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A Beatiful books Shot

post from NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS on 04 July 2009 07:47:23 AM. © NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

Patrick Shanks steps up to the plate with a beautiful ‘books’ shot.The flip-flop does it for me.

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post from on 04 July 2009 07:23:56 AM. ©

Moviefone and the 15 Things to Know about Half-Blood Prince Including News on Scrimgeour, More[...]

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post from on 04 July 2009 06:23:30 AM. ©

PotterCast 198 3/4: "Pigfarts!"[...]

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a compact of words, rob mclennan

post from rob mclennan's blog on 04 July 2009 06:04:00 AM. © rob mclennan's blog

a compact of words, Canadian poet rob mclennan?s fifteenth trade poetry title, comes out of a series of reflections on domestic matters ? a break-up, his daughter ? influenced by the ghazal as brought into Canadian literature through the American ex-pat John Thompson in the 1970s. Through disparate leaps, the lines write as much between them as the words themselves, writing out a clear and present labyrinthine voice that goes beyond even what the words themselves convey. Where not a word is wasted.

Born in Ottawa in 1970, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. He has published nearly two dozen trade titles of poetry, fiction and non-fiction in Canada, England and Ireland, and his poetry, fiction and critical work has appeared in over one hundred journals and anthologies in fourteen countries and in three languages. A prolific editor and publisher, he has edited a number of books for publishers including Insomniac Press, NeWest Press, Guernica Editions, Black Moss and Vehicule, and is the editor/publisher of above/ground press and the long poem magazine STANZAS (both founded in 1993), the online critical journal Poetics.ca (with Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell), the Ottawa poetry annual ottawater (ottawater.com), the online critical journal seventeen seconds and (with Jennifer Mulligan) the trade literary publishing house Chaudiere Books. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com. He will be spending much of the next year in Toronto.

12.00Eur Paperback 134 x 210 mm 98 pages ISBN 978-1-907056-11-6 July 2009
For further information, and online ordering, check out the publisher's link here;

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My reading mojo

post from Vulpes Libris on 04 July 2009 04:53:02 AM. © Vulpes Libris

Reading was my first love. In the interim between my fifth birthday and the day I discovered alcohol and boys (discoveries that, as I remember it, both occurred on the same thrilling day) I was a bona fide bookworm. I was the sort of child who jumped feet first into a book, much like those [...]

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My Sister's Keeper - Book review

post from BiblioHistoria on 04 July 2009 04:37:00 AM. © BiblioHistoria

My Sister's Keeepr
by Jodi Picoult
Simon & Schuster 2004
Authors Website
Movie Website

I went to see the movie yesterday afternoon. And I purchased the book off a book shelf at the same time. So I hadn't read the book when the movie ended.

I brought the book because on her website, Jodi says that the ending of the movie was different from the ending in the book.

Having now read the book and seen the movie, I understand why they changed the ending, and I actually do prefer the movie ending rather than the book ending. There were a number of other changes as well.

I dont want to spoil the movie for you so I will try not to put any spoilers in this review.

In the book you have the Fitzgerald family living in Rhode Island, In the movie they are living in California. The family consists of Brian Fitzgerald, a firefighter, his wife Sarah, who used to be a lawyer but has been a SAHM (stay at home mom) for the last 12 years. Their children are from oldest to youngest - son Jesse, and daughters Kate and Anna.

When Kate was 2 years old she was diagnosed with APL (acute promyelocytic leukemia). Her older brother Jesse was not a match for her. Neither were the parents. They were unable to donate any blood or bone marrow.

So Sarah decided to have another baby who was a perfect genetic match. This baby was named Anna and she is the main character of the book (and movie). Anne was a testtube baby - one of 4 embryo's who were genetically manipulated to have all the proteins required to be a perfect match to Kate.

Anna's cord blood was donated to Kate right after she was born, in the hopes that this might stop the disease. It did but only for 5 years. From then on Anna is subjected to more and more procedures just to help Kate stay alive.

The life span of an APL patient is usually 5 to 6 years. Sarah was desperate to save Kate, so she had Anna. Every time Kate was hospitalised, Anna was forced to drop whatever she was doing, and rush to the hospital to have contribute more blood or bone marrow to Kate. All the attention was on Kate. Anna was only in the lime light when she was required to donate more blood or bone marrow. Jesse is ignored altogether.

At age 14, Kate's body start shutting down. First her kidneys. Anna is told by Sarah, that of course Anna will donate a kidney. Anna revolts, hires a lawyer and demands medical emancipation from her parents. She takes her parents to court. She wants to stop being forced to be a donor, even if this means Kate will die.

