Category Archives: Literature

About the only thing I can control in life is my artistic output (and what I wear). This is somewhat infuriating, as I tend to need control to feel safe and secure. Without that control, I often have to rely on others who are usually not as dependable as me. Sorry, but the truth is the truth, and one of my greatest strengths is my dependability and sustenance. (You don’t keep a website going with daily posts for eight-plus years, or hold down a job for almost ten if you are inconsistent or unreliable.)

That said, it’s not always fun to find the control, (and even those enterprises over which I have complete autonomy aren’t entirely joyful all of the time). This passage, another from John Tarrant’s Bring Me the Rhinoceros, has been teaching me to let go. It’s been a revelation – and a rather freeing one at that:

Maybe nothing will change and the uncertainty will continue. What has changed is that he doesn’t torment himself with his thoughts. He has breakfast, goes to work, comes home, has dinner, plays with the children, reads a novel. He lives. He does not require the moment to be different in order to be happy. He is happy…

The Buddha doesn’t say that nothing happened, that someone didn’t beat you, that no pain was caused. He is not encouraging you to pretend you are a robot, to go into denial, or to take up positive thinking. He just says that feeding the story of suffering makes you suffer. And he doesn’t say that not feeding the story of suffering will make you happy. His words are a koan; they take away the story about suffering. How happiness appears is your business.

This koan raises the idea that freedom might be freedom from your own stories about life and who you are and who you should be. When you first see that you suffer from your thoughts, you might want to get rid of the difficult, painful thoughts and put good ones in their place. This is not the koan approach. What might it be like if you got rid of the painful thoughts and didn’t put anything in their place? Then you might not be struggling to make the world fit your fiction. You wouldn’t suffer from bad art…

When the Buddha made his discoveries, he said, “I have found the builder, and I will not build the house of pain again.” Without your fictions, life has a simplicity that is full of beauty.

There is nothing I dislike.

~ John Tarrant, Bring Me The Rhinoceros

There is usually one book that stands out above the rest in the course of a summer. I still remember David Copperfield in the sunny weeks between ninth and tenth grades, and Treasure Island in the summer leading up to eleventh grade. In recent years the Harry Potter series became an annual summer rite. This past season, Kraken by China Mieville captured the hot spot – a memorable romp of wickedly wild other-worldly mayhem. It doesn’t fall into an easy genre, and to be honest I picked it up in the bookstore not knowing anything about it.

More often than not, I have an idea of what book I want to read next – based on the news or reviews, or even the simple suggestions of online alchemy. Not so this time – I picked up Kraken based on the title and my fascination with Architeuthis dux – the giant squid. There was no indication whether this was a comedy or a tragedy, reality or fantasy, fun or scary, so it was a bit like boarding Space Mountain for the first time without having heard anything about what it would be like. Thankfully that was part of the thrill.

So many preconceived notions are brought to the books we read, based on the title, the cover, the author, the synopsis – how many of us simply pick up a book and read it for the sheer thrill and joy of reading, regardless of content? Yes, it’s a crapshoot, and a rather Russian-Roulette-like danger of disappointment lurks beneath every cover, but in this instance it turned out for the best. Kraken is the kind of wonderfully weird corkscrew of a book that benefits from a cloak of mystery.

Being that I had no background knowledge of it, I also didn’t know whether what I was reading was actually happening, which only added to the heightened sense of suspended belief. Mieville manages to fry the mind in this giddy brain-fuck of a book, going so far as to seemingly bend time, erase and eradicate both history and memory, and kick up so much pseudo-scientific dust that you can do nothing but marvel at what has been conjured before your eyes.

The author has also crafted two of the most terrifying manifestations of pure evil in Goss & Stubby. They will hunt and haunt you long after their story ends. If you’re feeling adventurous, and want one more magical go-round before the summer ends, put Kraken on your reading list.