about "what went on". 

I have much empathy for Mellissa Fung and am heartened to see that writing this book has helped her to deal with her horrific experience, but fair or not, I have recently seen the format done better, and as a result, this memoir is ultimately disappointing. 

Shovel Ready

I don't want to know your reasons. I don't care. Think of me more like a bullet. Just point.

So, what do you get if you cross The Sopranos with The Matrix, throw in some nods to 9/11 and Occupy Wall Street, have Chuck Palahniuk write the screenplay and ask Quentin Tarantino to direct? Why, a Shovel Ready project, of course. And if that sounds like a mashup of a lot of pop-cultural references, it might not be surprising to learn that the author, Adam Sternbergh, is the culture editor of The New York Times Magazine. (And that might explain why I've heard more buzz around this debut novel than it might actually deserve -- it must be nice to have friends in the right places.)

I don't think I've ever read any actual cyberpunk -- a word I see used to describe Shovel Ready -- so I won't be a poseur and throw that around, but I have dipped my toes in classic noir (note Spademan's name is a nod to Hammett's Sam Spade), and can understand why Sternbergh refers to his book as "future noir": After a dirty bomb has made Times Square radioactive and a further series of car bombings causes half the population of New York City to funnel away for greener pastures, Spademan, a former garbage man who has lost everything in the attacks, remains in the city as an assassin for hire. (I thought his weapon of choice would be a shovel because of his name but it's a boxcutter -- and that's an authorial decision fraught with significance, no?) When Spademan is hired to kill an 18-year-old runaway, complications arise (she's pregnant with her powerful Evangelist father's baby), and the hitman becomes protector -- he's not that kind of psycho, after all. 

In this near-future world, people are able to enter the limnosphere: a Matrix/Holodeck virtual reality experience, complete with cybernerds creating the storylines with their laptops and nurses monitoring vital signs. In a not-too-subtle commentary on class disparity, regular people scrape together their change to escape their bleak lives in rundown Chinatown buildings, stacked up on cots cheek-by-jowl with their fellow escapees, while the super-rich have private beds in their homes and can stay tapped-in essentially forever -- taking in nutrition by iv and expelling waste through tubes, all under the eye of a starched and dedicated nurse. (What isn't made much of is the fact that the limnosphere is actually the great equalizer -- class pretty much disappears once someone taps-in.)

There are some Chandleresque wordplays: the slow exodus from NYC is called the "incremental apocalypse"; the sight of a man wearing ten silver rings is a "sterling graveyard"; prescription drugs are the "toothless tap-in". But I have trouble thinking of Spademan as a sympathetic anti-hero -- he's more Tony Soprano the cold-blooded killer than Philip Marlowe the flawed detective; as the quote I opened with shows, Spademan will kill anyone, no questions asked. So, while reading Shovel Ready, I wasn't exactly rooting for the protagonist (rooting for him to kill people?), and the dirty bomb dystopia/virtual reality escapism didn't exactly feel fresh or new (the laptops and heart monitors and bedlike capsules was exactly The Matrix in my mind). There were logical flaws in the plot, including characters saying things they couldn't have known -- for example, describing what Rachel was experiencing as she first tapped-in when she never told anyone about it -- and the climax was a little…anticlimactic. But, there were some twists along the way and I did think that Sternbergh did a deft job of filling in the characters' backstories as he went along -- no one's real motives were truly revealed until the end. 

This was not my favourite book. I've recently heard the term "dick lit" to mean the masculine form of "chick lit" and I think that would describe this book -- kind of lightweight and pulpy and for which I'm not really the intended audience. And I hated the voice of the actor who read this audiobook. But I'm sure Sternbergh doesn't need my support -- I hear Denzel Washington is attached to the movie version of Shovel Ready and the author is hard at work on the sequel. Maybe he can work in some wikileaks and Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad and Fight Club and…

A House in the Sky

In August 2008, Amanda Lindhout, a novice journalist, and Nigel Brennan, her erstwhile lover and semi-pro photographer, made a trip into Somalia, hoping to uncover some human interest stories that would jumpstart their careers. Within four days, their vehicle was ambushed, and along with their three Somali guides, Lindhout and Brennan were kidnapped; the two Westerners held for over fifteen months. A House in the Sky is Lindhout's chronicle of the ordeal.

