I gave my nephew his first Christmas book. Start ‘em young, I say! The readers and writers of tomorrow need to be supported. Some of them don’t have a munificent uncle. For them, there is theliteracysite.com. I’d encourage all my readers to bookmark it as a reminder and click the big orange button - it’ll help donate free books to children. There are other very worthy causes on the site’s tabs, if you’d like to support them too. I try to click them all once a day before starting work. It costs nothing but a click and is a great feeling to start the day with.

… rephrase, in plain english, the following classic piece of Donald Rumsfeld obfuscation under press questioning:

“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

Here’s my attempt:

“I don’t want to answer your question.”

Photo by retinafunk

I’ve always been fascinated by Japanese culture, perhaps because to a young Irish boy it seemed so alien and exotic and eccentric compared to our Western norms. I did a lot of research on Japan for the novel, and my head is still swimming in the invigorating pool of Japanese culture. I don’t think you can ever really fully understand a culture unless you’ve grown up in it. Outsiders just get privileged glimpses of understanding.

However, it was great fun. I think I’m turning Japanese.

To the casual observer I must appear as un-Japanese as possible — a tall Irish Caucasian lug! And yet I feel an affinity with Japan: maybe it’s my love of baths; maybe it’s my love of electronic gadgets; maybe it’s because the road where I grew up was lined with cherry blossoms (or sakura as we Japanese call it!) ; maybe it’s because of my fondness for meditative ways and unobstrusive, demure, polite people.

Or maybe it’s because Ireland is mooted to be following Japan into a prolonged 80’s-style property-induced economic crash!

I think we’re turning Japanese … I really think so.

I just hope we stop before we get this bad:

The re-write and edit of my novel Broken Evolution is over, and has been sent to an agent who requested it. I hope the improvements will work in my favour, and the five week delay in getting to the agent won’t be held against me!

An interesting little irony - on the week that I finished Broken Evolution, the geneticist Steve Jones gave a lecture, saying that human evolution is over. Am I tapping a vein in the zeitgeist here? I suppose the premise of my book is that, while natural selection might be over, we might be embarking on a lateral step in human evolution instead. The theme came through nicely in the re-write, this time via the plot - where all themes should.

There was also the minor matter of a global economic meltdown during the week.

Evolution is over. Capitalism is dead.

Maybe Douglas Adams was right; it was a bad idea coming down from the trees in the first place. Time to go back up.

I’ll fetch my hammock …

It’s the weekend and I feel the need the relax, to take time out from forums and writing and programming and phone calls. So I take up Karoo and start reading. I read this:

It is relaxing, playing the image Cromwell has given me to play.
I had forgotten the mindless comfort of being an image instead of a human being.
It’s not a lack of willpower that makes me go along with the charade of playing the image I’ve been given to play.
There are benefits.
I need a break from being.
Everyone, I think, needs an occasional break from being.

In those few sentances, the author captures how I feel at that very moment. Writing, I often think, is a form of displaced communication. The author is displaced from the reader in time and space, but the aim is to communicate emotion, fellowship, and solidarity with another human being. It is the great honour of being an author that you can never know who is reading your work, where, or when.

The author of Karoo is Steve Tesich. He died shortly after completing it. I am having displaced communication with a man who knows exactly how I feel at this moment in time, a man I have never met, a man I never will meet, a man who is dead. I understand and feel now what he knew and felt then. Our conversation goes beyond time and space, perhaps to another dimension beyond any scientific understanding. It is magical.

Writing is magic; that’s why I love it so.