Dogs and vegetables

[imomus]

Today I have a loose canine theme to my entry. Animator Joji Koyama is based in London (where he studied Fine Art at Goldsmith's) and has made pop videos for Four Tet. His pseudonym is Woof Wan-Bau, a name which combines the sound of a dog barking in the English, Japanese and German languages. You can watch his latest film, an animation entitled Watermelon, on the Mesh page of Channel 4's website. It uses a sliver of music by the talented Tujiko Noriko, whose sexuality becomes ever more stiflingly Bardotesque as she ripens. (Wolf whistle!) By the way, Noriko's fifty minute radio broadcast is worth a listen, even if you don't speak Japanese. It gives a good overview of her music, whose strangeness makes the perfect counterpoint to the silliness of her giggle. (Showbiz gossip: last thing I heard, Tujiko Noriko, who lives in Paris, was dating Julien Loquet, the very talented figure behind musical projects Gel and Dorine_Muraille.)



Atelier Bow Wow is an architecture practise in Tokyo. They also sometimes call themselves Atelier Wan Wan, after the sound of a dog barking in Japanese. (I love the word 'atelier', by the way. I hope one day to have an 'atelier' of my own.) The animal theme continues in Atelier Bow Wow's designation of a certain kind of haphazard, domestic, small-scale architecture found in Japanese cities: they call it 'pet architecture'. I've chosen an early project by Atelier Bow Wow to illustrate what they do, 1992's 'Kiosk for Vegetables'.



Vegetables now take over as the theme of this entry. The highlight, for me, of Osawa Tsuyoshi's 'Answer with Yes and No!' exhibition at the Roppongi Hills art gallery this September was a greenhouse filled with photos of women all around the world holding 'vegetable machine guns' made up of the contents of their favourite recipes, in a cross between Patty Hearst and a cookery show.



I'm sure there are some vegetable clothes somewhere in On Conceptual Clothing, an interesting-looking group show by artists and clothes designers currently being held at Tokyo's Musabi University.

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'm reading all the time, but it tends not to be fiction. I should write something one day about why, because in many ways I'm the ideal target audience for a certain sort of serious contemporary fiction, and yet I'm much more interested in time-based media, visual media, music. I could hazard some reasons as to why this is:

1. I think I dislike the sensory deprivation element of reading -- the lack of colour, sound, texture, form.
2. I dislike the sense that literature is something for an elite bourgeois class, usually university educated (like myself).
3. I think that having studied literature has made me massively self-conscious about any act of reading, and I don't like that.
4. I'm usually living in some country where the bookshops stock products I can't read.
5. I think of literature as a moribund artform, somehow.
6. I have issues with language as an art medium. We have the illusion that we know what we're talking about when we use the same words, but I'm not so sure. Language appears to be close to 'reality', but in fact it's closer to conventions and assumptions about reality. It rarely startles us, and when it does it's usually in the form of poetry, not prose.
7. Nevertheless, the literature which is about the limits of language and explores the very autism I'm describing is tremendously depressing.

Writers have influenced me enormously, from De Sade and Sterne to D.H. Lawrence, from Kafka to Bataille to Bellow to Nicholson Baker. In a weird way, though, I see them as recording artists who just didn't have access to recording studios, or lyrics writers who never found the right musical partner!

[(Anonymous)]

Allow me to slip into my Invisible Man suit of anonymity here to address some of the comments Momus makes about fiction, comments which can't help but make me (admittedly a writer or would-be writer) a little sad both for Momus and the world at large--for I'm afraid much of what Momus believes is not only justified and unsurprising but increasingly prevalent. Is Derrida to blame--or was it your sixth-grade English teacher?

Sorry--this going to be a long post, and everyone is going to glide right past it--but so what, we've all got the bandwidth! I don't mean to take Momus to task, because he's not the only one, and he seems sincere about this (naughty word that, sincere!) but let's go through his comments one by one:

1. Actually, many bibliophiles consider reading incredibly sensuous, though there is much to be said for the sensory-deprivation of being alone with a book. In a world fraught with the sensory overload of advertising and news and politics, it is nice to retreat to the zenlike silence of a book, to a world which because it is so minimal, is such an oasis for calm thought, no matter how unnerving the subject.

