18396D 12H 12M 34S

I don’t know why I do this, but my diary entries are numbered in days as well as dates, starting with my first dated comment referring to an actual date when my mother suggested starting one, which was “17th July, 1975 ¶ I saw two spaceships docking”, referring to the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. I choose to date it more precisely to the handshake between Thomas P. Stafford and Alexei Leonov at 2:17 pm, CDT. This was 8:17 pm BST, and I’ve rounded it off to the start of the minute. This numbering system is a little reminiscent of the Julian Date, which is the number of days elapsed since 1st January 4713 BCE, which was the last year the Indiction, Solar and Lunar years coincided. Two of those are self-evident but the first refers to a fifteen-year assessment for taxation in the Roman Empire, and I presume it’s in there because it used to be used as a proxy date. Obviously all three of these are proleptic, i.e. projected back before their real invention, because the year didn’t used to begin in January and the Roman Empire didn’t exist that far back. The point of the Julian Date is to provide a standard for the timing of astronomical events. It’s also used to calculate best before and sell by dates, batch tracking (for instance for product recalls), converting between calendars of different cultures and for dates in databases, since it’s less cumbersome than using the peculiar and fairly irregular numbers for the days of the month. However, in these situations it tends to be cut off and the date is recorded as the number of days since a more recent date, since otherwise the number would be needlessly large. The exact current Julian date is 2461006.828461, or actually it’s moved on since then. It actually begins at noon GMT, presumably because most astronomical events were recorded at night. It also, incidentally, provides decimal time, which makes things easier but is in the wrong base. My own dating system is based on days since a certain date, so in a way it is a real Julian Date. I have changed it several times. It used to be based on what was coincidentally my parents’ sixteenth wedding anniversary but I realised that prevented me from referring to dates before that, so I changed it to the first dated incident I wrote down. There is an earlier date in April 1975 but it just records the measurements of a staircase so it’s not about a temporal event and I ignore it. My sister once pointed out that I was recording historical events which were not appropriate for a personal diary, but in fact more than 99% of them are in fact personal.

It looks a bit odd to me that I’ve written out (18396) above, because I’ve almost always just used it in my diary and it feels like I’m revealing something intimate and personal by writing it out publicly. Another thing about it is that for me the day starts at 7:17 pm GMT, but I ignore that most of the time. If the Julian date had been used for computers there needn’t have been any Y2K problem. Incidentally, that wasn’t a panic about nothing, but I don’t want to get too distracted here. If it had been recorded as a 24-bit value, it wouldn’t have become an issue for tens of millennia. There are quite a few peculiar things about Y2K, not least the fact that software actually does use Julian Dates.

This has been on my mind recently for two reasons. One is that I’m writing an astronomical calendar for a client, so I should probably use Julian Dates for that for simplicity’s sake. That’s what they’re for of course. The other is that I couldn’t resist watching the current Vince Gilligan series ‘Pluribus’, which uses a similar day-based dating system for time before and since the Joining. I should point out that I have subscribed to Apple TV before, and no it isn’t ideal that I’ve had to do this again to watch it. I’m not going to try to defend that decision, but I will say that the quality of Vince Gilligan’s and his associated team’s work is so high that it’s hard to resist the temptation to do this. Just this moment, I’m wondering about whether I should introduce a spoiler warning, and I suppose I should but I’m not sure how important that is. At some point I will talk about the nature of spoilers and when they are and aren’t appropriate, but that’s for another monologue.

So here we go:

SPOILER WARNING

‘Pluribus’, styled as “PLUR1BUS”, has a title which can be analysed as “You Are 1: Be Us”, which makes me wonder if “PL” is also significant. It does constitute the first two letters of “please” I suppose. This sums up the premise of the series. The Very Large Array radio astronomy facility in New Mexico detects a signal repeating every seventy-eight seconds from the direction of the TRAPPIST-1 system around six hundred light years away, consisting of four different codes, and the scientists deduce that it’s an RNA sequence although I’m not sure why because DNA also has four bases. I should probably explain this although I think it may be common knowledge. DNA stores genetic code in most living things and RNA is the medium they use to transcribe that code into proteins. It does make sense that RNA would be used for this purpose, since it is actually being used to transmit information rather than store it. There are also some viruses which use RNA instead of DNA, and also some smaller things which I don’t fully understand which seem to be bare RNA molecules which behave like viruses which are candidates for the smallest life forms of all, assuming they are alive.

