My wife is delivering our second child this week (a daughter). So please excuse me as I can’t post as much as I’d like to. It’ll get more hectic with family flying in from California. And school’s starting again in a week! I will cardiac arrest right after all this is over. For some reason, I’m very nervous, although I’ve been through this process before. I’m freaking out, also, because I chose not to go to a refresher Lamaze class at the hospital, because I fell asleep my first time there. But I think I forgot most of the techniques, and we’ll have to resort to impromptu breathing patterns during labor. It is very likely that at my wife’s side, I’ll look like a third-base coach sending complex and frantic signals to a confused base runner. My wife, on the other hand, exudes a Siddhartan calm. Just an amazing woman.

Two nights ago, I took her out on a date. A last-chance respite, you know, before our incarceration. We went to the Radu Lupu recital at the Carnegie Hall. One of my favorite discs is Radu Lupu’s Late Brahms; when I die, I want to lose my final consciousness listening to his Opus 118 A-major intermezzo. Or Weird Al Yankovic, maybe, who knows.

Anyway, the first half of Lupu’s recital was devoted to Schubert’s D. 850 Sonata, and the second half, to the first book of Debussy’s Preludes. The hall was packed. Amazing, considering that there was no war-horse virtuoso piece nor an especially intriguing program. But I suspect all of them were there, just like me, to hear the sheer beauty of sound that Lupu can produce out of the piano. I don’t know of any other pianist who is capable of producing that kind of tone from the instrument. Maybe Krystian Zimerman or Murray Perahia.

Schubert’s D. 850 Sonata is called “Gasteiner” because it was composed in 1825, during Schubert’s visit to the spa town of Gastein. He would die in three years. His last symphony, the “Great” symphony in C-major, is also based on the sketches he made in Gastein in 1825. So the sonata, too, has a Beethovenian grandeur. I don’t know if Lupu was over-pedaling or if the Carnegie Hall’s acoustics were suspect, but the first movement came off a bit hazy. But the Con moto slow movement was perhaps the finest I’ve heard, either live or on record. And it was beyond my understanding how Lupu could make the mysterious hush of the ppp which ends the sonata linger in the hall’s air.

The Preludes were even finer. Became a suite of damn-near miraculous luminous sound in Lupu’s hands. As an encore, he played something from the second book of Debussy’s Preludes (I can’t remember the title, because Lupu didn’t announce his encores). Then for the second encore, he played the C sharp-minor from Schubert’s Moments Musicaux. In virtually all the renditions I’ve heard, the pianists invariably try to accentuate and over-emphasize the piece’s connection to Bach. But Lupu downplayed such a connection, and just… played. It sang as I’ve never heard it sing.

It should be obvious to you by now that this post isn’t much of an objective music review, because it was impossible for me not to love the moment. During the slow movement of the Schubert, I was holding my wife’s hand, my forearm nudged against her side. The entire hall was silent, straining to listen to the quiet music of Schubert, then I felt my baby squirm and move, grazing against my arm. I looked at my wife in wonder. I was so happy. She’s listening to this, I thought, the way the notes hang in the air before their decay.

(Image: by Shaun Tan)

I don’t know if some of you are planning on reading Coetzee’s Diary of A Bad Year, which received - for the most part - excellent reviews so far. I haven’t finished the book yet, but I must say, some of the discursive patches of writing on politics are pretty derivative and disengaged from Coetzee’s usually lively fictional imagination. The author’s disquisition on State and Power, especially, reads like a limp distillation of the Frankfurt School ideas. I believe that there’s definitely a place for essayistic, political writing in fiction, if done well. One prime example that I know of is Alexander Kluge’s The Devil’s Blind Spot. Even when dealing with topics such as the 9/11, Iraq and Guantanamo, Kluge’s mischievous and elliptical fictional frame of mind shapes such issues beyond the simplistic, binarious notions formed by the media images, the headlines. The book is structurally a series of quick feuilletons, and in progressing through the short pieces, one simply moves along with the author’s pace of thought in a state of constant surprise; a perfect read. In one particularly disquieting chapter near the end of the book, Kluge uses Kant’s retort - “A well-intended lie is an act of omnipotence” - as a prism through which to contemplate the various political occurrences of such lies in history (The French Revolution, The Stalinist purge during the 1937 Moscow trials, the CIA interrogation of Al-Qaeda operatives, etc.). Then, immediately following the chapter is the author’s whimsical musing on Fourier’s mathematical calculation of the transmigration of souls -

The human soul, says Fourier, must assume 810 different forms before it concludes its planetary circuit and can return to earth. Of these existences in the cosmos 720 years are happy, 45 favorable, and 45 unfavorable or unhappy. After the end of our world the chosen souls will travel to the sun! Only those with complete courses are chosen. Before souls spend 80,000 years on our planet, they must have inhabited all other planets and worlds. The human race will have enjoyed boreal light for 70,000 years.