Beginning with an account of her tumultuous childhood -- Lindhout's parents split up when she was six and her father came out of the closet. He moved out with another man and her mother started an affair with her much younger foster brother, allowing him to move in with her and the kids, keeping him around despite his abuse and alcoholism -- when Lindhout described her move to Calgary from Sylvan Lake at 19 to work as a cocktail waitress, I could totally relate -- I moved from Lethbridge to Edmonton, at 20, where I became…a cocktail waitress. This was 10 years earlier than Lindhout -- it was more bust than boom at the time -- and while I didn't make a thousand dollars in tips per night, I did make a couple hundred -- and I kept my stacks of bills in a coffee can like she did, and I spent my time off at the Wee Book Inn…like she did. Perhaps if my own childhood had been as chaotic as Lindhout's, I too might have sought out adventures straight from the pages of National Geographic, but I blew my savings on a wedding and a down payment on our first house. 

This first part of the book was interesting enough, but repeatedly I could sense the ghostwriting of Lindhout's coauthor, New York Times Magazine contributing writer Sara Corbett. The following passage felt like it was out of a semi-fictionalised book like In Cold Blood or The Executioner's Song instead of belonging in a straight-up memoir:

I'd landed in plenty of chaotic places before, but this one was different : The chaos here felt edgy, dangerous, as if we couldn't keep ourselves outside of it and were breathing it in, as if it sat already in the lungs of every last person in that airport, the cyanide edge of a nasty war.

And Lindhout's reaction to the first time she was raped by one of her kidnappers, reported here, seemed so obviously written by someone else that it drained the moment of true connection; I could feel a barrier between me and the woman who had experienced it:

I felt as if I'd been evicted from my body, like I no longer fit in my own skin. What had been outside me was now in, like some vicious flattening force. I was a ghost wandering the ruins of a wrecked city.

But soon after, something happened -- I don't know if the writing got better or if I just surrendered to the narrative, but I started to really care about Lindhout, and even though she was obviously freed eventually, the daily dangers she faced became real and heartbreaking to me. In one scene -- the pair makes an escape, eventually heading to a mosque where they hope to find someone who would help them. Although curious about the filthy, wild-eyed white people who burst upon their prayers, when the captors arrive, the hundreds of men present help to return them to their imprisonment. Only one middle-aged woman attempts to intervene, grabbing onto Lindhout's arms and throwing herself across the young woman's body. Her eyes are filled with horror and tears as Lindhout and Brennan are eventually dragged away -- the pathos was enough to bring tears to my eyes. I was totally invested by that point, and even though I knew they would be freed eventually -- or how else did she write the book? -- when Lindhout and Brennan were finally reunited with their families, I was freely crying.

In the end, Lindhout decided not to react with bitterness: in a way, she sympathised with her mostly teenaged captors; young men who had grown up in a war-torn and fundamentalist society; young men who wanted the kidnapping ransom to pay for their education or weddings. Pursuant to her ordeal, Lindhout founded "the Global Enrichment Foundation, a non-profit organization that supports development, aid, and education initiatives in Somalia and Kenya", and I completely admire her efforts. You can watch movies like Black Hawk Down or Captain Phillips, read the works of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, or note that the Somali druglords who once cheekily posed with that hilarious crackhead mayor Rob Ford have been disappearing each other of late, and wonder, "Well, what can be done about such a basketcase-failed-state as Somalia?" Few people take the next step towards actually doing something.

I should also note that there's been some controversy about whether Lindhout should have put her family and the Canadian government to such trouble trying to extract her when she had no real business going to Somalia in the first place. Here's some interesting reading I found on the topic:

In her defense

A look at the kidnapping from both victims' points of view

That second link also includes some quotes from Nigel Brennan's account of the kidnapping, The Price of Life. I am happy that I stuck with this book despite the early annoyances (which might very well be peculiar to me alone) and I think overall it is an important and impressive read.

