kazuo ishiguro and caryl phillips + kazuo ishiguro!

YEY!  ISHIGURO!!!  ishiguro is one of my favorite authors, and never let me go is my favorite book -- i read it at least twice a year -- so i was super, super excited for this week.

first event!  on march 18, 2015.  kazuo ishiguro and caryl phillips at the 92Y!  they both read for roughly 20 minutes each, and the moderator took questions from the audience (submitted on index cards) and selected questions to ask.

things to note:  ishiguro's newest book is the buried giant (knopf, 2015), and phillips' newest book is the lost child (FSG, 2015).  ishiguro's ambition when he was younger (before he was a writer) was to become a singer/songwriter.  phillips and ishiguro have been friends for decades, since the time they were both starting out as writers.  phillips calls ishiguro "ish," and ishiguro calls phillips "caz."

• ishiguro (before he read):  "i felt like i should be proud of my pixies and ogres [...] and not apologize for them."
• his little rule of thumb while writing the buried giant:  if the people of that time could reasonably hold a belief, then i would allow that to literally exist in my fictional world.
  • decided to respect what we might today call superstition.
• ishiguro read chapter 11 of the buried giant.  phillips read different sections from the lost child.
• Q:  do you usually utilize rules of thumb?
  • ishiguro:  no, not usually.  if i'm creating a world that's slightly tilted away from reality, then i like to have one.
  • like many of his generation, he often quotes bob dylan.
  • likes to control the element of surprise.
  • "guidelines to keep my world coherent."
• Q to phillips about taking inspiration from the brontës.
  • didn't have any intention of taking inspiration from wuthering heights.
  • "it sort of ... intruded, impressed itself."
  • started writing and the moors started to intrude.
  • "i grew up in the city, so i'm used to concrete ... and dog poop."
  • prefers to think of it as there being a conversation with the brontës throughout.
  • the brontës were a dysfunctional family, and the father was an irish immigrant who tried to scrape the brogue from his tongue, which is common of migrants, this idea of the amount of accent as demonstrative of how much they belong.
• ishiguro:  has oftentimes felt some kind of pressure that perhaps he ought to be addressing more of the immigrant and multicultural experience.
  • personally finds he can't find much artistic energy as a writer on it.
  • "when i'm writing a novel, i feel like i'm writing from another part of myself."
  • thinks he took it upon himself early on not to take on the immigrant issue -- had other themes he was obsessed with and wanted to explore.
  • phillips doesn't think any migrant is under any obligation to explore that experience.  he also thinks it's different for ishiguro -- japan wasn't a colony.
  • phillips:  "a colonial migrant has a different sort of obligation inculcated into his soul early on."
• ishiguro:  listening to music is a good way to get away from the world of words.
• ishiguro finds it important to keep the musical side of his creative process alive.
  • when we're writing novels, we feel like it needs to be very rational, very logical.
  • oftentimes, though, finds himself having to make decisions that don't seem logical and feels like he makes them in the ways that musicians do --> a more instinctive way.
  • "music is important to me but not as music when i'm writing."
  • phillips:  this man knows more about music than he's saying.
  • phillips can listen to music while he writes as long as there are no words.
  • ishiguro doesn't think he thinks about music on a prose level.  he thinks more about music on a larger structural level.
  • ishiguro thinks that part of the way he writes has to do with his former goals of being a singer-songwriter -- his first-person narratives as being like songs expressing things to a small group of people.  it's why he likes first person and why he likes words that muddle things because they're like songs -- they have to leave room for more than the lyrics.
• phillips:  "i think i've learned more from poetry than i've realized."
• phillips does look for that cadence of rise and fall on the line level.
• Q:  what does a longstanding literary friendship mean to each of you?
  • phillips:  "we have known each other a long time."
  • phillips:  "i don't want to talk about it like it's over."  ishiguro:  "maybe after tonight."
  • phillips:  we met in thatcher's regime, and now we're here in obama's america.
  • phillips:  "writers don't want to write a book; they want a career.  they want to write a shelf of books."
  • ishiguro:  learned very quickly that it's slightly taboo for writers to talk about their work, at least in britain, so he doesn't think he and phillips ever really discussed their work.
  • ishiguro explains that he calls phillips "caz" and phillips calls him "ish" even though his name is kazuo, and he finds that confusing.
  • phillips:  "i'm confused why we're wearing the exact same thing."

