country mouse: neck deep
a cow eating its way through
five-foot tall haystack
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Wednesday, March 03, 2010
Friday, February 26, 2010
The Chinati Foundation is looking for a new director, as is the Dallas Contemporary. And Jeff Koons is curating at the New Museum.
This weekend, I am travelling to Little Rock.
Where can I see these Gonzales-Torres billboards?
This weekend, I am travelling to Little Rock.
Where can I see these Gonzales-Torres billboards?
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Photo essay on our old 'hood in Seattle. But where is India Palace and Whole Foods and SIOM and Dream Clinic?
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
I'm teaching a class for Gemini Ink in late July. Here's the course description:
The Exquisite Eye: A Poetry Workshop, Saturday, July 24, 2010, 9 a.m. – 12 p.m.
Poet and assistant curator at the Wittliff Collections Shin Yu Pai will lead a workshop on ekphrastic poetry. We will look at various poetic models that deploy a range of strategies including descriptive illustration, the poem as interpretive occasion, and ekphrasis as a critical meditation, through reading poets with ties to the Southwest including Carol Moldaw, Arthur Sze, and Miriam Sagan. Participants will sharpen their visual thinking skills and experiment with writing poems based on photographic images from the Wittliff Collections’ Southwestern and Mexican Photography Collection. In keeping with the theme of environment and landscape for the Summer Festival, this workshop will contemplate images of place, drawing inspiration from images composed by children from Mineral de Pozos, Guanajuato, to anonymous photographers documenting la zone de tolerancia in the red light districts of Mexican bordertowns to Graciela Iturbide’s images of quotidian life in Juchitan, Oaxaca. (Maximum enrollment: 10-12)
The Exquisite Eye: A Poetry Workshop, Saturday, July 24, 2010, 9 a.m. – 12 p.m.
Poet and assistant curator at the Wittliff Collections Shin Yu Pai will lead a workshop on ekphrastic poetry. We will look at various poetic models that deploy a range of strategies including descriptive illustration, the poem as interpretive occasion, and ekphrasis as a critical meditation, through reading poets with ties to the Southwest including Carol Moldaw, Arthur Sze, and Miriam Sagan. Participants will sharpen their visual thinking skills and experiment with writing poems based on photographic images from the Wittliff Collections’ Southwestern and Mexican Photography Collection. In keeping with the theme of environment and landscape for the Summer Festival, this workshop will contemplate images of place, drawing inspiration from images composed by children from Mineral de Pozos, Guanajuato, to anonymous photographers documenting la zone de tolerancia in the red light districts of Mexican bordertowns to Graciela Iturbide’s images of quotidian life in Juchitan, Oaxaca. (Maximum enrollment: 10-12)
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Flood Song by Sherwin Bitsui. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2009. 69 pp. $15.00 paperback.
In Korean culture, the solo pansori singer vocally and physically transforms herself through performing every character in a story, in addition to vocally mirroring the sounds of nature within the span of a single recital. A traditional performance lasts between three to eight hours, and requires not only musical talent, but intense focus and fortitude. “In pansori, the voice that narrates is more than a message-bearer…Pansori thrives much less on improvisation or new composition than on the confirmation of its past. Still, its performance is a reconstruction of not merely the past, but the continuing past. In the process of unquestioning emulation emerges an individual voice expressive simultaneously of the tradition and of the performer’s own interpretive aesthetics.”*
It is through this metaphor of the pansori tradition, that a reader might consider Sherwin Bitsui’s Flood Song. Composed of muscular lines that “stomp across the living room ceiling” refusing to be silenced, Bitsui’s contemporary lyric is one that is characterized by visceral language, urgent rhythms, and the abstraction of archetypal and cultural images and symbols that “speak a double helix.”