At this point it’s worth saying that conceptually the series is worth dividing into the setting and therefore science fictional stuff and the more conventional aspect of the story, which I will get to. Back to the science side then.

There are a number of whiteboards shown throughout the series so far. The first has equations on it referring to signal processing, the second is a plan for creating the virus and the third and fourth, unless I’ve missed some, are Carol’s whiteboards, one for planning her next mass-market romantic fantasy novel and the other detailing of what she’s determined about the Joined in an attempt to repeat them. I have no idea if this is significant or whether it’s just a good way to convey exposition and maybe conceal Easter Eggs. Possibly significant, I don’t know

A defence organisation in Annapolis, MD put together the genome and test it on rats. Unsurprisingly, it’s clear to neither the scientists nor the viewers at this point exactly what the RNA code does, but one interesting detail is that there is a gene in it which encodes for a receptor which responds to the scent of Convallaria majalis or lily of the valley and is also found in sperm cells and attracts them. This is possibly nothing, but it may be a reference to the lily of the valley storyline in ‘Breaking Bad’. It’s probably too obscure to be more than a passing reference. The astronomers also speculate that the dish or other antenna used to send the message must have been the size of Afrika.

One of the rats appears to have died and a scientist, suitably protected, picks them up and tries to feel for a pulse, but since she’s wearing gloves she can’t do so, takes one off and gives the rat cardiac massage, and they then wake up and bite her. Although she tries to wash it out and follow the emergency protocol, it doesn’t work and she’s infected. She then infects everyone else in the facility by kissing them, licking doughnuts on reception and pretty soon there are planes dropping the virus from the sky and infecting every human in the world. The result is that almost the whole human world becomes a single hive mind with the exception of thirteen people, including one in Paraguay who was undiscovered and appears to have avoided being infected. The other twelve are immune. Five of them speak English as a second language and one, Carol, is the focus of the series. She lives in New Mexico and her partner was killed by falling backwards when she, like almost everyone else, has a seizure on being infected.

Now there’s the larger, as it were Galactic, picture in the story and the smaller global one. The former is of course open to interpretation and on a galactic scale six hundred light years is practically next door. A fairly simple explanation for the developing scenario is that the Galaxy has a plague or a process which eliminates threats, like how the immune system eliminates cancer. At some point, civilisation becomes able to carry out genetic modification and decode messages from other star systems. When this happens, it detects a message, interprets it and out of curiosity turns it into a virus, which it is then infected by. This causes it to form a hive mind, build an enormous transmitter and send the genome signal to other star systems, and the cycle repeats. This could be a few things. It could simply be the next stage in the evolution of intelligence, a plague which is spreading through the Galaxy or a galactic defence system that renders potentially harmful species innocuous. Or, it could be pre-emptive action by another civilisation attempting to neutralise humanity, deliberately targetted at us. Scientifically, this makes more sense because the codes involved are RNA bases, suggesting that it’s designed for functioning among life on this planet unless RNA and DNA are the only basis for life.

To nitpick, it isn’t clear why adenine, uracil, cytosine and guanine were chosen for which of the four bases. There are presumably four types of signal and it does make sense that humans would interpret these as bases, but how do they know which is which and why did they see one as uracil rather than thymine? There are also other bases, such as flurouracil, used in cancer chemotherapy, and the synthetic pair known as P, Z, S and B, and some viruses use unusual bases to protect themselves from host defences.

All this, though, is about the science and very probably the point of the series is not connected to the wider Universe as such. Many fans of ‘The Walking Dead’ zombie series got very focussed on the idea of a cure or an explanation for the cause when in fact the point of the show was entirely unconnected to that, so far as I know – (<=en-dash – I am a real human) — I stopped watching it after I think the fourth series. It might not matter how it happened.