Kluge then trains his gaze on Benjamin, who contemplated Fourier’s notion of transmigration of souls in The Arcades Project, its hopeless utopia. All too naturally, the reader’s sense of desperation about the atrocities of human history grafts onto Benjamin’s - especially after having read Kluge’s preceding chapter about “lies” in history. And the twin emotions of despair and glee which attend Benjamin’s description of Fourier’s hopeless utopia seem the same attendant feelings which visit the reader, and Kluge’s fiction becomes, effortlessly and simultaneously in the seamless instant of unnameable sadness, also a palimpsest of historical disillusionment -

Fourier also says that… humanity will acquire the capacity to live like fish in the water and to fly like birds in the air, and that, by then, humans will have reached a height of seven feet and have a life span of at least 144 years. Everyone, at that point, will be able to transform himself into an amphibian; the individual will have the power of opening or closing at will the valves connecting the chambers of the heart and so - without the blood having to pass through the lungs - bring it directly to the heart… Nature will evolve in such fashion, he maintains, that a time will come when orange trees blossom in Siberia, and the most dangerous animals will be replaced by their opposites. ANTI-LIONS and ANTI-WHALES… New stars will emerge to take the place of the moon, which, by then, will already have begun to rot.

(Image: by Ji Lee)

I’m re-reading Cortazar’s Hopscotch. As you know, you can read the book in a linear fashion, up until Chapter 56, or alternately, in a “hopscotch” fashion, jumping around according to the dictates of the author given in the Table of Instructions. This time around, I’ve chosen to disregard the Table of Instructions, foraging through the book according to my whim, to see what might happen. I’ll write more about the results later, but I must say, some parts of Hopscotch make better sense to me, now that I’m in NYC and have been on the L train to Brooklyn on numerous occasions (I’d insert a smiley face emoticon here, only if I knew how to) -

… and it occurred to me like a sort of mental belch that this whole A B C of my life was a painful bit of stupidity, because it was based solely on a dialectical pattern, on the choice of what could be called nonconduct rather than conduct, on faddish indecency instead of social decency.

I’m sure most of us are guilty of this “faddish indecency” at certain points of our lives. But in this post, I’m going to deviate from Cortazar’s connotation here to appropriate the phrase, “faddish indecency,” to describe a kind of writing that I don’t have much of a tolerance for. Specifically speaking, it’s the kind of writing pertaining to rendering moments of violence through fiction (for that matter, let’s also include rendering sex in fiction as well). The faddish indecency, in such cases, occurs when such moments are overly aestheticized.

A couple of years ago, in the summer ‘06 issue of Zoetrope’s All-Story, there was a good short story written by David Means, called “Nebraska.” From the beginning, I was engrossed by it. The prose was beautifully immaculate, each word impeccably considered. The story wasn’t one of those enervated pieces about the tortured inner lives of people, either; it had a real, strong plot, concerning a heist that a set of characters were to pull off.

The characters in “Nebraska” are faddishly indecent, in the original Cortazarian sense, deliberately living in defiance of social decency, but with a cool sense of style. Before the planned heist, one of the protagonists bleaches her hair and feels like Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits, and her cohorts strive for a certain élan as well, going for the Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway vibe, circa Bonnie & Clyde. I have no problem with this; it’s entirely natural for these characters to fashion their identities, referring back to their cultural icons. But I have a problem with how the actual heist is rendered, the violent crux of its action. Means’ prose goes into a cinematic slow-mo -

… all frozen there for a moment in the fear and agony until there is the flash of muzzle fire and then - in what seems to be a modulated time/space, not slow motion but rather something else, a kind of compact glimmering shimmer of movement - the fat man falls to the side, collapsing under the weight of his torso as his knees give, falling to the ground and then bowing down, prayerfully, his dark oil-slicked hair glinting in the light and his scalp bright red with sweat until another bullet hits and the top of his skull flowers with bone and spray; then the other man falls too, his lean slim body folding over sidelong and leathery; his own bones balsawood frail and delicate so that he appears to come down to the earth with a sliding motion, like a leaf blown by the wind, crumpling over himself.

