good grief life is strange. imagine this. you are naked laying on a comfortable massage table having some sort of jelly like lubrication rubbed into your testicles by a series of very attractive young girls and getting paid $40 an hour for the privilege. such was captain missions luck this week. i was helping the medical school train people in ultra scanning technique. i've had my lungs scanned, my kidneys and my bladder but this time was somewhat different.
of course the hardest part of all this was trying not to have an erection, i mean i was laying down thinking about the most non sexy things possible while some beautiful australian asian girl started to chat to me about books and films and rub me with the probe, good grief this required so much discipline it was almost a martial art. i think she knew i was squirming. i made her laugh a bit but i never crossed the boundary, it crossed my mind but i was somewhat shy and embarrassed. i'm getting more and more nervous around girls as i get older, they mystify me with their complexity and curves and their seductive scent and the way they move but they make me nervous with their irrational demands and unpredictable ways.
oh well at least this way i'm assisting mankind by offering my body to their nice warm hands and scanning techniques.

other weird shit that occurred was some kinda violence at the airport where a biker gang killed some one, apparently biker violence is getting more frequent. some one should talk to them, tell them to calm down and chill out.

now here's something you won't see on the news. why? because the population of jews is vastly less than the population of muslims. the muslims have the oil and the western democracies in their grip, subverted from within. the UN knows this and knows it's only option rather than confront the situation is to appease the muslim world.
moderate islam is a non existent concept, ultimately islam is the worlds most powerful and unrelenting meme.

dan simmons book 'the terror' starts with two ships frozen in the ice after two years, the 1845 franklin expedition ended with all crew missing, no one knows what happened, simmons fills in the missing pieces and the result is staggering. this book is a litany of failure and not so subtly the failure of western civilization itself; however, there is a surprisingly redemptive streak running throughout. simmons is a tremendous author, capable of producing masterworks in any genre of his choosing and he is at the top of his powers in this work, which though ostensibly historical fiction owes a debt to mystery, biography, horror, and science-fiction with liberal doses of shakespeare, sociology and philosophy.

more than a retelling of the franklin expedition to find the northwest passage, "terror" is the story of captain francis crozier who commands hms terror. crozier has to overcome bad food, poor leadership, even poorer subordinates, mutinous sailors, cold, scurvy and a monster, in order to reconcile himself with the future that he has seen but fails to understand. strangely the journey through this dark and 750 plus page novel is ultimately reaffirming and as voiced by a character late in the novel, salvation was always waiting for crozier who just had to make his choice.

though ostensibly about failure, this book summarizes the triumph of man over adversity. though ostensibly about discovery, the book details the tragedy of men dying needlessly within reach of the very survival skills they refused to seek much less adopt. this duality of themes gives great weight to the story; indeed, simmons quotes liberally from hobbes, shakespeare, homer, poe and probably several others that i missed. and for fear of spoiling the read, suffice it to say that the author's erudition serves his purpose of rendering the tale disturbingly modern. it is a cautionary tale and in his wisdom, simmons leaves us to determine what we take from it.

tantalized.
the church are back with guitars, they ripped and rocked the stratospheres, the heavens asunder with soaring guitar, pummeling drums and bass lines your mother wouldn't like, a very satisfying set list, steve playing with heaps of energy and enthusiasm, you would have never thought he'd just come out of the hospital. for some one that had lost all their electric lights (electrolytes) from their body you would have thought he could power the city with the energy he gave out, amazing.
it was quite literally beyond words, one of the best gigs ever. no special light show, in fact there was an element of chaos and randomness about the gig which i just thought added to the overall quality. the church are the only band that matters.

time passes, it ebbs and flows, it freezes and shimmers, it twists and turns, it' s hard to pin down, hard to hold, it's a mystery as events are effected by intricate causality. i had a few restless nights, strange abrupt endings where i found myself alive in a captain mission body, trapped and confused, there were moments of clarity as i came back to familiar haunts and faces. i recalled some events...a birthday!
lets get this straight, i don't like going out to bars, clubs or anywhere where they have dress codes, bouncers, to many rules or regulations, fashion police or loud music blasting out. but my brother loves this kind of thing and he took me to 'the arthouse' a very nice four or five story bar in the city for birthday drinks, mine being a lemon lime and bitters. as we stood at the bar a young girl started buying paintings, she asked my advice.
'should i get the male nudes or the females?'
i don't know anything about art but i said, 'get the girls, they would be nicer to look at.'
later we were joined by this lady who intruded on our quite conversation, martin and i discussing relationships. it turns out this girl was on a date with a man who also joined us, she was not enjoying the date and wanted us around for safety i guess. being english gentlemen we did the honorable thing. our new friend bought a bottle of very expensive moet and we all seemed to be getting on very well. some girls on the next table started flirting with me, they were all being made redundant and out getting drunk. they seemed in good spirits. the guy on the date left and then suddenly the girl started to attack martin for not owning a car, then she attacked me for wanting to go home and keep pan (my dog) company. when i say attack, i mean attack, that is get very personal about stuff she had no right to. i had to put her in her place. i ended up going home with her. a lot of these girls need to be put in their place it appears, then suddenly they start thinking your the most attractive man in their life and throw themselves at you. i don't mind occasional mindless sex. happy birthday capt!

next event
smoking some very nice organic weed, mmm, i'm on holiday, broke and somewhat depressed about it but i have some high grade spliffs to get me through the next two months.

event 3
steve is in hospital, i'm very anxious and feel helpless. i dunno, after listening to his music for 30 years you can't help but feel attached to the guy and now i kinda know him a bit, jesus i want him healthy and able to create his 'thing' so i can appreciate something good in the world of men. it's selfish but i'd be lost without his art. there's so much shit out there, including my own that when some kind of authentic beauty and genius comes along you have to appreciate it and revere it as direct from god or some intelligence within the universe. steve has that, it comes down his line into the world. i'd probably dry up like an old vampyre exposed to the sun if that stopped. so my thoughts and healing energies were directed at steve and his family for most of the weekend.

event 4
i got an iphone. i recommend them. i have downloaded four applications so far:
1. the complete works of william shakespeare, yes i plan to read this on the bus.
2. a spacial synth, beautiful design and concept.
3. a wikipedia widget so i can check my facts.
4. shazzam, a tool that you can hold up to any tune heard on the radio or in a bar or wherever and it will identify the song for you.
so there you go, all free, hours of fun, stimulating and very addictive.

event 5
the church sunday night at the factory sydney. great venue despite the freaky line up wait outside. well it was packed, great crowd, saw all my friends, andrew was there with his cameras, latiticia, sue cee, kate with her cameras, rehan whom i lost in the crowd and need to catch up with, greg, we all managed to get down the front, it was a bit tight but when the band came onstage and just launched into tantalized, wow!

back from the strange experience of not having a computer, oh how i missed it, i'm addicted to various blogs and sites, i love googling various obscurities and conducting various researches, it's nice to be back on line.
i've been reading vast amounts of stuff, various books which i shall comment upon here:

'america alone' by mark styen is the book everyone needs to read if they are worried about the rise of islamic fascism in the world, it paints a very clear picture as to what's going on but alas it will be ignored due to the fact its politically incorrect and not very conducive to the left wing agenda. mark writes with humor as he rips through the reality everyone is in denial about.

