SUCH A MINT-CHOCOLATE TREAT

Is it perplexing or tragic that are present position in life is the steadily regurgitated by-product of countless decision sloppily enforced by our clueless younger selves? Every five, ten years, we occasionally, cautiously  look back and think: "What the hell was I thinking?" The answer is clear: We were thinking what we thought. Those thoughts led to actions, and those thoughts led to here. Did we control what we thought, or did our thoughts control us? Right now you are thinking certain things that will lead you to do something tonight that will impact tomorrow. Perhaps it's that extra-scoop bowl of mint-chocolate ice cream you're cautiously debating to devour before bed; maybe it's the late-night YouTube binge that will leave you decidedly cranky come dawn's reddened crack. Either way, bilogical and psychological processes will be undertaken that will alter your path. That we don't think of these ostensibly minor decisions as profound is all the more proof of their darkly cloaked stealth. ,

Even now, a silvery, slippery cascade of sensations is running through your mind as you read these dumb words. You could have been doing anything else in the world than the very clear thing that you're doing at this exact moment. That you are scanning my sentences ensures that a billion other choices have been closed-off for good. You could have been one click away from stumbling across a website whose information just might have changed your whole life to come. Or else, had you not been reading this blog at this moment, you could have tripped on the edge of the just-barely-jutting-out kitchen-table leg and sprained your right ankle, which might have led to you getting  a nasty infection which could have spread to your thighs, oh what a fine mess. A green, greasy splodge of veins bulging out, right next to your crotch. Beauty, eh.

Yet you are here, reading this blog, and your life has been changed. Not by my words themselves, but simply by your presence in time at this random spot. All because some stuff in your noggin muttered 'look here and look now'. The thoughts that we think in our heads reach right out into the world. Are they always riding shotgun with us, or are we just along with them for their ride? Fucked if I know, but we always end up somewhere, and it's usually not behind the podium where we thought we would be. The self of your past sure has some explaining to do, but that person is gone, checked out long ago, even as they share your same psychic space and wonder as you do if you should have one scoop or two before bed, such a mint-chocolate treat.    

WORLD JUNIOR HOCKEY: SHOULD CANADIANS TRULY CARE ALL THIS MUCH?

Bravo to the boys in red for capturing the championship crown at the World Junior Hockey championships, but one wonders if the intense focus and pride of the Canadian nation should be so feverishly reliant on the athletic prowess of kids barely twenty.

Canada lives and breathes and practically chokes on all things that are hockey, and I'll grant you that the Olympics, majestic as they are, historically so, are worthy of a bit (just a bit) of chest-thumping blather, but I'm a bit hesitant to get so caught up in a tournament that, at its best, should be viewed as a training ground for most of these kids who are still aiming to be pros.

One could scan American websites in vain for even a scant mention of the tournament, but the on-ice exploits of the young Canadian lads dominated the front page of almost every homegrown paper that's worth a faint click. Not to mention the endless updates and highlights on tsn.ca. I think things reached a ridiculous nadir when a recent segment on Max Domi (the son of former Maple Leaf thug and pug and all-around grand entertainer Tie Domi) focused for half of its length on why he had decided to stick out his tongue after every goal that he scored. (As Richard Moll as 'Bull the bailiff' on NIGHT COURT said so eloquently: "Oooooookay.")

Canadians don't often get to see themselves in heroic form on the screens we now so steadily stare at. Almost nobody watches Canadian films; Canadian dramas on TV have not historically been all that great; our comedy, it's good, but that's pretty much just a goofy version of ourselves. Our national literature paints a suitably complex and grim and humourous tint of our character, but reading's an individual act (and not many folks even read all that much anymore.) Canadians need something communal to observe in shiny digital form, an elevation of spirit that approaches the gods. Hockey gives us that. And if our aspirations to (humble) godhood require the benediction of teenage boys on black skates, so be it. We'll go where we can ascend.

It's nice, living abroad, to keep in touch with my home secondhand via the games that we play. I played house-league hockey (quite poorly) every year from age seven to fifteen; the first novel I ever tried to write was about a young hockey player who was also a talented novelist. (My infatuation with THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP was pretty plain to detect.) I like reading good writing about hockey. It's where I come from, if not where I am.

I wonder, though: Is all that flag-waving and chest-beating surrounding these games entirely healthy? Shouldn't these games be seen simply as an entertaining way for our teenage-talent to develop against the best of the other kids in the world? So much of our collective Canadian energy and ego is wrapped up every year at Christmas in these young players' exploits. That's a hell of a lot of pressure for those guys to deal with and defuse. Perhaps a nation's bravado would be better spent on something that drains less psychic energy from themselves and these kids.

