writing, computing, media, thoughts on what it all means…

HBO recently aired a ten part miniseries – The Pacific. It was made by the same guys who did Band of Brothers (Tom hanks, Spielberg), in that same gritty handheld cinematography that made Saving Private Ryan so revolutionary.

But this series lacked the crumbling architecture of blitzkrieged Paris, or even the beautiful grassy hilltops of Terrence Malick’s Guadalcanal. This was all mud and black sand, sopping trenches that held the piled and maggoty remains of corpses. It was nightmarish not only in the violence but also the aesthetic: suicidal banzai rushes, flamethrowers in mountain bunkers, meaninglessness death in a struggle for little desert isles in the middle of the ocean.

That same nihilism informs a reading of Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Although much of the book focuses on the mundane non-adventures of our modern day narrator Toru, the crux of the book’s theme – and the best passages – are in the dark depths of Japan’s imperialistic conquests during the World War.

Wind Up is an odd book. Set in the mid 1980s, Toru has recently quit his job as a lowly salaryman to rethink his life. He sits at home and listens to music, reads books, counts the number of times the telephone rings, cooks spaghetti, while his wife goes off to work. Every day he wakes to the sound of a strange bird – dubbed the Wind Up bird – which greets the morning with a strange creaking call, like the winding of a spring.

Toru’s cat goes missing, and he has some squabbles with his wife, but in the first few hundred pages of the novel very little happens. It’s a study in passivity. Toru really doesn’t *do* anything. He’s pushed around by external forces and the people around him. This can be somewhat frustrating – an odd sensation, reading something with so little drive to *advance* the plot.

The mundane is broken up by exotic and visceral episodes that feel completely out of place in their stark contrast. Sex and Violence. The first in the form of obscene phone calls from strange women. The second in the retelling of horrific events from the war by an ancient veteran.

Toru’s wife disappears. He meets a number of other women who act as doppelgangers for his wife, engaging in conversations both spiritual and mundane, providing physical comfort and sexual release. But most of the plot points feel like filler around the excellent episodes from the 1940s.

By the end of the book (as it resolves a sort of half-boiled thriller regarding his wife’s disappearance), he gets letters from a young girl named May Kashara. She’s probably the most compelling of the book’s characters, with childlike curiosity and mischief underlain by a deep fascination with mortality and human evil. She writes:

“Anyway, it seems to me that the way most people go on living…, they think that the world or life (or whatever) is this place where everything (or is supposed to be) basically logical and consistent. Talking with my neighbors here often makes me think that. Like, when something happens, whether it’s a big event that affects the whole society or something small and personal, people talk about it like, “Oh, well, of course, that happened because such and such,” and most of the time people with agree and say, like , “Oh, sure, I see,” but I just don’t get it. “A is like this, so that’s why B happened.” I mean, that doesn’t explain anything.”

Is the surface of the book nonsensical on purpose? Are these random characters and Toru’s passive reaction merely an illustration of that absurdist tenet?

There’s a lot to think about and digest in Wind Up. It’s easy to write the whole thing off as poorly organized, half-complete, or lost in translation. But it’s a book that requires multiple passes. On the surface, Toru is a passive robot, a blank everyman, a zombie of modern consumer culture. But he does possess a deeper spirituality, a hidden meaning, that’s only revealed when he climbs down and contemplates what lives in the darkness underground.

At the turn of the century, the country was polarized by muckraking political parties, corporate corruption dominated the public funds and private industries, a foreign invader threatened stability, and the specter of environmental destruction hung over everything like a sooty cloud.

This was not the year 2000, but the decades leading up to 1900, a hundred years previous and many of the same problems we still face today.

All of American History contains valuable lessons – but probably no time is more relevant to our current crop of problems than the Gilded Age. In the years following the Civil War, industrialists from the northern states stretched their iron fists across the mountains and forests of the west to transform raw materials into hard currency. Waves of immigrants and newly freed slaves provided the man-power, and the growing corruption in all levels of politics allowed these robber barons to grow fat and wealthy.

Into this world of privilege – in fact, the capital of it all: Manhattan – was born a sickly boy named Theodore. His father was an influential businessman / politician, and the boy’s youth was filled with homeschooling, trips to Europe and the lands of antiquity, summers on the shores of Long Island. But Teddy was an inquisitive guy, fascinated with the workings of the natural world – especially birds, which he would first shoot and then stuff to practice his amateur taxidermy.

