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A Quantum Novel

Posted on March 9, 2016 by Lesley Hazleton

Allow me to rave. I’ve read several good novels over the past few months, but none has bowled me over like this one.

suddendeath2Sudden Death is bawdy and metaphysical, cheeky and deadly serious, vividly funny and yet written from a place of very deep pain. In other words, it’s totally uncategorizable. And if I try to describe it, I know I’ll only turn most readers off.

It’s set in the sixteenth century, for a start. It revolves around a tennis match. It takes place in Mexico and Italy and Spain. The dialogue is without quotation marks, so you need to hear the speakers rather than read them. And on the very first page, there’s a sentence in Latin, untranslated.

Are you sufficiently turned off?

So let me tell you that the tennis ball in play is made of Ann Boleyn’s red hair, cut off her head just before her head was cut off from her body. And that there was nothing Wimbledon-like about tennis in the Renaissance, when it was a vicious game beloved by gamblers and low-lifes.

Then let me tell you that one of the players is a certain artist by the name of Caravaggio. And that one of the judges is a mathematician who turns out to be, on nearly the very last page… (but no, that would be a spoiler). And that major appearances are made by the conquistador Hernán Cortés, by Aztec emperors, by a Mayan princess, and by an assortment of venal popes. And – the clincher for me – grappa is downed by the jugful.

Or perhaps you’ll be as entranced as I am by tapestries woven entirely of feathers (scroll to the end for a piece made of hummingbird and parrot feathers). Or by the extraordinary mastery of the way Enrigue spans time and distance, finally setting my head spinning as though I was on mushrooms.

This Spanish and Mexican award-winner is the first of Enrigue’s novels to be translated into English, and I want to read all of them, right now. In the meantime, after marveling for a day once I’d finished this one, I began reading it again – and realized that of all the blurbs on the back cover, only the late lamented Carlos Fuentes manages to describe Sudden Death the way I would if I could.

This is a novel, he wrote, that “belongs to Max Planck’s quantum universe rather than the relativistic universe of Albert Einstein: a world of coexisting fields in constant interaction and whose particles are created or destroyed in the same act.”

Precisely (as it were): a quantum novel. No wonder I can’t describe it. No wonder many people will be frustrated by it. No wonder I love it.

————-

In case you take the leap, here’s a rough version of the Latin on the first page (with a bit of help from Google Translate). It’s a quote from the fifteenth-century Bishop of Exeter describing tennis as “profane oaths and gatherings, illicit and full of perjuries, often with fighting.”

And here — miserably flat and two-dimensional — is a Mexican Indian feather-art portrait of Jesus, made with hummingbird and parrot feathers:

feather portrait

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This Pre-Order Thing

Posted on March 4, 2016 by Lesley Hazleton

Is this pre-order thing bugging you? I don’t blame you — it bugs me too. That should stop me from suggesting you pre-order the agnostic manifesto (and herewith, a huge thanks to those who’ve already done so). But I’ve persisted nonetheless — partly because I’m a persistent creature in general, but mainly because I know it’s important.

The question is what makes it so important.

And it comes down to — ugh — algorithms. Particularly Amazon’s algorithms. Which are, depending on your point of view, either awesomely or horrendously powerful.

I generally delight in resisting these algorithms. The day Amazon “suggests” books I actually want to read will be the day I know they’ve finally got my number. So far, I’m glad to say, they haven’t been able to figure me out. I use their site in order to scope out books — read descriptions, reviews, and so on — and my range of interest is evidently algorithm-defiant. The program doesn’t yet exist that can predict that someone who wrote a biography of Muhammad is also interested in quantum physics. Or that someone into philosophy would currently be devouring a book on rust (yes, rust). I imagine algorithmic wheels spinning in frustration.

pre-order4And yet, to the best of my very partial knowledge, the pre-order thing works. It can boost just about any book (as well as toys, games, and almost everything else), because it’s a generator. Which is to say, pre-publication sales generate post-publication sales.

How? Those algorithms are self-adapting operating instructions: the more data they chew up, the more they “learn.” So as the number of orders rises before publication, the algorithms pick up on it and pay more attention. They begin to promote the book. It’ll start appearing in those you-may-also-be-interested-in lists, or on order-together-with banners. And as pre-orders rise — at a lower price point than after publication — so too does the prediction of larger orders once the book has been published.