Waving the Maple Leaf around an arena in Toronto or Montreal doesn't hurt anyone. We all love where we come from, and want to flaunt our triumphs. A little goofily flamboyant pride for one's country, and all that. Always a nice tug at the heartstrings. Yet you look at those Russian players who lost in the final, tears slipping out of their eyes, heads hung down in shame, as the Canadian spectators in the stands all around them cheered with great glee, and I feel for those Russkies. It's part of sport, this agony of defeat, and we all love a good game, and I understand that the players, both winners and losers, are building their confidence and physicality here for the professional and international exploits on ice to follow for the next good many years, but there's still, for me, something almost cruel about thousands of folks flag-waving and screaming because 'our' teenagers won, while 'their' adolescents mildly fucked up. Makes me think that patriotism is for adults, but when that same sentiment is so ferociously aimed at barely-out-of-high-school teenagers, it can quickly devolve into crass nationalism.

YOU MUST BE OUT OF YOUR MIND

Not to get too heady on you or anything, but I've always been mystified and mortified by the uneasy connection between what goes in our heads, silently, and how these ephemeral thoughts actually connect to the world, audibly. We think stuff, then say shit. Words are thus formed straight from the intangible fabric of brain cells colliding. You react, based on sound-signals you decipher according to your own unwritten rules of consciousness-comprehension. And we then assemble this uncanny interplay of human interaction under the rather harmless-sounding rubric of  mere 'coversation'. A give-and-take that we're so used to in life that we think nothing of it. Granted, we constantly consider the content of what's aurally bopping back-and-forth in our dialogues, and we're 'reading' body-language, and facial signals, but the second-nature aspect of the exhange itself starts to get a bit creepy if you dwell on it for too long. On a rotating globe, screaming through space, we stand next to each other and shoot the shit about sports. That this passes for commonplace stuff still makes me uneasy.

Why? I guess it goes back to the kind of boring, circular arguments that dwell on free will and its ultimate form. How can we say we 'control' the thoughts that we think? How can you pretend to be 'in charge' of what arises in your brain and exits on your tongue? Genetics is one thing, and environment is another, but cram these two existential entrails together in life and what comes out is just us -- an awkward, perpetually defensive organism that values our stake in the world, even if we had no say in its roots.

We always have to prove that we are 'right', which I sometimes try to look at in evolutionary terms. Me no understand diddly-squat about evolution, per se, but there must be something inherent in our in-built survival mechanisms that will not readily allow us to admit that we're wrong. To hesitate, to doubt oneself, to be slow on the uptake when it comes to our own stand -- this would have, in the past, led to us being eaten. Devoured, pretty damny quickly. So now we've evolved into the kind of creatures that will brutally hurl insults strangers on chatboards over the artistic worth of a comic-book sequel because we secretly fear that we're probably wrong. Were our evolutionary forebearers somehow able to understand lanugage, and were I try to connect their own impulses to stay confident in the face of other-animal danger, and somehow, via my argument, have them intellectually link that notable and sensible state of ego-aggrandizement in the face of certain death with the current practictioners of internet-slurs, I'm pretty positive that these proto-pre-humans would take a long, sad, pitiful look at me before bashing my head in and dining out on my spleen. ("This is what we're evolving into?" they'd be thinking as they chowed down on my skull.)

Japanese has a concept known as 'iishin-denshin', which essentially means a group-form of mind-reading. Because this is a consensus-country, with everyone trying to ape all the others, the masses have developed a form of telepathy founded upon what's behind all those words. My own observation of this idea in various forms over the years has kind of led me to rethink my own notions of a single 'personality' as our defacto form. (Or norm. ) In the West, we expect the individual to be unique and creative and a lifeform all its own; in the East, in a collective culture, it's no surprise that a mono-personality is formed, an integration into others that creates fascinatingly broad ranges of expression, yet perhaps at the expense of individual 'uniqueness'. The West: Be different! The East: Be the same! One state leads to constant one-upmanship to sooth the ego; the other can tend to stifle distinct ways of thought. Viewed critically, from afar, you could say that humans have not truly found the ideal way to deal with each other. We grope as we can, based on where we come from, then gradually realize as we age that the cultural-system we inhabit has silently hooked us in to its style without so much as even asking if we'd like a cold drink.
 
