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From Brain Pickings

If there is a word for what you’re facing, life seems so much more rational.

After months of floundering, I am back to my reading habit. Everything is manageable if you read books—your mind sounds more orderly. I tried various countermeasures: declaring a moratorium on book-buying, reading the short books first, reading short stories to rebuild my mental stamina…

What really worked for me: Lockdown. I had a manuscript to finish and had somehow let it slide. Sure I was writing, but not fast enough. So I went into lockdown and did not leave my house until the manuscript was done. (Obviously I had to lay in my food and necessities supply before lockdown began.) Initially my mind kept coming up with reasons to go out, but eventually I hunkered down and got my work done. And since I was spending all my time at home, with few distractions, I started reading again. Finished four mid-size books in two weeks.

After three days in lockdown, though, I started turning into Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining so I sent an SOS to my friend Tina and we had lunch the next day. I just had to have an actual conversation (and we kept running into people we wanted to see, so there were many conversations). And then I went back to work.

The question that snapped me out of my funk: If I don’t read books and I don’t write, what am I?

1. It is possibly the greatest science-novel ever written.

2. Published in 1965, it presages the political turmoil and climate disasters of our time. Not a joke: In the near future we may be wearing stillsuits that recycle sweat and urine for drinking.

3. Never have we needed the Litany Against Fear more.

4. David Lynch’s loony adaptation is still fascinating.

5. Even if Alejandro Jodorowsky’s movie of Dune was never made, his ideas and designs for the film have influenced a generation of movies including Star Wars. Moebius!

6. Denis Villeneuve is making a Dune movie. He’s proven he can adapt great SF with Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, which became Arrival. And however you feel about Blade Runner 2049 (which I love and have seen in four countries), you have to agree that it looks fantastic.

7. Timothee Chalamet is in takes to play Paul Atreides in the movie, so you have an official reason to think about Timothee Chalamet.

8. The name “Atreides” comes from Greek mythology. They’re supposed to be descended from the House of Atreus, meaning their forefathers were Tantalus, Agamemnon..

9. Shai-hulud!

10. You can read it as a manual on how to create a messianic figure.

Let us know on your Instagram and Facebook. #twisted25

(The Twisted books are now out of print. We’re gauging interest to see if there’s any point in reissuing the Twisted books, hence our request to repost this on Instagram and Facebook. Apparently the readers of this blog don’t care, but lots of reaction on Instagram.)

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We were talking about sleep (My real talent), which led to dreams (I don’t remember mine), which led to Paprika (I cannot forget my friend Jay yelling “Etchosera!” during a screening of Inception), which led to the late Japanese filmmaker Satoshi Kon, which led to his television series, Paranoia Agent.

This weekend I saw the complete Paranoia Agent. It’s brilliant. Paranoia Agent starts with a seemingly random series of attacks committed by a boy on roller skates, wielding a dented metal baseball bat. This leads to a police investigation, which then moves into unexpected directions. The attacks are not random after all: the victims share feelings of anxiety, dread, helplessness. It is as if their worst fears have taken external shape, like Jung’s concept of synchronicity (“temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events”).

For a simpler illustration, listen to this song by The Police.

(Aye and I used to sing this between classes. I thought the line “Only the rush hour hell to face” was “Only the Russians have soufflés”. Which I think is better. Also I think this was Sting’s audition for the role of Feyd-Rautha in David Lynch’s marvelously terrible film of Dune. Or Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.)

Paranoia Agent (2004) reminds me of other works I love: David Mitchell’s novels Ghostwritten, number9dream and Cloud Atlas (Note David Mitchell’s long-standing Japan obsession) and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia.

Just seeing this trailer makes me want to watch the movie for the 20th time. Those tracking shots.

And if I watch Magnolia again, I’ll have to see The Earrings of Madame de…(the Criterion edition has an intro by P.T. Anderson and by the way I love Phantom Thread even if I frequently want to strangle Daniel Day-Lewis’s character, which is the point).

Meanwhile, the final chapters of my travel book are waiting…waiting…waiting…

So this is really a post about procrastination.

Yes, I failed. Not only did I violate my self-imposed moratorium and buy a new book within days of announcing the plan to clear my reading backlog, but I cheated constantly on my selection of short books. One minute I’m reading The Perfect Nanny when my eyes wander over to the shelf where Durrell’s Justine has been gathering dust for years, and before I know it I am in Alexandria and planning to buy the last two books in the quartet, and then the books for the reading group arrive, and then…

So in the spirit of Kierkegaard’s despair of possibility, which is all I remember or likely misremember from Existentialism and Phenomenology class other than an abiding hatred for Heidegger, I have hatched another plan:

Read short story anthologies. Stories require less prolonged concentration than novels; in theory this regimen should help me build up my wrecked attention span.

Good luck to me.