2. Literature just for the elite?! Yes, you do have to know how to read, and a university education will sometimes improve your vocabulary, but a good writer writes for the ideal reader--and Mr. or Ms. Ideal might have any sort of education or almost none. In fact, a good book is a good education. If you were to follow this argument up, it would therefore be better (nobler?) to be illiterate and of the lowest class than to dare be "elitist," like, say, those highly educated and culturally aware Momus fans.

3. And trained musicians (trained by others or themselves) aren't self-conscious about music? Being at least a little self-conscious while reading literature is something to strive for; it means being aware of the "self," understanding how things work, feeling a bit like the writer him- or herself, and most of all being awake, not lulled to sleep by meaningless words. This is an argument already lost in foggy abstractions. If we were all truly a bit more self-conscious, we might be better people--and better readers.

4. A very good reason to learn a new language or practice an old one. Or discover the joys of translating! In many places it's hard to find books in anything but the native tongue, and it's important to recognize that, yes, not every thinks the same way or with the same words.

[(Anonymous)]

5. Literature will be moribund when people no longer use words to talk or to describe things or ideas in journals such as this. That day is no doubt coming, but until humans can only think in pictures, as only infants and animals can, words and the stories they tell will compel us. True, most of what is pushed upon us by publishers and advertisers is dead on arrival, but books a thousand years old are still breathing strong.

6. Where do I begin? Is language supposed to be an "art medium," exactly, whatever that means or is? Much of what Momus says here doesn't apply to the books I love, or the ones he does, and most novels or stories are probably not going to "startle" us the way some music or graphics do. But some books do--in fact, quite a lot do, and quite a lot of music and visual art doesn't. It is true that poetry can often be more visceral and immediate than prose, and many writers themselves would consider it "superior," but poetry lurks in some unexpected places, and I find a lot of it in everything from the goddamn Bible (hello, Nick Cave!) to Kafka (who took great pains not to sound too "poetic").

7. It's hard to tell exactly what Momus means here, since he doesn't give any examples--but this might lead into a long discussion about what depression is and how "tremendously depressing" writing somehow redeems itself by being tremendously good (on occasion). I agree that if the work is merely about exploring "the limits of language," it's probably not very interesting or good, otherwise. The same could be said of much avant-garde music and art which is interesting or good only in theory; as much as I love experimental art, I have to admit the avant-garde and experimental often dates the fastest. No amount of brilliant theory can make anything artistically better. Be that as it may, it is the duty of writers to explore as much as musicians or visual artists do--and a thousand hacks is worth one James Joyce.

You know what I secretly (and now not so secretly) think it's really all about? Time. Reading takes time in a way nothing else does, when we can multitask to music, breeze through galleries, scan headlines and columns for the juicy bits, flip through channels, fast-forward through movies. I wish I could sell time at a profit, the time people need for novels and story collections; it's our greatest indulgence and most valuable resource, but there's no way around it--reading equals thought and thought equals time. Time to read should be a right we demand when we demand food, shelter, and clothing. Maybe if the world got off their cellphones--and computers!--there'd be time enough to spare. Magically, good books make time.

Momus has obviously read a lot (one has only to give his lyrics the slightest glance), and so have his fans and extremely knowledgeable followers of this journal, so it's not as if I have to chastise him for not reading enough or daring to criticize what passes for "literature," in this age or any other. But writers can't afford to lose one more intelligent reader due to generalizations or pronouncements from people who actually do know a lot better. There may be more books published today than ever, but fewer and fewer people bother with fiction, and the less said about poetry the better. But to judge art by popularity isn't something Momus does and doesn't with his own work, so I'm entreating him and everyone else not to give up just because so much literature is bad--it is, very very bad--but because there are still stories and novels out there that could change your life. If I had given up on music for any reason like the reasons given above, or a thousand other reasons which I could readily give you, I might never have discovered the music of Momus. Now, shouldn't he be glad, that as jaded as I might be, I didn't stop searching?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that 'defense of poesie'!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Perhaps I could just add that I think Kierkegaard's 'Either/Or' is a much, much greater work than Tolstoy's 'War and Peace', and that 'Either/Or' strikes me as being closer to blogging and journalism, which I read huge amounts of, than to novels, which I hardly read at all.

