gained in translation

now i love jun'ichirō tanizaki. reading the key turns one into a crazy person, or a kid, or a retard, one who doubts everything yet believes everything that is written in the alternating diaries/"confessions" of a seemingly ordinary couple. if everything is real then the opposite of real is real too. husband lusts after his wife, ikuko, who he says is reticent and modest but is actually sexually insatiable. wife tells lies in her diary entries and makes husband jealous, the husband meanwhile knows of the plot, gets jealous a little. they read each other's entries and pretend they don't, or haven't; they have incredible sex, they're not teens anymore.

the translated tanizaki is written in short, uncomplicated sentences. yet if some essence of the original work is retained, we see an irrationality in love and passion, or just sex, that ruins people and also makes them whole. husband and ikuko compete. they both win and they're both destroyed. oxymoron/paradox. one cannot be better than the works one reads, so that's my summary. give me more tanizakis.

weakdance

done reading rushdie's grimus. for a first novel this one's very ambitious, though not grandly ambitious as rushdie's more famous the satanic verses. here we see a writer whose mastery of the english language, seen in his extreme manipulations of the word, remains unparalleled and unmatched by any modern writer. then he mastered storytelling too. the second novel midnight's children shows us how the folk and the popular can be combined in a single work to give us grand (rushdie is all about repetition) entertainment while making transparent too, notions of self, country, and nationality. grimus is about science and art-philosophy. sir salman would later discover the uses of satire and allegory (midnight's, shame), and would apply those in his commentaries on the political and cultural situations of east and west.

a completely unrelated thought. i'm used to deifying (thanks for the word alanah). which makes it so difficult when, erm, figures you thought would make you feel like trash start acting like ordinary people. then you see right through them, realize they're your equal, and start not liking them anymore. gayatri spivak (i think i've quoted spivak a thousand times already!) calls herself a practical marxist feminist deconstructionist. can we call this practical masochism? haha. tanizaki, you're next.

i disagree michael stipe, living well is not the best revenge

when i watch movies, or read books, there's always that scene or chapter or page where i say, that's me. i am that character, those words say how i feel! all bs really. some dreamed dream about greatness, and having other people watch you in all your tragedy. the reality of the absent audience is hard for me to accept, but i can't do anything about it. can't change history, but won't surrender either. the albert camus effect, let's call it that. i cannot define myself, i am all donnie smith and sarah mclachlan singing angel live, vladimir or estragon, penny lane (but only when she said "what kind of beer?") and one of robert altman's characters.

i spend hours wishing i were miles davis, or roger federer with a french open title, or steven soderbergh, or salman rushdie with a nobel prize and an oscar for best screenplay. i wish my mom and dad were karen and henry hill, that would be an exciting life. but i'm stuck listening to jazz and not playing it, reading the virgin suicides and not writing it, watching taxi driver, or goodfellas, or even the departed, and not living it. violent lives, i know. i need violence right now.

(and i still like you, michael stipe. i wish i were you too, sometimes.)