These pieces led us into a discussion of what’s important to us at home. Everyone in my family is an artist of some kind: between them, Mum and Dad are painters, ceramicists, woodworkers, illustrators, printers and sculptors; my brother Daniel is a 3d animator and sculptor who trades in curiosities and antiques as Musaeum and has a flair for interior decoration; and his girlfriend Candice is a fine art student who works in all sorts of media. Me, I’m just a humble editor and publisher, and lately a novelist. I grew up in a house that (even more now than then), is packed from floor to oregon-beamed roof with art and artefacts, carpeted with Persian rugs, and furnished with distinctive armchairs, antique desks, and cabinets of curios. Boaz’s “maximalism” is pretty much what I’m familiar with.

Mum and Dad’s collections on display

Mum furnished us with this list of the things that are important to her at home:

1. reminders of my family all around me
2. Persian rugs
3. visual warmth
4. a lush and interesting garden
5. having a hot shower, and an inside loo with sophisticated plumbing, which many people in the world don’t have
6. comfortable furniture and good books to read while sitting on the comfortable chairs

And Daniel gave us his:

1. cozy
2. full of interesting, thought-provoking objects
3. cave-like and dark
4. warm as opposed to being cold and lifeless
5. everything I like is around me.
6. somewhere I never want to leave

Now, I’m a little different. Perhaps as the black sheep of the family, a literary man rather than a practitioner of the visual arts, this is to be expected, but my list of six things is less about the tangible. I like Mum’s mention of hot showers: we’ve got a stellar hot water system that lets me take 15-minute showers with impunity. It never runs out.

A typical still life from Daniel’s apartment

But what comes through as I read back over my list it is that my big desire is not to feel burdened, controlled, or blocked, and this comes through in the way I furnish my own room and organize my life. Here’s my six:

1. proximity to the center of things
2. visual warmth, and a hint of opulence
3. minimal possessions: a sense of being unburdened
4. comfort and ease: knowing I don’t have to be fussy, or that this space is being rigidly controlled
5. good company
6. a feeling of quiet and repose: good music, no TV, no drama, and no bullshit

All of these things say something about my personality and my preoccupations. I live in a beautiful apartment in downtown Melbourne, and walk out my door to find people on the street and something open and happening at almost any hour of the night or morning.

1. Proximity to the center of things

My love for proximity comes out of the time I spent living amid the crowds of Osaka, near the shopping district at Shinsaibashi, and is central to my social and intellectual life.

2. Visual warmth, and a hint of opulence

This has a lot to do with the visual sensibility that I learned at home with a creative family. Following Alain de Botton’s comments on architecture in The Architecture of Happiness, which see the built environment giving form to those values that see only weak expression in a society’s everyday life, my interest in “opulence” looks a bit like a reaction against coming from a family that is by no means wealthy in anything but a spiritual sense.

3. Minimal possessions: a sense of being unburdened

Rather than being overblown in the way of those immigrant families whose homes indulge in eccentric roccoco, I furnish my rooms with velvet couches, brocade bedspreads and antique/vintage furniture—but prefer to have a minimum of clutter. I’ve moved six times in the past ten years, and lived in three cities across two countries. While it’s not exactly a vagabond lifestyle, the moves have taught me the value in living light.

4. Comfort and ease

Ease has always been important to me, but was sharpened by the painful experience of living briefly with a woman who I loved but who was obsessive about minor household details. (Don’t leave the knife to dry on the sink! Hang your towel straight, not bunched up!)

On the Myers-Briggs personality test, I score very strongly P (perceptive) on the P–J dimension. P stands for openness, creativity, and to a certain extent, disorganization and rule-breaking. On the other hand, J (judgmental) stands for making lists, following rules, keeping things in their proper place.

Tragically, while P people will let others be, Js feel the need to control not only themselves, but others, and a P-J pairing, while productive in some ways, is often fraught with conflict. I hate being controlled, and if there’s one place where I absolutely will not tolerate it, it’s in my home. That said, where once my domestic spaces were chaotic, now they’re usually quite neat.