'the devil we know' by robert baer is the polemic opposite of marks book, he recommends that america admit they have lost the war on terror and accept iran as the winners. he plays down the iran nuclear threat and says its all attention seeking and posturing. there's lots of pro iranian stuff in here painting a picture of a country that is willing to embrace some aspects of modernism as long as america treats it fairly.

'the cairo diary' is a novel set in two time periods, the older scenes set in cairo are great reading but the modern ones were awful. not highly recommended.

currently im halfway through dan simmons 'the terror' which i have to say is fantastic, dan always writes brilliant stories, i recently read his first novel, 'song of kali' which is fantastic and a really classic horror story.

okay lets talk global crisis now, it's great that such an event has occurred, the whole system revealed to be an sham, what i find absolutely incredible is the way govts. are throwing more money into a black hole. i'm amazed and shocked at the political impotence, after all now would be a great time to unite the globe and start again. let industry fail, let banks collapse, use the money to invest in renewable and sustainable energies and resources. let the old industry die and the new be born, new jobs, new skills, a generation given a new start. but no we have to steal their future as well. james lovelocks new book, 'the vanishing face of gaia' spells out disaster as we approach tipping point. i don't agree with all of lovelocks ideas but it is obvious that the earth is a living system off which we are part off, the aboriginally know this, the native americans and the south american indians know this and through my intuition and my experiences with ayahuscia i know this.

i've convinced the drug company clowns in white lab coats to dim their lights and play some music suitable to the experience, i plead with the head honcho saying it will help me relax and also prolong the experience. so with side two of meddle playing, echos, i descend into the strange fractal world of dmt, my dose is huge, enough for an elephant to stay out for at least a day,
the flood of fear as i loose my self, fade away as i find my new self immediately in mechanical elf body, looking into the strange reptilian eyes of the mate i have on this side of reality, she, it, is happy to see me and we exchange warm signals. she strokes my head, he three fingers seem to emit strong and pleasant electrical impulses. messages flood my head.
'we are happy'
'why are they playing meddle, i wanted dark side'
welcome home'
i engage with them, it's like a conference call. i am a mechanical elf being, not human, i was sent into the human realm as an undercover agent. my mission was to bring back information about the human exploration into the dmt universe, the elf beings are afraid premature human contact will pollute the elf universe. apparently there are hundreds of operatives undercover, they are in deep, thinking they are human but in reality they are machine elves who during ther human existence will be drawn to seek out dmt experiences and thus return to the dmt universe. apparently alex grey, steve kilbey and various other creative are all undercover mechanical elf beings delving into home when the opportunity arises.
i'm not surprised. i seem to know this, and loosing my human identity comes as a release.
the dmt world is composed of information, it operates on a completely different geometry to the human one. it truly is a different dimension and human language is not capable of describing or defining it, mathematics is needed or art. words can't wrap around the conceptual paradigm but i will attempt to do this.
we are in a war room, there are various screens, on which indicate the portals into the human dimension, plus various others. it is the human one the dmt beings fear most. at some point contact will be inevitable and the dimensions will merge, causing a great schematic shift in the cosmos, this will be a great time for existence, a golden age. this will occur when love is accepted by humanity as the supreme energy, unfortunately humanity is not ready yet and a premature entry would result in chaos for the elves. i look at the strassman team, i can see the subjects and know they have been given great insights and access to privileged information, some of which they have shared in a cryptic manner but just enough to reside on the fringe. they have all returned to the human realm to prepare for the day when the dimensions are reconciled. they send messages of love into the human realm knowing that there is much more than petty politics, religions and ideology, this is my mission, it's the great work, bodhisatta. i know that during my human incarnation i will only be able to access the dmt through my own short personal experiences, the drug companies cannot be allowed to know about this or continue to experiment in this area until they are doing this without an agenda and without expectation. the idea being when humanity learns humility we can evolve at a rapid rate to another level completely. until then we are in tis dimension, forced to confront ourselves as one another.
i spend a few hours with my wife, although it could be a life time, because time operates differently in this dimension, then i prepare for return.

'so far we have several almost contacts, would you say that's correct mission?'
the chemist and his research team were repeating themselves, hoping for a variation on my answer.
'look, i think we should double the dose, given the data, that should considerably lengthen the time i'm there, whereever that is, and intensify the experience. i feel certain that these 'elves' want me there, their intentions seem benevolent so far and i have this incredible sense that they have something for you they want me to give you.'
'a message?'
'i don't know, it's speculation based on my feelings.'
they turned and went into a private huddle, i was left on the bench, eyes staring at the horrible neon lamps above me. they refused my objections to turning the lights down as well as to have some music playing along, they insisted that the lab maintain a research facility ambiance not a bed-sit.
i could see the cameras on the ceiling and feel the wires they had attached to my head and chest. i let out a long breathe and closed my eyes, contemplating the experience.
i had fallen through the vortex into their world of fractal information, then i had seen their faces appear from the swirling purple kaleidoscope, they seemed happy to receive me, beckoning me towards them, into a chamber where they seemed to be surrounded by some sort of machinery, it was as if i were in a lab again only there was nothing here that i could recognize. the faces appeared, half alien and half insectoid, they made high pitched sounds, not speech but clicking and i picked up some telepathic information. they were very happy that i had arrived, they implied i was expected and then they seemed to greet me in some strange way i cannot recognize. the elves pushed something into my brain, they opened me up without anesthetic and seemed to weld some kind of electronic pulsing device inside there. i felt no pain but a little concern about the intrusive operation. they seemed very interested in making me feel comfortable and they started to give me a sequence of instructions about returning.
that was the information i shared with the team, i stated that i then was pulled back to their lab and the dose must have been absorbed by my body but there was more to my experience. i had omitted the drugs they injected into my head.
after the electrical device had been inserted i was taken to another area and sat in a chair. a helmet device was placed over my head and a needle on a robotic telescopic arm seemed to extend itself towards me. i looked at my legs and could see they were different, same with my hands. it was like theirs, my body appeared to be the same as theirs. then the needle was attached to the helmet and slowly the syringe emptied its contents into my head, my brain. i could almost understand the strange clicking, i could make out some of the statements.
'next time bring us back some music, the church or pink floyd's early stuff.'
'sometime anywhere or meddle' another being seemed to request.
'don't stay so long this time.'
'i love you baby.' this last communication came from one of the smaller machine elves, she, or he, it was standing further away and looking sad and worried, i picked out the affection within the sequence of clicks. i could feel a strong connection to this particular creature, i wanted to reach out to it and hold it.
i didn't want to leave but very quickly i discovered myself back in this reality.
here.
the only way back, to the machine elf that i seemed connected to was another massive dose of dmt, i needed to play these human research chumps, it would be a fine line, a delicate diplomacy, especially with these government jerks.
they kept their stash under tight lock and key, there would be no way i could access it without sanction. i had to play them, i had no choice. i needed to return.

