Return of the True Plan (sic)

 I built my previous plan, which I titled “The True Plan”, on the notion, completely on the notion, that re-reading a book leads to greater understanding and awareness. I still believe this notion is true, but I no longer believe in the plan because I seem to be unable to discipline myself to re-read a book. So it seems that I can’t perform the most important part of the True Plan. 

So it seemed, that is, past tense. Because it occurred to me that it might be the books themselves that are the problem, in that I just am unable to re-read Isaac Asimov and Anne Rice at this stage in my reading life. I’m not being snobby about those authors because I have in my time read and enjoyed Anne Rice and Isaac Asimov’s books. No, maybe I am being snobby, but I’m not trying to be snobby. Or maybe I am trying to be snobby because I don’t want to face dire truths about my mental abilities at my age. 

Months Later…

I faced the dire truths, not by facing them but by imagining  a horror novel about my workplace. In my imagination I was the author but I forgot that I was the author. Now I can move onto Paul Theroux’s travel books with a clear conscience. I say Paul Theroux’s travel books because he’s written fiction also, including the Mosquito Coast, which they made into a movie starring Harrison Ford, which I understand to be critically acclaimed. I haven’t read the book or seen the movie because the movie sounds dreary even though I expect the book is good. I’ve liked every book by Paul Theroux that I’ve read, but I’ve only read his non-fiction travel books, and I don’t generally like travel books and I have mixed feelings about nonfiction. I don’t know if I would like his fiction because I haven’t seen him make up a story. He does a fantastic job of describing the completely unremarkable traveling events that nobody else talks about because they’re self conscious about being interesting or admirable.  But Peroux doesn’t seem to care if he’s interesting or admirable- ha ha! That’s a joke, as I said before I do enjoy his books. He goes into the details and the humdrum and makes it interesting and he obviously hates tourism so his books are not about tourism, they’re literally about the traveling. Especially the trains, which he obviously loves. But when he’s describing a trip he doesn’t really need to work out a story, so I don’t know, even after reading seven or eight of his books, whether he can make up a story. I know he can write a riveting account of his travels, but that story is just following the path of where he went. And also his most famous fiction is mosquito coast, which I don’t want to read because the movie looks like a downer. 

Also, I don’t like the parts of his books where he talks about meeting other writers. Why do writers think writers are interesting? They should know better than anyone. So why would a writer write about a writer, or about writing?  I say this even though I try to write about writing sometimes, but I should point out that I write about failing to write, not about actually writing. So what is the attraction? Is it just exhaustion? Is that when you know they’ve run dry? When they write about clever book about a writer writing a book? So I don’t like it when Peroux talks about meeting writers, especially if they’re famous. Actually if he talks about meeting a writer and they’re not famous I do find it interesting to seek out their work, but only sometimes. 

And I think I read that Mosquito Coast is about a writer, so that’s another turn-off.  

This is a post about a writer I like and I’ve spent most of it carping about things and I even did a zinger about him. Rest assured that I recommend his books. 

And now let me get to the point, which is that I might try re-reading some of Peroux’s books. Especially the ones about trains. Which would tie in neatly with the True Plan. 

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!

List of great blog posts that I haven’t finished

 I haven’t posted an actual written passage in a while because I’ve been working on a long historical post about Aethelred the Unready (or Redeless), and then I lost interest in that. The experience taught me that while I enjoy reading about history, I do not enjoy writing about history.  And I can apply this personal rule generally, with any serious subject. So I’ve decided to make a post, this post, about all the posts I began and then gave up on

1. Aethelred the Unready. Saxon King of Wessex circa 978. Generally blamed for the collapse of the house of Wessex, founded by Alfred the Great. Winston Churchill despised him but I saw myself in a distant mirror.. That’s all, haven’t finished it. 
2. The Pharmaceutical Industry, an insider’s perspective, based on my years of working in a pharmaceutical factory. Kind of an expose of waste and inefficiency based on fifteen plus years of irregular entries in my work journal that I sometimes kept up on and sometimes not. The regularity and level of detail in the journal entries usually depended on how frustrated or irritated I was on a particular day, usually with management, and over the years I’ve slowly lost my ability to respond emotionally to work. I call it lab rat in a cage syndrome. Recently I came up with a great idea for a horror movie script based on my work but I only think about it when I’m at work and don’t have much time to spare on the script. 
3. Growing up Mormon. Based on my years of growing up Mormon. I’ve already posted an incredibly well thought out proposal for a restructuring of the Mormon church. Or was it a restructuring of the Mormon church service? I don’t mind doing another one. 
4. An extensive re-write of the US constitution. Based on my disappointment with the US political system. Another topic that I’ve previously posted, where I discussed the serious problems with the presidential election, or as I call it, the single greatest threat to American democracy. 
5. My theory of literature, based on years and years, fifty years to be specific, of reading books and comic books. I’ve had some great thoughts about this and I’m eager to share them in blog format where people can’t talk back except in comments that I don’t read unless I know the person. 
6. My ideas for restructuring of corporations, based on years of working in a corporation. These ideas may sound a little communistic to people, hopefully. 
7. My ideas about community radio stations and how completely the internet has eclipsed them except with old people. Based on five years working at a community radio station. 
8. Now that I’ve listed these terrific blog ideas I’m feeling pretty motivated to finish one of them! Maybe

