Norwegian Wood
By: Haruki Murakami
"It's a quiet place, so people talk quietly,"
1. It's pretty much a love story. Accessing it seems pointless being thoroughly unJapanese myself.
2. Murakami: "Norwegian Wood is, as you've said, the only one written in a realistic style. I did this intentionally, of course. I wanted to prove to myself that I could write a 100% realistic novel. And I think this experiment proved helpful later on. I gained the confidence I could write this way; otherwise it would have been pretty hard to complete the work that came afterwards. For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I'm still awake. I can continue yesterday's dream today, something you can't normally do in everyday life. It's also a way of descending deep into my own consciousness. So while I see it as dreamlike, it's not fantasy. For me the dreamlike is very real."
3. Its gone now; tucked between the stacks. I can't remember the line that's been dicing up my brain. This place that is no place? This place that is no space? I can't remember. It seems irrelevant though; what the words are precisely.
4. Place: Easy to identify: 1960's Tokyo primarily, secondarily a few geographically insignificant countryside locales (something out of a SÅtatsu painting or a Hiroshige ukiyo-e: busy within the placidity of blank space; irrelevant chaos). In lieu of geographic purpose the primary and secondary function in orbit of each other.
Space: Does Tokyo even exist? Wantanabe walks through it again and again, but its vastness makes it slippery with nothing to hold on to. Incomplete memory? Maybe; the novel's tone echos through dreamlike whispers. Geometrically speaking however, the space, if we include the characters themselves as space, functions in perpendicular lines: Tangential from assumption, but examined beyond the eye separate with vacuous breadth.
5. "It's pretty much a love story". If so, what is the lover and what is it's the love object? Which characters are main, and which secondary? Who do we look at? but more importantly, where do we look? Are the absences of such distinctions irrelevant in the love story?
Conclusion:
A ghost town; here plants grow.
No one lives
under the wooden eaves
of Fuwa Barrier.
For years in ruins:
now only the autumn wind.
Cooling, so cooling,
with a wall against my feet,
midday sleep—behold.
When I awoke, I was alone
this bird had flown.
So I lit a fire
isn't it good Norwegian wood?
Monday, February 15, 2010
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Artistic Manifesto
Today I picked up this book on drawing that's been knocking around my pockets for ages. Its short and out of print and was sitting at the bottom of an antiques shop wicker basket just outside of Micanopy. I stole it. I don't feel very good about this because the woman at the register was 83 and pinched my cheeks, but I knew at the time I wouldn't feel very good about it, so chalk this up to curious stupidity.
Before this becomes any more like a diary entry I should tell you about the "Principles of Drawing". As a 1920's approach to drawing the book had less to do with drawing, than on the mental and physical preparations one must go through before drawing. Chapter 1 deals with supplies, Chapter 2 deals with hand exercises, Chapter 3 deals with observation and developing "acute perspicacity", Chapter 4 deals with which artists you should be familiar with and which ones are "rubbish", and Chapter 5 talks about "Developing One's Art Manifesto". There is a Chapter 6 but its just a list of absurdly practical drawing exercises (IE: "Draw a Tree in Precise Detail Without Loosing the General Image of a Tree").
I can't say "The Principles of Drawing" was a bad book, it really wasn't. As you might be able to tell though from the table of contents, the book is covered by a thick historical dust that just begs me to draw a few penises in it with my finger. Chapter 4 especially. In it the author, who's name I never really learned, calls Picasso a passing fad and preaches about the new English Renaissance about to grip the world. His passion in this section breaks through the book's even tempered tone and causes nothing but a happy giggle fit.
At any rate...Chapter 5 claims that the most essential aspect of learning to draw was developing an Art Manifesto. This was somewhat shocking after Chapter 4's fit with the avant garde and its masturbatory praise for classical pieces, but I decided before laughing at it I'd see what he had to say. Artistic manifesto by his definition "implies the creation of one's artistic aims through its statement in a lucid though dynamic prose".
