ON AND OFF THE ROADS WITH COLIN HOGG

 ON AND OFF THE ROADS WITH COLIN HOGG

 

Sometime last year (2024), I heard Colin Hogg on Radio NZ, as part of a music programme, on which he was interviewed, mainly about his choice of some of his favourite music clips. Introduced as ‘legendary music critic’, I was not particularly impressed by his choices ('Lonesome Town' by Ricky Nelson, 'Mama Keep Your Mouth Shut' by Bo Diddley, 'Mr Moon' by The Headless Chickens, 'Greenstone' by Emma Paki, 'Big Black Bus' by Hello Sailor, 'Flying' by The Beatles), even though I can understand his darker NZ themes, as Colin was brought up in Dunedin and Invercargill. But never mind. A better Beatles short clip would have been ‘Why don’t we do it in the road’. 

 

Then, by chance, I was given Colin Hogg’s (2018) Sam Hunt – Off the Road, which is the most hilarious book I have read in a long time. Sam Hunt being a true legend in his own lifetime, is being interviewed by his friend Colin, consuming plenty of weed and alcohol, thus engaging in increasingly witty exchanges. Colin asks Sam about the story of him writing a letter to Winston Churchill, when Sam was about nine years old. As the story meanders along, Colin asks if Sam remembers what Winston Churchill said in his letter back to him. Sam says ‘No, I can’t remember now. I was thinking he was asking for my phone number’. Colin says ‘I believe these were his lonely years. He was reaching out to the Boy Scouts of the world’.  Replies Sam ‘They wouldn’t have had me in the Boy Scouts, and I wouldn’t have fucking gone near them …’. 

 

I couldn’t stop laughing for a long time. I recited the lines at a poetry meeting in Titirangi but hardly anyone laughed out loud, but a few of the poetic characters present confessed afterwards to having met Sam Hunt, and that they liked him and his poetry very much. Sam Hunt, as a performance poet had extensively toured NZ, and I had happened to see him on stage as a support act for Leonard Cohen for his Auckland concert. Sam says this was a highlight for him, while Leonard Cohen was definitely a highlight for me. 

 

Colin had toured with Sam as his journalistic minder, and eventually published a book (1989) about him entitled Angel Gear, excerpts of which appear in the 2018 book. Not having read the former, it is nevertheless clear that some of the wild stories of drugs and rock’n’roll reduced Sam Hunt’s suitability to give performances in NZ schools – as he had done a lot before the publication of the book. Not that Sam Hunt minded a lot, as by then he had already become a legend, able to live a life of relative comfort derived from royalties and appearance fees. Not that he ever became rich, having now retired to a rented farmhouse on the Kaipara, where the interviews, or rather stoned conversations took place. Sam, born in 1946, was 72 when the book was published while Colin Hogg is four years younger. Both succumb a bit to the old geezer’s blues, Colin more so than Sam, even though he is the younger one. Sam is resigned to be ‘off the road’ while Colin stays resolutely on it (he drives all the way from Wellington to the Kaipara). The book is interspersed with Sam’s poems and the last chapter somewhat morbidly entitled ‘End of the Road’ features a great poem entitled Chord 1, a somewhat sad note to his grandkids who might want to know seventy years later what he carried up the stairs, notably a ‘bottle of wine, the colour of blood’. 

 

Obviously we learn a lot about Sam’s life story although grandkids are not mentioned a lot. We also learn quite a bit about Colin’s life, his evolution from being a 17-year-old cadet at the Southland Times in Invercargill to becoming a minor journalist celebrity appearing in print and on TV.  This whetted my appetite to learn even more, and Auckland Library provided me with two more of Colin Hogg’s books, namely (in order of reading them), Going South – A Road Trip Through Life (2015) and The High Road – a journey to the new frontier of cannabis (2017).

 

Going South has a sad beginning (and end, ultimately) in that his old (both born in 1950) journalism buddy Gordon McBride has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. They both started as cadet reporters at the Southland Times in Invercargill, Colin and Gordie being 17 years old. At the time of writing the book, that was some 46 years ago. They decide to do a weeklong road trip down memory lane, going south, with the apt subtitle ‘a road trip through life’. There is a good map on p.8 that tracks their progress. While Colin was born in Dunedin, Gordie comes from the backblocks of Invercargill.

 

I have never been in Invercargill but lived in Dunedin for a year or so, studying for my first year at Otago University while my wife worked at Cherry Farm as a psychiatric nurse. Many years later while our daughter was working as an editor at Natural History in Dunedin (no, she does not remember Allen Hall and his wife Silvia whom Colin and Gordie meet in Dunedin during their road trip - it must have been before her time), we took a roundtrip Dunedin – Queenstown, Arrowtown – Dunedin, so I have a rough idea about the southern lands, if not about Southland proper. As an avid consumer of journalism (and these days as a blogger) I also have a feel for what Colin and Gordie are all about as journalists and their style of writing. I can also empathise with Colin’s lifelong consumption of weed (cannabis), having, as a hippy in my younger years, consumed all sorts of drugs, and now in my old age I only occasionally take a puff. Gordie only smokes the occasional cigarette but is au-fait with Colin’s habit. Both are beer drinkers (and have the occasional wine as well) what with Colin leading the way by a mile. They drink like real Kiwi blokes in all the pubs known to mankind. This I cannot quite understand, for coming as a migrant to Aotearoa from Germany in my 20s, I brought with me the experience that pubs (in Bavaria) are generally populated by right-wing rednecks, and while this not necessarily true of New Zealand, the pub culture here does smack of hard-drinking blokes who are misogynist, racist and to the right politically. Colin and Gordie fit none of these characteristics, so, sure, there are/were some pubs like the Ponsonby Gluepot where beer and weed mixed quite well while listening to the latest band from Dunedin. Sure, the music scene in terms of progressive bands was often played out in beer swilling pubs where the clientele might throw things at the musicians – giving them a rough punk edge. Sam Hunt too performed in many a pub, having to play the beer card to connect with the patrons, lest they too failed to pay attention. So, what is their obsession to visit every pub on the road? Maybe this in the DNA of Southlanders? I have plenty of Kiwi friends who, like me, enjoy a beer or two (and a glass of wine) and maybe a joint in the privacy of our homes, but who wouldn’t normally be seen dead in a pub. 

 

I don’t mean this as a criticism of the book, merely to point out that personally I cannot quite immerse myself in this scenario, however authentic it may be for Sam, Colin, Gordie and later Bruce in The High Road. I do, however, have a couple of point of real criticism: Colin on various occasions describes historical Māori warrior battles of the Southland region, amongst themselves, or with pakeha, as cannibalistic slaughters. For example, is there any historical evidence for the ‘legendary’ incident in the 1880s about a German (more about the Germans later) tourist who played the violin on a Southland beach described as follows?

 

The hapless German was seized, carried off, then slaughtered, cooked and eaten. Legend has it the feasters were so enthusiastic that they even ate the violin strings. (p.108)

 

Is this some sort of parody of the racist cartoon of the black Africans putting the fat white man in a big pot and boiling him and eating him? The ill-informed obsession of white Europeans with widespread non-European cannibalism is indeed a ‘legend’. While there is quite some scholarly literature on the subject, the consensus seems to be around the conclusion reached by Bowden (1984):

 

Māori cannibalism, like its Aztec counterpart, was practised exclusively on traditional enemies – i.e., on members of other tribes and hapu. 

 

To eat the heart of a vanquished warrior would transfer the fighting prowess (mana) to the victor. A Melanesian rationale I know off is that the sailors of a canoe that washed ashore disposed of, and possibly eaten during times of famine, if they were weak and sick, but elevated to chiefs if they were in good physical shape – all to increase the gene pool of an island population. The point is that there is no point to make a mockery out of cannibalism, as Colin Hogg seems to do numerous times in his book when telling stories about local Māori in the Southland regions.

