No Large Words, No Despair, Just Hats and Caps and Shoes

The blue costume, the greasy hair, are details, signs of a moderate realism. Supply the particulars, allow the significations to emerge of themselves. A procedure pioneered by Daniel Defore. Robinson Crusoe, cast up upon the beach, looks around for his shipmates. But there are none. "I never saw them afterwards, or any sign of them," says he, "except three of their hats, one cap, and two shoes that were not fellows." Two shoes, not fellows: by not being fellows, the shoes have ceased to be footwear and become proofs of death, torn by the foaming seas off the feet of the drowning men and tossed ashore. No large words, no despair, just hats and caps and shoes.

-J.M. Coetze from his novel Elizabeth Costello

something short. something fast. something pithy. doubt it'll last. dusk comin in. week starts again. end of sunday. hello monday. sky blue. kinda blue. but i hear you. it's ok. just quiet. ok.

FLASHBACK* - "Portrait of an Idol: Haruki Murakami at the New Yorker Festival"

The stage was bare except for two chairs and a small table, on top of which was a pitcher of water and two glasses. The talk's moderator, New Yorker Fiction Editor Deborah Treisman, sat on the one side. Haruki Murakami, his legs crossed, sat on the other. He was wearing a creamy beige suit over a white t-shirt so washed-faded the Tide laundry detergent brand in the centre of his chest was almost as white as the T-shirt itself.
His shoes, like a narrator from one of his novels, were red, also tremendously faded, sneakers.

His hands were in his lap and he spent much of the afternoon's talk looking down at them. When he looked up, to punctuate a point, say, you saw the full colour in his cheeks. He is in his late fifties, but all his marathon running and highly, highly disciplined life show in his glow. He looked healthy, happy. You don't get the sense this man knocks back Bukowskian quantities of cheap booze.

If Murakami drinks, (he does; read his first ten novels), he drinks the good stuff and he doesn't overdo it. If he's self-assured it's the good kind, the confident kind. None of that arrogant stuff.

You can't fake humility. Murakami was the self-effacing real deal, and this is a guy touted to win the Nobel Prize. It's not that he is so daft as to not realize how big a literary celebrity he is. But nor did he do as I'd seen Jhumpa Lahiri do at a New Yorker festival event two days earlier - so overwhelmed by her fame as to selfishly reject it, seeming to play that celebrity 'I hate that you love me' game.

Murakami wasn't rejecting anyone's thanks. Instead he was warmly receptive to it, like Audrey Hepburn's Roman Holiday princess saying "thank you" in that gloriously warm and generous way of hers.

I previously posted the New Yorker blog piece about Murakami's talk , thrilled as I was to be mentioned in it (I'm the Canadian). While it highlighted many of the anecdotal threads of wisdom the famous novelist had to give, it couldn't cover all the talk had to offer.

It mentioned Murakami outlining harmony as one of the essential elements in his fiction. What wasn't mentioned was the balance this man gives off not just in his prose but in his presence, the way he sits, the way he takes his time to think over a question; a long time before he will start to speak; an act he also is in no rush to babble through. Murakami doesn't babble.

This guy who drinks little, is early to bed and obscenely early (as early as 3am) to rise, described all of his working endeavours, including writing, translating and revising, as fun! That he used the word 'fun' was mentioned in the blog. What wasn't was how childlike sincere he came across when saying it, or the number of times he said it (I've no idea, but it was a lot.)

One final addition to the online New Yorker piece was an audience member's astute observation that reading Murakami is a calming experience. Perhaps that explains why so many fans read not one but all of the guys novels. This not to say his stories are without their darkness. They almost all delve deeply down the dark well. Yet even in the digging there remains a seemingly contradictory serenity. Murakami so embodies a spiritual calm it all but changed the way we audience members breathed for a couple hours of a Sunday afternoon (I don't even think I'm exaggerating). Though he never discusses religion, and as far as I know is not in any way a religious man or even affliated with any religion, I think his grandfather was a Buddhist priest. This seems pertinent.

Speaking of Buddhism, I doubt I am the only person to walk away from watching their favourite living writer wishing that they too could diminish their ego to that degree.