I understand that this may be Means’ prose homage to the hail-of-bullets ending of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde. Even still: is it me, or is this too pretty or too precious Would such a moment of terrible violence really boil down to a “compact glimmering shimmer of movement” Would the falling man’s bones really occur to anyone to be “balsawood frail” as he crumples in death Perhaps it’s only a matter of subjective opinion, but I found the action of the violence too thickly smeared with aestheticized glaze, too prettified and stylized to be convincing as any real moment. So I found this passage to be an instance of “faddish indecency.”

I don’t know why such writing bothers me more than any other kind, but I figure I’d need an analyst to figure it out rather than a literary critic. But on an aesthetic level, I feel that the closer you get to depicting the limits of death, the more difficult it gets in rendering the truth in that given moment. Rather than dressing it up with beautiful shrouds, I feel that the writer should strip death of decorousness. It doesn’t mean that every writer should write about violence and death in a stark, Cormac McCarthy-esque cant. In his essay “That To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die,” Montaigne writes that it is the dreadful trappings and faces with which people surround scenes of death that are more frightening than death itself -

Children fear even their friends when they see them masked, and so do we ours. We must strip the mask from things as well as from persons; when it is off, we shall find beneath only that same death which a valet or a mere chambermaid passed through not long ago…

Montaigne’s stoical prescription on dealing with death seems as good an advice on writing about death as any: to strip the masks from things to discover in the moment of death - by the process of attrition - any and all truth available, lurking beneath the masks.

Wow. Did I really use the word “Geist” in my last post I’m such an asshole. I swear it won’t happen again.

But speaking of Geist (he he), I’m thinking about the Chinese idealist philosopher Wang Yangming (1472-1529), sitting in front of a bamboo tree for a week with his friend. He was an innatist Confucian philosopher who believed that because of the human capacity for memory, one can comprehend every essence of multivalent physical objects in the universe, by examining and understanding - through anamnesis - each essence of every thing, one by one, gradually. (Or - so to speak - rung by rung, up the Plato’s ladder).

Anyways, Wang and his friend sat in front of a bamboo tree. They didn’t eat or sleep, trying to explore the complete essence of the tree (Pass the pipe, Wang!). The friend passed out after three days, the wuss that he is, and Wang fell ill after one week. But he concluded that in the end, he continued to exist in his state, just as the tree had all along, on its own accord, existed in the universe.

According to Wang’s formulation, it is not the world that molds the mind, but the mind which gives rise to the world, through reason. First of all: the word “mind” is problematic here, as the word should mean “heart” or “consciousness” as well; just as it is with the German word Geist, the Chinese word escapes a straightforward English translation. It is common in the western world to use the word “mind” with Wang’s philosophy, but in the eastern world, the translation of the word tends toward “heart” rather than “mind”; to me, it makes more sense to use “heart,” albeit in a loose sense. Especially since the word “mind” comes with a heavy Cartesian baggage in the western philosophy. Just know that we’re talking about heart-mind-consciousness. So in rephrasing, Wang said that since “heart” is reason itself, there is nothing in the universe outside one’s “heart,” no reason outside “heart.”

One day, as Wang and his pupils were walking alongside a cliff, one of his pupils pointed toward a flower tree growing in the dark crevice of the cliff. He asked Wang: “If indeed there exists nothing outside one’s heart, then how related is that solitary flower in the cliff to my heart, seeing as it lives and falls quietly, unbeknownst to me” Wang replied: “Before you noticed that flower, both your heart and that flower were silent, but in the moment you noticed the flower, the flower’s color became clear, and is that not letting you know that it lies not outside your heart?”

Wang’s response is almost a paraphrase of George Berkeley’s dictum, Esse is Percipi. Or what about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle? But screw all those comparisons: Wang’s response to his pupil precisely mirrors the fox’s lesson to the Little Prince in St. Exupéry’s book, doesn’t it? The fox teaches the Little Prince to “tame” him, and through that taming, the fox says he shall hear every day, in the Prince’s approach, “the sound of a step that will be different from all others.” After he learns to “tame” the fox, and gets to “know” the fox, the Little Prince realizes that the roses on earth cannot compare to the rose he loves back in Asteroid B-162. When the Prince goes back to bid farewell to the fox, the fox tells him that he has a very simple secret to tell him -

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

Happy new year, everyone.

