Neat on the Net: Word Nerd Edition

I haven't done a Neat on the Net in over a year, but recently I've found a few interesting things for word-lovers.

1) The Found Poetry Review will be celebrating National Poetry Month 2015 with a challenge called Poetry Month Scouts, in which you can earn poetry merit badges by completing tasks in five poetic categories: remix, erasure, conceptual chance operations, and out and about. If you complete all the badges within the month of April, you'll even win a prize.

This looks like so much fun! Get more information and sign up here.  And, if you are like me and hesitate to sign up to submit all your work in early drafts so that it might be published as part of the project, the prompts and assignments will all be available at the site as of April 1, and you can play along unofficially. You can't win if you don't play, though.

2) English T-shirts in Japan are regularly hilarious, though I have to say, this was truer in the past. Apparently the same phenomenon is still pretty amusing in China. Eric Doise reports on the t-shirts he saw during his two years in China in the Peace Corps on his website. This video of a slideshow presentation (entitled "What English Language T-shirt from China Can Teach Us About Translation") not only provides funny examples, but also considers the nature of translation, semiotics, and the role of the design elements of the alphabet when the language is not used conventionally. For those of us who've puzzled over strange English, it's thought-provoking.

3) Haruki Murakami is going to do a personal advice column. Yes, it's true. It's like a dream come true.....

On A Metaphoric Bender

Aimee Bender on the Skylight Books podcast this week discussed exactly what I needed to hear.

First she read a story from her new collection The Color Master, and if you have time you really should listen to it.

But then she started answering questions and fielded one that led into a rumination of the use of metaphors (beginning at about 29:50 to the end). She said that a metaphor shouldn't have a one-to-one correspondence with the thing it is standing in for, or with the magical element. It needs to be more intuitive (from the unconscious, from a feeling of being drawn to use the items in the metaphor) to be infused with an emotional life. "The magic is a kind of access point into the emotional life of the story," she said.

Quoting Donald Barthelme, she said, "Art should both invite and repel interpretation." A one-to-one correspondence between symbol and meaning defies this mystery. Kills the mystery even. Bemder said where you are drawn to the meaning but don't completely understand the meaning, the emotion will be in there, as infused by the symbols you have been drawn to.

Later she said that once you (the writer) begin to see the symbol as a symbol, there are a few ways to fix this. One is to throw a random element in "to get the brain off its analytical mode."  She doesn't believe that anything is chosen at random, but rather that everything is selected from the buried unconscious, and that "to kind of know what you are doing and kind of don't know what you are doing is a very productive space to be in."

Another fix she cites is one used by George Saunders and Haruki Murakami, one in which "as soon as you smell the meaning, you put it in the story." That is, you acknowledge to the reader that x is a symbol for y, yes, they saw it and you saw it too, and now the reader is ungrounded because they no longer know what will happen next, because you have to do something different next, having just acknowledged the symbol. "The story refreshes itself," she explains. The story is free to become bigger than that one symbol.

She says it better than I did, and with examples. Plus she's charming. So go and listen for yourself.

Murakami Covers Uncovered

Check out these newly commissioned alternative covers (by Vintage) for ALL of Haruki Murakami's novels. Will you see a theme? Yes, you will. Here's a hint:

Check out the rest at the link. Most of them I like, although it's a bit much placed altogether like this. What do you think?

Resistance

The nature writer Terry Tempest Williams wrote "Dying doesn't cause suffering. Resistance to dying does." Another way to say it is "Pain in inevitable. Suffering is optional.," which comes from Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

I was reminded of these quotes the other day when a colleague was talking about her new way of handling jet lag. Instead of returning to Japan at the last minute and pushing through the jet lag, with discomfort and suffering, she decided to return to Japan a week earlier than her responsibilities began, and to experience jet lag by sleeping when she was tired, and waking when she was awake. This time, she enjoyed her jet lag and simply let it be. Jet lag doesn't cause suffering; resistance to jet lag does. (Obviously no children were involved in this experience, and more particularly no children with jet lag, but even if there were, what could be done to reduce everyone's resistance?)

Obviously there are things that require resistance: evil, manipulation, unfairness. But I for one waste a lot of energy resisting what is and what cannot be changed. If I need good weather for an event and get a typhoon, instead of hunkering down and enjoying the quiet day of being stranded in a typhoon, I tend to struggle against the rearrangement of my plans. When an extremely difficult relative calls or visits (or I even hear her name mentioned), I immediately begin to resist without even hearing what she wants, from long practice of suffering through her unreasonable demands, constant complaints, and general meanness. But I don't have to do that. I know she has her way of looking at the world, and I can let her have it without letting it affect me. I don't have to suffer just because she has decided to.

