Till We Have Faces

Most of the plaintive introverts-are-people-too articles on the net will tell you that our world and our languages are extrovert-oriented. This can be demonstrated with a common-or-garden thesaurus: take the list of synonyms for “extrovert” and “introvert” and sort the synonyms by whether they are positive or negative.

Extrovert (22 total):

18 positive synonyms: approachable, civil, communicative, cordial, easy, expansive, friendly, genial, gregarious, informal, kind, open, sociable, sympathetic, unconstrained, unreserved, unrestrained, warm.

4 arguably negative synonyms: character, exhibitionist, show-off, showboat.

Introvert (62 total):

6 positive or arguably positive synonyms: modest, conscious, cautious, self-observer, solitary, humble.

56 arguably negative or outright negative synonyms: lone wolf, loner, nerd, autist, hermit, outsider, circumspect, coy, demure, diffident, disinclined, reserved, reticent, retiring, self-conscious, brooder, creep, drip, egotist, narcissist, oddball, weirdo, wet blanket, wimp, anomic, afraid, apprehensive, averse, backward, bashful, chary, distrustful, fearful, hesitant, indisposed, loath, mousy, nervous, rabbity, recessive, reluctant, self-effacing, shamefaced, sheepish, shrinking, skittish, suspicious, timid, unassertive, unassured, uneager, uneffusive, unresponsive, unsocial, unwilling, wallflower, wary.

I got started on this subject because I was going to talk about the NOSO project -the No Social Networking project, yet another antisocial networking site. Like Isolatr, Snubster, Nemester, Introvertster, and so forth.

NOSO’s website seems to have died sometime in the last few months (but there’s a good interview with RU Sirius) and the gimmick is probably dead too, but in a nutshell, the gimmick was that NOSO members would create NO events -which are precisely not social gatherings. The idea was to go to a selected public place and disconnect -to switch everything off, cell phones, laptops, neural implants- presumably in the vicinity (but not the company) of other people who were also disconnecting. To be alone in the middle of a crowd.

So: is the NOSO project dead because it never took off, or because it was redundant?

Out Of Shelf, Out Of Mind

My books are still in their boxes. They entered these boxes earlier this year when I moved and, well, I never unpacked them. I am reminded of this brute fact because a friend asked to borrow some books that I know I own, but for the life of me I cannot find them, though I did find some books which I didn’t know I owned. Huh.

On that note; either I’m getting stupider or Justina Robson’s Living Next Door To The God Of Love is a little denser than I was expecting. I had to take a week-long break from reading it and when I came back I was thoroughly confused. I intend to exploit this unexpected pleasure and read it again from the beginning. Until someone gives me Endymion (two people have offered so far) this is all I have on hand to read.

Until I wrote that sentence I think I honestly believed it to be true. But then, of course, one stares at the words, and one thinks, wait, that can’t possibly… It’s not even remotely true. Not only do I have three hundred and eighty-seven megabytes of downloaded unread texts, not counting comics, but I have only this very evening discovered, while digging through the boxes, that I also own books that I have not in fact read.

Many of them, I think, are books I felt I ought to read. The category of the acquired-but-unread ranges from the comparatively lowbrow but essential genre reading (say, Delany’s Dhalgren or the entire Moorcock back catalogue) to the likes of David Foster Wallace or Thomas Pynchon. And Dostoevsky. I found a copy of The Brothers Karamazov lying forlornly in one of the bigger boxes, sandwiched between Marcus Aurelius and a Fritjof Capra book which -come to think of it- I haven’t read either. I was halfway through Crime and Punishment earlier this year, before I moved, and now I can’t even find it. And I had forgotten I was reading it.

Started, not finished, and then forgotten that I’d started. Amnesia gives us a further subset. Moby-Dick, for example. Some non-fiction, including the Dawkins-Dennett-Harris New Atheist unholy trinity.

(It suddenly strikes me that this is the ideal post to namecheck Pierre Bayard’s Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus, which would be especially delicious since I haven’t read that either. Nor do I have a copy.)

Alors, unexpectedly cheerful fact: far more importantly than a few bouts of amnesia, I have discovered a vast pile of unread books in my possession and am not actually hostage to Dan Simmons.

Now I just have to get some goddamn bookshelves.

Inky Lucre

I.e., stuff that people write on money. See Stuff People Write On Money.

