Big Book Love

I’ve always been fascinated by books, in particular big ones. I don’t know exactly what it is about them. Maybe I look at books like Atlas Shrugged or Moby-Dick the same way an athletic person looks at an upcoming marathon; it’s a challenge, all that everyday effort being concentrated in one place. I think the first book I ever read strictly for its size was Stephen King’s It back in the summer of ‘86. It was my first 1000-pager, and it really felt like climbing a mountain – a lot of fun, and its length added to the sense of involvement I had with all the characters.

From there, I moved on to other longish books – the two I mentioned above, along with L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, King’s The Stand, The Lord of the Rings (which was really intended to be just one big book before the publishers chopped it up and named the pieces themselves)... and I still have copies of Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Joyce’s Ulysses sitting on my shelf at home, ready for the next time I’m in this frame of mind. In all cases, the main reason I got into these books was because they were BIG, not because I heard good things about them or they had anything else in particular to offer. The fact that some of them are considered “classics” just legitimized my wanting to read them.

Another part of it, though, is that I marvel at people who really have that much to say, that they would sit down day after day and just keep weaving the same tale. I’m not the kind of person who is able to just talk and talk without having some sort of real content to it, and I’ve never had that kind of stamina in terms of writing either… Even in my writing projects that have made it past short story length, I’ve had to drape my story across an already-existing frame to give it the sense of structure I need. For “28 IF” it was the Beatles’ Abbey Road album, for “Tints of Dread” (which I still haven’t finished) it’s Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”, and for my still-unfinished novel “Nadir”, it’s Dante’s Inferno.

Even stories about such mammoth tomes really intrigue me … Spalding Gray did a monologue in the early ‘90’s called “Monster in a Box”, which concerned his process of writing an incredibly long novel that he eventually scrapped. But the way he would talk about the “monster” was fascinating, the myriad story lines and how it started to take over its life because of its sheer size and psychological weight.

Then a few years ago I heard about Henry Darger. He had a troubled childhood – if I remember right, he had some mild form of mental illness -- who ended up working as a reclusive janitor in the very sanitarium he had spent a lot of time in as a child. He seemed like a quiet, unassuming loner until he passed away in the 1970’s… and when his apartment was unlocked, his employers found a secret project he had been working on for over 30 years. It was a novel called “The Story of the Vivian Girls in the Realms of the Unreal”, a 15,000-page fantasy novel about a fictionalized Civil-War-type conflict between armies of children and child slavers, that takes place in a world he had completely devised on his own. Not only that, but there were also hundreds of panoramic watercolor paintings that he had done, illustrating the many fantastical battles. The estimated length of this work is over 9 million words (for comparison, all seven Harry Potter books added together are just over 1 million). There’s a great documentary film about Darger and his work called “In the Realms of the Unreal”. That just blows my mind, the sheer power of imagination that must have involved.

And then there’s Charles Crumb, brother of famous underground comic artist Robert Crumb (the guy who came up with the “Keep on Truckin’” logo in the ‘60s). It was actually Charles who became obsessively fascinated with comics as a kid, and got his younger brother to take it up. Charles drew many comics of his own, but eventually gave it up. Well, not exactly gave it up… in the documentary film “Crumb” (directed by Terry Zwigoff) you can see Robert thumbing through some of his brother’s later work, and it’s bizarrely fascinating. Charles’ obsession seemed to center on the story of Treasure Island, more specifically on the Disney film version that the Crumb kids all saw when they were young. Charles would write volumes and volumes of comics about Long John Silver and his young apprentice, but after a while his focus seemed to change… there’s a scene in “Crumb” when Robert flips through a particular comic, and as the pages go by, you can actually see Charles’ obsession running away from him… the figures in the comic panels get smaller and smaller, the text starting to take up more and more of the pages. After a while, the words take over entirely, small, crabbed writing filling the whole page, and even further along Charles stops using words altogether, with page after page full of squiggles that look like words until you examine them closely.

