BEST of PBIHT: Portrait of a Mentor: At the New Yorker Festival with Haruki Murakami

There was a small table with a pitcher of water and two glasses on the stage, two chairs on either side of the table. 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-out the Tide laundry detergent brand in the dead centre of his chest was almost as white as the T-shirt. His shoes, like a narrator from one of his novels, were very faded red 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 looks healthy, happy.

You can't fake humility. You can think you can, but you can't, and Murakami was not faking it, 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 does he do as I'd seen the writer Jhumpa Lahiri do at a New Yorker festival event two days previous - so overwhelmed by her fame as to selfishly reject it, playing that celebrity 'I hate that you love me' game (a rather lousy move to an audience of people who've paid to see you, and who just want to come up afterward to shake your hand and thank you for what you've given them). Murakami wasn't rejecting it because he doesn't take himself or his status so seriously as to allow that to be a central issue of his life.

Previously, I wrote on my being mentioned in the New Yorker's blog on this very talk, and included the blog itself. It highlighted many of the anecdotal threads of wisdom the famous novelist had to give. But the blog, in its probably strict requirement to be pithy, couldn't capture the whole thing (and maybe few people other than hard-core Murakami nerds like me care), but I feel the need to add a little, like the ambience in the packed theatre that the man created. Online the New Yorker mentioned Murakami outlining harmony as one of the three 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 does not babble.

This is a guy who drinks little, is early to bed and incredibly early (as early as 3am) to rise. He described all of his working endeavours, including writing, translating and revising, as fun. That he used the word 'fun' was mentioned. What wasn't was the number of times he said it, and how childlike-sincere he seemed to be when he did.

As well there was an audience member's astute observation that reading Murakami is a calming experience. That's why millions around the world are reading not one but all of the guy's novels. This not to say his novels are without their darkness. They almost all delve deeply down the dark well. Yet even in the digging there remains a kind of 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 (or was it his father?) was a Buddhist priest. This doesn't seem coincidental.

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 published in October 2008 when I was still high from having just seen my idol in person. Happy birthday, Murakami-san.]

BEST OF PBIHT: I Heart* New York, I Admit It

[Originally posted last spring]

i'm going lower case today, for speed, and lack of time, and cause i have somewhere to be. also, this is me more free, easier, flowier, CRAZIER me. woohoo. oh boy. can you keep up?

this is about new york, this post is. that famous city that still holds true as the centre of the planet. who cares and why should it really matter? but unfortunately it does and you go back, for a five day trip, and are reminded of all the things about the city that grab you. the obvious things. it's the energy, it's the size. the sheer squash of skyscraper upon skyscraper. it never gets old. it never ceases to astonish, not when so much of this larger than legoland urbanity, these old buildings of height and might are actually so many of them architectural marvel, ie. beautiful. and not just the skyscrapers. in fact, prettiest of all are the brownstones of brooklyn or in the lower west village.


new fucking york. it's that you can see a celebrity on a street corner. you think you don't give a shit. liar. course you do. it's exciting. ted danson came in the bar i was in. and really, what would i ever have to say to ted danson. and who cares? and still, it's exciting, to me and every patron and bartender, waiter and manager in that 17th street bar. all the cynicism in the world and still it's exciting. it's exciting to be in manhattan. everyone knows that. that you can't deny.

it's the walking. that from one section of manhattan to another is walking distance is only part of what makes it so good. (ever notice how not fat new yorkers are. every wonder why. answer: walking.) much better is that the walk from one place to another is itself so filled with life. the variety of people on the street. not nearly as varied as in its pre-guliani years to be sure, but still varied, still coloured still honking loud and with voices so much stronger than you ever hear in canada. and sure it can be rude, but it can also be so refreshing. energy given out, given forth, given up. you walk the streets and watch the people and feel the way that each and every one, from the ivory coast cab driver to the dean and deluca butcher, every one is striving, aiming higher, reaching.

and then precisely when you've had just about enough of all that ego and all the striving and traffic and honking and ambition you come to central park. oh central park. a paragraph of its own. what need be said for a park that north to south spans 50 city blocks. to fly over manhattan, as i once did, and see that forest of green, that big fat square of green taking up so much of that precious little island, it boggles the mind how much the land would be worth. this the secret of new york, me thinks. that the very centre of capitalism could also make the money sacrifice to have a park so big. that they didn't pave paradise and put up a parking lot.

central park is a good 40% of what makes new york one of the world's great cities. that you can play baseball or frisbee or walk your do or rollerblade your legs or jog or saunter, or bench laze all for no money, all in the priciest place i know. this is a major miracle. it's genius. i love love love central park.

for the lover of the arts, of course, new york is unbeatable. the museums, the choice of theatre, music, food. because you can have the best pizza or honestly the very best falafel. then you get the met, the moma, the guggenheim, the whitney and i'm just getting started. cause two of the best plays i've ever seen i've seen in new york. if you're reading this, and you live there, and you can, go see our town. now!

it's not that i don't like where i live, it's that i love new york.

fuck. now alls i need is a green card, a hell of a lot of money and a job.