I turned that idea over in my head for a bit. I ended up writing a page long manifesto but unsatisfied I slipped it between pages 87 and 88 leaving "The Principles of Drawing" in the library restroom attached to a post-it note that read "please steal me" in red ink. In a strange way I felt like I'd done something worthwhile.
Walking out I came up with a new artistic manifesto that was precisely detailed without ever loosing the general idea:
Manifest of the ? Style
1. Lightening my pockets.
Before this becomes any more like a diary entry I should tell you about the "Principles of Drawing". As a 1920's approach to drawing the book had less to do with drawing, than on the mental and physical preparations one must go through before drawing. Chapter 1 deals with supplies, Chapter 2 deals with hand exercises, Chapter 3 deals with observation and developing "acute perspicacity", Chapter 4 deals with which artists you should be familiar with and which ones are "rubbish", and Chapter 5 talks about "Developing One's Art Manifesto". There is a Chapter 6 but its just a list of absurdly practical drawing exercises (IE: "Draw a Tree in Precise Detail Without Loosing the General Image of a Tree").
I can't say "The Principles of Drawing" was a bad book, it really wasn't. As you might be able to tell though from the table of contents, the book is covered by a thick historical dust that just begs me to draw a few penises in it with my finger. Chapter 4 especially. In it the author, who's name I never really learned, calls Picasso a passing fad and preaches about the new English Renaissance about to grip the world. His passion in this section breaks through the book's even tempered tone and causes nothing but a happy giggle fit.
At any rate...Chapter 5 claims that the most essential aspect of learning to draw was developing an Art Manifesto. This was somewhat shocking after Chapter 4's fit with the avant garde and its masturbatory praise for classical pieces, but I decided before laughing at it I'd see what he had to say. Artistic manifesto by his definition "implies the creation of one's artistic aims through its statement in a lucid though dynamic prose".
I turned that idea over in my head for a bit. I ended up writing a page long manifesto but unsatisfied I slipped it between pages 87 and 88 leaving "The Principles of Drawing" in the library restroom attached to a post-it note that read "please steal me" in red ink. In a strange way I felt like I'd done something worthwhile.
Walking out I came up with a new artistic manifesto that was precisely detailed without ever loosing the general idea:
Manifest of the ? Style
1. Lightening my pockets.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Charles Brocken Brown is My New Best Friend
I did the calculations just now, and realized that officially I now spend more time with old CBB than I do with an single person born after 1771. Somehow I'm not bothered by this. In fact, so little am I bothered by it that I think I'll even donate this precious post number 20 to him and his cause.
Take it away Charlie:
A Receipt for a Modern Romance
Charles Brockden Brown
TAKE an old castle; pull down a
part of it, and allow the grass to grow
on the battlements, and provide the
owls and bats with uninterrupted ha-
bitations among the ruins. Pour a
sufficient quantity of heavy rain upon
the hinges and bolts of the gates, so
that when they are attempted to be
opened, they may creak most fear-
fully. Next take an old man and
woman, and employ them to sleep in
a part of this castle, and provide them
with frightful stories of lights that
appear in the western or the eastern
tower every night, and of music heard
in the neighbouring woods, and ghosts
dressed in white who perambulate the
place.
Convey to this castle a young lady;
consign her to the care of the old
man and woman, who must relate to
her all they know, that is all they do
not know, but only suspect. Make
her dreadfully terrified at the relation,
but dreadfully impatient to behold
the reality. Convey her, perhaps
on the second night of her arrival,
through a trap-door, and from the
trap-door to a flight of steps down-
wards, and from a flight of steps to
a subterraneous passage, and from a
subterraneous passage, to a door that
is shut, and from that to a door that
is open, and from that to a cell, and
from that to a chapel, and from a
chapel back to a subterraneous passage
again; here present either a skeleton
with a live face, or a living body
with the head of a skeleton, or a
ghost all in white, or a groan from a
distant part of a cavern, or the shake
of a cold hand, or a suit of armour
moving—fierce “put out the light,
and then”—
Let this be repeated for some nights
in succession, and after the lady has
been dissolved to a jelly with her
fears, let her be delivered by the man
of her heart, and married—Proba-
tum est.
