These days my stories always begin with girls: one of the perils of writing novels about love is that in learning to understand it, it takes on an inflated significance in one’s own life. But then, as Morrissey sang, “if it’s not love, then it’s the bomb that will bring us together.” I believe that more truly now than I ever have.
In 2011 I finished 24 books, and the journey through them is inseparable from the adventure of my life. Where other authors’ reading lists are just that, lists, or stories of criticism and judgment, mine is one of feeling. In this first part of 2011’s epic, enjoy a tale of love, betrayal, fantasies of revenge, and spiritual crisis.
In this part:
- Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
- Laozi, Tao Te Ching
- Robin Sharma, The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari
- Bhagavad Gita
- John Birmingham, He Died with a Felafel in His Hand
- Albert Camus, The Stranger
- Peter Saunders, The Versailles Memorandum
January–March: To want to kill a man
Gifts
On a night just before Christmas in 2010, I sat on a couch in a Collingwood townhouse and exchanged gifts with a girl I’ll call Emily. I gave her a pair of earrings with tiny dangling paper cranes, and a copy of The Dispossessed (Ursula Le Guin, 1974—my favorite book), and of Resurrection (Tolstoy, 1899). She gave me Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk (2010)—my first encounter with David Sedaris, which I finished joyously before 2010 was done, and How to Be Alone (2002), a collection of essays by Jonathan Franzen.
It had been a long time since a girl I had such affection for gave me a book as a gift. It moved me. I told her meeting her was the nicest thing that had happened to me all year, she told me something similar but in retrospect less enthusiastic, and I suppose we must have gone to bed.
A year on, the girl is gone: eight months later the relationship fell victim to both our dreams of finding “big love” elsewhere. A great shame. In many ways I liked Emily better than any girl I’d known, and appropriately for this story of reading, she was the first lover I had who appreciates books as deeply as I do. That’s a hell of a thing to discover after twenty-nine years and then say goodbye to.
At the time I met Emily, around October 2010, I was still in the grip of my life’s first experience of true heartbreak. That February, a woman who shall be known as Hat Girl, who I’d been with for three years and lived with briefly before a catastrophic argument with her mother over, of all things, a donut, left me for a mutual friend. This friend, who I’ve since mentally branded “enemy for life,” took her from me when he could have taken his pick of anyone he wanted from the harem of female friends he cultivated. Perhaps they were or are in love. Hat Girl and I certainly had our problems, and he offered her an escape.
This episode showed me many things. How passionately I’d loved her. What it’s like to have the object of that love taken from you, to wake up at 3am night after night, knifed in the heart by her absence, and stand on the edge of an unfathomable abyss of loneliness. And true jealousy. If we lived in a different society, I probably would have rounded up my friends and had the traitor killed, half out of revenge for me and half for his offense against the brotherhood of men.
I know this sounds crazy. But we all feel these kinds of things, and we repress and sublimate what’s inappropriate or what cannot possibly work with our reality. We humans are united in love, but we’re also united in suffering and imperfection—in feeling and in being low.
Having been through these things I can use them in my writing and show people that they’re not alone. In an odd stroke of fortune, I got dumped just as I was writing the final scenes of my first novel, which deals with betrayal and jealousy that until then, I had never experienced.
The Count of Monte Cristo
It was my interest in such feelings, and in the desire of revenge, that led me to The Count of Monte Cristo (1844). I had just begun Dumas’s 600,000-word epic when Emily and I started seeing each other in October 2010, and with the distractions of new love and other books to contend with, it took me a long time to finish. We sat one afternoon at window of the Bell Jar at the top of Smith Street, and we joked about how many men tell girls, at first, that they are readers, and later it’s revealed as a lie. I laughed and said that there might come a time when I had to dump her because I couldn’t keep up the charade any longer, but on 10 March 2011, the count fell before my mighty resolve.
By then, my interest in revenge had faded. It had been over a year since Hat Girl, and Emily had finally blasted her out of my mind by revealing herself as a superior person in almost every way.
Tao Te Ching
But Monte Cristo was not the first book I finished in 2011. That honor goes to Jonathan Star’s translation of the Tao Te Ching (c.6th C. BC; trans. 2011). At the time, I had a game to play and a secret to keep, neither of which are things I do easily, and I turned to it for solace. The Tao Te Ching is the closest thing I have to a Bible since I left Christianity in my mid teens. I always have a copy on me. Star’s translation is my favorite to date, although I still have a sentimental attachment to Ursula Le Guin’s version (1998), which is beautifully typeset and the work of a wise heart.