There are several other major things that are in the book but not in the movie. One is the court appointed guardian for Anna which is not mentioned at all in the movie. The second is Jesse's activities. While Jesse is seen out by himself in the city, his activities are not shown.

The movie was powerful enough without the guardian or Jesse's activities. I really wanted to call Cameron Diaz (who plays Sarah) a bitch for spending all her time on ONE child at the expense of the other two kids. No parents should be like that. However I know that Cameron is just acting. She was so believable.

Also in the book the judge who is deciding the court case is a man. In the movie the judge is a woman. And in the movie, Kate gets to go to the beach. In the book she does not.

As to the ending, well one sister does die. You have to see the movie and read the book to find out which.

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Stewart L. Utdall Pens Book on Environment

post from The New Book Review on 04 July 2009 04:16:00 AM. © The New Book Review

Title: The Quiet Crisis
Author: Stewart L. Udall
Categories: Environmentalism, Nonfiction
ISBN:B0011UH0S8

Reviewed by Taylor Smith

To my way of thinking one of the greatest tragedies of modern American politics has been the increasing polarization on a wide range of issues which focuses more on who is right rather than what is right and in the public interest. Nowhere is this truer than in the realm of environmental policies. We endlessly debate issues which have grave importance for the future only paying heed to the demagogy of the left or right and ignore the true moral, historical and scientific issues at hand.

The author of this book is Stewart L. Udall, a distant cousin a couple times removed from me on my father?s side. He was a Democrat (I know! I have relatives who are donkeys!), and JFK?s Secretary of the Interior. This book has had a profound impact on the way that many Americans think and feel about the environment. For this reason I am writing a review of it by itself rather than with a companion book like usual for my blog. I think it is important enough that it needs to be considered on its own.

The book chronicles the history of the United States from the perspective of the land. The first period is the era of contact between Native Americans and the European settlers and the contrast between their respective views of the land. To the Natives the land was something owned by everybody in the same way as the ocean, air, sky and stars were the property of no single individual. To the Europeans, however, land ownership was the entire basis of their society and, for the English especially, the entire reason for their being in America.

This land ownership, however, was fundamentally at odds with the Native concept (and indeed the older medieval concept of land ownership in Europe) which stressed the claim of future generations on the land and allowed for the use, but not abuse, of the resources available from the land. I could elaborate on the late medieval/early modern shift in concepts about ownership, but I will spare all of you this lesson for now!

This new concept of land ownership was coupled with a new idea arising from the sheer size and overwhelming wildness of the American continent which Udall calls the ?myth of superabundance.? In short the idea is that there are so many buffalo, beaver and deer, so much fertile soil and forests and so many mineral deposits that conserving them was counterproductive and uncompetitive. The final critical element added to this mix was the rugged individualism which helped to create the essential elements of American democracy but also contributed to a lack of civic mindedness among some classes. Thus the few who made massive fortunes at the public expense were often seen as good examples rather than the pillagers of the future that they were.

Gradually some people began to see that this system was unsustainable and ethically lacking. Diverse characters like Davie Crockett, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Daniel Boone, and other began to see the effect on the land that our unthinking policies were having. Eventually as we began to have massive extinctions on our own soil (there were more than five billion passenger pigeons in the United States at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but shortly before the start of the twentieth century the last surviving member of the species died in a zoo in Ohio), and people like Audubon and other conservationists and scientists began to take action. Eventually people like Teddy Roosevelt were able to make political gains in breaking up the Iron Triangles (a political science term for the relationship between business, regulation agencies and congressional committees which all deal with a particular subject and often scratch each others backs) which had allowed so much of this legal pillaging to happen.

Now as a country we have made a good start, but there is still a lot to do. The balance between using resources and preserving land is a delicate one (one person quoted in the book says that the boundaries between the workshop and the temple of nature is inevitably going to be a contentious issue) and has not been fully resolved. However the scientists, politicians, farmers, hunters, activist, philanthropists, and voters of the last century have done some wonderful things to try and help preserve for us large areas of wilderness.

Now we have challenges involving overcrowding, littering, pollution, and a lack of planning- all brought on because we still lack a sense of reverence for nature and our environment. As the author put it:

"The quiet crisis demands a rethinking of land attitudes, deeper involvement by leaders of business and government, and methods of making conservation decisions which put a premium on foresight. With the acumen of our scientists we can achieve optimum development of resources that will let us pluck the fruits of science without harming the tree of life. Once we decide that our surroundings need not always be subordinated to payrolls and profits based on short-term considerations, there is hope that we can both reap the bounty of the land and preserve an inspiriting environment."