*Originally Posted October 18th, 2008

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Input

Reading: George Eliot's Middlemarch and James Woods' How Fiction Works.

Listening to: Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago and the first three songs on my Walking Mix, which are, in order: Corrine Bailey Rae's "Paris Nights/New York Mornings," Stevie Wonder's "Sir Duke" and Mel Torme's "Comin Home Baby."

Watching: [renting] "Tyson" (thank you Jen Harris), and the amazing "Rachel Getting Married" for the 2nd time, and [in theatres, but just barely] the fantastic "Fantastic Mr. Fox"

Eating: Too much chocolate, not enough fruit. Too many chips (Ruffles or Doritos) not enough salad. Too much burger, not enough tofu.

Drinking: Too much coke not enough water. Much tea, a bit of Bailey's, the odd lovely Scotch and more red wine. Red wine is good when it's good and we've found a good one, a Canadian one (Oh Canada!).

Beyond Harry Potter - The Importance of Imagination

Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense.


Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation, in its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

-JK Rowling from the remarkable Commencement Speech she gave at Harvard in 2008.

Ice Whine

If I lived by a beach.
If it was warmer.
If I had more money.
If I had more time.

If if if.

It would be so much easier.
I'd feel so much better.
The world would be so much better.

Ok, maybe not.
That doesn't make it easier, though.

The daily grind again.
That hamster wheel to nowhere.
The dreary 9-5.
The endless cycle.
The tired Monday.
The can't get out of bed Thursday.
The too short weekend.
The Sunday night I hope this never ends.

Sigh.
To be on a good Ko in Thailand.
Just five days.
That's all I'd need.
Fruit drinks with straws, umbrellas.
Mornings that never end.
Two hour breakfasts where you read the whole newspaper.
Long beach walks at dusk.


Meanwhile February's just began and I live in Canada.







Fuck.

Letter to J.D. Salinger (RIP) Part II,

Continued from Salinger Letter Part I

This is what you gave me:

You gave me a lonely soul to share with mine, which is a pretty pure kind of love if you ask me. I got to go to New York before I ever really went to New York. Got to ride the train, just me and Holden, me and Holden against the world. That's a mighty special thing to give to a kid who feels like he doesn't fit in. To get a literary soul mate so young.

You hung out with me when I felt lost and lonely and angry and yet so often in the midst of it you made me laugh, made me chortle out my nose. My favourite kind of jokester, the chortle-inducing kind. ("Sensitive. That killed me. That guy Morrow was about as sensitive as a toilet seat.")

You had courage to write about the "small" things, to recognize the significance of ducks long gone from a frozen pond, or the kid sister that holds onto the gift, a record from her brother, Holden, even though it was broken into itty bitty pieces by the time he gives it to her.

I just want to say that I'll miss you. We'll miss you, us coffee shop loitering, small bookshop supporting, word nerding types. Thank God you've left us so many sides of your soul to return to, cause on a late sun-setting Sunday afternoon, sometimes I need to hang out with Esme or hear the tale of the Laughing Man. I'll always wish I could call up the guy who wrote about Holden, but am satisfied to have Holden nearby, when I need to take a trip to New York on my own.

I'll continue to wish Seymour didn't, and that Buddy published more of what he wrote. I'll continue to adore Muriel's father's uncle, the tiny, elderly man with the unlit cigar.

Franny a legend; Teddy a genius.

And I will always get right inside that little room at the Yoshoto's, that little art school in Montreal in what has to be an all time favourite short story.

Who doesn't wish they had a kid sister named Phoebe or that after finishing your book that they couldn't call you up?

Thank you for teaching me that great books don't need blood or guts or guns. They don't need to have any big P politics in them either. That great books can be "pretty skimpy-looking" things and still knock your socks off. Thank you for teaching me that Zen Buddhism is as good a narrative theme as death.

For Hazle Weatherfield, alone, thank you.

Thank you for teaching me to have fun when I write, to fill even the darkest of tales with a dashing and dangerous and witty sense of fun, with a sense of self-mockery at the self-seriousness inherent in all writing acts, all the ego involved in that.

You were a great writer. A master. Thank you for the gifts.

Jonathan