Killspeak

I have tried to rid myself of the guilt of being poorly cultured. It is, in my case, an unreasonable self-criticism and a drain on my bank balance: it has made me purchase books like Camus’ The Rebel (I’ve started that book a half dozen times, but never finished it) and Macunaíma. (The latter purchase was motivated by many kinds of guilt, among which were those stemming from my weakening Portuguese, my feeling of having never cultivated my Brazilian identity, and of recently having read a bunch of comics and sci-fi paperbacks—not “worthwhile literature.”)

The pressure to read canonical or acclaimed books is something I believe many of us feel, those of us educated enough to feel poorly educated. It pushes us to pursue books that may be dull and difficult to get through. We have been convinced that these books are worth the effort, if not for the ideas or experiences they give us, then for the illuminated company in which we’ll be once we finish the book.

It is hard to admit to yourself (more so to others) that this is bullshit. Slogging through the Aeneid or The Wealth of Nations will not make you a better or more authentic person. You’re likely to get as much out of the Cliff’s Notes. Your patience, schedule, and personal habits won’t allow you to become as ridiculously erudite and well read as you’d like to be. If you don’t enjoy it, don’t read it (unless it’s for a course or some such).

I’m working at this myself, trying to accept the limits of my own attention, to be realistic, to pursue books that I am interested in—and capable of finishing. So long Complete Stories of Franz Kafka. Hello Neal Stephenson.

If only it were so simple. I’ve just finished reading Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene and feel a little disappointed. It’s well written, but not exciting: I had heard and agreed with much of what he writes about well before I read it. This is something I’ve felt after reading many of the books I’ve chosen for myself lately. The characters, phrases, and ideas are already reasonably well known to me; drained of novelty, I only really enjoy the small refinements and differences that haven’t managed to escape their original source. I finish these books, but slowly and for the satisfaction of knowing—later, bragging—that, yes, I’ve read that book.

It’s this reading-to-have-read-it that I was trying to move away from in the first place. I’m still a victim of my own self-conscious book selections, though now not because of a self-hating drive to become well read, but because my selections are too familiar. To some extent, I already know much of what I’m reading, and this takes a lot of the fun out of reading it. Sure, Here Comes Everybody and Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions had some neat ideas, but they were only refinements of ideas I’d already seen or gleaned from other essays and books. I got even less from The Prestige (I’d seen the movie several times) and re-reading Ender’s Game.

The interest that motivated me to obtain and start these books faded quickly, and somewhere between the front and back cover, reading them began to feel like a chore. I did not enjoy them as I thought I would due to spoilers or redundancy. This isn’t because I’m all-knowing, but because I’ve over-applied my new standard.

(I wonder if Brottman covers this in The Solitary Vice. Her insights on reading are quite keen.)

I sound whiny and pompous, don’t I? I do. This frustration is not as bad as I make it out to be; I think that choosing for myself is still better than following some literary consensus against my own patience and curiosity. The Selfish Gene was not nearly as arduous as was my World War I-like struggle to completing The Brothers Karamazov. There were many ideas of interest in Dawkins’ book, though they seemed to have been packed in at the end. (I should have read The Extended Phenotype instead.)

I need some non-Lucas noise to throw-off my book selection methods just enough to keep me interested. Perhaps I should try reading books recommended to me by others, a compromise of my own tastes, as they perceive them, and theirs (a received opinion, a should read).

He turned, pulling a pillow from under his head and tucking it under his arm. He was about to push his face down into the mattress when he noticed the knife. It was tucked between the mattress and headboard, blade out. Awake, fully and so suddenly, his face hesitated inches from its point.

He slid back. How did it get there? How long had it been there? He hadn’t made the bed in days and had been sleeping in it for days. A pairing knife hidden under his pillow.

One thing that made me feel strange as I was growing up—I remember feeling it first when I was about five or six—was that much of what I learned was already known by the adults around me. When I realized that all the adults around me knew how to add and subtract and write in cursive, indeed, had known all along, I felt a little more grown up and a little cheated. Now I was operating at the same level that, say, grandma was working on (cursive-wise; I didn’t yet understand why dad used all-caps printing); but why had she kept all this to herself? Why was I so late to the game?

