Inverting "An Artist of the Floating World"

In his New Yorker review of Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel The Buried Giant, James Wood describes the narrators of Ishiguro's earlier novels as follows:

His complacent or muted unreliable narrators, like the painter Ono, in An Artist of the Floating World, or the butler Stevens, in The Remains of the Day, tell stories that mildly and self-servingly repress secrets, shameful compromises, and the wounds of the past. (Both of these narrators have reason to conceal or minimize their involvement with Fascist politics just before the Second World War.).

 While this is an accurate description of Stevens, it gets Ono backwards. I know this, because I misread An Artist of the Floating World the first time I read it. Only a second reading did I notice what makes the novel so distinct and striking: Ono does not "conceal or minimize his involvement" with Fascism. On the contrary, throughout the book, he is trying to acknowledge his guilt – and everyone around him doesn't want to hear about it. They tell him he's exaggerating; they tell him there's no reason for him to feel so guilty. If the novel is a figure of "self-serving repression of secrets", it is the people around Ono who are doing the repression, not Ono himself.

It's time to reread An Artist of the Floating World so I can back up this claim with some evidence!

Hidden messages

If the universe contains hidden messages for us, what are those messages?

Perhaps they are messages about aesthetics:

But since we see the world as it currently is as a figure for how everything works, it's more likely that the messages are about branding.

Persuasion

The article about Camus in the April 9 issue of the New Yorker (which is unfortunately only online for subscribers) contains this quotation from Camus:

We have witnessed lying, humiliation, killing, deportation, and torture, and in each instance it was impossible to persuade the people who were doing these things not to do them, because they were sure of themselves, and because there is no way of persuading an abstraction.

How does one talk to those who are so sure of themselves that they never doubt the validity of their actions, no matter what the content of those actions may be? If you perceive someone as being so full of certainty and completely unwilling/unable to be skeptical about their own beliefs, then perhaps the only thing to do is not to talk to them, but to talk to others who are not as uncertain, to help them avoid being persuaded by abstract certainties that lead to "lying, humiliation, killing, deportation, and torture."

Still, it would be nice if the people in power were not engaged in those activities quite so unreservedly.

*

Near the end of the article, Adam Gopnik paraphrases Camus's position on place as follows: No human being is more indigenous to a place than any other. This rootless cosmopolitan applauds such a point, but Camus's basis for it is quite convincing: his mother may have been a French colonist in Algeria, but she worked as a cleaning lady; she had none of the privileges of the colonial. And Camus, born and raised in Algeria, was as Algerian as anyone else born and raised there.

"Then you get another guy"

In the "Talk of the Town" section of the November 7, 2011, issue of The New Yorker, there's a description of the singer Gillian Welch and her guitarist David Rawlings driving from Philadelphia to New York. The article is not available on-line (except for subscribers to the magazine or the magazine's archive); here's the bit I noted:

The other thing that Rawlings had brought to divert himself was a collected works of Shakespeare. "I've been reading the histories," he said. "I'm up to the third act of 'Henry V,' and when I'm done I might even start them again. I like how fatalistic they are. They feel a little like the Iliad and the Odyssey. I like it in the Iliad when Homer introduces a warrior and says who he was and where he grew up and who his parents and his grandparents were and what they did, and then Hector disembowels him. Then you get another guy."

I love a guitarist who reads Shakespeare on the road and compares the plays to Homer, with superb comic timing in the next-to-last sentence of the passage. What would it mean to play guitar like this, with a flurry of information and then a comic twist?

Since I'd not only read that passage but also read it out loud to my son Miles (who was not as amused as I was ...), it was striking to find the same point made in a different article in the same issue: "Battle Lines," Daniel Mendelsohn's review of Stephen Mitchell's new translation of the Iliad, which begins like this (also only in the on-line archive):

For sheer weirdness, it would be hard to find a passage in the Western canon that can compete with the tenth book of Homer's Iliad—the one classicists call the Doloneia, "the bit about Dolon." Not the least of the book's oddities is that it's named after a nobody: Dolon is a character whom the poet conjures merely so that he can kill him off, a few hundred lines later, in literature's nastiest episode of trick-or-treating.