Today I got a ten-rupee note back in change on which some fifteen-year-old kid had written her name, school, home address and date of birth. Well, she would be seventeen now, but going by her grade in school she was fifteen when she sent this little message-in-a-bottle out into the world. I suppose fifteen is young enough not to be paranoid about letting so much personal information out into the wild in quite so random a manner. Or maybe it’s just geezers like me who worry about privacy and information and being googled by stalkers, etc. Not that I worry about any of this. It’s just that privacy and anonymity matter, for some reason. I like my personal space, whether physically or informationally.

You know what’s weird? She and I share birthdays. Same day, twelve years apart.

Twelve years ago, I think I was also fascinated by the concept of leaving secret messages in the world -in my limited world, high school. In my own small way I was a vandal. Wood was my preferred medium, because it allowed me to carve in words that couldn’t be washed or scrubbed away. Desks, chairs, benches, the underside of staircases bearing odd turns of phrase or curious sentences. Whatever was going through my head. Once the entire lyrics of some song or the other… I was a heavy metal teenager. Naturally I never left my name or home address, but I suppose I intended that these graffiti to be messages -I don’t know to whom, or expressing what, but then nowadays I’m writing a novel and I still don’t know. Those are hard questions.

Endymion

Ladies and gentlemen, Bill Coyle:

Earth, despite all the astronomers say, has not one moon but many.
All save the one called the Moon are inhabited, all have distinctive,
frankly fantastical climates and landscapes. Initiates know this,
meteorologists, farmers, sportsmen and almanac keepers
know what was once, in the antediluvian world, common knowledge.
They have conspired for six thousand years, now, to keep it a secret,
fearing that we, if we knew of inhabited worlds in near orbit,
might be so taken with them we’d neglect our terrestrial business.
And they are right. Having unearthed their secret I’ve found myself growing
arrogant, distant, bored with the every day details of living,
pale and exhausted from gazing all night at the heavens. Oh stranger,
stranger whom I, both by chance and design, entrust with the secret,
do not take lightly my warning; do not believe for a moment
you can believe in such things without gradually growing inhuman.
Think of the Harvest Moon, patchworked with wheatfields, orchards and vineyards;
think of the Hunter’s Moon, teeming with prey unafraid of the arrow;
think of the Hunger Moon, peopled by figures from Giacometti;
think of the Flower Moon, the Ice Moon, the Strawberry Moon and the others.
You, if you ever return to your life, will return as a stranger.
The Moons of Earth from The God Of This World To His Prophet

I’ve been limping back to my book, a little painfully. It’s a busy week at work -it’s always a busy week, but this week we’ve got a whole thing going on, complete with external consultant -don’t ask- plus an AGM to cap it off on Friday, and a big contract we’re pitching for Thursday. Sigh. As if that wasn’t enough, last Friday I hadda go get my head examined.

Bada-boom.

It all started with the tentative diagnosis of migraine. The pills weren’t working and the blood tests came back normal, except that I’m apparently a mutant -I may be carrying the genetic trait for thalassemia, though as far as the headaches are concerned that seems neither here nor there. The doctor suggests a CT scan. I say okay. Always being one to leap headlong into things, I have the CT scan done immediately. An incredibly ancient crone-nurse jabs me with an unnecessarily large needle. Very extremely ancient, with the kind of face that has three times as much skin as necessary. I have my head strapped to a conveyor belt and stuck into a doughnut for twenty minutes. It makes whirring and clicking noises. Sometimes you wonder with machinery like this: to be perfectly blunt, it all looks so fake. Sure, you’re zapping my brain with many x-rays. You’re not really just using the same brain pictures you’ve been using for everybody for the last fifteen years.

“Close your eyes. Now open your eyes. Don’t move your head.” says the doughnut operator.

I open my eyes and there’s a little sign on the inside of the doughnut that says DO NOT STARE DIRECTLY INTO APERTURE and now I can’t remember if the last thing he said was “close your eyes” or “open your eyes”, and for a moment I panic, knowing that I’m about to go blind and it’s all a horrible mistake.

After it’s all over and I’m in a cab going home, there’s a sudden pain in my chest from where I imagine my heart is. It lasts for nearly half an hour. I have a cup of coffee and try to breathe deeply and -incongruously with the last- have a cigarette or two, and it goes away. I chalk it up to stress. I like it because it is bitter and it is my heart -who was that, Stephen Crane?

