Reading about Krishna for a change

 I gave up on Anne Rice and Isaac Asimov. I had a plan and I dumped it immediately, almost as soon as it I tried to execute it. Its always the execution for me because I start to hate the plan when I execute it. 

It’s always better for me to execute before planning, it’s better to focus on executing so well and perfectly that it doesn’t matter if the plan was good at all. The plan ruins it for me because I put all my execution into the plan. Its better to put all the execution into the execution. Even an amazing plan needs execution. But the execution can save a bad plan. Actually scratch that I don’t really know that. 

I’ve started reading other books, so many books since I tried to read Asimov and hated it. 

Astoundingly, I read all of Mahabharata, the Hindu epic. Instead of reading Asimov, who writes cleanly and simply and is astonishingly transparent with his story and clear, I read a translation of a long inscrutable Hindu epic about Krishna, a divine being who is born as a man and incites his troubled relatives to fight a big war with each other. I won’t try to explain how Krishna is related to the people in the story because it is very complicated because there’s a lot of kings and sages fathering children by many women and various women getting pregnant by multiple kings and sages and gods. And Krishna is just another fellow who happens to be the creator of the universe. To clarify not all Hindus consider Krishna the high god. Some Hindus consider him god, some do not, and just consider him to be an important avatar of Vishnu, who is the main god. One of the three main gods. So I think some consider Krishna to be an avatar of Vishnu and some consider Vishnu to be an avatar of Krishna. It’s a subtle distinction. I won’t try to describe the whole story of Mahabharata here because it beggars description. But I do want to point out that in Mahabharata, Krishna is considered to be the main god of the universe, and I enjoyed the idea that he was just one of the guys amongst all the warriors in the story, people would talk to him and sometimes they would casually refer to the fact that he created the universe, as if they were describing his hometown. And the other people would complain to him quite freely about almost everything because basically everything was his fault. 

Another thing about Mahabharata is that there are infinite narrators talking about narrators talking about stories within a story within a horse sacrifice. The whole story is told to a king to encourage him to make the horse sacrifice, and at the horse sacrifice he asks someone to tell him the story of the horse sacrifice and they encourage him to make the horse sacrifice with a story about a horse sacrifice at which someone tells someone the story and casually mentions that they heard he was planning a horse sacrifice. It turns out he isn’t sure. Should he go ahead with the horse sacrifice? The Brahmins are all for it, but it’s not their horse, is it? 

My second favorite part of the story was the Brahmins. The author critiques the work of several kings in the story, and clearly regards treatment of Brahmins as a critical indicator of a king’s job performance. And tells stories about kings who treat Brahmins well, who are blessed, but tells many more stories about kings who treat Brahmins  badly, and who afterwards get horribly cursed.  Of course one might suspect that the writer of Mahabharata might have himself been a Brahmin, and a not entirely dispassionate supporter of horse sacrifices. 

But one might also note that despite the fact that the kings who mistreated Brahmins always got horribly cursed, there seems to be many more accounts of kings mistreating Brahmins than there are of kings who treated the Brahmins well. Also there are a lot of stories in Mahabharata describing the blessings for women who sleep with Brahmins even when the Brahmins are smelly and dirty. But if they marry the Brahmins they have to practice austerities with them in the woods and get immolated if the Brahmins die first. So the best deal goes to the princesses who just sleep with some old Brahmin, and the next best deal is for the women who marry Brahmins.  The worst deal is for the women who refuse the Brahmins. They get cursed, usually a horrible medical condition. 

Unsurprisingly, the Mahabharata is attributed to the sage Vyasa, a wily Brahmin. He has the gall to describe his own liaisons at the beginning of the story, chapter 1, wherein he fathers the major characters of Mahabharata with various women. Perhaps he’s making some sort of literary metaphor?

Understanding Anne Rice through Asimov

 I’ve done some reading. Not enough that the Rice and Asimov material has fermented together, but I’ve read two Asimov Foundation books, and I’ve read Rice’s The Witching Hour. 

I didn’t really enjoy the two Asimov books so much, so that I lost all my initial enthusiasm for this project and read other books and began playing video games again. I see a pattern and an overall direction to my biography unfolding here, the beginning of a downward spiral into discouraging and disappointing decisions which will lead to an intellectual flaccidity and vegetation. 