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second event!  on march 19, 2015.  kazuo ishiguro with john freeman at the congregation beth elohim!  event by community bookstore.

• Q:  what about memory interests you in general?  why do you keep coming back to it?  (or did you forget?)
  • kind of got hooked on memory in the beginning of his writing career because a lot of his personal motivation was remembering his early childhood in japan.
  • not memory as in autobiographical memory.
  • left japan at age 5 and grew up in britain and had this idea of japan.
  • wanted to preserve that world in a book.
  • memory became a means by which to explore human nature.
  • this time, the buried giant is about societal memory, how a nation remembers and forgets -- when should a nation face the things it's hiding from?  the same Qs are also applied to a marriage:  when is it better to forget some of the darker passages so the relationship can carry on?
  • the disintegration of yugoslavia and the genocide in rwanda were both catalysts for these Qs about societal memory.
• didn't contemplate setting the novel in "real" places.
• most people in britain don't know much about arthurian legends beyond monty python.
  • he also doesn't know that much about them either.
  • the buried giant doesn't lean heavily on the legends.  he took more from history, though he constantly took pains to remind the reader that all this history is debatable and has no consensus.
• Q:  have you ever been on a quest?
  • "most books i've written feel like that."
  • has to go on his way, pretending like he knows where he's going.
  • in his 20s, he spent a lot of time arguing with people about moral values, political views, philosophies, etcetera, thinking that, if he could figure out a blueprint then, he could cling to it for the rest of his life.  as he's gotten older, he's realized that, although it's fun to figure out and set all these values and such, you can't really stick to that plan.  it's more like, when you get to certain points in your life, you pretend that you intended to get there all along.
• in never let me go, he wanted to explore the heroic.
  • it's a vision of how human nature is an optimistic one.
  • thinks of it as a cheerful book.
  • thought that he wasn't going to make this a book about human frailty but the beautiful sides of humanity -- that, when people are faced with the end of their lives, the insignificant things like amassing fortune or getting vengeance fall away.
• the buried giant as another love story:  often, when we use this term "love story," we think of it as "courtship story" that tells about the pursuit and the happy end of marriage.
  • "i kind of think a love story should be about what happens after that" ... where you have to keep that flame going.
  • "i am interested in a lot of the shared memories of marriage."  [...]  "i think shared memories are really important."
  • Q of, can love continue if these shared memories have been taken away?
• the strategy of never let me go was that readers might start off thinking of the characters as Other but to recognize they are more and more familiar.
• "i have a habit of auditioning characters for narrator."
• "i think it was the singer [part of singer/songwriter] that was wrong."
• re: christianity and its idea of infinite mercy (a God who will forgive as long as you ask in the appropriate way):  is there a danger in that?  especially given the horrid brutalities and atrocities committed by christians throughout history around the world?
• "i do worry that we're going to end up a homogenized literary culture."

hello monday! (150316)

alex ross’ listen to this (FSG, 2010) is giving me pure joy.  pure joy and pure pleasure.  i think i’m almost done (again, not reading it in order but hopping around and reading what catches my fancy), which makes me sad, and i really do mean sad because i’m enjoying it so much — but, then again, i can simply go to the new yorker and browse the archives, so there’s that.

in his preface he writes,

“So why has the idea taken hold that there is something peculiarly inexpressible about music? The explanation may lie not in music but in ourselves. Since the mid-nineteenth century, audiences have routinely adopted music as a sort of secular religion or spiritual politics, investing it with messages as urgent as they are vague. Beethoven’s symphonies promise political and personal freedom; Wagner’s operas inflame the imaginations of poets and demagogues; Stravinsky’s ballets release primal energies; the Beatles incite an uprising against ancient social mores. At any time in history there are a few composers and creative musicians who seem to hold the secrets of the age. Music cannot easily bear such burdens, and when we speak of its ineffability we are perhaps protecting it from our own inordinate demands. For even as we worship our musical idols we also force them to produce particular emotions on cue: a teenager blasts hip-hop to psych himself up; a middle-aged executive puts on a Bach CD to calm her nerves. Musicians find themselves, in a strange way, both enshrined and enslaved. In my writing on music, I try to demystify the art to some extent, dispel the hocus-pocus, while respecting the boundless human complexity that gives it life."  (xi-xii)

(i copy-pasted this from my ibook, hence the capitalization.)