 

Maybe Colin is just repeating what many a Kiwi bloke understands to be bit of a joke when having a few beers with their Māori mates. To be the butt of a joke can be a bit grating if it is directed at one particular nationality alone, namely the Germans as in the example above (Colin’s other Māori cannibals eat their victims by the hundreds if not thousands). So, in Colin’s other book under review here, The High Road, there is an incident where another ‘hapless’ German is at the receiving end. There Colin and Bruce stop in a small town somewhere in Oregon and ask the German manning the tourist information booth where the ‘covered’ railway bridges are. Colin had noted in his research that there are such things and might be worth a visit. The elderly German has a heavy German accent, or so they say, and he does not understand the word ‘covered’ thinking they are inquiring about someone called ‘Covett Bridges’. Only eventually is the matter cleared up with the German saying ‘Ve haff something somewhere. Coffered bridges, eh? Ve don’t get many inquiries about those’. It’s a bit extreme to write ‘I briefly consider leaving Klaus battered to death …’. Nobody else in Colin’s books under review does get the funny-murderous accent treatment. I mean we could do the (Southland) Scottish accent or the Māori working class accent – did they come across any French ‘allo, ‘allo accents? With German being my first language, I can only say to Colin:

 

                  Ve haff ze veys to make you laff.

 

 

To Colin’s credit, he can be scathing when it comes to European colonialism of the English sort, especially when it comes to the rapacious appetite for land and minerals in Southland, erecting monstrous factories and mines of all sorts, turning the beautiful countryside into rubbish heaps of European industrialisation, like in Mataura where the meatworks and paper mill make it the ‘spooksville’ of the south. 

 

As they travel from Queenstown in their rented Ford Falcon (a Kiwi icon of sorts, favoured by All Blacks), each village or town is referenced (size of population) and their main attractions (if any) are described. This can become a bit tedious, as it occasionally sounds like Lonely Planet data sheet. Once they get to Invercargill, the real story begins, and what a story it is. There are some real gems, like when Colin’s Latin teacher at high school introduces the class to Jefferson Airplane and the unforgettable White Rabbit, the Bolero inspired crescendo by Grace Slick. The song blows Colin’s mind – as they said in those days – and while he discovers the mind-blowing substances much later, his taste in music has become irreversibly fixed on (mainly) progressive rock’n’roll, leading him on the way to become a (popular) music critic for various newspapers and later TV stations. I wish I would have had such a Latin teacher. Still at high school Colin applies for a position at the Southland Times, and so does Gordie. Both, and to their surprise perhaps, get the jobs. Having been a reader of newspapers all my life (nowadays on-line), I am acutely aware of the ambiguities involved in the journalism trade, writing for the readers and the owners (and advertisers) of the paper, hence always having to read between the lines. I must confess that I never read (or remember reading) any of Colin’s stuff in the Auckland Star, NZ Herald or Woman’s Weekly – for the latter he apparently became a sort of agony aunt ‘column’ writer – so it is quite illuminating to read his ‘Lost Column’ in the book, although this columns was never published, for the probable reason that the press barons would not have the stomach for such a delectable story, involving his move to Wellington from Auckland. ‘Trading gold for capital’ as he cleverly puts it, relentlessly mocking Wellington’s weather:

 

Not that I had much to say about Wellington weather, except perhaps, Good bloody grief. (p.35)

 

Colin’s gift for mockery (not always appropriate), irony, sarcasm and cynicism as writerly tools makes him a standout writer, all packaged in a highly personalised working-class style that is easy to read and digest. One has to admire his tendency to bare his soul, not sparing himself, nor his friends and family. The outcome is often hilarious, even when the subject matter is somewhat tragic, such as Gordie’s cancer diagnosis. Treating life as a bit of a joke is one way to cope with its viscidities. It helps Colin to take the next step, the move to the next town on his journeys through life. While still in Invercargill, there was a surprising music scene variety early on, what with even the Rolling Stones making a concert appearance long before they became superstars. Colin didn’t miss a beat. His editors at the Southland Times seemed happy enough as he reached a youthful readership that the old fogies could not and would not entertain. 

 

Colin and Gordie, as 17-year-olds rented various dumps in Invercargill where they party every weekend, consuming large quantities of alcohol (still no weed) which in those days was an acceptable lifestyle, since the older generation did exactly the same, but with more drinking and less sex (unable to stand up, as they say). Indeed, the book ends with an escapade, where Colin has returned to Invercargill by himself, only to meet up with someone from his party days, who has a ‘confession’ to make. The (now old) mate in question tells him that he once tricked Colin into getting more booze by letting him drive his Mini Cooper (Colin only had a Vespa), only to screw Colin’s then girlfriend while he was out. Says Colin:

 

                  You cad. It’s alright. I still forgive you. (p.272)

 

Should he have horse-whipped the ‘cad’ in the good old English aristocratic fashion?  No, that’s Colin for you, joking that this former girlfriend (insinuating she was one of many) had always complained about ‘getting cold feet’ riding on his Vespa. A masterclass in double entendre. 

 

While the road trip is dedicated to Gordie, we actually learn much more about Colin than Geordie. There are more inserts like the Lost Column, e.g. A Father’s Story which is a lengthy exposition of his father’s Scottish background and his eventual migration to New Zealand. There is also the re-publication of ‘a life under the influence’ originally written for the magazine Planet. It details Colin’s discovery of marijuana and hash. It’s a hilarious account with a dose of some negative side-effects, like trying to find the toilet without finding the light switch first. So, he peed into the host’s bathtub which unbeknownst to him was used as the food storage for the midnight munchies – he had found the light switch after the urgent relief. The story moves on to Colin’s expanded use of drugs, including growing his own dope but increasingly relying on the dealers. He got to be smoking eight to ten joints a day, which is quite an accomplishment. The growing paranoia about police helicopters swooping around Grey Lynn was also not lost on Colin. Having declared his criminal pastime, he jokes that it prevented him from becoming a politician, while on the other hand using his public persona to push for the sensible decriminalisation of drugs like marijuana. To his and many others’ disappointment, New Zealand has not moved that way apart from minor legalisation of medicinal cannabis. Of course, Colin’s next book The High Road investigates the amazing turnaround in some US states, legalising recreational marijuana. 

 

In the meantime, a nice device used in all three books reviewed here, is the use of black and white photographs that nicely illustrate the topics under discussion, be it the landscape, Colin’s mugshots, food on the plate, Sam Hunt’s famous boots, odd sights along the roads, like a half a kilometre of dead wild pigs’ skins (with heads) strung up on a farm fence in the middle of nowhere.

 

One of the questions about book design, especially the lavishly designed Sam Hunt – Off the Road book, is how HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) can afford such a publication that is not bound to have huge sales? I presume that Colin has a longtime editor who is smitten with Colin’s writing genius, and will finance any book proposal that Colin brings along, racking up an amazing ten titles or more.  Well, good on the editor, I say, because it is not often that fairly controversial voices reach the public ear. Good also on the various newspaper, magazine and TV producers/editors that let Colin rip. It is not that Colin is a celebrity that brings in the advertising dollars by the bucketload, nor is he a mega rock star that can give the fingers to the establishment. Serious political writers like Nicky Hager do get a bit of traction publication wise, but there are many out there who keep collecting rejection slips because they are not meeting the market which is as reactionary in New Zealand as in the rest of the Five Eyes. 

 

So, onto the next road, The High Road (2017), an even more amazing enterprise as the publisher had to fork out the travelling expenses before the book was written. The journey from Auckland to San Francisco (by air), from San Francisco to Seattle (by rental car), from Seattle back to San Francisco (by train) and back to Auckland (by air), and a separate trip to Denver and back, for Colin and his driver Bruce must have cost a bundle. Again, good on HarperCollins Publishers financing the project even though the book might not hit the best-seller list – there might, however, be a larger number of cannabis enthusiasts in New Zealand than commonly assumed (the recreational marijuana referendum in 2023 was rejected 50.7% to 48.4%). Counting myself amongst the losers, the lost referendum was a huge blow because the shares we had invested in a NZ Cannabis company went belly-up – unlike the wild stories that have emerged from the cannabis-friendly states and countries, where billions are to be made on the flourishing free market. Colin makes mention of it in his book. 

