Joseph Grammer's Blog, page 3

Trout Life (Atom Bomb)

'Masu' (as in Masuji) in Japanese happens to mean trout.

He stood firmly apart from the left-wing trends in late-1920s literature. Instead of literary agitation, he preferred river fishing, and wrote a series of essays about this peaceful hobby. He was always 'The Compassionate Angler'.

Ibuse's post-war writings are often filled with bitter condemnations of the war and its after-effects.

On Black Rain, his most famous work: 'Written in an understated tone, and with a thread of irony running through it, this novel is nevertheless by far the most devastating account of the effects of nuclear war ever written.'

His name had been put forward for the Nobel Prize, and he would have been the ideal candidate because of his anti-war stance. It was a matter of indifference to him when he did not receive it. He hated literary log-rolling and the tedium of social life, and when he was awarded his cultural merit prize in 1966, he felt he could not face all the dignitaries and journalists, so slipped away unobserved to a neighbouring restaurant where he spent the night celebrating on his own with sushi and flagons of sake.

Ibuse was a perfectionist ... typically wry, self-deprecating humour.

Besides the quality of his writing and his eloquent quietism, one of the things I most value about Ibuse is that he generously helped a tormented misfit, Japan's greatest modern novelist, Osamu Dazai, giving him money, giving him a room in his house and introducing him to publishers and editors at a time when Dazai was in the grip of drugs and alcohol and tried several times to kill himself.

He was that delightful rarity, an untypical Japanese, who nevertheless never lost his native soul, and enriched his native tongue.

writer = sakka 作家

Read! Yome!
読んでください!
Write! 書いてください!

These Leg-Shaped Wheels Suck

When man resolved to imitate walking, he invented the wheel, which does not look like a leg. In doing this, he was practicing surrealism without knowing it. --Guillaume Apollinaire

Oh Shit This a Diary

Today I cut the sleeves off one of my shirts and talked to my client about narrative arcs. It was pretty fun. I got to face a few basic fears about social interaction, listen to old live versions of Soundgarden and Alice in Chains, connect with my fiancee about work stress, buy groceries, read some of a biography about Sinclair Lewis (the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature), and eat a spicy shrimp dish I made. I also wrote a message in Russian to my friend whom I haven't seen since 2010, which felt cool because I'm one of those drop-off-the-face-of-the-Earth-sometimes guys, although I'm trying not to do that now.

Tomorrow I'm heading to New Jersey to do New Year's behavior. I wish I'd written more, but I've been busy. Satisfaction/system/adaptation.

Sometimes I get this long, high-pitched whining in my ears, possibly from listening to too much loud music.

Most humans in the world have an easier time of it than I do, so I feel grateful even when my eyes feel like they're filling up with pressure. Although to be honest sometimes I act like I'm the only one with any problems -- which is laughable, so I laugh -- heh. Then I feel glad I can eat when I want and drink clean water and use multiple electronic devices simultaneously, which puts me at the pinnacle of human wealth.

Ironic memes are cool, but so is exposing my pathetic underbelly to other people's cutting tongues.

I love sitting on my parents' porch at night with a cup of tea and reading. Rubbing my two dogs' heads and underchins, then playing guitar in my basement with my brother and friends (I wish I did that more, too).

One day we'll be dead and these words will be forgotten, but that is the way of stuff and I like it like that. Today I guess I'm thinking about the people I know who have died: you know who you are. I guess I'll drink some tea for them, then. And tomorrow I can do it on a porch.

When I get home I can do it in the road.

Solving Dreams and Reality

I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.

--Andre Breton

I never heard surrealism explained so concisely -- I'm not sure why I didn't go to the guy who wrote the Manifesto earlier.

Helping

"One gray November day, Elliot went to Boston for the afternoon." This is the first sentence of a story by Robert Stone. Not an auspicious start, to be honest. Grayness and the past tense of "go" aren't exactly eye-catching, but then again, we live in a world now where everything is supposed to be screaming for your attention, so perhaps there's nothing wrong with a quieter approach (especially from a man who won the National Book Award and was a finalist, twice, for the Pulitzer).

Either way, Stone quickly picks up. "The wet streets seemed cold and lonely. He sensed a broken promise in the city's elegance and verve. Old hopes tormented him like phantom limbs, but he did not drink. He had joined Alcoholics Anonymous fifteen months before."