And another fact that is probably only interesting to me:

I felt deflated when I read this line (during my early and unenchanted phase of reading this book):

Melissa Fung, the CBC television correspondent who looked so purposeful and confident, couldn't know that sixteen months later, on a return trip to Afghanistan, she would get kidnapped outside of Kabul and spend twenty-eight days as a hostage, kept half-starved in an underground room in the mountains. 

Deflated because that's whose story I thought I was reading. Fung's book is called Under an Afghan Sky, and when I was done reading A House in the Sky, I went to the downtown branch of the library, where Fung's book was supposed to be available. Well, it wasn't on the proper shelf and I couldn't find it on a display shelf, but I did see a copy of Chariots of the Gods by Erich von Däniken. And what's weird about that is that I really did spend a lot of hours looking at used books at the Edmonton branches of the Wee Book Inn, and while Amanda Lindhout spent her tips on travelogues and National Geographic Magazines, I amassed a collection of all of the crazy old ancient-aliens-visiting-earth-themed paperbacks that I could find. Weird that that forty year old book would have been propped up on a display shelf while I had been musing -- earlier today -- about what different books Lindhout and I had picked up.

Another small insight -- I think I wasn't totally connecting with Lindhout at first because I really expected to -- what with our similar experiences when we first left our family homes, but she wasn't actually much like me at all. When I did finally engage with the story was when women of my current age began to appear -- the woman in the mosque or every time Lindhout got to talk to her mother on the phone and called her "Mummy". I must be too far from the young woman I was to put myself in the victim's shoes, but as a Mom of daughters, I think I was most affected when I empathized with the older women who were helpless; the Moms who could not protect the daughter. 

Mind Picking : Viva Las Vegas

After reluctantly deciding that we missed out on taking a week at a resort this year, Dave and I impulsively decided to cash in his Aeroplan miles last week and go to Vegas. He booked the flights at 10 am, and at 2 pm we were taking off. This was all meant to be low low budget, so I used up most of my Air Miles to rent us a shiny red convertible and we booked a room at Circus Circus for $30/night. Also part of my plan was using groupons as we went along but the only thing I prebought was an all-you-can-eat/all-you-can-drink buffet at Planet Hollywood ($46 for both of us) and tickets to a comedy show afterwards, also at Planet Hollywood.

What I didn't take into consideration was that everyone else would also have found that buffet groupon if they had gone looking, and apparently, everyone had. When we got there, the lineup really didn't look that long but it barely crawled along, and I soon noticed that there was a second lineup for people with a priority card -- they could walk straight to the hostess and get seated right away while we stood and stewed. We were in line for probably an hour, long enough to share eye rolls with the people in front of us, and it was truly dispiriting when we got closer to the front and twice had the hostess come looking for groups of 6 and take families out of the line behind us. The third time she came over looking for a large group, the woman ahead of me started waving her arm saying, "Right here, we're six." She winked at me and put her arm around a startled old woman in front of her and said, "Come on Mom and Dad, they've got a table for us now."

Dave gave me a wide-eyed What is going on, do we really need to talk to these people throughout dinner? look and it's a look I'm sure I returned -- we like other people just fine but prefer our own company. We went right to the buffet and loaded up our plates and when we got back the introductions were made -- we were sitting with Henry and Bea of New York City (no duh -- they were sweeter copies of George's parents from Seinfeld, but the accent was the exact same) and to my right, Diane and Jay from "the Bay area". The drinks started coming, and to our great surprise, we had an interesting and hilarious dinner: there was much laughing, and Henry made thoughtful comments to Dave (who he was sitting beside) about the differences between Canadians and Americans (and Bea piped up, "You know, I've lived in New York my entire life and have always wanted to go to Niagara Falls. I've just never made it"), and Jay had many questions for me about how we like our healthcare system and the ways that it might be different from the system they're phasing in down there. Diane, as it turns out, is a Prosecutor who specializes in Environmental Law, and although we didn't talk much about that, it was fascinating listening to her talk about her earlier days as a Legal Aid defense attorney. We talked about our families and dogs and politics and taxes, and how we did laugh, and as much fun as we were having, Dave and I had to eventually leave for the comedy show -- which wasn't nearly as much fun as the dinner we had had. 