[(Anonymous)]

No you may not, you naughty name-dropper! And don't try to raise blogging or journalism to the level of fancy foreign philosophy either; just listen to your conscience and admit that not only is it crap - it's all you are able to read! Sensory deprivation? That means you are numbed, boy, numbed! Too much titilation with that Manky De Sade! Try depriving your senses and maybe they will return.

Anon

[(Anonymous)]

Apples and oranges? More like mangoes and kumquats, these books and their intents are so different. Nonetheless, as original as Kierkegaard's philosophy may be, Tolstoy's sprawling, monumental fiction is at least as "great," being a work of art and imagination as universal as any can attempt to be, whatever "great" is. There's no real "point" to fiction (as there must be with philosophy) and that's one of its greatest points.

This other "Anon" is right: although attuned to the wonderful possibilities of parallel worlds in blogs and journalism and music and fashion and art, Momus needs to rediscover the parallel worlds that have existed in fiction for time immemorial. I have yet to read a blog, even this one, which could help me see in such profound new ways as "Candide" did.

Teachers and writers and critics have all let us down, apparently. If we're not reading anything other than the hype of the day, we all lose.

[tump.livejournal.com]

All novels are written by novelists.

Obvious, ok, but think a bit about what sets novelists apart. None really enjoy facing the blank page, yet they are compelled to do so, whether by art or money or misanthropy, something keeps them hermited away for unending hours, shaping their own psyches to something on the page. Away from all, dependent on none other.

Like those who choose to be policemen or headshrinkers, these people are a peculiar lot who probably shouldn't be permitted to engage in intecourse with normal humanity at all, and their works should not be taken as serious engagement with the real world.

Given this situation, I don't think it's necessary to upbraid an intelligent adult, who most likely has read more novels in his youth than the average 5 Americans read in a lifetime, for choosing to forego the experience at present or in the future.

When novels simply stop speaking to you, there is no way to pry their mouths open. This is especially so of anyone with a creative bent, tending as they do to greater awareness of the bare-naked manipulations of creativity. They do not need to be made more self-conscious in their own creations by the imperfect creations of others.

We all have to be curators of our own collections, and we all have different conceptions of what deadwood needs to go. If one feels non-fiction is more immediate, more true and more relevant than the musings of even the greatest novelist, what is the use in shaming such a person toward fiction?

[tump.livejournal.com]

and furthermore... (http://www.emusic.com/m3u/song/10807077/12820386.m3u)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I agree with the Anon poster above on Voltaire's 'Candide'. I like the picaresque format, and I like novels of ideas. I like pre-19th century fiction. To me 'Candide' is not so far from 'Either/Or'.

think a bit about what sets novelists apart. None really enjoy facing the blank page, yet they are compelled to do so, whether by art or money or misanthropy, something keeps them hermited away for unending hours, shaping their own psyches to something on the page.

I was just reading a NYRB (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17594) review of a biography of Graham Greene yesterday. It said:

'His well-known practice of writing a certain number of words a day (five hundred, later reduced to three hundred) was a ritual that enabled him to carry on a task that he often found agonizingly difficult. The gradual accumulation of words was reassuring and he attributed to the figures an almost magical significance, cabling Catherine on the completion of A Burnt-Out Case: "FINISHED THANK GOD 325 WORDS SHORT ORIGINAL ESTIMATE."'

I must say it doesn't exactly sound like an outpouring of joy. If the reader finds reading equally painful, what's the point? It reminds me of Nick Cave saying how he never listens to his own records. I really like art that the maker and the consumer take real, immediate pleasure in.

The people I mention in today's entry -- Joji Koyama, Tujiko Noriko, Ozawa Tsuyoshi, the architects at Atelier Bow Wow -- I really love what they do. It enriches the world. It's very particular (I can almost smell the earth that vegetable kiosk is made of, and I can 'taste' the soup made from those vegetable machine guns) and yet rather universal (although these artists are all Japanese, their ideas can survive transplantation from the national context to an international one).