Years later after my death, readers, if there are any, of my biography, if I do eventually write it, will understand my failure to grapple with difficult mental challenges at this point in my life as the final turning point, the submergence of any faint glimmer of intellectual light that still exists in my writing. If so, I expect that the only people who might read this or anything else I write will be my own children. Hopefully they won’t be too disappointed. 

I didn’t particularly enjoy most of the Anne Rice book, because most of the book is a dopey soap opera - with a few mildly uncanny moments, but there is a book within the book, the “talamasca” file on “the Mayfair witches” that I enjoyed far more than the main story, that in a better world would have just been sold as the book without the boring frame of the soap opera overlay that is hundreds of pages long with very little happening while the “file” has sex and witch burnings and murders and incest and a spooky ghost all jammed into less than a hundred pages.  Reading it is like finding one of those web sites with the amateur feel that you know could never be published as a book because it’s too short and all the words are misspelled and there’s a clammy awkward feel to the tone like you’ve intruded on someone and they’re unhappy and you’re unhappy that they’re unhappy and you want to make a joke but you can’t.  So I liked that part a lot. Polished writing is drastically overrated. This philosophy should not come as a surprise for any reader of this blog. 

Speaking of polished writing, I attribute my reaction to reading the Asimov books to over familiarity with the stories and ideas. I’ve read them many times and I have to say that with Asimov the Ideas are elucidated very clearly but the characters don’t ultimately feel real to me, except for a few moments with Janov, an elderly researcher who accompanies Golan, the PC of both books. Golan is portrayed as a strong-willed man of action, mostly annoyingly hostile and proud of it, but the interactions between Golan and Janov are very sweet and touching.  It seems to me that Janov must be based on one of Asimov’s friends, for whom he had deep affection but also some subtle contempt. Janov is affable and easygoing, intellectually curious and enthusiastic, but physically timid and socially accommodating. He is portrayed as lacking in practicality, but empathetic. Golan is the singular hero of the two books. Able, forceful, impatient, masculine, and a real turd with other people. He wears thinner for me with each re-reading. More annoying, more dubious. He has a mystical talent for being Right, often referenced to in the book along with descriptions of Golan’s outspoken skepticism of his mystical ability to be right that I don’t know, of course Golan has to show how skeptical he is because the author knows how insufferable the character is anyway? There is an unmistakable “chosen one” aura about the character that I have grown to despise in all literature and film. It’s a sign of elitism in my opinion, a giveaway of the author’s estimation of their main character. “This guy is a loser and nobody will be interested in him so I need to make him the chosen one to justify telling a story about him.” It’s always completely unnecessary. Characters don’t need to save the universe to be significant. 

Asimov most definitely subscribes to the “great man” version of history, it is explicit in his fiction and nonfiction. Even in the Foundation series, which is based on one of my favorite ideas in science fiction, an epic story driven by an advanced mathematical study of history, “psychohistory”, which ascribes the major movements of history as based on impersonal and inevitable historical forces, Asimov unironically ascribes the whole psychohistory theory to one heroic genius who figures everything out. The first book of the Foundation trilogy is a serial about singular heroes who understand the theory and save the day. Asimov does introduce the antihero in the later books,  a person whose singular and unique abilities upend the mathematics of the series. I should admit that I loved the Foundation series the first few times I read them, and I truly admire and appreciate Asimov’s ideas and the spare, uncommon clarity of prose with which he explains them, but the characters in his books are not interesting to me.  Asimov’s fiction is all about the Idea, not the character. Ironically, there’s a line in one of Anne Rice’s books; “Beware the Idea,” that could summarize my complaints about Asimov’s books (the anti-idea theme is one of Rice’s central tenets, or ideas, in her vampire books). 

Okay to be fair, his heroes are thinkers who value facts and truth and reason. But it’s interesting that Asimov, a college professor and intellectual science writer, chooses to keep emphasizing that Trevize is also a man of action. And the sympathetic friend, Pelorat, is an intellectual, and he is depicted as a bit useless in a fight. Maybe a little self-hate from Asimov?  