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.  

First reading of Moonglow

 I just finished Moonglow, by Michael Chabon. Really enjoyed it, as I’ve enjoyed his previous stuff. If you haven’t read it, don’t read this post, because I’m not super careful about spoilers. 

It’s basically a story about a guy, ostensibly Michael Chabon, who’s recounting the story of his maternal grandfather’s life, as told to him by the maternal grandfather himself on his deathbed. So he describes some scenes where he’s at the side of his grandfather’s bed, talking to him, and then he describes his grandfather’s reminiscences for a chapter or so in third person, not as if the grandfather is saying it, but as if he’s telling the reader what his grandfather told him.  Keep this in mind; the book is fiction, so although there’s a “Michael Chabon” in the book, narrating the story and talking about his grandfather, the story is made up. So the “Michael Chabon” is a character in the book. So when I say “Michael Chabon’s grandfather” I’m not talking about a real person. I’m talking about a character. So Michael Chabon’s grandfather, it turns out, is not the biological father of Michael Chabon’s mother. The character. When he met the narrator’s grandmother, she already had a daughter. But he raises the girl as his own. This makes you admire the guy, because he puts up with a lot from the grandmother, who has a severe mental illness. He has principles. Also, he really likes the grandmother. So you feel admiration for the guy, and he in addition goes on spy missions during World War II but has sympathy for the German people, and he’s tough, and can fix things and invent things.  Another thing I like about him;  he obsessively makes rocket and space capsule models. He’s a professional model maker. So he gets paid to make these models, but it’s more than that; he has an obsession with space travel as a means of escaping the earth. The narrator keeps returning to one model in particular as a centerpiece of the grandfather’s model making obsession; a lunar base with a hidden module that contains little human figurines, meant to portray himself and his wife. Now I can’t remember if there was a figure for the daughter. That means I need to re-read the book. No problem! Chabon’s books are very re-readable. 

As a side note, I know there are people who don’t like to re-read books. I consider those people level I readers. A level II reader knows the value in re-reading a good book. A level I reader reads for the surface story, and figures they’ve finished a book when they reach the last page. They believe in genres, they believe most of all in Fiction and Non-fiction. A Level II reader knows you can re-read a book and discover things you wouldn’t find on the first read-through. And they know that book publishers invented genres to sell books by mediocre writers. Especially the Non-fiction category. A level II reader knows that Author is by far the most meaningful category. I’m not talking about the Author as a person of course. 

That was a Total digression. 

Back to the main narrative. Actually I don’t know if I believe in main narratives either. Anarchy Now! 

So the grandfather in Moonlight creates an extensive model of a lunar base with miniature figures depicting himself and his wife in a secret capsule and I think there’s a garden there too, a space garden. And I believe I was saying how much I liked the grandfather and that brings me to the beginning of the book, describing the enraged grandfather’s attempt to murder the president of the company that has just fired him.  A crossroads moment for the character. An office worker knocks him out as he’s strangling the guy. If he’d succeeded in murdering the guy, he would have gone to prison for decades at the least, but for attempted murder he gets less than five years. So the office worker did him a favor for sure. Does the narrator point this out? I can’t remember. Another reason to re-read the book. 

How could this character who loves space travel, and is such a devoted husband to his crazy wife, and a dutiful parent to her daughter, be an attempted murderer? Time for me to lay out the theme of the book: Escaping an imperfect Earth. It fits with his space travel obsession, and Chabon the Author doesn’t really hide the idea. It’s very overtly established and ruminated on by the narrator. 

In light of my diagnosis, I would describe the attempted murder as an escape attempt by the grandfather, away from his caretaking responsibilities for his wife and daughter. The reader eventually finds out that his wife had just gone psychotic and set a fire in their front lawn and checked into a convent. I’m not sure about the chronology of those events, but I will be after the second read-through. 