A chain reaction is set in motion. Booksellers order more copies from the publishers, who then print more copies and invest more in ads in order to sell those copies, which then means that the book is more visible, which leads to greater interest in it and thus to more sales in brick-and-mortar bookstores as well as online ones, which sends more algorithmic wheels spinning, and…  lo and behold:  a self-fulfilling prophecy is set in motion.

pre-order2I am no fan of prophecies, self-fulfilling or otherwise, but I have to acknowledge that Amazon has figured out the math behind a basic marketing principle:  the more an item has already sold, the more it will continue to sell, regardless of the intrinsic worth of that item.

Shudder all you like at this — I certainly do. I find it hard to get my mind around the idea of anything I write being seen as a consumer item, subject to the same kind of marketing analysis as diapers or turkeys. But that merely goes some way to explaining why Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is a multi-billionaire, and I… am not.

I have less than zero desire to shill for Amazon or for Barnes and Noble or for any other online store offering pre-order discounts (I even pay to keep ads off this blog), so I would ignore the whole business if it weren’t that I want to give Agnostic the best possible chance in a world newly dominated by metrics and by hard-nosed marketing decisions.

Call it the pre-order paradox, if you like: I don’t mean to bug you, but I do. The hell of it is that I then have to acknowledge that the algorithms have gotten to me after all….

pre-order3

Filed under: agnosticism, existence, technology | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 6 Comments »

The Agnostic Celebration

Posted on February 29, 2016 by Lesley Hazleton

Five weeks to go to release of the agnostic manifesto!  Last week I posted the first couple of pages, so now here’s a taste of how the first chapter ends:

It’s time to get beyond either/or, yes-or-no answers, because while such a digital way of thinking may be excellent for computers, it is downright dangerous for human beings.  The grim joylessness of fundamentalism is testament to that.

I want to bring color the table — to explore the richly textured terrain in which we really live instead of the narrow black-and-white one in which preachers and pundits have tried to confine us….  And to approach this whole complex, often crazed subject of faith-belief-meaning-mystery-existence not as something to be ‘solved,’ but as an ongoing, open-ended adventure of the mind…

What impels me is a desire to rise above the plethora of things-taken-for-granted, to shrug off the multiple tyrannies of the definite article (the truth, the soul, the universe, the meaning of life), and to find more honest ways — both intellectual and emotional — to talk about such intangibles as God, infinity, and consciousness.

To those looking for certainty, such a stance will be nothing short of a nightmare.  It embraces both possibility and its correlate, uncertainty.  It suspects all absolutes, all simplifications… It takes delight in the play of ideas, and resists all attempts to shoehorn them into the narrow constraints of conviction.

No ‘answers’ here, then.  I make no claim to truth, let alone ‘the Truth,’ buttressed with that capital letter to give it a kind of unassailable grandeur.  There are already far too many people convinced that they possess such presumptuous truth, and I do not intend to add to their number.

Neither do I have any desire to preach, or to convert anyone to agnosticism.  In fact I’d take the ‘ism’ out of that word if I could, since the last thing needed is yet another pompously ‘complete’ system of thought demanding adherence to some sort of party line.

So while I offer this book as an agnostic manifesto, I recognize that it’s a strange kind of manifesto indeed — one that offers no certainties, and eschews brashly confident answers to grand existential questions.  And if this makes it a peculiarly paradoxical creature, that is exactly what it needs to be, because to be agnostic is to cherish both paradox and conundrum.  It is to acknowledge the unknowable and yet explore it at the same time — and to do so with zest, in a celebration not only of the life of the mind, but of life itself.

(I’ll be posting later in the week about the pre-order thing, and why I have the gall to keep asking you to do it.  Meanwhile… here!)

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The First Two Pages

Posted on February 23, 2016 by Lesley Hazleton

How Agnostic begins:

There are some four hundred houseboats in Seattle. Many, like mine, are little more than shacks on rafts, but this may be the only one with a mezuzah at its entrance.

mezuzahIf I were religious, the small cylindrical amulet would hold a miniature scroll inscribed with the Shema, the Jewish equivalent of the Lord’s Prayer or the Islamic Shahada. But mine doesn’t, partly because the scroll kept falling out when I put the mezuzah up on the doorpost, and partly because I don’t believe a word of the prayer anyway. I’m not sure what happened to it. I may have thrown it out in a tough-minded moment, or it may be squirreled away in the bottom of a drawer somewhere. No matter. Most of the time I don’t even notice the mezuzah, and neither does anyone else. But I know it’s there, and that does matter.

Yet why should it? I am firmly agnostic, and haven’t been to a synagogue service in years. Decades, in fact. So is this mezuzah an empty sentimental gesture on my part, or does the word hypocrisy apply? Could I be in denial: a closet theist, or a more deeply closeted atheist? Or am I just a timid fence-sitter, a spineless creature trying to have it both ways, afraid to commit herself one way or the other?