I wish that we would all take a step back and reevaluate our opinions and activities in light of an increased respect for the earth and for the future generations that are going to inherit it. Maybe this is all a little too utopian and impractical, but if we are only thinking about here and now how can we claim to be any better than the people who came before us? It is easy to be critical of the slaughter of the buffalo as a short-sighted policy, but are we any better? I?ll let you decide that for yourself.
-----
The New Book Review is blogged by Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of the multi award-winning HowToDoItFrugally series of books for writers. It is a free service offered to those who want to encourage the reading of books they love. That includes authors who want to share their favorite reviews, reviewers who'd like to see their reviews get more exposure, and readers who want to shout out praise of books they've loved. Please see submission guidelines on the left of this page. Reviews and essays are indexed by author names, reviewer names, and review sites. Writers will find the index handy for gleaning the names of small publishers. Find other writer-related blogs at Sharing with Writers and The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor.
This blogfeed is from Carolyn Howard-Johnson's The New Book Review, a service of HowToDoItFrugally, a series of multi award-winning books for writers. www.howtodoitfrugally.com

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The Philosophy of Shadows

post from Brit Lit Blogs on 04 July 2009 02:30:58 AM. © Brit Lit Blogs

By Richard Marshall.

sdt

Roy Sorensen, Seeing Dark Things: The Philosophy of Shadows, OUP, 2008

This is a wonderful book, full of a profound, unsettling cleverness and weirdly satisfying counter-intuitiveness that the subject requires. Sorenson tries to answer puzzles that rear themselves in childhood and won?t be dispelled by the offhand disinterest of grown-ups. What is a shadow made of? (Absence of light.) What?s the difference between a shadow and a silhouette? (Silhouette?s are the far side of an object being shown on the side facing the observer and is therefore part of that object. A shadow is just an absence of light caused by an object blocking off light in a three dimensional space and so is no part of any object.) Is black a colour or just the absence of colour? (A colour.) Can you see darkness? (Yes, unless you?re blind.) Is there a difference between a blind person?s experience of a totally dark cave and a sighted person? (Yes, because dark is something that is seen, blindness is an absence of any seeing at all. Total dark is seen as black, if you can?t see you can?t see colour.) Do shadows spin if the object causing it spins? (Yes.) If you have two shadows and you join them side by side, do you still have two shadows? (Yes, although it may look to you that there is just one.) Can shadows move quicker than the speed of light? (Yes.)

He also asks other brilliant questions that are connected and analogous, such as questions about sound. Can you hear silence? (Yes, because silence is the total absence of sound and you pick that out by hearing. A deaf person can?t pick out anything by hearing.) Is there silence when there?s noise at the same time and in the same place? (No, because silence is the absence of noise. You can?t have absence of noise and noise at the same time and place. But there are interesting issues about where is a sound? Is it where it?s cause is, or everywhere the soundwaves go?) And he asks whether we see holes or just the surrounding things. Are holes things or just the shape of things? Or are they just gaps between things? (Holes are 3-D absent things, which is why we can see them and touch them and why don?t see the gaps between things as holes and can?t touch those gaps.) If there?s an eclipse of the sun caused by a large far planet getting in between us and the sun, and then a nearer smaller planet blocks out the far planet, which planet is blocking the sun from us, the near one or the far one? (This last one is Sorenson?s famous puzzle ? he says you see the far one not the near one because it?s the far one that causes the blockage of light.)

Well, you can see from this list ? and these are just some of his questions and answers, the guy asks more than this snap sample ? that Sorenson is an amazingly fertile thinker. His conclusions are as unsettling as his questions, and the reasons he has for getting to the answers are also fantastic because they are rigorous and draw on up to date science and philosophy plus deft, quick-footed illustrations. He has a fantastic way of giving vivid thought experiments to get the strangeness of the whole subject across and there are loads of really helpful pictures too.

Sorenson has a reason for looking at shadows and such like. Sorenson takes issue with a prejudice against negative reality that he thinks colours much metaphysics and, because of this, science and semantics too. We are prejudiced against what is not there, favouring in our explanations what is present instead. He gives as examples of this prejudice Henri Bergson, Victor Hugo, Lewis Carroll and Jean Paul Sartre as all expressing this prejudice towards what is present over what is absent. He writes in his essay on Nothingness on the Stanford University website that; ?Henri Bergson maintained that nothingness is precluded by the positive nature of reality. The absence of a female pope is not a brute fact. ?There is not a female pope? is made true by a positive fact such as the Catholic Church’s regulation that all priests be men and the practice of drawing popes from the priesthood. Once we have the positive facts and the notion of negation, we can derive all the negative facts. ?There is nothing? would be a contingent, negative fact. But then it would have to be grounded on some positive reality. That positive reality would ensure that there is something rather than nothing.?

