“Then he looked at it a bit more and started to scratch his head and after a while he said, ‘Excuse me!’ And he disappeared.

“About half an hour later he came back beaming all over his face and said triumphantly, ‘Yes, I was right — it is obvious!’”

(via mefi)

read online here

Since I was in high school, James Clavell has loomed largely among my guiltier pleasures. Somewhere circa age sixteen I plowed through Shogun and Tai-Pan one summer, and came away from them heady with Orientalism: because these books are, really, Orientalism at its pulpy contemporary finest (if that isn’t an oxymoron). In them, the European hero is thrown into an exotic, spice-scented eastern culture where, through a combination of courage, canny and luck, he is embroiled in conspiracies, admitted into the luxurious inner circles of power, beds beautiful women, and defeats his enemies….

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Did the early Middle Ages really exist?

This question in itself – and more so the answer ‘NO, the early Middle Ages did not exist’ – is surprising, to say the least. It contradicts all basic knowledge and attacks the historian’s self respect to such an extreme that the reader of this paper is asked to be patient, benevolent and open to radically new ideas.

Since 1998, a radical theory called the “Phantom Time Hypothesis” (PHT) has been propagating steadily through academic circles. The punchline: contemporary chronology has it wrong, and we’re currently living in (roughly) the year 1712. Although hardly credible, this is the kind of conspiracy theory (with lots of obscure footnotes) that makes my day: Umberto Eco, eat your heart out.

Also see here for a quick summary.

Although it sadly neglects the topic of safeguarding our precious bodily fluids in a global age, it is an extraordinarily lucid, compelling read in many ways. It’s framed, first and foremost, as a re-thinking of Cold War-era “containment” ideology — a political and pragmatic framework, the authors argue, whose goals still shape national policy and identity although they have become impossible and indeed counter-productive.

From the paper:

America emerged from the Twentieth Century as the most powerful nation on earth. But we failed to recognize that dominance, like fossil fuel, is not a sustainable source of energy. The new century brought with it a reminder that the world, in fact, is a complex, open system – constantly changing. And change brings with it uncertainty. What we really failed to recognize, is that in uncertainty and change, there is opportunity and hope.

… like I said, it’s good stuff. It also strikes me as a lovely acknowledgement (by the Pentagon) of the profound role narratives play in our identity, both at the individual and collective level. As Prof. Anne-Marie Slaughter of Princeton notes in the introduction:

“We need a story with a beginning, middle, and projected happy ending that will transcend our political divisions, orient us as a nation, and give us both a common direction and the confidence and commitment to get to our destination.”

It’s easy to read this as Machiavellian, and it is, to a degree, but there’s also some essential fact being spoken to. A sense of nationhood, to whatever extent such a thing exists, is a sheaf of shared stories which try to encompass the scattershot facts of “our” past and bind them into a meaningful whole.

It seems to me that the same observation, with slight alterations, could be made about our private selves and how we (most often) understand the world.

Elagabalus… corrupted by his youth… and his fortune, abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures with ungoverned fury, and soon found disgust and satiety in the midst of his enjoyments.

–Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Answering the group’s questions was a fun exercise, so I thought I’d post them here. (For those in the Cleveland area, the group has a website.)

1. Do you have any plans for a prequel or a sequel, and if not do you have thoughts on what happened to your characters Peter and Cheri.

At the moment I’m not planning a sequel: my current project is a historical novel set in the 17th century Ottoman Empire – although I don’t absolutely rule out the possibility of a follow-up to KOH someday.

As for what happened to Peter and Cheri-Anne, the end of the novel is left intentionally ambiguous. In a sense, KOH is a cautionary tale about the dangers of clinging to a particular story. By the time Peter returns to New York he has spent the better part of his life obsessing over the past, at the expense of the present; at the conclusion of the book he (literally) steps away from that well-trodden, obsessive narrative into the unknown future – the part of the map inscribed with the warning, “here be dragons” which may, or may not, coincide with his own death.