And there’s the problem — right there in that phrase “one way or the other.” It sees the world in binary terms:  yes or no, this side or that. It insists that I can be either agnostic or Jewish but not both, even though both are integral parts of this multi-faceted life that is mine, as integral as being a writer, a psychologist, a feminist, all the many aspects of this particular person I am. All are part of the way I experience the world, and myself in it. Take any one of these aspects away, and I’d be someone else.

To be agnostic is to love this kind of paradox. Not to skirt it, nor merely to tolerate it, but to actively revel in it. The agnostic stance defies artificial straight lines such as that drawn between belief and unbelief. It is free-spirited, thoughtful, and independent — not at all the wishy-washy I-don’t-knowness that atheists often accuse it of being. In fact the mocking tone of such accusations reveals the limitations of dogmatic atheism. There’s a bullying aspect to it, a kind of schoolyard taunting of agnostics as “lacking the courage of their convictions” — a phrase that raises the question of what exactly conviction has to do with courage.

We need room, I continue, in which to explore and entertain possibilities instead of heading for a safe seat at the one end or the other of an artificially created spectrum:

What’s been missing is a strong, sophisticated agnosticism that does not simply avoid thinking about the issues, nor sit back with a helpless shrug, but actively explores the paradoxes and possibilities inherent in the vast and  varied universe of faith-belief-meaning-mystery-existence. That’s my purpose here.

I want to explore unanswerable questions with an open mind instead of approaching them with dismissive derision or with the solemn piety of timid steps and bowed head — to get beyond old, worn-out categories and establish an agnostic stance of intellectual and emotional integrity, fully engaged with this strange yet absorbing business of existence in the world.

I’ll be posting more extracts in the weeks ahead, but in the meantime… well, you know what to do:  pre-order here!

 

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Two Thumbs-Up For “Agnostic”

Posted on February 10, 2016 by Lesley Hazleton

Wow!

Publishers Weekly, the Big Daddy of all pre-publication reviewers, has given two big thumbs-up to Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto.

First thumb-up:  It’s featured on their Most-Anticipated-Spring-Books list as “brilliant and provocative”–

ag final coverAgnostic by Lesley Hazleton (Riverhead, Apr.) – A celebration of agnosticism as the most vibrant, engaging—and ultimately the most honest—stance toward the mysteries of existence. In this provocative, brilliant book, Hazleton breaks agnosticism free of its stereotypes as watered-down atheism or amorphous “seeking” and recasts the question of belief not as a problem to be solved but as an invitation to an ongoing, open-ended adventure of the mind.

Second thumb-up:  They just gave it a terrific starred review:

Though Hazleton’s subtitle boasts a manifesto to follow, she advises readers early that this manifesto is “strange” in that it “makes no claims to truth, offers no certainties, eschews brashly confident answers to grand existential questions… because to be agnostic is to cherish both paradox and conundrum.” Hazleton immediately sets herself in relation (and in opposition) to the conversation among the four most prominent “new atheists” (she calls them H2D2)—Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins, and Dennett. Their “contemptuous” tone toward the religious is problematic, in her opinion, and they often substitute “wittily phrased generalizations for clarity of thought.” Hazleton flies through the history of various thinkers in concise and fluid prose, treating the reader to a quick yet thorough journey through theology and philosophy. To be agnostic is not to sidestep the question of belief, for Hazleton, or to commit to a wishy-washy moral framework. It is instead to have enough backbone to stand firm in the liminality of uncertainty. She wants readers to give agnosticism a fair shake, and many will be convinced by her appealing voice and accessible prose. (Apr.)
I’m beginning to get excited…

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A Superbowl Holdout

Posted on February 8, 2016 by Lesley Hazleton

The one thing I really like about the Superbowl is that for a few hours on a Sunday afternoon in February, the whole urban world goes very quiet. Just about everyone else seems to be glued to the television, eating guacamole and downing beer. Since neither guacamole nor beer figure in my concept of the good things in life, I politely decline invitations to Superbowl viewing parties and instead, roam the empty streets and appreciate the silence.

2footballAnd yesterday, as I indulged once more in this unwonted peacefulness, I realized that despite my seemingly un-American aversion to American football, I have lived in the United States more than half my life.

I was somewhat stunned by this fact. It’s been many years since I added an American passport to my British one (the airport shuffle: “which one do you want?”), yet I still don’t think of myself as “an American.” On the other hand, I don’t think of myself as British either. For someone who’s lived on three continents, nationality is not a big definer of identity.