What I'm saying is that not I dislike humans (because that would be, you know, pyschotic), or the way in which we communicate with each other; I'm saying I still don't think we've perfected, or even reasonably amplified, what it is that we feel nanosecond-by-second as we think in our heads, and how we could (or should) transmit these emotions to other humans in tow. Layers of family, and environment, and education, and time, make for an awkward collusion that results in our poorly shaped 'selves'. Extract said 'self' from its natural habitat and let it loose in the wider-shaped world, and it's no wonder that stagnant or hostile interactions can seem like life's norm.

Yet there's also all that other stuff, like kindess, and empathy, and humour, or love. We daily sense these other smelly organisms around us attempting to step out of their heads and into our own, whether it's via  a joke or a smile or a good-natured slap on the back. All these simple, life-affirming pokes. I have to remind myself to see them, and notice them, and return them in turn, because it makes me appreciate that getting out of our own skulls can be actually be done. I guess it's not an imperative, this exiting-one's-own-mind-in-the-attempt-to-acknowledge-another, because people still can live a fairly fresh life catering to their own inward needs, but the warm grasp an old friend's firm hand, or a store-door held open for you as you dawdle along can, at the right times,when your private thoughts are all dark, make the endlessly fragile meeting of our minds seem almost worth it.    
   

JUST A FLICK

She walked through the 7-11 doors with her mom right beside her. I was paying for stuff at the register. The girl was thirteen. Fourteen, maybe. Purple-framed John Lennon-glasses perched square on her nose. She wore a dark black sweatshirt with the pink words 'HELLO, DARLING' written right on her chest. Her mother was wearing one of those masks Japanese wear when they don't want to get sick. Or are already sick. The mum reached out her hand and rubbed her daughter's cheek, a slight little slide on the underside of her nose. The teenager sort of smiled. It looked to my eyes like a little flick of love from a parent to child. A kind of 'I-got-you' light scratch. Or maybe the mother was merely getting rid of a smudge of ketchup from those french fries at lunchtime. Either way. The girl went to one part of the store. The mom went to another. I felt like I had accidentally seen something intimate, and in its own tender way as private and pure as an open-mouthed kiss.

THOUGHTS ON TRANSLATION (via a Muramaki panel)

I recently watched (via YouTube) a panel discussion in a San Francisco bookstore about Haurki Murakami, a conversation that raised some very interesting points about literature and identity, both national and personal. What do works of 'art' (the word in air-quotes because I actually hate using that word, it always reeks of pretension) say about ourselves and where we come from? How does the language and form of the text shape the person and place from which it arose? And can we look to this work to see some form of ourselves?

One of the panelists, an old, close friend of Murakami himself, pointed out that there's a curious contrast to be found when comparing what's currently popular now in Japanese literature, as opposted to what's trendy with its U.S. counterpart. In Japan, that most group-conscious of cultures, stories centreing in on the pyschological experiences of individual characters are selling quite well -- one reason why the translated works of Paul Auster are so popular, because his stories often intensely delve into human consciousness as its lived. Conversely, in America, that most self-centred of countries, tales of family struggle and connection have been in vogue for awhile. (Think Jonathan Franzen's THE CORRECTIONS, for example.) 

It's almost as if people turn to literature to somehow converse with what's most absent in their lives. The United States, individualistic to the core, is obsessed in its art with the strained ties that we form and unravel with our family and friends; Japan, a seemingly bland monolith of collective cohesion, finds solace in tales that let a single person take hold. (I have no clever conclusion to reach from these observations, but they sure make some sense to me.)

Other issues raised in this talk kind of sparked me a bit. It's interesting to me that Japan, such a supposedly isolated and very-much-itself kind of country, reads an absolutely astonishing amount of literature-in-translation. (Compare this reality to the reading habits of Canadians and Americans, who rarely, if ever, read a current book that comes from elsewhere.) Not only fiction, either; scan the shelves at any Japanese bookstore, and you'll see non-fiction books from abroad on basically any topic. There's a craving here to know how others think and might live.

Yet another observation from Murakami's Japanese friend I found quite interesting, and I'm paraphrasing a bit here, but he mentioned that up until the Seventies, while the Japanese public still consumed a lot of literary work in translation, very few 'voices' from those books really connected that much. Meaning, the authentic vibe one would groove on in the original English didn't cross the boundaries of language all that much, or even that well. The languages are so different; there's a rigidness, a kind of static directness due to the Japanese characters and kanji that makes English's dexterity almost impossible to convey. (That's my theory, anyways.) 