5. Good company

My desire for company at home continues to bear on the subject of personality. People who’ve only known me a short time usually don’t believe me, but I’m an introvert. My natural inclination, if I don’t have some reason to seek company for the sake of interests, practicality, or love, is to rest in solitude. I lived on my own for eight years, after a difficult year with some housemates from high school, and in the last two years of that, where I was single, I spent a lot of time on my own at home, which amplified my idiosyncrasies. It’s healthier for me to live with others, and these days I live in a beautiful, architect-designed apartment with one of my closest friends, and another friend that we found as a housemate on the internet. It is the best living situation of my adult life, and I’m very grateful for it.

6. No bullshit

This last item about integrity, authenticity, and peace of mind. Maybe it’s a failing, but I’ve tended to feel like a lot of the people out there in the world are obsessed with things that simply do not matter (the cut and thrust of daily politics, the accumulation of material goods that do nothing to make them happy, silly personal grievances, fashion without aesthetics, and foolish intellectual fads). I don’t want needless arguments (see #4), physical or intellectual clutter (which is why I don’t watch any kind of broadcast TV—I’ll allow pull but never push), or any kind of fakery. There’s enough of that out there.

• • •

So … what’s important to you at home?

This evolved into a “has anyone seen any good anime lately” discussion, into which our friend F injected the criteria “as good as Hayao Miyazaki.”

My assessment of most anime is that it’s formulaic, repetitive, and lacks insight into the human condition. Beyond that, I often feel like it wastes my time—since a lot of it adapts manga, I could get through the story quickly, and more directly, by reading the original. Most anime, simply, I don’t consider worth my time.

Walking back to the office from lunch this afternoon, along a street lined by trees which are now shedding their yellow leaves in the autumn, I wondered if this comparison of Miyazaki with C’s latest anime discovery was fair.

See, Hayao Miyazaki’s work isn’t just great anime: it’s great art. Whisper of the Heart and My Neighbor Totoro are some of the few works (including novels) that know I can turn to for consolation when I’m feeling down.

Ponyo evokes the spirit of water in as iconic a way as Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa. If you want to understand the spirit of animistic religions such as Shintoism, Totoro and Princess Mononoke will do it for you in a matter of hours. The art is alternately soothing and inspiring. And there is that fortunate pairing with composer Joe Hisaishi, whose soundtracks and piano collections are always on my iTunes playlists designed for concentrated creative work and for relaxation (along with artists like Nomak, DJ Okawari, Brian Eno and Mike Oldfield).

Daring to skirt the fine distinction between sweet and saccharin in their sentimentality, they cause me to remember the innocent and inquisitive spirit of childhood and adolescence rather than merely being nostalgic for it, and restore my faith in life. His female heroines, at once determined, independent, tender, and struggling for authenticity and wisdom, remind me of what I should be looking for in a woman when my latest passion inclines me to forget it.

There is really no appropriate comparison for Miyazaki. Much as I might wish for more work like his, as I wish for another Ursula Le Guin, another Kenzaburo Oe or Wong Kar Wai, artists such as these are irreplaceable. There are others as good but different—and in the field of manga and anime, Naoki Urasawa of Monster and 20th Century Boys is the first I think of. But Miyazaki stands alone, as do all titans, gods and geniuses.

As a novelist and an editor, you’d expect me to tell people that they need to be good writers, or at least that they should try to be good spellers, or to punctuate well.

Today, a Persian friend apologized to me on Facebook for making a very small mistake in a comment to a post I made about Alain de Botton’s Religion for Atheists. He’d left off the final S in “sounds”.

I wrote this back to him immediately:

It’s okay, I won’t judge you. So long as I understand what you’ve said (and I always do), you’ve fulfilled your mission. It’s all about communication!

See, although I’d like to see more good writing in my everyday life (on signs, in the emails people write me at work, on my Facebook, etc.), I don’t expect it. I’m a specialist, and it would be foolish of me to expect others to be the same.