In Les Misérables, he asserts that Victor Hugo contrasts universal negation with universal affirmation: ?All roads are blocked to a philosophy which reduces everything to the word ?no.? To ?no? there is only one answer and that is ?yes.? Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing. Man lives more by affirmation than by bread. (1862, pt. 2, bk. 7, ch. 6).

He gives a further example of Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. ?I hope you’ll enjoy the dinner?such as it is; and that you won’t mind the heat?such as it isn’t.?

The sentence sounded well, but somehow I couldn’t quite understand it ? (chapter 22)

And finally when Jean Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness arrives late for his appointment with Pierre at the cafe, he claims he sees the absence of Pierre but not the absence of the Duke of Wellington.

Sorenson denies the claims of these four and argues for the metaphysical importance of the absent, arguing against the deeply held prejudice in philosophy and science to make reality solely about things that are there. Hence his interest in shadows. Shadows are real things that are made up of absence of light. They are not subjective things though they are immaterial things. When people aren?t looking they still exist. They are black but they are not black because they absorb all light. Not all black things are black for that reason. Shadows are black because shadows are the absence of light. Blackness is not the same as darkness. Things can be dark but not black. Shadows are black not dark because the absence of light is black not dark. Shadows are a good example for Sorenson of this idea that reality is also about what is absent, about what isn?t there as well as what is there. What isn?t there is not parasitical on what is, in fact if anything, for Sorenson, absence is the first order thing. He looks at optics and suggests that without being able to see absent things we wouldn?t see the things that are there.

So the main thesis of the book is that negative facts exist. In my room at present there are no elephants. This is a negative fact about my room at the moment. (It?s likely to be a fact about my room that is going to be always true and always has been but who knows, it?s a contingent fact about my room at the moment.) It has nothing to do with anything subjective though, like my expectation that there will be a student currently absent in a classroom so I say that she is absent. Her absence is a fact independent of my expectation, as is the negative fact about there being no elephant in my room.

So Sorenson disagrees with a great deal of contemporary science and philosophywhich thinks reality is exhausted by explaining everything that is present. But he doesn?t do that explicitly in the book, although it?s much clearer in the Standford University article about Nothingness that he does. He notes in both the book and the article that Bertrand Russell took this view to Harvard after he couldn?t get ?The cat was not on the mat? to be parsed successfully in terms that didn?t use a negative somewhere along the line and caused a riot when he announced that consequently he believed that negative facts existed.

Seeing things that are not there is useful. It is a crucial part of being able to see. Hence his analysis of shadows. Without shadows, which are the absence of light in conditions that make the absence visible, seeing objects that are there wouldn?t have evolved. So seeing absence of light, which is the colour black, and not just dark, which is certainly not the same as the experience of being blind, which is the absence of seeing, is an important piece of evidence to support the thesis that negative facts exist. He argues that a baby born in total darkness can see that darkness, even if they can?t focus their eyes. That baby sees the black if she has normal vision. A baby who was so born and then died before seeing light would have therefore seen everything in their life without ever having seen light. It would be a total life experienced as seeing nothing but absence.

Sorenson argues that a sighted man in a totally dark cave sees the darkness but a blind person doesn?t see anything. Only the sighted can tell just by looking that the cave is totally dark. It isn?t the same kind of experience either. The absent of sight is what is happening at the back of your head right now. It isn?t the same as seeing blackness. A normally sighted person looking at the black and white squares of a chessboard sees more when looking at the board on a colour tv than on a black and white one because he sees the absence of colour in the colour tv but doesn?t in the other one. The experience may seem to be identical, but then this shows that a purely phenomenological approach to seeing and colour and the metaphysics of absent things is inadequate. It can?t explain the difference between seeing blackness in colour and not seeing it in colour.

