biolog

In a correspondence between Menachem Kaiser and Aleksandar Hemon, author of Love and Obstacles, the obvious answer to a tired and annoying question asked of novelists.

The narratives in “Love and Obstacles” follow the life of a Bosnian writer who moves to Chicago, a trajectory similar to your own. How autobiographical are the stories themselves?

Here’s how it works: Last night, on my way to give a reading, I hurt a ligament in my right hand while putting my shoe on. As I was driving this morning and talking on the phone with my sister in London, I lost my grip and sideswept my neighbor’s car. Being honest, I went to their house to tell them what I had done. When I rang the bell nobody answered. I knocked and went in anyway, thinking they might be in the backyard. The house was empty, and as I walked through I noticed a vase in the shape of a monkey head. The light angle made it somehow seem that the monkey was winking at me, so I picked the head up to examine it, but then, dropped it, what with the weak hand ligament, and it shattered in a thousand pieces. For a moment, I considered cleaning up or waiting for my neighbors to show up, but then decided to sneak out. Now I dread hearing the door bell.

I could go on and turn this into a story. I did hurt my hand last night and I did get into the car this morning, but I did not cause any damage, nor did I trespass. I did not talk to my sister yesterday, but she does live in London. And I’ve never seen a monkey head like that. So, how much of this putative story is autobiographical?

Similarly, I did spend a few weeks in Africa some time in the eighties, just like the narrator in the story “Stairway to Heaven.” But my father was not a diplomat, there was no Spinelli, no Natalie, and most of the things that happened in the story did not happen to me. For some reason or another, I compulsively imagine scenarios alternative to what happens to me. To my mind, my stories are not autobiographical; they are antibiographical, they are the antimatter to the matter of my life. They contain what did not happen to me.

John Wilkins is one of my favorite living philosophers, which is saying a lot because I think philosophers are weirdos and sometimes kooky (I’m looking at you Plantinga!). It doesn’t hurt that he’s a philosopher of science with a blog entitled Evolving Thoughts. You know I read it. He has a new book out called Species: History of the idea. It belongs to a series called Species and Systematics. Now it is a well-known fact that philosophy books are read by virtually none, and yet they’re priced like textbooks. One would think, to sell more readers publishing houses would price books more reasonably. Poetry books have this same problem…something about niche markets and limited vendors. In any event, life isn’t fair when a 320 page book on philosophy is twice the price of a 1000 page book about a boy magician.

From the University of California website:

The complex idea of “species” has evolved over time, yet its meaning is far from resolved. This comprehensive work takes a fresh look at an idea central to the field of biology by tracing its history from antiquity to today. John S. Wilkins explores the essentialist view, a staple of logic from Plato and Aristotle through the Middle Ages to fairly recent times, and considers the idea of species in natural history—a concept often connected to reproduction. Tracing “generative conceptions” of species back through Darwin to Epicurus, Wilkins provides a new perspective on the relationship between philosophical and biological approaches to this concept. He also reviews the array of current definitions. Species is a benchmark exploration and clarification of a concept fundamental to the past, present, and future of the natural sciences.