So we should go over my actual reasons for re-reading books I’ve already read. I had a method, a theory, a reasoning for doing all this that has broken down in the implementation, that has resulted in this posting, this idle chatter in place of the prescise and powerful scientific and mathematically driven screed that I had originally envisioned.  I believe that you don’t really fully understand a book after reading it once. You may enjoy the story, you may react and experience the story as the entertainment as it was intended to be, but you don’t notice much on the first drive through. For me, the true understanding of the book, the  real picture, only comes to you after several re-readings. I’ve experienced this with movies as well as novels. The re-reading, or re-viewing, results in truly revelatory insights. Or at least they feel revelatory to me. But in order to accomplish this, it seems to require a degree of focus that I might no longer be able to muster at this stage of my life. If I was young and relatively undistracted, I believe I could come up with some great stuff, but I don’t really have the time to bear down and re-read books anymore. I’ve stopped this project to read other books or play video games or even work so many times that I can’t even remember when I started on this post with these books in mind. So I would like to apologize to any reader of this blog for the lack of genius insights. Its just a mess in here, really, and I would prefer not to disclose what “here” means and infers and entails to strangers on the internet. No

Understanding Asimov through Anne Rice

 We’re doing a cartoon! Or “animated series” as the sophisticated people say. The cartoon will cover the same content as the regular blog and the regular comic, which is to say almost nothing. I don’t have any idea what to cover except for opinion pieces and the only things I care to write are critical reviews of books.  I also fancy the occasional piece of consumer advocacy. But mostly books. Other media aren’t worth it really - go ahead change my mind. 

Not really a challenge, I change my mind all the time. 

Additional upcoming events: Anne Rice and the Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov. Yes! And yes the post will include them both, as if they had anything to do with each other. As if their fan bases had a single person, other than myself, in common. Nope, I’m the only one. The only human alive or dead who loves them both.  And I’m the only one who can bring them together in one glorious crash up: Asimov’s galactic empire finds future earth, and it’s all Anne Rice vampires! And robots. And robot vampires! And spirits! And mind control institutes. I really feel like they make a great couple. But I’ll have to read them again. It’s extremely important. I need to bring them together inside my head before I do it on the blog page. I feel like it’s a pity they didn’t get together, except that he was twenty years older in actuality. So in an ideal world I would nudge Asimov’s birthday ten years later and I would nudge Anne Rice’s birthday ten years earlier. Also in the spirit of godlike reality adjustments I would not let Anne Rice’s daughter die at a tragic young age.  I just realized that Rice was her married name, but that’s okay. These are groovy people and I feel that they’d all be cool with a triad. Stan Rice seemed like a fairly liberal guy. I mean, he was a poet. 

So besides all that, the whole point of this alternate timeline would be the mashup, the fantastic combination of Asimov’s fussy and cerebral Foundation Series with Anne Rice’s fleshy and embarrassing Vampire Series. As diametrically opposed as two storylines could be. Asimov basically wrote his stories as a long intellectual debate between two scholarly personalities, with a few intrusions from reality, some occasional warships and soldiers or random enemy NPCs.  Rice actually wrote the phrase “beware the idea” in one of her books. I mean, I like it a lot, but you could not ask for a more opposite statement to Asimov’s oeuvre. 

But in this hypothetical timeline they’re in love and age appropriate and really digging each other on all levels, one night the three of them, after an all day binge of booze, sex, and weed, come up with a space vampire epic, with poetry by Stan. Or maybe it’s a rock opera. A galactic empire ruled by vampires, headquartered on earth. Fighting a Foundation of psychically powered witches.

Obviously in order to fully delve into this subject I’ll have to re-read some Asimov and the Anne Rice books. I’ve already begun reading his last Foundation book; “Foundation and Earth,” and it’s already annoying me.  Well, truth: I finished reading it before I finished writing this post. And I forgot that Foundation and Earth sucks - or I should say that I don’t like it, maybe other people like it. Now I really need to re-read the other Foundation books to get a better bead on the series for the mashup, which I’ve decided that Anne will be writing, with input from Isaac. And she needs to tell him that the mashup will not be used as a means to ram his thesis on multi-organismic super-beings down the reader’s throat.  Like he did with Foundation and Earth.  And the ending to Foundation and Earth, it’s just awful.  I don’t why I chose that one for re-read. I should have read the old trilogy and then Foundation’s Edge, which was my favorite. But maybe I’ll change my mind after I read that one too. 

I’m re-reading all these in order to do the mashup, to join these disparate philosophies together in a glorious mess. I need the books by Asimov and by Rice to ferment together in my head.  

Wait, why do I have the feeling that this mashup is already an anime?  I’ll have to research space vampire anime before I get sued. 

Anyway, we’re doing a cartoon!