in a lab 15 people undergo americas second academic and scientific study into the effects of the substance known as dmt. the doctor leading the research team is strassman, a middle aged hippy idealist who lost his radical roots as he passed through his rite of passage the wrong way into adulthood. he passed his degree with honours and went on to be funded by the current administration to administer varying dosages to his subjects and then record the results for the governments study group. the results were so shocking to the panel and were sealed in a vault. strassman being a middle class jewish (my people) academic had embraced buddhism but not quite lost the idea of contradicted illusion, therefore his understanding of the results were limited by his experience whereas the administration saw dangerous mind expanding drugs that must be locked away to save joe public lest they expand their minds and realise they don't need an administration.
at the same time a private drug multinational were conducting their own experiments. the results were the same but experimentation continued and the board of directors decided to up the dosage. the guinea pig they used was a guy named captain mission. the doses they were using was injected and 100 times the average tat strassman used.
mission was laying down in a dimly lit room, soft lighting, easy on the eyes although the environment was far from optimal mission had learnt to not allow the setting to effect his experience, he just used visualizations and his imagination to block out the antiseptic areas and replace them with something a bit more cozy. he had fasted for 8 hours and was preparing himself for the dose. he had smoked a bit of dmt in the past and been involved in a number of experiments with the drug company before, igobaine, ayahuscia, no pharmaceuticals though. that was the rule. mission hated them with a vengeance.
the evil drug company was probably going to synthesise the dmt anyway and find something to cure with it, or maybe invent some new condition to treat. mission was only there as it was the only way he could obtain large amounts of these substances and ingest them without getting busted while getting paid. he often lied to the scientists when giving feedback, saying that he could see pretty patterns and abstract information, he could just make out strange insectoid faces and hear chatter but then the drug wore off. they would always up the dose. the reality was far stranger than this fiction.

fire has ravaged the state of victoria.
apparently some one started these bush fires.
300 people dead so far
that makes it the biggest mass murder in australia

in the late 1993 my brother and i were in the sydney bush fires. we watched the column of smoke and flame move down the mona vale road from the newport arms pub, for about a week people attempted to put it out but it got closer and closer cutting of the peninsular where we live. once i drove up the road to see the devastating display of flame but obviously the road had been blocked, however my car went from white to black. it was an eerie time for the population on the peninsular, we knew tat if the fire reached the main road we would be cut off, the only escape would be by water and everyone knew some one with a boat.
one afternoon while i was driving towards avalon, down newport hill we passed what appeared to be a spot fire, it had just started setting a small bush area aflame. i puled over grabbed some blankets from the car and together with my brother started to beat the flames out, however the land being so dry these fires just grew faster than they should. soon a small team of people, drivers who had pulled over had formed a chain and passing buckets, the flames were wild, reaching high up to the over head electrical cables, in a matter of seconds the cables started sparking and snapped apart sending sparks everywhere. the flames now were at least two stories high and the fire was uncontrollable for our small group, fortunately the fire truck arrived and dealt with the situation.
to this day that small group of 'passerby's' stop one another in the street to shake hands and acknowledge our own efforts and comrade. total strangers share that dunkirk spirit.
well i guess what i'm trying to say here is in victoria people have lost a lot more than i can even imagine, it's a terrible loss, an awfully helpless situation, some of the bodies are unrecognizable, families torn apart, homes destroyed and trauma unfurled upon many innocents. yet there are small stories of humanity pulling together, over coming the odds and the kindness of strangers. perhaps in tragedy we can all learn something at this terrible price.

from seed magazine, a science magazine i delve into occasionally.

The Prophetic Brain
It's a commonly held belief that information from the outside world impinges upon our brains through our senses to cause perception, then action. But this reasonable assumption now appears to be false.

by KARL FRISTON
Over the past decade, neuroscience has revealed that rather than acting as a filter that simply maps sensation onto action, the brain behaves like an "inference machine" that tries to discover patterns within data by refining a model of how those patterns are likely to be generated. For instance, depending on whether the context is a crowded concert hall or a deserted forest, a sound can be perceived as either a human voice or the wind whistling through trees. The pioneering German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz articulated this idea as early as 1860, when he wrote of visual perception that "objects are always imagined as being present in the field of vision as would have to be there in order to produce the same impression on the nervous mechanism." Now a unified understanding of how the brain makes and optimizes its inferences about the outside world is emerging from even earlier work — that of the 18th-century mathematician Thomas Bayes.

Bayes developed a statistical method to evaluate the probability of any given hypothesis being true under changing conditions. The concept is straightforward: The probability of two things happening together is the probability of the first given the second, times the probability of the second. This allows the certainty of a single inference to be weighed according to how much additional evidence exists at any particular time. The "Bayesian" approach has emerged in many guises over the past century and has proved very useful in computer science applications like machine learning.

Since at least the 1980s, neuroscientists have speculated that the brain may use Bayesian inference to make predictions about the outside world. In this view, the brain estimates the most likely cause of an observation (that is, sensory input) by computing the probability that a particular series of events generated what was observed — not unlike a scientist who constructs a model to fit his or her data. This probability is a mathematical quantity we call the "evidence." But evaluating the evidence for most realistic models requires calculations so intricate and lengthy they become impractical. This would be particularly problematic for the brain, which must constantly make split-second decisions. Fortunately, there is an easier way. In 1972 the American physicist Richard Feynman devised an elegant shortcut to calculate the evidence using something called a "free-energy bound." Freeenergy is a concept from statistical thermodynamics —  it is essentially the energy that can be used for work within a system once that system's entropy, or useless energy, has been subtracted.

Feynman's basic idea was simple: Instead of trying to compute the evidence explicitly, just start with a quantitative guess about the causes, which we will call a "representation," and then adjust the representation until it minimizes the free-energy of the data. Feynman exploited the fact that the freeenergy is, by construction, always greater than the negative logarithm of the evidence, a mathematical quantity we will call "surprise." In other words, the free-energy is an upper boundary upon surprise (remember this — we'll come back to it later). So by changing the representation to minimize freeenergy, the representation becomes the most likely cause of whatever sensory inputs make up an observation, and the free-energy becomes the evidence itself. The machine-learning community has used this approach with great success, leading many researchers to wonder: If minimizing free-energy is so effective in allowing statistical machines to perceive and "learn" about their surroundings, could the brain be taking similar shortcuts?

In this formulation, a "representation" is simply a quantitative guess about the likely cause of a sensory observation. To understand representation in the brain, imagine you are in a bar having a conversation. The sounds you hear have no meaning beyond being the product of someone speaking. Your brain must first represent the deeper cause of the sounds (in this case, the concepts and words that make up the speech) via its internal variables like the activity of neurons and the strengths of connections between them. Only then can you infer any meaning. What would this process look like?

