of course we have a camel for a neighbor

it seems i have only a limited amount of words at my disposal. and when they are going elsewhere, i have none to leave here. i've been editing a book. i think i'm actually pretty good at it (could it be i found my calling at this advanced age?), but it's pretty time consuming. and has filled my brain for days, leaving room for little else.

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i've also just reread murakami's wind-up bird chronicle. he always makes me feel a step apart from the ostensibly real world (if i even know what that is). his words are so beautiful it feels pointless to try to put any down on the page (let alone send them out into cyberspace). plus, he makes me think it would be a good idea to spend time down a well. too bad ours is full of water.

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polylingual poet cia rinne doesn't lack words. i wish i'd been at louisiana to hear her yesterday.

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not a whole lot of words here in sign: moa + holmberg
i'm fascinated by the spare, clean, modern, scandinavian aesthetic, even as i could never indulge in it myself.

bakhtin's chronotope and murakami moments

russian literary theorist mikhael bakhtin had a theory of the chronotope. it wasn't one of his more-developed theories and the closest he comes to a definition is: "in the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. the intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope" (quoted in the dialogic imagination: four essays, edited by michael holquist, 1981).

while this may sound like something generated by the postmodern generator, i think it's actually a way of explaining why when we read murakami, we enter a murakami world - one in which we still access this world, but from a parallel place, where it seems like a good idea to hang out for some time down a well, or make elaborate meals involving spaghetti late at night, or in which we lose our cat and comb jazz bars and hotels full of anonymous, locked doors looking for it, possibly in the company of a brilliant, but young and uneducated japanese girl. murakami time becomes real time and our world becomes filled with murakami moments.

i think what i like about entering that murakami space is that it is so much like the world i inhabit in my dreams - waking and dreaming intersect with no apparent cognitive dissonance in ways that are usually convincing only in dreams. yet they take on flesh and feel concrete and whole - they are, in other words, a chronotope. i think it's the mark of truly magical writing. it transports and transforms everything, including space and time.

i wonder what bakhtin would have made of murakami?

a rather disjointed "review" of murakami's 1Q84

to my dismay, i have finished murakami's latest huge novel (in 3 books) - 1Q84. as always, i was completely transported into a parallel world.  murakami does that to me - it's like he reaches into my head, snatches my strangest dreams, moves them to tokyo and writes them. this book didn't really have new themes for him if you've read his other work...memory, time, people who are split or separated from some form of themselves, lonely thirty-something writers, young strange boyishly thin girls...but it was marvelous nonetheless.

in a way, the story itself is a reworking of the storyline of hardboiled wonderland and the end of the world, but wherein he explores an opposite ending...letting the characters return to the "real" world, rather than choosing to stay where they are split from their shadows, tho' here their split selves are called dohta and maza.

i found this book to be richer with literary allusions to world literature than i've noticed in his other works...from george orwell to chekhov (he never did use that gun tho', so he went against chekhov's rule that if you introduce a gun in the first act, it had better be used by the third, tho' aomame actually said that out loud several times, so it was done intentionally). so tho' hardboiled wonderland still remains one of my favorites among his work, 1Q84 adds somehow another dimension that i don't remember from his previous works (i'm not saying it's not there, just that i don't remember it - that's the kind of reader i am).

music plays a central role, as in his other works, and i want to seek out the janacek sinfonietta.

the way in which murakami twists time and memory and splits personalities and makes you strangely fall in love with strange and twisted characters is something no one can do like him (except maybe bulgakov).

book 3 carries the time shifts to new levels---i expected continuity in time with the shifts between aomame, tengo and ushikawa, but instead time jumped back---i think it took me 'til nearly the end to stop being jarred by this. it was a VERY effective device.

i swear along the way while i read this that i could actually SEE two moons in the sky. his capacity to pull you into his fictional universe is that strong. i always begin to question reality on every level when i read him. and it takes me a number of weeks to surface again fully in what is ostensibly my real world when i'm finished.

murakami has the most marvelous way of describing things...."he spent day after day feeling uneasy and muddled, like someone who has mistakenly swallowed a thick swatch of cloud." or "a long silence descended. long enough to walk to the end of a long, narrow room, look something up in a dictionary, and walk back." descriptions that make you immediately say, "YES, i know precisely what he means," even tho' you never thought of it that way before.

i suppose it will be a long wait 'til his next, but i'm certain it will be worth it.

oh, and it's essential to read all three books in one go....if you reach the end of 1&2 and stop, you will be dissatisfied, because it doesn't really end there. you must read book 3 as well, preferably immediately. personally, i think they should be together in one volume, rather than divided, but that would be my only complaint about the book.

if you haven't read other murakami, i wouldn't start with this one (start with kafka on the shore), but if you've read him, this is absolutely a must-read.

great quote

"the world is, after all, an endless battle of contrasting memories."- murakami, 1Q84