I returned several times to these lines from Star’s version of verse twelve:
The sage is led by his inner truth
and not his outer eye
He holds to what is deep
and not what lies on the surface
The year was to be one of intense discontent, further heartbreak, and ultimately, of transformation, and this call to hold to the inner truth presaged a year of spiritual enquiry.
Just a few days after finishing Monte Cristo, I took my first ever trip to Europe. Sent by work to a conference in Berlin, on the way home I stopped by Paris, London, and Singapore. At the last, I had some banking to do for the electronic publishing business, hourigan.co, that I started the previous December.
While there, I discovered that the soul of Singapore is in Orchard Road, a mile of malls, and felt crushed to insignificance by the looming presence of the international bank towers downtown. The tragedy of modern Asia is that many parts of it are now animated by a completely vacuous materialism in which nothing but money has any value, and Singapore is as good as any a place as any to be struck by a feeling of profound inadequacy if you don’t (and may never) have the kind of wealth that frees you from work, gives you status, and lets you live in opulence.
I was to return home and sink into a pit of massive self-doubt. Should I try once more to become an investment banker, knowing that it would likely rob me of the time I need to write? Trade my hopes of personal fulfillment for money?
April: How do you justify your existence?
The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari
The book I bought at Kinokuniya in Singapore was little help. The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari (Robin Sharma, 1997) tells the story of Julian Mantle, a multimillionaire lawyer who, after suffering an intense but unnamed personal tragedy, gives up his career and travels to the Himalayas where he tracks down a reclusive spiritual community that teaches him their secrets. While well-intentioned, it lets itself down by its very premise: of course, as a multimillionaire, Mantle can afford to quit his job and devote himself to spiritual pursuits. One assumes he cashed in, put the money in an investment paying a reliable return and collected a pension of a few hundred grand a year. What hope does this hold out for the ordinary man? Nothing.
The Bhagavad Gita
Next stop on my spiritual crisis was the Bhagavad Gita (c.4th C. CE?), in the version by Stephen Mitchell (2000). This helped more. The Bhagavad Gita has two main messages: that the most wretched creature on earth is the man who shirks his appointed destiny; and that the way to live is to perform the action you are compelled to while abandoning hope of reward. This offered a way forward: do the thing you feel you must do.
And what I have always felt I must do is write. If that comes to mean a thoroughly middle-class existence, writing in my spare time and never earning riches or recognition from it, so be it. If there’s one thing that’s worse than failing at what you’ve tried, it’s the pressure of never having tried at all—the strain of being bloated with the festering corpses of a thousand stillborn plans and ambitions. If you’ve tried and failed, at least you can move on.
He Died with a Felafel in His Hand
After the Bhagavad Gita, I finished He Died with a Felafel in His Hand (John Birmingham, 1994), the product of a thing tried and, at this stage I think I can say, probably failed. I’d started hourigan.co to help out Michael Duffy of Duffy & Snellgrove, who wanted to get Felafel out as an ebook but had no idea how. “I’ll figure it out and I’ll do it for you,” I told him.
Producing the book was a learning experience: I started a company, got an international bank account and accounts for Amazon KDP and iTunes Connect. I learned to create ePub and Kindle versions (not a remotely simple process, with the tools and formats available), posted them and monitored sales.
The problem? Felafel sells, on average, about 30 copies a month—and that’s hourigan.co’s most successful title. On each one, I make a little more than a dollar. I have to make the ebooks for hourigan.co and do the accounting in my spare time, after 40+ hours of work at my day job a week. But at the same time, the books I can publish don’t make remotely enough money to let me reduce the amount of time I spend as an employee. The situation only gets worse when you consider the books I promised people I’d edit free of charge (a misstep, I realize) in exchange for the electronic publishing rights. As of now, I haven’t worked on most of those projects for months.
Did I mention that I also look after a small copywriting business that employs two freelancers and writes hundreds of web pages a month? Oh, yeah, and I had also volunteered to be the treasurer of the Society of Editors (Victoria).
