the spider's house

First two-thirds excellent, then got a little bit too telly and didactic, then got disappointing, then redeemed itself and ended with startling poignancy and sadness. Bowles is a fantastic writer and goes much more deeply into his often unlikeable characters than does St. Aubyn.

Meditation on the levels of communication and understanding that exist between individuals and cultures. We are often unable or unwilling to imagine what other people must be thinking in a given situation, and that inability is exaggerated when backgrounds are very different. That prevents us from really understanding or having compassion for each other. Looks at events and groups I know little about -- Morocco at the time of independence in the mid-50s, the Moroccan nationalist/communist resistance movement and the French regime it rose against -- from the perspective of outsiders coming from different sides. Learned stuff without being taught it directly, which is always satisfying.

Liked it okay.

Nice epigraph: "The parable of those who take protectors other than Allah is that of the spider, who builds (to itself) a house; but truly the flimsiest of houses is the spider’s house;- if they but knew." From the Quran.

al anon

Went to my first (on my own) meeting tonight. Glad I did.

several books

Godel, Escher, Bach
Whoa. From microbiology to insect colonies to number theory to musicology to computer programming and finally to AI, Hofstadter tries to explain how consciousness arises from seemingly inarticulate matter. This book was dense and it took me a long time to read, more than a month. To do it real justice I would have needed at times to sit there with a pen and paper and work out some of the puzzles he poses, but I was reading mostly in bed. Oh well. Still a really stimulating book and quite prescient, without ever using the term directly that I remember, about "emergence." In the end it wasn't as mind-blowing as its early promise, but I think that's because I was already well-prepared to receive the idea that consciousness -- defined as self-reference in a system -- arises organically from unconsciousness. Not such a strange idea these days, I don't think, although probably most people would still balk at applying it to the brain. But it's incredible to think that he wrote this in the 70's. With a few updates (e.g., computers can kick the everloving shit out of people at chess now, which he didn't think was going to happen) it would still be fresh reading if published today.

Some Hope
Manages to create a Wolfe-ian universe of hateful, contemptible characters without succumbing to the temptation to line the characters up as figurines on a table and flick them off with the middle finger (h/t Dad for the analogy). St. Aubyn has enough compassion to stay out of that trap, which I could not say about trash like A Man in Full. Bill sent me this book with a lovely note, which I'll respond to now. There's another novel in the volume about the same main character, but from quite a different perspective, which I've just started.

The Illustrated Man
Read this in about 2.5 hours on the flight back from San Francisco yesterday. Delightfully playful and imaginative; also dark and sad. Very Cold War, violent annihilation is everywhere, even in the more seemingly whimsical or happy stories.