The emerging picture is that the brain makes its inferences by minimizing the free-energy of messages passing between hierarchical brain regions. Imagine the brain as an onion, where meaningful exchanges with the outside world take place on its surface (the outer sensory layer). Information from these exchanges passes on to "higher" levels (those responsible for cognitive functions) through "bottom up" connections. The higher levels respond with "top down" messages to the lower levels. This reciprocal exchange repeats itself hierarchically, back and forth, layer by layer, until the highest level (at the center of the onion, or front of the brain) becomes engaged. Only then will you consciously register a perception. In this scheme, the free-energy is essentially the collective prediction error over all levels of the hierarchy: Top-down cognitive messages provide predictions based on representations from above, and lower sensory levels reciprocate with bottom-up prediction errors. These "error messages" drive encoded representations (such as neuronal activity) to improve the predictions for lower levels (that is, to reduce free-energy).

For example, in your hypothetical bar conversation, no matter how ambiguous the acoustics, you are more likely to hear "credit crunch" as opposed to "credit brunch." Here the high-level conceptual representation "credit crunch" provides contextual constraints on the words, which restrict the sounds predicted or heard, namely "c," not "b." If the bar is very noisy, you may find yourself watching your friend's mouth closely. This is because the cause (speaking) allows you to make both acoustic and visual predictions. Hierarchical optimization allows sounds to help you see and sights to guide hearing — binding different sensations into a coherent perceptual framework. This recurrent messagepassing leads to the self-organized brain dynamics that support perception and recognition.

The perspective afforded by this hierarchical Bayesian formulation is especially important for neuroscience, because hierarchy is a key architectural principle of brain anatomy — our brains are organized in successive layers, and we can measure the neural activity encoding prediction errors and representations. But this is not the end of the story. What follows is a new theory that considers what would happen if the free-energy principle applied not just to perception but to action as well.

Let's begin with the notion of an ensemble density — a probability distribution of the states you or I can occupy. Imagine I had 100 million copies of you, at different times in your daily life. If I could measure all your sensory states, I could construct a sample density or histogram that reflected the probability of your being in any particular state. Critically, for you to exist, the number of states you occupy must be small in relation to all possible states. For example, your temperature will always be in a certain range. Mathematically, this means your ensemble density has low entropy. Here, we meet a characteristic of adaptive biological agents (like you and I) in that they seem to resist the second law of thermodynamics (a universal tendency to disorder) by minimizing the entropy of their ensemble densities. What does minimizing entropy mean? It simply means that you will, on average, avoid surprising or improbable states (i.e., you will not find yourself at the bottom of the ocean or suddenly engulfed in flames). Though arcane, this implies something quite fundamental: To exist, you must avoid surprising states.

Adaptive agents like us are open systems that exchange with their environment. The environment acts on us, which produces sensory impressions, and we act on the environment to change its states: If you see an apple on a table, you can reach out to pick the apple up. If we can change the environment that causes sensory input, then, in principle, we can act to suppress surprising input. But there is a problem: How do we compute surprise? In fact, we do not need to compute surprise at all. Returning to Feynman's elegant methodology, all we need to do is to minimize free-energy, because free-energy is an upper boundary on surprise. This means that free-energy can be used not only to optimize perception, but also to prescribe action. This is the basis of the freeenergy principle, which states that all quantities associated with an agent will change to minimize free-energy. This line of reasoning prescribes an intimate relationship between perception and action, where both work in concert to suppress free-energy (that is, to minimize prediction errors or surprise) in our sensory experiences. In other words, we will actively sample sensory data so that it conforms to our expectations; we will constantly alter our relationship with our environment so that our expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies. A simple example of this is turning one's head to get a better view of what seems to be a familiar face in peripheral vision, but this principle may encompass our entire navigation of the world to avoid the unexpected.

In terms of neuroscience, the key issue is not so much the information theoretic principles above, but how the brain realizes them. Multiple predictions follow from these ideas. For example, brain systems should be deployed hierarchically and connected reciprocally. Forward connections should be largely linear in their influences, whereas backward connections should embody the nonlinearities inherent in the causal structure of the world. We would expect that predictable stimuli evoke smaller responses, and unexpected stimuli larger ones. Scientists are now starting to confirm these conjectures with brain mapping, by comparing brain responses with stimuli that are coherent or incoherent, predictable or unpredictable. This principle also has implications beyond neuroscience, in the sense that it applies to all biological agents. Could single-cell organisms use the concentration of metabolites and kinetic rate-constants (as opposed to neuronal activity and connection strengths) to encode their implicit representations? In this speculative case as well as with the brain, the great challenge is to find the mapping between the internal states of a phenotype and representations that this theory mandates.

Returning to statistical machines, from which much of this work emerged, the theory suggests a profound revision of current approaches to reinforcement learning and optimal control in engineering artificial neural networks. It should be possible to teach automata (such as robots) complex adaptive behaviors by simply exposing them to a controlled environment (like a classroom), then returning them to their normal surroundings to seek out the new states they have learned to expect. The limitations of this approach are difficult to predict, but further synergy between theoretical neurobiology and machine learning, between a deeper understanding of our own minds and those we wish to create, appears inevitable.

sunday down in bondi, the beach packed with bronzed bodies the water empty save for my brother and i as we surf in almost freezing temperatures. strange contrast. my lips are turning blue, out there as i wait for waves, i'm in shock. where s the iceberg, has it melted around the corner at bronte, why is it so freaking cold. later at the markets i meet the beautiful israeli girl ruth selling her trinkets and jewels, i buy my brother a necklace with some cabalistic jargon, i wander through dazed from the chill factor despite the soaring temperatures. we pass through the beautiful people, two non descript wanderers, i smile at the girls wave at the boys and fall into bookshops and cafes thinking about ruth and how beautiful she is.

monday tuesday i'm home organizing a pa, driving jake here and there, having lunch, drinking coffee, talking with gravy about the gig, i'm filthy and smell awful, it's time for me to get organized and start training and rehearsing and clean myself up. i sit down and write the music for my song, i think about sending ruth a valentines card, stupid commercial bullshit but what am i going to do? i can't let them all slip away. i have to try at least. i'll try in my own passive kinda way, what the hell. i'm lost before i even run but at least im going to run. it's been so long since i put any effort into having a date, i'm certain i'll be rejected in the nicest way, for all i know she's married. i didn't see a ring but then these days that doesn't mean anything. ah ruth i could easily love you but that's all i really know how to do, i'm pretty crap at the rest of it.