Possibly, heteronormativity prevented me from realising that Helen and Carol were a romantic item all the way through the first episode. However, I tend to do that with heterosexual couples too, so maybe not, but I don’t think it was very clear. I thought Helen was Carol’s agent who had become a friend. One important aspect of Carol being queer is that she’s estranged from her parents due to them sending her to conversion torture and has no children, which is not inevitable of course but probably is more likely. This puts her in a different position with regard to intimate relationships, particularly because Helen dies in the pilot. However, she becomes one of the joint in the final moments of her life and the hive mind therefore has access to all her experience, memories and personality, to a greater extent in fact than Carol ever had. She feels violated by this and she orders them to close Helen’s memories off and never to refer to them again, though on one occasion so far she’s caved into temptation when she wanted to know what Helen thought of her writing.

More than eight hundred million people died when the Joining took place. I presume this is due to things like people operating heavy machinery, driving passenger vehicles, crossing roads, being in the middle of surgery and so on when the virus hit, but some viewers have suggested that they deliberately killed some of those infected. I don’t think this is what’s happening though. It also emerges that if Helen expresses strong negative emotions towards them, they have seizures and on the one occasion when she did this so far, eleven million people were killed, meaning that she has to tread very carefully.

The hive mind is working towards assimilating all the people who have not been so far and they don’t know how long it’ll take. Most of the other people who are immune are entirely happy with the situation and at least one of the children wants to become part of the hive mind. Some of the others, notably an Indian woman called Laxmi, haven’t accepted that people close to them have had their identities dissolved into the collective. Carol has the Joined arrange a meeting of all the willing English speakers and they travel to Bilbao where she meets with them in Airforce One, which has been commandeered by a Mauritanian immune person called Koumba Diabaté, to whom I shall return. In this meeting, she comes across as a typically American White saviour and also to some extent a Karen, and in fact she has strong Karen energy throughout. She’s the only White person there and everyone else’s English is a second language, but she has insisted on English speakers rather than allowing interpreters. It’s understandable that she might not trust them, but – okay look, this is getting too involved. Right now I have a huge blizzard of thoughts about the show and I’m just going to jot down a few points.

• Event TV used to be something which united people in a particular country and in a sense, very occasionally, globally, as with the lunar landing with Apollo II, and maybe to a very limited extent the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project on (1), but with the advance of the internet and the advent of access to non-live video, among other things, there has been fragmentation. ‘Pluribus’ is in a sense a unifying factor although it isn’t easily accessible or on the main streaming services, which is a shame because it would be appropriate if it were.
• There’s a purple and green thing going on, which is interesting because those are the two main colours of aurora. I’m not sure what they mean, but there’s a pattern, as there was in ‘Breaking Bad’, of colour-coding. Purple was associated with Marie, whose clothing stays purple until almost the end of the series, green with Walter White more than anyone else and associated with money, greed and jealousy. Purple is the colour of the emperor, so it may be that purple in this signals those who rule, i.e. the Joined or the virus, which starts off in a purple solution. Green also symbolises growth and change. I don’t know what to do with this. Yellow also seems significant – Carol wears a yellow jacket at the start of the season.
• “Soylent Green Is People”. Right now, and this is why I’m rushing this out on (18402) because the next episode, ‘HDP’, is out on (18404) (again, this feels weird), Carol has found that the Joined are constantly drinking “milk”, which is however a plasma- or serum-like yellow fluid which we are at least led to believe from the final scene is partly made from something shocking, presumably human corpses. The issue, though, is that it probably either isn’t that simple or is misleading. Maybe the yellowness is also significant, I don’t know. My current presumption is that the 800 million deaths led to a surplus of corpses which are rendered down into nutrients or possibly some kind of culture medium for the virus or source of antibodies against a simple and relatively harmless pathogen which would enable them to become individual again.
• Things like serial numbers, licence plates and other sequences of characters may be significant. In ‘Breaking Bad’, these referred to colours as hex triplets. But there’s more going on than colour in this.
• There’s a suggestion that Carol’s unpublished novel ‘Bitter Chrysalis’ is connected to the outcome of the series in some way, for instance that its plot prefigures the arc of the show. There was a large butterfly on the wall of the ice hotel in Norway. It could simply be that Carol has to become the butterfly through the bitterness of her experience.
• Even if the viewers’ sympathy is meant to be with Carol as the product of capitalism against the Joined as communism, and of course my sympathy would be the opposite, it’s still interesting as a study of the American Way. Gilligan is in any event a genius at making us root for the bad guy.
• Speaking of which, maybe this is a mirror image of ‘Breaking Bad’, which is “Mr Chips becomes Scarface”. This is an unsympathetic character whom circumstances force to be a messiah.
• Speaking of which, obviously he gets us onto Team Carol, but actually there’s not a lot wrong with her. It’s more that women are rarely permitted to behave like that in popular culture. In real life it’s not quite so bad. She’s the opposite of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
• Connections have been suggested with a ‘Twilight Zone’ episode. I personally perceive connections with David Brin’s ‘The Giving Plague‘ and possibly even Andy Weir’s ‘Project Hail Mary’ in the sense of an interstellar plague, which links to Olaf Stapledon too. There’s an episode of ‘The Twilight Zone’ called ‘Third From The Sun’ with a character in it called Will Sturka, based on a 1950 Richard Matheson story. It doesn’t seem to be otherwise connected. In ‘The Giving Plague’ a sociopathic scientist has to deal with a blood-borne virus which causes people to become more altruistic and therefore more likely to give blood, and ends up faking altruism out of necessity. ‘Project Hail Mary’ has an algal plague spreading between yellow dwarf star systems which dims their suns, which is more loosely connected, and Olaf Stapledon has two instances of interstellar plagues, one of which, the “Mad Star”, infects stars and ends up seeming to wipe out the human species in the distant future, and the other of which is spread by apparently very sane, virtuous and balanced civilisations on various planets which gradually, through interaction with beings in other star systems, would conclude that it would be in the other civilisation’s interest to have its culture destroyed or even the species exterminated.