But he was plagued with debilitating asthma and other ailments and struggled to keep up with his athletic siblings and cousins. Instead of sinking into feeble nerdy despair, he took to heart his father’s stern prodding, and willed himself to physical health, climbing local mountains, lifting weights, boxing and swimming and playing tennis. His mission was not happiness, or leisure (which were his by birthright, and did in his brother), but to live the Strenuous Life.

By the time he enrolled in Harvard, he was fit and trim, and moved like a man of action, despite occasional setbacks and fits of ill health.

If anything can stand as a metaphor for his life – it’s that image of a sick boy denying reality and pushing through to build himself up.

He excelled in Harvard, socially and academically, becoming president of prestigious clubs, and he even wrote history books in his free time. He pursued and married his college crush, a beautiful and radiant girl named Alice Lee, and soon after graduation was elected as a state representative.

After two years of honorable (if raucous) service, his wife and mother died on the same day, throwing him into a black despair. It was from there he went west to seek his fortune in the cattle business and heal his soul.

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt is the account and exploration of TR’s life from birth to his ascension to the Presidency, following McKinley’s assassination. The book is written as narrative, utilizing private journals and primary accounts to paint a picture not only of Roosevelt’s actions, and the focal points of history, but his mind set, his strategic political thinking, the growth and evolution of his ideologies.

Roosevelt is fascinating because he is a study in contrasts. He was a son of the rich New England Upper Crust, yet he found himself at home among leathery cowboys of the Wild West – the Rough Riders. He was a sickly boy yet rose to great physical heights, climbing the Matterhorn in his early 20s. He was a thinker and writer, but also a man of action and physical drive – riding horseback for days through North Dakota snowstorms. He was a great lover of the beauty of the wild – yet he was a bloody and violent hunter, cataloguing his slaughter by the dozens, complete with gory descriptions of the carnage. He was an idealist and a promoter of moral values and absolutes, yet he was a shrewd player of the political game, accumulating favors and playing rivals off one another, even reaching outside his ‘legal authority’ when his superiors were off on Summer vacation.

At the turn of the century, American industry was churning – railroads and factories were producing the goods of the civilized world, and making fledgling corporations wealthy. But America as a country was still weak – with an aging fleet and an undisciplined army. Spain still controlled islands in the Caribbean – Cuba, Puerto Rico.

Roosevelt had the vision to see America as more than a collection of States united by a common constitution, but more so, a common dollar. He saw America as a first-world power, the hegemony of the western hemisphere, and Europe locked up on their side of the Atlantic. He even went so far as to provide racial reasoning for his imperialism, in his sprawling four-tome series The Winning of the West. He saw the Anglo-Saxon peoples as destined to conquer both the rugged land of the west and the natives that inhabited it, and that journey forged them into a unique and bold race called Americans.

Roosevelt adhered to the philosophy of “Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checked by failure…than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.” He applied his philosophy to civilizations as well as individuals. These ideas, which veer close to Social Darwinism, are certainly out of vogue today, but an interesting thought experiment is to follow these ideals to their logical conclusions.

Every other major world power was also engaged in nationalism and imperialism, and if America hadn’t started when it did (with the building of the Great White Fleet and the victory over the Spanish in Cuba) the United States potentially could have been overrun in the decade leading up to World War I.

Of course, this is all speculation, but if anything, Roosevelt kicked off the modern era of American history, the American Century. No longer the underdog, we became the masters of our geography, global-political events, culture, etc. One could say Roosevelt foresaw all that even as a young boy traveling by boat along the Nile, observing the colossal decay of the old empires, stuffing Ibises with formaldehyde.

Rise is a brilliant biography not because it accounts for the facts and accuracy. The footnotes can vouch for that. Morris’s gift is presenting Roosevelt as one of the most fascinating characters in American history, with tics and flaws, but also possessing greatness.

Roosevelt was a die-hard republican, and even in the 1890s the GOP was a party of big business. Yet he spearheaded the progressive movement, slicing through corruption, creating better accountability and transparency in government, and siding with the people (in most cases the generic idealized populace, or the natural health of the land, rather than a specific populist lobby). In his view, the role of the GOP was to set guidelines and principles not only to referee commerce, but also benefit the United States.