Silence is a negative fact, being the absence of noise. Like blackness, it can be caused by different things. Two noises can cancel each other out so the effect is silence. But if one of the noises stops the other noise becomes audible. The noise was there all the time. So hearing silence is again not like not hearing. And so too with cold. Cold is for Sorenson just the absence of heat. Apparently some have claimed he makes a mistake of physics when he claims that a vacuum has no temperature. But he rightly says that physicists can only say that a vacuum has a temperature because it isn?t actually empty. To a layman this is a kind of cheat that physicists need to fess up to so Sorenson?s ideas still have force. Cold is not a something but is a nothing, is a lack of heat. It is a fact nevertheless. It is an important fact, because it can kill people. So this absent fact is very important.

He disagrees with Cage when Cage explained that his 4?33?? of silence was about showing an audience that silence was impossible because throughout the performance there were intruding sounds from people coughing and traffic noise and so on. Sorenson disagrees with anyone who wants to claim that. He sees such claims as part of the prejudice for only having an explanation of reality in terms of facts that are there. Sartre?s Being and Nothingness is full of this prejudice, as are the metaphysics of Bataille. Any philosophy that thinks reality is exhausted when it has explained positive fact is wrong because negative facts are part of reality too. Cage?s point is bogus as it makes standards for silence artificially high and for noise artificially low. And it is even by those standards false: most of the universe is empty and so black and silent and cold; eventually, as Sorenson points out, everything will be destroyed and the universe will be totally like that, all over, forever.

Sorenson allows for subtleties that sceptics about absent facts don?t allow. So we can start to understand that it is the silence underneath the music that allows us to hear the music. We make silence so that musicians can fill it with sound. Artists can play with our prejudice for the positive fact over the negative fact in order to gain profound effects. So in Harold Pinter?s radio play A Slight Ache one character is silent throughout so the drama emerges out of the question of that absence. The audience begins to wonder if the third person is real. A hunter sits down to hear silence. A pause has to end or it is no longer a pause. The edge of silence can?t be detected so the centre is where we concentrate on. Which is part of the problem of knowing where a sound is, and so of knowing where silence is too.

It is the absence of light that guides our visual understanding of 3-D space. Shadows contradict Berkeley?s assertion that it is touch that informs us of that 3-D quality of space. We work out the solidity of things by seeing how they make light absent. If shadows are caused by the absence of light then Hume?s sceptical arguments against causation are damaged; if there is no causation as Hume contends but just one damn thing after the next then there could not be shadows. But there are shadows. Night is the shadow of the earth. It is darkest at midnight. We are afraid in this dark. If there are no such things as shadows then what are we afraid of? We are afraid of darkness without anything stimulating the fear. This contradicts the empiricist principle that we learn everything from experience.

The use of shadows by most conscious life, even mosquito larvae, takes away the force of metaphysical paradox and claims of depth that post war existentialists claim for humans? perception of nothingness. In Nazi philosopher Heidegger’s What is Metaphysics? we get an example of the twisty windiness that treats Nothingness in a spirit of bravery, facing nothingness?s ironies and paradoxes in a manner that lesser thinkers would be too scared to handle when he writes ?What is to be investigated is being only and?nothing else; being alone and further?nothing; solely being, and beyond being-nothing. What about this Nothing? ? Does the Nothing exist only because the Not, i.e. the Negation, exists? Or is it the other way around? Does Negation and the Not exist only because the Nothing exists? ? We assert: the Nothing is prior to the Not and the Negation?. Where do we seek the Nothing? How do we find the Nothing?. We know the Nothing?. Anxiety reveals the Nothing?. That for which and because of which we were anxious, was ‘really’?nothing. Indeed: the Nothing itself?as such?was present?. What about this Nothing??The Nothing itself nothings. (Heidegger as quoted by Carnap in ?The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language?) But as Sorenson is happy to note, if Heidegger?s sentences are crammed with meaningless then they are like shadows of meaning themselves and can be understood as illuminating nonsense by being an absence of meaning, just as shadows are an absence of light.

Absences cause things. Absence causes the blackness of shadows. Blackness is not absence of vision but absence of light, is Milton?s darkness visible. Holes are absent spaces and can be felt. So holes are absent facts that are sensitive to touch as well as sight. A leper with dead fingers can?t feel holes with her fingers. A shadow is absent light, sensitive only to sight but not touch, or smell, taste etc. A blind person can?t see shadows, so pitch black night is not the same for her as for a sighted person. The sky is like a hole and therefore is an immaterial object and like a hole it would disappear if the earth and moon disappeared.