 

The book is dedicated to his mate Gordon McBride, of the Going South book, who died in 2016.  While on the high road, Gordie is still alive, and Colin records some emails between him and Gordie. When Colin pitched his High Road to the publisher, he even contemplated to take Gordie with him. He sensibly declined. Instead, he commissions his old mate Bruce as his driver. Bruce is never identified by his surname in the book, but I understand it is Bruce Jarvis, a well-known photographer who has accompanied Colin also on previous jaunts. In any case, the book starts off with a little vignette from the end of the story, namely on the train back from Seattle to San Francisco. They had consumed some ‘incredible edibles’ bought in Seattle, so when they are seated in the dining car, the couple opposite asks them what they are up to. Colin is so ‘zonked’ that he tells them straight:

 

                  We’re marijuana tourists. (p.12)

 

Then, before the journey begins, there is a lengthy treatise on Colin’s experience with weed in New Zealand, including a weed eureka moment: at the legendary Bob Marley concert on Auckland, a big, patched gang member standing next to him suddenly turned on him, kissed him, ‘blasting my pale lungs full of powerful smoke’. He says, ‘he’s never been the same since’ and owns every Bob Marley record ever made. For the uninitiated, he provides a potted history of the many benefits of cannabis down to the sad and mad recent wars on drugs, cannabis included. Then he describes the current situation in New Zealand, interspersed with his personal experiences, and finally telling of his mission to tell New Zealand to get her act together, and follow the weed-friendly states, like Oregon, Washington State and Colorado. Publishing a road trip through these states, sampling all the weed on offer, might just do the trick. Here’s hoping.

 

Unfortunately, they first land in California where at the time only medicinal cannabis for residents only is legal. For quite a few days they do the San Fran tourist thing, including the now obligatory Haight Ashbury tour. The main thing they notice are the ‘street people’, the ‘hobos’ that populate every nook and cranny, at least around the hotel where they are staying. They find this quite unsettling, careful not to make any contact lest these crazed characters mug them. They come across this problem not only in San Francisco but in every other major city they visit. Maybe Colin could have engaged in some political analysis on this topic, given that otherwise he is scathing when confronted with Trump maniacs. The other trend started in SF is visiting every bar on every available corner, sampling craft beers by the bucket full. Having spent some time in SF in the 1970s myself, I never saw the insides of a bar, being content with smoking weed (which was then very illegal). Beer and weed did not seem to go together in those days, although I must confess that there were a few characters I knew who specialised in ‘shooting’ beer from cans, i.e. shaking the can, and then ‘shooting’ the contents down the throat, but this was never done in a bar. Colin also specialises in describing just about every meal they eat, breakfast and really bad coffee included. Given that Colin despises American cuisine mainly as slush served in large quantities, one wonders why the effort. As such the reader cannot wait for Colin and Bruce to get out of California to the promised land of Oregon where the weed is basically legal for recreational use.

 

It takes some 50 pages before they get there, the first little town in Oregon called Brookings (pop.6336). And there it is: West Coast Organics, with a sign outside saying Medical and Recreational Marijuana. Colin can hardly contain himself but still manages a very witty line ‘I am Alice and this is the rabbit hole’ before entering the ‘wonderful shop’. The choice is dazzling: buds in many jars, edibles, vapes, all labelled with THC and CBD levels. They splurge out on a disposable vape (150 hits), a gram each of two sorts of buds and a medicinal concoction called Pine Tar Kush for Bruce’s sore knee. All for only $70.- (plus a T-shirt and rolling papers).  They drive on with their stash and stop at a beach that reminds Colin of Piha. Time to test the vape that has a 55% THC level. Powerful stuff. Neither of them feels any great effect: maybe all the NZ Green and Thai Buddha Sticks back home has made them ‘resistant’. So, strangely enough, they drive on to the next bigger town called Bandon (pop. 3066) where the German incident occurs (as mentioned before – which BTW is a phrase Colin uses a lot). We get a Wikipedia-type of potted history of Bandon, followed by various bars and disgusting meals. They have a few more puffs from their stash but still no extraordinary effects are mentioned. Eventually they go back to their miserable little motel and crash for the night. One would have expected a more stoned introduction to their first free weed stopover, as promised in the subtitle of the book ‘a journey through the new frontier of cannabis’, but never mind.

 

Next day, next stop is Portland. They check at a hotel where reception tells them that ‘we are famous for our beer, our weed and our strip clubs’. Colin writes that this was the ‘grooviest greeting ever’. I wouldn’t call it that. But never mind. Reception also takes the two of them as ‘a couple of old gay tourist types’. Colin finds it funny, as it is obviously absurd, being a staunch heterosexual. One wonders a bit if there are any subconscious skeletons in the closets, as all three books under review here are to do with bloke-to-bloke stories, a sort of New Zealand archetype of rugby mateship grabbing each other by the balls while spitting on any poofters that walk the streets. Not that Colin, Bruce, Gordie and Sam belong to this club, assuming they are liberals who have a few gay friends to prove the point. Colin, we hear several times, is happily married, and so are, or were, his three mates, and in this context I am only referring to this sometimes-unsettling NZ bloke-culture that is not only a cliché, namely men drink beer in the garage while the wives drink wine in the kitchen, and the twain never meet.

 

In Portland, in the meantime, they do the tourist thing, checking out the world’s biggest independent bookshop, having a few tokes on the vape on the way – which is a bit distressing because, as in SF, there are a lot of street people, including an army vet begging. Having perused The Giant Book of Erotica in the bookshop they walk the street to the next beer bar, and on to the next bar with a few tokes on the vape in between, so they are stoned, a bit drunk and quite hungry. The food is unexpectedly quite good. Later they go to another bar next to their freaky, gay hotel. In my estimation they drink far more beer (and gin) than they smoke weed. Next day is the drive to Seattle, with basically the same story line. A bit repetitious but still fun to read. In Seattle the main story line is visiting a marijuana shop to sample and buy interesting wares, including ‘incredible edibles’.  Having returned their rental car, it’s now a train journey back to SF. Having now quite a stash, the interesting problem is to consume all of it before getting on a plane back to Auckland – they are not game enough to try a bit of smuggling. By the time they get back, Colin figures that by now the real marijuana thing is in Denver, Colorado, so he organises another 6-day trip just to do research there. His publisher is in agreement, good on him or her. 

 

Dragging Bruce along, the main idea was to book a cannabis-themed holiday whereby the hotel in question also has bookings for events like a Cannabasics Sommelier Class. The hotel room is equipped with a vaping thingy (photo included p.217), so on arrival they rush to the nearest shop to get a few grams of the best Denver has to offer and rush back to try out the vaping machine. Then it’s down to the hotel bar and for a nightcap it’s another vape. Sweet dreams. When they attend the class the next day in some shady place in downtown Denver, they get a rundown on all the rules and regulations that Colorado has imposed on the weed business, but as the vapes and joints are passed around, interest turns to all the wares, like a ‘stoned pussy sensual enhancement oil’. In between picking up more weed for the cooking class, they frequent various bars and eateries, before returning to the sushi and joint rolling class. It’s all described in delectable detail. Next day at breakfast TV, there is something about Trump, but they pay little attention, explaining their political disinterest as ‘America has been run by jerks before and survived after all.’ I suppose that’s true enough, although personally I would prefer some detailed analysis, along the way Colin describes the pitfalls when trying to roll a perfect joint. To dismiss reactionary politicians and their fans as ‘arseholes’ is probably a good step in the right direction, but if no further thoughts are produced or no action is taken, it might sound a bit lame (despite the language used). The next organised event is the Budz and Sudz Grow and Dispensary Tour on the Cannabus. It goes all the way to Boulder and back, and the overall effect is one of all passengers being ‘all off their nuts’. Colin is having a bit of a bad trip on the bus but survives all right, describing it as another ‘once-in-a-lifetime experience’. Back in Denver and after a few beers at various bars, all is back to normal. There is a hilarious incident on the suburban train back to the hotel when Colin is desperate for a pee:

 

I explode out of the train, leap down the concrete stairs three at the time and scamper out onto the prairie, turn my back to the car park and pee for 15 minutes, looking up in wonder and relief at the stars. p.246

 

As an elderly person myself I appreciate that our bladders are not as leak-proof as they were when we were young and could hold back, so, I’ve had similar experiences of orgasmic relief.

 

The last couple of days in Denver are spent more on the bar and eating side of things which can be a bit boring. Even Colin’s mum makes an appearance with a story about some cheap, old bottles of wine she found in the garage – bought a long time ago by her late husband, Colin’s father – and which she gave to the carpet guy who was, strangely enough, laying a carpet in her garage. So, Colin remembers his dad’s poor taste in wine, and when asked about what he thought of it, and since ‘it smelt like Gasoline Alley and it tasted similar’, Colin gasped, asking ‘What is it?’ and his father saying, ‘Pinot Noir’ and Colin replying:

 

                  Pinot noir? I’m not even sure it’s made of grapes.

