 I read the beginning part of the novel as a reflection on art and life; married and middle aged Oki Toshio, a Kawabatan male artist falls in love with teenage Otoko Ueno, and impregnates her. The baby dies at birth, but out comes a novel by Oki through the experience, which is type written by his real wife. Oki begins his career as a novelist, and Otoko soon follows with a career as a painter.
The story takes place more than 20 years after this event. The novel he wrote almost takes on an autonomous life of its own, stripped is it from the particularities of its existence and moved to the universal plane of art. Kawabata writes through Otoko to explore the relationship between the artist and art, following the minute thoughts that pass through her as she prepares a painting.
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 A quick and interesting read. Jules Verne wrote this story in 1863 of a Paris of the future, but his editors deemed this tale too unlikely and rejected it. 130 years later, one of his relatives found his manuscript in a lock and it was published.
The story takes place in the Paris of 1960, and Jules Verne extrapolates from the technologies available in his time to construct this Paris (as the introduction of this edition details in-depth). Verne's Paris is an expansive metropolitan area, a city of electric lights, a city connected by an expansive metro system, while on the roads there are horseless carriages "invisibly powered by a motor which operated by a gas combustion" (p. 24)--a surprising double of the modern city. The values of Verne's Parisians in 1960 are what interested me the more. Verne's Paris is a city where industry, commerce, and scientific progress are dominant and have stifled the arts; everything exists through a utilitarian logic. In this world, protagonist Michel Dufrénoy is a poet; he wins first prize for Latin verse among lycéen graduates; the uncle, aunt, and cousin who he lives with are ashamed. Verne was prescient here as well. Through his characters, Verne communicates his own artistic tastes. Verne is horrified with Wagner and would have been doubly so with Schonberg ("in his [Wagner's] day, melody was already being suppressed, and he decided it was appropriate to get rid of harmony as well"). Quinsonnas (through whom Verne expresses his opinions) also says this about music in his day: "a score now consists of only a single phrase--long, loopy, endless"--an interesting description that conforms to music like Philip Glass and ambient music, like that of Brian Eno. His conservatice tastes in music are extended to the arts and literature; he would have disliked the Impressionists, Hemingway, films (too spectacular), etc.  A collection of short stories by Maupassant.
Sur l'eau Amazing story combining Maupassant's waterborne spirit and an early hint of his later supernatural, fantastical phase. A bourgeois city dweller goes to rent a house on the river Seine, where he meets a canotier, who tells a story of his passion, the river. Maupassant describes the river in an amazing two paragraphs (below, I translate one of the two): "The fisherman is bounded on the earth, but in the shadows, when there is no moon, the river is limitless. A sailor does not experience the same for the sea. She is often difficult and wicked, it's true, but she cries, she howls, she is loyal, the great sea; meanwhile, the river is silent and perfidious. She does not moan, she flows forever without a stir, and this eternal movement of the flowing river is more frightening for me than the high waves of the Ocean." The canotier is on the river at night, and tempted by its tranquility, so he decides to anchor his canoe. A fog descends, river-creatures are silent, and when he attempts to leave, he finds his anchor immobile and stuck. An "hors-la" spirit spooks him during the night; in the morning he discovers that... Histoire d'une Fille de Ferme One of Maupassant's stories of rural Normandians. One day, Rose, a farmgirl, feels a visceral desire for some sort of freedom, and then later that day gives in to Jacques, a farmboy who has pursued her for some time. (Maupassant portrays ruralfolk as primitive, un-formed by culture, animal-like.) They start an amorous liaison, Rose gets pregnant, Jacques leaves, and a bastard child is born and hidden away in her hometown. (The bastard child, a common theme of Maupassant.) Motivated by the desire to give her child a better life, Rose works hard, redoubles her efforts so that they cannot but pay her a higher wage; her wages don't get higher but she attracts the eye of her petit-bourgeois boss, who measures her value to the farm and desires her as his wife. And then... Le Papa de Simon In this story Maupassant is sympathetic; he explores the anxiety of the bastard child. Simon, who is fatherless, goes to a new school, where he is bullied by the "children of the fields, who are nearly beasts" and so decides to end his life (this sequence reminded me of Mouchette by Robert Bresson), but is saved by the