The part of western culture I come from -- protestant, bourgeois, didactic, literary -- has an unfortunate aversion to the body, to colour, to sensuality, to sex... it tends to pallid disembodiment, Apollonian abstraction, ratiocination... It fosters national cultures rather than international ones. It fosters puritan and political ways of thinking rather than sensual and embodied ones. Artforms which correct this bias: contemporary dance, the plastic arts, design, music, animation, cookery, crafts... That's one reason I talk about them here. They correct me and my literary bias, and they correct the bias of the culture I come from. (Actually, must talk more about cookery in future!)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Plus, isn't it extremely exciting that Atelier Bow Wow made something a bit like fiction, but made it in the real world?



Doesn't that break down all our body-mind and theory-praxis and real-ideal splits?

In defence of literature

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

I'd very much like to leap to the defence of Anonymous, here, because I agree with most or all of what is being said. To dismiss a whole medium as moribund seems a bit like a slef-fulfilling prophecy and nothing else. Personally, I'd rather that prophecy was not fulfilled. And in that connection I'd like to state that there are plenty of writers who are aware, for instance, of the problems of the novel, plenty of writers who are doing something different, new, sensual. But people don't tend to search out writers in the same way they search out, for instance, music, and so writers are generally only appreciated after they're dead.

I think this is a sad state of affairs, but I would, because I'm a writer. I remember the book shop owner who put on the launch of my last collection saying, "Well, living authors don't sell, but anyway, we'll have a nice party and it will be fun." I think two or three copies of my book were sold at the launch. But here's an interesting thing - when I did an actual reading at another bookshop, almost everyone present (unfotunately not a large number of people) bought a copy. I sold thirteen copies that time, and at twenty seven quid, that's not cheap. But people somehow don't seem to be able to imagine that a piece of writing can be interesting. Sorry if this sounds like boasting, but clearly, just by reading something aloud I demonstrated that it can be interesting. Of course, people are not obliged to read anything they don't want to, but I'm surprised at the number of people who consciously don't read fiction, as if it's an actual rule. Indeed, a friend of mine declars that he doesn't read novels. There are reasons for this - he reads poetry and non-fiction - but they are still reasons basically based on prejudice, because he's been reading the wrong novels in the first place. I think one of the problems is the Jane Austen-influenced fiction we have in Britain, combined with poor translations and little respect given to translators. I handed my non-novel-reading friend the first three chapters of a Japanese novel I am translating and he only glanced over a paragraph and he was hooked and couldn't stop reading until he'd finished the whole thing.

Finally, an example of what happens because people don't read or look for living writers. I believe I know of at least one living writer who is both great and almost completely obscure. His name is Thomas Ligotti (http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/show.html?iw,ligotti,1). I'm well aware he might not be to everyone's taste. He's in the tradition of Poe. But I have no hesitation in saying he's a great writer. (He's not a novelist, actually, but a short story writer). But his last collection was limited to a thousand copies. To me this is a great injustice, and, if nothing else, I would just like to highlight this injustice. This is only one example. It drives me mad when people say there's no good fiction around, leaving struggling writers like Ligotti stranded.

Well, that's my two pence worth.

Re: In defence of literature

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Sorry if this sounds like boasting, but clearly, just by reading something aloud I demonstrated that it can be interesting.

Actually, I love to hear authors reading their works. Because then it becomes embodied. It becomes a time-based medium. It turns from text to texture. I love Books on Tape, and I love radio, including radio which is just someone reading a work of fiction.

This is a big and interesting question, so I want to continue it on a new blog entry rather than in these shrinking columns.

Re: In defence of literature

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

I look forward to it.

Re: In defence of literature

[(Anonymous)]

Can't you just use your imagination to embody the text when reading? Don't you like to go into that private space? Maybe not if you like to show your willy on the internet.

Anon

Re: In defence of literature

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Ooh, you literary people are all so poison pen! Don't you know that the penis mightier than the sword?

Re: In defence of literature

[(Anonymous)]

I would challenge you to a duel but I have sympathy for your wife.