That said, I have a feeling Cheri-Anne survived and found a place to call home somewhere.

2. Did you have any specific authors that you drew upon for the sci-fi/ time travel elements?

I’m not aware of particular authors who influenced the sci-fi elements of the book, but the novel as a whole is deeply indebted to Mark Helprin, specifically A Winter’s Tale,, which is set in a similar version of New York City.

3. Any reason for the use of the subway tunnels and time travel…tunneling through time and tunneling through the earth?

My decision to use the NY subway tunnels in the book was the result of some fairly convoluted personal history – so you’ll have to bear with me on this one.

Several years ago I visited the “Seattle underground,” a network of semi-abandoned tunnels beneath that city. There’s an interesting story behind these passageways: Seattle was originally a logging port where cut timber was loaded onto ships. At the time, most of the town was built on a tidal flat, and the streets were paved with sawdust. As you can imagine, this led to some problems. For one thing, because the town was at sea level, there were serious plumbing issues: if someone flushed their toilet at high tide, it resulted in a geyser of sewage. For another, the town was prone to flooding – and when it did flood, the sawdust streets turned into a morass that could swallow up incautious dogs and small children.

Then 1889 the Great Seattle Fire destroyed about 25 blocks including most of the old downtown. When the city leaders started to rebuild, they decided to raise the street level by ten feet, the second floor of the old buildings becoming the new ground level.

This had the side-effect of creating a kind of underground city. The old streets became tunnels that linked the buried portion of the buildings. These tunnels became the domain of smugglers and runaways and pirates, a kind of secret city beneath Seattle. Over the years, they fell into disrepair and were finally forgotten for decades.

When I visited the tunnels, they struck me as a metaphor for America’s relationship with its past: how we tend to smooth over the messy parts of history, so that progress looks like a straight line rather than a series of false starts, detours and accidents. Although Seattle itself didn’t make it into the book, the echoes of those tunnels survived.

Specifically, one of the themes that interested me was the intersection between our idiosyncratic personal histories and our relatively homogenous sense of shared history. Both the subway tunnels (the underside of visible existence) and time travel (a rupture in the historical process) felt to me like ways of playing with that relationship.

4. There seemed to be a lot about memory, madness and identity in the story. (Cheri would be considered mad for her memories of her past life, Peter keeps switching his identity with counterfeit paperwork, Peter continually recalls his memories of Cheri, Tesla feels his memory is ironclad, etc.) How did you choose to put these themes into the story and connect them with the “relative state formulation” discussed on page 250?

The process of writing a novel, for me, is more like having a conversation (with myself and the reader) about certain ideas or themes, rather than putting forth a well-defined thesis.

In this book, the themes of memory, madness, and identity are, for me, all connected with the sense of history I mentioned above. Our memories are the building blocks of our identity: our sense of the past, and our relationship with that past, largely defines our selves.

But what happens when our private experience of selfhood comes into conflict with history writ large? Normally our identities are a kind of negotiated compromise between what other people think of us, and how we see ourselves. The discrepancies between the two can be both a source of strength (the private hopes we nurture) and great pain (for example, in the case of invisible minorities). In KOH, Peter’s false identities and Cheri-Anne’s struggle with her past are different kinds of rupture between who we know ourselves to be, and who the world thinks we are.

I’m not sure if I see a (direct) connection between these themes and the brief discussion of “relative state formation,” which relates more to the paradoxes of time travel and causality.

5. Names often have significance and can be symbolic. Do you think the names you chose for the characters and for the name on the door, “CROATOAN,” were specifically chosen, and if so why those?

I chose the name “Cheri-Anne Toledo” because it struck me as at once elaborately royal and otherworldly. The “cheri” (precious, or darling, in French) seemed to work as a reference to the Latoledan family ancestry and a veiled suggestion of the cosseted, over-protected life that she lead before arriving in New York.