the first notes arrive on the back of the previous track, the haunting song 'fly home' which i will talk about later, those final notes fade into the sonic cyclic drone of tone, the harmony that steve and marty attain is perfection, the wonderful picture, no make that a landscape painted with words, and dreamy choral echo of those guitars in loop. there's a beautiful little bit where the instruments just fade out and we are left with that lovely acoustic ring, then slowly as your mind accepts that it's the end, the song slips back in full regalia, it shimmers and shines like a precious jewel. and then the most unexpected 'whoosh' it soars above the clouds, i'd love to know how they came up with that bit, and before the surprise can register this wonderful hawkwind like harvey bainbridge synth takes the song into the stratosphere. it's just bliss.
towards the end a female voice starts to talk deep in the mix, my ears struggle to make out her message, what does she talk about, who is she and what is her message to the dead man? i struggle to decipher its meaning but i never have despite repeated listening and internet searching.
there's something narcotic about this track, it's the dead mans dream, slipping from consciousness to something else, the book of the dead charts the souls journey, the dead man's dream sees him in memory clinging to earthly things, between things of myth and magick, between a time of wizards and witches and machines and technology. it's a journey to another realm that once your sucked into its vortex, that moment of surrender you begin to think dying dreams are just like the living ones, for in life don't we all dream of magic and unicorns and the wonder of innocence.
i love this song and think the album it comes from is an underrated master piece.
i'd like you dear reader to give it a listen again, light up that jazz cigarette and dim the lights low, kick back with your girl and enter the realm of sometime anywhere.

it's early and i'm wandering along the beach at avalon, my feet burning on hot sand, the scorched earth, i look at the waves breaking below me, crystal clear, i'm wandering down into the ocean. my feet recoil at the freezing temperature. and then i'm in.
days like this are slow, the burnt land knows no sanctuary except the sea and today the sea is a staggered cathedral to reality, waves soar up above and then in the flash point of time freeze momentarily before the tremendous crash as they burst over me like liquid war. my body does what it needs, it dives under and through and finds the surface when it needs, my lungs grasp at air when it comes, and let it go when necessary. im thinking about sharks, my fin is a weapon, i can see the sharks eye, that eye scares me more than the sharks teeth, and reason takes hold, as i understand there is no shark but the one eating my mind.
i surf, catch waves and feel the hot sun incinerate my back.
later i meet Jake for lunch, he's looking like a wasted model from the 60's, trashed after a huge night clubbing and now recharging his batteries at the beach. we grab a 50 50 lunch. people stop us in the streets to talk, but we are hot, anti social and somewhat tired. words don't come easy, the chit chat, the small talk, the empty sentences, the hollow vowels and lazy consonants, it's an undead conversation. i go home. listen to shriek, loud, sleep in my hammock, it's mercurial and menacing in parts. whatever landscapes it takes me to i would dwell there momentarily before moving on, this cityscape is a strange cross dickens cross china melville place. steam punk engines and strings, mad people wander the streets but they are not different from the sane, there's a haunting hallucination like quality here, dead people in the land of the living. i'm gonna read the book.

fucking hell man it's so hot i'm sliding through my dreams, tossing and turning like a greasy chip in a deep frying machine, flipping and turning as i travel through dreamscapes and illusions, playing strange games with myself and myself. i awake already disorientated and stumble up to the bathroom where i piss for what seems like ages, standing there watching a yellow stream listening to that reassuring noise and wondering if this is the longest one ever, it seems to go on and on and i have to prop myself up against the sink. then when it's finally over i wander into the lounge room where the first thing i see is a huge giant mutant wasp. now i kid you not, this beasty is the size of my fist, it resembles an alien bug crossed with wasp dna, i can see it's intelligent but somewhat dazed as it hovers around the window looking for an exit.
i pick up some of it's transmissions
'this is killer wasp one (KW1) to base, i'm trapped in the subjects home, he's standing before me like a oaf, i'm attempting to exit before he exhibits human like fight responses'
'this is wasp command, try attacking first, preemptive strike, stingers on full power.'
we engage in some strange maneuvers, i'm still half asleep and know my reactions are slow, i attempt to help the wasp by opening the window wide.
the wasp flies out immediately.
it's now to hot to breath. sydney is melting, my vision is blurred, i'm covered in slime, sweat and my eyes water. i head for the shower and thus begins my day.

attempting to create a my space page for the deep fix is driving me nuts, i hate all the layouts and have no idea how to change them, i don't like all the adverts and it took forever to load two songs on there, anyway i'm flicking through a whole bunch of images and found a nice series of lips, which i think i will use as a theme.

apart from having an awful infection of some sort, a genetically engineered virus at work in my system feels like my body is burning up and freezing at the same time, even when i'm sleeping at night the lights are far to bright and there's that awful exhaustion that permutes all muscle and flesh, there's also the terrible pain from my latest blow to the head, where i banged it last week. i think it took a few days for the bruise to show up. anyway i'm in the wars but not complaining, after all the weathers good, there's plenty of interesting things keeping me distracted like sleeping. for some strange reason i feel like sleeping all the time, it's very strange, my sleep is so deep and dreamless it's like being in a huge void of nothing, the same as being in a float tank. you know the type?
the type that just kicks in, zomp! from awareness to void.
anyways that sleep is seductive, it's calling me, beckoning like a siren, i know it's not really healthy to sleep so much but i can't help it. this virus doesn't help.

Transcript from interview with David Mitchell

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Ramona Koval: David Mitchell's first book Ghostwritten was described by AS Byatt as 'the best novel I have ever read'. His second Number 9 Dream was shortlisted for the Booker and the James Tait Black Memorial prizes, and his third Cloud Atlas was hailed as spectacular by both critics and general readers alike, another Booker nominated work.

His latest novel is Black Swan Green, the story of 13 months in the life of 13-year-old Jason Taylor, the year his parents split up. A lot happens to him that year; he survives another year in the schoolyard, and a boy with a stammer doesn't have it easy, and he emerges as a young poet, although he publishes under an assumed name. That description is really very one-dimensional and as usual this David Mitchell book is very much multi-dimensional.

At our session in Wellington at Writers and Readers Week last week David began by reading from Cloud Atlas, and those who have read the book will know that the text has a very interesting structure, with the first half of the book being the first half of a series of stories (like ABCDE), and the second half completing them in a Russian doll-like stack (EDCBA), and with each of the chapters written in a different kind of English, from the language of an 18th century shipboard journal to a projected future language. So when he sat down to talk after his reading I asked him how we went about working out what these languages might sound like, what's his system?

David Mitchell: It depends if we're in the past, the present or the future.

Ramona Koval: Take your pick.

David Mitchell: In the past, if you've got an American narrator in the 19th century then Melville is a good place to start, so I read Moby Dick and cribbed down all the things that I wouldn't say myself, antiquated terms of phrase and items of vocabulary, and just worked them into the narrative as I wrote it. We speak 21st century English, so the present is not problem, and the future is the easiest of all because you can make it up and you won't get any angry letters from Tunbridge Wells to say 'I'm disgusted by Mr Mitchell's misuse of English.' So in the far future part, English sort of gets crushes and melded. I was teaching English in Japan at that time, so I based a lot of the English that might be spoken 600 years from now on my Japanese students' mistakes of English. So I used the way...their mistakes with irregular English verbs, for example.

Ramona Koval: But is that because you think English is going to be the global language probably? Or maybe Chinese will be, but anyway at the moment it looks like it's English, so English will accommodate itself to all the mistakes that everybody who is not an English speaker will make.