i dare say ross succeeds in his intentions, and i appreciate the lack of condescension or pretension that sometimes creeps into discussion about classical music — or about music in general.  ross doesn’t seek to elevate one form of music over another, which i find to be incredibly refreshing, especially as it allows music, in whatever form or whatever discipline, to shine and be seen in all its richness and complexity and adaptability.  the last sentence of the essay, “the music mountain,” says, “the remarkable thing is the power of music to put down roots wherever it goes” (264), and one of the things that makes this collection so fun to read is that it demonstrates just that, how music travels and takes root and shifts and grows, rubbing against different cultures and new technologies and changing and taking new forms.

music is such a visceral thing, and i call it a “thing” because it is so many things.  it’s an experience, an emotion, a discipline, a practice, a thought, an art, a way of life, and it’s a living, breathing thing that’s made new with every performance.  musicians bring different experiences and interpretations to music, just as listeners bring different predispositions and energies to music, and, when all these things come together, it’s like magic, the way the head and the heart collide.  in many ways, i suppose, to me, music will always be the highest form of art, but, then again, music is the thing that’s been with me longest and my memories are created and stored largely in sounds and songs.

in his art of fiction interview in the paris review, jonathan franzen said, “i’m more envious of music than of any other art form — the way a song can take your head over and make you feel so intensely and so immediately.  it’s like snorting the powder, it goes straight to your brain.”  i agree, but i’m more inclined to take it a step further — music goes straight to the heart, and therein does its incredible power lie.

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(speaking of franzen, september is — april/may/june/july/august — five-and-a-half months away?  feels like for-e-ver.)  (i finished reading the kraus project over the weekend, so now i’m fully out of franzen.)  (this is weird.  i think the only other author whose entire backlist i’ve read is nicole krauss.  and jeffrey eugenides?  but they each only have three books out … right?)

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on saturday night, i was going through my shelves, looking for something read when my eyes landed on rebecca mead’s my life in middlemarch (crown, 2014).  i picked this up when it was released last summer because (one) it has a beautiful cover and (two) i’m intrigued by the role of books in our lives and (three) i love mead’s journalistic pieces (her profile of lena dunham is the only thing, whether interview or otherwise, that has made me somewhat like dunham) (at least while i was reading it) (then it reset me to having no regard or interest for her again).

i never got much into it last summer, which shouldn’t be taken as a reflection of the book as i’m in the habit of starting books and pausing them and picking them up again later (books, like many other things, speak to us when we’re ready) (or we need to be ready to receive certain books) (sometimes, we pass those moments, like with me and salinger’s the catcher in the rye and, to a lesser degree, plath’s the bell jar).  i picked it up again on saturday night, though, and loved this passage from the introduction:

“reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book.  but a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself.  there are books that seem to comprehend us just as much as we understand them, or even more.  there are books that grow with the reader as the reader grows, like a graft to a tree.

this kind of book becomes part of our own experience, and part of our own endurance.  it might lead us back to the library in midlife, looking for something that eluded us before.”  (16)

and, so, my week’s challenge, i suppose:  to read george eliot’s middlemarch with mead’s my life in middlemarch as a “supplement” of sorts.  

not that mead’s book is meant to be a supplement.  i know myself, though, and my tendency to fizzle out, especially when books are long, and i also know my reading memory, so i’m going to try out my little reading experiment and see how it fares.  i would try to come up with some kind of blogging accountability, like i’ll give myself three days per section and write a post, but this week is ishiguro week (HELL YES), and i have other things like work and writing to do, so, uh, i suppose y’all will have to check back next monday to see how it’s gone.

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things i miss about california:  driving.  family, friends, and long conversations in cool los angeles evenings about art and craft and publishing dreams.  korean food and tacos, tacos and korean food.  philz and its mint mojito iced coffee.  long drives at night when there’s no traffic and the music’s turned up and i'm alone with my thoughts (long drives are good for detangling story problems).  the pacific ocean.  the easy-going nature that comes hand-in-hand with all the goddamn sunshine.  the way california, to me, is locked in time, a place i can slip into with ease temporarily, like an old skin i've shed but return to for comfort every now and then.

things i love about new york city:  walking.  friends and catching up in coffee shops, small loud restaurants, four and twenty.  four and twenty.  easy access to great coffee.  redeemer.  easy access to great independent bookstores and all the amazing book events held year-round.  the brooklyn book festival.  the new yorker festival.  long rides on subways with earphones or not, a book or not, losing myself to the rhythm of the moving car and watching the people around me (long subways rides, also, are good for detangling story problems).  brooklyn.  the city and all its constant motion, the way it fits my heart and treats me with kindness and reminds me time and time again, hey, you’re home.