So there’s plenty more, and I realise this has broken down into disorder but I want to get this out now to beat the deadline of ‘HDP’ being released, which incidentally seems to stand for “Human Derived Protein”.

That’s it for now.

Han Kang’s ‘The Vegetarian’

First of all, my understanding of mainstream literary fiction is that it can’t be “spoilt” because although the plot is there for a reason, it isn’t the main point, so there just will be “spoilers” here. Not that it matters.

Han Kang is a South Korean winner of the Nobel Prize in literature who also won a big prize of some kind, possibly the Man Booker. You see, this is how ignorant I am in this field. She’s written quite a few novels, one of which, ‘Greek Lessons’, I’m currently reading. ‘The Vegetarian’ (채식주의자) seems to be her best known. It’s quite short. In it, a previously apparently conventional woman, Yung-Hye (romanised differently by the way – her name’s 영혜 I think) who has a series of gruesome nightmares which persuade her to go veggie. Although it’s described as vegetarian, she is in fact vegan. She throws out all the meat in the kitchen and refuses also to wear animal products. Her family problematise all of this and regard her as harming herself and being unnecessarily defiant. She loses a fair bit of weight and eventually her father hits her and attempts to force feed her a piece of pork violently. She then slashes her wrist and is admitted to hospital where she’s psychiatrically assessed and diagnosed with anorexia nervosa, then leaves and after she’s found, she’s sitting at a fountain apparently having taken a bite out of a song bird. That’s the first of three sections, called ‘The Vegetarian’ and told from her husband’s viewpoint. In the second section, ‘Mongolian Mark’, her brother-in-law, the new narrator, becomes erotically preoccupied with her and the idea of painting her with flowers because of her Mongolian blue spot, which he thinks of as a petal. She wants to retain the floral body painting. He hires a young man to do the same to, videos it and tries to get them to have sex. When he refuses and leaves, they have sex themselves and fall asleep. In the morning, his wife, that is, her sister, discovers them. The final section, ‘Flaming Trees’, is from her sister’s viewpoint. Yung-Hye is in decline in the mental hospital refusing to eat and insists on standing on her head most of the time. In-Hye, her sister, is aware that she’s wasting away, takes her into her care and leaves the hospital with her, knowing that she’s wasting away and apparently wishing to become a plant.

For me, reading mainstream literature is pearls before swine. I won’t appreciate it or understand it because I’m overcome by stress and a sense of inferiority when I attempt to read it, even if I have an aptitude for following it in the first place, which I probably lack. Also, before I read it, absolutely will not listen to or read anyone else’s take on a novel because I want my reaction to be my own rather than being informed by someone else’s personality. Therefore, what I’m about to say is purely my own reaction. Here we go then.