However, in the Seventies, the Japanese translation of Richard Brautigan's book TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA became a huge sensation in Japan, because the specific tone of the story was somehow rendered clear and complete. The voice survived. People ate that shit up. And Murakami's friend mentioned that this book had an extremely big impact on Murakami's own style of fiction; people soon began to say that the authors' stories read, in Japanese, like translated works from English -- thus giving his stories a funky new feel. Indeed, many felt that Murakami's work resembled that of Kurt Vonnegut's, who had also been extremely popular (in translation) in the Japan of the Seventies.

My point? That one benefit of examining in translation works from other cultures is the mental interplay that occurs, a blending and inversion of language and tone, style and story that at its most effective can become close to transgressive. Reading stories from other cultures, in our own language, somehow gives us a better sense of where we too might stand, or how others stay grounded in this shaky world. There is, admittedly, at least for me, sometimes an off-putting element to many translations, or even when watching movies from abroad, all those strange sounds and odd sights. The language feels slightly ajar, the situations more than unreal. An overall stiltedness, I guess you could say. This uneasiness is an urge that I've had to learn to accept, because within those cultural gaps, that artistic awkwardness that arises from language and tone being blended and served, you can occasionally glimpse the odd sight of yourself.  

  

'LIFE the sale'

The other day I passed a sign plastered outside a deparment store in my suburb of Yokohama advertising 'LIFE the sale'. (Complete with that rather odd and arbitrary font-style.) This phrase struck me as a little bit better than weird, almost beguiling and brash in its impenetrable 'huh'? I have no idea what, in practical terms, in strictly physical terms, was being sold at such a bargain rate, whether 'life' referred to the specific brand-name of a product, or a generically shiny assembly line of new goods, but that quick glimpse of the banner got me thinking about 'life' as a concept, its wholesale value and merits.

Couldn't one argue that we are all constantly selling 'life' to the highest bidder we can find? Usually, that's us; often, its others, occasionally what we might like to call 'God'. Rarely, sadly, nobody's buying, because nobody's interested.

Life is such a parasitic enterprise, no? Pretend otherwise all you want, but the market-based economy extends to ourselves. We offer up what we are to loved ones and stranges for far less than we're worth. (Or else we overestimate our own value, and are  subsequently shocked to discover only small change offered in return.) Our physical selves, our personalities, our endless mind-games -- constantly seeking for an 'other' to partake and exchange in our crude sense of barter.

Read another way, 'LIFE the sale' could be rendered as a blatant form of 'sell-out'. Scrapping our dreams. Giving up on our wants. Settling for whatever. Taking what we can get. Diluting our own worth because it's no longer worth much

Or how about this: 'Life' as a place where all things must go. Isn't that the usual, blatantly commercial connotation of what a nice sale should be? A specific time in a season where the leftover stock must be sold at all costs. There's a desperation to that reading, an urgency, a push. Somebody will buy us. Somebody will want us. We will find a home. A cozy place will be made for what we can do.

I didn'push my luck, though. I didn't go into that store. I didn't want to wander the aisles and find out just what the slogan meant. A spooky, I want to say, 'legitimate' chill kind of went through my chest as I scanned that strange sign. (You could blame such a cold spell on the January air of Japan, but I know otherwise. I felt it.) If I had walked into that shop, and casually looked for what 'life' was, idly pursuing what 'sale' I could find, I fear that something might have happened to me, TWILIGHT ZONE-style in its final strange zonk.

All those shining white lights. (So bright, almost perky!) Row after row after inventory-filled aisles. (Like children at gym class, praying they're not picked last for the team!) I suspect that I would have, very quickly, perhaps even instantly, come to believe that this was the one place where I could truly fit in. (If only for the short time that it took for me to be bought, then dispersed.) 'Life' as a store, with me as the product. Not such a bad way to live. Everything out of my hands. Relying on others to determine my worth. There's a relaxed, almost laxative-like relief in knowing that it's not up to me anymore. My life as somebody else's new click-ordered endeavour. This blaring, soothingly antiseptic place where I'm assembled and valued and promptly made ready to be shipped out to those who eagerly requested and seek some kind of my self.

That doesn't sound half-bad, which is why I turned away from that sign and scurried the hell home just as fast as I could.