David Mitchell: It will, it does, and that's a fabulous thing. It's great how language evolves. It inches forwards by mistakes. I'm into very controversial linguistic areas here, I suppose, but it does seem that something like 'long time no see', which would once have been a native Chinese-speaker's misappropriation of 'I haven't seen you for a long time', that sort of gets adopted first with a sense of irony, and then even the irony evaporates and it becomes standard English. Isn't it fantastic? We're all a part of it, a great linguistic democracy. Great. Love it. Next question.

Ramona Koval: I'm just enjoying the pleasure you have in language, and obviously why wouldn't you have pleasure in language? But not every writer has that sort of pleasure.

David Mitchell: Maybe they do, they just don't whitter on about it so incessantly. But we're so lucky. Perhaps people in all language groups have a sneaking suspicion that however egalitarian they may wish to present themselves, really their own language has...it reaches the parts that other languages cannot reach. But English is this great central reservoir. We've got words like 'circumambulation' that I can't even pronounce without thinking. There in the depths we can kind of scoop up...but we've got more recent great American contributions coming into the language, and even from New Zealand as well. So I consider myself fortunate having English as my birthright, as a writer.

Ramona Koval: And you are interested in the building blocks of sentences as well as sentences, and I'm thinking now of the structures of your book and the engineering that goes into something like Cloud Atlas and the Dream book. So I wanted to talk to you about whether you perhaps wanted to be an engineer or an architect when you were a young man, because they seem so architectural. You can walk through these books and you can actually visualise the whole structure of them and you can actually climb on the scaffolding and look down.

David Mitchell: Thanks for the nice things you said about my writing there, Ramona. I did want to be an inventor, that was my very first thing, which is a pretty fair description of a novelist.

Ramona Koval: What did you invent?

David Mitchell: I invented spaceships. I made very elaborate cardboard spaceships and space station with UHU glue, who are not a sponsor of this festival. That smell of it...you shouldn't smell it too much, kids! But yes, I used to invent very elaborate space stations. Then I wanted to program computer games, and I did for a while on my Sinclair 48K ZX Spectrum, which was the future for a while. They no longer exist, so they haven't sponsored me, obviously. You can see the adult vocation in childhood forms of play, and I bet when you were a kid you were one of these kids who were always asking questions and wanted to interview people.

Ramona Koval: It's true, though it's not about me today, it's about you. Black Swan Green of course is a much more conventional book, although there are hidden worlds within the story, the world of Jason Taylor who has a hidden identity as a poet and even an assumed name. Tell me about the structure of this book, because actually there are worlds in this book too. It's small on the outside and big on the inside, if you know what I mean.

David Mitchell: Like Dr Who's spaceship, the TARDIS.

Ramona Koval: I was going to say TARDIS. Because sometimes you take us off the page into a magical space, not really magic realism in a way, but a kind of thrillingly invented language world that he finds himself when he's by himself.

David Mitchell: There's a few questions in there. It is a more conventional book, but for me after the first three, that was unconventional, if that makes sense.

Ramona Koval: So this is unconventional.

David Mitchell: It was for me, even though it looks like a conventional book from the outside at least, as you say. Perhaps to my satisfaction then I had exhausted the possibilities of novels with monkeyed-about-with structures, and so in a sense a more ordinary book was a more revolutionary next step for me. His language...it's tough when you're writing a novel narrated by a kid because unless you kind of cheat by making him a genius you're stuck between writing plausible 13-year-old but using his language and giving him a sufficiently interesting voice to retain an adult reader. Certainly when I was 13 the things I said weren't that interesting, and the idea of 300 pages of it would have sent me to sleep, certainly. However, what kids do do (and this was my way out of this fix really) is accidental poetry.

Kids of a certain age, hopefully 13, are on the cusp of acquiring an adult vocabulary but they'll still assemble and conjugate words that adults don't or that we could censor ourselves and prevent ourselves from saying. If a kid steps on a piece of crusty several-day-old snow that hasn't melted and it goes crunch, and it's very much like stepping on a Cadbury's Crunchie (who are also not sponsoring me) and we might not say that unless we are writers or eccentric or have some disorder, but a 13-year-old would; 'Wow, it's like stepping on a Crunchie.' So even though things Jason says aren't that coherent or articulate, in his own mind he's a poet, but most kids are, I think. I haven't been inside the heads of other kids, I can only speak for myself, but I suspect that that goes on.

Ramona Koval: He works at expressing himself in poetry, but he has difficulty in expressing himself aloud in the language that he loves.

David Mitchell: Yes, like me he has a stammer and I very much wanted to write about it, that was one of my motivations for the book. It's not talked about very much and well-meaning friends don't want to ask about it for fear of hurting my feelings, but this means I think it's probably much easier to find really good accounts of what it's like to be blind or deaf than it is to actually be fine but not be able to speak without an arsenal of techniques and evasions that people who stammer need to use. So I wanted to write about it and, perhaps in this area more than others, send...we're into Dr Who area again, but send a message to my 13-year-old self just containing all the things I wish someone had told me then. I think the science of speech therapy has advanced a lot since those days, and I think kids these days get a lot more useful help. But back in my day, not so great.

Ramona Koval: I was struck then by your description, equating it to blindness or deafness. Do you feel as if it is as big a disadvantage to you?

David Mitchell: No, of course not. I can see and I can hear and this allows me to interface with the world much more directly. Perhaps it isn't as major an inability as deafness or blindness, and this is why it has slipped under the radar of help and of knowledge for a long time. My book is one modest way to rectify that.

Ramona Koval: So you just talked then about strategies that you employ to get a sentence out, and if we had a tickertape of your brain going up behind us here...

David Mitchell: I'd be arrested.

Ramona Koval: ...apart from those lines, we would probably see a whole lot of instructions to yourself about the sentence that's coming up and how to negotiate it, a kind of map of what you want to say.

David Mitchell: Yes, you would.

Ramona Koval: Can you tell us a little bit about that map?

David Mitchell: It's complex. The relationship of a stammer with spoken language is very complex and it's largely beyond my understanding. Of course I have a greater understanding that a non-stammerer would, but why I can speak in front of a few hundred people and not be afflicted...dunno, I don't really know. I can draw up a general list of rules and these include...when it's really important that I don't stammer, like now, I don't. This is one rule. Rules can be broken, and they're listed in a book folks, but in terms of your question, what does happen is...I do this less now, I've come to a more useful working accommodation with my stammer and it tends not to sort of mug me as much, but what I used to do more was to examine the sentence ahead and if necessary engineer it so that I would be avoiding a word that I thought I might stammer on.

Really severe cases, if someone is asking you if you would like water or milk and you know that you tend to stammer on words beginning with 'M'...there's always one or two key consonants at any one time, and interestingly these consonants alter through life. So at the moment, say, I would have a hard time with 'Ks', hard 'Cs' and 'Ss', whereas years ago I remember being unable to say words beginning with 'Y'. I dreaded being 12 years old because then I couldn't say words beginning with 'T', say. But now I can do these fine. How come? I don't know. But water or milk, can't say words beginning with 'M', the worst thing, even if you want milk you'd ask for water because you can't say 'milk'. You live with it and you devise coping strategies. Compared to what a lot of people live with happily, it's a lucky break really.