The novel is unusually structured, being divided into three sections, each expressing a different character’s perception of Yung-Hye. The only time she speaks for herself is through the nightmares she has at the start of the novel. I think it’s clear that this is to deny her agency and illustrate how her perspective and therefore she as a woman in South Korean society is not respected. This theme permeates the whole story. Even initially, her husband finds it embarrassing that she doesn’t wear a bra, making everyone aware of her nipples in his unfortunately probably accurate view. At no point is her decision taken seriously and it’s generally seen as wilfully causing a problem for everyone else. It would be easy to say that the mere fact of her going vegan is one possible symbolisable act among many and is fairly arbitrary, but it isn’t quite that. It’s a reaction against perceived violence, which is not only stereotypically masculine but is shown as such in the story. And to be honest, I am well aware that dietary veganism is often seen as a nuisance by carnists, and I don’t want to go into too much depth here but there is a tendency for carnists to see their own dietary choices as, dare I say, “normal”. This brings about a second theme, that of conformity and the stigmatisation of non-conformity, where the latter is seen as obstreperous and disrespected. There’s no distinction here between rational and irrational decision-making. Yung-Hye can certainly be seen as anorexic but the real point is that no attempt is made at any point to empathise with her and what of her dietary choice means to her is entirely ignored by her family and the psychiatrists.

In the second section, she’s clearly strongly sexually objectified by her brother-in-law. Concern is expressed by others that he’s taking advantage of her but it’s also ambiguous because she does seem to want to become a plant and the sex may be akin to pollination, so he’s fulfilling her desires in one sense and she could be seen as having consented, though very passively. Her brother-in-law is only very distant from his wife and I didn’t get a feeling of outrage from her about his infidelity.

In the final section, Yung-Hye’s sister comes to perceive her as having done something with her life, unlike herself, because all she’s done is conform and not really lived her life at all compared to her sister’s own decision, or perhaps natural drift, into becoming a plant. Even her psychosis is an achievement compared to her own life. At this point, I began to worry that the novel was going to turn out to be magically realist, but thankfully it didn’t. I think magical realism is the kind of thing which needs to be present throughout a story rather than introduced most of the way through, and I half-expected Yung-Hye to turn literally into a plant, which I think would’ve been silly.Okay, so there’s all of that, but I do still have a problem. A fairly unimportant part of this is that I probably missed the significance of almost everything in the story, but there’s a bigger issue, which is that of universalism. I’m aware that South Korea is a distant country on the other side of Eurasia and not much of what goes on there filters through to the Western media, so I know about a few things and as usual a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and it may lead to a mental caricature of the country. I know, for example, that it’s a young democracy where there was recently an attempted coup which was defeated by parliamentary representatives themselves, that it’s rather surprisingly mainly Christian, the origin of the Unification Church, and more relevantly that there’s a “4B” movement among women which seeks to avoid sex with men, childbirth, marriage and heterosexual dating — 비섹스, 비출산, 비연애, 비혼 — which is also prejudiced against queer men. Moreover, I’m aware of Chip Chan, a woman who appears to be mentally ill and not receiving much help who has confined herself to her flat and streams everything 24/7 because she wants the world to monitor what’s going on for her personal safety. I have also heard, and this may be incorrect, that they’re highly conformist and anti-vegetarian for that reason. There are other things, like K-pop, which are largely irrelevant to this story, and also the sublime and inspired invention of Hangul, the Korean alphabet, which is perhaps a little more so. And this is what gets me, because from those few features I could easily construct a largely inaccurate image of the culture, but at the same time I have to say that this novel does seem to confirm this. I’ve written about Korea before of course. But this is what bothers me. There’s an attitude referred to as Orientalism, which fetishises the specialness of Eurasian cultures outside our peninsula and can be seen, for example, in certain attitudes towards Yoga and the suicide forest in Japan, or even something as simple as taking your shoes off when you go in the house, where utterly routine and prosaic things are othered, so I don’t want a Korean author’s writing to be pigeonholed in this way. All the same, the question of universalism arises. I already find it surprising and disquieting that, for example, Greek drama seems to speak to us today over two thousand years later, because it makes me feel that I’m not letting the work itself speak on its own terms and not hearing the playwright owing to projecting my own preconceptions on it. I tend to find – look, I’ll try to define universalism first as that might help.