 

Now his mum giving some more bottles to the carpet guys and Colin shrieks:

 

                  Good God Mum, you’ll poison them.

 

That’s hilarious dialogue, although I am not sure what it has to do with being in the house bar of his hotel in Denver. Still, as I also buy bargain Otago Pinot Noir in the strange belief that this is good wine, I occasionally get a remark from my wife that it tastes like vinegar, so I get the joke alright. LOL. 

 

Colin is prone to insert all sorts of stories in a non-linear sort of fashion, which tends to lighten the otherwise chronological discourse. There is even a bit more of the political stuff, quoting a cab driver as saying ‘Trump is a bad man’ adding a hint of optimism with ‘They’ll get him. They got Nixon’. When nothing much is happening at the house bar, Colin feels like shouting  ‘So, who here likes Trump?’. Bruce warns him that he might get shot. Now with Trump having been re-elected, I wonder what Colin and the taxi driver have to say about it. Bloody tragic, I reckon.

 

It’s their last night in Denver. And so, before take-off home, there is a visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art with exhibitions by Basquiat and McGinley, the latter making an impact with explicit gay photography which Colin considers ‘immature’. They also have to consume any left overs, so they arrive in Auckland still pretty stoned. 

 

As a coda, Colin delivers an impassioned statement for the legalisation of cannabis in NZ, even if it means that NZ, like Denver, turns into a weird havens for cannabis tourists. Colin’s optimism is dampened by meeting a judge at a dinner party who has heard about Colin publishing a ‘light-hearted book about cannabis’. The judge opines that this is socially irresponsible. The question for me at this juncture would be: “What kind of fucking reactionary dinner parties is Colin attending?” 

 

In the end, Colin is resigned to being Colin on the road: ‘… if I’m not a wiser man, then I am certainly a man who rolls a better joint.’ Q.E.D. (ask Colin’s Latin teacher if you are not familiar with this acronym – since she is the one who sent Colin on the musical roads to everywhere and nowhere, maybe Latinate Cannabis sativaincluded).

 

 

 

 

Bowden, Ross (1984). "Maori Cannibalism: An Interpretation". Oceania. 55 (2): 81–99 – via Wiley.

 

https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/the-mixtape/audio/2018945710/the-mixtape-legendary-music-critic-colin-hogg

 

 

A REVERSE ENGINEERED REVIEW OF ELON MUSK BY WALTER ISAACSON (2023)

 A REVERSE ENGINEERED REVIEW OF ELON MUSK BY WALTER ISAACSON (2023)

In 1978 or so, when flying from London to Auckland, I had bought at Heathrow Airport a cheap little computer (I think it was an MK14) for my wife’s little brother. He wasn’t terribly interested so I assembled it for him and programmed it for text and some simple games. Coding was done by copying the code from the manual. It seemed a very laborious and boring process with endless lines of command code like GOTO. At the time it seemed to be a strange contradiction to instruct a machine minute step by step by step to do something very simple, like write text - coding the letters of the alphabet when a typewriter could do it with just one click per letter.  What was the point? Obviously I missed the point. My own first computer was the Apple Macintosh. No coding required. Some poor software engineering bugger had done it already. Again, I missed the point and missed the bus altogether.  

Elon Musk was fascinated by coding even as a teenager. I too know someone who loves coding. Good on them (choice of pronouns to be discussed later). Like connecting oceanographic satellite data with maps to show fishermen where the best chances are today for catching the big one. Musk had this idea long ago when he and his brother developed Zip2, i.e. connecting business directory data with maps. A revolutionary idea? Clicking on the business address and a map pops up with the location in question. Before you had to consult a map and locate the address yourself. Very labour intensive! 

 

Walter Isaacson who describes the life of Elon Musk up until April 2023 in some 95 episodes does not really tell us how such an idea can come about, given that this idea launched Musk into the stratosphere of entrepreneurial stardom. Was it random selection? Fate? Karma? Genius? Isaacson goes mainly for the latter, attributing Musk’s stellar success to a complex character make-up that makes Musk a unique human being who is crazy enough to want to change the world (these are, more or less, the famous last words of his book on Elon Musk). Not that Isaacson doesn’t let rip with a few criticisms, like Elon being an unhinged asshole at times but, alas, Musk is a great innovator, so we just have to suck it up. Isaacson who has written biographies of luminaries such as Einstein, da Vinci, Jobs and Kissinger – what a strange collection is this – not that I have read any of them – is obviously well versed in his metier, and one can only assume that he has to say good things about them all, Kissinger included. Having written a biography on Noam Chomsky (2006) myself, I found it hard to give credence to any of his detractors (some more unhinged than others) but studiously trying to avoid being accused of writing a hagiography by keeping a critical stance when justified. Being obviously very sympathetic to Chomsky’s political and linguistic orientation on what I assume to be purely rational grounds, it would be inconceivable to do a nasty hatchet job. Those who do probably shouldn’t be called biographers. There are exceptions, of course, like all those who have written, deservedly, totally negative biographies of Hitler and Co.

 

 I do not know what Isaacson’s political leaning are (he does attach labels like ‘left’ and ‘right’ to the various characters in the book but never to Musk himself when it seems quite evident that Musk is now on the far-right MAGA scale) but I assume that he himself is centre-right, being sympathetic to the anti-woke Musk ideology. Having been given Musk’s approval to shadow him for two years, Isaacson obviously had a great opportunity to get to know his subject in a way few others could have done.

 

Given Elon’s conflicted upbringing, there is the temptation to engage in some layman’s psychoanalysis, and Isaacson falls for it in a big way. Is Elon’s psychological make-up a consequence of his father Errol’s tendency towards a very nasty kind of behaviour towards his own children? Errol being a racist, sexist wannabe MAGA capitalist who in his native South-Africa leads a chaotic life of ups and downs, he has his moments of an engineer’s lucidity and recognises the entrepreneurial potentials of Elon and Kimbal, giving them some $28,000 for their Zip2 venture (their mother Maye gives them $10,000), even though they had escaped from his clutches to California. Errol having two children with his adopted daughter sounds like Woody Allen, raising the heckles of Elon and the rest of his family, and Elon finally cutting off his financial support for his father. Such moral outrage sounds a bit strange when considering Elon’s shenanigans with fathering children, like his sperm-donated twins with Shivon Zilis, one of his top managers. To Elon’s credit, he does like children in general (as guarantors of human consciousness) and his children in particular, even when one of them (Xavier) becomes Jenna and a hardcore communist on top, causing Elon much emotional pain as to choice of pronouns and becoming number one class enemy for his son/daughter/whatever. To repent, Elon even sells some of his luxury estates and moves into a little house in Austin, near his rocket launchpads. Still, as the world’s richest man he is unable to shake off his ability to spread largesse wherever he goes. Using his private jets like a busy urban salesman uses taxis might be considered a contradiction in his aim to end fossil fuels via his electric Tesla cars. 

 

Getting back to how and possibly why it all started via Zip2, the breakthrough came via Mohr Davidow Ventures to invest $3 million. Bill Davidow apparently ‘loved’ the sales pitch by the Musk brothers. That’s all Isaacson tells us. It would have been interesting why he loved it, for this is the single most important stepping stone for the Musk success story. We learn from Davidow’s website that he is an electrical engineer and a venture capitalist who by now sits on every conceivable corporate board in the US – which doesn’t really explain either why he decided to invest in the Musks’ enterprise. As Kimbal explains, interactively linking addresses with maps is commonplace nowadays but in 1996 this was quite amazing. So, maybe Davidow must have thought the same. Or was it just an impulse? A kind of engineer-to-engineer brainwave? To trump up $3 million and $30,000 for a car each for Elon and Kimbal seems ludicrous. Elon promptly bought a 1967 Jaguar E-type. Quite a step up from the $500 car that his dad had bought him together with the $28,000 grant. I suppose venture capitalism is not a new thing – it is the very nature of capitalism – but the intensity of it in Silicon Valley broke all records. You are betting against the odds but when you strike the jackpot that guarantees you 40% or more of the stratospheric company stock, you are laughing all the way to the bank. When after only four years Zip2 was sold for a staggering $307 million, Davidow and his venture company (and partners) certainly laughed all the way, and so did Elon with his share of $22 million (and poor old Kimbal with only $15 million). Elon’s bank account went from $5,000 to $22,005,000. 