Crumb and Darger seem like flip sides of the strange obsession that writing can cause… where Darger, over the course of decades, was able to construct something huge and weird and impressive, Crumb’s own writing devolved until it wasn’t writing at all, just barely-organized scrawls across a page. Sadly, but not too surprisingly, he committed suicide in the mid-90’s.

I’m also really intrigued by the film Se7en… in the scene where Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt find the apartment belonging to Kevin Spacey’s serial killer character, they find bookshelves filled with those standard black-and-white composition books, each one of them filled with tiny writing, the meticulously set-down thoughts of a madman raging at a world he only imagines that he understands. This movie really got under my skin the first time I watched it, but that scene in particular… I think it’s because insanity that focused, that precise and clear in its own self-analysis, is more frightening that any random act of violence. At least, it is to me.

(That scene, in fact, inspired a story of my own, called “Outside My Window”, in which a man on death row writes obsessively, and it’s not until it’s too late that you realize he has somehow become capable of bending the physical world to his will through the process of telling his own story.)

When you think about it, there’s nothing particularly challenging about a long book… it just takes longer, that’s all. But I can’t help but feel a big sense of accomplishment when I finish one. Maybe it’s the knowledge that not many people have attempted to read such a long book, and even less have finished it. I think it’s just a way of taking my bookish leanings and making them seem like more of an achievement than they really are. It the same reason why have a list of every book I’ve ever read, every movie I’ve ever seen… it takes something that I do for fun and would do anyway, and turns it into some sort of accomplishment.

It’s a good thing I’m not more of a loner than I already am, or I get the feeling I’d be chasing this ideal to its end, trying to find the subject(s) that would allow me to write, and write, and write… still, I love hearing about these writers who, for better or worse, have dedicated themselves so single-mindedly to their art. But I’m also glad I have family and friends to keep me grounded, to prevent me from running off too far into my own fantasy lands…

Weird on Top

In the next few weeks, there may a breakthrough in physics unlike anything seen in the last hundred years. Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland are closing in on the elusive Higgs boson, the subatomic particle that gives atoms their mass. If this particle actually is proven to exist, it will change much of the way we think about matter, the Universe, and, well, everything.

On this occasion, I thought I’d take a stab at writing down an explanation for one of the weirdest (proven!) scientific theories I know. It concerns the rules that we understand about the Universe on the smallest scales we know of. These rules are collectively called “quantum mechanics”.

So what’s so important about quantum mechanics in the first place? Well, we humans have figured out the physics how things work on big scales.. and by that I mean things atom-sized and larger. We understand most things about how gravity and electromagnetism works, and use that information to create all the cool, useful tools we have today. For example, did you know that GPS satellites have to take into account how the mass of the Earth distorts space-time when they’re figuring out the best way to get you to the mall?

So we’ve pretty much squared away how things work on a macroscopic level. However, when you start looking at things on smaller and smaller scale, the less sense they make. Then things quit making much sense It appears that empty space itself is full of random pairs of tiny particles that spring into existence out of nowhere, then collide and return to nothingness again. It’s a kind of “quantum foam” that forms the very fabric of the universe. And because the particles appear only to disappear again mere billionths of a second later, no energy is gained or lost. We kind of understand how this all works, and in fact about a third of our tech gadgets use some aspect of this odd, counterintuitive side of the Universe to make them work.

But it gets weirder than that. Say you have a flashlight that only emits one photon at a time. If you shine it at a window, does the photon bounce back at you or pass right through? The answer is… *it depends on whether you’re watching or not*. This is where things get seriously crazy. Until you check, the photon actually does both. It passes through *and* it gets reflected. And until someone looks, it stays merely a probability (say, 50% refraction/50% reflection). But when someone looks, or checks on it in some more subtle, indirect way, it finally decides where it is -- inside the house or out -- and retroactively makes it appear that it had been that way all along.

