Kingdom of Ten Thousand Years

The Apocalypse came and the dead rose from their graves, but there was no Messiah.

So begins the plot of Kingdom of Ten Thousand Years, which Faye recently lent me. What remains after this resurrection-without-redemption is an extremely difficult politics as groups with entirely different understandings try to live in society alongside each other. Germanic tribes struggle to adjust to a world far too crowded for their migratory way of life. Renaissance thinkers leave tight-knit neighborhoods of their century's former inhabitants and wander through the cities, trying to take everything in. Ancient African nobles try to use their influence over former subjects to get nice jeeps and build McMansions.

Initially, twenty-first century governments stay more or less intact, but the issues of how to accommodate the extra billions of people reveal deep-seated differences between different segments of the never-dead population. How many inhabitants should an overcrowded Europe be allowed to send to America? How much religious freedom should be granted to the often shocking faiths of the past? Should divorces be handled according to the customs of the couple in question's time and place, or should society have one standard divorce law? And what about language--is there room in England for schools to teach Old English?

As the newly risen begin to adapt to the new system, vote, and attempt to assert their influence, the conflicts between centuries eclipse many old and bitter conflicts between contemporaries. Old rivals like the Medicis and Strozzis, for example, drop old differences to work together in defense of their worldview. Lancaster and York, Mughals and Marathas, likewise see each other in a new light. Twenty-first century U.S. Republicans and Democrats begin to feel they have more in common with each other than they had ever thought possible before, and that have hard feelings for the nineteenth-century versions of their parties, and some progressively serious differences with many of the Founding Fathers. Trust between these different factions erodes quickly as levels of violence increase...

The story that eventually unfolds is one of increasingly repressive and brutal autocracy by the natives of the present and their allies in the face of a thousand challenges from the past. But it reads as particularly poignant because as a twenty-first century reader, you tend to side with the never-dead in the book. How are they supposed to react when the standard levels of domestic violence in medieval ghettos escalates into a pattern of murders of wives and daughters who try to leave? And how are they supposed to react when virulently anti-Semitic Christian extremists from the early Reformation period assassinate a Jewish scientist as part of what turns out to be a plot to get their hands on a nuclear bomb?

This is one dark and wild ride through the future into a churning mess of the past.

The Brothers Brar

Confession: I have never read The Brothers Karamazov in its entirety. It is entirely possible, in fact, that no one living has read the book in its entirety--even those who turn every page have, I suspect, let their minds wander for paragraphs at a time, the way I tend to skip out on hours of what's going on in my immediate surroundings to think about food.

I like the idea of the book, though. Though I haven't actually read it, I'm struck by the concept of exploring a given time and place through the trajectories of different brothers. Where do they go? What do their choices say about what the crises of their time were? About what universal human questions mean in a specific time and place?

That core seems to be what's driving Ranbir Singh's The Brothers Brar. The book starts in rural Punjab on the eve of Indian independence, in a family where the fourth of seven sons is about to be born. Subsequent chapters jump back and forth in time as you watch the lives of the boys unfold. The old ways of life are collapsing and in their place communism, religion, and emigration are options. I'm only about a fourth of the way through the book and already the world's a stage for these characters: one is moving from post-doctorate to post-doctorate appointment, trying to find a place for his science in the U.S.A. One has risen in the communist party ranks and is moving all around India, though tensions with the government are rising. Another married a foreign girl, but can't seem to stay away from India and is still fiercely loyal to the family. One is still making his living off the soil, but is beginning to think about moving away from the family land and the obligations that go with it.

It's a pretty intense read, and a good catch-up for anyone who wasn't paying close attention over the last half-century. Makes me wonder: with so much excitement just a generation or two ago, what's next for those of us who are still young? What paths will history offer to our brothers and sisters and us?

Vampioneers 1: The Everlasting Covenant

Was visiting some friends last week and noticed, nestled between Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series and Gerald Lund's The Work and the Glory saga, a book I'd never heard of before. I guess it's the first of an still-unfinished trilogy about some Welsh vampires who join the early LDS church.

I was torn between a dismissive impulse and a morbid curiosity...in my life, morbid curiosity typically trumps condescension, so I borrowed it. I've been surprised: the book so far is actually quite good. The missionaries haven't shown up yet, though, do it might get corny yet (so far all that's really happened is that the village priest is noticing something's weird in the town, and the vampires are getting nervous because apparently his grandfather came pretty close to killing them. Got a cool building/foreboding feel at this point.)

Anyway, I'll let you know if it stays good. Otherwise, consider this post notification that the world is already weirder and writers are already more desperate for attention than you probably previously thought.

Existential Choose Your Own Adventure

This book is so good, it's not even a book.

As anyone who gave up reading Choose Your Own Adventure books at the age of twelve after developing a lifelong fear of paper cuts will be glad to hear, the genre has reemerged in none other than--yes--blog form (clicking on links is so much quicker and safer than turning to page 132, then back to 71, then to 12 for the third time [it's got to be the third time because you can see the dried blood on the page from the last two paper-wounded visits] because you're stuck in some loop and contemplating sending anthrax to the book's writer and/or publisher--which I never threatened to do as a child, unless, of course, the statute of limitations on such threats is up).