 

If I win $22 million in Lotto tomorrow, what would I do? Like Elon, I would buy a nice condo, but would I buy a $1 million McLaren F1 sports car? Just for the hell of it? To show off to my poor friends or is this the way to make new rich friends (like Peter Thiel and discard the old poor ones)? How can you psychoanalyse such a process? Isaacson suggests that Elon would go on to have a conflicted relationship with wealth. What on earth is that supposed to mean? Apparently Elon as a new kind of celebrity was interviewed on CNN and said he wanted to be on the cover of Rolling Stone.  Sounds like that song by Dr Hook … wanna show my picture to my mum!  Elon more likely would want to show his picture to his dad (he did give $300,000 to his dad but gave a million to his mum).

 

Having won Lotto, would I become addicted to winning? Invest my remaining 19 million or so to buy more tickets? There is a saying that only the first million is hard to get but then the millions will multiply like rabbits. Once you are a high roller you are on a roll, so to speak, and you can only lose if you’re a complete idiot (and play Russian Roulette). 

 

“What matters to me is winning … it’s probably rooted in some very disturbing psychoanalytical black hole or neural short circuit” says Elon when justifying his habit to fire people who might stand in his winning ways. Being addicted to winning is indeed a strange obsessive compulsion, as correctly self-diagnosed by Elon. Still, the winning goes on and on, what with Paypal and our friend Peter Thiel – I say this because I reside in New Zealand as a permanent resident while Peter Thiel bought his NZ citizenship and is forever in the local news for wanting to build a survivalist bunker disguised as a lodge in one of New Zealand’s most scenic spots, only to be thwarted by bloody-minded conservationists who get court injunctions on the grounds of such ugly buildings being incompatible with the local environment – and whatever business opportunities come along the way (Space X, Tesla, Boring Company, Neuralink, X.AI). It is quite tedious to read all the ins and outs (intermittent, weird family/lover sagas included), and the whole Twitter/X saga could have been written up as one episode instead of the 10 or so, detailing every sorry aspect of ‘let that sink in’.

 

One may at this juncture identify another enduring trait of Elon Musk, namely that he has a knack for correctly identifying the causes of any problem (mainly of the engineering sort though) but then arriving at the completely wrong solutions to the problem. In terms of wrong engineering solutions that tend to blow things up, like his rockets, the consequences are not that bad if he can learn from his mistakes and remedy them (e.g. too much automation in the Tesla factories is a problem and is eventually fixed by manual labour). In terms of his financial meltdowns, gambling too close to the edge, it is only good fortune (or call it luck) that saves him in last minute deals (e.g. the Twitter saga may yet cost him dearly). In terms of political and economic ideology (human engineering) he has correctly identified many a problem (e.g. the Biden/Harris inflated bureaucracies that back up incompetent corporations with lucrative government contracts, as in the space industry) but then arrives at the totally wrong solution, namely the Trump MAGA machinations that defy any rational solutions other than Musk’s favourite processes of ‘delete, delete, delete’ any regulation that is not immediately supported by the laws of physics. To put it in the starkest terms possible, Hitler and Co. correctly identified the problem that the struggling German capitalism at the time was to some degree managed by a cabal of Jewish entrepreneurs and bankers, but the ‘final solution’ was of course totally insane, namely the ‘deletion’ of the Jewish people in total. The extreme right-wing pronouncements in the USA and elsewhere today are forever echoing chambers of fascism. When Musk in a moment of such insanity shared a tweet that ‘Jews hate white people’ he revealed himself as the wolf in sheep’s clothing, and now that he successfully bankrolled the Trump campaign, he can and probably will influence the Trump administration by ‘deleting’ all and sundry regulations and laws that interfere with solutions that in engineering terms value the bare minimum, the most cost-effective, and to hell with the consequences. The blow-ups due to too much deletion will cause enormous suffering, e.g. as in the proposed mass deportations of illegal immigrants in the US. While Musk is, to his credit, always ready to reconsider and rectify too much deletion, the demons he is supporting will not. They will always go down the road to the final solution.

 

Elon Musk is also correct in identifying the ultimate problem humanity faces: the survival of human consciousness (as he calls it). Human life on earth seems to go down the gurgler, so what is the solution? Colonise Mars. Interplanetary travel for Musk is a reality, not science fiction. His obsession to get his Starships ready for take-off seems a very sad response to what is happening on planet earth, namely, to simply escape by ferrying a few thousand select humanoids to Mars, from where they can look back at the nuclear winter lasting for some 20,000 years. This is insane. Surely Elon Musk can do better than that. He must work on a solution for the survival of the human species on earth. Find a way to stop wars and climate destruction. Stop virtual hitchhiking in the galaxies, take a trip along Route 66 and find the ‘answer to everything’. I don’t mind if he becomes a benevolent two-headed CEO/president/dictator of Earth Ltd., if that’s what it takes. 

 

Of course, Isaacson doesn’t quite see it this way, being satisfied that Elon Musk is ‘crazy’ enough to change the world for the better, even though most of the evidence presented in this hefty volume (and subsequent events since 2023) points to a disaster of sorts. Mechanical and electric/electronic engineering solutions have often been effective in the short term (and Musk is a master of it) but applying AI solutions to questions of ‘free speech’ (e.g. algorithmic moderation on X) are doomed to failure even in the short term. Software engineering is a different kettle of fish, and writing code is more fiction than fact. Elon himself spends endless hours rewriting ‘fucking stupid code’ written by his fucking stupid idiot coders.

 

Which brings me to both lingo and the question of stupidity. Elon’s ‘idiot index’ and ‘algorithm (sic)’ as mantras for correct thinking are already legendary. If the idiot index is high or you do not follow the ‘algorithm’ you’re a fucking idiot to be fired on the spot. Musk excels in what he calls ‘hardcore’ feedback, peppered with the f-word, sounding either like a working-class jock or like an aristocratic asshole. Empathy for him is a woke disease. The effects on polite middle-class jokers can be quite devastating. Sure, from a rational, engineering point of view, it can be frustrating if someone proposes a solution that is evidently wrong, or worse if someone talks patent nonsense, but to pronounce such human behaviour as ‘stupidity/idiocy’ to the face of the presumed idiot, is a very poor solution for the problem. As the famous saying goes, there is no law against stupidity, neither in natural nor human-made laws, although in the latter case, maybe, there should be one. Elon having been denigrated in this way by his father, in demeaning language, Isaacson suggests that Elon’s own choice of language is merely a trait of his upbringing, the son becoming his father, mitigated by the fact that Elon is anything but stupid in terms of engineering. When Elon makes an engineering mistake he will own it, and no doubt call himself a fucking idiot. When Elon makes a big (non-engineering) mistake that he doesn’t own up to (as in his choice of bankrolling Trump to accelerate the climate crisis) he will call his accusers fucking idiots, quickly disseminated on his X account. When even good people (as endorsed in the first place by Musk) quit his employment because they cannot stand the ruthless office politics, like Yoel Roth, Musk comes down on them like a ton of bricks, tweeting that Roth might condone paedophilia amongst other defamatory allegations, to the effect that Roth was viciously harassed, and since his address had been published, he had to sell his home and move to escape such unwarranted persecution. 

 

The human cost of Musk’s ruthless application of his idiot index is incalculable since the victims are the people without a history, falling by the wayside as irrelevant sideshows. Deserved or undeserved, this is not the way to treat human beings. As Leonard Cohen’s song lyric painted a bleak picture with the line ‘… the homicidal bitchin' that goes down in every kitchen to determine who will serve and who will eat’, the few winners and many losers live in different worlds, and never the twain shall meet. Isaacson’s attempt to portray the greatest winner of them all is an essential failure in perspective, and I suppose it’s not really his fault that he can only look up and never down. As he says, almost as a badge of bookish honour, Elon didn’t read the draft and probably never will read the finished book, because Elon knows Elon much better than Isaacson ever will, so why waste time to read 95 episodes of his own life when he knows damn well that any episodic drama about his deluded life will only be of interest to himself when he finally reaches Mars. 

 

Spending his billions on Starships and associated enterprises, Elon Musk will go down history as a man who wanted to be an immortal Martian, only to find out that immortality is like planting a seed in the desert of time (a line from Elsbeth Huxley’s The Flame Trees of Thika). Musk’s fellow travellers, well documented in Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk, may, too, ride the wave of contemporary history (check who else got posts in Trump’s administration), only to drift away as coded data, through the dusty, interstellar clouds of the universe.