hello friday! (150313)

i’ve been thinking a lot about this space and how to utilize it, how to be “regular” about it instead of haphazard as i’ve always tended to be with blogging.  i’ve also found myself feeling a little restless near the end of the week because i enjoy writing here and have been having fun with my monday posts, so, for a while, i was toying with the idea of doing a second weekly post, except i wasn’t sure if i wanted it to be as freeform as “hello monday."

so!  friday papers!  these weekly friday posts will focus on writing, whether it’s the craft/act of writing, my own writing “process,” or querying/submitting/etetera-ing.  part of it is the simple, compulsive desire to have a record of the writing/querying/submitting process, but the greater part of it is that i’ve been thinking a lot (and talking to my illustrator friend) about creativity, the act of creating, and the motivations and struggles of querying agents and trying to get published — and it’s not that i think these thoughts are so deep and profound that they merit sharing but that, maybe, someone out there is thinking or struggling with similar things who might be able to connect.

because that’s kind of at the heart of it (and of this blog in general) — wanting to feel less alone.  the thing about being in new york is that i oftentimes feel intensely alone, and, while this isn’t necessarily a bad thing (because so much of my work requires solitude), i do wish i had more people to talk to about books and about writing and submitting, especially given how soul-crushing querying and submitting can oftentimes feel.  

so here’s this!  this is a brief introduction post, and we’ll kick things off properly next week, so please come back and check it out!  as of now, i’m thinking of giving some more background about myself and my own writing next week, but these friday posts will be pretty loosely formed like my monday posts, though they’ll all relate to writing — or, really, to creating art in general, but i’m a writer, so i’ll refer to it as writing.  (:

any questions?  comments?  any other writers/artists out there?  anyone querying and submitting?  let me know!

hello monday! (150309)

this post comes from california -- hello from california!  i'm here for the week on holiday, spending time with family and friends and eating way too much good food and filling the in-between spaces with reading -- and i suppose i'd like to say something about these books here, at least the ones i'm currently reading because i'm savoring them both, taking them slowly, piece by piece, which works because one's a collection of essays and the other's a collection of columns:  alex ross' listen to this (FSG, 2010) and cheryl strayed's tiny beautiful things:  advice on love and life from dear sugar (vintage, 2012).

i'm loving listen to this, which is a collection of pieces ross has written for the new yorker.  i'm not reading the essays in order but skipping around and reading the ones that catch my fancy (usually the ones about composers and musicians i know and like), and there's nothing fancy or particular about alex ross' writing -- he simply writes well, and he writes about music without getting lost in terminology or being overly technical or, even, too sentimental -- and i thoroughly enjoy reading him because he genuinely loves and appreciates music, and that comes off the page.

(you know, i have to say that i love the new yorker's non-fiction.  this isn't to say that i dislike its fiction but that i have a particular soft spot for its non-fiction because fiction allows for more leeway in style and voice [as it should], but its non-fiction takes different writers and their voices and brings them under the overall tone and voice of the new yorker.  which, yes, all magazines [should] do, but i really enjoy the new yorker's voice because it's smart without being too intellectual, intelligent without being academic or dull, proud of its identity without being full of itself.  i can't confess to reading every single piece in every single issue [or even to reading every issue every week because i tend to amass issues then sit down with a pile of them for a lovely evening of marathon reading], but i love having the new yorker and think its worth every penny of my subscription.)

and cheryl strayed -- oh, strayed as dear sugar is abso-fucking-lutely brilliant.  she's blunt and honest but generous and kind and sympathetic, and she makes me laugh and cry and nod my head in vehement agreement.  i was introduced to her from a link to her column on envy, which is wonderfully paired with her column on writing like a motherfucker, and i'm happy that they made this into a book to have and to hold.  i only wish there were a hardcover of this (i believe it was only published in paperback?  please correct me if i'm wrong).