I’m not the only one stressed by the proceedings. “I really wish the doctor hadn’t used the T word,” N. says. N. is, in the parlance of our times, my special lady friend. Even if the context is on the lines of “let’s rule out the T word with a scan, eh?” there are times when you just don’t want to hear the T word.

If that brain scan report comes back with bad news, I will title my next blog post “Goodbye Cruel World”. Heh heh. If not, it’ll probably end up being something utterly banal, and I’ll be out four and a half grand for the damn CT scan for no reason at all. You can’t win.

Yes, getting your brain scanned is fucking expensive.

The Bill Coyle is via Fungible Convictions. Dramatic re-enactments of brains being scanned are via my unreliable memory.

Living By Architecture Alone

Cities make an ideal laboratory for evolutionary biologists to watch adaptation happening before their eyes
Evolution gets busy in the urban lab – life – 26 April 2006 – New Scientist

Yeah, no shit. Oh, wait… you didn’t mean people, did you?

Naturally, most of the rapid adaptation that happens among humans is cultural/psychological rather than biological. I assume there are keen-eyed memeticists and anthropologists watching the urban evolution-o-rama and taking notes. on this somewhat more immediate (and therefore more interesting in an instant-gratification sort of way) level of variation and selection.

[I]t often becomes noticeable the extent to which rural towns and villages are constructed against the nearest city. Rural inhabitants’ own understandings of themselves continually exist in relation to nearby cities, with their potential to symbolise modernity, allow alternate social spaces, create different possibilities for personhood and social life and range of diverse phenomenological backgrounds and neighbourhoods.

Moreover [...] the very existence of cities is dependent upon the differences between the persons who inhabit them. It is a foundational diversity that is responsible for bringing the many different types of city into being; the discursive city, the mythical city, the physical city, the poetic city, the underground city, the late-night city, the working city, the women’s city and the men’s city. To this list we might also add [...] the ethnic city, divided city, gendered city, contested city, de-industrialised city, modernist city, postmodern city, fortress city, sacred city and traditional city [...]

Thus the city does not exist in an individual’s mind or ‘out there’ as an objective physical landscape but as a collective entity that gathers people’s emotions and memories, mixes them with architecture and elicits distinctive practices and ways of being being. Or put another way the city is not simply architecture alone, but a curious melding of ‘flesh and stone’.
Cities: an Anthropological Perspective

And to this profligate proliferation of cities we might add at least one more: the mundane city, the everyday city, the one that faded slowly when you stopped seeing it and just isn’t there any more.

Jack Hawksmoor in The Authority by Warren Ellis is a subspecies of human hyper-adapted to living in cities. Ellis interprets this in a delightfully cartoonish way, but that’s an interesting notion anyway. In a way it begs the question. Cities themselves evolve, I suppose, at least in a metaphorical sense. There’s variation and selection of a sort. But maybe we’re mistaken and they’re not all beasts of the same stripe. Could be cities are more different than they are alike, and to adapt to one is to lose another. Would I call myself a human adapted to living in cities? Maybe not. The city bothers me. It’s messy and noisy and dangerous and full of strangers. The city gives me adrenaline poisoning. I’m sure it’s killing me, sure and deadly as the cancer sticks. But I couldn’t leave it, either -I mean, maybe I could leave this city, though I don’t want to, but I can’t really entertain the idea of living outside cities altogether. I can’t take bucolic romanticism seriously. I may not be very well adapted to the city, but I’m addicted to it.

Or take Tom O’Bedlam in Morrison’s Invisibles, who declares that cities are a viral parasitic superspecies from outer space whose sole purpose is to drive their host -us- to create more cities, until we choke the earth with urbanity and take the virus away with us in spaceships to infect other places. (Of course, he was mad as a hatter. Poor Tom.) Not cities that we live in, but cities that live through us. Pirsig says something like this, in New York at the end of Lila -the city as super-organism, overtaking, overriding. Maybe it was just NY getting to him, eh? It seemed to contradict his own thesis, his Metaphysics of Quality, what with him placing the Intellectual so clearly as a product or output of the Social.

Writing about cities is hard. Small towns, world-spanning uber-megalopolises, it’s all been done to death. And when you’ve lived in a single city all of your life, in a way the city is writing you. Your perceptions of cities in general, no matter how coloured by what you’ve seen pictures of or what you’ve read about, fall back on the defining reality of your own blood and brick, flesh and stone. That’s where all the real building blocks come from. The smells and textures. The feeling of walking down the street, paranoid or pronoid by turns.