He's a drunk! (It's okay, I can say that, I come from deeply entrenched alcoholic stock. I can also say "lush," but I've never heard anyone outside a jewelry-encrusted WASP in a movie say that.) Anyway ...

"Day in, day out, he was sober. At times it was almost stimulating." I feel the humor in this, the quiet, sad, very battered comedy of a man who has ruined himself with alcohol. Maybe some empathy here for our hero.

"Sober, however, he remained, until the day a man named Blankenship came into his office at the state hospital for counseling." So, like the unperceptive reader I am, I totally missed the importance of this information the first two times I read it. Stone tells us right here where the action of the story is, and how, presumably, Elliot will change in front of our eyes: he's gonna drink.


Boozy booze booze

"Blankenship had red hair, a brutal face and a sneaking manner." In other words, he's gross. It turns out that Elliot is a Vietnam vet, and Blankenship, while undoubtedly a wreck of a human being, is only posing as a service member, all the way down to specific dreams about "The Nam." At this point we consider him a liar, a scammer, a legitimately mentally ill man, or all three. Certainly annoying, but one of the people you treat at a hospital, because it's a fucking hospital. Yet in Stone's words: "Elliot had had enough of him."

Our counselor proceeds to say things like "Dreams are boring" to his admittedly unlikeable patient. This isn't at all ethically approved or useful, but we know Elliot is not in a helping mood.

So, after he botches his psychology session, Elliot proceeds to leave work early and purchase booze (oh no!). No one had taken away his house or shot at him: he just felt anxious, restless, alert to "possibility." Occasionally it's those little nothing problems, and not the house-losing or shots fired that, for whatever reason, send us off on our shitty tangents.

Said tangent translates to him getting drunk, going home, and having a half-fight with his wife, who throws a bowl at his head and misses. There follow sentences like, "Stiff with shame, he went and took his bottle out of the cabinet into which he had thrust it and poured a drink."

If parts of this scene feel clichéd, both Elliot and Stone are aware of this. That's the source of the story's humor and sadness, the knowing eyebrow raise of: we've all seen this before.

As part of the plot, Elliot's lawyer wife Grace has lost a case in which two young parents were abusing their child. The victorious snot of a father telephones her house to gloat, but Elliot, hammered, answers instead. He more or less goads the man into threatening him, and then readies his shotgun after he hangs up, having invited the man to come on by. Our hero has served in Vietnam, and he might be old, but he's apparently not someone to fuck with.


This isn't Robert Stone, it's just a snazzy stock picture, kids.

Then Elliot falls asleep and nothing happens (oh no?). In the morning he drinks some more, then goes out with his gun and walks through the snow until he meets his neighbor: a dapper, happy professor named Anderson, who, seen through the lens of cynical Elliot, you kind of want to punch in the face--since the guy is friendly and likes to ski. (Elliot is not friendly and hates skiing, and in fact has a violent fantasy about stringing razor wire along the trail behind their houses so the Anderson family gets decapitated.)

Elliot threatens his neighbor, perhaps more subtly than he does the plaintiff, but afterwards feels badly about it (which means I feel badly, too, since I kind of identified with the Asshole and wanted the other harmless guy to get hurt).

"Getting drunk was an insurrection, a revolution--a bad one. There would be outsize bogus emotions. There would be petty blackmail and cheap remorse. He had said dreadful things to his wife. He had bullied Anderson with his violence and unhappiness, and Anderson would not forgive him."

Elliot has been here before, has been educated through AA to the point where he knows all the tropes of addiction. This reminds me of a passage from Azar Nafisi's The Republic of Imagination, in which she tells the story of an alcoholic Sinclair Lewis, who, while being wheeled away to a hospital for his sickness, and while obviously drunk, looks at his wife and says in a nasty imitation of her voice, "You're a monster, what are you doing, you're ruining our family, you promised me you wouldn't drink!" In effect, savagely having his wife's side of the conversation for her, since he knows her reactions to his old, shitty behavior. The difference here is Elliot is better off--potentially--because he's only mulling these ideas in his head, and seems ready (at the moment, at least) to not act like a total dick.

As evidence for redemption, at the very end we get: "Elliot began to hope for forgiveness." A simple, bald statement that makes sense, given the balls we've just been through with him. Now he waves to his wife, whom he spies in the window of his little house. At this point, tired and hungover, all he wants, or needs, is a single response from Grace (significant name, by the way, right? Elliot made a joke about it earlier, prompting her to say, "You're really good at this ... You make me ashamed of my own name.") ... "It seemed to him that he could build another day on it." The story ends before we know if she waves back.