(Does this in any way relate to the ignorance and confidence I sense when reading things written a long time ago? Did the medieval and modern pre-Freudian worlds feel just as capable and cheated when came the Renaissance and the theory of the unconscious?)

I was not conscious of my “inability to grasp… any very large portion of human knowledge.” This I admitted to myself only when I became a teenager. That until I was fifteen I felt excluded from the adult world—of driving and long division—rather than feeling simply unready or uninterested seems, in retrospect, a little odd. At what point should I feel cheated of my childhood naïveté, my lack of responsibility and bills?

Being an adult child (as a child—whatever) was a confusing thing.

Peter Lynn would like to write a book called The Greatest Puking Stories Ever Told, and I would like to buy it. Not only for the fact that he’s a good writer, or that he would like to publish it as a handsome leather-bound, but because I enjoy hearing barf stories—and, honestly, who doesn’t? Drunk or sober, young and old, nothing is as sure to involve and amuse as a good vomit story. That time you puked on your pillow and were too tired to clean it up. That time you put a Swiss Chalet meal back in the container it came in an hour after eating it. That time you followed a trail of what seemed to have once been fried rice and whiskey down some stairs to find three underage drinkers comically passing around a soggy paper bag, laughing and saying “If you’re gonna spew, spew in this.” That time you vomited for a large audience.

Some friends and I were returning home from a party at a friend’s place (where the toilet had “R. Mutt” scrawled on the side of the bowl). She lived way up by York University, a long subway ride away from home. We were travelling on a Sunday: the trains were few and far between and the cars were pretty full.

I was spinning. We had all had quite a bit to drink; I had all of the night’s good times souring inside me. Before stepping into the train, I was trying to reassure myself that I did not need to vomit. When at that point, of trying to soothe your stomach with words first imagined and then silently mouthed to yourself, vomiting is inevitable.

My friends weren’t any help. They’re the kind of people who, when made aware of your need to barf, will taunt you, jab you in the stomach, impede your frantic scramble for the washroom. You’ll be throwing up in the bathroom, long past the point of swearing you’ll never drink again, and reach one of those moments of respite where your body is deciding whether or not to retch some more. My friends? They’ll be right outside the bathroom waiting for that very moment to begin to make loud retching sounds, provoking another spell of vomiting. They’ll keep on doing it too, until you’re exhausted, at the brink of consciousness, just as hoarse from the bile as from cursing their names.

When I answered a curious “Are you alright?” with a bleary-eyed nod and a stifled burp, they knew exactly what state I was in. From Finch to Lawrence station, I tried to keep my eyes on the advertisements and the tunnels rushing past the window, away from my friends’ sly grins and fake half-retches. It was awful.

At Lawrence, a group of cheerful young girls came onto the train and sat across from me and my friends. They were sunny, happy, chatting loudly, and perfumed. Their pungent, vanilla-like reek made my stomach churn. I swung against the doors and closed my eyes. I had a wet mouth. It was going to happen.

The doors opened, I rushed out into Eglinton station and met the nearest garbage bin with a big fist of puke. I held onto the garbage and emptied myself. At first it came with strong pumps, but soon became painful and drawn-out, like squeezing all you can from a tube of toothpaste. It was loud. It was gross. It was in full view of everyone in the subway car.

The car driver had left the doors open, perhaps because of a shift-change, perhaps out of kindness (not wanting me to miss the train and have to wait for another). When I had finished, I turned around to see the occupants of the car watching me. They were silent, embarrassed, disgusted. The chirpy early-teen girls were wide-eyed and still. I boarded the train less aware of my acid breath than of the way I was being judged. This was not what the other passengers had wanted to see on Sunday morning. Except my friends. They seemed okay with it.

Lynn, your book idea is great. Think of it: sections dedicated to hasty cover-ups and last-minute dashes, cautionary tales of survival, and leather covers that’ll be easy to wipe. It’ll be a bestseller.

“For a dollar, who can tell me what’s the world’s best-selling car?”

My brother and I were waiting for our mother outside some store in Old Strathcona. The call had come from just a few metres to our left: a man standing on a folding chair in the shade of a tree. He held out a loonie to passing pedestrians, asking them for an answer, assuring them it was easy. There were a few cautious guesses called out by people walking by, none of them right.

