Last minute holiday wish!

There is only one other piece of modern literature that talks about the concept of how a person contains and integrates the multiple personalities we are all made of and that is the Frankenstein Series written by Koontz, Anderson and Gorman. It is a piece of fiction, of course, and it is bent by and devoted to the process by which fiction can help us understand who we are. It is narrative in nature and a page-turner in style and ends up with a composite character that is capable of integrating the consciousness of several other singular personalities we have met individually into one rather difficult to understand character.

Book of Aliases deals with that idea poetically. After all, we seem to often be made up of some pretty contradictory stuff from time to time. So much so that our spouses/lovers/friends often find themselves saying “oh, they’re just in one of those moods” to try and explain our strange behavior. In addition to that, our problems with plural/singular pronoun references to ourselves I believe stems, at least in part, to that multiplicity of personalities we are all capable of.

Just as in fiction, we better understand the motivations and peculiarities of a single character but Dostoyevsky, in earlier times lets us understand that, in some real sense, the criminal and the policeman are one person seeking to experience re-integration. Again in Ulysses we can start to understand through Joyce that maybe Homer was really talking about the components of an ideal soldier by describing the personalities involved in a successful army.

Fortunately poetry lets us look at this issue as if we were holding a gem up to the light. Of course Book of Aliases seems to contain lots of personality types but the simple fact that it is autobiographical in style suggests that we must take all these parts inside ourselves and let them be at home. It takes that “why did I do that?” kind of behavior and lets us put it to rest in the sprawling mansion of our lives.

It’s getting too close to the holidays now to have time to ship a gift so it’s time to consider sending an e-book as that special gift for that rare person that you love and respect. Please consider sending Book of Aliases or some other of the works of literature that make our lives so much better.

Happy Holidays!