Now, you might be thinking the same thing I did when I heard about this: WHAT THE HELL?!?! Up until I started looking into this, the way I believed the Universe worked was very linear. Allowing for some distortion, time moved forward. But if we accept what the evidence is telling us, it requires time to be rewritten as things move along. Either that or… and this seems to be the solution that seems most elegant to me… multiple universes.

This is an idea that I had been turning over in my mind for a long time, just from reading lts of sci-fi, but never really had any context to put it in. The idea is that both results exist, and when you check to see how it turned out, you push the Universe along a particular path. The fact that other people who check will see the same thing proves that everyone is moving along the same path. But the truly mind-blowing thing is that this is happening millions of times, every second of every day. (It also brings up the thought of who actually can push the Universe along a path by observation – if a cat looks, is that enough? How about an amoeba? Is sentience required? Or any kind of consciousness at all?)

This theory is something Brian Greene talks about in his book The Hidden Reality. I haven’t read it yet, but I have heard interviews with him, discussing the theories involved in it. Apparently this idea of multiple possible universes meshes nicely with “string theory”, which basically says that all particles are made of unfathomably small loops of some unknown cosmic material, and when they vibrate at different frequencies, they become a photon, or an electron, or any of the other particles we know about. The geometry of the strings apparently explains how our universe can exist alongside others almost like it, and how they can split off from each other.

But one of the great things about this theory is that it’s somewhat testable, which has been the problem with string theory up until now. One of the many things they’ll be doing with the Large Hadron Collider in Europe is smashing particles together and seeing how much energy they get out of it. If what comes out is less than what they put in, they’ll know that in high-pressure and high-temperature situations, it’s possible for energy to get knocked out of our Universe and into a nearby one.

So, as usual, the Universe (or the Multiverse, as some people are now calling it, considering there might be many slightly different ones right alongside ours) turns out to be more complicated and bewildering the closer you look at it. Barry Gifford wrote it and David Lynch used it as the main idea of one of his movies: “The whole world’s wild at heart and weird on top.” And it just keeps getting weirder.

Warning: Old Man’s Ear Hair Freely Discussed Here

A few weeks ago, Amy and I took a rare night out to go to a play that a good friend of ours was in. Standing in line outside the theater, waiting for the house to open, we ended up standing behind some season ticket holders, all of which were older folks, divided mostly into couples. One gentlemen was by himself, though, and even if he had been in a crowd, his status would have been evident by one aspect: his ear hair.

I’m aware of the ridiculous things that happen to men as they grow older, and I’m certainly not looking forward to any of them. I could go down the list, but ear hair is the worst, and I’ll tell you why. It’s because, unless someone feels comfortable enough to tell you that it can been seen by the entire general public, there’s no way you could ever be aware of it on your own. Seriously, I’ve tried to see my own in the mirror. There’s just no angle or configuration of multiple reflective surfaces you can pull which affords both the right sight lines and the correct lighting to see if there’s anything there, much less guide your hands toward removing it. All you can really do is stick an electric trimmer in the vicinity every week or so and hope for the best.

And that’s clearly all the solitary guy waiting in line could do. He might not even have known to do that much; he had a disturbing “blossoming” situation going on, so much so that I was surprised he could hear anything. All I could think was that there’s no one looking out for this guy. He’s got to figure this out all by himself. It was kind of depressing, even after someone came to stand in line with him. It was an older woman about his age, maybe a good friend, but it clearly wasn’t his wife. If it were, my guess is that would have taken better care of him.

Maybe that’s the lesson that ear hair has to teach us (and I can’t believe that I actually just wrote that sentence). The lesson is that we need someone that close to us, who can tell us when things aren’t right. Not only do we need to be told sometimes, but someone has to be willing to take tweezers in hand and right the wrongs, ones that we not only aren’t aware of, but are in blind spots we *can’t* be aware of. It’s a special brand of intimacy, and I’m very thankful to report that I have it in my life. I know beyond a doubt that I’d just be another guy with ridiculous ears if I didn’t.