I was wondering about resistance in my writing. I sometimes resist sitting down to write, finding all kinds of chores to do instead, and meanwhile I suffer thinking about how I should be writing and am not. Instead of resisting writing, I can merely sit down with my notebook and wait. I also tend to suffer through fallow periods in my writing, when I try to write and nothing comes at all, or nothing of use, even though I know that fallow times are almost always followed by extremely productive periods in which problems that had been plaguing me in certain projects or in writing in general are resolved. So instead of resisting fallow times, I can just accept them, sit with my notebook, and know that my subconscious is doing important work.

It's a good reminder for me (again) to notice when I feel resistance and to see if it is really necessary, and to notice when I am suffering and try to identify what (if anything, and more particularly if anything worthy of such a struggle) that I am resisting.

Murakami Around the World

Flavorwire has today provided me with the most fun I've had in a long time. In honor of Haruki Murakami's birthday (which apparently is 1/12, and therefore already finished in Japan, and likely nearly done or all done for the year where you are too), they have put together different book covers of his novels from editions all over the world. Compare the Vietnamese cover of Kafka On the Shore to the German one, for example. See which country's style you tend to favor. I found the Israeli covers largely sympathetic, for instance, and would never have known that otherwise. See many different Murakami covers here, and I'll paste some of my favorites below.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles covers are lots of fun for me, because I have a passion for bird imagery. Check these out:

Israeli edition

 Turkish ediiton

Slovakian edition

More bird imagery in the Vietnamese edition of Kafka on the Shore:



Here are the Russian A Wild Sheep Chase covers:

And check out covers to the new 1Q84 from around the world here.

Murakami Interview

Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami has done an in-depth interview with The New York Times Magazine. (Thanks to my virtual friend Chris for passing along the link.) The interviewer Sam Anderson has done an excellent job of not only portryaing Murakami's uncanny blend of detachment and depth, surrealism and the ordinary, but also in capturing the Tokyo that Murakami lives in, which is not the one he writes about.

Anderson writes, "I had always assumed — naively, Americanly — that Murakami was a faithful representative of modern Japanese culture, at least in his more realist moods. It became clear to me down there, however, that he is different from the writer I thought he was, and Japan is a different place — and the relationship between the two is far more complicated than I ever could have guessed from the safe distance of translation."       

And here's what Murakami in his inimitable style says himself, “I live in Tokyo,” he told me, “a kind of civilized world — like New York or Los Angeles or London or Paris. If you want to find a magical situation, magical things, you have to go deep inside yourself. So that is what I do. People say it’s magic realism — but in the depths of my soul, it’s just realism. Not magical. While I’m writing, it’s very natural, very logical, very realistic and reasonable.” 

Anderson offers his interpretation of why Murakami's cultural references are almost always western, and rarely (some novels apparently have none) Japanese. Anderson writes, "You could even say that translation is the organizing principle of Murakami’s work: that his stories are not only translated but about translation. The signature pleasure of a Murakami plot is watching a very ordinary situation (riding an elevator, boiling spaghetti, ironing a shirt) turn suddenly extraordinary (a mysterious phone call, a trip down a magical well, a conversation with a Sheep Man) — watching a character, in other words, being dropped from a position of existential fluency into something completely foreign and then being forced to mediate, awkwardly, between those two realities. A Murakami character is always, in a sense, translating between radically different worlds: mundane and bizarre, natural and supernatural, country and city, male and female, overground and underground. His entire oeuvre, in other words, is the act of translation dramatized."

Questioned about his monastic and strict writing regime, Murakami responds, “Concentration is one of the happiest things in my life. If you cannot concentrate, you are not so happy. I’m not a fast thinker, but once I am interested in something, I am doing it for many years. I don’t get bored. I’m kind of a big kettle. It takes time to get boiled, but then I’m always hot.”  

I also learned that Murakami loves to iron, so we have one thing in common. I too love the repetitive soothing nature of ironing. Murakami loves baseball too, because "it's boring." His life-altering writing ephiphany came during a baseball game. Boredom, repetition, routine, who would have expected it from a writer of such bizarre and surprising fiction? And yet, nothing Murakami says should be jarring, since you expect to be startled by him, after all these years of reading his fiction. But still, it is.

Enjoy the whole interview at the link above.