(Top Image: by David Chelsea)

I just woke up from a dream which I don’t want to talk about in much detail, except that the dream began with me looking at myself as a 3rd person, but by the end - when the dream had become traumatic, sad - I’d become so ensconced in my 1st personhood that it almost felt as though I had no body to refer to, but only a reeling… Geist, or something. The dream was terrible. It probably has to do with the fact that I watched 시간 (Time) before going to bed, a film by Kim Ki-duk, who had directed an excellent film called 빈집, which was released in the States as 3-Iron. This new film was not nearly as good as 3-Iron, despite some scenes of ludic brilliance. There’s an extended sequence involving a paper mask which is as disturbing and unnervingly funny as anything I’ve seen this year. The film, despite its many flaws, is a kind of a 21st century update of the ol’ identity-switcheroo game, and the various attendant metaphysical maladies which usually accompany such a game. A kind of a heavy-handed reworking, so to speak, of Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina Something like that, I guess. Although I’d have to say it’s more like a melodramatic, quasi-philosophical version of John Woo’s Face-off.

2007 has been a good year. I got to know my daughter better as she began to recognize the world and me, first of all. The year has been largely uneventful, which is more than I can ask for from life. I started this blog with no ambition in August, but met so many people, like you, who think and feel about the similar things. Thanks for reading. I’d thought that perhaps, with this pseudonymous identity that the blog affords me, I could write about crazy things, fuck-it-all But that hasn’t been the case, because I see myself better, more clearly here sometimes, than I’d otherwise be capable of seeing: the reverse of my nightmare which I just woke up from. This stanza from Eugenio Montale’s “Encounter” -

Maybe I’ll find a face again:
in the glancing light a movement leads me
to a sad bough craning from a jar
by a tavern door.
I reach for it, and feel
another life becoming mine, encumbered
with a form that was taken from me;
and it’s hair, not leaves, that winds
round my fingers like rings.

Do you do those New Year’s Resolution lists which you abide by until some drunken night(s) in February? I don’t. But I’m thinking that I’ll do a list this year. I’ll be kinder to people around me, for example. Love my darling wife better. Be a better dad. Stop procrastinating. Drink less. Exercise more… I’m tired already.

(Image, from Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia)

Woke up at six in the morning and found a personal essay in yesterday’s NY Times called “The Gift” by Sam Lipsyte, about the author’s experience of taking care of his cancer-ridden mother as she was dying (Thanks for the link, Jenny). The essay is a gift for me, as a reader, in a different sense, since it’s so damn good. Moving, unsentimental, funny, and lucidly written. If you know Lipsyte’s fiction, this essay will further enlighten how you read through certain autobiographical streaks in his work, especially in Venus Drive. I interviewed Sam Lipsyte two years ago for The Blue Notebooks, and not knowing about his mother, asked him a pretty specific (and perhaps insensitive) question concerning his relationship to her. I forget what the actual question was. But I do remember that he did not skirt the issue, was frank and honest; it really was the highlight of that evening. I’ll shut up so you can go read “The Gift.” It’s perhaps my favorite Christmas essay, ever.

Once, lying on her bed, talking, talking about nothing in particular, I studied her as hard as I could. Her eyes were closed, and for the first time I could actually sense the end of her, her body. And lying there beside her was so sweet. Why did we wait until the end to let go of everything that ever kept us from just lying there and talking like two people who are going to die and not be able to talk anymore

(Image: by Georges Seurat, of his mother)

Slow blogging through the holidays, sorry. But I hope you’re all having a great time with your family and/or loved ones. Some short notes: Congrats to Ed, a new father. If you need advice on strollers, etc., I’m your man. Also, Erasing has a great post on Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (which he describes as La Jetee + M. C. Escher + Chris Van Allsburg + Codex Seraphinianus).

Because of school, I didn’t get nearly enough time to read/listen/watch much of anything, or at least not as much as I would have liked to. But for what it’s worth, the following items gave me much pleasure in 2007.

MUSIC

Alkan, Concerto for Solo Piano, etc.: Marc-Andre Hamelin (If I ever have to demonstrate to the martians the expressive and technical range of an instrument commonly known as piano, I’d pop in this disc. My second favorite Hamelin CD, only after his Charles Ives Concord Sonata disc.)

Radiohead, In Rainbows (I’ll shut up.)