simple, honest, and admirable ouvrier, Philippe. Maupassant might have been thinking of the Greek drama, Philippe, Simon, and Simon's mother are all "good" characters, and there is a scene where Simon visits the forge where Philippe works to ask him to be his father; the other ouvriers respond in tandem, in a chorus. Une Partie de Campagne A Parisian family goes on a vacation to the campagne. There are four, a father, a mother, their daughter, and the daughter's suitor. While picnicking, two young and viril canotiers join them. They take the mother and daughter for a walk, they separate into two pairs, and the daughter has her first romantic experience, symbolically represented by a bird singing with great fervor and drunkenness, but stops to hear below "a profound moan that one took for the departure of a soul." The daughter marries the suitor some time later, which one of the canotier finds out during a visit to Paris. He goes to the area of the campagne where they met, and he runs into the daughter and her husband. "I think about it every evening," she tells the canotier. Un homme marié est un homme cocu, as Maupassant notes in Pierre et Jean (I think). La Maison Tellier The titular story. Maupassant displays his devilish sense of irony. The Madame is a petit bourgeois character who ran a guesthouse with her husband; now a widow, she runs an establishment with her five girls, who are likened as "boarders." It is a trade that is not stigmatized in the town; it has, in fact, become some sort of an institution for all the male bourgeois to frequent. The Madame is invited to the baptism of her niece; her brother, a petty bourgeois himself, keeps her in touch as he knows about his sister's success: he hopes to obtain a share for his young daughter. She takes all her boarders to the baptism; the people in the small village are stunned by the arrival of these glamorous city-folk. The baptism itself is marked by a divine moment. Rosa, one of Madame's girls, remembers her own baptism and starts to sob, then cry; this is spread to the other girls, and eventually the whole church. "Like a spark that alights a fire on a ripe field, the tears of Rosa and her friends spread in an instant to the crowd. Men, women, the old, the young, all of them started to tear up, and something surhuman seemed to glide above them, une âme épandue (not sure how to translate this), the prodigious breathe of an invisible and all-powerful being ... " (There is more but I will cut it short here.) After the ceremony the priest approaches them: "Above all, thank you, all of you, my dear sisters who have come from so far, whose presence among us, whose visible faith, whose lively piety served as a salutary example for us. You all are the edification of my parish; your emotions have warmed all our hearts; without you, perhaps, this great day would not have had this divine character." "It is sufficient, at times, to have a single elite member of the flock for the Lord to descend to the rest of the herd," said the priest to the prostitute  My first Korean-American novel.
Kim dedicates this work to the memory of Camus, whose work helped him overcome "the nihilism of the trenches and bunkers of Korea" during the Korean War. The influence of Camus is evident. "In my profession I have seen many men die. As a doctor I can explain why or how my patients die. But God knows I can't explain the reason for all these men dying in war. There is no rational explanation when you get down to the bottom of it. It doesn't make sense. Yet somehow it must make sense" (p. 162). The war is an absurd event, where man's condition, his thirst for clarity in a meaningless world (Camus said something like this in one of his formulations of the absurd) is thrust upon with an unrelenting force, and Kim's protagonists persist in their lives despite living in such senseless circumstances.  One needs to be a good listener to read Kawabata properly to hear what is not written. There were times where after a reading session, I felt the quality of my surroundings change, while at other times, I was left with a frustrating feeling, not being able to hear the unwritten.
Kawabata uses space so effectively, not only in what is left empty, but in the spacing between paragraphs as well. Spacing can mark the passage of time (although not necessarily), let linger a resonating feeling, or capture the shifting emotional tensions between characters in their dialogue (I imagined moments like this cinematically, where there is a shift from one type of shot to another). The Old Capital refers to Kyoto, and this novel is tinged with nostalgia for an unchanging past in the face of change and modernity. However, it does not read like a lament; there is an acceptance of the end of an age.  Bessire's Behold the Black Caiman read for me as a diary of a witness, an anti-hero who experienced senseless, incomprehensible violence and wanted to use the process of writing to attempt to give form and coherence to his experiences working with the Ayoreo people.
