State of the Nation

It would seem that the world is going through some disruption lately. Both the microscopic world that is my creative life and the world-at-large.

The novel is coming along, but I found I'd written as much as I could. It couldn't get any further in its current draft without a "state of the nation" - the necessary point at which the writer must ask tough questions before proceeding. So, I decided to distill each chapter into cue card format, with the thought of posting them on a corkboard - the main idea was to be able to glaze over the thing and look at it objectively; this is something that's impossible to do when you're building the thing chapter by chapter. After completing the summary of the last-written chapter of the current draft, I realised that the draft was anaemic.

This was no surprise - or rather , it shouldn't have been a surprise. The whole purpose of summarizing the novel into cue card form was for the fact I couldn't see the forest for the trees anymore (pardon the cliché). You find yourself telling a story filled with characters and ideas, yet at times it ends up being a bunch of ideas posing as a story - at worst, neither...just a bunch of semi-articulated characters talking in order to necessarily further the plot so that the fucking thing can keep moving forward the way you thought it would.

In any case, justified or not, I was disappointed.

The next day, I took a long walk - the saving grace for the creative mind. I rolled the book's problems and inefficiencies around my head like rocks in a laundry dryer. I then found myself sitting in a familiar coffee shop and proceeded to spend a couple of hours writing down the resulting thoughts from my medicative stroll. In the end, it wasn't as bad as I'd thought. While not every individual issue got solved, I found myself with a solution or two which addressed my doubts. However, the long road seems longer - there's still a lot of work to be done before I can consider the current draft complete.

And the rest of the world, you ask? What of that macroverse you've avoided telling us about? Well, one bastard got kicked out of office. Another promises to step down. One did everything possible to halt any significant movement on climate change. Another continued to arrest anyone who questioned his hand-picked successor's path to election.

The moral of the story lies in the immortal words of Charles Bukowski: perseverance is greater than strength.

Photo: Cloud Gate Self-Portrait

Thanks for the credit(s)

I got an awesome birthday gift from an anonymous admirer: 1,000 BlogExplosion surf credits to Imaginary Magnitude. Thanks very much for the traffic!

On Awareness: A Diatribe

I was cruising around the blogdom (blogoshpere, blogoverse, what have you) and visited Bookninja - a great, topical place for writer/publisher/reader types. George, the site's author, in his posting about the controversy surrounding book pricing in Canada [controversy summary: our dollar surpassed parity with the USD$ in August, and yet our sticker prices are still in line with our dollar being worth $0.85] began as follows...

The parity/book pricing issue is still making headlines, which probably means nothing else is wrong with the world. Glad to hear we cleared up that Darfur/rainforest/child sex trade mess. Just like acid rain and the impending nukular armageddon. Whew. Glad it’s over. Now, back to blindly consuming my way through life….

The point of his posting was about customers getting upset over the supposedly unfair pricing scheme, but I was caught off-guard at first by the bitter sarcasm of the opening paragraph. With no criticism directed towards George (because what I've excerpted above is just that - an excerpt - and is not his main point), there's something about people taking a passive "high road", even sarcastically, which drives me nuts.

How, pray tell, shall we "clear up" what's happening in Darfur? Anyone got a quick-and-easy child sex trade disinfectant? It inadvertently highlights a problem that I've noticed: everyone seems to be aware of the world's problems. Indeed, thanks to television, the internet, and various types of media, that whole AWARENESS thing has totally succeeded. It has succeeded in creating a society that is so self-satisfied to simply be aware of suffering - suffering-by-agency, if I may invent the next cycle of academic theses - that doing anything to help isn't necessary anymore. It seems as if it's enough nowadays to simply say: yeah, I know. And that's the end of our moral responsibility.

In fact, I would wager that it's probably harder to motivate people to get off their asses in support of a cause/belief now more than ever. Part of this has to do with the fact that people who are getting-by reasonably well - what used to be known as the middle class, but which is now becoming "the haves" (vs. the "have nots" who are working three part-time jobs and still flirt with the poverty line) - have absolutely no incentive to lift a finger to do anything. In the United States, as an example, the greatest thing George W. Bush did was to stay the hell away from drafting kids for Iraq - rather than seeing sons and daughters ripped away, like during Vietnam, we're all comfy in our well-paying jobs, in our warm homes, with our new TVs, arguing about the relative strengths of Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD.

Our economic comforts make us lazy. They allow us to philosophize idly, without consequence. Nothing, save the economy itself, makes us worried anymore. Our perspective of the world becomes increasingly virtual; the suffering of others becomes something we hope TV and film celebrities, like Don Cheadle, can solve for us. We're simply asked for money to donate - again, another passive gesture. Alms for the poor.

I don't mean to critique anyone who's got money, nor to cast aspersion on the efforts of anyone who's trying to make a difference; I'm not trying to be a prole with a chip on his shoulder. I just turned 37 yesterday and this is the first year of my adult life where I haven't had to worry about paying rent - and I like not having to worry about that. I'm just concerned about the lull of consumerism and the lack of ways for people to truly, as in dirt-under-your-fingernails truly, get involved and feel as if they're making a difference in an immediate, non-virtual way.

In Memorium: Thomas Drayton

The city I moved into in the summer of '95 is changing. Indeed, all things change and the best of us learn neither to fear it nor be heedless of what it is ushering. If there was an icon of Queen Street West, a spiritual totem that all in the city was not so bad, it was Thomas Drayton (shown pictured, left, with Andre Benjamin of Outkast).

He was often seen outside his marvellous vintage clothing store, Cabaret, or taking walks with his behemoth of a Rottweiler. It seems odd to say this, because in a sense you'd expect it to be commonplace, but Thomas was such a decent, grounded, and inherently benevolent person - indeed, I come back to the word totem to describe such a person. He always smiled warmly and greeted you on the street, regardless if neither of you had ever been formally introduced.

