Topic: Personal
So it turns out my novel is about religion. And here I thought it was about a dead kid. Who knew?
Anyway …
|
[a worldview]
Topic: Personal
“To put it simply, I feel that the universe is full of glorious energy, that the energy tends to take pattern and shape, and that the ultimate character of things is comely and good. I am perfectly aware that I say this in the teeth of all sorts of contrary evidence, and that I must be basing it partly on temperament and partly on faith, but that is my attitude.”
That quote, which closely matches my own attitude, is from the poet Richard Wilbur, recorded in another New Yorker article.
[m.i.a., midnite vultures and the world]
Topic: Culture
If you read Sasha Frere-Jones’s article in the latest New Yorker about the Sri Lankan rapper M.I.A., you might want to check out her website, where you can hear some of her music. I have to agree with Frere-Jones that this stuff is more deserving of the term “world music” than the stuff in world music bins at most record stores. We tend to use the term “world music” to mean local music, where the locality is somewhere other than the US or the UK. But I like the idea of world music as the music that’s assembled from global flotsam, that sounds like Bombay or Colombo or Seoul. It’s not the traditional court music of anywhere (though I tend to love that stuff), but rather the street music of everywhere.
In fact, I think this is what Beck’s album Midnite Vultures was about, even if the critics (and possibly even Beck himself) didn’t get it. The album was attacked for being a snide, possibly even racist parody of hip-hop and soul. But it came after Mutations, Beck’s first exploration of music from outside the US, and it also followed a period of extended tours around the world. Vultures is full of lyrics that point beyond American hip-hop to its reprocessing abroad. A sampling:
Perfumed blokes on the Ginza line
She looks so Israeli
Do you wanna ride on the Baltic Sea
Eat at taqueria
Pop lockin’ beats from KoreaThe snipers are passed out in the bushes again
I’m glad I got my suit dry-cleaned before the riots startedThose bra burning deportees at the service station
They know that beige is the color of resignationGhettos and grey Rivieras
Did you hear those war torn stories
Where the lifeguards slept in the streets
In the jungle lands
With the cold cola cans
You’ll get the keys to the city for freeBangkok athletes in the biosphere
Arkansas wet dreams
We all disappear
Kremlin mistress
Rings the Buddha chimesEgyptian bells are ringing
When it’s her birthdayLike a fruit that’s ripe for a pickin’
I wouldn’t do you like that Zankou Chicken
If nothing else, the relentlessness of the international imagery and name-dropping — the quotations come from every song but one — suggests that it’s thematic and important. Yes, “Debra” (the hidden bonus track) is a pretty straight parody of R. Kelly-type love soul, and “Hollywood Freaks” is obviously a parody of gangsta rap. But I’m not sure that these aren’t parodies of Korean and Lithuanian and Israeli copies of American music, rather than just parodies of the American music itself. It’s unfortunate that so many critics, too focused on America’s racial issues, failed to notice that Midnite Vultures is as much a world music album as Tropicalia, and that it is one of the first records by a major American artist to explore the ways in which American, and especially African-American, culture has been apropriated and recontextualized around the world.
[turning japanese]
Topic: Humor
My friend Daniel alerts me to Hanzi Smatter, the East Asian response to the classic Engrish.com. I have to admit that bad Hanzi (that is, Chinese characters, called Kanji in Japanese and Hanja in Korean) just aren’t as funny as the mangled English on Engrish.com, because English, as a phonetic language, always parses to something, even if that something is “Such a beautiful thing is always good that it is fascinating. However, a good thing is beautiful always.” (Jenny and I brought back some T-shirts like this from Korea, including one that reads “ADVERTISING DEITIES CONSUMER PANTHON.”)Hanza errors, by contrast, tend not to read as anything — there’s a lot of “Hey, that character is backwards and missing a stroke!” Still, it’s a good reminder for all of us: if you don’t know a language at all, don’t get it tattooed on you!
[ol’ dirty bastard]
Topic: Culture
You will be missed, Dirty. Farewell.
[for the masochists among you]
Topic: Personal
It occurs to me that what with all these posts about my NaNoWriMo novel, some of you might want to read the thing. To you, I say two things:
1. ARE YOU INSANE?
2. If you really wanna read this beast in its current wandery form, in which tone shifts every four pages and I go into nightmarish detail about transferring trains and ordering dinner, let me know and I’ll consider emailing it to you.
[a note on comments]
Topic: About This Blog
So far, this new comment feature is working out well. I’m a little sad, though, that some of the most interesting comments are anonymous. Come on, folks! Leave me some sorta clue! I mean, at least if you’re someone who actually knows me.
[nanowrimo day 18]
Topic: Personal
Okay, I recognize that if there’s anything worse than a self-indulgent novel, it’s someone talking endlessly about writing a self-indulgent novel. Nevertheless, it’s my blog, and I’ll cry if I want to. Plus, I admit that I just really like seeing that blue bar of woids get longer and longer. However, at the end of this month, while the NaNo novel won’t be done, the NaNo posts will be.
In the meantime: progress today was good. I was getting bogged down over the last couple of days, but I freed myself up, remembered I was writing fiction, not my memoirs, so I could do whatever I wanted. That helped.
|
[nanowrimo day 17]
Topic: Personal
Some days, the writing just sucks. Today was one of those days. I’m feeling certain that much of what I’ve written yesterday and today will have to be deleted. But hey, it’s words. I made my minimum total for today, although not my daily quota. Ah, well.
|
[nanowrimo day 15]
Topic: Personal
After taking three days off from the novel, writing today was like pulling teeth. I was unsure where exactly to go with the novel, what the next step was. What got me going again was a complicated chain of associations: my main character (again, a proxy for myself) is in a Hindu temple town, so I sent him to visit the temple. This led to a digression into Hindu theology and how bizarre my MC finds Hinduism. And that, in turn, opened out into a long section, still in the process of being written, on his (my) curious religious background, a mixture of New York secular Jewish, California hippie and Chassidic orthodox Judaism.
That should keep me busy for a few thousand words.
So here I am on Day 15, still ahead of schedule, and up over the 50 percent mark.
|