Major themes in Bitsui’s dazzling second collection include the loss of language, agency, and cultural symbols, that explore “some piece of the idea of now/ before it becomes was.” (26) Throughout this extended poem, the author calls attention to linguistic erosion:
What happened when gunfire blew into their speech
and left one language hanging by a nail
at the entrance of mouths (21)
A song falls flat when it cannot be understood, “what what what – is how the song chimed in wilderness” (13) and “how na ho kos feels/ under the weight of all that loss.” (11) Colonial intervention into the native language creates an impenetrable wall where “…there is no tongue to smooth away the hairline fracture between us and them.” (24 )
An unwavering consciousness of indigenous subjectivity runs throughout Flood Song: “… we have become bodies for the first time/… our language stabs the fork with the spoon.” (29) "Bodies pile up on the lawns, “…landlocked inside the naming of: / them, those, not like us…” (51), while others rest on surgical tables “waiting for the surgeons to carve us back into shape.” (66)
The making of subjects is addressed elsewhere in Flood Song through the recurring imagery of televisions, commercials, and media that manufacture images and depict native subjects.
A whip’s leather scent flairs camera shutters
open to the softened teeth of masked dancers…
pressing a handful of chipped house paint
against their smeared faces
you say
‘We need this color of wings blood’ (42)
Elsewhere, a figure is “photographed on a horse facing west,” and later a spectator watches “a boat fizzle and flake.” Viewed through the static of television, the mediated image becomes another kind of manmade conundrum akin to “locked doors” and a paper crane unfolding “into a square cage.”
Flood Song is filled with stunning visual images that loop and repeat throughout the poem. The recurring image of eyes and seeing are significant – the poet “breathe[s] through my eyelids/glimpsing the thawing of our flat world.” (64) Keyholes and doors evoke the imagery of Jean Cocteau’s surrealist film Le sang d'un poète: While Cocteau’s artist smashes a sculpture with a hammer, here, the poet downs a tree with an axe.
Turning full circle back to the idea of pansori, it takes about ten years for a performer to learn the basic vocal techniques of the form; the singer must develop a complete command of the lyrics, as there are no scores to aid the artist throughout his performance. As a follow-up collection to Shapeshift, Bitsui’s Flood Song demonstrates the mature development of one of our generation’s most gifted and promising poets.
*Park, Chan. “Korean p'ansori Narrative” in Oral Tradition 18(2), 2003, pp. 241-243.
In Korean culture, the solo pansori singer vocally and physically transforms herself through performing every character in a story, in addition to vocally mirroring the sounds of nature within the span of a single recital. A traditional performance lasts between three to eight hours, and requires not only musical talent, but intense focus and fortitude. “In pansori, the voice that narrates is more than a message-bearer…Pansori thrives much less on improvisation or new composition than on the confirmation of its past. Still, its performance is a reconstruction of not merely the past, but the continuing past. In the process of unquestioning emulation emerges an individual voice expressive simultaneously of the tradition and of the performer’s own interpretive aesthetics.”*
It is through this metaphor of the pansori tradition, that a reader might consider Sherwin Bitsui’s Flood Song. Composed of muscular lines that “stomp across the living room ceiling” refusing to be silenced, Bitsui’s contemporary lyric is one that is characterized by visceral language, urgent rhythms, and the abstraction of archetypal and cultural images and symbols that “speak a double helix.”
Major themes in Bitsui’s dazzling second collection include the loss of language, agency, and cultural symbols, that explore “some piece of the idea of now/ before it becomes was.” (26) Throughout this extended poem, the author calls attention to linguistic erosion:
What happened when gunfire blew into their speech
and left one language hanging by a nail
at the entrance of mouths (21)
A song falls flat when it cannot be understood, “what what what – is how the song chimed in wilderness” (13) and “how na ho kos feels/ under the weight of all that loss.” (11) Colonial intervention into the native language creates an impenetrable wall where “…there is no tongue to smooth away the hairline fracture between us and them.” (24 )
An unwavering consciousness of indigenous subjectivity runs throughout Flood Song: “… we have become bodies for the first time/… our language stabs the fork with the spoon.” (29) "Bodies pile up on the lawns, “…landlocked inside the naming of: / them, those, not like us…” (51), while others rest on surgical tables “waiting for the surgeons to carve us back into shape.” (66)
The making of subjects is addressed elsewhere in Flood Song through the recurring imagery of televisions, commercials, and media that manufacture images and depict native subjects.