Early in our trip, we were accosted by someone who bribed us into going to a timeshare presentation -- Keith's sales pitch was slick, asking us what our plans were while we were in town and giving us the inside scoop on how to do everything the best way. We told him that we were planning to drive out to the Grand Canyon and he told us about what a hard drive it is to the West Rim, over an unpaved road, to get to where the new skywalk platform is, and also told us that it's owned and operated by an Indian tribe whose land it's on and they overcharge for every part of the experience (from the shuttle bus they make you take to the pictures only they are allowed to take and then sell to you). Keith advised us where to buy a good supermarket picnic on the way and even gave us his personal cell phone number in case we ran into problems. His pitch was so exuberant, and he shared so much information with us, that we agreed to attend the presentation, for which we would get a free breakfast buffet and tickets to a Cirque du Soleil show.

We were pretty unexcited about the Grand Canyon experience as Keith described it, but once we were back at the hotel I was googling tripadvisor about driving to the Grand Canyon and many people recommended driving the 4.5 hours to get to the South Rim -- we were planning on using up a whole day anyway, so that's the route we took. We left early enough that we weren't too discouraged by the the chilly weather -- too cool to put the top down on the car, but since we thought we were heading into a desert, we figured it would warm up eventually (Dave was actually frustrated that I insisted on bringing him a sweatshirt "just in case it got cold later"). It never did warm up, the landscape was scrubby pines, not desert, but we did hit a giant tumbleweed, originally 4 times this size, that Dave had to get out and remove from the car's grill:

The closer we got to the Grand Canyon, the cooler it got, and by the time we parked, the car's thermometer said 40 degrees. (Good thing we can't convert F into C because we laughed pretty hard when we later learned that we silly Canadians were walking around in shorts in 4 degree weather.) It was breathtaking at the Grand Canyon, of course. Dave said it had never been on his bucket list, but in the end, it was Dave who kept wanting to walk a little further (and a little closer to the edge in areas without a barrier too, the brat), taking pictures and gushing about how beautiful it all was.

You'd also think he'd never seen a real live animal before by the hundred pictures he took of some wandering elk, but his enthusiasm was adorable.

We had many more interesting meals, using groupons when we felt like it, including some turkey burgers and margaritas at Fatburger and it was impressive to me that every restaurant had a special ipad or smartphone that scanned the vouchers right off my own phone (it's just such a difference with the way that servers up here write down the voucher numbers and check them against a master list -- things are always more organised and high-tech in the States).

But I was more amazed that the best tasting meal we had was at  Vince Neil's Tatuado -- more bar than restaurant, we went because we had a 2 for 1 coupon, but the catfish I had was perfectly cooked and absolutely delicious.

We did end up going to the timeshare presentation, and as promised, we were given a breakfast buffet (meagerly served out by assistants), but our personal salesman, Ryan, sat with us, talking and asking questions, the entire time we ate.  The main presenter started talking, and although his spiel was persuasive, it really didn't apply to me and Dave -- he said that the average American only gets 2 weeks holidays per year and most of them don't go anywhere, but Dave gets 6 weeks and we spend at least half of them travelling. I totally had on open mind, since we do travel and I understand the benefit of making an investment now to save money in the future, but when we got down to the dollars and cents, Ryan couldn't show me how buying a timeshare was a better deal for us than the all-inclusive resorts we love going to (the main point for us, as Canadians, is that all-inclusive trips also include airfare -- any timeshare we bought that meant we had to get flights and still pay for food and drinks didn't save us anything). He brought over his manager, who also said that it probably wasn't for us, and we were released. 