Stockhausen, Stimmung: Paul Hillier and Theater of Voices (see here.)

Herbie Hancock, River, The Joni Letters (I enjoyed this disc so much better than the other Joni Mitchell tribute album which was more hyped. Wayne Shorter hasn’t sounded this good in years, either. Tina Turner in “Edith and the Kingpin” is wicked, and Hancock’s solo in the same song is too good. My favorite of the album Luciana Souza’s cover of “Amelia.”)

No Age, Weirdo Rippers (Wesssssssiiiiiiiide!)

LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver (my daughter’s favorite album of 2007.)

Carla Bruni, No Promises. (Sexy, sexy…)

Motian/Frisell/Lovano, Time and Time Again. (I am kicking myself for having missed their concert last month.)

Burial, Untrue (The music I listened to the most while writing this year, alongside Tallis Scholars’ Requiem CD.)

Sally Shapiro, Disco Romance (Makes me feel old and young at the same fucking time.)

Beethoven, Sonatas Op. 101 & Op. 106: Mitsuko Uchida (The Hammerklavier that pounds the head and stirs the soul.)

Brahms, String Sextets: Nash Ensemble.

Schumann & Schubert, Cello Works: Antonio Meneses (Great Arpeggione sonata, but even better Schumann. Lyrical, searching and intimate. One of those records that gets better with each listen, starts living inside you. I know I will listen to it over & over again, for years, i.e. Radu Lupu’s late Brahms.)

Glenn Gould, The Complete Original Jacket Collection (80 CDs. Immaculate packaging, with each CD encased in its own sleeve, which is a reproduction of the original LP cover. This is for the completist in you, if you’re a Gould fan. I am in love.)

BOOKS

Fred Wander, The Seventh Well (A remarkable novel by a holocaust survivor, tautly written and elegantly translated by Michael Hofmann, whose recent literary criticism, by the way, makes me believe he is very very angry at life. But as for Wander, see my post here.)

Felisberto Hernandez, Lands of Memory (This book is actually a reissue that will come out Spring ‘08, but you can find used copies online, I think. Writing that is at once enigmatic and utterly natural. No wonder why writers like Calvino, Cortazar and Garcia Marquez worshipped the man.)

C. P. Cavafy, The Canon (Yes!)

Gerhard Richter, The Atlas (An update of the artist’s “idea book.” You know how Wittgenstein, in his Preface to Philosophical Investigations, called his propositions “a picture of a landscape… a thought criss-cross… an album” The Atlas is exactly that.)

Roberto Bolano, The Savage Detectives (But look out for Nazi Literature in the Americas, due out soon. Crazy little book. It’s a personal preference, I guess, but I much prefer Bolano in shorter works. But I’ll save the ultimate judgment until the release of 2666.)

Shaun Tan, The Arrival (See here.)

David Malouf, The Complete Stories (I just can’t believe I haven’t read his writing until this year.)

Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise (Well worth the wait.)

David Peace, Tokyo Ground Zero (Thanks, Terry, for the recommendation.)

Hooray. Now that the semester is finally over, I can drink in the morning hours. As true as that may be, I won’t (at least for today). Instead, I’d like to recommend a book: Soseki Natsume’s Spring Miscellany and London Essays, which is Soseki’s recollection of his stay in London, where he studied with W. J. Craig, a noted Shakespeare scholar who was the editor of the Arden Shakespeare. Soseki Natsume is best known in this country by his novel I Am a Cat of which narrator is - drum roll, please - a cat (see my post here). He had stayed in England between 1900 and 1902, and was not very happy during the course of his stay. The short pieces which are collected in Spring Miscellany were originally serialized in 1909 in the Asahi Newspaper. They are called shohin (little items), the Japanese counterpart of the European feuilletons. Particularly delightful is Soseki’s meditation on Thomas Carlyle written after his visit to the Carlyle Museum on Cheyne Row, Carlyle’s home in London. “It was here,” Soseki writes, “that Carlyle lived in austerity, like Cromwell, like the Emperor Frederick, in this house resembling a factory chimney, without even receiving the annual income offered him by Disraeli for the publication of his writings in which both Cromwell and the Emperor Frederick were celebrated.” Soseki wanders through Carlyle’s house, lightly pensive, comparing Carlyle to Schopenhauer, digressing as he walks. Not many writers can balance irony and sincerity as deftly as Soseki can, and his light-footed poise is evident even in these slight shohin pieces. (If you are in NYC, you can pick up a remainder copy of Spring Miscellany for two bucks at the Labyrinth Bookstore on 112th & Broadway.)