I think I may be dismissing the book with this theme. Maybe I’m attempting to escape something myself. Maybe there’s an even deeper theme I’m not getting. I’m thinking specifically of the Werner Von Braun theme. Von Braun is a prominent feature of the space travel theme of the book, in that the grandfather hunts for Von Braun in war-ravaged Europe,  and has a personal hatred for Von Braun after seeing the slave labor camp that supported Von Braun’s rocket-making operation. But Von Braun gets away and becomes a driving force behind the real space program. So we have a contrast here; the evil Von Braun, who creates murderous rockets and later works with real life sized rockets that actually send people into space, and the good guy grandfather, who makes toy rockets. The reality is awful and huge and all-powerful, the fantasy life is small and weak. And I come back to the beginning of the book now, with the “small” man, the grandfather, attempting to kill the “big man”, the company president. And failing, but it’s a good thing, for his family. He almost contributed to the violence in the world, but was thwarted. His attempt becomes almost comical in the narrative. 

Oh, and why is it a good thing for his family, that he only goes to prison for a few years? We find out later. We get almost a what if? vision later on. He has to leave the daughter, now a teenager, with his brother, a former rabbi gone bad, now a seedy gambler and con artist. Inhabitant of a fallen world. I liked the brother for most of the book anyway, he seemed fairly amiable, and rascally. But we later find out that while the teenage daughter was in his care, he got her drunk and sexually assaulted her. Pretty shocking and disgusting. Why? I thought when I read that part. Now I think it was to show what could have happened if the grandfather had succeeded in the murder. He would have gone to prison for so long that the daughter would have had to stay with the bad uncle indefinitely. Her mother would have stayed in the mental hospital maybe forever. The book describes the daughter’s behavior after the few years with the bad uncle. She’s smoking, drinking, a foul-mouthed delinquent. Going bad, so to speak. 

When we find out about the assault, it’s from the girl herself, the narrator’s mother. Interestingly, she minimizes the assault by saying he wasn’t her biological uncle. Just as the grandfather is not her biological father. 

I really need to re-read the book before I say anytmore

How to RPG the CSL Space Trilogy

 I originally tried to begin this post with the words; “According to my rather indifferently performed internet research, this post will mark the first time a literary work is analyzed by being turned into a role play game,” but the fact that I hadn’t done any internet research at all began to bother me, so much so that I tried to actually do some research, and ended up getting a nasty shock when my first google search result returned a Wikipedia article on “LitRPG” which seemed to be an entire genre based on an idea that I had been congratulating myself for inventing. I did some reading and even found some fascinating sub-genres with Japanese names because they pertain to styles of manga. Eventually I concluded that LitRPG does not quite correspond to my idea but that my idea no longer afforded me any satisfaction and I did not feel like developing it in a post. 

It just doesn’t seem all that neat or original anymore. But anyway, while other people may have turned books into role play games, I would be willing to bet scads of money that no one else has ever even felt an inclination to turn this particular book, Out of the Silent Planet, by CS Lewis, into a role playing game. It would probably suck. The protagonist that you would play doesn’t really do anything adventurous in the book, and most of his character development is learning how awful modern earth civilization is and how much happier and more in touch with everything the primitive seeming martians are. 

So I figure that you would begin the game on the spaceship. You could play Ransom, Devine or Weston, but instead of strength or intelligence points I would give them Earth Pride Points and Understanding, or Ken points.  Their Ken points track how hip they are to what the martians, who are in a state of Grace, are laying down for their gross fallen earthly civilization type souls, and would help them develop their  EP score to 0, so that they are sufficiently ashamed of Earth by the end. Ransom would have a beginning Earth Pride score of 10 (out of possible 20 like DnD), but as a linguist he would have a Ken score of 15. Devine would be a 12 on EP and a 12 on Ken. Weston would be a 17 on EP but only a 10 on Ken. After his trip through the space, Ransom would get to remove one EP point. By the end of the story, when Ransom meets the God of Mars, his EP would be like 1, but Devine would be like 7 because of his low Ken. But Weston would still be at 14 or so on EP because his Ken is too low for EP lowering opportunities. 