Sorenson is a proponent of epistemic vagueness. That?s the idea that borderline cases are not indeterminate but unknowable due to the absolute limitation of human knowledge to know where the borders of borderline cases are. Whether coffee is food is therefore unknowable because it?s a borderline case of food. It is either a food or isn?t but we can never know. He?s written a great deal about this view. He?s written a history of the paradox as well, another marvel of concise precision. This is what he does, splurge out his tightly argued, focused and brilliant thoughts with wit and engaging enthusiasm all the time to make us think again. But his arguments about seeing dark things and the like is not about epistemology but ontology, about what exists rather than how we know that exist. And he?s really about dispelling the paradoxical nature of the existence of absent things so that he can dispel the prejudice that such claims of paradox have been used to endorse. By looking at dark things he brings enlightenment and lets us play around with the thoughts we had when kids, before we were told to shut up and grow up.

There?s so much to like and admire in this book. I like the examples he brings in from films and books and artists to make his point. For example he shows the error of the visuals in the fight in Star Wars between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker when their light beam swords throw shadows. If the swords are beams of light then they couldn?t cause a shadow, shadows being absence of light. Candle flames can?t cause shadows either.

I read Sorenson?s book just after rereading Mark Z Danielewki?s Book of Leaves which is a novel that plays around with ideas about holes in light and space and sound to create a deranged reality of terror and horror. It?s a haunted house novel of exceptional skill, beauty and depth and one that Sorenson?s ideas enrich. It also got linked up in my head with Lovecraft inevitably where his story The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath is linked with the hollow earth reverse fantasy of John Uri Lloyd?s Etidorhpa , the very title of which, by spelling ?Aphrodite? backwards, signals the strange disorientations that discussions of negative realities bring about. Sorenson?s description of the possibility of hollowing out a shadow so that it is at times merely a surface of no depth at all is spooky as hell and links up with a whole genre of hollow earth fiction that includes Poe and the last novel of the awesome Pynchon). In Lovecraft?s story The Shadow Out Of Time we are presented with a similarly underground world of horrific and insane shadows crossing enormous spans of time that locates a reference to native Australian mythology used by the unfortunately racist Lovecraft to signal the profound influence darkness had on his whole oevre. In this great story references Buddai, ? a gigantic old man?? according to the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, ?? lying asleep for ages , with his head resting upon his arm, which is deep in the sand. He is expected one day to awake and eat up the world.?

This links us back again to the way some philosophers, like Heidegger, see negatives as a necessary nihilistic force for creating the world we have. The American philosopher Robert Nozak thought something like this when he thought about the existentialists ideas about the use of nihilism as a force to impede reality. He thought, like Heidegger, that there must be something self destructive in this nihilism in order for there to be something rather than nothing. This idea is found illustrated in the Beatles film The Yellow Submarine where there is a hoover-creature that hoovers everything into itself and then finally, paradoxically, hoovers itself into itself too. At which point a plenitude of non-negative reality sprouts into being. Sorenson points out that Heidegger would have thought that this was far too historical an understanding of what he was going on about. Lovecraft seems to have something like this in mind in his stuff too where the horrific dark is a destructive nihilism the suppression of which enables there to be existence for a while. Sorenson points out that a shadow could travel faster than the speed of light because it is an absence of signal and the Special Theory of Relativity only forbids things that carry a signal from moving faster than the speed of light. Time travel then might be possible for shadows. This strange thought I found disquieting somehow, projecting it onto Lovecraft and Poe somehow.

Sorenson is clear; non-being is real. It?s there even when we?re not. Animals, even the smallest bugs, see non-being, because they see shadows and holes, feel cold and hear silence. Shadows, holes, cold and silence are negative facts in our world. And when we?ve gone the way of the dinosaurs they?ll still be there. We all know about absence. When someone we care about dies they are not here anymore and that is a fact we have to live with and something that causes grief. They have become an absence. It?s a fact about reality that presence doesn?t exhaust. So we should stop being prejudiced about present facts and start thinking about the reality of things not here as well. And another reason for doing this is because ?there are many more ways for things not to happen than to happen? so we get to expand our horizons of reality with this approach. I like the way he keeps it all on the ground. As he says in the introduction, ?Before we run with the likes of Sartre and Heidegger, let us walk with shadows.? It?s a great book.

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ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Richard Marshall is contributing editor to 3:AM and lives in London.

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The Everything Austen Challenge

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My suitcase simply isnt big enough a conundrum
and a competition

As you can see, I’ve been collecting again. Oh, that’ll do nicely for my German trip … and that … and that … oh, that too. If I packed them all, there’d be no room left for clothing. What is a bookworm to do?The good news is the problem has been solved with bookworm and suitcase now on their way [...]

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conundrum-and-a-competition/