*Every single thing in this post was seen and thus conveyed with a strong coating of on-a-vacation romanticism.

On 2nd Thought (Questioning the Heart* of NY)

They ate their corned beef on rye and cream cheese with lox in a diner peopled by waiters who looked like they'd met with utter disappointment and became attached to it.
-Mary Gaitskill, from "An Affair, Edited" a short story in her collection Bad Behavior.



[*Response to a comment (thank you, Yair) on the previous post. And, because on greater reflection, as the gleam of that Big Apple starts to fade, I wonder how many struggling artists never do get to sell that script.]

Jhumpa Lahumpa Lahiri at Angel Orensanz & Beyond

I think that I’ve always been someone more comfortable observing life ... intensely so as a child ...
-Jhumpa Lahiri (in conversation with Charlie Rose)


I once had a crush on a writer named Jhumpa
[pronounced joom-pa]
Last name: Lahiri
For years now
In my mind's ears and my poor wife's
She was Jhumpa Lahumpa
That's how I thought of her, how I referred to her
I couldn't stop

If you don't know, this is ridiculous
The London born, Bengali-Indian author from America
Her stories are not silly
They're New Yorker literary
Jhumpa doesn't write for kids
That's not her style
Not Jhumpa Lahumpa
Ahem, Lahiri
Sorry

No, but seriously
At 33
For her first book
Jhumpa Lahumpa
Lahiri!
Won the Pulitzer

It's that name
I can't stop converting it to Willy Wonka creations

Jhumpa, Lahumpa, zoomtitty doo

This is unfair
She is a serious writer
I have an actual anecdote

Last year I flew to New York to meet her
Truth told, I was to meet many famous writers
The annual New Yorker Festival

She'd share the stage with two other American scribes
Also with unique names
T. Coraghessan Boyle
And, really, what're you gonna rhyme that with
And Jeffrey Eugenides
Which only ever made me think of Eugenics
Which brings up the Nazis
And there's nothing funny about that
(Unless Tarantino, Roberto Benigni or Mel Brooks are involved)



But Jhumpa
Lahumpa
She didn't have to be funny
Her tense, realist, powerful stories sure weren't

The three writers were on a stage in a converted old synagogue
Angel Orensanz was the venue's name
Someone famous probably
I didn't google him
Left him a Sephardic Jewish left fielder in my mind
Angel Orensanz
If he'd been any baseball good
Shit, if he'd ever gotten to wear the pinstripes
They'd have had to name a fizzy citrus drink after him
Angel Orensanz
Ksh
Glug glug glug
Ahhh!

It was a Friday night
Sabbath eve at the old synagogue
Not that anyone seemed to notice

The writers were speaking

Jhumpa who had been Lahumpa
on that stage
In Angel Orensanz's wooden cathedral of a synagogue
Eugenidies and Coraghessan on either side
Up there she became Lahiri La-lousy

She was so cold and closed
As if she were angry to be there
To share
Not just uncomfortable
Because believe me, I was ready to give sympathy
To Jhumpa who had been
Lahumpa
We all were
Lovers of her Interpretation of Maladies
But this woman was downright contrary
What flow the other two writers on stage produced
Lahiri cancelled out
Like a negative bug lamp
Zapping any good buzz in the room
The Shul
The Orensanz

She was awful
Anti-social
Discomforting
Unsettling
Disagreeable
Awful

I couldn't help myself
Going up after
Joining the line of the many who went up after

No photo request
No, no, I don't want you to sign my book
Just hear my appreciation
Know my thanks
For your big-brassy talent
For the depth of your soul-shuddering insights

To the lined up folks before me
Lahiri was glass-eyed cold
That stage awful
It was also personal

Things would be different for me
For us
She and I
I knew
I was wrong
It was not
She shook my hand
She did not smile
Those cold eyes

There was no Lahumpa to this Jhumpa

Crush crushed
Romance over
I'd no longer even like her
It was decided

But then I heard that quote
That soundbite I wrote above
The half I wrote above
And the half I left to put here, below

...But I think that that’s really … always a part of me – the fact that I am very comfortable removing myself from actual experience.

It's not personal, Jon
You don't even know the woman
It's her books you fell for
Her short stories
Remember
I do
And soon
I'll return
She is that good
Jhumpa Lahumpa Lahiri

I love New York in Spring (even when it won't stop pissing with rain and the Yankee game we had tickets for had a two hour delay), How About You?