A whip’s leather scent flairs camera shutters
open to the softened teeth of masked dancers…
pressing a handful of chipped house paint
against their smeared faces
you say
‘We need this color of wings blood’ (42)
Elsewhere, a figure is “photographed on a horse facing west,” and later a spectator watches “a boat fizzle and flake.” Viewed through the static of television, the mediated image becomes another kind of manmade conundrum akin to “locked doors” and a paper crane unfolding “into a square cage.”
Flood Song is filled with stunning visual images that loop and repeat throughout the poem. The recurring image of eyes and seeing are significant – the poet “breathe[s] through my eyelids/glimpsing the thawing of our flat world.” (64) Keyholes and doors evoke the imagery of Jean Cocteau’s surrealist film Le sang d'un poète: While Cocteau’s artist smashes a sculpture with a hammer, here, the poet downs a tree with an axe.
Turning full circle back to the idea of pansori, it takes about ten years for a performer to learn the basic vocal techniques of the form; the singer must develop a complete command of the lyrics, as there are no scores to aid the artist throughout his performance. As a follow-up collection to Shapeshift, Bitsui’s Flood Song demonstrates the mature development of one of our generation’s most gifted and promising poets.
*Park, Chan. “Korean p'ansori Narrative” in Oral Tradition 18(2), 2003, pp. 241-243.
Friday, February 12, 2010
One is walking
one is standing
who is more entitled
to the path
*
To distribute material possessions
is to divide them
to distribute spiritual possessions
is to multiply them
- Josef Albers
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
I just finished reading Alex Lemon’s new memoir Happy. The library copy is a bright yellow – evocative of lemons and 1970s happy faces/acid trips. Slightly modified from the mainstream trade edition which splits the cover design into yellow and black color fields, with the title text designed to create a bleeding effect into the black color field.
Lemon’s memoir focuses on the diagnosis, treatment and recovery of a brain malformation which is discovered while the author is a young athlete at a tight-knit mid-Western liberal arts college. Lemon chronicles a hyper-masculine existence of drunken parties, substance abuse, male bonding, locker-room talk, and promiscuity and a substantial amount of the book’s dialogue is comprised of one expletive after another. The author indulges in a fair amount of physical abuse and self-mutilation of his own body, which can be connected in part back to his earlier childhood experiences of incest which is touched upon briefly in a flashback sequence in the book.
While this is a fairly straight-laced vs. experimental prose narrative, Lemon uses a certain amount of poetic liberty and device, which too often interrupts the narrative by refocusing the reader’s attention on strange turns of phrase and quirky metaphors. The primary device deployed is the use of nouns transformed into verbs:
“I shotgun the beer”
“Blood curtains my teeth”
“Knuckling my groin”
“the party cords around the basement”
“I pyramid the rocks”
“I smoke up and mummy myself”
“she slowly napkins her mouth”
“I want to puddle into the floor”
“shipping tankers domino the hem of the water”
“anesthesia zippers me up”
“noise carousels above me”
“my lips are peeling again, swollen and strawberried”
“I Zorro the cane”
“I gimp into Snelling”
“brightness porcupining my face”
“siphoning out of our clothes”
Scattered throughout the book, these phrases are inconsistent with the rest of the narrative language, which shifts between high and low vernacular, though extracted and taken out of the whole, are interesting fragments of language.
Lemon also uses unusual metaphors:
“my heart flops up and down like a Ziploc bag of ground beef”
“when the neurologist turns the lights own, it’s a charred jar dropped over me”
“rain splatting the windshield like chum”
“a spray of birds is flapping madly, like puppets hanging from the sky”
The ground meat metaphor doesn’t work for me at all, but the rain likened to chum is evocative of a heavy downpour.