Yet you’d think that after so much time, I’d have a good handle on American folkways such as the Superbowl. I followed baseball with a passion for the first few years I was here, and a column I wrote on it for the New York Times is still probably the most reprinted piece I’ve ever written. It even became part of a Smithsonian exhibit. But whatever the opposite of a passion is, that’s what I have for American football.

A new acquaintance once tried to turn me on to the game (if “game” is the right word for a ritual in which people do their best to bash each others’ brains in, with well-documented and utterly predictable long-term results) by explaining that it was really all about real estate. If he’d known me better, he’d have tried a different tack. This was in New York, where at the time, real estate regularly made for stultifying dinner-party conversation.

More recent attempts to persuade me that it’s really a game of strategy just made me long to get back to the backgammon board or the billiard table, at both of which I acquit myself with much more gusto than skill.

Call me slow on the uptake, but this morning I finally realized that the Superbowl is about neither real estate nor strategy. As Bernie Sanders would doubtless point out, it’s about money. Big money. Which is why a considerable portion of the news coverage of the game today is devoted not to the game itself but to the commercials.

The Superbowl is really the fraternal twin of that other big-bucks rite of communal television worship, the Oscars (with the difference that in football you actually get to see black people in starring roles).  And for me, at least, it’s just about as irrelevant, which is why I’ve already turned down invitations to Oscar-viewing parties (I used to accept, only to find myself in endless complaint about the awards going to the wrong people and the wrong movies). Nothing for it but to just be un-American again, and take to the streets to commune with the silence…

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The Art of Not Knowing

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Lesley Hazleton

asmKirkus weighs in with another pre-publication review of the agnostic manifesto:

“Here, with clever elucidation, are artful essays that celebrate the wonder of the unknown… Hazleton does not deny possibilities; she denies only assured and implacable dogma.”

I know it’s pointless to review the reviews, but I can’t help myself.  “Clever elucidation”?  What about simply lucid?  Never mind: it may be in kind of antiquated language, but it gives a pretty good idea of what I’m about:

A seasoned reporter on religion and an old hand on the Middle East beat, Hazleton (The First Muslim, 2013, etc.) is Jewish by blood and convent-educated by nuns. After more than a decade in Jerusalem, she finds that accepted pious practice is not for her. For the author, doubt is not a problem but a blessing. She does not seek assurance of an all-encompassing intelligent design but, rather, revels in the prospects that just might yet be discovered by mankind. For this agnostic, there is delight in mystery. Her faith is in not knowing everything. Humanity, certainly, is subject to misadventure, yet it is for humans to determine what is truly significant. Meaning, in her book, is not the responsibility of a force beyond us; how we behave is our choice and our obligation. The old aphorism is clear to Hazleton: man created God, not the other way around, and she sees Him (who is consistently male) as an anthropomorphic metaphor for something bigger. “If there is one thing that can really be said with any certainty about God,” she writes, “it is that the name is utterly insufficient to the concept.” Throughout the book, the author dissects the manifestations of religious devotion. Religious belief is seen as binary, a true-or-false proposition. Where, she asks, is the nuance? Is our universe unique or only one in a greater cosmos? How can we comprehend what is beyond infinity? The agnostic mind finds no satisfactory answers in canonical tracts or fundamentalist piety. There’s no need to reckon with evil, infidels, or visiting angels. Here, with clever elucidation, are artful essays that celebrate the wonder of the unknown. Atheists and devout worshipers alike may never accept the agnostics’ philosophy. But even in defense of simply not knowing, Hazleton does not deny possibilities; she denies only assured and implacable dogma.

Pre-orders are important, so go ahead right here!

 

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Reviewing The Review

Posted on January 27, 2016 by Lesley Hazleton

ag final coverThe first pre-publication review of Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto just arrived from Booklist:

“Hazleton’s manifesto makes the suspension of conviction as attractive as any theist or atheist testament,” it concludes.

Well, I’d say far more attractive, but then I might be a tad biased.

It’s always odd to find your own work written about in terms you’d never use.  “Mental comfort?”  None of that for me, thank you!   “Historiography?”  Never on the agenda.  But overall, my review of the review is that it’s a serviceable overview, and a very positive one.

Feel free to add your own review of it, of course.  And don’t fear using the pre-order button.  I’ll post soon about why this is important (it involves the mysterious realm of algorithms).

Meanwhile, roll on, April 5!