Ramona Koval: I'm just thinking now about how it might have influenced the way you've written, the idea of...the breaking down of things, the geography of the sentences that you're about to speak, the geographies of these words that you create.

David Mitchell: Linguistically it doesn't change how I write because of course I'm totally free on the page...

Ramona Koval: No, but it changes how you think though, surely?

David Mitchell: As a kid it gives you a whacking vocabulary really early. You do need other ways to get around words. It gives you a sensitivity for language register, by which I mean if you don't think you can say 'pointless' because you're stammering on words beginning with 'P' at that point, and it's more likely you will know substitute words like 'futile', however this brings you up against the other problem whereby if you use the word 'futile' amongst 13-year-old they'll do yer bleedin' 'ead in because a 13-year-old has no right to be using a word of a higher register like 'futile'. So this is useful stuff for a writer and it's stuff that I still use now. All writers do but I was aware of it from a much earlier age, which does show what we think of as our handicaps and our inabilities can actually be teachers, they can actually have very useful functions. Would I wish my stammer away? I'd like to wish it away but I certainly wouldn't want to pay for that wish by losing what I'd learnt about language through it.

Ramona Koval: Jason develops this idea of his stammer as 'hangman' because the stammer is so pervasive that it has an ego and it has a kind of presence.

David Mitchell: It does rather feel like that. When you're a kid especially you personify abstracts in order to understand them better and in order to feel as though you're doing business with them and interacting with them. So it made sense for Jason to do that.

Ramona Koval: This is a cousin to all the books that you've written before because we have characters that reappear from the other books. They're a different age and they're referred to. This Madame...now I'm going to mispronounce... Crommelynck...

David Mitchell: Unless we have any Belgians in the audience, it's Madame de Crommelynck, and if we do then they're very welcome to come up and correct me afterwards.

Ramona Koval: She's a character from that, and she's just fantastic. In one of these magical moments he goes in to see this woman who is this Belgian countess, I suppose, she's been everywhere, she knows everything...

David Mitchell: She's like you, Ramona.

Ramona Koval: She's like me, thank you. I thought she was probably about 40 years older than me.

David Mitchell: Okay, she's like how you will be in 40 years time.

Ramona Koval: We're all a bit demented in our own ways. She was very wise and she was prefect for a young poet, wasn't she, she knew what he should read and what he should listen to. She was talking straight to him. She was a gift.

David Mitchell: She was. Well, he deserves a gift after everything else I put him through. I wanted an opportunity to talk about art in the book and there wasn't one, and wasn't really one when I was a kid either. But I advertised this vacancy amongst the cast of people I'd already written, and she applied for it and she passed the interview unanimously. So bring her in and hopefully she brings with her the ontological certainty. If you read this book and believe it's real, then in theory someone from this book who then appears in this will bring that realness with them and make Black Swan Green a more real place as well. So there's a technical reason for doing it as well, but it's also just kind of fun.

Ramona Koval: But you do want everything to connect, don't you.

David Mitchell: I stand accused. Yes, I'm guilty, I suppose. Yes. Nothing more profound really. Isn't it great when things do? Doesn't it remind you to be happy that you're alive when things like this happen, when something from a long time ago that you thought would never re-enter your life, it does, hopefully not in a negative way. When you see an old friend that you haven't seen for 15 years who you never expected to see, they just pop up. Isn't that wonderful? Maybe I do a little bit...

Ramona Koval: How important is music to you for that, old songs?

David Mitchell: As everybody knows (which is a Leonard Cohen song of course), songs bring things back instantly, in as undiluted a way as smell. Songs are companions in life as well. We might have a song that we knew when we were 13 years old and if it's art it evolves as we do and we can listen to it when we're 80 and it's a touchstone, all the way back. I couldn't...I would live without music of course but I'm very glad I don't have to.

Ramona Koval: So this young poet, Jason...you wrote poetry too when you were this age. You published under the name of James Bolivar.

David Mitchell: How do you know that?

Ramona Koval: I know stuff, I'm so old now, I know stuff, it's not hard. What happened to the poetry with you?

David Mitchell: Realistic assessment of my own gifts happened...

Ramona Koval: By you or others?

David Mitchell: By me. Of course when I was 15 I thought I was absolutely wonderful, and then luckily for me and posterity I read some real poets and met one or two, and realised that it is a higher art that I can't really attain. It's not where my vocation is and it's not...what gifts I may have, poetry isn't what these equip me for best. You can't make a single mistake in poetry, every last word and inflection has to be perfect. Short stories are higher than novels for this reason. Short stories are somewhere between the novel and poem.

Ramona Koval: Because the novel is more forgiving?

David Mitchell: Yes, novel comes with getaway cars. You can write a duff scene or a half-duff scene and if the next one is brilliant then the half-duff scene can still earn its keep. But a half-duff scene in a short story and the short story is dead. I've written a few, I know.

Ramona Koval: Is originality more important to you than telling a story or creating characters?

David Mitchell: What's important is a really simple question; is it good or not? Is it any good or not? If you are true to yourself then originality happens by default because every single person in the world has original a personality as their iris. It seems that it's not original when we...I haven't had this thought before and it might be a load of nonsense, so I apologise in advance if it is...but it seems that we are like other people and one book is like another book if we allow our true selves to be overly doctored or influenced by the 'other' or rather the 'others'. But I think if you (I hideously mix my metaphors)...if you mine yourself deep enough then the metals you will find will be precious and original. So originality isn't a thing, it's the absence of other things, which is great news.

Ramona Koval: It's not really a young person's book, is it?

David Mitchell: Yes, a few schools from around where I grew up have adopted it. So certainly a few hundred schoolkids in Worcestershire are reading it this year and perhaps hating me because I'm...

Ramona Koval: Have you had any communications from them?

David Mitchell: A few, yes. Luckily people who take the time to write you a letter about a book usually do it because they love it rather than they hate it. I haven't had any hate mail, no, not yet.

Ramona Koval: You've spoken before about going to live in Japan in 1994 as the beginning of your life as a proper writer. You were a foreigner with little Japanese and you say it afforded you the luxury of having no social belonging and probably no real responsibilities, I guess, and also you didn't have to talk, I suppose. What did that...so they think about your stammer, or that was a way of presenting yourself without a problem?

David Mitchell: My evasive strategies were sufficiently developed by then for that to not really be a factor.

Ramona Koval: Did that feel like you were a different person?

David Mitchell: I went there because of wanderlust more than anything else really. I feel like a different person every few years actually, I guess we all do, we become a dad or get married or get unmarried or change your job or have a near death experience, this sort of nudges you along the great journey.

Ramona Koval: But also it probably provided you with a kind of writer's retreat, like in a bubble. You were always in a writer's retreat because you didn't have to communicate with people, you couldn't read anything, you couldn't watch television. Was that something that stimulated you towards the page, because what else were you going to do?