I can say that everyone I know who met him, whether it were fellow dog-walkers in the park or infrequent patrons of his store, were heart-broken to hear of his passing. He died peacefully after the onset of a sudden illness, on October 24th.

Songs are not legion for those who are neither particularly heroic nor lamentable; we prefer to base our odes, it seems, on those who straddle one of two extremes. Lost in the middle, where the majority of us dwell, are pillars such as Drayton. He was one of us and yet still managed to set an example of what could be attained.

My heart broke when I saw the placard in the window display of his store, explaining his passing. There is a copy of the memorium here. It's one thing to keep memories of the dead alive in our hearts - I think, in the case of Thomas Drayton, we can go further and emulate the example he set for us, in his day-to-day style.

Advertising

-----

UPDATE: Thanks to everyone for their feedback on this. It's a contentious issue and I'll probably shelve it until further notice. I appreciate your points of view.

-----

When I first envisioned this blog, I had it in my mind that it would be a potpourri of thoughts and feelings, curated with an eye to people of reasonable intelligence and cultural curiosity - with photographs too.

While it hasn't veered off-course too much, I've found that 'imaginary magnitude' has become popular for the book reviews, which, owing to evolution, it seems have been the most prodigious type of posting. (As for the photographs, I'm still trying to get some quality scanning time - my scanner broke a while ago, leaving only my wife's, and it's hooked up to her computer, and I tripped over first base after my dog ate my shoelaces, blah blah blah).

So, lately, I've been wondering whether I should - with all aesthetic considerations taken into account - consider ads on the blog. Those Amazon-y things you see on other sites whenever they mention a book. Yes? No? Ambivalence? Do you find them invasive? Would you be offended by an ad in the margins or click-throughs that would enable people to purchase the books I'm reviewing directly?

I'm torn. I'm torn because I generally prefer to buy books locally at independent booksellers. That said, not everyone visiting my site lives in a major metropolitan area that allows for the cultivation of said booksellers. And hey, I can make a couple of bucks on the side for my time.

Let me know what you think - I'll start a poll in the margin as well, in case you're unable to type.

Book Review: Introducing Quantum Theory, by J.P. McEvoy

Never let it be said that I'm only a fiction-reader...

I've been fascinated with the concepts (and the idea) of quantum theory since I was but a boy in high school. There were several problems, however, that stood in my way:

1) I sucked in both math, physics, and chemistry (though I attained a rather impressive "B" in biology).

2) Quantum theory is notoriously difficult to visualize, and if you're an artsy-type person who sucks in mathematics, it will perennially seem somehow "just around the corner" from one's understanding.

However, as Bukowski said, "perseverance is greater than strength". I've never given up my interest in quantum theory, even though I long ago realized that I would probably never truly understand it within the language it was conceived (ie. math). For a writer, not being able to visualize with language is a form of impotence.

One day, during a "second wind" of faith - that I could find a book which could magically explain quantum theory comprehensively - I posted my question to a message board. It would be a year later before someone responded. After adjudicating my level of "maths", a kind person suggested Introducing Quantum Theory by J.P. McEvoy.

Having previously read (surprise, surprise) Introducing Wittgenstein, I was familiar with the format of the Introducing series; essentially, they are well-written and concisely distilled comic books. I know of no better way to describe them and I can think of no better series of books that manage to grapple subjects as diverse as Keynesian Economics and Kafka for the curious mind. They also make great streetcar reads.

It took some hunting - let's face it, this isn't exactly a top-seller - but eventually I found a copy (with thanks to Toronto's World's Biggest Bookstore).

And now that you've read my heart-warming prelude, the review...

The most important paragraph in this book, as I discovered about a quarter of the way through, is on the second last page, in the Further Reading section:

Quantum theory cannot be explained. Physicists and mathematicians from Niels Bohr to Roger Penrose have admitted that it doesn't make sense. What one can do is discover how the ideas developed and how the theory is applied. Our book has concentrated on the former.

I wish I'd known this when I was a kid.

That said, Introducing Quantum Theory is an excellent primer. It focuses on the historical impetus which led to the stumbling-upon of the theories which now formulate our current (if not fixed) understanding of quantum phenomena. It starts with establishing the era of Classical (Newtonian) Physics - so assured were scientists of the day with the prevailing theories that it was referred to as the Age of Certainty...and, rather deliciously, it began to unravel via the route science often is forged: experimentation. Thanks, primarily, to Max Planck, Albert Einstein, and Niels Bohr, foundational rules of Classical Physics were brought into question and a new, quantum, world was revealed.

The book is full of formulae - it has to be - however, it's not necessary for the casual reader to use the formulae or to necessarily understand what any given formula does (although the latter would be nice). The concepts are outlined well by J.P. McEvoy - the conflicts, the dead-ends, and the frustrations of the worlds greatest minds as each took turns refining the prevailing speculation. He has done a great job outlining, linearly and non-linearly, the essential questions: how did this happen, when did this happen, who was involved, and - most importantly - why we should care.

It is a book that deserves (requires, perhaps) that the reader approach it from the beginning straight to the end, on several occasions in order to fully grasp the evolution of quantum theory. I fear that, in one read, it may all be too much for most - personally, I look forward to approaching this book again, as I feel it of great value which, over the course of several reads, will keep inspiring me in different ways. It's important to realize that this isn't necessarily about science, but about the refinement of how mankind perceives the world around us.

Introducing Quantum Theory, by J.P. McEvoy (ISBN: 1-84046-577-8) is available at an independently owned bookstore near you, or available at various online vendors. I should add, since this book incorporates original illustrations on every page, the graphic artist: Oscar Zarate.