The end of The End of Eternity is not the end

I re-read books a lot. If I like them.  For this post I’d planned to read End of Eternity again but I lost my copy. I didn’t really like the book enough to re-read it per my usual standards but I wanted to keep re-reading it and come up with pun titles for the posts and amuse myself so I felt some disappointment when I couldn’t find it. I daydreamed about using one of the “kettles” in the book to go back in time and retrieve my copy while it sat on my nightstand and then take it back to my time to re-read it, but by the time travel rules in End of Eternity this act would change my reality and prevent my past self from ever finishing the book in the first place. So my past self would post a humorous blog entry with an “Eternity got Longer” pun and go back in one of the “kettles” and retrieve my copy while it still sat on my nightstand.  These hijinks would continue until I had completely unraveled all my reading progress on End of Eternity until I hadn’t read it at all and I would post something like “The Eternal Beginning of the End of Eternity” and I would give up until the future when I had the copy again but could not for the life of me think of another terrible pun. 

I also imagined an alternative reality where I used one of the time travel cell phones in the Marvel series Loki to go back and grab the copy on my nightstand and by the time travel rules in Loki and the Marvel universe in general - as explained in detail by Smart Hulk in Endgame - my reality wouldn’t change and I would still have read the End of Eternity once before and I would have plenty of punny post titles to use. But, also by Marvel universe time travel rules, when I took the book from Past Andrew’s nightstand, I would create an alternative reality, and in the alternative reality, alternative Andrew would lose the book before finishing it and would never post any idiotic posts about End of Eternity at all and might complain to the TIme Variance Authority from Loki who would arrest me for taking Alternative Andrew’s book but now I’ve really pushed it because I really doubt that the TVA from Loki would care about a missing copy of an old Sci Fi book and they would more likely tell Alternative Andrew to get over it unless - get ready for it - I myself am and always have been Alternative Andrew all along, and a careless Andrew from the future has taken my book and all the infinity stones holding our universe together and left our precious timeline to suck it - all to post one more dumb pun variant on the End of Eternity. 

Short Post script:

I found the copy of End of Eternity and I watched some of the Eternals movie again but I haven’t started to re-read End of Eternity. There’s always another book to read, I have a stack of books on my nightstand and I don’t see how I’ll ever get to it. I need a time machine. Ba-dat ssssss.  

Critique of “End of Eternity”

 I just finished another book; End of Eternity, by Isaac Asimov. I know, you immediately thought about the movie with the couple rolling around on the beach. That’s From Here to Eternity. They were copying Asimov. Ha ha, I don’t actually know that. I haven’t seen the movie, nor do I have a strong desire to see the movie - except that I kind of want to write a book comparing the movie and the book, which as far as I know have nothing to do with each other except the word “Eternity” in the title. But I would argue very strongly in the book that From Here to Eternity was a subtle ripoff of Asimov’s End of Eternity. I would call the book “Battle of the ‘Eternity’s”.  Note the punctuation. I would begin the book as a Critical Theory Tour de Force. In Chapter One I would discuss my own bodily functions and hang ups, then I’d smoothly transition to whatever similar issues the characters in the movie share with characters in the book. The personal details in Chapter One would jar the casual Reader of Critical Theory, but as  the book transitioned to an actual battle, in my mind, as detailed by its effect on my daily habits, the Reader would begin to realize that in fact I had never intended to write a Critical Theory book.  Those few readers who would ever think to purchase a Critical Theory book with the intent to read it would feel cheated. They would hopefully go online to post vengeful reviews that would explain the execrable dishonesty of the book in detail. 

I’d be willing to bet that the outrage burning in their souls would  flame through the stifling objectivity lashed into their verbal cortex by years of Lit classes, enabling them to compose insulting and mean-spirited and delightfully readable diatribes, all inextricably connected to the book in online searches. 

In the epilogue I would admit that From Here To Eternity came out in 1953, two years prior to the publication of End of Eternity, and that although Asimov might have come up with the central concept of End of Eternity years before, it is extremely doubtful that whoever wrote From Here to Eternity could have known anything about it. 

I would add a postscript to the epilogue with an additional confession for readers who hadn’t ever seen From Here to Eternity, admitting that I haven’t seen it either, and that the scenes referred to earlier in the book and ascribed to From Here to Eternity were not actually in the movie. 

In the same postscript I would admit that while I had read End of Eternity, many if not all of the extracts purported to be taken from the book were as fictional as those I pretended to take from the movie. 