Bessire's writing style exemplifies this assertion. His writing seems to me to be a frenzied effort to inscribe on paper his own experiences of fragment making violence before the pieces fall off into nothingness. It is with this intention that he writes sentences like, "I remember those scenes now as a series of disjointed images of brown skin and muscle cramps and biting flies and acrid smoke and tepid water and earnest voices..." in which these image-fragments are not divided with the use of a comma, but seem to flow fluidly into one another with the use of the 'and,' just as how the work itself tries to piece together disappearing fragments. It is definitely the most violent ethnography I have read, and Bessire's descriptions of gratuitous violence is one way of dealing with these experiences.  When it was first written 20 years ago, it must have had quite an impact. The books insights have lost its freshness in today's world, and are starting to enter into the territory of the everyday.
Driving the books insights is Kurzweil's law of time and chaos. Taking an evolutionary approach with a wide cosmological lens (from the Big Bang onwards), Kurzweil develops this Law: "In a process, the time interval between salient events expands or contracts along with the amount of chaos" (p. 29). This means that with more chaos, time exponentially slows down (time interval between salient events increases) and on the contrary, with more order, time exponentially speeds up. He derives this law from several sources, like the Big Bang, in which a whole bunch of salient events like formation of various basic particles occurred within the first second, before becoming subject to entropy and expansion, and biological evolution, which uses an internally growing order and the chaos from the external world as its material for exponential growth. This leads to his discussion on technology. Made from human ingenuity, the evolution of technology is also exponentially growing and the accelerating evolution of technology allows us to escape the fetters of biological evolution. "Human intelligence, a product of evolution, is far more intelligent than its creator" and intelligent technology will also build on evolution to become more intelligent than its creators, homo sapiens sapiens. Kurzweil synthesizes different schools of research to explore different implications, like the issue of consciousness (can machines have a "ghost"?), different schools of AI programming (recursive vs neural nets etc), the future human and machine bodies, and more. The research was very well done, and although I thought that Kurzweil is only a hard sciences type of guy, he brings in sources like American philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, who from my knowledge, focuses on Heidegger, the existentialists, and other continental philosophers. Reading this book gave me access to research way outside of my field, like the mysteries of quantum physics and quantum computers (while digital computing relies on bits that are either zero or one, quantum computing uses qu-bits "which are essentially zero and one at the same time [!!!]" (p. 110)), which will have computational abilities far exceeding our current capacities. Kurzweil ends the book with his predictions for the decades to come (1999, 2009, 2019, 2029, 2099; I feel old reading about predictions made in the past about the present time I am in), and they are quite prescient ("privacy continues to become a major political and social issue with each individual's practically every move stored in a database somewhere" (p. 207)) although sometimes optimistic. Kurzweil's 2099 is a world where the ideology of individuality is replaced with a cybernetic reality of fluidity, of floating immaterial minds inhabiting bodies, and a world where "the struggle is discovering new knowledge to learn" (p. 245).  Barthes uses the framework of Saussurian linguistics and goes further, adding another stage to analyze the myths of modern society. The final term (sign) in Saussure's structural linguistics becomes the first term (signifier) for Barthes analysis.
The last section of the book, "Myth Today," explains and expands on this methology for analyzing myths, although I thought that his analysis took a forced political dimension in the end, when he writes that myths depoliticize, dehistoricize, and naturalize bourgeois realities. The speech of the proletariat is always political and linked to action, to labour, and is the other end of the spectrum to mythological speech. I read in another source that he wrote his analyses after writing the monthly columns analyzing modern myths that make up the bulk of this book. Some of the modern myths he analyzed were quite apolitical, like his article "The World of Wrestling." Perhaps it was the political climate that gave this political bent to his analyses in the end. As for his actual writings on contemporary mythologies, they were instructive, well-written, and provocative. Some of his references were outdated and outside my particular cultural sphere, but seeing how he methodologically dissects each modern reality to its component linguistic 'terms' was informative and gave me a new frame of reference in seeing the world. The World Ahead: An Anthropologist Anticipates the Future (Writings and lectures by Margaret Mead)5/13/2019  A fantastic collection of essays and lectures by Margaret Mead, compiled by William Beeman and Robert Textor.