This book was a challenging to stay with and finish out. At times, I found myself disliking the young narrator who post-op, "flicks the scabby crumbs [of his surgical wound] at strangers' food and cups." But juxtaposed with more complex scenes such as the narrator's recollection of the first bed that his mother ever made him "egg foam and a salt of cardboard, raised off of the floor by bricks" and the narrator's discovery of a frozen dead mouse beneath that bed, Lemon begins to create more complexity to his narrator's history and character. Yet the author writes of his fear of being seen as weak (after the surgery) or vulnerable - and while I think this admission and self-disclosure is quite revealing, I'm not sure that as a project, Happy dug beneath the surface of physical suffering. I've been reading Ben Saenz's work a lot lately, another poet, who works within prose writing and think that Saenz more skillfully addresses themes of shame, incest, family violence, and psychological trauma.
Lemon’s memoir focuses on the diagnosis, treatment and recovery of a brain malformation which is discovered while the author is a young athlete at a tight-knit mid-Western liberal arts college. Lemon chronicles a hyper-masculine existence of drunken parties, substance abuse, male bonding, locker-room talk, and promiscuity and a substantial amount of the book’s dialogue is comprised of one expletive after another. The author indulges in a fair amount of physical abuse and self-mutilation of his own body, which can be connected in part back to his earlier childhood experiences of incest which is touched upon briefly in a flashback sequence in the book.
While this is a fairly straight-laced vs. experimental prose narrative, Lemon uses a certain amount of poetic liberty and device, which too often interrupts the narrative by refocusing the reader’s attention on strange turns of phrase and quirky metaphors. The primary device deployed is the use of nouns transformed into verbs:
“I shotgun the beer”
“Blood curtains my teeth”
“Knuckling my groin”
“the party cords around the basement”
“I pyramid the rocks”
“I smoke up and mummy myself”
“she slowly napkins her mouth”
“I want to puddle into the floor”
“shipping tankers domino the hem of the water”
“anesthesia zippers me up”
“noise carousels above me”
“my lips are peeling again, swollen and strawberried”
“I Zorro the cane”
“I gimp into Snelling”
“brightness porcupining my face”
“siphoning out of our clothes”
Scattered throughout the book, these phrases are inconsistent with the rest of the narrative language, which shifts between high and low vernacular, though extracted and taken out of the whole, are interesting fragments of language.
Lemon also uses unusual metaphors:
“my heart flops up and down like a Ziploc bag of ground beef”
“when the neurologist turns the lights own, it’s a charred jar dropped over me”
“rain splatting the windshield like chum”
“a spray of birds is flapping madly, like puppets hanging from the sky”
The ground meat metaphor doesn’t work for me at all, but the rain likened to chum is evocative of a heavy downpour.
This book was a challenging to stay with and finish out. At times, I found myself disliking the young narrator who post-op, "flicks the scabby crumbs [of his surgical wound] at strangers' food and cups." But juxtaposed with more complex scenes such as the narrator's recollection of the first bed that his mother ever made him "egg foam and a salt of cardboard, raised off of the floor by bricks" and the narrator's discovery of a frozen dead mouse beneath that bed, Lemon begins to create more complexity to his narrator's history and character. Yet the author writes of his fear of being seen as weak (after the surgery) or vulnerable - and while I think this admission and self-disclosure is quite revealing, I'm not sure that as a project, Happy dug beneath the surface of physical suffering. I've been reading Ben Saenz's work a lot lately, another poet, who works within prose writing and think that Saenz more skillfully addresses themes of shame, incest, family violence, and psychological trauma.
Monday, February 08, 2010
Because I love my husband, and my best friend, and realize that whenever we eat out I tend to vote Asian, I've consented to go here for Valentine's Day - which also happens to be Chinese New Year's. Sigh.