Eric looked at me and asked “The Beetle?”
“Don’t tell me. He’s the one with the dollar.”
“The Beetle!” We turned to see a man walking up to collect his dollar. Eric turned back to me and raised his eyebrows.

The man on the chair asked another question while digging in his pocket for the second dollar. The first winner stood with his back against the window of a store, watching, calling out answers every now and then. To me, it was obvious the two were working together, probably to drum up business for a nearby bar. “Come to Trivia Night,” or something like that.

The sidewalks were reasonably busy, it being the middle of Edmonton’s Fringe Festival; traffic from the Farmer’s Market and Whyte passed their spot. Slowly, people stopped to hazard a guess or to watch the man on the chair and his growing audience.

At first, my brother would tell me what he thought the answers were, but as others began to win with the same answers, he gathered enough courage to shout his answers out. After winning one he became even more eager. We went to stand a little closer. Our mother joined us, and the three of us listened in the shade.

“What restaurant food do Americans choke on most?”

It took much longer for someone to answer that one than it had for any of the others. The man on the chair became nervous, insisting that the answer was worth money, that we all knew what it was. Small, round, not soft. “For a dollar, c’mon.”

“Hard-boiled eggs?” The man who guessed didn’t sound at all certain.
“Yes!”
I could see by some of the faces in the audience that I wasn’t the only one wondering where that bit of trivia had come from.

The man on the chair seemed a little more relaxed. He tucked his folder under his arm and brought out of his pocket, not a loonie, but his wallet. He announced that his next question would be worth five dollars, and that he would need a volunteer. He pointed to a few people in the crowd with the blue bill, asking them whether they wanted to win five dollars.

He hesitated for a half-second when my brother went up. He searched the crowd a moment before asking my brother his name, again after Eric answered. It wasn’t what he had wanted, an eager kid, but he went on anyway.

“Eric, we’re going to find out if you’re a good person.”
Something inside me dropped.
“Do you know the Ten Commandments? Thou shalt not lie? Eric, have you ever told a lie?”
Eric looked back at me, at mom, then at the man in the chair. “Yeah.”
“What do you call someone who lies?”
(”Human,” called someone behind me.)
“A liar,” said Eric.
“You’re a liar, Eric, and that’s not good.”

He kept talking as his audience left, taking my brother down for stealing, for being envious, for being angry at others, concluding each strike by telling Eric he was “not a very good person.” Eric was silent.

I wanted to pull the bastard down off and ask him how he dared to condemn my brother. I wanted to feed him those five dollars. I didn’t. I wanted to lead Eric away, to leave the man without a victim. I didn’t—Eric wouldn’t have received his five dollars. I went and stood next to Eric, between him and the self-righteous jerk on the chair. I tried to absorb my brother’s humiliation. I tried to contain my anger. I whispered into my brother’s ear, “Don’t listen to him. You’re a good person. He’s an idiot, bullshitting.” Eric watched the ground, wounded. The man went into his sermon, saying all men are sinful and guilty, and only through the love of Jesus Christ can one be redeemed.

When he finished, Eric took the five dollars. The man snapped his chair shut and walked off to set his trap somewhere else.

Tetris, as a product, has a nasty history. Soon after Tetris spread beyond the Soviet Union, the rights to the game were ignored or sold by people who didn’t own them. Companies pumped out knock-offs like TETЯIS, which angered Nintendo, who believed it had exclusive rights to the game in the West. Lawsuits were filed, disks were taken off store shelves, and the Soviet organization which mediated electronic exports disintegrated. Tetris’ creator was allowed his reasonable right to profit from Tetris very belatedly, ten years after the game had become ubiquitous, when it was almost useless as intellectual property. The success in the West of one of the most emblematic, most imitated games left a knot of confused rights-holders and resentment. The wrong people got rich. The meek Russian who invented the game was left with little more than a 286 desktop computer to show for it.