The names “Peter Force” and “CROTOAN” are much less the product of a writerly plan: I once met a Peter Force, and it had a ring that I liked. My use of CROTOAN is, as they say, “over-determined” in that it comes from at least three different sources.

The first is a fantastic short story (of the same name) by Harlan Ellison, in which the narrator descends into New York City’s sewers where he finds a tribe of crocodile-riding fetuses, and this word crudely lettered on a wall; second, it’s the title of my favorite album by the greatest pop star the world never knew; and third, the history of the lost Roanoke Colony itself (which is briefly described at the end of the book). Between those things, I couldn’t resist; my only regret is that I couldn’t work in the crocodiles too.

In the mean time, I’ve been enjoying the fruits of the online world. It’s stunning to think how recently none of this stuff existed (the www, I mean, and it’s ilk). During middle school and high school, I had a dialup modem — 56Kbps in my glory days — and messed around with BBSes, and later in college played with programs like Gopher and Mosaic, but in a qualitative sense that era of stuttering connectivity was fundamentally different than the access to communication and information tools we have today. I was reminded of this forcefully when my father sent me a box containing my correspondence from back then, letters that I received and a few that I wrote myself. In addition to their heartbreaking adolescent earnestness and extravagance, many of them are physically beautiful. We made collages and packets to send each other; we illustrated the margins of our pages, and hand-crafted envelopes by gluing postcards, sewing fabric, and with origami. Those letters were labors of love, little gifts that arrived unexpectedly in the post.

It’s hard to imagine a kind of communication more different from a facebook update or a tweet. Looking through those old notes and screeds I got nostalgic, of course. But then, in other ways, I’m grateful for the changes every day. Here are just a few of the things that have made me happy lately:

• Character Development a short story by David Mitchell from the Amnesty International anthology, Freedom
• The ongoing series of intimate and thoughtful letters about past Nobel Prize winners at Bookslut
• Wikipedia’s list of unusual deaths
• paperpools, the blog of Helen DeWitt, a writer I admire
• Poet Tony Hoagland’s essay on Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment
• This series of interviews with Iain Banks
• Mario Vargas Llosa’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech
• …and, of course, The Wilderness Downtown, an interactive film Google made from the Arcade Fire song.

From their travelogue:

It would soon become clear that very little information was available. We did not know of a single traveler that did this in the last 20 years. We knew of two who tried (both on motorbikes) in recent years. One crashed after a few days and got evacuated. The other got arrested and deported….

A major showstopper for our trip was a Permit to travel through Congo. Nobody really knows what kind of permit one needs, let alone where to apply for it. But everybody agrees that a permit is required….

Our Belgian Consulate really tried hard to get this stupid little piece of paper for us, but to no avail. They even managed to get us invited with the governor of Katanga, but he too could not give it to us. After many days of trying we asked the consulate to give us some sort of official looking letter with an official looking stamp. We would chance it without the permit!

From Josephine and Frederik’s journal

In addition to being a fascinating informal glimpse into one of the most troubled and often-overlooked places on the planet, one of the things that struck me about this narrative is how little it relies on the idea of “motive.”

In the literary world, people tend to get very excited about the idea of character motivation — the dark secret, or hidden yearning, or lifelong dream, or etc., that compels X to depart on whatever quest or journey lies ahead. In this journal, by contrast, we hear that Josephine and Frederik “decided to drive across the Congo” — and then we’re off. Yet despite this, it’s an amazingly good story.

And the fact is, it seems to me that most real stories don’t rely much on the notion of motive. For example, when I was in college I decided to buy an ancient, rusted-out, dangerously unreliable Cadillac hearse and proceeded to drive it all over New England, getting into various kinds of legal and interpersonal trouble along the way. Sure, if I dug deep enough I could probably scrape up some childhood moment that led to an adolescent yearning that led to my forking over $1,500 cash to a hunchback in a backwoods garage in Massachusetts, but that would be artificial. Instead, it was more or less a whim that led to my decision — and the real story isn’t the why of what made me do it, but the what of what happened afterward.