 

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/04/donald-trump-elon-musk-and-the-threat-to-press-freedom

 

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/06/elon-musk-israel-trump-gaza-hostage-deal

 

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/06/elon-musk-rbg-pac-abortion

 

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/07/campaign-spending-crypto-tech-influence

 

https://www.davidow.com/about/

 

 

 

A VEGAN REVIEW OF THE VEGETARIAN BY HAN KANG

 A VEGAN REVIEW OF THE VEGETARIAN BY HAN KANG

 

‘Life is such a strange thing … p.168’. Having studied psychology and having trained as a psychiatric nurse at some stage, and my partner having been a mental health nurse for many years, I am well versed with ‘madness’ as is mentioned as praiseworthy on the cover by Ian McEwan:

 

                  A novel of sexuality and madness that deserves its great success.

 

In that Han Kang won the Booker Prize for The Vegetarian and now the Nobel Prize for Literature, one has to agree with McEwen, who as a famous author should know a thing or two about it. Which in the first instance brings me to the question of ‘translation’, i.e. in this case the original novel written in Korean and translated into English by Deborah Smith, who in turn has no doubt much experience in such matters but all the same has been criticised in the Los Angeles Times for some failings. My own interest as a linguist and translator (cf. various entries in my blog) compelled me to delve a bit deeper into the quote used as a beginning of this review, i.e. ‘Life is such a strange thing …’. This strikes me as a contradictory statement in English even though ‘thing’ is used in all manner of contexts, not only as an inanimate noun, for example as used by me in reference to McEwen in assuming that the knows ‘a thing or two’ about such things. Metaphors we live by (cf. Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) are notoriously difficult but not impossible to translate, and easy when one can find a suitable alternative metaphor in the target language, the theory being that despite so-called linguistic and cultural differences the universal features of language (à la Chomsky et al.) and culture/humanity, there are many universal metaphors that deal with life’s issues. As I am not familiar with Korean but can attest to German-English translation issues, I would have thought that a more common metaphor in English is simply ‘life is strange/life can be strange’ as in the German equivalent ‘das Leben ist (manchmal) seltsam’, neither of which add ‘thing/Ding’ as Deborah Smith does in this instance. The French ‘c’est la vie’ carries a similar meaning. If such minor translation irritations multiply we arrive at some major problems as alluded to in the critique above.

 

Anyway, just let us sympathise with the proposition that life is indeed ‘strange’ and that the story of ‘the vegetarian’ couldn’t be any stranger (or is it ‘more strange’?). Other metaphors/similes Kang/Smith employ are that life hangs on a thin string/thread that can snap at any moment, somewhat similar to the general idea that the ‘veneer of civilisation is very thin’. The current state of the planet seems to echo in this dystopian family saga, one that falls apart by having a dream, like a nuclear bomb. That a nightmarish, disgusting raw meat dream could turn one into a radical vegetarian the next morning is ‘not impossible but rather unlikely’ (a sort of metaphor invented by Chomsky), especially in the context of a starkly conventional Korean family context. That the two moronic men (as protagonists in the main two – out of three - episodes) emerge to inflict pain and suffering on the vegetarian, is only a likely scenario if we accept the erstwhile premise of the dream.

 

I have voiced this criticism before (in my review of The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki), namely why should fiction double down on the daily reality of the many miseries that life has on offer? Is it a perverse desire on part of the readers to feast on graphic (sic) gore and insanity that compels an author like Kang to meet the market? Is sexual violence, rape and plunder indeed the greatest pleasure of the Genghis Khan in all of us? The graphic (again) depiction of a male sexual fantasy in the second part of The Vegetarian seems strangely (sic) out of focus of a feminist perspective that Kang otherwise embodies – or is there the ambiguity that consensual sex is or at least can be something beautiful and wholesome versus sex as a tool of violence? After all, when the video-man forces himself on the vegetarian, she pushes him away, and – to his presumed credit – he goes off the get himself painted with flowers as this seems to be a condition for the vegetarian to be turned on sexually. This flower business in itself seems equally bizarre: as it is originally the video-man’s fantasy, the vegetarian seems to fall for it via her strange dreams of being a plant/tree, with her arms planted in the earth, doing headstands, and flowers growing out of her ‘crotch’. Is this connected to ‘de-flowering’ a virgin?  The mind boggles as one has to wonder if there is a Korean language equivalent (German, for example, has no such metaphorical equivalent, although there are of course others, as to provide evidence for my assertion that the universality of language covers the universal concerns of human life, e.g. the life-changing event of a woman losing her virginity). 

 

Going back to the third part, the descent into ‘madness’, there seems to be a tendency (as in The Book of Form and Emptiness) to portray psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses – with some exceptions – as emotionally cold practitioners who are pushing the pharmacological medical-biological approach to mental illness, negating any deeper issues brought about societal dysfunction – or at least conform to the realisation that this is beyond their expertise and one that nobody has anyway.  As noted in the beginning, my personal experience with psychiatry, whilst endorsing certain elements of Laing’s anti-psychiatry, as well as Freudian psychoanalysis, the harsh realities of mental breakdowns brought to ED leave little choice but the tranquiliser gun as immediate crisis intervention, and subsequent maintenance with appropriate medicines and a bit of CBT depending on the financial resources the patient and their family have. As in The Vegetarian, the patient is sent to a less expensive institution as her sister cannot afford the one with a better reputation. Now imagine all the mental breakdowns suffered by the precariat that are often below the radar of the already underfunded public health systems, and you come to realise that we did not advance much from the medieval practice of locking up the mentally retarded in the dungeons and hit them with ECT if they misbehave. I imagine that in Korea modern psychiatry is equivalent to the Western models, especially the US, and as such there are countless detractors, of all political and religious persuasions, who push alternatives such as conversion therapies and exorcism. It seems to me that the underlying message by Kang is that societal dysfunction, especially at the level of conventional family life, is to blame for pushing a sensitive female soul over the cliff into the abyss of insanity. Or should I say, male dysfunction, in the shape of a violent patriarchy. As one of the reviewers on the back cover puts it:

 

                  … the desire for another sort of life.

 

A life of female sisterhood compassion, devoid of the necessity for psychiatric wards other than perhaps to treat any remaining members of the patriarchy. After all the only vaguely sympathetic male character in the novel is J who consents to be an actor in the playful segment of the painted body frolics but runs away when the video-man asks him to perform real sex as well. J does not want to be involved in a porn clip. Good on him, given that the sex-violence porn industry in Korea is one of the most lucrative in the world. Psychiatrists are unfortunately ill equipped to bring about societal changes to get to grips with the victims of a dysfunction that masquerades as capitalist normality. Are authors like Kang in a better position? I think they should be or at least could be: describe what a ‘better world’ looks like, where normal, ordinary people can lead a reasonably happy life from beginning to end, just don’t call it Utopia. But, if all you can do like Kang, to reduce to the written word to the unspeakable misery of two sisters, racing in the ambulance that picked them up from the proverbial bottom of the cliff, with In-hye staring ‘fiercely into the trees. As if waiting for an answer. As if protesting against something. The look in her eyes is dark and insistent.’ These are the famous last words in the novel. Is there a glimmer of hope? Why the trees when in an earlier passage trees were denounced as uncomprehending dummies that cared only about trees? Yeong-hye of course wanted to turn into a tree, or at least into something that is rooted to the ground, growing flowers by dint of sunshine and water alone – certainly not by eating meat. But hey, what about the venus flytrap? But then again, I am informed by Wikipedia that Kang was deeply influenced by a Korean modernist poet who asserted that ‘humans should be plants’ as a protest against human violence, a sentiment also expressed by Bertrand Russell when he said that the human species is but a passing nightmare and afterwards peace amongst the natural world will return. It is a sad reality to be repeated over and over again – do we need it repeated in fiction as well?