At this point in the blog post I would like to assure the reader that I have no intention to submit “Battle of the Eternities” for publication in book or novel form, and that I have destroyed the proofs and all drafts and that I intend to fully comply with all terms of the settlement. 

“Battle of the Eternities” is of course the title of one of five Star Trek episode scripts submitted to Paramount by Gene Roddenberry for consideration to be produced and aired during the fourth season of the series.  The episode represents one of the primary examples of Roddenberry’s seminal “Crossing the Streams” concept, originating in the hyper cube of his mind some fifteen years before Terminator X popularized the DJ Remix. 

The episode begins with the Captain ruminating on past relationships in the Captain’s Log. Most of the ruminations concern “Yeoman Crantor”, a relatively recent flame that the Captain admits he is reluctant to discuss with Spock. As he speaks, a dreamlike image of a woman’s unsmiling face appears over Kirk’s scowling visage.  The woman possesses the elf-like ears of a Vulcan. Kirk’s reverie is broken by ship’s alarm. Spock’s harshly unpleasant voice chimes in immediately after the alarm, indicating, unnecessarily, that the ship has encountered the object they’ve been searching the quadrant for after the nearest colony’s distress signal about a large anomalous object set on a collision course with their home, and on and on, he won’t stop until Kirk issues a stinging rebuke and a reprimand that seems to finally register on his alien Vulcan mind because that’s the only way to talk to these people. 

The object is a gigantic alien structure spinning slowly through space, a chunk of something much larger, almost planet-sized, with twisted metallic framing covered in ancient ice crystals. Spock is scared and wants to go home, but Kirk has had enough. He leaves the bridge and visits McCoy, delivering a verbal tongue-lashing that leaves McCoy in tears, just weeping, hysterical. Kirk doesn’t slap him because of the recent disciplinary hearings. But he insists that McCoy join them in their exploration of the object. He takes the ship transporter to the floor below McCoy’s office, where he sees the door to Yeoman Crantor’s quarters at the end of the hallway. Kirk wanders around the hallway like an angry chimp. He ignores the calls to his breast logo and keeps an eye on Yeoman Crantor’s door.  He angrily accosts any crew members emerging into the hallway from their quarters, demanding to know their names and rank and proper whereabouts. Then he gets a text from Spock that begins; “Jim, I know you’re scared…” Spock means emotionally scared because he knows about Kirk’s relationship troubles, but Kirk takes it as a provocation. He runs to the elevator. He means to surprise Spock on the bridge with his patented two-fisted thunder punch. The elevator takes too long, so Kirk takes the stairs, taking three steps at a time until he’s bent over, gasping for breath. He’s too late to catch Spock on the bridge, so he hurries to the transporter room. Spock and McCoy and Yeoman Crantor are waiting on the circles. Kirk glares at Spock, but he walks with quiet dignity to his circle. Before they beam down, he informs McCoy that he has been demoted to Yeoman, and that Yeoman Crantor is now the ship’s doctor. “But Captain, I cannot heal,” Doctor Crantor says. 

“Neither can I,” Kirk says softly. 

They find two alien skeletons in one of the rooms in the object, intertwined in what Kirk interprets as a lover’s embrace, but Doctor Crantor deduces is in fact the final stage of a grim struggle to the death. 

Their argument grows heated, with McCoy egging them on until Spock administers a Vulcan grip to the Yeoman’s left eye socket. Kirk lunges at Spock, but Doctor Crantor administers a Vulcan grip to Kirk, removing his shirt in the process. They collapse together, their bodies entwined in a fashion intriguingly similar to the contorted alien skeletons.  Scotty beams them all back at once, humans and Vulcans and alien skeletons together. Back on the enterprise, Kirk commands Crantor to keep the skeletons in her quarters, as a reminder of “what might have been.” 

The last shot is of Crantor lying glamorously in her bed, gazing across her bedroom to a museum style exhibit with a placard reading “love is what you make it”.  The camera pans to a clear shot of the skeletons, their hands at each other’s throats. One of them wears a crumpled black robe. The other has Darth Vader’s helmet on. 

The credits roll to a jazzier version of the Star Wars theme, and end with a special note of thanks and tribute to the guy that played McCoy, making it crystal clear that the character passed away during the episode. The note also makes it clear that he passed away as a Yeoman, not as a doctor