Tucked near the end of the book is Soseki’s letter to his wife, Kyo, on March 8, 1901. In the letter, Soseki is unnerved because he has been expecting a letter from her, especially as he knows that his wife must have delivered their baby. He asks Kyo if the baby is a boy or a girl (Tsune, his daughter, was born on January 26, 1901.) “SS Rio de Janeiro,” writes Soseki, “which set sail from Yokohama on February 2nd, has been wrecked off San Francisco, and I am very worried as to whether there was mail for me on that very boat.”

Inexplicably, when I read this letter about the wreck of SS Rio de Janeiro, I became intrigued. Probably for no other profound reason (which is often the case with me) than a coincidental tangent: in my previous post, I’d quoted a stanza from Brodsky’s “Rio Samba.” Apparently, on February 22, 1901, SS Rio couldn’t navigate through the dense coastal fog of San Francisco, and as the steamer neared the Golden Gate Bridge, she hit the jagged rocks near Fort Point and sank. It seems that even though the visibility was zero, the captain disregarded others’ warnings and decided to approach the harbor. 129 people died, and about 80 survived. The ship was filled with immigrants. “Chinamen,” said an eyewitness in the NY Times article, “were even more panic-stricken than the white women… [rushing] about the deck howling frantically.”

The same article mentions a certain Third Officer Holland, who, along with a man named J. K. Carpenter, was in a rescue boat. But the hull of the SS Rio crashed into the boat, splitting it in two. The report states that J. K. Carpenter had swum away and eventually rescued, but “the fate of Holland is not known, but he is supposed to have perished.” It seems that indeed Holland had been supposed as one of the deceased, until he surfaced, two days later, unharmed. Nobody knows how he had come to be numbered among the dead; he was pulled down by the suction, but took hold of a life preserver and swam to the surface, where he was rescued by an Italian fisherman. (I keep thinking about Dashiell Hammett’s Flitcraft in The Maltese Falcon.)

About nine months after the wreck, a diver named Sorenson found the sunken ship about a half mile from Fort Point. On board, it was reported, were $65,000 in general cargo and $400,000 in raw silk (I am going to resist making a Sebald parallel here, with the silk in RoS and Austerlitz - maybe another post.) Sorenson, according to the article, was entitled to 70% of everything recovered from the wreck. I wonder how much of that booty he actually ended up keeping, how much of that was recovered. There was even speculation that vast quantities of gold and silver were on board - $3 million worth - the rumors of which were never substantiated. Anyway, in 1990, the wreck of SS Rio was declared a possession of the State of California and became listed in the National Register as nationally significant.

I suppose Kyo’s letter to her husband was in fact among the mail which sank with SS Rio. If so, it’s most likely that the letter has since been long dissolved in the water, forever irretrievable. But maybe - who knows - the letter is preserved still, kept inside some black chest impermeable to water and time, sealed and locked away for all eternity. Who the hell can ever know of such things By the way, in the same letter to Kyo expressing his anxiety about his mail vanishing with the wreck of SS Rio, Soseki writes with pure delight and amazement of his experience attending a Christmas pantomime staged in a theatre on Drury Lane. He tells his wife of the wondrous stage effects, especially during a scene in which fifty girls dance in a submarine palace, their hair and costumes lit up, sparkling with thousand little red bulbs. “Just think!” Soseki writes to his beloved wife -

You have only just been looking at a palace beneath the ocean, and already it is covered over by the wonderful flower garden which succeeds it, and after this it is the sun shining on the sea, while finally we find blue-tinged mountains appearing and then turning into a snow-clad landscape.

(Bottom Image by Anthony Goicolea)

On Books (Passing of Time):

“What would you think, fair reader, of a problem such as this - to write a book which should be sense for your own generation, nonsense for the next, should revive into sense for the next after that, but again became nonsense for the fourth; and so on by alternate successions, sinking into night or blazing into day, like the Sicilian river Arethusa, and the English river Mole - or like the undulating motions of a flattened stone which children cause to skim the breast of a river, now diving below the water, now grazing its surface, sinking heavily into darkness, rising buoyantly into light, through a long vista of alternations”

- Thomas De Quincey, from Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

…

On Flying (Getting Lost):

“Come to Rio, oh come to Rio.
Grow a mustache and change your bio.
Here the rich get richer, the poor get poorer,
here each old man is a Sturmbahnführer.”