This might not be the right phrase, but by literary universalism I mean the way that works separated considerably in space and time, i.e. culturally, still seem to speak to an audience which is very different to the creators. Due to my own background as a Northwestern European, I experience this particularly with the works of William Shakespeare. That said, many people do benefit from reading the notes which often accompany his plays. We may need a study guide, and that makes a lot of sense because of the drastic differences in cultural mores between then and now. I’m sceptical that we’re really able to make a connection and wonder if we’re just hallucinating. It seems to me that there cannot be any kind of phenomenon which facilitates that. At the same time, the Good Samaritan is a relatable parable and if we really could not understand another culture, passing by on the other side would be entirely feasible. I want to give an example of this from my own life. Many years ago I was walking down the street on a windy day and a woman had her umbrella blow inside out and she was struggling with it. I decided it would be an insult to her independence to “help” and walked on by, at which point she irately and sarcastically said “thank you!” to me. This is probably an example of failing to meet expectations of some kind, and it’s also an example of trying to pass by on the other side in a supportive way. There was presumably some kind of script I was expected to follow in these circumstances which I didn’t. Likewise, the tale of the Good Samaritan, among other things, attempts to indicate that one can transcend cultural differences and marginalisation by “being human”, i.e. it does seem to recognise or assert that there is a universal human nature. I imagine that she had a kind of idea of the “done thing” in this situation against which I consciously rebelled in a manner which was supposed to be passively supportive, or rather, because that’s quite patronising, not assuming that she’d want or need any intervention from someone else to deal with her problem. Some years after when I told someone about this incident, they imagined it as a “meet-cute”, which struck me as utterly bizarre but indicates how we might try to cram incidents into particular cultural narratives which have no real significance.

This in a more general sense is what bothers me about ‘The Vegetarian’, or perhaps I should actually be writing ‘채식주의자’ to emphasise its foreignness. I generally try to avoid reading works in translation, partly because I’d then have to trust the translator but also, and mainly, because they’ve then been ripped out of their cultural context and plonked unceremoniously into mine, at which point I will fail to understand them completely while having the illusion that I have. So, looking at ‘채식주의자’, I see it as including themes of women’s oppression, conformity, cruelty and failure of empathy, and I realise that good literature has to try to leave room for ambiguity and not close off the narrative, but I don’t know how what I call veganism and what I call anorexia nervosa maps onto Han Kang’s world view. I am aware that some people, particularly teenage girls, describe themselves as going vegetarian or vegan as a way of masking eating disorders, but I also find it a little irksome that this decision is pathologised in this way. It shouldn’t be associated with what seems to be self-destructiveness because to me that’s a lazy equation which makes concessions to carnism. The trouble is that in a wider setting, Yung-Hye’s vegetarianism and what’s constructed as an eating disorder does actually work very well as a kind of quiet rebellion, shorn of the question of whether it’s primarily a conscious decision, because of its contrast with the inherent violence of Korean, and in fact most, societies. She has nightmares and this provokes her to behave in a manner her peers find unacceptable. Her husband and sister in particular then take her current behaviour and use it to reinterpret her past, as if everything was inevitably going to lead to this. Her behaviour, perhaps, feels like an accusation. She does in fact seem to impose it on her husband by throwing out all the meat and dairy and refusing to prepare animal products, but it may be more out of obliviousness than a conscious attempt to assert herself, and this is probably in fact a theme of the story.

One thing I completely failed to understand is why she seems to have bitten a living song bird, to the extent that I wonder if I got that scene wrong. This indicates a bigger issue: I lack lived experience as a South Korean woman. I don’t know how I can be expected to appreciate any of this, and more broadly how any reader can be expected to appreciate any novel. It seems like an illusion or a form of trickery to me that this seems to be possible.

I don’t know. I just find these things very hard and quite traumatising, and not because of any trauma or conflict portrayed in the pages so much as that I seem to be expected to hear this communication when I don’t know how I possibly could, and it’s quite depressing. I can’t step out of myself far enough to do that, and have doubts that anyone really can.