there's more i actually want to say in regards to those two columns linked above, though, and specifically about craft and querying and writing, but i shall save that for another week.  i've been having these wonderful meandering conversations with my illustrator buddy about all those things, so there are lots of thoughts bubbling around in my head, which i shall endeavor to get down into articulate words, but i suppose i shall leave y'all with this:  write because you love it.  create because you can't help it.  pursue the art because not to pursue the art is simply not an option.  and, if you decide to make something of it, to pursue publication or production or whatever it is your art deems "professional" and "a career," then go into it knowing that it's going to hurt like hell and your heart is going to be broken over and over and over again and that you're going to have to pick up the pieces over and over and over again.  do it because it's worth the pain (and it will be pain), because you want it so bad it fucking hurts, and it's the trying that makes it worthwhile, the attempts that make you a better writer, a better artist, a better creator that truly count.  do it because the work itself brings you joy, not the desire for recognition or fame or a huge advance.  do it because you must.

marie mutsuki mockett with maud newton @ mcnally jackson!

from last thursday (2015 march 5) (when it snowed and the world was magical):  marie mutsuki mockett wrote a book called where the dead pause and the japanese say goodbye (w.w. norton, 2015) (which i really must read) of her time in japan after her father's death, which was also after the 2011 tohoku earthquake.  this is my second time hearing her read (the first was at AAWW with emily st. john mandel; post here).

maud newton is currently writing a book on the superstitions and science of ancestry for random house.

• mockett wanted to do an event with newton because she (mockett) writes about very ancient rituals and newton is writing a book about ancestry from a modern approach.
• the question of how we deal with loss/suffering is an ancient one.
• when she (mockett) was a child, she'd be confused when she went to people's homes in japan and the first thing she ahd to do was go to the family shrine and light a stick of incense, but, now that she's gotten older, she's come to appreciate that ritual, that sense of assuaging the past and, in a sense, befriending it.
• refers to japan as the "land of exception" -- i.e. owakare is the final parting (of loved ones) ... except for when the dead come home in august (or sometimes july) (again, the land of exception) during obon.
• on the collective experience of grief in japan:
  • she didn't think she was writing a book about herself but about japan -- a common criticism is that there isn't enough about her.
  • it's very clear, though, that's she is grieving.
  • if you're grieving, there isn't one way of dealing with it -- found that useful about japan's many rituals for grief.
  • the common message of all these rituals acknowledged that they couldn't get rid of your pain or make it easier, but they could help you see the collective and see your pain against the pain of others.  they didn't make her pain smaller but made her feel like she was expanding, which in turn made her pain feel smaller.
  • i.e. a trip she took to see a specific temple in kyoto:  she was pissed because it was so crowded so she couldn't see the temple but had to go through these steps of writing something on a sign/paper, but she had to wait on line to get a pen, then to do this, then that -- and the effect of all that was to make her realize that she was one person among all the people there.
• newton:  you can't generalize about DNA.
• newton:  ancestry actually used to be a good thing until christianity intervened and supplanted ancestors with saints.
  • because we're such a rationalistic culture, we tend to look at DNA as a purely scientific endeavor (the idea of scientists as thinking of DNA as a purely technological and scientific endeavor, as something they will be able to decode)
• mockett:  "if you're grieving and you get a card that says something like, 'don't worry; he's still watching over you,' it makes you angry because it's such a platitude."
  • grief is a very raw emotion.
  • tells a story about a temple with a puppet hag (you stand in front of this box, and a terrifying puppet hag pops out at you -- this is a very simplistic explanation of the ritual; she did a much better job describing it):  the idea is that, when you cross the river styx, the hag jumps out at you.  if you're wearing clothes, she takes them, but, if you aren't wearing clothes (because your family wasn't wealthy enough to afford sending you into the afterlife clothed), she takes your skin.  if you look at this hag face-on, she's terrifying, but, if you look at her from the side, she's sad because she doesn't want to do this but has to because it's part of life.
  • the puppet hag shows how death is terrifying but that death happens, and we have no choice but to be sad.
  • old cultures have ways of explaining things in these indirect ways, but mockett also found comfort in that, to think that, a hundred years ago, people had already been thinking about these things.
• used to love ishiguro and was obsessed with steinbeck, but she's starting to read a lot of nonfiction nowadays while exploring the idea of "how can we stretch the story?  where do we go with being east asian and/or multicultural?"
• talked about the duality of being seen as quiet/shy in the west but louder with a lot of questions in japan.
• the beauty of japan is that there are places to go and grieve publicly.  this doesn't really exist in the west.  the west has a narrative of "you grieve ... and then you move on."  she appreciated that, in japan, there was constantly a place where she could go to grieve, the joke being that, if this temple didn't work for you, then you could go to another temple or another because we have lots of temples!  we have lots of gods you can pray to!
• "the thing about grief is that it's universal."