 

I bought the book by being fascinated by the title, partly because I am myself a vegetarian (undogmatic – I eat meat if there is no other choice) and one of our grandsons, aged 12, suddenly decided to become a quite strict vegan (not because of a dream but because of cruelty to animals and a girl at school he admires for being vegan), with everyone in the extended family freaking out as to how he can survive and grow to be a strong man. Not anyone threatening him but constantly advising him that he needs dietary supplements lest he misses out on vital proteins, vitamins, and a thousand other ingredients which apparently are in natural abundance when following a meat diet. He is doing well, me in his defence forever citing a former NZ world champion distance runner (female) who was a strict vegan. I even thought I might give him this book to read but now that I have read it, I am sorry to say, I would not recommend it because there is nothing in it that gives you sensible advice and encouragement to be vegetarian let alone a vegan. All our grandson would learn is Kang’s explanation of her book in that she ‘wanted to show the extreme core of a dog-eat-dog world‘ (is that a Korean metaphor as well?), and that’s what he knows already, hence his conversion to veganism. 

 

Still, we don’t begrudge her the Nobel Prize in Literature in the hope she will write the great Korean novel that is a blueprint for a better world. 

 

 

Lakoff, G & M. Johnson (1980) Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press.

 

https://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-korean-translation-20170922-story.html

 

https://www.donga.com/en/List/article/all/20071102/255688/1

 

 

 

A ZEN-LIKE REVIEW OF THE BOOK OF FORM AND EMPTINESS BY RUTH OZEKI (2021)

 A ZEN-LIKE REVIEW OF THE BOOK OF FORM AND EMPTINESS BY RUTH OZEKI (2021)

 

If and when I become an unorthodox Zen Master of the universe, including the world-wide-web and the world herself, I will, as a benevolent secretary of culture in the One World Administration, outlaw all death in fiction, for we have enough of that in real life. Or maybe, should we ban fictional tragedy altogether and regale in Dionysian Bacchanalia instead, at least in fiction ? Not for nothing did Friedrich Nietzsche entitle his treatise on this matter ‘Die Geburt der Tragödie oder Griechentum und Pessimismus’.

 

So, there is death and tragedy in the first chapter of Ozeki’s Book of Form and Emptiness, and it grinds on until in the end there is a happy ending. Benny, the main protagonist exclaims:

 

                  You’re a book, you can fix it! You can make it come out right!

 

So, why bother with the tragedy in the first place? It’s fiction, for heaven’s sake, not fact. We all know the facts of life, as Ozeki describes it in ever more painful detail together with an unorthodox Marxist commentary by the Slovenian Bottleman named Slavoj.

 

Has Slavoj Žižek (never acknowledged as such) escaped to the US and is living underground as a hobo in a wheelchair, recuing damsels in distress and dispensing words of wisdom via the tragic damsel who names herself The Aleph after a Borges story?

 

“It’s the fucking world we live in. It’s capitalism that’s crazy. It’s neoliberalism, and materialism, and our fucked-up consumer culture that’s crazy. It’s the fucking meritocracy that tells you that feeling sad is wrong and it’s your fault if you’re broken, but hey, capitalism can fix you! Just take these miracle pills and go shopping and buy yourself some new shit. It’s the doctors and shrinks and corporate nedicine and Big Pharma, making billions of dollars telling us we’re crazy and then peddling us their so-called cures. That’s fucking crazy …” (p.365)

 

All so true but as the Aotearoa-Marxist author Shannon Walsh puts it: ‘Everything's fucked: But the point is to go beyond that’. Sounds a bit like Nietzsche’s ‘Jenseits von Gut und Böse’? Sounds a bit like Zen?

 

Before we get to the latter, let me just mention a minor irritant in the novel: whenever Slavoj speaks he must speak with this ridiculous speech impediment that is commonly ascribed to Germans when trying to speak English (ve haf ze veys to make you laff), in a somewhat haphazard fashion, e.g.

 

We must learn to luff our garbage! To find poetry in our trash. It is ze only way to luff the whole world.” (p.538)

 

What on earth is the point in that? Should I have cited Nietzsche with Ze birth of ze tragedy or ze Kreeks and pessimism? Since Ozeki seems to very fond of Walter Benjamin, prefacing chapters with quotes from his “Unpacking my Library” why not 

“Unpackinck ze Library”? 

 

Anyway, not to worry, I’m just a bit upset because I’m German too, and zis is my story about Zen – before we get to Zen Ozeki’s way.

 

I think I was in the last years at the Gymnasium Hohenschwangau when I was first introduced to Zen Buddhism, reading Christmas Humphreys’ Zen Buddhism and then Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki‘ Essays on Zen Buddhism (bit of a worry when later discovering his alleged sympathies for fascism), moving on to the Americans like Allan Watts and finally Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I say ‘finally’ because in my life’s journey I became less interested in Zen Buddhism as a sort of religion (following Marx’ dictum that ‘religion is opium for the people’ – also quoted by Ozeki) while maintaining an interest in Zen as minor ingredient in my political and linguistic involvement, following a Zen Master of sorts by the name of Noam Chomsky. A Zen interlude was when in the early 1970s on my travels around the world, I happened to visit the Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi Tree in Anuradhapura, a Buddhist num gave me a leaf from the tree and pronounced me a bodhisattva. I carried the leaf with me for many years until I lost it. I interpreted this loss as never having been and never will be a bodhisattva. Many years later in Kyoto I saw the famous Zen Garden – rocks in the sand – and while I am now an enthusiastic gardener myself, I was quite disappointed by this little patch of ‘emptiness’ that is supposed to trigger satori (at least for those who are ready). Zen these days has become a fashion accessory, what with Zen perfume, Zen spas, Zen retreats for celebrities like Leonard Cohen on Mount Baldy – I actually quite like Leonard Cohen and wrote an obituary poem calling him a Zen Master of Music. 

 

In that context one has to mention Ozeki’s tragic protagonist, Annabelle, having a ‘Zen massage’ with a bit of erotic after play. I can see a bestseller entitled ‘Zen and Sex’. In fact, one of my favourite koan is that of a Zen Master being visited in his cave by a prostitute who asks him to marry her so she can escape her sordid profession, and he does. I can picture the happy couple in a slim two-story apartment in Kyoto, he, working in the local supermarket and she being a demure but pretty housewife looking after the kids. They visit the Zen temple on Sundays.

 

So, now that you have learned of my Zen experience and hopefully allow me to pontificate on the subject, let’s return to The Book of Form and Emptiness, a sort of koan in itself. Ozeki being a Buddhist ‘priest’ herself pays homage to ‘Zoketsu Norman Fischer and to the lineage of Zen teachers whose words suffuse these pages’. In the book, Zen as the Deus ex Machina involves a rather quaint story of a young Japanese marketing professional who turns her back on the material world and joins a small Zen-Buddhist temple as a disciple of an aging, dying Zen Master. To save the temple from decay she hits on the idea to write a book on Tidy Magic, the Zen way to declutter your life. As a self-help book it becomes a best seller what with the author travelling the world to promote sales – naturally she ends up at Annabelle’s local Library where she conducts a short ceremony to send off Kenji’s ashes to the heavens. Of course it all starts with the hoarder Annabelle (hoarding as a traumatic response to her husband’s untimely death) coming across Tidy Magic plucking at hersubmerged heartstrings, writing unanswered emails to the author (until in the end she asks her assistant to reply) and slowly but surely rises to the occasion in the end, and declutters her apartment and turns it into a little Zen living quarter for herself and Benny, her son. Zen saves the day.

 

I suppose this is quite a clever deceit in that Ozeki as the Zen author has a character in her Zen book that is a best-selling Zen author. A sort of Russian doll format. I suppose there are various contradictions involved: how can a Zen person write a book for sale for the capitalist publishing market and then stoop so low as to do promotional tours to sell some more? Not that Ozeki is the only one – there is now a whole industry devoted to all things Zen. The Aleph and her tutor Slavoj would have to use some strong language to counter these trends (or shall we call it self-criticism?). 

 

But then again, isn’t Žižek and Co. flogging books as well? Didn’t Marx, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Borges and Co. become famous by way of writing their respective books that sold well (not necessarily in their lifetimes though)? Are books innocent? Surely not. Hitler (yet another Austrian/German) wrote a book too.

 

This is of course another one of Ozeki’s clever devices: having the book speak as a character, sidelining the author as a typist? In the brief beginning chapter entitled ‘In the Beginning’ she/they write(s):

 

A book must start somewhere. One brave letter must volunteer to go first, laying itself on the line in an act of faith, from which a word takes heart and follows, drawing a sentence into its wake. From there a paragraph amasses, and soon a page, and the book is on its way, finding a voice, calling itself into being.