Felafel, then, while an entertaining book, stands here as the symptom of something that was to become a huge problem. More on that later.
Fear and Trembling
I next finished Fear and Trembling (Søren Kierkegaard, 1843; trans. Alistair Hannay, 1985), by completing the introduction. There’s a problem with Penguin Classics: the introduction is at the front. Yes, yes, I know that’s traditionally the place for it, but in fiction it is often a spoiler, and for philosophy—is it really necessary? We should have enough confidence in our own minds to encounter philosophy for the first time as it was written. Second-hand explanations can come later.
I had abandoned the intro to Fear and Trembling in a hospital waiting room several months earlier, and returned to it only for an easy get on my lists read. I’d gotten the meat out long ago: around May in 2010, Kierkegaard had inspired me to take a leap of faith and abandon a girl I was seeing but wasn’t falling in love with.
The Outsider
Then came The Stranger (L’Étranger, Albert Camus, 1942; trans. Stuart Gilbert, 1946), starting one of the year’s other reading themes: angsty books everyone else seems to have read as a teenager. Discussing it with Emily, I found that she, like most people I know, had read it while at high school.
The Stranger had two major effects. First, it reminded me how much I loved short books, and gave me the idea that I could serialize my novel No More Dreams as an ebook in three parts of about 60,000 words each. Second, it got me interested in Camus. Months later, on 4 October 2011, I’d attend a lecture, “Albert Camus and Nihilism,” by Ashley Woodward of the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy. There I’d hear that where Nietzsche took an elitist approach to solving questions of alienation, morality after God, and the realization of human potential, Camus had insisted that the solution must be a solution for everyone. The same approach that applied to him, the philosopher, must also be accessible to the common man: the slave, the subcultural outcast, the oppressed.
This was a revelation. Throughout the whole of 2011 I’d wrestle with the issue of repeatedly being frustrated in attempts to connect with others (a problem I think I share with most of my postmodern urban neighbors), and here was a piece of the puzzle solved. I’d encountered Nietzsche in my late teens, through Milan Kundera, and although it introduced me to the notion of self-overcoming, which I’ve found transformative, it also strengthened a pre-existing belief that I was fundamentally different from, and therefore separated, from other people.
If, like Nietzsche, you believe you walk a lonely road, your road will be lonely. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. The encounter with Camus showed me I should try dealing with at least some of the problems of life at ground level instead of up in the mountains: down in the streets and gutters of life where we all love and suffer and rejoice and die.
The Versailles Memorandum
April finished with another book I published during the year, The Versailles Memorandum by Peter Saunders (2009; ebook by hourigan.co 2011), who I once worked with at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney. Peter is one of the most inspirational, wise and educated people I’ve ever known. This, to date his only novel, is set in a dystopian near-future where large parts of Europe are governed by Sharia law, and and deals with the issue of Western intellectuals’ loss of confidence in their own civilization and its values of rationality and individual freedom. It’s not received remotely the attention or readership that it deserves: check it out.
Look for part two soon, starting with “May: Peaks and valleys,” and continuing with “June: Alice,” “July: The show for nerds,” and “August: Oh-oh.”
Today a friend is sharing a post by Alfred Kappler about Václav Havel’s 1984 speech Politics and Conscience, which identifies modernity itself as a root cause of totalitarianism and other problems in modern politics.
Kappler writes that modernity “catastrophically undermined a pre-reflective human relationship with nature, which Havel conceives as the foundation of moral intuitions and values.” And at the beginning his speech, Havel himself says that children and peasants “have not yet grown alienated from the world of their actual personal experience.”
This reminds me of what I was saying at a recent philosophical forum about Islamic extremists’ treatment of women, that they fail to see others’ humanity, and it is for that reason they fail morally and are to be condemned.
Morality in politics (and other areas) is an individual matter, a choice not to cross a line into evil (to cause harm, to deceive). There can’t be a systematic response, in terms of political reform or revolution, to the problems of modernity as Havel identifies them because we are dealing with more fundamental problems of how we relate to the world and each other in daily life: we have become alienated from our experience.
To begin to change this, we have to start by shedding the barriers we put up between ourselves and our experience to protect us from hurt and to achieve results. We need to be open to our emotions and our intuitions, to see others and the world as they are and completely, and let others see us in the same way.