- Joseph Brodsky, the 1st stanza from “Rio Samba”

(Bottom images by: Shaun Tan from The Arrival & Chris Ware from Jimmy Corrigan)

Browsing through the “Notable Children’s Books of 2007″ on the NY Times site, I was floored by this image taken from a book called The Arrival by Shaun Tan. Perhaps I’m late in discovering his work; the reviewer called the book more of a graphic novel than a children’s picture book. Curious, I went to the book store to see for myself. Found it in the graphic novel section, completely dissed: a single slim copy buried between gargantuan Marvel and DC compendiums on the top shelf. Took the book and read it in about twenty minutes, mesmerized. Probably the best twenty minutes of my past week. I was too cheap to buy it at full price, so it’s on my Amazon wish list. But all told, it’s one of my favorite books this year.

The Arrival is completely wordless. It tells the story of a nameless immigrant, who looks Asian one moment, European the next. He leaves his family back in the old country to settle in the new country. One might presume the new country is America, as the port that the immigrant comes through is vaguely reminiscent of the turn-of-the-century Ellis Island. But if the new country is America, it is in its opaque, allegorical disguise (let’s call it Amerika.) As a matter of fact, aside from the people themselves, who are rendered in precise physical and emotional realism by Tan, everything else is allegorical, as if taken from a dream or a myth. Even the hieroglyphic script - which is beautiful but illegible, printed everywhere - is invented by Tan, forever indecipherable.

The strongest part of the book, for me, was the first half of it. Estranged from his old country and way of life, the immigrant struggles to find work, and pines for his wife and daughter in the new land. It’s possible that I found a more personal kind of emotional resonance here, as my father came to the states a year before us; reading The Arrival, I could easily imagine my father’s hardship and loneliness. But in the images above, see how subtly the images in the montage panes on the left transmogrify into their alien counterparts on the right. Throughout the book, the narrative moves through arresting and elliptical sequences of images; many of you will be reminded of Chris Ware’s poetic way of distilling ephemeral moments into images, memorializing the present fleeting into the past in the process.

There are many moments in The Arrival that will convince you that what Tan has accomplished is just great art. It’s a free and inventive work, immaculately designed and composed. Strange creatures and enigmatic symbology, along with Tan’s consummate but peculiar logic in arranging the book’s images into a compelling narrative called into my mind both Hieronymus Bosch and Kafka. The surreal design of the new country and its architecture, though, made me think of Brodsky and Utkin the most.

Brodsky and Utkin are Russian architects who were called “paper architects” during the Soviet years because they were avant-garde architects whose style remained radical, even after the Socialist Realist style was denounced as “over-decorated” by Khruschev in the ’50s and abandoned. Brodsky and Utkin, though, continued to produce a series of whimsical architectural etchings. They were influenced by the cosmopolitan architecture of the past (i.e. Byzantine, Egyptian) as well as the post-modern concept of the city. As a result, their work seems both utopian and dystopic at once. (I don’t think they work together any more as artists; each of them is a practicing architect.) Anyway, their etchings are usually accompanied by equally whimsical texts written by the artists. (My favorite is “Villa Claustrophobia,” clearly influenced by Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, which I have no reason to insert into this post; please check their small but fascinating body of work in a book published by Princeton Architectural Press.) The work above is called “The Crystal Palace,” and its accompanying texts - a haiku by Basho and the artists’ description - could very well describe the strange land which the immigrant in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival must adopt and call home:

Seaweed swarms with
Transparent [minnows] Catch them -
They shall thaw without a trace.

Basho

Crystal Palace is a beautiful but unrealizable
dream[,] a Mirage which calls you always[,] seen
a the edge of [the] visible. But as each dream [is seen] in
close examination[,] it will prove the other thing
than it seemed [from] afar. [It stands on the edge of the city.] A person who wants to
visit it will make a long way through the town
borderland, blocks of slums and dumps but co
ming at last to the Palace find neither roof nor
walls - only the huge glass plates, stuck into the
huge box of sand. A Mirage remains simply
a Mirage, though it can be touched. Passing
from one glass chink to another, a visitor will
walk [through] the Palace… and find himself at
the border of a small square, where the Landscape
commences… Did he learn the very essence of the Crys-
tal Palace[ W]ill he have a desire to visit it once more
Nobody knows…