Writing well is my job. Your job—nay, your mission in life—is probably something entirely different. So you can relax.

Of course, I’m happy to help others improve their writing (especially when they pay me), and I’d like to see the ability to write promoted more strongly as something virtuous and attractive. Well-written letters, for instance, can be charming, even moving–a great gift for the recipient and an outstanding tool for building friendships, family, and romance. I’m happy to have this as my superpower (though it might have been better to have the Midas touch, like Warren Buffett).

But the reality is that most people get by without being masters of language. An everyday grasp is good for everyday life, and that, reader, you almost certainly already have.

Smashwords founder Mark Coker today sent an email to independent authors and publishers using their system to announce the policy change, which primarily affected Smashwords.

Here are some highlights from Coker’s email:

This is a big, bold move by PayPal. It represents a watershed decision that protects the rights of writers to write, publish and distribute legal fiction. It also protects the rights of readers to purchase and enjoy all fiction in the privacy of their own imagination. It clarifies and rationalizes the role of financial services providers and pulls them out of the business of censoring legal fiction.

Following implementation of their new policies, PayPal will have the most liberal, pro-First-Amendment policies of the major payment processors.

You can see my earlier response to PayPal’s proposed censorship of erotica here, including my response to a statement by PayPal communications director Anuj Nayar.

You can also read more about the overall story here, on Techcrunch.

May I congratulate PayPal, today on taking a position that favors free speech and avoids extra-legal censorship of independent fiction. Yet it is a shame that it took an outcry from authors, the press, and pro-free-speech organizations including the EFF, ABFFE and NCAC to get them to this point. Without protest, their default approach was to censor.

This incident highlights the importance of agitating for free speech and shows that the battle to protect it is certainly not over. It is, perhaps, never-ending. Organizations with coercive power at their disposal, and interests to protect, such as governments and big corporations, frequently fear speech and their impulse is to curtail it.

Authors, readers, publishers, and indeed all free-thinking people, must ensure that such organizations are never permitted to control what we say and by extension what we think.

Without condoning this kind of material, especially where it is created for mere titillation, let me note that throughout the world, much of this kind of material is legal. PayPal’s discrimination against it constitutes a layer of extra-legal censorship, against which there is little course for appeal, and none of the customary protections afforded citizens by a judicial system.

There is also a significant risk that literature treating of rape, incest or bestiality in a critical way (as part of a tragic narrative, for instance), will in the end be censored along with those works with a more pornographic motive. Those lovers of language among you may wonder, for instance, what would become of Lolita in this new world of ours. A self-published Nabokov may well fall afoul of an overcautious marketplace’s fear of his story of pederasty, keeping it from the public eye or, at least, denying the author compensation for his labor.

In response to protests against PayPal’s policy, today Anuj Nayar, director of communications at PayPal, issued a statement outlining his company’s cowardly decision to censor legal speech to avoid business risk.

Though Smashwords is encouraging supporters to leave comments, the PayPal blog does not currently appear to accept comments from outside users, so here is my response on the open internet:

Dear Anuj,

This policy is not acceptable. Banks and payment solutions should be as neutral as the currency they handle, and not delve into their clients’ businesses, particularly where speech is involved. If these works are legal, PayPal should not discriminate against them or the companies and platforms involved in their publication.

You, PayPal, are the billion dollar company. If there is a risk that comes from this legal material, you have an ethical responsibility to shoulder it rather than caving to fear and using your power in the marketplace to create a chilling effect on speech.

Businesses, and those who run them, have a responsibility not only to protect their immediate interests, but also to consider the wellbeing of the societies in which they function, and the individuals they affect. By enacting policies that effectively censor legal books, you fail in your obligation. In short, you do evil.

Stop it.

The concerned among you can help the fight against internet censorship by signing this petition against PayPal’s decision, organized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

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:

1. Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
2. Laozi, Tao Te Ching
3. Robin Sharma, The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari
4. Bhagavad Gita
5. John Birmingham, He Died with a Felafel in His Hand
6. Albert Camus, The Stranger
7. 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.”

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.