Perhaps it’s not surprising that the author of accessible, balanced accounts of Muhammad, the Sunni-Shia split in Islam, and the Blessed Virgin withholds judgment about the existence of God.  In eight personably persuasive chapters, she counts the benefits of agnosticism, though not so much for the practice of objective historiography as for personal intellectual freedom and mental comfort.  Neither believing nor disbelieving in God removes the irksome pressure to choose sides.  It allows deep and continual exploration into the realities the word God used to contain.  It permits living in doubt or, as Emily Dickinson had it, “dwell[ing] in possibility.” It accepts irresolvable mystery, facilitates understanding how humans makes meaning, encourages acknowledging mortality (“The meaning of life is that it stops”), and grasping — well, appreciating — infinity.  Finally, agnosticism lets one give up on the soul — a possession — in favor of soul as a “quality of existence,” as when we say something is soulful.  Informed by science, philosophy, literature, history, travel, hiking, and more, Hazleton’s manifesto makes the suspension of conviction as attractive as any theist or atheist testament.

— Ray Olson, Booklist, February 1, 2016

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At The Recording Studio

Posted on January 15, 2016 by Lesley Hazleton

Many strange things happened this week, but this was one of the strangest.

I was in the middle of a two-day recording session for Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto, experiencing the delight of reading my own work for the audio-book. Standing alone in a padded room, just me and the microphone a few inches from my mouth, I moved my arms – indeed my whole body — as I spoke, as though I could reach through the mike and draw the listener in.

At home, though, the resident feline was fading fast: Dashi, fourteen years old, a silver-grey tabby with blue eyes, a wide range of vocalization, and a personality ranging from ornery to enchanting. Early in the morning of the second day of recording, I realized there was no longer any doubt about what I had to do. Tears streaming, I called the vet, wrapped the cat in her favorite fleece blanket, and took her in.  She died cradled in my arms, barely thirty seconds after the final injection. It was hard, and awful, and yet right. She had a great life with me, and I saw her out of it as best I could. That, in itself, was a privilege.

“I should cancel the recording session,” I thought, but something in me said not to – that it would be good to lose myself for a few hours in total focus. By midday, I was back in the studio. “You are absolutely rocking it,” said the director, to whom I’d said nothing of what had happened. Then, with only the last chapter still to go (on what we mean what we talk about soul), I called a cigarette break and headed toward the door.

A man was leaving in front of me, and as he went through the door he kind of half-sang a “bye-bye” to everyone there. Something in me picked up on the lilt of it, and without even thinking, I began to sing “Bye Bye Blackbird.”

Here’s where I should say that I can’t sing. I mean, I’m no good at carrying a tune. I once took jazz lessons to try and deal with this, but enthusiasm without talent can only take you so far.

As I went out that door, however, I was singing perfectly. I could hear it: every note crystalline and pure. And I went on singing, my voice carrying through the rain on Seattle’s Fourth Avenue, the cigarette dangling unsmoked in my fingers as I let the song rise up into the grey sky, thinking all the while of Dashi.

And I knew as I sang that I’d never sing that beautifully again.

Dashi by Susie

 

(“Pack up all my care and woe, Here I go swingin’ low,  Bye bye blackbird / Where somebody waits for me,  Sugar’s sweet, so is she, Bye bye blackbird /No one here can love or understand me, Oh, what hard luck stories, they all hand me / Make my bed and light the light, I’ll be home late tonight, Blackbird bye bye.”)

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Three Months From Today…

Posted on January 5, 2016 by Lesley Hazleton

ag final coverCountdown!  Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto is due out on April 5, in exactly three months’ time.  I love this book.  And here’s why, in the flap copy:

A widely admired writer on religion celebrates agnosticism as the most vibrant, engaging—and ultimately the most honest—stance toward the mysteries of existence.

One in four Americans reject any affiliation with organized religion, and nearly half of those under thirty describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” But as the airwaves resound with the haranguing of preachers and pundits, who speaks for the millions who find no joy in whittling the wonder of existence to a simple yes/no choice?

Lesley Hazleton does. In this provocative, brilliant book, she gives voice to the case for agnosticism, breaks it free of its stereotypes as watered-down atheism or amorphous “seeking,” and celebrates it as a reasoned, revealing, and sustaining stance toward life. Stepping over the lines imposed by rigid conviction, she draws on philosophy, theology, psychology, science, and more to explore, with curiosity and passion, the vital role of mystery in a deceptively information-rich world; to ask what we mean by the search for meaning; to invoke the humbling yet elating perspective of infinity; to challenge received ideas about death; and to reconsider what “the soul” might be. Inspired and inspiring, Agnostic recasts the question of belief not as a problem to be solved but as an invitation to an ongoing, open-ended adventure of the mind.

Pre-order here or here, and be one of the first to read it!

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