The upside was that we did get to go see Ka for our time and it was epically epic. We were told that it's the most expensive stage set in the world at $85 million and it looks every penny of it. The story was hard to follow but it didn't matter -- from a beautiful shipwreck to a crazy rockwall ballet to the guy jumping rope on top of a double-ended spinning cage thingy that made me hide my eyes behind splayed fingers, it was a gorgeous and thrilling show.

Now, since Dave bought last minute plane tickets with his points, he was initially disappointed that the only flight home would entail a 9 hour overnight layover in Washington D.C. To me, that's just more adventure! Despite the warnings from some American friends that it's not generally safe to go walking around D.C. at night, I couldn't let the opportunity go to waste, and Dave and I rented a car and drove to the monuments. We parked, despite Dave's mild objections that it would be easier to drive to each site, because in my mind the Mall was more compact than it actually is -- and in the end it was a 3 hour walking loop to see everything from the Washington Monument to the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials (stopping at all the smaller ones -- the wars, FDR, MLK, etc -- along the paths on the way), down past the White House and back to the car. Even though it was shortly before midnight when we were done, there was a nonstop procession of tour buses at the monuments themselves, and although the walking paths were actually pretty dark, all we passed were couples like us and families -- I was never scared and was glad we didn't listen to the nervous nellies (and of course more glad that they weren't right to be nervous for us).

Overall, this was a great trip -- just what Dave and I needed -- and is a valuable reminder about why what the timeshare presenter had to say didn't apply to us: Dave and I do play together and intend to stay together. We don't need the bright lights of Vegas to excite us (as much as we appreciated Vegas' warm weather), and actually, our most memorable experiences were walking along, hand-in-hand, at the Grand Canyon and through the streets of D.C. The timeshare presenter was trying to sell a lifestyle -- a dream -- and we weren't buying because we're already living it.

Know what I like most about this ^^ picture? Dave's wearing the sweatshirt I insisted on bringing for him -- the same sweatshirt he had to buy himself at Disneyworld last year when we showed up in shorts and tshirts on a pretty cold day. Silly Canadians.

Our Final Hour

I heard about Our Final Hour when I watched Martin Rees' Ted talk on the mounting risks that the Earth now faces, here. I thought that I would be getting a more in-depth treatment of the topics he covered in the video, but for the most part, I had already learned his most interesting ideas. Also, since the immediacy of the issues is a main thrust of the book, it has gone a bit stale already, as in:

Some innovations just don't attract enough economic or social demand: just as supersonic flight and manned space flight stagnated after the 1970s, today (in 2002) the potentialities of broadband (G3) technology are being taken up slowly because few people want to surf the Internet or watch movies from their mobile phones.

Wasn't 2002 such a simpler time? I did enjoy some of the philosophical parts (ie., the Mediocrity Principle), but was put off by Rees' constant use of ironic quotation marks, as in:

But there is a difference when those exposed to the risk are given no choice, and don't stand to gain any compensating benefit, when the "worst case" could be disastrous, or when the risk can't be quantified. Some scientists seem fatalistic about the risk; or else optimistic, even complacent, that the more scarifying "downsides" can be averted. This optimism may be misplaced, and we should therefore ask, can the more intractable risks be staved off by "going slow" in some areas, or by sacrificing some of science's traditional openness?

Those are on every page and drove me bonkers. In the end, if there is truly a 50/50 chance that humanity won't survive the 21st century, do yourself a favour and just watch the video.

My Man Jeeves

So, a bunch of wealthy birds -- coves and chappies all -- have right rummy and bally goings on, by Jove, and when one of them gets into a dickens of a pinch, all is soon set to right, by Jeeves. 

This is my first foray into P. G. Wodehouse, and honestly, I thought it would be funnier and less formulaic. The funnies:

There was something sort of bleak about her tone, rather as if she had swallowed an east wind. This I took to be due to the fact that she probably hadn't breakfasted. It's only after a bit of breakfast that I'm able to regard the world with that sunny cheeriness which makes a fellow the universal favourite. I'm never much of a lad till I've engulfed an egg or two and a beaker of coffee.