This is not the first time I have come across such a doubling in the New Yorker. I wrote about a case a few years ago, when articles by Malcolm Gladwell and Caleb Crain referred to the same thing in consecutive issues. And in April of 2006, I also wrote about two profiles in the same issue (of Pete Seeger and Maurice Sendak), which both included images of the profiled celebrity interacting with a famous poet (Seeger with Edna St. Vincent Millay and Sendak with Marianne Moore). Amusingly, the Seeger profile is by Alec Wilkinson, who also wrote the bit about Welch and Rawlings.

John Mellencamp, "No Better Than This"

Simfy listening: John Mellencamp, "No Better Than This"

As a kid, I was a big fan of John Cougar's "I Need a Lover," not as much because of the song itself but because of the great introduction to the song. And then he had his big moment in the limelight with "Jack and Diane," another tune I liked. But I haven't listened to anything by him in a long time. I was convinced to check out his latest when it was referred to in The New Yorker, and with Simfy I can easily check things out (simfy is something like Pandora in the US, I take it).

So I've listened to it once, and it's a very fine album that I'm going to listen to again: the sound of the record is fabulous (clean, simple folk-blues-country production), the playing is superb (somehow I knew before checking just now that Marc Ribot was on guitar here!), and the arrangements are varied enough to not get boring while also being consistent in sound and feel.

Still, my first reaction is to play with the title: "Why is 'No Better Than This' no better than this?" With one exception, my response to the lyrics was rather critical: they are good but not great. Too often, Mellencamp reaches for the standard lyrical turn from the folk-blues tradition, so that when he doesn't, on the stunning "Easter Eve" (the exception), it makes the "straightness" of the other tunes even more noticeable.

I have to admit I'm probably being unfair here, because I have been getting so into the magnificent Conor Oberst (and Bright Eyes) that almost all songwriting pales by comparison. But even without comparing Mellencamp to Oberst, I feel like he could have done "better than this" in the lyrics.

A streaming service changes how one thinks about music: do I want to own it for my collection? Do I want to listen to it again? Do I want to delete the album from my playlist right now? Those are the three basic responses. Here, at the moment, I'm with the middle of those: I'm going to listen to it again (and perhaps several more times after that, if only because of Ribot), but I don't think I'm going to buy it for my collection.

Oh, and there's also the category "songs to listen to again," and "Easter Eve" belongs in that one!

Claudia Roth Pierpont's "Black, Brown, and Beige" is a review of several recent books about Duke Ellington, but it concludes with an image of Charles Mingus that brought tears to my eyes:

Two years before Ellington died, in 1972, Yale University held a gathering of leading black jazz musicians in order to raise money for a department of African-American music. Aside from Ellington, the musicians who came for three days of concerts, jam sessions, and workshops included Eubie Blake, Noble Sissle, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Mary Lou Williams, and Willie (the Lion) Smith. During a performance by a Gillespie-led sextet, someone evidently unhappy with this presence on campus called in a bomb threat. The police attempted to clear the building, but Mingus refused to leave, urging the officers to get all the others out but adamantly remaining onstage with his bass. “Racism planted that bomb, but racism ain’t strong enough to kill this music,” he was heard telling the police captain. (And very few people successfully argued with Mingus.) “If I’m going to die, I’m ready. But I’m going out playing ‘Sophisticated Lady.’ ” Once outside, Gillespie and his group set up again. But coming from inside was the sound of Mingus intently playing Ellington’s dreamy thirties hit, which, that day, became a protest song, as the performance just kept going on and on and getting hotter. In the street, Ellington stood in the waiting crowd just beyond the theatre’s open doors, smiling.

Who else but Mingus would have come up with an act like that? Well, maybe Charlie Haden, who dedicated "Song for Che" to freedom fighters in Angola and Mozambique while performing in Lisbon in 1971. See here for his version of the story.