You could make a better game out of the next book in the series, Perelandra, because in this book Ransom is already hip to how nasty earth is compared to the other planets but he’s a wimpy professor and has to fight the devil. So the big conflict is whether he can work up the courage to punch Weston, who is possessed by the devil. Also, there’s a Venusian Eve who has green skin and walks around naked, and Ransom has to maintain British indifference to her condition. These twin goals can complement each other by giving Ransom a capacity to transfer his sexual testosterone into violent testosterone. So every time he sees the naked green demigoddess he has to make a saving throw for his British indifference. If he succeeds on the throw he can transfer 1 point of sexual testosterone to his violent testosterone score. Then every time he sees the possessed Weston (who is also naked which probably helps with the BI) talking to his girl he rolls for indignation. The higher his violent testosterone, the better his advantage on these rolls. If he succeeds the indignation roll he can take a swing at the possessed old man.  At that point you can just play the game like a DnD battle.   Both of the pugilists are professors, so strength and constitution would be minimal, as would attack damage. 

I think we’ve made some good progress with the Space Trilogy, but unfortunately the last book in the series, That Hideous Strength, besides being mostly unbearable to read until the end, is also almost completely unplayable, like the dictionary or Doctor Dre (showing my age there). I honestly don’t know what to do with the third. It needs something. If I were a book doctor, I would prescribe radical multi-segment-otomy, the wholesale removal of the preliminary chapters. But we have no organic replacements for those chapters, unless we could draft some master writer, like Charlie Kaufman or Eminem, to provide us with some replacement chapters. But of course they’re busy, and we have a patient on the table with four or five chapters removed, cut open to their binding, desperately in need. We’ll have to provide something. If not a living transplant, a clumsy, crude prosthetic will have to do. 

Fortunately I happen to have crafted some in my spare time

More on Lovecraft and Lewis but with a huge digression on interstellar drama

 It is pleasing to report that I have managed to re-read Out of the Silent Planet, the first book in the CS Lewis Space Trilogy. I hoped to achieve some insights to bring to you, gained in that crucial third reading, but I have nothing.  I can’t even remember a good portion of the re-reading because I kind of blanked out during some of the more tiresome parts where he and all his hrossa and sorns have yet another go at how wicked and crazy and unnaturally evil humans are, and the despicably patronizing main character Ransom just nods like one of those kids in Sunday school who made like they liked church just to annoy other people. 

So really, instead of coldly and dispassionately subjecting the work to razor sharp analysis, I just kept mentally looking at my watch and eating snacks. It looks as if my intellectual capacity peaked in my forties, and my forties are a fond memory now, a hazy and indistinct one. Like Out of the Silent Planet. 

Okay, major confession: 

Halfway through the re-reading I thought about reading Jack Chalker again. I’ve mentioned his books in this blog before, and I don’t care to revisit the shameful nature of the original association between his Well of Souls books and my teenage self, but I still enjoy the epic sweep of his stories, and I believe he tried to do justice by his female characters, if in the manner of a kindly pimp (lots of sexualization, but some of them are smart and can beat people up, like Lara Croft or the women in Marvel Movies). He also explored transformation and gender bending, eye opening stuff to a kid who group up Mormon in Utah, but a gay or transgender person might find his stuff exploitative - actually anyone might.  

Chalker published his first novel and his biggest hit, Midnight at the Well of Souls, in 1977, at the same time Star Wars came out. I find this interesting because In his book, Chalker describes a spacefaring humanity, an interstellar civilization, but that interstellar civilization is a backdrop for his story, a given. Much like Star Wars, he tells a story about people traveling around in spaceships that could just as easily have been about people traveling the ocean in sailboats. The plot does not revolve around how spaceships work, it’s basically a fantasy set over a traditional “sci-fi” background, or a sci-fi skin set over a sword and sorcery tale. 

I think Isaac Asimov might have done this first, with the “Foundation” series, which is about a “galactic empire” in which people travel all over the galaxy in spaceships as casually as we might take a flight to the coast, like it’s no big deal at all. The story isn’t about space travel at all, except that Asimov does insert a paragraph here and there where the characters muse about space travel in a very abstract and philosophical way in verbiage that could just as easily have emerged from the mind of a chemistry PhD living in New York City with a great memory and a fear of flying. 

Asimov knew a lot of science and he certainly knew that “hyperspace” was a plot device, and he knew that if humans ever do send spaceships out of the solar system, that it will take those spaceships hundreds if not thousands of years to go to even the closest stars, and that any galactic empires that might develop would not bear any resemblance to the societies described in his books, unless you took an extremely abstract view of his stories, meaning you took them as a story about an interstellar civilization with the elements tweaked, with the people described as normal humans like us even though they would have to be hundreds or thousands of years old to live through multiple interstellar trips. And of course we now know about genetic engineering and computers and the society changing effects of them. The people and the communities and governments of a civilization that could manage intergalactic travel wouldn’t look like ours at all. They would actually start to resemble the creatures in a Lovecraft story. His aliens don’t resemble humans, and experience time on a much different scale than ours. I think a true representation of these interstellar galactic empires should be a mashup of Star Wars and the Mountains of Madness. Which of course I certainly would set out to write if it weren’t for all that copyright stuff. 