Sunday, February 07, 2010
Second weekend in a row that Kort and I drove up to Dallas. Yesterday in town for a reading at Paperbacks Plus with Jerry Kelley. I read work written primarily while we lived in Seattle and Jerry read new short prose excerpts from a long short-story that he's been working on based on his experiences of living in the Canadian bush. It was great to see Renee Rossi and old WordSpace friend Martha Heimberg and DMA friends. Karen X has also returned from her exile in Santa Fe and is back to hosting the P+ series. Met poet Peter Gurnis, a thoughtful and observant listener and reader of poems, who commented to me that my poems are "moral." This reminded me of Xi Chuan's comments in China that my poems reflect a certain "value." My hope is that I am not clubbing anyone over the head with this sense of morality or value, but for me the interest in social justice and poetry are inseparable. Peter was the only person in the audience that I didn't already know from my days in Dallas - which is to say that the turnout was pretty thin, but reading for friends is a good audience to try out new material. Kort insists that I stop talking about Turrell's Roden Crater as an extinct volcano, as supposedly according to science, volcanos never truly go extinct. I can't wait to visit the Crater someday - and for that matter the James Turrell Museum in Buenos Aires that is on the grounds of a vineyard...
I spent this morning working with Ben Fountain, who has a new op-ed piece in the NY Times, inventorying the archives of Robert Trammell, the founder of WordSpace. There was a treasure trove of correspondence that included materials from Robert Creeley, Gerald Burns, Jeff Davis,Naomi Shihab Nye, and Susan Smith Nash. Manuscript materials from David Searcy and Gerald Burns, and of course, Trammell himself, who was quite prolific, both as poet and prose writer. Also, a great poster collection that included promo pieces for the New Arts Festival in Dallas that Trammell organized, long before he started up WordSpace and began organizing events through the nonprofit. I never realized what a community organizer and social activist that Trammell was and seeing his programming notes and ideas for conferences and events really gave some wonderful insight into his aesthetic and intellectual values. I learned too that not all of Bob's books were self-published under his Barnburner imprint, but that at least two of his books were published by Salt Lick Press.
I spent this morning working with Ben Fountain, who has a new op-ed piece in the NY Times, inventorying the archives of Robert Trammell, the founder of WordSpace. There was a treasure trove of correspondence that included materials from Robert Creeley, Gerald Burns, Jeff Davis,Naomi Shihab Nye, and Susan Smith Nash. Manuscript materials from David Searcy and Gerald Burns, and of course, Trammell himself, who was quite prolific, both as poet and prose writer. Also, a great poster collection that included promo pieces for the New Arts Festival in Dallas that Trammell organized, long before he started up WordSpace and began organizing events through the nonprofit. I never realized what a community organizer and social activist that Trammell was and seeing his programming notes and ideas for conferences and events really gave some wonderful insight into his aesthetic and intellectual values. I learned too that not all of Bob's books were self-published under his Barnburner imprint, but that at least two of his books were published by Salt Lick Press.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
I have finished reading Last Night I Sang to the Monster and am now on to reading Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood and He Forgot to Say Goodbye. Saenz's Last Night... reminded me in ways of James Frey's A Million Little Pieces - similar themes, similar scenarios, but oh so different writing. The fact that Saenz is a poet, really comes through in the craft and language of this young adult novel for adults. You will not find unending run-on sentences or vertical pages of text where there is a confusion about who is speaking, and pages of texts that could be trimmed - I am thinking of Frey's work. The teenage protagonist, Zach, finds himself in a detox/rehabilitation facility and has blacked out and forgotten how he got there. Throughout his healing journey, he makes connections to others in his therapy group who model certain behaviors and attitudes which help to push Zach towards working through his wounding. Zach finds himself connecting particularly with an older male father figure (like Frey's friend Leonard) who helps him to both love and allow himself to be loved. The monster is a metaphor for the wounded child inside all of us - in Frey's book it was the green-eyed monster that he could never look in the eye in the mirror. This is so much a better book than Frey's, in that although it is a work of fiction, it deals completely with emotional truth and the process of uncovering and working through one's pain from the perspective of a victimized young person who is trapped by circumstances. Zach is not the overprivileged white protagonist of Frey's pseudo-memoir, but a poor kid who is the son of an alcoholic father and a manic depressive mother and the brother to a rager who murders his parents in cold blood and then commits suicide in front of Zach, leaving him the sole survivor of family dysfunction. The sorts of violence that happen in Saenz's books are real, true-to-life, and severely damaging. I found myself in tears at least 5 times, reading Last Night... and came away feeling that this work was a sort of gift/offering, something that I did not feel after reading Frey's memoir when it first came out.