In university I learned of Margaret Mead solely as an anthropologist of the culture and personality school--I did not imagine that she wrote so extensively in the futurist mode. This collection is comprised of 25 articles that cover a lot of topics from the future of the family to the future of work to the implications of a globalized world; it was quite refreshing to see an anthropological perspective being applied in such a general scale. While none of these articles were overly academic (overladen with citations upon cirations), Mead shows how an anthropologist can contribute to future studies through her nuanced and provocative cultural analysis. For example, in her discussion of the future of the family, Mead draws on her broad knowledge on family forms in various 'primitive' (an outdated word) cultures, noting the that the position of the father is replaceable, which opens up the possibility for various types of surrogate or "social fatherhood" (p.49). For example, in her discussion of the future of the family, Mead draws on her broad knowledge on family forms in various 'primitive' (an outdated word) cultures, noting the that the position of the father is replaceable, which opens up the possibility for various types of surrogate or "social fatherhood" (p.49). Mead also demonstrates her ability to analyze her own American society; in her discussion of Universal Basic Income, she talks about the American cultural categories of work and leisure that make the idea of subsistence without work a "dangerous" idea--such dichotomies are not active in other cultures. These Puritan categories combined with the development of industrial capitalism leads to what she calls "modern savagery" (p. 228)--the idea that the right to live is only reserved for individuals who work--Mead looks towards community-based support and subsistence models in other cultures as an alternative. Mead wrote these articles in the post WWII era and in the post-60s era, where an unprecedented global perspective forced its way into the consciousness of humankind. Mead is sensitive to the implications of the new global frame. Writing on man's landing on the moon, she thinks that this makes the “world one, a bounded unit within which all human beings share the same hazards and have access to the same hopes” (p. 248). The nuclear bomb is another such event, where complete annihilation of humanity becomes a possibility, and "all hope [for futurity]... is placed in jeopardy" (p. 79). How to live in this new global condition? Mead largely preaches acceptance, tolerance, and learning from one another. One interesting idea she proposes is the creation of a global language. This cannot be a language divorced from the human environment--it must be vital and in a state of change (so no Esperanto). However, Mead is also wary of employing a language of a world power; this will "swamp the smaller languages" (p. 114)--given the vast number of extinct languages and the predominance of English worldwide, Mead was correct in her assertion. --- The introduction by Robert Textor is a great primer on Anticipatory Anthropology in addition to Margaret Mead's activities as a futurist. He summarizes his anticipatory anthropology methodology, and the contributions that anthropology can make to future studies. --- I developed a posthumous respect for Margaret Mead: she was not afraid to step outside of the ivory tower and engage with the public; she had strong opinions and ideas to better the human condition; I do not know if there is an equivalent of her living today. The academy is increasingly a hostile and precarious place, and academics are forced out from the confines of the library to practice en plein air; this I hope, is an opportunity for a future generation of Margaret Mead's--we must overcome our fear of fresh air and sunlight.  I think this book would have made a stronger impact if I read it as a teenager, but I am also glad I didn't read it then because Bukowski's semi-autobiographical novel follows the life of an angry, lonely kid, Henry Chinaski making all sorts of bad decisions (from the point of view of my middle class upbringing).
Bukowski's writing was sometimes tedious, and at other tines powerful, and containing a real energy. An example is: "There was no fear of the drill anymore. There never had been. Only an anger. But the anger was gone. There wasn't even a resignation on my part, only disgust, a disgust that this had happened to me, and a disgust with the doctors who couldn't do anything about it. They were helpless and I was helpless, the only difference being that I was the victim." (On page 149) Bukowski rarely uses adjectives with nouns and adverbs. He also sticks to short sentences to prevent energy from dissipating. I have noticed that Bukowski likes repeating a few key words (anger, disgust, helpless) or phrases (including the way he starts sentences, eg. there was) to create an internal rhythm that adds to the paragraphs energy with each repetition. |
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