But I will provide an illustrative discussion of a future member of an interstellar species:

To begin with, they would have to be equipped with internal radios/smartphones, so they could communicate in the vacuum of space. This means they would have metall in their skeleton, in order to provide maximum reception and transmission capability. So obviously, we’re talking robotic skeletons with data storage capacity, vastly augmented memory and intellectual ability. Obviously this would entail greater strength and durability, but at the expense of weight. So we could give this future human a much thinner skeleton. Next, let’s talk tentacles and antennas. I’m envisioning a set of antennas and intermediate tentacles on the top of the head, replacing the useless hair so prized by primitive humans. Next, a tentacle instead of a tongue, and jointed mandibles for more efficient chewing.  I think almost anyone would agree that a third set of limbs would be tremendously helpful. These should be long enough to reach the ground, so you could use them for locomotion or use the finger tentacles on the end like extra hands. Next, a long prehensile tail and a pair of wings. The wings would actually be tentacles with a little rocket engine on each tip. And an extra eye to see in infrared. And metallic scales as skin. This human would run on electricity instead of food, but we’ll definitely keep the stomach in order to house useful bacteria. This human should not require oxygen, but just as with the stomach, the lungs will be kept in order to store useful chemicals in gaseous form. 

Of course by now you might be thinking that this creature might look strange or repellent to us.  Picture this creature as the cast of Star Wars. Darth Vader would look comparatively benign. 

But that’s not all. The ships these creatures would ride across the galaxy would not look anything like the movie set spaceships, where people sit in what looks like a couch from a winnebago and talk or play space chess for a few minutes while someone flips a “hyperdrive” and they teleport to wherever they want to go. These ships would take hundreds or thousands of years to go to other stars. Nobody could sit on a couch and wait it out. They would have to be cryogenically frozen if they wanted to physically make the trip. Or, hear me out, they could make the trip as a hologram. Their thoughts would be downloaded into a transmitter and sent in a radio transmission to a receiver on a planet a hundred light years away. I picture holographic starships, beamed across interstellar space, carrying a host of holographic passengers. Once at the destination, they could rent a solid body or float around in holographic form. And of course they would be a copy of the original, who would still be hanging around on earth. 

Try and work through the plot of Star Wars or the Foundation series after these adjustments

Hagenart comic 01/07/20

Unexpected treat; CS Lewis HP Lovecraft mashup

I actually have a grand plan in mind for the CS Lewis and HP Lovecraft series, wherein we delve into some wild theories about their inner mind and homosexual tendencies and all that spicy stuff, but before we do that I have to re-read the books again.  But before I do that, I believe it’s time for a mashup, wherein we attempt to tell a short story as if the two of them got together for some kind of literary retreat in 1925, when Lovecraft was falling apart financially and about to leave New York, and Lewis had just become a professor at Oxford. For the purposes of the mashup, in this scenario they get married. Why? Because it seems to me that the differences in the philosophies of the two of them would ordinarily make it extremely unlikely that they could ever willingly collaborate, but people tend to overlook all types of differences if they have romantic feelings for someone, so I believe they would have fall in love and get married in order for the mashup to happen. After getting married they live in England where Lewis can support them, since Lewis in reality had a far better job than Lovecraft did.
And they write a story together:

Something Hideous Came Out of the Silent Planet
I write these sentences supine, lying in a bed in the Miskatonic University Center for Invalids and Convalescent Scholars. The daily effort to lift pen to paper drains the last vestiges of my waning strength, yet a fierce desire to warn the public of the threat from within, while seeking to protect and advocate for the furry peoples of Malacandra, impels me to my painful, remorselessly damaging daily toil.
For the Reader’s sake I will attempt to organize and cohere my tangled memories into an understandable narrative.
To begin: My name is Elwin A Ransom. I am a professor of linguistics at Magdalene College, Miskatonic Campus. Until recently, I had been immersed in my studies and my teaching duties, living my quiet, inoffensive life, writing the occasional short story about magic elves and sharing them with close friends and never dreaming that I would someday visit another world where I would meet ghastly aliens that turned out to be Anglicans and perfectly reasonable if you overlooked their tendency to be a bit judgmental and a kind of purposeful abtrusiveness that set me on edge at times but I’m not really a people person and I’ve come to terms with that.
My adventures began when I - against my better judgement - accepted an invitation for late tea from an old schoolmate who I ran into at a tavern whilst on a walking tour of New England. He claimed to live on an estate, which turned out to be true, with his friend , a genius named Weston, which turned out to be only partially true. The estate was an old mansion, filthy in a grand old way, one of those old houses that looks as if it had somehow enjoyed more weather than any of the houses around it. Weston turned out to be a sociopath, but not in an interesting-conversation-over-bottle-of-wine sort of way. I was drunk enough to misconstrue his offer to show me “the spaceship” and follow him into the backyard, where I passed out. I came to on the spaceship, on route to Mars, if you can believe it. Pretending to have Stockholm Syndrome to get their guard down, I cooked a delicious lasagne, with the unintended result that my old friend Devine developed reverse Stockholm syndrome and tried to set me free immediately, and Weston developed Oslo syndrome, consuming so much pasta that he could not fit through the kitchen doorway, in effect kidnapping himself. At this point Weston admitted that they had planned to sell me to the native Martians for meat, which is what atheists do. Devine said he was sorry and told me I could go and tried to push me into the airlock. We fought, but the ship crash landed on Mars at the exact moment that my knee liberated his front teeth. “Take that, Dicky!” I shouted, and regretted it instantly. I spent my first day on a new planet trying to think up a better line. Eventually I sought Devine out after dinner and shouted “Welcome to Mars, Dicky! Love, the Tooth Fairy!” I tried to kick his mouth again, but he dodged and heeled my instep, dropping me like a sack. We stopped speaking after that, except for making fart noises whenever Weston asked for help moving supplies. Weston eventually produced a pistol and motioned me into the nearby trees, where we met several inhumanly tall, monstrously countenanced creatures who intoned unnerving syllables in a ghastly, unknown language. Sensing that my end credits were commencing to roll, I resolved that my screams would haunt these abominations to the end of their unearthly days.

And so on... it’s a special thrill to read the collaboration of these Gand masters!

Hagenart comi 12/12/19

More on CS Lewis and HP Lovecraft

So last week we began a series on CS Lewis and HP Lovecraft
Usually when people publish a blog post on a topic, they draw upon years of professional experience and study, or upon painstaking research on the subject they wish to discuss. I’m saying this in a knowitall tone, as of if I’m an expert in these things, but I just recently found this out, in the last few days or so actually, because It did not occur to me to research the subject I wanted to write about until after I had attempted to write about it, that is until I re-read what I had written and found it to be paragraph after paragraph of utter nonsense without any discernible point. Appalled, I dug out the CS Lewis space trilogy and the Lovecraft compilation, and also searched the web to see what smart people had already said about CS Lewis and HP Lovecraft.  
I read some interesting stuff, all apparently written by Christians who ultimately disagreed with Lovecraft but still said nice things about his stories. Lovecraft depressed them, they all said, and then Lewis talked them away from the window. I completely agree with their immediate emotional reaction to reading Lovecraft, his stories will leave you with a feeling of queasy disquiet, and then Lewis inevitably reassures you. But his reassurance only works if you’re religious, it’s all about how god will take care of the scary stuff.  And so I have to wonder how come those religious people got depressed by Lovecraft at all. Don’t you have to find his point of view compelling to find it depressing and scary? 
If you believe in God, how can you be frightened of ghosts and spirits?   But if you believe in God, but are also frightened of supernatural gibberish, you may like to have protective mental walls around you, and Lewis paints a beautiful wall of stained glass with renaissance scenes all around the universe.  Wherever you go in his stories, you’re still in church. I do not personally like that feeling. My memories of church are of groaning inside while I  struggled to stay awake during the interminable sermons. No matter how compelling I find the imagery of his worlds, I find myself repeatedly disappointed by his mental cloistering of his own stories. But for a religious person, that is an intelligent religious person who reads and therefore probably thinks about things from time to time, I believe this cloistering is a comfort, a shelter. 
Lovecraft seems to completely understand the terror of ideas. His narrators often express a desire not to know what they have discovered. But Lovecraft was not his narrators, and he couldn’t possibly have agreed with that sentiment, since all the monsters in his stories came out of his own head.  What his narrators found horrible and uncanny, he may have found magical and beautiful.  His protagonists often end up embracing their monstrous, otherworldly fate. The narrator in Shadow over Innsmouth speaks euphorically of his future life as a grotesque fish-person, in the ending passages. The narrator in Mountains of Madness speaks of the Old Ones as fellow creatures, as “men, of a sort.”  And he waxes euphoric over the achievements and civilization of the “Great Race” in the Shadow Out of Time. It’s actually a little disturbing how sympathetic he is with aliens who switch minds with creatures against their will, but there’s an undeniable joy in his writing, a delight with the ideas for their own sake. I think Lovecraft secretly found the universe to be a much more wonderful place than he let’s on in his stories. But in his fiction he’s always speaking in character as the narrator, and his narrators are basically 19th century gentlemen, who see the world through a very moralistic lens.  Was that Lovecraft? It seems to be part of him, but he had an uncanny side, a side with tentacles dripping ichor and and scaly skin and multiple staring eyes.