Everywhere I go I see people holding back, closing their eyes, lying to themselves and others about what they are and what they see. If we can’t be change that the situation is hopeless. If we can, we can do anything.
(Image: Sunburst, CC 2011 by Stephen Heron.)
iBall features revolutionary Retina display technology utilizing actual human retinas.
(Image CC by todbot 2009.)
A friend asks: “why should life perpetuate itself?”
In objective reality there is no should: there is only is. Life is the source of all value, all shoulds.
In the world of life, life creates ideas of good and worthwhile, and identifies itself with them as the source of goodness and pleasure and love.
These identifications are self-fulfilling.
In the world of life, healthy life perpetuates itself because life is good.
Sick life, that hates itself and is tired of goodness and pleasure and love, lets itself wither and die. It disappears, and healthy life lives on.
Life exists so that shoulds can exist.
Earlier this week, The Age published an article by Bettina Arndt on women in the workforce. Arndt is a clinical psychologist specializing in sex therapy. She is now, better known for being a commentator reviled by feminists, as I discovered when some of my Facebook friends started angry tirades against her, branding her as a misogynist and (in an unjustified slur) an apologist for wife-beaters. In this case, Arndt is branded a woman-hater because she favors claims that “most women choose to structure their working lives around family responsibilities.”
I’ve been thinking about this issue of misogyny a bit, recently. In the past few years I’ve been acquainted with a few women and circles of women who describe themselves and identify very strongly as feminist, and in some of those people and circles, people are often accused of misogynist behavior or of holding misogynist beliefs.
This has often puzzled me, as I took the term literally to signify hatred of women (of women in general and of particular women for being women). I do know a very small number of men who do hate women in this literal way, often for perceived wrongs done them by particular women in the past (usually in matters of love). But I consider a pervasively woman-hating attitude largely dead in the West. Oddly, we often tolerate the existence of profoundly woman-hating societies, in the Islamic world particularly, on the grounds of cultural relativism.
In the Wikipedia entry on “Misogyny,” there is extensive discussion of genuine misogyny throughout premodern and early modern history that baselessly ascribes negative attributes to women, notably inferior mental capacity.
But today, the term misogynist is “frequently used in a looser sense as a term of derision to describe anyone who holds a distasteful view about women as a group,” says Wikipedia, in its final section on misogyny, labelled “Feminist Theory”. So, what we have is a group or individuals that identify with a particular identity-political ideology attacking those whose views they find disadvantageous to their ideological or political interests with the slur, “you hate women.”
“X is misogynist,” then, may mean little more than: “X is against a particular brand of politics and ideology.” It would be better if this were said openly, as to call someone a woman-hater in this context is, very likely, no more than a scurrilous lie.
Objecting to Arndt’s claims that women when viewed as a group have different life and career preferences to men seems based on an insistence that to be of equal value to men, women should make not different, but identical life choices to men. Specifically female patterns of behavior are viewed as inadequate. How’s that for woman-hating?
Personally, I love women. I don’t know about Bettina Arndt, but I suspect feminists who bandy this term misogyny about because they can’t stand the idea of female difference are the truer misogynists.
(Image: “Misogynist Batman,” via Wereturtle.)
Melbourne Writers has a great post today about e-Publishing, with a link to a “getting started” article by Lindsay Buroker.
I stopped by to mention that some of the Melbourne Writers’ Group has ebooks out now.
Joanna George has Forty Scrubs on Smashwords. Her YA novel is about a teenager with an obsessive thought disorder.
There’s also my book Kiss Me, Genius Boy, “a story of sex, ambition, and teen romance,” as the ad copy goes. People have told me it reminds them of Salinger, Bukowski, and Osamu Dazai. It’s on Kindle and also iBooks and Smashwords.
Benjamin Grant Mitchell, who I heard about at the last Write Club held here at the Wheeler Centre, also has his novel The Last Great Day on Kindle.
Any others? I’d love to collect a full list of all the serious indie authors active in Melbourne.
I turned thirty this September, and I’d never read The Catcher in the Rye. Even though it’s my friend Sasha’s favorite book. Even though it’s one of the most famous novels of the twentieth century. Even though it’s short and I love short novels a lot better than long ones that are padded out with bullshit for forty thousand pages.