At least Elliot isn't trapped here in a Hateful-Eight-type situation.

One obvious point is that Blankenship is not responsible for Elliot drinking. No part of his shitty, yet entirely normal and unremarkable day is responsible. Not the snow, not the boil on his asscheek, etc. The dude, and only the dude himself did it, and he understands this perfectly, even during his rather spiteful conversation with his wife, or his dickish threatening of various people.

The title "Helping," then, carries a bitter irony. Elliot is supposed to assist people and he doesn't. We see him act like a bad counselor, a bad husband, a bad neighbor. Yet, by my account, he's not a complete shit, if only because of his self-awareness (although you could make the case that knowing something is bad and doing it anyway is worse than being ignorant and fucking up, except this would belittle the horrible power of addiction, which is literally a neurological disease).

Elliot's "fuck-you" attitude has become tired, because he is old, he has been through this before, and, not even that deep down inside, he doesn't want to do any of this. At some point he even says, "It's out of my hands," which is true, because he's an addict under the power of his substance, and once he starts he literally, physically can't stop: although I'll hammer home that he first decided to start drinking, so he's gotta own up to that (can you tell I've been around these sweet recovery programs? ; )))))

Elliot does manage to say some halfway decent things to his wife, but that doesn't give him any points, since this logic sounds a lot like an abused partner insisting, "Sometimes he's really nice!"

Still, I have to call out my own judgments of him as an "asshole," "not a total shit," etc. When I see a character, or a person in real life, I consciously try to avoid judging her (not all the time, actually I judge people constantly and just try not to, and sometimes it works), so this guy Elliot deserves the same; even more so because I relate to his struggles with a substance, with his violent fantasies of axing cheery, pleasant pillars of community, too (which I then feel badly about). I've even put my life partner through some similar shit, although it ends up much less dramatic than it is here, and I'm not an alcoholic (I pass out after three or four shots). But I come from addicts, and I have to face that particular train track for the rest of my life, which seems obvious when you consider I picked this story to write about.

And while Elliot fucks up helping, and so does Grace (losing the case), it's not all bad. Maybe she'll wave back! And maybe this man won't drink again.

Eh. Better him than me if he does. (The extent of my Darwinist impulses.) I wish him well ...? I definitely wish you well, whether you read this or not.

Hope it helps!

Lifted from Dingle Foot's Intro to Hard Times

Yes, he lists his name as Dingle Foot:

Of course, Dickens was himself a snob. As George Orwell pointed out, nothing in any of his novels is more convincing than his description in David Copperfield of his shame and humiliation at having to work in the blacking factory with Mick Walker and Mealy Potatoes. ... Yet nowhere in David Copperfield does he exhibit the slightest sympathy for Mick Walker and Mealy Potatoes. It never seems to have crossed his mind that they also were unfortunates, or that someone should be indignant on their behalf. His only feeling was one of acute self-pity at having been obliged to associate with them. This does not mean, of course, that he had no sympathy for the working classes. But he did not expect to live with them.

His snobbery was, however, the snobbery of the English commercial middle class -- a class which in DIckens's formative years had a pride all its own. It did not desire to ape the aristocracy, and nothing is more striking in Dickens's work than his general contempt for titles, office-holders, and almost any kind of uniform.

No one would dare suggest that Dickens could not portray the working classes. But, except in David Copperfield, nearly all his working-class characters are comic characters.

Dickens disliked trade unions in much the same way that he disliked the work-house, or the Circumlocution Office, or the House of Commons, or the Courts of Law. They were all of them great, or potentially great, organizations, and Dickens displays a marked bias against every form of organized institution. The only unit in which he is interested is the family. ... His favourite ending is a kind of enormous household re-union. Pickwick, Nicholas Nickleby, and Martin Chuzzlewit all conclude in much the same way, The virtuous characters settle down to a state of perpetual, unbroken domesticity.