INHERENT VICE (or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Or At Least Grudgingly Accept The Fact That I Don't Have a Fucking Clue As To What's Actually Going On In This Novel)

What does it mean when we say that we can't 'follow' a story? Who's leading who here -- the language or the reader? I'm only asking because I'm almost finished reading INHERENT VICE, by Thomas Pynchon, a private-eye tale set in late-Sixties Los Angeles, with hippies galore, acid in abundance, and enough colourfully warped, fucked-in-the-head characters to fill up an old VW van. but I can't honestly tell you what the hell I just read. This isn't a Pynchon problem; his novels are notoriously dense and recursive and intentionally odd, yes, but VICE is his most 'accessible' book, at least judging by all these erudite limey reviewers whose blurbs blanket the covers of my British edition both inside and out. Everybody seems to be absolutely gaga for this thing, but my own dirty little literary secret is that I can never understand most mystery stories, and I'm always trying to figure out why that's the case.

The story is essentially, all eccentricities aside, a typical gumshoe procedural straight out of the world  of Raymond Chandler, or Ross Macdonald, or even John D.Macdonald, only it's amusuingly psychadelic setting adds an off-centre tilt. I got off on the language, and the characters, but, as always with these types of stories, I could never understand where I was going or why. Again, I do get that this is Pynchon w'ere talking about here; to say he's obtuse is cutting him some nice slack. Even so, I don't think this particular tale is designed to confuse us to no end. I believe it's just me.

Maybe I'm overthinking it, but I think my problem comes down to language itself, and how my brain innately responds to relatively complex systems of thought. Meaning, detective or crime stories are usually plot-heavy, relying on double-crosses and twists to advance the writer's agenda. These convoluted narrative arcs usually (but not always) tend to use the emotional aspects of their characters' lives as colourful backdrop to the plot machinations. As someone who tends to, first and foremost, dig into character before getting caught up in plot, perhaps my brain subconsciously ignores subtle clues in the story that would keep me caught up.

Writers of crime fiction often use a relatively streamlined appropach to their prose, avoiding most kinds of obvious artistic fuss. This doesn't mean that they don't have a smooth aesthetic glide that makes it all go down quite nice; but their language as such tends not to draw attention to itself. The Sunday dress shoes are usually left in the closet. (A masterful exception would be that off-his-rocker, self-educated, semi-genius James Ellroy, whose bullet-point prose assaults me in the face and dares me to stop reading). Pychon's style is always slightly aslant, only in this book its beautiful strangeness runs pretty much in tandem with a strangely-coiled tale. The combination of a quirky writing tone and a plot that veers left when I'm still looking right? Enough to make me feel pretty dumb as I drop the book to the floor and slump down on my pillow.

I think the best writing, the most vivid writing, the kind of writing that not only knocks your socks off but also washes them for you while you wait and chew gum, sort of bypasses all intellectual gadgets in your head and hits you quite hard in the instinctual, even reptilian part of our brains that craves emotion and oomph. Detective fiction sort of does the opposite; it leads you along via logic and incident, dovetailing with emotion only when it suits the story. Pynchon is overlaying this kind of traditionally noir narrative with a funky new vibe (even though it's retro, but you get what I mean), yet that smoky gloss still can't undermine the mazelike genre he inhabits. His prose is so colourful and dense that when he mashes it up with a deep plot I end up lost in the corners of the very mystery he's unfolding.

Late in the novel, a character explains what the term 'inherent vice' actually means, and I was very surprised to discover that it's a term taken from real life. To amplify it all a bit further, here's the definition from businessdictionary.com: "Hidden defect (or the very nature) of a good or property which of itself is the cause of (or contributes to) its deterioration, damage, or wastage. Such characteristics or defects make the item an unacceptable risk to a carrier or insurer. If the characteristic or defect is not visible, and if the carrier or the insurer has not been warned of it, neither of them may be liable for any claim arising solely out of the inherent vice."

Put (partly) in my own words, the 'hidden defect' of this story is my own inability to understand certain narrative progressions, which inevitably caused 'deterioration, damage, or wastage' to my enjoyment of the eventual denouement.

I'm not blaming Pynchon; I'm chucking pond-stones at myself. I'm perpetually stumped as to why my brain can't process simple instructions in life, physical tasks that need tuning, and I think have a similar problem with prose that's linear and designed to unfold and progress using a kind of connective straight logic. For me, language itself is counter-intuitive, logic's randy rude friend. Popping up, twisting around, slashing our brains. Language is essentially all Mystery with a capital 'M', its origins in our mind and second-by-second uprise in our thoughts a continual mind-fuck that frustrates as it strokes. Why don't I get certain things that are right there in plain English? I guess if I could answer that straight away, I wouldn't have to keep reading.