David Mitchell: Yes, I think so, I'm sure it helped. I've been looking for a good way to articulate this for years and you've just supplied it. Japan was my writer's retreat. That's great. Is it okay if I use that in the future?

Ramona Koval: Of course, feel free. What about in Ireland? You live in Ireland now.

David Mitchell: I'm a dad, as I've said about three times already. I've got some photos to show you later.

Ramona Koval: They're very beautiful children, I've seen them before.

David Mitchell: And of course when you become a dad everything becomes very simple; what's best for the kids? We went back to Japan last year just for a year so that our daughter could learn the language, which she did in about three weeks. I've been doing it for nine years and it's still very ugly. Then we realised that, for who we are, West Cork is the place, so we went back to Ireland.

Ramona Koval: So do you feel like an outsider there?

David Mitchell: It's good with an international marriage to live in a third country because then it's no one's fault when things go wrong, and things in Ireland do go wrong. It's not a systems society, it's a leisurely...which is a great Irish word...if you don't have much on this afternoon you say, 'I'm quite leisurely this afternoon,' and there's something very Irish about that...which does mean that if you want an electrician this afternoon, forget it. You'll get one next month maybe. But it also means that people are less stressed, I think, and it's a good place for children.

Ramona Koval: And what about a good place for writers? Because we have this idea that it's a place full of writers and they don't pay tax and everyone's a poet. Is that true?

David Mitchell: It's a place for writers...anywhere is a place for a writer. Humanity is so fascinating and our work is to put that fascinating-ness into the book. Yes, it's true that there are generous tax breaks and it's disingenuous of me to not mention that when people say, 'So why do you live in Ireland?' 'Well, the environment is great, a good place for kids,' and they're waiting for me to mention this. But it is being reduced, which is fine as well. The midwife who helped deliver my son...I don't know if I mentioned I'm a dad, by the way...but she is of more value to Irish society than I am, and if anyone deserves a tax break it's her and not me. But my principles are not that strong that I will insist on making voluntary donations to the state, I haven't gone there yet. Have I answered your question?

Ramona Koval: Yes, you have. I've got a question about the work you're working on now, and I believe we're going to Japan and we're going back in time, and we're going to a place where language is very important again.

David Mitchell: We are. It's the Napoleonic era in Europe, and while Japan was closed to the outside world for 248 years or so there was one exception that no one outside Holland really knows about which was an artificial island, very small, perhaps about the size of this theatre, in Nagasaki Harbour called Deshima, and on this for the whole of those two and a half centuries the Dutch East Indies company was permitted to trade with the Japanese, and it was staffed by about 10 or 15 Dutch guys a long way from home.

The ships would come once a year from Batavia, which is now Jakarta, and they weren't allowed off the island, and the only three categories of people who were allowed on were the merchants who did business with them, the prostitutes who also did business with them, and the interpreters who belonged to a hereditary caste, it was passed on from father to son. The Dutch officially weren't allowed to learn Japanese, although they tend to be such gifted linguists that they did, but officially they weren't allowed to. And no Japanese other then the interpreters and a few academics towards the end of the period as well were allowed to learn Dutch. So language is power, and the interpreters had it.

Ramona Koval: But then how are you going to translate that into English with all of those different kinds of languages and the importance of which language you speak?

David Mitchell: With difficulty. The other thing about originality that I didn't say earlier, the more...to use an adjective I've just borrowed from Christian Bok the poet who's also at this festival, he talks about Sisyphean constraints, and the more Sisyphean the constraints, provided you can...just to turn Houdini into a verb...as long as you can Houdini your way out of the Sisyphean constraints then originality happens.

Ramona Koval: That was a triple somersault with pike, wasn't it!

i'm listening to the church soundtrack of shriek, so far it's awesome, space rock boogie with ambient tonal drifts and some exceptional words by the author jeff vandermeer.

heat strong enough to melt clocks these last few days and nights, i get myself into the ocean and catch waves, cooling my body and mind, i can't really move just slip into hammocks and chairs and sleep languidly like a chubby lizard. i've discovered 'acaci' a substance from the amazon that you eat frozen, just like ice cream without the cream but it's fantastic, tasty and nutritious. i'm gonna live on acaici all summer.

i meet my comrades from left as in sinister, a very nice crew of musicians, val explains things to us, apparently i'm gonna have a t- shirt although i'd prefer lingerie. vals a genius, his mind works on millions of things at once, you can see his mental process is always in hyper-drive.

in the surf i catch another wave, suddenly i feel my solar plexus charka explode. this is awakening for me, this is exactly what i require.

i'm reading john birminghams book ''without warning' it's ot something i would normally read but it's my first australian sci fi and it reads like an airport thriller, trashy and clique as if he's writing for the movie. i'm curious to see how it ends but i'm kinda already bored.

i finish reading micheal pollens book, the omnivores dilemma, a great read for anyone interested in food. how it grows where it comes from, if it's good and i have to say the book was a revelation. he basically asks, 'what should we eat for dinner?' following the food chain he observes and participates in the process that sustains us, from industrial foods to organic. i'm particularly amused and fascinated by the trend in america where the farmers basically say they farm grass. grass is essential to the food chain, and the animals that eat it are basically turning sunlight into energy for us via their grass consumption. in the end we are all stars. or at least part of the sun.
i also just finished 'song of kali' by the tremendous writer dan simmons who captures calcutta in this modern horror novel that leaves you feeling some what haunted. the idea of kali is amazing. the goddess of time and change although in the book she is the goddess of death and destruction.
Kali's most common four armed iconographic image shows each hand carrying variously a sword, a trishul (trident), a severed head and a bowl or skull-cup (kapala) catching the blood of the severed head.
Two of these hands (usually the left) are holding a sword and a severed head. The Sword signifies Divine Knowledge and the Human Head signifies human Ego which must be slain by Divine Knowledge in order to attain Moksha. The other two hands (usually the right) are in the abhaya and varada mudras or blessings, which means her initiated devotees (or anyone worshiping her with a true heart) will be saved as she will guide them here and in the hereafter.
She has a garland consisting of human heads, variously enumerated at 108 (an auspicious number in Hinduism and the number of countable beads on a Japa Mala or rosary for repetition of Mantras) or 51, which represents Varnamala or the Garland of letters of the Sanskrit alphabet, Devanagari. Hindus believe Sanskrit is a language of dynamism, and each of these letters represents a form of energy, or a form of Kali. Therefore she is generally seen as the mother of language, and all mantras.
She is often depicted naked which symbolizes her being beyond the covering of Maya since she is pure (nirguna) being-consciousness-bliss and far above prakriti. She is shown as very dark as she is brahman in its supreme unmanifest state. She has no permanent qualities — she will continue to exist even when the universe ends. It is therefore believed that the concepts of color, light, good, bad do not apply to her — she is the pure, un-manifested energy, the Adi-shakti.

There's a deep similarity to kabalistic concepts here, i wonder if much research has been done on this.

The other book i just enjoyed was a book on the HGA which gave some interesting steps on the process.