The modern GOP forgets the nationalist side of the equation (outside of the hollow warhawk rah-rahing), allowing big biz offshore tax havens and freewheeling outsourcing, even allowing foreign firms to own domestic infrastructure and manufacturing. Roosevelt would never have stood for that. He knew that unmoderated corporations were an amorphous, evil thing, and he hit them hard with intelligent and effective measures.

Perhaps the American century is over, globalization’s hold is too strong we’ll never again see a politician as dynamic and effective as TR. But both his life, words and deeds are part of our heritage, and maybe our hour has not yet come. Teddy would have reveled in the challenge.

Conspiracy theories abound these days. From the 2012 doomsayers, 9/11 truth squad, and the Obama birthers, even to those retro folks who think the moon landings were faked and there was a second (or third) shooter on the hill – secrets, cover-ups and prophecies are nothing new.

Umberto Ecco, in Foucault’s Pendulum, takes this rich raw material and turns it into a grand post-modern satire of all conspiracy theories.

The book opens in the darkened halls of the Paris Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers, after hours, looking up at Foucault’s Pendulum. “That was when I first saw the Pendulum. The sphere, hanging from a long wire set into the ceiling of the choir, swayed back and forth with isochronal majesty.” Our narrator is Casaubon, a scholar of the Knights Templar. He’s investigating the disappearance of his friend Belbo and rumors of a strange rite to take place at midnight.

“I knew – but anyone could have sensed it in the magic of that serene breathing – that the period was governed by the square root of the length of the wire and by PI, that number which, however irrational to sublunar minds, through a higher rationality binds the circumference and diameter of all possible circles. The time it took the sphere to swing from end to end was determined by an arcane conspiracy between the most timeless of measures: the singularity of the point of suspension, the duality of the plane’s dimensions, the triadic beginning of PI, the secret quadratic nature of the root, and the unnumbered perfection of the circle itself.”

As he waits, he recollects in extended flashbacks the path that brought him to this point – totally invested in The Plan.

Casaubon, Belbo and Diotevelli are three guys who work in a small Milan publishing house, specializing in historical texts. They continually receive crackpot manuscripts from all assortments of crazies, whom they label The Diabolicals. Somewhere between an intellectual game and a drunken pub past-time, they attempt to trump all the other theories in a meta-narrative encompassing all history, starting with the Knights Templar and a strange document found in the bowels of an old French fortress. This is The Plan.

The Plan moves from the Knights Templar to the Masons, the Hashishin and the Jesuits, Francis Bacon and the early devotees of the English Scientific Revolution, the Holy Grail, Kabbalah, Alchemy and even the Count St Germain, a mysterious figure of 18th century Europe said to possess immortality.

Foucault’s Pendulum has been called “a thinking man’s Da Vinci Code”, and I can see the comparisons to Brown’s inferior thriller, if it was tossed in a blender and re-assembled by algorithm. Cleverly, there’s actually a computer program in the book that does just that.

The writing itself is playful, rich, dense, and the references to obscure and mystical facts are almost overwhelming. But the mass of information creates a flow and a vernacular that blends together, and all the disjointed links of The Plan begin to make some sense.

By the end of the novel (back to where we started, witnessing a secret ritual in the Paris Museum), our narrator is thoroughly unreliable, and we’re left at a fork in the path of truth. Do we trust The Plan as truth, something Casaubon and his friends stumbled upon? Or do we take it for their original intention, a joke, and the very real consequences (kidnappings, secret societies, etc) are merely zealots yearning for a prophecy, and so giving The Plan life?

Deeper still is the question of truth in text. Written language is a sort of incantation, a dark art, where symbols and characters on parchment (or a screen) can enact very real changes in the minds of one or millions. The very same text can drive some to enlightenment and inner peace, and others to madness. Are there certain combinations of text that contain timeless secrets?

If History is written by the winners, and Truth can only be discerned by analysis of the facts (written text), how can we trust what we know about the world or civilization? In the depths of paranoia, Casaubon and his friends put forth the notion that in order to truly “know” you must throw out reason, throw out science and logic and trust what you “intuitively feel”. This is a dangerous and tricky notion, but does contain a sliver of truth – at least in relation to how humans believe. And why we create conspiracy theories.

Underneath all the thriller and conspiracy tropes, Foucault’s Pendulum is a post-modern novel. The narrative elements are pieces that illustrate intertextuality and the evolution of belief. It’s erudite and complex and very entertaining.

And who knows, maybe descendants of the Knights Templar are manipulating the global economy in a proxy war to reveal the resting place of the true Grail. You can never really know.