As has been frequently remarked, there is an obvious lacuna in Dickens's social philosophy. He was passionately on the side of anyone who was weak or oppressed, and he succeeded in communicating his tremendous indignation to his contemporaries. He supplied the impetus which led to many of the reforms which marked the second half of the nineteenth century. The system of judicature was thoroughly overhauled. The Civil Service was established on a new foundation. ... Although Dickens was himself largely responsible for all these changes he never suggested the shape which they should take. To do so would necessarily have taken him into the sphere of politicians, civil servants, and judges, that is to say, of all those persons in official positions whom he so cordially disliked.

The lesson which Dickens persistently teaches -- and indeed it is almost the whole of his creed -- is the value of human kindness. Almost every happy ending in his novels is the result either of a change of heart or of the exercise of sheer philanthropy. Scrooge is changed overnight. Mr. Winkle, senior, relents at the appropriate moment and welcomes Arabella as his daughter-in-law. For no clearly apparent reason the kindly Mr. Brownlow takes Oliver Twist into his home. Nicholas Nickleby is saved from penury by his opportune meeting with the Cheeryble Brothers, who are philanthropists in the guise of employers. The sum total of happiness can only, it seems, be maintained by an unfailing supply of benevolent old gentlemen with ample means.

There is, I think, a still further explanation of Dickens's philosophy -- or lack of it. He lived in an age of melodrama. It is obvious that he was intensely interested in the stage, and indeed in every form of then existing entertainment. ... And nearly all his plots are essentially melodramatic. It has been remarked that his characters (always, of course, with the exception of the autobiographical David Copperfield) never develop. They are fully formed from the beginning. Now this is the essential characteristic of melodrama. The hero must be forever above reproach. The villain must be a monster of iniquity. The comic characters must always remain comic except for the occasional moment when they are allowed to relapse into pathos.

Being essentially a purveyor of melodrama in novel form, and having therefore to work with unchangeable characters, Dickens is very little concerned with human psychology. His genius lay in the description of things seen. He was the greatest reporter that England has ever produced.

Stolen from Lydia Davis's Intro to Swann's Way

For only in recollection does an experience become fully significant, as we arrange it in a meaningful pattern, and thus the crucial role of our intellect, our imagination, in our perception of the world and our re-creation of it to suit our desires; thus the importance of the role of the artist in transforming reality according to a particular inner vision: the artist escapes the tyranny of time through art.

Murakami!

From the Paris Review interview:

Even now, my ideal for writing fiction is to put Dostoevsky and Chandler together in one book. That’s my goal.

The first draft is messy; I have to revise and revise.

If you can’t have a fantasy, what’s the point of writing a book?

My protagonist is almost always caught between the spiritual world and the real world.

We have a sane part of our minds and an insane part. We negotiate between those two parts; that is my belief. I can see the insane part of my mind especially well when I’m writing—insane is not the right word. Unordinary, unreal.

When you’re serious, you could be unstable; that’s the problem with seriousness. But when you’re humorous, you’re stable. But you can’t fight the war smiling.

It’s the driving power of my stories: missing and searching and finding. And disappointment, a kind of new awareness of the world.

As a translator myself, I know that to be enthusiastic is the main part of a good translation. If someone is a good translator but doesn’t like a book so much, that’s the end of the story.

The way people act, the way people talk, the way people react, the way people think, is very Japanese. No Japanese readers—almost no Japanese readers—complain that my stories are different from our life. I’m trying to write about the Japanese. I want to write about what we are, where we are going, why we are here. That’s my theme, I guess.

This might be considered my reply to the fact that “family” has played an overly significant role in traditional Japanese literature. I wanted to depict my main character as an independent, absolute individual. His status as an urban dweller has something to do with it too. He is a type of man who chooses freedom and solitude over intimacy and personal bonds.

I like to make people laugh every ten pages.

In the classical kind of magic realism, the walls and the books are real. If something is fake in my fiction, I like to say it’s fake. I don’t want to act as if it’s real.

When you describe the details of small things, your focus gets closer and closer, and the opposite of Tolstoy happens—it gets more unrealistic. That’s what I want to do.

The closer it gets, the less real it gets. That’s my style.

Writing a book is just like playing music: first I play the theme, then I improvise, then there is a conclusion, of a kind.

I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It’s a kind of fuel; it burns and it warms you.

I don’t like Tokyo; it’s so flat, so wide, so vast. I don’t like it here.

Dragon Walls Z

He who controls the definition of terms controls the perception of reality.

Use your friggin' words.

Keystone Trigger

Blue Okinawa sun
Choking a woman by the sea
Your path to unpull your trigger
Vulnerability