"I suppose you haven't breakfasted?"

"I have not yet breakfasted."

"Won't you have an egg or something? Or a sausage or something? Or something?"

"No, thank you."

She spoke as if she belonged to an anti-sausage society or a league for the suppression of eggs. There was a bit of a silence. 

**** 

I tried to think of something to say, but nothing came. A chappie has to be a lot broader about the forehead than I am to handle a jolt like this. I strained the old bean till it creaked, but between the collar and the hair parting nothing stirred.

****

I had decided—rightly or wrongly—to grow a moustache and this had cut Jeeves to the quick. He couldn't stick the thing at any price, and I had been living ever since in an atmosphere of bally disapproval till I was getting jolly well fed up with it.

I like British humour, and I don't need it to go full Benny Hill to make me chuckle, but the jokes here were weak tea for me. I listened to this collection on audiobook and there's a chance that I might have liked it better on the page -- perhaps I could have rolled around a bit more in the wordplay if it had been more leisurely.

As for the formula, half of these were Bertie Wooster and his man Jeeves stories, and in every case, some rich chappie of leisure would come to Wooster with a rich chappie's problem and Jeeves would offer a solution. After the plan backfires, it is revealed that Jeeves has already set things to right. And probably thrown out one of Wooster's ugly ties. The stories are less charming when they feature Reggie Pepper -- especially since he has no Jeeves -- and the story that had a nasty manservant named Voules, "Rallying Round Old George", was the least charming of all.

I don't know that I was missing out on much before meeting Sir Wodehouse here but could be persuaded to try him again if the mood suited.

You Shall Know Our Velocity!

You Shall Know Our Velocity has a strange history: Meant as a fictional memoir, it was released in 2002, with an apparently strangely textured hardcover and the opening paragraph, announcing the author's untimely death, printed on the front. In May of 2003, the book was renamed Sacrament and an extra chapter -- supposedly written by the dead author's friend at a later time to rebut details of the original book -- was inserted two thirds of the way through. In September of 2003, the book was again retitled You Shall Know Our Velocity! (note the exclamation mark) for the paperback edition (the one I read), complete with the extra chapter and a note on the cover that states, "This paperback edition includes significant changes and additions". Anyone who has read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius knows that Dave Eggers has a quirky sense of style, so it begs the question: Is You Shall Know Our Velocity! an innovative comment on the nature of memoir or a self-indulgent art piece?

As I often do, I read some old newspaper reviews of this book after finishing it and it was interesting to me that critics were mostly underwhelmed by the original version, but since I haven't found a review of the "complete" version, their critique seems nearly irrelevant. One thing I did find interesting: Writing in Salon, Peter Kurth notes of the two main characters, "Will (Thought) has a friend called Hand (Action)". I hadn't noticed that, but again, is that truly clever or fatally ironic?

In Hand's rebuttal chapter, in which he lists all of the parts that Will had made up, he writes:

I realize how difficult the world makes it for those who want to lead and talk about unusual lives in a candid way, in a first-person way. I understand that to sublimate a life in fictions, to spread the ashes of one's life over a number of stories and books, is considerably better-accepted, and protects one greatly from certain perils -- notably, the rousing of anger or scorn of all the bitches of the world (more often male than female). But then again, I don't know -- maybe he wasn't afraid of that sort of thing. Maybe he just wanted to fictionalize for his own entertainment. Maybe he found it artful.

As this was Eggers' first novel, coming on the heels of his debut tragic memoir, I have to believe that this is a comment on the author's own experience -- so did he write this book as an example of how he could have sublimated and fictionalised his own losses if he had wanted to, or did he mean it to be "artful"? Is this an example of meta-ironic hipsterism, or did Eggers purposefully capture that flannel-and-beard ethos? 