What drove me over the line was that recently my friend Madaline Rielly, who’s a keen writer and a fine and curious human being herself, had the gorgeous idea that she’d read my novel Kiss Me, Genius Boy, which I’ll call KMGB from now on, and then write me a letter about it. Among other things she said that the main character, Joshua Rivers, reminded her of old Holden Caulfield. So I thought I’d better get my ass in gear and read Salinger’s one famous book at last.
I find I don’t have any reason to object when she says Josh and Holden are alike. Some of the parallels are truly uncanny. For instance there’s a scene in KMGB where Josh is standing outside a bus stop and feeling depressed about girls and it starts raining and he just stands there and lets himself get drenched. Actually, I once stood in the rain at a bus stop like that myself, which is how I got the idea. And there at the end of The Catcher in the Rye I see Holden let himself get soaked sitting in the rain watching his sister Phoebe on a carousel.And right after that it looks like he gets shipped off to a mental asylum, so I guess that was the point where people thought he’d finally lost it.
Josh doesn’t lose it, and neither did I. I don’t think it gives anything away to say that.
Like Holden, there’s a pretty strong voice that Josh has, too, and I can tell you, when you read Holden Caulfield practically talking to himself all the way through The Catcher in the Rye, it sort of gets inside of you. Like, today I had an argument with someone in my office about cleaning out the fridge, and I said “I’ve never opened that goddamn fridge,” and went right on about it. That’s how it works.
I guess some of you might say it doesn’t help to talk about characters in books like they’re real people. But the thing is, Holden Caulfield is a real person. He’s exactly the kind of person that hangs around this world and gets misunderstood and pissed off and nobody realizes that there’s actually a really sensitive person in there who in a bunch of ways is really better than the petty bastards around him.
Thing is, Holden’s got a sharp mind, even though he doesn’t care much about school. What he sees around him is a bunch of people act phony or miss the point. And the point is the whole thing of that kid who jumped out of a window at that school he went to, and that flitty Mr. A’s picking him up when no-one else would go near him. Joshua Rivers in KMGB’s not nearly so much of a humanitarian, but still there’s this feeling of being someone who’s actually more sensitive than other people, and gets to being a bit of an asshole just because he’s so damn disappointed in how crumby everyone else can be all the time.
The Catcher in the Rye is that immortal story of the young man who thinks himself superior and gets so pissed off with the phony, petty bastards who want him to play by their rules that he gets the idea he should just give up and drop out. Holden has his dream of a cabin, or going out west, or going out West to a cabin, and taking some girl with him and just letting the world go by. And maybe I’m like that and not everyone else is like that, but this seems to be like, the final human dream, the final utopia for the guy whose just been trying to do his own thing and while he was doing it some petty bastard came up and wrote “Fuck you” right on his forehead.
I fucking love that dream. I get a huge bang out of it.
That’s why I give this goddamn book five stars.
Hi, guys,
I’ve been a publisher with KDP for about a year now, and I’d just like to take this opportunity to ask for something that’s really important to me, and no doubt to many small publishers around the world.
Let me thank you, first, for providing the platform, which has reinvigorated literature, and also for announcing recently the new HTML5 format that will support CSS. This is a huge deal for us, as it means we can create ePubs as our standard and then convert them to MOBI with confidence that the formatting will remain intact.
What would be the next huge thing for us is if you could add support for electronic payments to a range of international bank accounts. Even if you did this via PayPal it would be a huge leap forward. We have a bank account in Singapore, and by not offering electronic payment it has an impact on our cashflow (cashing US checks is a huge pain and the funds take a minimum of 7 weeks to clear).
By not offering international payments, you guys are well behind Apple, which pays regularly by EFT to our Singaporean account.
Let me say again, we’d love for you to start offering electronic payments on a global basis, and I would really appreciate it if you could give us some information about your plans in this area.
An assurance that it is in train would greatly improve our confidence in the future of the platform, and free us from having to look at other, suboptimal options like possibly publishing our Kindle books through Smashwords in future (since they don’t offer direct ePub, MOBI, or even HTML upload, their publishing process is awful, but they will at least pay us by PayPal).
I look forward to what you have to bring us in future, for a new, truly global publishing industry and literary culture.
Sincerely,
Ben Hourigan
author of Kiss Me, Genius Boy
Director, Hourigan SA
