A visit to the Town of Cats

I've recently devoured all 623 pages of parts one and two of 1Q84 by one of my favorite authors Haruki Murakami. The translation was published last autumn, but I hadn't seen it in a book shop until a week ago. I had to read it.

It has been argued that his created fictional worlds are very similar, sometimes remarked as being too similar, or indeed, the same. I find this criticism to be a strange one. It seems odd to me to expect that each time one man digs into his psyche out of self-discovery and revelation, mining its' contents and sifting through the fragments to piece together a sense of himself, his place in the world, the nature of that world, and so forth, that that self should be completely different each time. It would be absurd, unreal, forged and to me, as a result, empty. What good is a fantastical story if it speaks of nothing in any earnestness?

When I read his fiction, more so even than when I've read his non-fiction, I get the distinct feeling that I'm truly privy to a human man revealing his inner self to me, in his confusion, his fear, his joy. Of course this happens within the works of countless authors, certainly all of my favorite writers, Lawrence, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Salinger, Bolaño (obvious and teenage choices but they are at least honest, I've yet to devour anyone's words like I have those of these men, which is no small achievement given how difficult the act of reading is for me at times)... But, perhaps because of the times in which they were written, and the backgrounds to which each man was familiar, Murakami's work is easier.

I accept the fantastical when he writes about it. Like looking at a Gregory Crewdson photograph, or a Hopper painting, I don't care if the laws of the everyday or even Physics are defied, the angles are off, the limbs disproportionate, so? What the artist conveys is done in such a matter of fact, yet somehow, incredibly subtle way, hell, I'd be benighted if I didn't accept the presented outright.

Yet there is still this feeling that accompanies such acceptance, it's been called the Uncanny, Surreal, ghostly, macabre etc., etc., whatever you choose to call it, it's there. It isn't unpleasant for me though, that feeling.

In a chapter of the book, later published alone as a short story in The New Yorker, Murakami introduces the Town of Cats, it is a short story one of his protagonist's happens to be reading on a seemingly impulsive train journey to a sanatorium by the sea.

If you have any interest in learning about the story a little better give it a read. As a stand-alone piece it isn't the greatest, but within the book it serves a vital purpose. Walking around I often feel disengaged, as do most of us I'm told. When reading I feel I am at least engaged with someone, someplace. Book Three is connecting me at the moment, for how long, well, that's up to me... It is hard to hold out. Especially those sometimes when, after closing the books and setting them down, I feel like I've returned to the Town of Cats.

Slide Show

An Interview in the Old Language

Page 256.

"I liked the idea of drawing out the rows of houses, extending them in time, understanding them as more important in their appearances than in the voices and sorrows they contained. It was an interview in the new language.

 Each silent and lovely home a slow memorial to some shrill inner moment unquieted by time"

[Translator] my old language of appropriation, or taking the concrete concepts of others, and using them in place of my own unrefined materials.

I've often intended to (and it wouldn't even be a difficult task, at all) set up a related but separate blog titled something like Taking Pictures from Books, where I would post phone photographs or scans of book pages or parts of them. Just to catalogue properly the numerous times i've literally taken photos of books, images and words. 

Spines and shadows.

 Orphans and Widows.

Of course we do this all of the time to some extent or other, absorbing and incorporating particles of places we've never been, sights never seen, maybe even feelings we've never felt. So too, in my case certainly, we pick out passages, sometimes unintentionally, that seem so relevant to a place or time in our own minds, that we cling to and seek a kind of solace in.

 I understand.

 We understood.

I took these, this week passed. The above while waiting for M in a bookshop, found in a handsome monograph titled Silent Theatre; The Art of Edward Hopper. A book I longed to have inhaled this time last year, immersed in the death rattle of my dissertation. I intend to add more of other people's words and images, and some of my own too. 

Especially on silence, 

which I miss hearing of late.

Back Issue

A very brief examination of motive/motif

As it may be apparent scant visitors, I've been looking back at 'old work' recently, for the practical reasons of cleansing my hard drive (no intended word-play), though as a seasoned procrastinator I haven't erased, condensed or filed a single pixel, apart from those which have ended up here.

Reading through over 10,000 work-related visual bits of my own making, and a time-span of some 5 years, it's an undertaking which understandably swallows evenings at a time. Frustrating when still nothing 'gets done' with them. So perhaps this is what I'm doing here then, some kind of catalogue and additionally something to show for lost hours.

Recurring themes; what predictably had its roots in self-exploration, became self-definition based on those closest to me.

Evolving into direct questioning of those important people, our shared experiences, and the notion of understanding itself.

 It seems now, that when I became comfortable with the ideas of shared understanding, and actually just being comfortable with those closest to me, particularly #2, that the 'work' then came to be more focused on us two, together, as bound objects in space, to put it awfully, lazily, and tiredly. It goes from defining yourself in parallel with those who aren't you, to binding them with you in this skewed search of acceptance. When this happened we then had to turn our attentions to the spaces we physically sought and found ourselves striving to be securely integrated with/in...
It is this place, or non-place, or dream of a place, that we find ourselves to be in now, separately,  individually, insecurely.

Second Best Things

Stockpile those little bits of information you can't quite understand or readily access.

Revisit as often as you can bear.

I read D. H. Lawrence's short stories Second Best, and Things in the bath around dusk today. The latter was particularly brilliant.

                                        

Library, Libre, Liebe.