Maybe the only solution is to consider You Shall Know Our Velocity! on its own terms, and so far as that goes, it's an interesting enough story: After Will and Hand's friend Jack dies in a car accident, the two friends decide to spend a week flying around the world and giving away $32k (all that Will has left of an $80k windfall). Problems with weather and visas and flight schedules force them to scale back the scope of the trip (in the end they only make it to Senegal, Morocco, Estonia and Latvia) and giving away the money doesn't fulfill them as they had hoped. That's the book that the reviewers initially read, but the information that Hand later inserts throws the entire venture into a different light: Hand states that they never had a friend named Jack, so of course, the foundational concept of the book -- a trip born of grief -- is a lie; while Will blames Hand for a severe beating he received from three men (that has lingering neurological and physical effects, not to mention the grotesqueness of his face that impacts how everyone they meet interacts with Will), the beating didn't happen; Will's mother, who he calls several times during the trip, had died years earlier; Will never had a brother, someone he refers to a few times; Will still has the remainder of the $80k to go home to, undermining the secondary conceit of the plot; and since Hand points out that a ghostwriter had added the first paragraph of the original edition, describing how Will and his mother died in a ferry accident, he casts doubt on the authorship of the entire book. The writing -- especially the conversations -- was clever and I was interested in the story…but this wasn't great until I started thinking about everything off the page; everything I've written about here. But, of course, what I'm thinking about is what Eggers wanted me to think about, so does that make it great?

In the end, I still don't know if this was art or just a guy with a bag on his head.

Here are some passages I liked that didn't fit in the review:

Out my portal the plane wing was silver and shining like it would have fifty years earlier, carrying happier and simpler people. All of them  smoking and speaking loudly -- musically barking every last word -- and wearing expensive hats.

_____

Quantum physics is saying that atoms aren't so hard-and-fast, just sitting there like fake fruit or something touchable and solid. They're mercurial, on a sub-atomic level. They come and go. They appear and disappear. They occupy different places at once. They can be teleported. Scientists have actually done this...So if these atoms can exist in different places at once -- and I don't think any physicists argue about this -- this guy Deutsch argues that everything exists in a bunch of places at once. We're all made of the same electrons and protons, right, so if they exit in many places at once, and can be teleported, then there's gotta be multiple us's, and multiple worlds, simultaneously.

I like that ^^ passage both because I always like passages about quantum mechanics and because earlier on the same day I read it I had this facebook conversation with Delight after she posted this link:

• Krista: That is REALLY interesting -- as you know, I have long been fascinated by quantum mechanics and the nature of subatomic particles -- Are they even particles? Are they waves? -- this plasma business is fascinating to me. See? Technology will set us free!

  Delight: buy you off or discredit you...that seems to be the method for the madness...discredit and doubt...isn't that what they did to Tesla? anyway, I am interested...but electricity is a current...yes, acts like a wave, but has other properties that a wave does not have...so how we can send electricity wirelessly has me confused too...kind of scary....radio wave...okay, go right through you...but a current traveling in space...??????

  Delight: ya, i get that...but physics doesn't act on the quantum scale like it acts on the macro scale as I like to call it...the bottle one suggests that we're using the universes energy like a galaxy...creating a mini galaxy within in the bottle....

  Krista: ...and the search for the unified field theory might be over...

  Delight: i have my own thoughts on what make galaxies spin...and to me it likely has something to do with the black holes at the center of each one...not free energy

  Delight: ya, some of it is just over my head...i found a list yesterday online...i didn't share it...mostly cause i didn't know enough about any of them to understand...lolol

  Krista: The latest theory has it that gravity isn't actually a force at all, not in the sense of something physically pulling at something, but rather a consequence of mass coalescing around a point of uncertainty. This world is not constructed with matter but waves and perception and consciousness -- this is my favourite way to blow my mind and I don't understand any of it, lol

  Delight: but, the magnetic field theory and electricity is interesting but theory, give me something running on nothing...and there must be money to be made on such things and there are people foolish enough to just about believe money can buy anything...but are they being taken for suckers...?