Tetris, the game, has been a small part of my own personal history. I can remember playing it on my grandparents’ Commodore 64 as a kid; hogging my cousin’s GameBoy to play it; being impressed with my friend’s brother and his shareware success, Ultris; working with Paul on our own variant, Bombtris, in Visual Basic; arguing with my father that pausing every time a new piece showed up in order to plan where to put it was cheating. (I was frustrated that I could never beat his high scores—but it was still cheap.) I’ve copied Microsoft’s Tetris (the same version I’d played in Windows 3.0) onto each of my relatives’ computers time and time again, as recently as last year. Having been raised around computers, it’s always been somewhere near at hand, a constant, innocuous presence: on the 64, the various PCs, Palm handhelds, even on the graphing calculators at school.

So, since my laptop died and took my only working installation of Windows with it (my only foundation for playing the copy of Half-Life 2 that’s been temping me all summer long), my free time has been spent playing Tetris (not Tetris per se, but one of its many imitators: Gnometris).

And, for two non-consecutive nights, I’ve dreamt about it.

It’s not uncommon to have elements of your waking world intrude on your dreams, be they conversations, people, or falling tetrominoes. As with any activity you busy yourself with, video games affect your mind. Given that I indulge in a dozen-or-so rounds of Tetris a day, I shouldn’t have been surprised to see coloured blocks in my dreams. In fact, some psychologists at Harvard Medical School would say that my Tetris dreams are a good thing.

According to a summary article in SciAm, these dreams are a side effect of a two-stage learning process believed to be important in learning and associating important events and experiences. While asleep, the hippocampus (an area of the brain important for the formation of memories) communicates my recent experiences to the neocortex. This communication serves to store the experiences in the cortex, the area of the brain best at associating stimuli and memories. The cortex then sends signals back to the hippocampus, perhaps to request more information, or to release the memories it has just stored. The memories I create of playing Tetris stay in my hippocampus where, at night, they’re passed to and imprinted on the cortex. During sleep, the brain studies these memories and teaches itself how to deal with similar experiences. The cortex is also where sensory input is processed, so as the memories pass through, I experience them: I dream of Tetris.

Of course, despite the benefits of compiling my Tetris experiences during sleep, I should be wary of playing too much Tetris.

Update: BBC Four recently aired an excellent documentary on Tetris. (Link via Grand Text Auto.)

(There was something to say about Heino Pars. There was a reason why you remember watching his films as a child, very early in the morning. Why are you reminded of him?)

Sunlight comes in through the window (a window that opens: rejoice) with complete disregard to my retarded sleep cycle—contempt, almost. My navy blinds are made a joke. Walls, furniture, retinas, all are blasted a fierce and relentless white until the late afternoon when the sun, gorged with the satisfaction of having made my adversely positioned monitor unusable for the majority of the day, lowers itself behind the houses across the way. My new room is beige only in the evening.

You’re using the space well, they’ve said. It was smart of you to remove the closet door. It must have saved, what, like, six inches along that wall. You’ve managed to fit quite a lot in here.

What they can’t appreciate is how new and fragile this economy is. How long do I expect to maintain the Scandinavian show-room tidiness that has freed so much space? This undramatic tautness is days old and already showing signs of atrophy, soon to give all at once. What they don’t see is the lack of purposeless surfaces. There’s no leeway. I sense the sagging shelves, can feel the failure of this room in the startling dreams I suffer in it, waking to sounds from the open window (a mixed blessing), to white walls.

I’m a stone fruit here. Not only in this room, but here in these twin cities. And on the television I’m being sold the tragedy of mismanagement.

My desk, a few days ago:

Since, the tangle of wires has been thinned some, thanks in part to a working wireless card; the most urgent bills, the ones buried deepest under the desk-toys and scribbled notes, have been paid; and the dishes spotted with cheese made their way to the sink soon after I found them under a pile of shirts I was to put away.

It is the books—four of which can be seen in the photo—that give me the most trouble. I have too many of them, and a bad habit of buying more before I’ve finished the ones I’ve already begun. (I am convinced that, it being summertime, I have ample time to make my way through all the titles I’ve jotted down over the past months, and so, shortly after my paycheck hits, I find myself waiting in line for a cashier at a bookstore. It’s only when I get back home, when I see the small piles on my dresser and on the floor, that I realize how quickly I’ve been accruing books—and lament how short the summer is.) My shelves are already packed. The papers can be shredded and recycled, the dishes washed, the clothes folded, but where do I put the books?

Earlier this afternoon, my mother phones in a solution. It’s from Ikea, you see. It’s on sale.