 

As a poetic recipe this is fine. As a linguist I beg to differ (paraphrasing Chomsky): in the beginning is the syntax of a thought, filled in with words to create a meaningful (semantic) sentence. You also can create a meaningless but grammatically correct sentence like the famous Chomsky sentence: ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’ – which almost turned into a Zen koan in its own right, i.e. Zen often dwells on paradox, demonstrating the need to go beyond good and bad, beyond black and white, to overturn the human obsession with dualism. Sure, when language became reduced to a writing system, letters (pictograms, characters) became ever so important, especially when Gutenberg (yet another German) invented the printing press. I always joke that the Bible got it wrong with the beginning sentence ‘In the beginning was the word …’ and even worse by the stupid story of the Tower of Babel where God stopped the enterprise by confusing the builders with creating different languages.

 

Anyway, books, books and more books. In Alexandria I saw the newly built Library, the mother of all libraries, a modernist architectural failure, in my view. Still, quite amazing to stand at the place where over 2,000 years ago the likes of Benny were hiding away from the turmoil outside. Well, Benny’s and Co. library in Ozeki’s book sounds like nothing like a normal library, what with the homeless and alcoholics (Slavoj) hiding away during day and nighttime hours. Where I live in Auckland (NZ), they also still have libraries which I frequent on occasion but here the librarians keep out all non-desirables (or ‘deplorables’ as Hilary called them). Not that the homeless and somewhat degenerate intellectuals (Slavoj) in general are interested in invading temples of civilization where high-brow pretenders walk the aisles. 

 

Still. It makes sense that in The Book of Form and Emptiness the library is a focal point, as an island of calm in the sea of turmoil. The library even has a good librarian – as opposed to the dour school librarians I remember – by the name of Cory who in her first incarnation reads stories for children (Benny as a toddler included) and many years later (when Benny is high school age) saves Benny from going crazy in the library and then saves his mother by visiting her and getting her to start the decluttering enterprise. Cory is of course also present when, at her library, our Zen author of Tidy Magic performs the final act for Kenji’s ashes. Can Zen also save the library? Can libraries survive the digital age? 

 

Just like Annabelle’s analog newspaper monitoring job becomes redundant but continues on a bit as a digital business – but not for long. Same fate for the local community libraries? Of course, some of the more prestigious temples of books (cf. Alexandria) in the USA like the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC will remain as ‘living’ museums. I mention the latter as I took part in an on-line book discussion group organized by the Folger, with a distinct feeling that this is a virtual place to be seen to be believed. There was even a slight discussion of American democracy.

 

Ozeki replays this scenario a bit what with a looming election that descends into a riot when the results come in. Sounds familiar? To be replayed as I write this a week before 5/11. That Benny gets arrested in the fray, and hospitalized again on the psychiatric ward (due to the intervention of his psychiatrist) is an evolving story that is the other centerpiece of the novel.

 

When young Benny starts to hear voices in his head – coming from the outside or wherever – culminating in his stabbing his physics teacher with scissors because the scissors told him so, we are in the territory of psychiatry. Dr Melanie (first name only), his psychiatrist at the ward is first portrayed as the mainstream professional who hasn’t much of a clue apart from the dominant paradigm of Behaviourism in league with Big Pharma. She has never heard of the fact that all sentient beings/things have voices – scissors included – and people like Benny can hear them, or at least some of them, some good some bad. Dr Melanie insists that such voices are the product of a confused if not sick brain that can be subdued by appropriate medication. The other kids on the ward, including the mysterious Aleph, also suffer accordingly. Poor ‘old’ Benny becomes a basket case, shunted in and out of the psychiatric ward, in and out of ‘special’ education programs at school, until he finds a secret message from the Aleph to go to the ‘library’ to meet her and Slavoj and other like-minded outcasts. Benny manages to excuse himself from school by deception and forthwith goes to library instead of school. Some of the extra-curricular adventures involve meeting Slavoj and the Aleph at their ramshackle headquarters in an unused factory building on the fringe of town, where he learns, amongst other things, that everybody hears voices and that this is quite normal and nothing to worry about. Slavoj says that all good poets – like himself – compose poems dictated by voices. Benny also spends a night in the park with a ‘posse’ of bros, one which beats him up by mistake. Then again, a longer sojourn involves the burial of the Aleph’s pet rat, requiring a trip up the mountains. Camping in the open air, Benny develops some horny desires towards the Aleph but is cruelly rejected. “I love you” says the Aleph “but not like this”. So, there you are. Tragic for Benny but good too because the voices from the badlands subside and platonic love invades his adolescent mind, calming his head. In fact, he now begins to follow Slavoj’s lead to write it all down, whatever the voices have to say. His voice. Other voices. It’s all the same. Benny on the way to become an author? If anything, this is cathartic therapy that Dr Melanie should pay attention to, moving away from pills and conversion therapy, to the new (some say ‘old’) age of a psychotherapeutic treatment that encourages the creativity of the human mind. Sounds nice, I know. Having studied 101 psychology myself at university and having a partner who worked as a psychiatric nurse in ED for many years, I also have some reservations. When psychotic patients arrive by ambulance with a police escort there is no time for therapeutic discourse, there is only the needle that injects the sedative. Aotearoa/New Zealand has, however, the famous case of the psychotic patient released from a psychiatric hospital, only to write a best-seller about her experiences and goes on to become one of the most celebrated authors in New Zealand (her name is Janet Frame). But for every Janet Frame there are thousands who never see the light of the day in terms of literary talent. Maybe it was a kindly orientated psychiatrist that expelled Frame from the asylum, recognizing her talent as a writer before she started to write. Maybe in the same vein as Van Gogh’s psychiatrist in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence provided him with a studio to paint and then sent him on his way. They who are recognised (in their lifetime) as worthy of artistic genius are perhaps as lucky as those winning the jackpot in a lottery, the rest of us waiting for the day when everyone is a winner.

 

In any case, during Benny’s unexplained absences from home, Annabell, the mother, is freaking out, not knowing what to do, who to call (she has no friends or relatives), where to go – but all is well, sort of, whenever Benny returns, goes to his tidy bedroom and will not tell his crazy mother what is going on. All Annabelle can do is go to the charity shop and buy some trinkets to add to her ever-growing collection of junk - that is before the Tidy Magic takes a hold. But when the latter does kick in, there comes the next tragic event: she falls down the stairs carrying junk to the dumpster, lands on the back porch and passes out. Benny is out on one of his adventures and doesn’t know about it. Next morning or so, the No-Good son of the next-door ‘good’ landlady (Chinese) finds her covered in a blanket of crows, thinking she has died, and the crows are feasting on her dead body. In a tragi-comedic turn he takes a stick to scare away the crows and Annabelle wakes up, thinking No-Good is trying to kill her. Eventually this is all resolved by the story that the crows, whom she had been feeding for a long time – to the chagrin of No-Good who thought of crows as a pest – so when she collapsed the crows came down and settled on her to protect her from the cold night. Bit of a silly but heartwarming story! Anyway, when Benny returns and finds his mother in hospital, there is not much else that can go wrong, or rather shall we invoke Murphy’s Law ‘what can go wrong will go wrong’.

 

As a parable of middle America going to the dogs, this is all painful stuff, were it not for the glimmers of hope in the shape of working-class people coming to help each other, like Cory the librarian, and even Dr Melanie and a social worker who eventually relent and do not demand anymore that Benny is taken into foster care. Of course, Slavoj, the Aleph and Slavoj’s Slovenian friends come to the rescue too, sprucing up the apartment for Annabelle and Benny. How real is that? In my travels in the USA, I’ve seen glimpses of this happening, like in Chicago when working class people gather in the park to listen to union speakers who seem to be genuine ‘voices’ of the left, preaching solidarity and people power. However, as we all know, the big picture is as depressing as ever, as we speak, with Harris and Trump as a side-show for screwing the working classes (the proletariat or precariat) for all that they are worth for. Proxy wars around the world keep the armaments industries laughing all the way to the bank while the factory workers squeeze a minimum wage from the corporate owners, happy that they have a job at all, producing bombs on the assembly line. 

 

Ozeki and her ilk of good guys wearing Zen robes can see the cosmic joke in all of this MAD madness, and perhaps they are right. What else could it be? The sound of one hand clapping? A case of form and emptiness?