  Krista: We should try to replicate the experiment -- the only way to know for sure. This just might be our Star trek moment

  Delight: right...and it is all a mystery really...and maybe our idea of physics is just a baby step to understanding the real world

  Delight: just look at the movement of electrons...no two electrons can occupy the same space...therefore that butterfly flapping his wings half way around the world does affect us...we just don't feel it, but our electrons do 

  Krista: Martin Rees was talking about multiverses in that Ted talk yesterday -- probably true -- and who knows what we'll be able to prove in the coming years? talking of electrons -- there's quantum entanglement and if that's not Star Trek science, what is?

  Delight: and if they had it figured out...would we need those funny numbers that they have to throw into certain equations...the uncertainty principal

  Krista: Heisenberg was able to describe the world as he understood it, but he's not the final word on reality. Even lots of Einstein isn't actually right anymore. E=mc2 might be proved wrong yet -- why oh why didn't I have the brain to be a theoretical physicist? Nothing has ever fascinated me more....but the MATH...

  Delight: yes, i was studying string theory for awhile...it got my attention...made sense...acts like a particle and a wave..but i always get lost with the other dimensions...and universes...i think we might just be a bubble among a whole wack of other bubbles....

  Krista :Could be -- kind of makes our troubles not amount to a hill of beans, eh?

  Delight: I could do the math...but I couldn't see the math...

  Delight: no imagination whatsoever

  Krista: Yeah -- that's me too. Darn left brain.

  Delight: but i want to know...lolol

  Krista:  I read some book that said a proper theory is one that you could explain to child and they would understand -- and this was a book about quantum mechanics -- and the author said that we're on the cusp of understanding it all and understanding it in that way that could be explained to the layman. I'm waiting.

We didn't solve anything there, but isn't a chat about quantum mechanics over your morning coffee a totally non-hipster moment?

I am here to express the opinion, no one's but mine -- not Will's, not this publisher's, not the wretched ghostwriter's -- that those who prefer fiction to nonfiction prefer game shows to the news. It's a decadent mind, a mind that has known ennui and passed through it to something more dangerous, that wants fictional contraptions over more difficult -- sometimes more obvious and clear, other times utterly incomprehensible -- truth of fact. But this is the opinion of a man who knows nothing, and it's an opinion that I throw at you to make you angry.

_____

Lord God, don't you think I could use these things against you? Don't you know that what you can do, I can do? Don't you know that I can summon your own winds, move the plates of this earth, just as you do? This earth is not yours; it's ours. Why do you play with us when you know I will do the same, and worse, to you? I will bring the winds of your world to bear against you. I will take your winds and twist them and throw them to you. I will mix them with your oceans, I will wrench them together and send them up to you and watch you drown in screaming waters of the blood and bones of your favorites. Look at you. Look at you! You all hairless and white and burning black and red -- what makes you so sure I won't hurt you the same way? What makes you so sure? I can take your skies and rip them in great swaths and crumple them, swallow them, turn them to fire. What makes you think I won't stalk you to the corners of the earth and make you pay for this? What makes you so sure that I won't bring it all back to you? I shall have waters of blood cast you away! I will sit upon the mount and send judgement down upon you. You shall cleave to my house. Therefore shall evil come upon thee; thou shalt not be able to pull it off; and desolation shall come upon thee suddenly, which thou shalt not know! And what shall ye say in the day of visitation, and in the desolation which shall come from below? To whom will ye flee for help? And where will ye have your glory? --

Oh Lord I am spinning and wet -- I will forgive you everything before if you allow us this, if you allow us this. If you should allow us this, if you should invest us with the necessary strength and then clear our path, so shall I honor thee and praise thee across the earth. But if thee shall take him away I will know vengeance --

^^That sounds like a totally unironic rant from someone who has bargained with God, and in a way, it redeems the cleverness.

I don't know what that was, all that dancing -- what we're allowed to do when we're looking for things we're required to do. What are we allowed to do when we're looking for things we're required to do?

And on a final final note, the only other Dave Eggers I've read is What is the What, a fictionalised memoir of a Sudanese refugee who Eggers had met. This notion of the relationship between memoir and fiction is obviously an important one to Eggers and it has made for some interesting thinking for me.