Went yesterday afternoon to Jack Myers' memorial service in Dallas at SMU. Tony Hoagland, Brian Clements, Ralph Angel, Joe Ahearn, Gillian Connolley, and Mark Cox, all spoke on their profound friendships with Jack and his ability as a master teacher, who had so very clearly had a huge impact on each of their lives. Jack's older brother played a chorus of "Around Midnight" by Thelonious Monk (a song that he and Jack would play together as adolescents) and Jack's eldest son and wife performed an elegiac musical piece with cello and piano. The service itself lasted about an hour and then the group proceeded to the reception where Thea, Jack's widow, had organized several small exhibitions of Jack's interests - things like his favorite foods (lobster and black licorice), manuscripts, books, esoteric interests of study, etc. There was also a station with his ashes enshrined inside a beautiful wooden box that was beside an image of him in his hospital bed. Jack was never a teacher to me, nor a close associate, but someone who gave me a chance to teach at SMU, by letting me take over his class. In truth, I probably had more interactions with his wife Thea over the years, and wanted to go to the memorial to show our support for her.
Though we've been gone from Dallas for three years now, there were a lot of familiar faces, and individuals with whom I left relationships at loose ends. In the end, gatherings like yesterday's remind me of why it's important to move on and how Dallas never felt like the right fit, and probably never will.
We've been getting used to the long and regular road trip from San Marcos to Dallas and come up with conversations to entertain ourselves. We wondered yesterday for instance why no one has invented an air freshener for a car that smells like freshly baked bread. Or why no one has invented a chewing gum that tastes like chocolate chip cookies.
Though we've been gone from Dallas for three years now, there were a lot of familiar faces, and individuals with whom I left relationships at loose ends. In the end, gatherings like yesterday's remind me of why it's important to move on and how Dallas never felt like the right fit, and probably never will.
We've been getting used to the long and regular road trip from San Marcos to Dallas and come up with conversations to entertain ourselves. We wondered yesterday for instance why no one has invented an air freshener for a car that smells like freshly baked bread. Or why no one has invented a chewing gum that tastes like chocolate chip cookies.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers and Kaz Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World.
Gladwell's book focuses on breaking down the myth of the self-made genius, analyzing a variety of case histories/stories where opportunity, privilege, access to resources, and circumstances played a large role in ensuring success and/or genius. He spends a fair amount of time analyzing why Asians are good at math (attributing abilities with math to the linguistic system and the short/compact words which form the basis of numbers in the Chinese language system, which allows even the youngest child learning how to count, to count to a higher figure than his/her Western counterparts). He talks about statistical odds, generational/historical opportunity, time investment, and the ancestral legacies that shape experience. While I didn't love this book, it did give me much to reflect upon, in terms of analyzing the privilege and resources that were available to me, and the sacrifices made by my parents to provide some of those opportunities. I would not be the person that I am, if I had stayed in Riverside at the age of 17. I would not be the person that I am now, if my my mother and I hadn't worked very hard to pay my way to studying abroad in a foreign country during my college years. I would not be the person I am, if my father had never decided to leave Taiwan, when he did. Does my dad's work ethic come from cultivating rice paddies and farming (which he literally did), as Malcolm Gladwell would suggest? And does my own work ethic stem from the transmission of these values? And would I be a very different artist/writer, if I put in 10,000 hours a year into my writing? I don't know, nor is this necessarily a practical or relevant question. We live the lives that we live and balance multiple priorities and commitments.