As in medicine there is what phy-
sicians call an elegant prescription to
distinguish it from those incongruous
and absurd mixtures of the ancient
empirics, so, lest any one should think
I have put too many ingredients into
the above recipe, let him take the
following:
A novel now, says Will, is nothing more
Than an old castle, and a creaking door:
A distant hovel,
Clanking of chains, a gallery, a light,
Old armour, and a phantom all in white—
And there's a novel.
ANTI-GHOST.
Take it away Charlie:
A Receipt for a Modern Romance
Charles Brockden Brown
TAKE an old castle; pull down a
part of it, and allow the grass to grow
on the battlements, and provide the
owls and bats with uninterrupted ha-
bitations among the ruins. Pour a
sufficient quantity of heavy rain upon
the hinges and bolts of the gates, so
that when they are attempted to be
opened, they may creak most fear-
fully. Next take an old man and
woman, and employ them to sleep in
a part of this castle, and provide them
with frightful stories of lights that
appear in the western or the eastern
tower every night, and of music heard
in the neighbouring woods, and ghosts
dressed in white who perambulate the
place.
Convey to this castle a young lady;
consign her to the care of the old
man and woman, who must relate to
her all they know, that is all they do
not know, but only suspect. Make
her dreadfully terrified at the relation,
but dreadfully impatient to behold
the reality. Convey her, perhaps
on the second night of her arrival,
through a trap-door, and from the
trap-door to a flight of steps down-
wards, and from a flight of steps to
a subterraneous passage, and from a
subterraneous passage, to a door that
is shut, and from that to a door that
is open, and from that to a cell, and
from that to a chapel, and from a
chapel back to a subterraneous passage
again; here present either a skeleton
with a live face, or a living body
with the head of a skeleton, or a
ghost all in white, or a groan from a
distant part of a cavern, or the shake
of a cold hand, or a suit of armour
moving—fierce “put out the light,
and then”—
Let this be repeated for some nights
in succession, and after the lady has
been dissolved to a jelly with her
fears, let her be delivered by the man
of her heart, and married—Proba-
tum est.
As in medicine there is what phy-
sicians call an elegant prescription to
distinguish it from those incongruous
and absurd mixtures of the ancient
empirics, so, lest any one should think
I have put too many ingredients into
the above recipe, let him take the
following:
A novel now, says Will, is nothing more
Than an old castle, and a creaking door:
A distant hovel,
Clanking of chains, a gallery, a light,
Old armour, and a phantom all in white—
And there's a novel.
ANTI-GHOST.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Everything I Write
Everything I write nowadays is about sex; I wonder if that's indicative of me or of writing.
If it's indicative of me, which it undoubtedly is, it's because I want my work to be less serious and sex makes it more pornographic.
If it's indicative of writing, which it may or may not be, it has to do with the fact that all writing wants to be taken as serious pornography*.
"In any case" (IDIOM), Porn "is the way of the future" (IDIOM), "haven't you heard" (IDIOM)?
*If I could muster up enough musicians I'd start a band called "The Serious Pornography"; we'd play home style folk and sip sweet tea between sets. You can play the washboard, but only if you have a 4 year rhythm degree from either Julliard or Berkley.
If it's indicative of me, which it undoubtedly is, it's because I want my work to be less serious and sex makes it more pornographic.
If it's indicative of writing, which it may or may not be, it has to do with the fact that all writing wants to be taken as serious pornography*.
"In any case" (IDIOM), Porn "is the way of the future" (IDIOM), "haven't you heard" (IDIOM)?
*If I could muster up enough musicians I'd start a band called "The Serious Pornography"; we'd play home style folk and sip sweet tea between sets. You can play the washboard, but only if you have a 4 year rhythm degree from either Julliard or Berkley.
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