Reading update

The other day I prepared to work on Morphei-Kay dialogue, which is by now 34 pages long, really prepared, listened to Bach, read Macbeth, spent the day in contemplative gloom, watched ... Oh, Shrek! I was gonna watch Passion of Christ, but I haven't seen Shrek in a while!... It's two in the morning, fuck it. I'll re-watch Shrek.

I picked up and opened The Shack - a bestseller in US - because it touched on the exact same subject: a man, faced with a great loss, meets up with a cool God and Son and hot Holy Spirit and they get shit done, soul-wise. It's neat, cutely written, for children, first-timer pedestrian Sunday School stuff, nothing to really read unless fapping on the idea of Jesus is what gets you going in the first place. Not really Thomas Aquinas stuff.

The other book I read almost a third of, because my mum liked it, was A Thousand Splendid Suns - a bestseller in the US - about some luckless bitch from crappy start to crappy finish. I can see why such books ARE bestsellers - westerners sure love them a fast read about dumb bitches suffering. It's almost arousing, how much humiliation some girl has to take and it solves nothing, she dies as miserably as she's lived. The way it's written, you read it very easily, no high language, very simply illustrated simple life, some Farsi or Pashto words thrown in it convince you this is an Afghan scene and not, say, any other household of any other country on any end of the planet, and from there it’s spite, misery, weakness, suffering, spite, misery and some more misery until the last page. But written in an entertaining enough way so you don't feel depressed but glad it's some toothless redneck far away country and not your own splendid country where everything is different and no sad ends allowed.

Idiotic.

 

Drej and I talked about 'problems' today. Some silly article she knows claimed to be above problems, in the same sense that Four from Divergent only had four fears. What the fuck is a fear? Is that like concern? Like an instinct? Like being afraid of spiders? Or heights? That's not fear, that's common sense. And being afraid of your father, as Four is, is not fear, that's childhood abuse trauma. 

So what is a problem? Last night I sought for A Real Word problem and found that the popular Pilipino president has PURGED the nation of tens of thousands of people using death squads, supposedly to combat drug problems. Women, children, orphans, homeless people, all slaughtered and taken to communal graves. I suppose that’s easier than paying social support to the least fortunate.

My problem is being so incredibly helpless to do ANYTHING about shit like that. Even as a journalist or humanitarian or politician or anything. I am helpless to an extreme.

At the bottom of the scale, on the most trivial, selfish level, I have a problem with money. There's never enough. The world is full of wonderful things I want, wonderful books and video games and calligraphy material. I'd love a new through-hike tent and another pet. I want want want. That's a problem.

I’m having a problem reading Tolstoy’s biography by Pavel Basinski. My first issue, few pages in, is how the guy's wife is portrayed, having a "weakness for adding her own worth in interviews." Media likes to call her Xantippe and Tolstoy's own friends publicly claim theirs was the most miserable marriage ever in history, ever.

Are you fucking kidding me?

They had thirteen children. 

She ran his household. 

She dealt with press and publicists.

She positively lost it in fear of him dying somewhere out there, when he ‘fled’.

She took care of him for SIXTY fucking years while everyone else sucked his dick, calling him the greatest genius of humanity, ever. Well, men did. His peers. His sycophants. While she was called a bitch.

Fuck. You.

This book is about my dad exactly. My dad is in every description, every line. He is a distracted, confused old genius who can't find his own socks without mum running after him. He doesn't know how to dose his heart medicine, he doesn't know how to call services to deliver firewood, he doesn't know how to use a computer. Oh, for sure, he is ten times the writer she ever was. But - and this is agreed in the Basinski book - he would not be alive as long. First chapter starts with the rich old guy deciding to flee everybody and of course dies a few days in, getting pneumonia on a train station, in a midst of a tremendous media pomp. Interesting way to ‘leave it all behind’. His family is devastated, looking for him, worried sick. Can you imagine your crazy old dad, half-certain and already sickly, just upping in the middle of the night, to 'liberate himself from wealth' or some senile shit? You go nuts, being worried. 

Seems my trolling habits from YouTube extend to books now. I have to hold back from making notes in the books every time I find something stupid. 

That's seven hundred page book. I'm gonna need a bigger pencil.