Ishiguro's Artist of the Floating World also took me awhile to warm to. But the book really picked up speed for me when the protagonist of the novel, a famous painter who uses his talents to further the Japanese nation-making project, renounces his past activities and beliefs for the sake of marrying off his 26-year-old daughter. The whole story takes place post-War, under the American occupation, when the island is beginning to rebuild and rapidly transform. The story is told in flashbacks. Ono remembers his early days as a painter, training under various teachers, and his relationship with his major teacher who sought to reinvigorate the style and subject matter of Utamaro, using Western techniques and aesthetic approaches. But Ono tires of painting pictures of the pleasure district, geishas, and night scenes lit by lantern light, applying himself to political themes and images which estrange him from his studio. But there is much to be learned in the master's efforts, in his understanding that the floating world is ephemeral, though its pleasures and joys are no less real because of that quality of ephemerality. There is a message here too about living and practicing one's art and life with conviction - whether for political or aesthetic impulses of the heart. Did Ono and his teacher log 10,000 hours of painting time a year, qualifying themselves as savants? I think the more important question is did they practice their art deeply.
Gladwell's book focuses on breaking down the myth of the self-made genius, analyzing a variety of case histories/stories where opportunity, privilege, access to resources, and circumstances played a large role in ensuring success and/or genius. He spends a fair amount of time analyzing why Asians are good at math (attributing abilities with math to the linguistic system and the short/compact words which form the basis of numbers in the Chinese language system, which allows even the youngest child learning how to count, to count to a higher figure than his/her Western counterparts). He talks about statistical odds, generational/historical opportunity, time investment, and the ancestral legacies that shape experience. While I didn't love this book, it did give me much to reflect upon, in terms of analyzing the privilege and resources that were available to me, and the sacrifices made by my parents to provide some of those opportunities. I would not be the person that I am, if I had stayed in Riverside at the age of 17. I would not be the person that I am now, if my my mother and I hadn't worked very hard to pay my way to studying abroad in a foreign country during my college years. I would not be the person I am, if my father had never decided to leave Taiwan, when he did. Does my dad's work ethic come from cultivating rice paddies and farming (which he literally did), as Malcolm Gladwell would suggest? And does my own work ethic stem from the transmission of these values? And would I be a very different artist/writer, if I put in 10,000 hours a year into my writing? I don't know, nor is this necessarily a practical or relevant question. We live the lives that we live and balance multiple priorities and commitments.
Ishiguro's Artist of the Floating World also took me awhile to warm to. But the book really picked up speed for me when the protagonist of the novel, a famous painter who uses his talents to further the Japanese nation-making project, renounces his past activities and beliefs for the sake of marrying off his 26-year-old daughter. The whole story takes place post-War, under the American occupation, when the island is beginning to rebuild and rapidly transform. The story is told in flashbacks. Ono remembers his early days as a painter, training under various teachers, and his relationship with his major teacher who sought to reinvigorate the style and subject matter of Utamaro, using Western techniques and aesthetic approaches. But Ono tires of painting pictures of the pleasure district, geishas, and night scenes lit by lantern light, applying himself to political themes and images which estrange him from his studio. But there is much to be learned in the master's efforts, in his understanding that the floating world is ephemeral, though its pleasures and joys are no less real because of that quality of ephemerality. There is a message here too about living and practicing one's art and life with conviction - whether for political or aesthetic impulses of the heart. Did Ono and his teacher log 10,000 hours of painting time a year, qualifying themselves as savants? I think the more important question is did they practice their art deeply.
Friday, January 22, 2010
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