Hagenart comic 12/03/19

CS Lewis and HP Lovecraft

Several years ago I purchased an odd book by CS Lewis called That Hideous Strength. I bought it because I had read the Narnia series and enjoyed most of them, and I’d read some of his pro-Christian work like The Great Divorce and the Screwtape Letters, and enjoyed them even though I had long ago stopped going to church or even caring about it and CS Lewis didn’t convince me because once you’ve read Carl Sagan, any Religious apologist just sounds like someone who hasn’t read Carl Sagan. I just realized that Carl Sagan’s initials are “C.S.” Just now, because I was deciding how to refer to CS Lewis. 

I bought it in spite of the hideous front cover illustration which reminds me, looking at it now, of the old English Sci-Fi TV shows like Doctor Who with the great ideas and the terrible special effects that the filmmakers know are terrible and they know you know so they kind of do symbolic special effects that are like signposts that say “this guy is supposed to be an alien, use your imagination and pretend he looks like one.” That’s the cover of That Hideous Strength, with the colored ribbons and what looks like a metal screw plate bracket of some kind hovering over picturesque college-type buildings and phantom chess pieces and and a poster on an easel. The bracket looked like one of those brackets where the screw holes make it look like a face but it’s really just a bracket, but after reading the book I realized it was a actually supposed to be a spirit face, which I liked, and thought it must be representing the devil, because metal bracket faces with screw holes certainly don’t look friendly. But now I’m thinking it might be representing god, who is kind of a super alien in the book. I did a google search to obtain the truth about the cover and failed, but I did get to see some other covers that have been published with the book over the years, some of which I liked better and some of which, unbelievably, I did not. 

Anyway, I purchased the book and eventually opened the book and read it in spite of the cover, and just as you might expect from the hideous cover and the terrible title (really rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?), That Hideous Strength is mostly an unpleasant read. It covers a whole lot of academic politics stuff that almost nobody on Earth could find interesting, inner university doings that probably seemed important to CS Lewis and riled him up and comprised the emotional focus of a lot of his tea time musings but that I skimmed through with rising resentment and anger until I reached the interesting parts in the last few chapters. I would have given up on the book long before but I’d happened to read the author’s note, or the Author’s Lame Apology as I later referred to it, where CS admits that he purposely left the fantasy stuff out of the first part of the book on purpose because that’s the way old timey fairy stories used to be written but nobody notices because they use old timey words like “cottage” and “castle” that used to be normal everyday boring things but you young folk don’t get it because of TV. So after reading that intro I knew that something interesting might happen later, and it did, and it was interesting enough that I later purchased the other two books in the series, Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, which I loved so much that I forgave CS for the first part of THS. 

I loved the other books because they’re fun and they don’t force the reader to endure multiple chapters of the most uninteresting college faculty in history, but also and mostly for Lewis’s big idea that makes it all worth it and makes you wish he’d not been such a subservient Christian with his stories and loosened up a bit with the Bible-validating that ruined a lot of his stuff. But back to the idea:

Any science fiction slash fantasy story needs one or more great, original, world changing ideas that makes the whole ridiculous and implausible storyline work, and the Space Trilogy, as I believe it is referred to by literary snobs, has the Macrobes, or the Eldils. I think he might have used “Macrobes” in THS, and only as spoken by Macphee, the terrific Scot Professor that made the book so much more bearable. (The only character in the book with an active heartbeat, as far as I could tell). The Eldils are superior alien beings, hyperdimensional energy creatures that Lewis takes great pains to make as non-humanoid as possible, and I found the idea of of angels (and also the gods of classical mythology) as alien superhuman energy beings (made of matter with ‘different movements’, as described in Out of the Silent Planet) to be a very fascinating idea, because it is also very terrifying. The terror makes the fascination. And Lewis seems to get that, because he describes something similar when he talks about the “numinous” in “The Problem of Pain”, the numinous being something that evokes awe and uncanny fear. But he also seems to kind of side step the truth about the feeling. In his passage describing “numinous”, he starts by referring to the fear a person feels when they hear there is a ghost in the next room. The “numinous” sensation is a magnified version of that fear, he describes it as the feeling you’d have if you heard it described as a “Great Spirit”, instead of just a ghost. Interestingly, he uses non-religious terms here to describe these feelings, which are instinctive, although he asserts that these are actually religious feelings. And this is one of those passages where you feel Lewis recoiling from his own mental imagery. Ghosts and spirits evoke uncanny fear in humans, but if you paste a religious doctrinal structure over them you remove the fear, and you also remove a lot of the fascination. Lewis does that with every vivid, spine-chilling, uncanny image he comes up with. So in the space trilogy, he says; “the angels are inhuman hyper dimensional energies, they are great spirits as far above you as you are from a mouse, these entities are also the beings that steer planets, they are called Eldils on other planets, where they rule alien creatures, but we have given them the names of gods. The greatest of them is called Maleldil, He’s a mysterious being with unimaginable...Don’t worry, he’s god. Just go to church”. Really? 

And that brings me full circle to HP Lovecraft, CS Lewis’s twisted American cousin (I can say full circle because I mentioned Lovecraft in the title, so don’t even comment on it. Please? Kidding, I really don’t care about commitment...I mean comments! That was autocorrect!). I could list all their similarities like you do with Lincoln and Kennedy, but I’ll leave that as a game for crazy people (hint: start with similarities in their names). I’ll summarize my opinion by saying that whereas CS Lewis, at his best, starts with an eery and compelling image in his mind and labors to describe it to you, and sometimes, unforgettably, succeeds, Lovecraft begins with an eery idea that he hints at, and never even tries to describe, leaving it entirely up to the reader’s mind to evoke. Because he knows that no monster could ever look as terrifying as his central tenet, the big truth of his writing; We are small, and the Universe is old and vast and unfriendly. 

If Lovecraft had written the Space Trilogy, you wouldn’t get the marvelous images that Lewis conjures, and Maleldil would not end up as a Sunday school story. Ransom might survive Out of the Silent Planet with sanity intact, but he would have been a shattered, neurotic mess in the Perelandra, which would have ended with the Un-man in charge of the planet, or possessing the Queen. The creatures of Malacandra might look like Lewis imagined, but they wouldn’t be boring noble savages anymore, and the book would most certainly end with a ghastly sacrifice that the reader would hear about second hand, because of course, it would destroy the sanity of the narrator to describe it. Interestingly, Lewis does describe, vividly of course, a rather horrible possession in the next novel, by no less than the devil himself. But here’s the difference; In Lovecraft’s universe, there’s no god above the devil, refereeing the story and making sure it all ends okay. Lewis makes it clear that his “dark lord” is a rebel against the just and all-powerful Maleldil/God. Lovecraftian gods are completely opaque if not malevolent. We would never know if one was rebelling against the other, and all their actions would appear inscrutably horrifying to the narrator. 

I would enjoy reading Lovecraft’s version of the Space Trilogy, but after I started writing this post, I of course decided to re-read the Space Trilogy, and I realized that it was possible that Lewis might have read Lovecraft, and that his Space Trilogy might be seen as a reply to Lovecraft, a Christian mashup of the Chronicles of Narnia and the call of Cthulhu. He describes very inhuman, hyper-dimensional entities with vastly superior intelligence to ours, and describes alien creatures and landscapes. But every time his protagonist, Ransom, experiences a pseudo-lovecraftian horror to the aliens, it’s analyzed and dismissed as a parochial, simple-minded response by Ransom, and 

he suddenly sees the reality of the alien creatures as beautiful in their own way. 

Lovecraft says “we are small, the universe is vast and horrible and malevolent.”

Lewis replies “Its okay to be small, God’s in charge and he’ll take care of you. The universe is a big beautiful garden of wonder”. 

Lovecraft never got a chance to reply. He died under fairly miserable conditions before the space trilogy was published. I would feel sorry for him, but he said a lot of awful racist things in his lifetime, and fully believed what he said. But he was also miserable and crazy and pathetic. Lewis actually might have been somewhat racist too, actually. He was a friend of Tolkien.  But more later... writing in blogger on an iPad is inscrutably unpleasant