I don't know why I didn't think of using a blog to create a Choose Your Own Adventure myself--now that I've seen it done, the parallels seem so obvious. In each case, individual pieces are designed to be short and interactive. In each case, the writer frees the reader from the established hegemony of front-to-back reading by interconnecting the posts to allow readers to take their own trajectory through the work. The forms are so close, in fact, that you could improve the readability of any of the old Choose Your Own Adventure Books simply by plagiarizing it into a blog, wiki, or other digital form.

Oh, but that would be like the Gutenberg Bible, a vast technological leap ahead of preceding Bible manuscripts but virtually indistinguishable from them, not having yet embraced the possibilities (such as adding verse numbers and inserting commentary) that moveable type print would make possible in the later Geneva Bible and its descendants.

The author of www.existentialadventure.blogspot.com is no mere Gutenberg. He is already beginning to explore the unique potential of his form, and the results are delightful. A few examples:

1) The blog looks for the implications of non-linear reading.

Traditional Choose Your Own Adventure books are still based on the concept of striving for a specific desirable end, such as getting a treasure or not dying a horrible death. This definition-by-ending reflects readers' expectations of print media.

As the title implies, however, this Existential Adventure is based on creating meaning through the journey instead. This innovation has as much to do with technology, I think, as with philosophy: in the '80s and '90s, kids accused their nerdier classmates of having read the encyclopedia--a task so improbable and boring in a world ruled by the hegemony of front-to-back that no one in their right mind would undertake it. Digital technologies have changed all that. Kids read wikipedia today for fun, understanding that you can enter at any point and don't even have to finish a page before you click away to somewhere else in a great and satisfying web of uncharted knowledge. I've yet to hear of someone trying to skip to the end of a blog or wiki to see where it's going before they'll commit to read it, as people still do with print.

The thrill of Existential Adventure, in accordance with its digital medium and philosophical interests, has much more to do with what you think about as you move from decision to decision and how you learn to define success than with any ending you may arrive at. Even the loops are not traps, per se, but opportunities to find meaning as Camus did in the the myth of Sisyphus. Sometimes you even want to lose yourselves in links you're fairly certain will not drive the story forward, which bring me to my next point:

2) The blog embraces the proliferation of choices possible in digital media.

The types of choices offered by traditional Choose Your Own Adventures books were often binary: do you choose this or that?, invariably action-driven: what do you want to do?, and of course, came all at once at specific turning points in the script, rather than in a perpetual stream of agency.

While Existential Adventure doesn't offer the mind-boggling array of choice available in real life, it offers more kinds of choice than the traditional choose-your-own adventure. While a number of choices await you at the end of each post, smaller choices are scattered all through the prose in an unobtrusive way: objects often have their own hyperlinks, so that you can, for example, stop and look at (if not smell) the flowers. Sometimes such links only go to images or other simple detail; other times they reveal otherwise-hidden information and possibilities.

Some extreme choice come in a sidebar as well as constant alternatives to the more contextually-driven responses available at the end of each post. In keeping with Camus' maxim that the only serious philosophical question is suicide, for example, killing yourself is always a sidebar option.

The blog also invites you to make choices about attitude and even philosophical orientation in addition to choice about physical action (one caution: I wouldn't recommend choosing determinism. If you do so, all subsequent posts will include lots of underlined options, but only with that is actually hyperlinked, presumably to reinforce your idea that choice is actually an illusion.) The meaning, again, is more in the mode than in the arc: it's about the kind of perspectives and choices you get in each individual post more than about the "plot" you manage to build as you choose your own course through. Mode over arc, presentation over representation: the times have changed, and keep changing.

3) The blog is less predictable than a box of chocolates.

About a week after I first ran across the blog, I happened to show it to a friend who made the same choices I did--but with different results. Further examination has convinced me that the blog is constantly being edited as well as being constantly expanded, leading to a Harry-Potter-esque uncertainty about where each metaphorical or literal staircase will lead. Editability is, after all, one of the most exciting as well as terrifying realities of the whole digital age. The world of choice and information is constantly shifting under one's feet, raising all kinds of epistemological and ontological questions.

So what will you choose: to hide from the implications of this new digital world and age, or, like Alice of old, to go down the Rabbit Hole that is Existential Adventure.

Menachem Bloodaxe *spoiler alert*

I realize it's kind of odd to be giving a spoiler alert on a work of nonfiction, but honestly, if you haven't read the book, it's worth letting yourself be surprised. So please STOP READING NOW.

OK, if you're still reading I'm assuming that means you've already read the book. I'm at the part now where he fled Njal Svenson by joining the raid on Ireland...and then got married there. Wow--I did not see that coming.

And it made me think...it's entirely possible that C.S. Lewis, Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, George Bernhard Shaw, William Butler Yeates, Richard Brinsley Sheriden, Oliver Goldsmith, or any of the other great Irish writers everyone assumes are English could be descendants of the intrepid Jewish Viking.

Amazing.

Dampening the pillow, but not with drool...

Stayed up late reading Menachem Bloodaxe. I just got to the part where he's hiding from enemies in the cliffs of a fjord, and has to celebrate Hanukah alone in a cave, reduced to using fish oil for the last two days' worth of candles.

I found the passage strangely moving.

Good reading

I'm about halfway through Menachem Bloodaxe: Lost Legend of a Jewish Viking. I'd highly recommend it to anyone who's interested in that sort of thing.